David Blue

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For God’s Sake, Just Sit Down to Piss Handwritten Notes (Diamond Notebook)

Updated 01312025-205702

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Images of Hand Notes

Citing specific human examples of who you should and should not model your future after in some form is perhaps unorthodox or ill-advised in this context, but I wouldn’t know - what I do know is that openly worshipping Elon Musk at this moment in human history makes you look dumb. If anything, I would suggest that you keep your thoughts to yourself. I don’t think I should suggest, unqualified, that you be ingenuine about him (or anything discussed in this volume, for that matter.) Without ranting, here is my most succinct explanation:

For the sake of clarification, I do not think Elon Musk is an unintelligent man in many aspects we have traditionally celebrated from the “genius” white men throughout history. The original Tesla product - the Roadster - was an electrified Lotus Elise. I have never driven one, but the automotive media’s reception of the infantile company’s implementation of what theoretically should have been a massive waste of time was surprisingly positive. I have absolutely no idea how the stock market works, but I implicitly trust Matt Farah’s criticism of Tesla’s business plan - to prioritize pleasing investors over making quality products. (Or at least that’s where they’ve ended up.)

I would add that - if this were wholly, truly the way the company intends to operate, they will have managed the impressive feat of blowing up any value they ever had as disruptors of the industry in a fraction of the time it took their opposing dinosaurs to turn into explicit, government-bailed-out scrubs. I want to be sensitive about this: I realize that Elon has let many of you down - I might even say us down because I remember being genuinely elated by MotorTrend’s declaration of the Model S as the Car of The Year under Ed Loh as EIC.1

When I encountered the opportunity to drive one very briefly a year later, I thought myself very clever in remarking “the Tesla Model S would be the best car in the world right now if it were powered by an internal combustion engine.” It was a genuine revolution if only because it was the only company in [???] years to successfully design, produce, and sell a mainstream automotive product. DeLorean, Bricklin… I wish they had, instead (especially the latter.)

This year, according to Johnny Liberman, Tesla is expected to sell 200,000 motorcars, which - as he repeats to Matt - nobody thought was at all likely. Frankly, I had hoped they would do literally anything else than what they have since the Model S-X because crossovers are literally the worst scam in recent auto industry history, the 3 because it was underwhelming and apparently made poorly. The “Roadster???” The one they sent to space ironically? The Cybertruck because it is surely going to be stupid, if it is ever actually produced, that is, and the Semi because Hydrogen seems almost certainly worth waiting for in the case of longhaul trucking.

On the other hand, that number is a quantification of the pressure the legacy companies are feeling from Tesla’s success which - Gourd-wiling - will lead to smarter decisions, more mindful innovation, and other changes toward modernization, generally. Out of a combination of personal biases and convictions about the heading the industry “should” pivot toward, I really hope emulating Tesla is at the very bottom of the idea bin.

Regarding his car company, there are other tidbits and minutia (e.g. the Home Depot weather stripping,) but Elon Musk’s most vulgar moment (perhaps America’s top five of the last decade,) was SpaceX’s launch of a Tesla Roadster into Earth’s orbit, in the way of spacecraft of real missions… Complete with cameras and a funny cartoon blowup driver. I cannot imagine a single version of myself after toddlerhood - as a space and auto-interested person - that would find the stunt at all reasonable or justifiable. Heroes of mine throughout both commercial and military aviation history - Charles Lindbergh, the Wright brothers, Jimmy Doolittle, Chuck Yeager, the Tuskegee Airmen, and so on - I cannot imagine any (save for a drunk Pappy Boyington, perhaps,) who would be pleased in the knowledge that enough people signed off on the launch in the 21st century for it to actually fucking happen.

My true ability to speak for these men is at a casual nerd history level for most of them. I had the ridiculously immense privilege of meeting the surviving Tuskegee Airmen in 2009, but was far too star struck to engage in any meaningful conversation. Otherwise, I know less about them than I should. However, I cannot imagine any of those men giving their blessing to such an expenditure of resources for the sake of a marketing stunt. I also seriously doubt any of them would say that R&D resources expenditure toward mars exploration/habitation is at all appropriate at this cultural moment.

Charles Lindbergh might, but I suspect he would understand and immediately comply with our instructions to shut the fuck up and zoom back to the stuff on which he would be/was actually a genius. As someone who has idealized, studied, derided, rejected, and defended Charles Lindbergh throughout my whole life up to this point, I have a strong longing for/acute time traveling fantasy in which I manage to refocus him back on his core subjects before he ever said/published the shit that all but explicitly supported Nazism. I’m almost sure that Philip Roth would spin violently in his grave if I claimed that Charles Lindbergh would hate what he saw from America’s President and richest companies if you were to revive him for a day tour of his country in 2020. Frankly, I would be overreaching what authority I do have on his mind if I did not specify that the Slim I know does not extend beyond his landing at Le Bourget field at 10:22PM on Saturday, May 21st, 1927, or the Slim he thought he was in 1927 while he finished the last revisions of The Spirit of St. Louis' manuscript in 1952. That Slim would call Elon Musk a fool, Tump a lying buffoon, and Jeff Bezos an ignorant glutton (though I seriously doubt he would use those words.)

The worldview presented in that one book is - dare I say it - perfectly clean of cultural supposition. It is a book written by the Slim who was an aviator, only, or at least who the Nazi-sympathizing, kindof shad-as-heck, adulterous, middleage Charles thought himself to be in 1927, perhaps in a moment of clarity. (Or, perhaps he just had excellent editors and public relations assets whom he actually listened to.) The differences between this man and Elon Musk are important insight. The latter is a manchild with a terrifying imagination, far too ready access to vast resources, and far too much power, who can sit down for hours pulling vaguely technological and scientific abstracts out of his ass, accompanied by utterly delusional timelines and a radical pro-technology bent. He is myself and many other young, cis, white boys at 16, sitting at the high school lunch table, having brought our “wacky” hypotheticals about technology and the future to cackle at. The spectacle of the hypotheticals, the contrast of the absolutely most bonkers happenings our imaginations could collectively manifest. Nuclear sea mines? Hilarious! I can’t believe anyone ever thought this was a good idea dude!

We were allowed to do this by our innate, adolescent ignorance and privilege crossing a handful of demographic variables. We were comfortable in that space, playing with the massively destructive playthings of nonsense and the hypothetical experiences of the disenfranchised, individually-fictitious or not. We were allowed our private proverbial dark smoky room in which to share our oppressive, imperialist inside jokes, fucking noodling edgy what ifs.. There, we taught ourselves to be insensitive and excused each other’s most malignant bigotry.

Should we have been allowed this developmental discourse? I do not have the answer, largely because the least-expected national and global events have happened since. Never did we think our absurdities would actually play out in reality almost verbatim in less than ten years. Never did we consider that real events would be outperforming the worst part of our creative imaginations - certainly not within our lifetimes. Not until “dystopia.”

We are certainly living in it now, and I often wonder what our currently-16-year-old equivalents have to say. At this moment, they are confined to their homes during a global pandemic expected to kill twice again as many of their fellow Americans, anticipating the most consequential (and absurd) Presidential election in their country’s history. (As I write, this election is scheduled for the day after tomorrow.) Their actual leaders are worse than their collective imaginations' worst villains, and nothing about the spectacle is truly comical anymore because reality is now at risk. If they have a roundtable, they’ve had to create it themselves, and it is not only proverbial, but virtual. When they do gather, it is within the same software (and language, therefore) as is their parents' virtual workspaces. (Enterprise leaves no sacred ground.) Shooting the shit with one’s high school friends is now a process of sharing the meeting invite link, connecting to the meeting, and joining the meeting. Surely, they are so much more somber. Surely, they are even more desperate for any means of escapism.

However, they do have more tools than we did to deal with their mental health. They are more sincere, if perhaps even less comfortable in themselves. Surely, they are so much more worried about their future, but perhaps they are better equipped to be constructively skeptical of the power structures around them. Gourd willing, they all already know it is never okay for a white person to use the N-word, or for anyone to use the R and 3-letter homophobic F-word slurs. I desperately hope they’ve been far more exposed to gender as a spectrum, perhaps even explicitly by their teachers. Hopefully the non-gender-conforming, queer, non-white among them feel much safer exploring themselves in their day-to-day lives.

I believe they are further along wholly in their social development than we were, for better or worse. Therefore, I suspect they have transcended most visible parallels with Elon Musk, who has distinctly not grown as a person. Even our gaggle was disgusted with him and all worship of him, but I suspect our predecessors are much more articulately so, in all the ways that matter. These suppositions would remain of the same accuracy even minus COVID, or any of the other singular cultural challenges we’ve faced since 2015. I also believe the progress they have ahead of our folk at that age means they will have to pay for it in some impossible-to-predict (or even conceive) trial, later in their adult lives.

What would I say to my 18-year-old self? None of the platitudes I’d already been bludgeoned with for the entirety of my life, despite how fucking keen they have continued to turn out to be. In case you’re like me and don’t pick up on implicit communication well, I am demanding of you older folks an immediate cessation of your bludgeoning. Say something concrete, specific, and reasonably original or do not speak! Repeated exposure to identical stimuli leads to desensitization! The amount number of times you can say even the most contextually-mindful shit like “I promise, you’ll see one day… It’ll all make sense and you’ll be saying this sentence to your grandchildren” and actually achieve retinence is far far less than your elderly brain wants you to believe. Specific instructions are best. I’ve found the most essential bullet points to send to my past self are often simply terms to learn, define, and pursue. “Ask/read from a variety of leftist sources what they mean when they use the term power, especially in discussions/conjunction with race/racism, class, and production. Yes, in that specific order, you fucking cringey cretin.”

As much as I would love to say “Guess what?! You’re going to beg for essay criticism and be desperate to get in school…” As part of very recent concessions, I am very tempted to include “yes, you really will have to find a balanced routine, or fucking die. They are right about that. Look again at your role models' lives. Look at all natural processes. Cycles, bitch!” However - in this extremely hypothetical exercise - generally done for the sake of humor - we must acknowledge that your past, naïve, younger self wouldn’t be interested in or able to listen to your two-cent wisdom simply because it is from their future selves. Metaphysical anecdote: our various “selves” across time appear as alien or moreso than strangers. Not just per the biological process of cells being replaced every so-and-so years, necessarily. If you were to pursue this further to the point of systematically differentiating between your individual “selves” over time, I would suggest reading yourself as a great place to start measuring. As soon as you experience the phenomena where your writing feels like it was written by someone else, entirely, you should lay down a new “self” marker. (Test I suggests I appear to gain a new self every other cigarette or so.)

You! Young, white, American man! You are so fucking undignified! Athletic shorts and a t-shirt do not make a whole, leaving-your-home outfit! On no planet I have ever visited do they constitute appropriate first-date wear. As I hope I sufficiently prefaced, Blame is not at work, here, and if it were, it would fall lastly on yourself. Society has let you down, along with your parents and my older siblings. We will have to address only a few counterarguments on this most specific fashion absolute, but they will be a challenge.

Apologies to my fellow Little Boys, but it’s easiest to start with those of you who consider regular have made a priority to regularly engage in physical exertion and/or simulated physical exertion (working out) in your day-to-day life. Allow me to suggest that alongside your desire to keep your body healthy motivating all that effort is a (precious and highly underrated!) desire/compulsion for your body to appear healthy to other people.

That’s wonderful and natural!

Now, I want you to extend that motivation toward the clothes in which you wrap your healthy body. Those of you who would respond “I already have!! Athletic wear is what my body look the best!”… Brothers, you are incorrect! No Some would further respond “well okay, but athletic wear is so much more comfortable than any other sort of clothing; I find it is worth it to sometimes appear fashionably out of context for the sake of my personal comfort.” Brother, you have been misled!

  1. “2013 Automobile of the Year: Tesla Model S” | MotorTrend ↩︎