gotta blawg. dun wanna blawg. blawggin iz ghey. reeee
last day of 2024, new year tomorrow. gotta blawg tomorrow, too.
i guess I dun hafta.
Holy shit, it's December! Gotta write at least one entry for this month so 2024.html looks complete near its end. I suppose I have no choice but to be the person that I am, at this point. I don't know that radical personal change ever was possible, but now it seems it's even less possible. I'll tell you a secret, so designated because birthdates are often wrapped up in service security, but...my birthday is NEARBY. I won't say when exactly but it is NEARBY. Tomorrow??? Could be. And, I'll be turning 50. It is weirder than I thought it would be. I told myself I had been prepared since 47, which is the first number in the "late 40s," according to my schematic, but turns out 47 was just a weak overture. This anniversary coming up is the REAL DEAL HOLYFIELD.
I told someone, an old friend, that I would have to do *SOMETHING* when I turned 50, but I did not then and do not now know what. A good version would be to do nothing and become some kind of chillaxed pseudo-enlightened Californian. I kind of hate Californians. This took me a while to develop but I am finally arriving at it after nearly 10 years here. It's like everyone here has to be totally unique and self actualized...ego masquerading as spirituality, perhaps. In Maryland, to contrast, people blend in and you don't notice them. You definitely notice Californians because they make sure you do: every boomer has a ponytail and a motorcycle farm, or brews his own carrot juice, or something.
I don't relate to people very effectively, or they don't relate very effectively to me. I believe many others make this same complaint but I have evidence that I am in a special category of dysfunction. It's impossible to know what everyone else has, or knows, or is, that you do not or are not. I guess the smart thing to do would be to give up without becoming bitter, as a FRIEND once suggested, years ago. "Give up" in the buddhistic sense, and not the neurotic sense. Maybe that's my 50th birthday project.
The archive of my last show was ruined due to connectivity issues during the storm. The ruination was apparent while I uploaded and so I ranted about how capitalism is to blame: it's not like the technology to make weather-proof internet does not exists, but the incentive is not there; better to make it cheaply, breakable, and prone to replacement or repair (and those repairs prone to additional future repairs). If my house were a military installation or "Fortune 500" company you'd better believe the internet would not go out in the rain.
I have been having some recent success with THOUGHT STOPPING. Oftentimes I'm bothered by OCD-type repeating thoughts, or ruminations over past decisions, or people I have difficulty with "living rent free in my head," to quote the internet. But I do have at least SOME ability to just say "no" and stop the thought, and it goes away. I should take advantage of this more I guess instead of just lying helpless and taking the punches as I've learned to do. I think it's beneficial to have fewer thoughts. That last sentence is funny in the same way "I don't think I have an 'I' thought" is funny. All this begs the question: is blogging (writing) harmful to enlightenment? I'm not sure. My instinct is to say it's just more mental jibbering but writing is structured in a way random intrusive thoughts are not. Maybe writing is even helpful to enlightenment or "enlightenment"...whatever.
Enlightenment talk is a bunch of horseshit anyway. Oh that reminds me: I quit going to Buddhist Sangha. It wasn't doing anything and I didn't like it. They incorporated a body movement sequence to meditation I did not care for, the nuns can't really speak English, and the attendees are a bunch of average dumbasses: DMV clients, Facebookers, and high school reunionites. I sorta felt good about going to sangha just to go, like I have felt about church in the past, as if it were some moral exercise and getting it over with was an achievement, but I think that's just goal-oriented thinking and is in error.
People have been dropping out of my life lately, and I'm getting more cold and distant and bitter, either as a result, as a cause, as some combo, or completely unrelatedly. I'm not sure this is a bad thing because not everyone has to be touchy-feely-social; it's ok to be hermit-like and not to want anyone around. I've been trying to watch more car, ship engine, and factory videos on the tube -- stuff like that that does not involve beings. Science videos are good too. I got stoned yesterday and had the insight/inspiration that my purpose was to be a conceptual physicist/theoretical cosmologist -- to investigate the big origin-type questions of material and conscious reality, like "why is anything here?"-type stuff. Now that I'm sober this seems stupider and less feasible, as plans are wont to go, but there's nothing really stopping me from writing about stuff like that, especially since I have chatGPT to help me with the harder material. Who gives a shit though...that's always the thing.
I'm kinda looking forward to January, so I can make a new archive page. AS I'm SURE YOU KNOW the methodology is different from 2023 on, than it was from 2017 back. From 2017 back I created a new page when the one I was working on felt like it was getting too big. This was probably an ok method, since each page had all kinds of stuff embedded in it (usually images but sometimes other things). Now, text r00lz.
I went out for breakfast today. It wasn't exactly fun or a happy time but I'm sort of glad I did it anyway. It was A THING, at least, and that's what we need: things in life. I don't have a great many things in my life so I need to pepper it with ridiculous drives 10 miles down frostbitten country roads at the crack of dawn to eat generic diner breakfast and peer at waitresses' asses, once a month or once a week or whatever. I'm glad I can return to my lair though where there are no asses or any other parts of bodies of humans to be found other than my own.
The only thing I can do that has any value is walk, but I am disinclined to do that. My excuses now are that I get bitten by dogs and run over by cars, which are both true, but a true optimist would not let any of that stop him. The truth is that I am lazy -- there is some natural resistance built in, to exercising; gotta conserve calories, I guess. For a while I tried a non-negotiable "David Goggins" disciplinary algorithm and that worked pretty well...it had me walking in the rain. But now that's worn off and I don't think I can or want to re-implement.
Sometimes I think I'd like to get out of here but I realize logically, actually, that I have it pretty good as things are and pretty much any move would be a downgrade, other than escaping wildfires, and possibly being closer to amenties. As I was setting out on my epic drive this morning I thought "wouldn't it be nice if there were a diner 2 miles away?" There is a restaurant 2 miles away, but it's expensive and doesn't open til 11am; what we need here is a GREASY SPOON.
I'm having trouble with neuroscience, Brahman, Atman, and Maya. HA. I'm so SMART!!!! REEEE
FUCK YOUUUUUUUU
Gotta keep the repeating letters under a reasonable number. Did you notice I posted all my old blogs? Some of them are interesting but the all lowercase style is harder to read. I tried running it all through a case converter but it didn't work out. Whatevs. My stepbro once told me I should publish my blog, all-lowercase and all. I remember the flatteries!
Brahman: a fundamental undetectable reality that this physical world we all know is built on top of. Furthermore, Brahman is somehow "realer" than worldly matter and energy. This makes modern sense in two ways: 1) neuroscience -- ultimately what we detect via our senses is not in itself the real world but a construct of our brains. 2) Modern quantum mechanical discoveries like holographic gravity and string theory, which basically propose that elementary particles, matter, and I suppose energy (?), are ultimately generated by something lower level: vibrating 2D strings, or some other lower dimensional structure.
But then they go on to say that if you really focus on CONSCIOUSNESS per se you get in touch with this fundamental reality, which is both Atman (human soul) and Brahman (fundamental generating undetectable reality that gives rise to matter and energy in the world). Maybe that's where I part ways and say "Yeah? Well...y'know...that's just, like, your opinion, man." I tend to take a more Daniel Denett'ish perspective -- which is similar to the Buddhist perspective -- on consciousness, and avoid valorizing it into religiosity or spiritualism or whatever. I am a naturalist -- therefor, nothing can be supernatural! I guess that's my fundamentalism.
Hinduism purports the existence of Atman, or soul, which animates the body and is different than the body, as well as Brahman, or universal spirit, which animates everything else and is different than the physical reality which is itself illusory as well as generated by Brahman. This seems dualistic: there is the physical universe, and then there is this other thing which is Atman/Brahman, animating individuals and the universe, respectively. But maybe not -- Maya, the illusion, doesn't counterweight Brahman. This is something I arrived at in my Buddhism essay.
Brahman is supposed to be a base-level, undetectable meta-reality that gives rise to physical reality, sort of like holographic gravity or strings give rise to what are perceived on some level as elementary particles. So in a sense Brahman is a "world soul" -- something more like "the force" or an animating/generating spirit rather than physical reality itself. But, this world soul or generating spirit is in some sense the important component of reality; pets cars trees staplers etc are sort of like window dressing.
Buddhism asserts there is no such thing as either Atman or Brahman, and could be pantheistic, or atheistic, or nihilistic. Furthermore Buddhism does not seem to assert that the world is an illusion (Maya), but only that we perceive it wrongly.
My basic discomfort with Hinduism is that it seems to amount to a conspiracy theory: the stuff in front of your face isn't the "real thing." Yes this is correct, in the sense of vision being generated by your brain, but I think more often the concept of Brahman generating the illusory "real world" (Maya) is used in the same way a schizotypal might think nothing you are told or that seems obvious is actually true, because he has special knowledge and knows the way things REALLY are. It's important not to valorize Hinduism and Buddhism; they might have gotten some things wrong. But at the same time, one should not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Oops I said HULLO last entry. No matter! This is the first entry since I sent out a group email advertising my web wares -- something I maybe have not done in years. Obviously it's a complex issue and I have mixed feelings and 10,000 thoughts.
I've always sort of wanted to be, or believed on some level that I am, some kind of media organization: a big time publishing body that dispassionately approaches and analyzes human culture. But I never marketed that way -- I marketed to friends and family, to distant friends and distant family, and to colleagues; to people I know. So why do I write and make web things? I don't know, and it's complicated. But complicated or not, the fact remains that I have to be careful. Probably no more careful than anyone on social media when they do a post that targets some person or some group and offends half their followers, but it remains: it's a sticky situation that I find myself in here on the web, publishing, after having sent out an email to...PEOPLE.
This is what I've chosen to do though. I could always write in a diary but I crave that public access...that little hint of the fame and power I have always wanted, all my life. I've always wanted to control people, to show them stuff, to be admired...I'm kind of a terrible person although of course in admitting this I transcend it and become even greater! Problem is, I'm terrible at controlling people and my attempts are awkward and grotesquely ineffectual.
I posted my whole old blog, the one I got a lawsuit threat out of back in 2004 or so. Those particular details were removed, I think, I hope, but others might be in there that will cause problems. I can never be safe, publishing. I suppose no one can. But this applies to folks on social media too, and I think not a lot of people have grasped this: you can never be safe on Facebook, on Xitter (pronounced "Shitter," like Xi Jin Ping), or Mastodon, or SDF, or any number of places like that. Some are better than others for certain people, certainly; Facebook is not for everyone just like SDF is not for everyone. But similar dangers exist, and exist with blogging, which is I think in the same category (a form of social media): you are going to hurt your relationships no matter how careful you are.
Are you reading? ARE YOU??? WHAT IS YOUR RELATIONSHIP TO ME??? Don't email me! Don't do it! Al;ksdgja;lksdgjads;klgjl;
My old blog is disturbingly similar to my current one (I blogged in 2003, 2004, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2011, 2012, 2017, 2023, the current year, and intend to in future years). In other words, I seem to have have not changed much between ages 30 and 50. I guess some would call this a good thing in that I haven't become a conservative dotard or anything (Thanks, Kim Jong Un!), but also that I haven't really continued to grow and develop in a positive way. Maybe I have. I don't know. But from my writing, you'd never guess it, except that I dropped the annoying all lower case habit I had back then. It seemed easier at the time, and it now makes it harder for me to analyze content vs content and verbiage vs verbiage.
Another thought: I am not superbly talented I don't think. I am a middling talent, who likes to put stuff out there. I am also LEARNING DISABLED which has made it harder for me to improve at anything beyond a pre-existing ability level, especially considering my pre-existing laziness and cowardice. This is all fine but I should not expect fame or discovery. It's hard -- maybe impossible -- to evaluate one's own work on how it compares, qualitatively, to the "top stuff" in any given context. All I can know is that Joe Rogan has millions of views and I don't even show up in Google ;_________;
Yet another thought: it's not the nature of a work that determines its popularity, but rather the nature of that work's containing culture. This aphorism goes along with a sort of "punk rock" or "hipster" or "opposite day" ethic of aiming to be different or non-mainstream such that if you happen to achieve fame then your work is necessarily bad. This view is suitable as a cope for people like me who never enjoyed REAL popular engagement, and it might in fact be a large error -- maybe work can suck or be good regardless of where and how it fits into a larger cultural background. Particularism?!? In my text?!? It's more common than you think!
MY WORK!!!! MY ART!!! ME!!!! You?
HULLO. I hate you. Just kidding. Sort of. I dunno, it's complicated.
I forgot what I was going to write about.
I guess it doesn't matter. But I want to continue this blog...all my useless html horseshit, dating back years. I'm still doing it now, at age nearly 50. I could always just write in a diary I suppose but I think I would have low motivation to write.
I have to write today, tomorrow, or the next day -- and preferably all three, ho ho -- because again: IF I DO NOT, THEN I WILL NOT HAVE AN ENTRY FOR *AT LEAST* EACH MONTH!!!
REEE
I was reading my own blog parked at the gas station this morning while I drank my supercaffeinated gas station cawfy and I thought "Gawd how brilliant...Barnacle has solved all extant spiritual and philosophical problems, and should be worshipped." I have issues with EGO. More'n most people, even. I think my Ego is especially bad; that's how bad my ego is! The most I can do is be aware of it, I suppose; it ain't goin nowherez.
Speaking of ego, I improved on the Buddhist Eightfold Path, and compressed it down into four items:
ChatGPT said it was good.
HELLection day is coming! I talked with my Dad (dad? IDFK) this morning about it. I'm a little nervous but mostly in terms of what the other side will do if their opponent wins; If everyone were happy and just accepted the torture chamber then there'd be no problems.
How does fucking time go by so fucking fast? FUCKING!!! Fuck fuck fuckity fuck. FUUUUUUUU. SEX!!! Shit. Shit and sex! Sex and poop. Reproduction and excretion. The proximity of the genitals and anus!!! HA.
My hip is FUCKED up, my left hip. I can't tell if it's some arthritic osteo-cartilaginous issue OR a muscular-tendinous issue; I'm leaning toward (b) at the moment. I think I'm kinda losing it intellectually. Either that or I am getting exhausted by my constant anxiety and drive to DO something. I had a revelation yesterday: I work too hard. It may sound silly but basically when I'm on the computer, I'm working -- my brain is working, parsing little bits of info, visually scanning and typing and clicking. I even have physical injuries from it (tendinitis). So in a sense I am a workaholic. Maybe this is a stretch but I don't think so.
You might be inclined to dismiss this because I have little to show for all this "work," a complaint many modern employees field. THE SOUND SHOW is terrible. This blog is actually not too bad as far as blogs go I don't think. My art is pretty good, except it's miniaturized and on the internet so no one cares about it; that is why I am not famous. However, most of my computerings do not even amount to bad, careless, simple, or free art -- my computerings amount to browsing the web and playing Nintendo. I'd rank my SKILLZ at 1) writing, 2) art, and 3) music, although I think that's just skills and not output; my longer work (especially sound and text) can feel pointlessly long, as if I were crafting sentences and arranging them one after another with no structure or plan behind it. I need to write STORIES. And be famous!!! And rich!!!
The notion of being "special" is multifaceted: of course, on some level, you, the reader, the individual, is special -- you are looking out from behind a pair of eyes and YOU feel like YOU, and that's all you have. The world comes at you, and then you process it. It's sort of obvious that there are two main categories: self, and other. This (dualism) is of course the grand error Dharmic religions try and dismantle, but it remains: my consciousness does not extend into the tree stump in front of me but is rather localized to "my" brain (debatable).
It's easy for only children and other narcissists to turn this sort of metaphysical approach into a pratical approach and come to truly believe they are unique and special in comparison to other people -- that they deserve special treatment. Most people have memorized enough tropes so that if asked "do you think you deserve special treatment?" they will answer a resounding "No!". But underneath that, they may believe they are unique in some quiet and irrefutable way. The more you learn about other people and their stories, the more you realized that everyone is "special;" everyone has a fantastic story, set of experiences, and achievements to which nothing else in the world compares. But this requires learning, I think...out of the box, many or most people are naturally self obsessed.
Here's something that is rarely talked about: in Advaita Vedanta, the "self" is the ultimate -- YOU are GOD, in a sense; the consciousness that you feel is the same thing as the universe at its most basic fundamental level: Brahman. This is all fine and dandy but what's stopping people from feeling like they are not "God" in a pantheistic sense, but as great as God, in a very basic and real world way? In other words, I think there can be a fine line between self realization and a crass ego trip; maybe it's all the same thing. I sometimes or sort-of think solipsistic narcissists are the most spiritual or at least potentially spiritual people, because it's just a little jump between regarding THEMSELVES as God, to regarding "The Self" as the Godhead.
A related thought I had recently was that my creative work (website) basically serves my ego -- it's like a demo of "what I can do," and you're supposed to marvel at it. PROPER ART, on the other hand, should be some Hegelian quasi spiritual/cultural dance. Thanks to chatGPT I finally learned about Kantian aesthetics and Hegelian aesthetics, as we were supposed to in my MFA program; I never formed it into a soundbite then, which is a shame:
Kantian aesthetics is the subjective experience whereas Hegelian aesthetics is spiritual/cultural in nature.
Kant focuses on the individual and is sort of libertarian and/or capitalistic, almost, whereas Hegel's approach is almost sort of Christian-leftist -- it blends community and spirituality. Under Frankfurt school postmodernistic academicism, Hegel is a better ideal, a better model to work toward. Kant is responsible for things like Jeff Koons and Andy Warhol and what's his name...the shark in a tank guy. And, generally, Kant did the "total aesthetic environment" consisting of the Coca Cola can and my Mac in front of me with its perfect soft plastic rounded corners. I don't want to come out on one side vs the other and say scribbling on burlap is BETTER (or worse and therefor better) than an unironic Barbie doll, or the other way around; THERE ARE GOOD PEOPLE ON BOTH SIDES.
The problem with monistic truth is that it is impractical. Even if you believe on some deep spiritual level that there is no "I," you still have to get by in the world and use language, which involves differentiating between yourself and the rest of the universe ("give me the second muffin on the right, even though in some sense I am the second muffin on the right"). I've seen some wackos go so far as to put "I" in quotes in common usage, and I mused on subbing in "ThisBrain" for "I;" it's beyond parody. If you are the world's purest Hindu, the paragon of faith, then you have to live somewhat dishonestly day to day.
One of the main things about humans, I believe, that extraterrestrials might note, is that they are full of shit: they are wrapped up in their own language, philosophy, and inner worlds, in wholly invisibile constructs that obfuscate more than they illuminate and have little to do with the price of eggs, so to speak; Kant, Hegel, blah blah. Who cares?!? Humans consume media all day, reclining or sitting to watch images of other humans on a screen; we have folded in on ourselves. And I think considering classy media like Kant and Hegel to be somehow different from binge-watched episodes of "Friends" is an error and a trap; it's all the same shit. Maybe this is a consequence of agriculture and AI -- of advancing technological civilization; we now have to choice but to enter The Matrix...to enter HELL!!!
I'm going to Maryland in a coupla weeks. I don't know how it's going to go. It might be a hard trip, but it will be an adventure, at my caliber of adventure; some people climb Everest, and others go on suburban people-visiting vacations. I yam what I yam and I'm not the genius I thought I was. I do have an MFA though! That says something. Basically, it functions like an ivy league undergrad degree functions as an ability-indicator, a value-indicator, an IQ-indicator. They don't let you into Harvard unless you are quite smart; once you're in, getting the degree is not that difficult, or so I have read on the internet. So maybe art school functions the same way but with creativity or absolute spirit or some other ineffable horseshit -- especially terminal degree art school, although they were playing with a PhD in art when I was there. I dismissed that as inflation, as did MANY MANY MANY MANYYYYYY others. Many!
Am I a god? Am I a CPoS (Complete Piece of Shit)? Am I PHM?!?! REEEEEE
Consider the future of Christianity...the FAR future. Hinduism is ancient -- older than other religions, existing for more than 5,000 years. Christianity is about half that age, as we know, because of the current year (!). Hinduism is philosophically advanced, and jives with new age spiritual concepts like monism and consciousness and so on ("we are the universe experiencing itself"). However, there's primitive material in Hinduism, like praying to Ganesha for more money. Obviously there is primitive material in Christianity, but what would a spiritually evolved, future version look like, such that it is as advanced as modern Advaita Vedanta (non-dualism, as expressed at the end of the Vedas, or sort of the endgame of the whole Hindu project)?
We already have Paul Tilich who talks about the "ground of being," which could be Brahman. I think the trick is to escape from a rigid Christianity, where you think, or believe, or know, some very particularist things about faith and God and salvation. And yes: places where religion differs from scientific revelation need to be looked at closely and possibly discarded (AHEM Buddhism Samsara/Karma/Nirvana AHEM).
Let's say you have in your head the character of Jesus, like Buddhists have the character of Buddha, and some devotees in early 20th century India and beyond have the character of Ramana Maharshi. You don't in this case need associated magical beliefs about history and science, such as the virgin birth, various miracles, or the resurrection. I image what very liberal Christians do with those ideas now is handle them gently and with care, and do not insert them into Britannica along side articles on the internal combustion engine. What I'm trying to say is: much of modern conservative Christian theology is based on "alternate facts," and is not really "spirituality" at all. Jesus was cool, I like him, he helped the poor, the sick, or the evolutionarily unfit ("losers," if you will) to overcome their station, and he promised everything is going to be ok. That's really all you need.
This doesn't address theism vs non-theism at all -- the religions that appear advanced to me and all right-thinking intellectuals (HAAAA-ha) are Dharmic and nontheistic at their core: Buddhism has Nirvana, Hinduism has Moksha, Jainism has something like that; there's no need for God as the One Big Thing, although you can happily throw in gods who don't matter much. So then, what would a far future version of theism look like? My first thought is that Christianity would then be reduced to Hero Jesus, Islam to Hero Mohammed, and Judaism to...eating kosher?
No that's not right; modern Hindu-derived monistic Vedantans (!) can and do talk about capital-G God, as in "can you show me God?" and they don't get confused. God in this case is the ultimate. Incidentally, Ramana's answer to "can you show me God?" is "God is your experience of being itself" (paraphrase). So, "God" is another word for "the ultimate" or "the absolute" in Hinduistic interpretations. Can you personify this and still be correct? Sure! Krishna and Yahweh hold hands and smile (sorry), and I suspect Paul the Apostle would have agreed, although Jimmy Swaggart, Kenneth Copeland, and most of contemporary Christianity -- no matter how "liberal" -- might balk at least a little.
Changing the subject:
SEPTEMBERELEBBEN!!! SEPTEMBERELEBBEN!!! Long ago when I was delivering pizza off and on, I worked with a big boisterous jocular Latin American, and two Nepalese. The big Latino would often lean in and yell "SEPTEMBERELEBBEN!!!", with a grin at these two Nepalese as he passed them on the way out to his car or in from his car, to be funny and to imply that all swarthy Asians are somehow, metaphorically, actually, responsible for 9/11. It was pretty funny, I thought, but the Nepalese contingent didn't seem to think so, and returned dirty looks.
Lookit wat chatGPT made for me, all in html/CSS (no image files):
It's not a huge amount of code; view source if you're curious. This changes EVERYTHING!!!
Ah gawt sayvrul tawpikz ah needz t'wraaaaaaaht uhbaiowt. Some of them will be controversial. In other words, I distinguish this from that. I might keep them short, and partly, I want to see if CSS will let me do a circular diagram thingy. Nah. Oh well. Anyway I'll start with that thing and kludge it out with some <pre> tags. Bleh it ain't werkin oot. I don't wanna put an image in and violate the creedo of this blog. Let me try chatGPT:
I know you can't easily read the items but I'm tired of wrestling with AI. I guess I'm just ugpid (PROMPT ENGINEERING SKILLZ!!!). Anyway, the items are "animism, polytheism, monotheism, panentheism, pantheism, atheism," and one leads into the next, illuminating the circular flow of religious systems and how they are related:
I'm not sure I need "atheism" in there but six terms work better graphically, plus as I said, enough GPT. I feel bad about the carbon squandering, and about bothering it; I guess this is the same thing.
The second topic is the brutally violent American character and one of its important sources. We all know the DH Lawrence quote, further down on this page. I'll reprint it for your usability benefit:
"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." - DHL
I don't want to say America is special and is especially traumatized by a unique history of violence -- China and other nations have suffered hundreds or thousands of years of bloody wars, too. But the taking of the land that would one day become the USA from its previous inhabitants is my focus here. The Indian Wars were horrifically brutal, and a lot of -- I would say most -- of the more surreally torturous and nightmarish violence came at the hands of the Natives (controversial).
There was a lot of ritualistic torture that took place over days, intended to take the soul of the victim (indicated when he screamed or lost control or went insane). The Indians (I read this term is acceptable as of 2024) wanted to break you, even more than they wanted you to die or go away or give them your horses. Whites would kill you or take your land or give you a Smallpox blanket, but for the most part they weren't going to torture you for days.
Regardless of the overall historical effects and outcome of violence and domination, torture leaves a strong impression. So, White settlers proceeded with the knowledge that Indians behaved this way, and this terror, anger, and brutality, seeped into the American character -- into Americana, permanently, along with violent revolution, slavery, Pearl Harbor, 9/11, and so on.
I believe that the removal of Indians from their homes and onto reservations was an act of vengeance that continues to this day; we, the descendants of colonists and White immigrants, are sending the Indians and their descendants to Hell, in exchange for burning the faces and hacking the limbs off White settlers during the period of colonization and westward expansion. It's very much like the North Korean practice of punishing multiple generations for the crimes of an individual.
The third topic is RACE AND IQ, yet again. But I think I finally figured it out.
The general sticking point for this discourse seems to be the definition of "race" as it pertains to humans. As I understand it, groups of humans who appear superficially different and are commonly called "different races" are a lot less different than the biological term "race" implies when it is applied to groups of animals; you have races of bears, deer, etc, that are the same species but are still quite different from each other, and furthermore these animal races are more different from each other than the human "races" are. So "race" is a kind of a bad concept to use with people in that it is conflated with the biological concept used to define groups of an animal species (such as brown bears being divided into Kodiak bears and inland brown bears), which differ a lot more than the human "races" do.
Groups of people historically tended to live in the same place and have babies for a long time; call it "geographic ancestry" if you like. Resultantly, we now have groups with differently colored skin, differently folded eyelids, different propensities to alcoholism, different consistencies of earwax, and lots of bio-medical traits that are significant in treating patients correctly, even if they don't amount to a scale of biological difference engendering the scientifically correct usage of the term "race" to describe these groups. You can call these groups a variety of things, but if you call them "races" then you should clarify that this term does not represent as great a biological difference as it does when applied to animal groups.
IQ is 50-80% heritable. If people are living and having babies in the same place over time, this trait will be passed to children similarly to traits like skin color, earwax consistency, etc. So yes -- human "races," or more accurately ancestral groups, have different average IQs, and this difference is at least 50% genetic. It's not a huge difference, just like skin color or earwax type or whatever is not a huge difference. People are all BASICALLY the same, especially when compared to races of bears or deer or whatever -- it's just that we are somehow geared to notice these small differences and make a big deal out of them. Apparently the Romans did not do this as much; racialism is a relatively new development.
Finally, self inquiry; basically I don't like it, or rather, this brain is uncomfortable with it. In order to gain self realization or moksha or enlightenment or whatever you want to call it, Ramana Maharshi recommends you ask yourself "who am I?", and then go deeper and deeper (apophatically not a name, not a body, etc) and realize that this question has no answer and in fact the "I" is an illusory concept. *IIIII* think though that you can get stuck on "who am I?", when the goal is rather to sort of flip a switch and become aware of your own consciousness, or aware of the present moment, to use an Eckart Tolle'ism (although that term can be problematic in the same way). Ultimately it doesn't matter what you do as long as you get to the same place. Maybe self inquiry made more sense in early 20th century India. The present moment made sense in the 90s, in the West. Maybe for me, now, "consciousness awareness" makes the most sense, or just "flip the switch."
I am more interested in micro structures than macro structures, I think, although I am interested in both. I'm talking about protons vs stars, in this case, which seem similar. I suppose particles seem more accessible, since they are right here; they make up my typing fingers and thinking brain. Stars, on the other hand, are far away, although not too abstract -- the sun is right in front of my face. So I've got it all! But in the meantime I can use chatGPT to learn about elementary particles in my own terms, and ask it endless questions.
Interestingly, a star and an elementary particle are sort of similar: a round ball. My "the Bohr model is wrong" contrarian intuition told me that you cannot properly call even larger particles like protons "spherical" since they are made up of 3 quarks bound together by massless particles called gluons, however chatGPT tells me protons are indeed approximately spherical (and consist of way more quarks than the main three "valence" quarks).
So, we are made up of particles that either have mass and no size or size and no mass. Great!
Not to be a Terrence Howard and reject the fundaments of knowledge based on my lego brick intuition, but the existence of gluons seems suspicious to me, and not just because of their silly name. It seems as if THEY defined a particle that carries the strong force based on this property alone. Why can't the strong force just exist in a vacuum? Why does it need a gluon?
What might be going on is the strong force moves in quanta, which is consistent with a construct called a "particle." So, might as well named it a gluon, even though it has no mass and so does not exist in the way we are used to things existing. But chatGPT is firm: gluons robustly exist and are confirmed by experimental evidence. Plus they sometimes combine with each other to form quarks (!).
There are things that seem either counterintuitive, or badly colored by a sort of overly-categorical or overly-mathematical scientific attitude. Here's my dirty Terrence Howard-esque secret: I think that division by zero should equal infinity, and not be undefined. Here's why:
| 100 | / | 50 | = | 2 |
| 100 | / | 40 | = | 2.5 |
| 100 | / | 30 | = | 3.33 |
| 100 | / | 10 | = | 10 |
| 100 | / | 5 | = | 20 |
| 100 | / | 2 | = | 50 |
| 100 | / | 1 | = | 100 |
| 100 | / | 0.5 | = | 200 |
| 100 | / | 0.004 | = | 25,000 |
| 100 | / | 0.00006 | = | 1,666,666.67 |
| 100 | / | 0.00000007 | = | 1,428,571,428.57 |
As the divisor approaches zero, the answer approaches infinity; I think this is uncontroversial. But, there is a special case for a divisor of 0 itself, even though in Calculus, to my memory, you can use limits to prove that the answer *IS* what the problem is approaching (???). I can accept the consensus of what smarter children have deduced, and also accept that the whole system of math wouldn't work if division by zero were equal to infinity. Plus, I understand that division by zero breaks the inverse property of multiplication and division -- you can't go in reverse and get the same thing anymore. So I'm like Terrence Howard without quite as much hubris.
It's funny how for anyone to pay attention to what you do, you have to be famous already for something else. Like, Steve Martin is a pro-level banjo player but no one would know about it or care or let him put on an NPR Tiny Desk Concert if he were not famous for stand up comedy and acting already. I have been enjoying RMS's free software song, as he slaps it out on his thighs in 7/4 (or 7/8?) for a conference of Hispanics.
I did something halarious: I searched this entire document, 2024.html, for the word "just" and replaced it with a blank, seeking to eliminate two or three gratuitous usages in the last entry, but forgot that entry was at the top of a huge document dating back to last January. So, "social justice warriors" became "social ice warriors," far below. Perhaps this is an improvement but there are probably more new absurdities I have no way of finding other than perusal. I just discovered "just kidding" had become just "kidding," which still works, but I prefer the two-word idiom. Ruinous! If you find a place that looks like "just" should be there, let me know.
In other news I happened upon something. There's a subreddit named /self/ that seems to have degenerated into incel posts -- romantically unsuccessful men asking what they are doing wrong. I thought, "accept that evolution has not selected you," and then googled for the phrase, finding nothing. Then I thought, "hey, evolution doesn't do the selecting, nature does -- as in 'natural selection'." I performed that switcheroo and still got no results. So "accept that nature has not selected you" is my new brilliant unique prose, copyright 2024 barnacle, all rights reserved. But more importantly it got me THINKING DEEPER:
In Darwinism, "nature" takes the place of God; it is the divine and mysterious will, except that we know Its methods, sort of, I think. I personally do not really get evolution -- specifically, I don't quite understand, in an intuitive and satisfying way, organisms mutating randomly, and those that have beneficially mutated surviving to reproduce while detrimentally mutated organisms die out. It seems like there has not been enough time, enough generations, for random mutations to lead to such insanely complex specificity as parasites who guide insects to behave in ways that will make more of that parasite:
To name just a few examples, some worms induce crickets and other terrestrial insects to commit suicide in water, enabling the exit of the parasite into an aquatic environment favorable to its reproduction. - PubMed Central
Would you have me believe that single-celled, photosynthetic bacteria eventually mutate into a cricket, as well as a parasite that causes said cricket to kill itself in water so the parasite can reproduce, with chemical mind control? This evolved? Like...here's a random mutation that alters some enzyme slightly to cause the cricket brain to seek water? But in the meantime there were other random mutations that altered the enzyme to make the cricket walk slightly slower? It's hard to get a mental handle on. I'm not saying evolution is a lie and God did it all and the world is 5,500 years old, but only that evolution is counterintuitive to me because it seems like even with 4.5 billion years, random mutation and natural selection could not account for the perfection or near-perfection of the interdependent biosphere (yes I know about the nerve that doubles back up and down a long neck rather than take the shortest distance between two points, in giraffes).
Two things: 1) maybe I don't fully grasp the time scales and number of generations involved, and 2) maybe the mutations are not entirely "random." Maybe they can only go in certain directions, something like an emergent property. You see emergent properties in chemistry as simpler things combine to form more complex things, and part of their new structure is they do things they couldn't do before. The final electron acceptor in cell respiration is the example I remember: because of the electrical properties of oxygen, it functions to strip an electron off some chain of action and blah blah energy is created. And oxygen has these electrical properties because quarks, electrons, gluons, and the four fundamental forces are the way they are.
It's been a long time and it's late and I don't really know what I'm writing but you can look up emergent properties and oxygen, the final electron acceptor, and cell respiration, if you want. The point is, evolutionary mutations might be constrained by pre-existing structure; a bug doesn't suddenly grow a piano on its head and then die out because it's too heavy, but instead grows bigger claws to better catch other bugs. Maybe emergent properties guide mutations in a beneficial direction. Anyone? Anyone? Bueller? Bueller?
This begs the question: why did we end up with quarks, gluons, electrons, and four fundamental forces? As the big bang happened that's how pure energy took shape, and it could have gone in infinitely many other ways, in each case resulting in an unfathomably different universe.
"God has rejected you" yields many search hits. I just got a flash that I really don't understand the planet Earth. I'm part of the biosphere and part of the planet, more significantly, obviously, meaningfully, and structurally than I am part of the universe, which you hear a lot more for some reason ("we are the universe experiencing itself"). I'm an outgrowth of this planet, which has now sent Voyager I beyond its solar system. Everything humans are and do, including their technology, is natural and is part of evolution.
I pretty much have to blog today, because if I don't, a month will have passed. Blogging is so shitty and weird -- immoral and uncertain -- in that you never know who is reading it. Or rather, you never know if some friend or family member is reading it, and will take offense. The solution is to never talk shit about anyone whose relations you don't want to lose or damage, but there is a gray area: people you are angry with or have mixed feelings about, with whom it might ideally be best to keep options open to accomodate some later-occurring sunshine and rainbows mood, but for now, you want to send to Hell. A writer might change the name of a character based on a friend but anyone in his circle can tell who it really is; I know this happens among people like Pat Conroy. It stings, seeing yourself talked about online -- so much that the first thing to occur to victims is often LIBEL and "I have consulted with my attorney," as if she had retained the services of one, an old family friend with whom they all used to go on ski trips.
On my side is waxybees.org's curse of extremely low pagerank; in fact I'm not sure /blog/ is indexed at all. I suppose it's better not to gossip about anyone. Luther and Buddha say not to do it, but I'm not sure if "gossip" means talking about someone, or doing kind of a 'meta' thing where you tell Joe what Steve said about him. Maybe that's especially egregious gossip, but anything negative about anyone while they're not there to defend themselves constitutes "gossip." When I've done it online, it's because I'm mad at the person, and I want to hurt them. So in a sense I hope they do read it, but of course I hope they don't threaten to sue me, or even bring it up. It's sort of passive aggressive and pathetic.
Part of this impulse is malicious, but part of it is my psychology thing. I wrote a whole long-ass paper asserting that psychology is baloney -- that you cannot in fact determine the cause of behavior with constructs like the unconcscious mind, trauma, values, or beliefs, because "the brain does not amount to a bunch of stories." I think that's partly valid, maybe, but in fact I wrote the essay to erect a permanent defense against psychological attack, while at the same time reserving the right to psychologically attack others (too much internet, and too much time spent in the company of my shitty aunt of some specific name). So, there's some cognitive dissonance there.
I told my FRIEEEEEEEEEEEEND (I put the "end" in "friendship") that I would have to do something as I approach 50...something big. I can't go into details but it is surely coming.
I love it when paragraphs get smaller and smaller, or bigger and bigger.
Hello hello hello I like you you are my friend will you be my LOVER too???? Will you engage in SEXUAL CONTACT with me??? REEEEEEEEE
Nah jk I do not seek such things out.
Then why did you type it? Is it in your SUBCONSCIOUS??? NO! I mean...no :)
My words come out of the culture and out of a lifetime of language exposure, and not some secret unknown-to-me set of drives and motivators.
IN THE FACEEEEEEEEEEEE oops can't threaten the horizontal confines of this blog on mobile
asji;
asd ds dgs___++++++
))))))) ________ kdkdkdkdkdkd
klsdjklsdjlsd
kl;asdjadklsfj YPU .
sdf .
dfffffff........|||||||
}
Taoism seems (in significant part) DUALISTIC!!! Holy shit. I never realized that, but it's obvious: the Ying and Yang, like you see in the T&C Surf Designs T-shirts I wore in 7th grade to try and fit in, is composed of interdependent opposites; the whole exists, but the whole has two elements. Advaita Vedanta sez: UN...AC...CEPTABLE!!! REEEEEEEE.
What do I do now? Sri Nisargadatta Maharaj answers "Kalpana, kalpana!" ("Concepts, concepts!"), implying language is merely a pointer to THE ABSOLUTE, and that apparent contradictions are something like artifacts or penmanship errors and do not, should not, dismantle faith. But what if, as Buddha tells us, there is no absolute, there is nothing there at all, and you are happy about this (Hindus respond, "if there is nothing, then who or what is happy?")? Or what if there really is a thinking and feeling entity beyond the universe who created it then sent a human out onto planet earth to be his son or "son" and redeem those members of mankind who believe this story (or, more spiritually, nebulously, broadly, liberally, "have faith")? WHAT THEN? HELL AWAITS!!!
I put in that last thing for DEI; I don't think the unique all-importance of Jesus (or Buddha, or Mohammed) is a very good model or method for understanding, attaining, or being the ultimate, the absolute, or the universe. I think it's time, or high time, to turn to an apprehension of scientific revelation for our spiritual needs, as Carl Sagan suggested. Psychology draws on Buddhism (or so claim Buddhists), and gods or even God is built into human social neurology ("if sumpin happens, someone musta done it on purpose!"). We are here now in the modern age and we have all this information, all this history, suddenly now via the internet at all of our fingertips, and NOW is the time to reach a COHESIVE FINAL PORTRAIT OF IT ALL!!!
Um...
In related news I'm getting more comfortable with Buddhist contradictions. The most recent one to pop up is: Nirvana is the extinguishing of all experience, all states, to result in happiness, or "true" happiness. The contradiction is, "happiness" is usually thought of in common Western parlance as another state; if you stop all thoughts and desires and so on, then that result will become another thing that stands in the way of Nirvana. Furthermore, why would anyone choose Nirvana over happiness? The trick is, Buddhist theology redefines "happiness" to some other thing beyond words or normal experience, synonymous with enlightenment or Nirvana, and asks you to trust that Nirvana is desirable or good or worthwhile in spite of the fact that it appears to be closer to death than a pleasant life, which a lot of Westerners take to be the highest good.
In Buddhism, what we modern laypeople normally regard as "happiness" is something like false happiness and amounts to the fulfilling of desire: eating a sweet snack when you crave it produces some temporary dopaminergic satisfaction but you feel worse afterwards. TRUE HAPPINESS on the other hand amounts to not indulging in that kind of behavior, and a better aggregate result.
It's all a little prone to logical issues, because even if true happiness comes from following a buddhistic non-fulfillment path, then the resultant calm or equanimity or whatever is not mystical or magical but another state, especially in a neurocentric world view. If you are truly aiming for a no-state state, then this equanimity should then also be dismantled. So, maybe "the right state" is what Buddhism, translated into modern terms, points toward, rather than some death-like nirvanic quasi-object. Buddhism is really old and it does not make sense to walk on tiptoes around it, or any such system for that matter, but instead look at it with modern eyes and fit it in with modern paradigms. The Dalai Lama said something like Buddhism should be in agreeance with science and where it is not it can be discarded or modified? Don't quote me.
Also a big thing with Buddhism is: JUST DO IT!!! Don't think about it and run it through some intellectual processor and find little things that don't make sense. Theology is ultimately irrelevant, which I believe is common wisdom in any and all faith traditions. Ultimately you have to walk the path of religion, as opposed to be a religious studies major in college...unless that's what you want, man.
My desire to be superior, to win, to beat and dominate other people, does not now seem like it could ever go away. And furthermore, I don't want it to go away...I want to win. Mostly this stems from frustration at being a LOSER: low earning, low activity, low everything. But this is the way I am and change seems fallacious, at least in terms of the way it's talked about in self help culture today (you must fundamentally alter the person you appear to be and you must then maintain this charade for the rest of your life). I used to run into this world view a lot on male dating advice webpages, back when I stooped to that level. I think radical acceptance is better; self improvement is a scam and a lie.
I find the Buddhist "anatta" (no self) concept useful. Namely, I can distance myself from embarrassing memories more now, and relatedly, not care so much about writing or talking myself into a corner -- into some logical trap that will cause others or some imaginary others to win the argument because I'm in contradiction with myself. If I don't exist, and never did, then what these fingers typed or what this mouth spoke at some point in the past is a story. It has nothing to do with identity, which is itself a confabulation.
Of course, this throws a roadblock up against punishment of crime; if no one is responsible for what they did in the past because hey, that was a different entity than the one before you now in court, then I don't know what the result would be. Anarchy? MANarchy???
Writing is sort of unhelpful to all of this because it stays on the page. Unlike the scribes of old, a writer now can easily, frequently, and potentially obsessively go back and edit writing on the computer, so in a sense it's better (the writer-self is a constantly changing gossamer thing) but in a sense it's also worse (it keeps this past notion of "you" alive in some way along with the idea that you have to keep fixing it). Maybe I like to edit, to make things perfect, BECAUSE I WANT TO WIN!!!
I don't care about anything you think, say, or feel. You are nothing and I am nothing. None of this matters, and none of this exists.
Tits amazing how time flies between entries. I feel like I blogged but here I see eight days have passed. There's a huge fire up north near Chico/Paradise but it does not threaten me, even in terms of smoke -- the winds are blowing it all further north, for now. But it begs the question: how long have I got? And furthermore, how long til two or three or more of these big fires begin close enough to each other to join up, and basically consume the entirety of California woodlands? It seems like a statistical eventuality that one day soon perhaps we will see THE BIG ONE.
But in the meantime, what about ME??? *III* hope that 1) smoke does not saturate the air for days on end, 2) evacuation orders are not issued for my locale, 3) my house doesn't burn down, 4) I am not injured, 5) I don't die, and 6) I am not grievously injured such that I die in a hospital burn unit 9 months later (this happened to one person in the Camp Fire in Paradise, with a double award for ironic nomenclature). These items are listed in order of awfulness, from least awful to most awful. I think there's a chance I can make it through -- make it through this life or at least life in this house -- and not go to #3 and beyond, but it seems like it's a matter of time before #1 and #2 hit me again.
I am one hour away from doing THE SOUND SHOW. Fuck that though. I recently did a political group email with my evil right winger friend and my stupid right winger friend. I feel like I won but everyone says that after a debate; maybe politics is in the air. Anyway I have been kissing ass and being a milquetoasty "centrist" around them for years and I am tired of it. It is time to fight back. FIGHT BACK!!! FIGHT BACK!!!
Thing is, I really am not totally committed to Democrat or Blue or Leftist or Progressive ideology and/or practicum. I don't think anyone is. I think it's boneheaded TEAM RED vs. TEAM BLUE. Well...no. Fuck. FUUUUUUCK. What I said in my emails was that the USA is too far to the right and the government doesn't do enough for people and so here, I'm a leftist...I'm an American Leftist. In some other place I might be a centrist or even a rightist, speaking now mostly in terms of welfare/nanny state. But the data is in and all the measure of national well-being (happiness, freedom of the press, economic equality, and human development come to mind) are ALWAYS on par with each other, and point to the USA being the stand-out FAILURE among developed nations SPECIFICALLY BECAUSE of its refusal to govern, refused in the name of "freedom." Where does all this extra tax money go then? Right into Elon's pockets! SO FUCK YOUUUUUU
Me me me me mem em emememe mememememe memememe mememeMEEEEEE!!!
I'm going crazy.
I had another fuggin dream about HIGH SCHOOL (cue Nirvana lyrics: YER IN HS AGAIN [x4] NO RECESS!!!). I think I did not tell m'blawg about the first dream, in which I was at some kind of reunion type thing and was talking to the most popular boy in school, and he finally asked me to prom. Just kidding. I was talking to him about how the jocks were then during our tenure starting to become "alternafied," around about 1993, following bleached-haired, nose-pierced Dennis Rodman of the Chicago Bulls's lead, and how this popular kid was some kind of pioneer there, maybe. He had really weird teeth in the dream. Anyway, last night's dream was about the LEAST popular kid: I asked him if he had (or maybe HAD had...in the dream he looked pretty good) some physical illness or disorder that was responsible for him acting and looking so weird, and he then called me out on this and said I was being unethical in some explained way. I gave him an apology, then woke up.
Back in high school, I did not so much want to be popular, to be cool, etc; I didn't really care about love and respect and power. I was sexually frustrated but hey, so is everyone. And I absolutely CANNOT EVER complain about my love life, when I see how poorly and meagerly it sometimes goes for the diseased, the deformed, the queer, the odd. I've never done two chicks at the same time. The closest I came was spring break when two of them were passionately rubbing suntan oil on my chest. I felt sort of molested to be honest. It's all over now but I have the memories, and the mammaries. ANYWAY...I didn't really lose my social status til I received a triple hit combo around-about the turn of the millenium: got fat, aged out of the acceptable range of being unemployed, and damaged my brain. These did not happen precisely at once, and I kept on having jobs and girlfriends up til around 2004 but after that, nothing. And that's ok. I can accept that I've been casted down, casted out of Eden. My only option now is to go all spiritually enlightened. OHM
I've lately been having thoughts about the other big category of my failure, along with LOVE: WORK. I can and do "work": I write, do music, cook, drive a car, do errands, do favors, work outside, draw a bit on the computer, play Super Mario Brothers 2, etc. I can travel, talk to people, and generally function out there, sort of, in short bursts at least. I'm not any more actually disabled, I don't think, than many people who were never categorized as legally disabled.
It's probably impossible for me to get a good handle on my TBI and exactly what it did, especially since it happened when I was pretty young, but something around memory, reasoning, emotional stability, sustained attention, general mental and emotional endurance, and oversensitivity sounds reasonable. Rehabilitators talked a lot about "accommodations" and "strategies," and I do some of those naturally in the course of my life to remember things I will probably forget, read text I really do need to read, and figure something out I really do need to figure out; I can get by.
Yes I am disabled, by definition: I don't function as well as I used to in many or most ways although probably I am as good at writing now as I was pre-injury, BUT I also don't want to suffer the pain, entrapment, humiliation, and degradation of employment -- especially if job duties and relating to colleagues are more difficult than they used to be, and I will be treated poorly as a result of bad performance there.
I did school: got an AA, BA, and MFA, all after my brain injury. I mostly accommodated myself there by "studying" a subject for which I did not have to read or learn much and that mostly drew on pre-existing ability (art). However, I can do well at math (reasoning) and biology (memorization) if I take one class at a time and work extra-hard at it (spend more time with study groups and homework and flashcards). I wasn't really interested in succeeding at employment. It was hard for me, and I had little desire to climb that mountain, unlike with school -- I think there was some "being smart" ego involved in that latter case, but jobs have always seemed like shitty serfdom to me: something you do because people insist that you do them, much the way school seemed to me before college.
So yeah...partly I'm not highly motivated and have an insufficiently positive attitude, but it's complicated; for one thing, all those "soft seeming" aspects of behavioral disability like attitude and motivation and mood, are real and really are sequelae of traumatic brain injury. I sort of seem like a generally shitty person now, as opposed to a bright eyed amputee or whatever: lazy, angry, egotistical, etc. But I am that way at least in part because my brain, which gives rise to all these attributes, was injured.
Since this blog is semi anonymous (not really) AND I'm probably permanently funemployed, I'll go ahead and talk about the contentious subject I steered into yesterday: RACISM (yet again). I think RACISM begins this year's archive, in fact. Is it okay not to love everyone? Is it okay to exclude some people from your mental tribe? It's interesting the way misanthropy is permitted in discourse but racism is not.
Maybe it's acceptable to dislike "bad people" or "racists," or even Rich White Republicans who themselves do not dislike Rich White Republicans. The government deals with this -- identifies groups toward which it is unacceptable to behave discriminatorily -- by setting up "protected categories": some groups have a harder time or are somehow non-mainstream and so they deserve affirmative action and other compensatory legislation/behavior.
I had a broad and large thought recently: that a lot of morality and ethics and law and what they teach you in preschool is Kantian in nature; if everyone does it, it's good for everyone, BUT if one person ignores it, that one person can benefit if he feels ok about ignoring it and is not severely punished (preschool doesn't teach you that last part). I guess this is sort of a philosophy of criminality.
I was watching a video in which a historian asserted humans are unique because they can cooperate in large numbers -- Neanderthals and chimps can do it in groups of 50 or 100, but Homo Sapiens can manage billions (as in global trade). But then of course you are going to find weirdos who don't fit in and can't manage societally mandated roles, and for them, crime can be tempting or even feel normal and natural.
Racism is clearly bad for humanity, because it harms groups of people. However it can also benefit other groups, and if you don't care about humanity as a whole but only your group -- or want to improve humanity by shutting out certain groups -- then racism is no longer evil, from a sort of sociopathic perspective. Being actively racist requires either not caring about or not thinking about human suffering, which transcends race or culture or ability or output.
If like a four year old we keep asking WHY WHY WHY about moral and ethical issues, then we usually arrive at something like raising kids, evolution, or survival of the species. If you're outside of that there's not really a good REASON (stressed because you might still FEEL bad about stealing, killing, etc, even if committing crime makes some logical sense) to be good, from a certain point of view. Throw all single men in the gulag! No but seriously -- they are indeed overrepresented in prisons.
So, Trump got shot. "How do you feel about Trump getting shot?" asks the imaginary MAGA, sullen, sneering, and snarling from the door of his mud-cracked house. I recall a sort of alertness on hearing the news, like I needed to be ready for action. Then I thought (worried) about ways it might affect me (do the signs in our garage make us a target?). Then I felt sorry for Trump. But these were mild feelings. I've had a lot of thoughts though. Right away, so soon it wasn't embarrassing, I said "hey, this will help Trump politically." If a few more hours had passed, saying that would have been too obvious and I'd get the psychological smirk.
It's like in "Pretty Woman": the shipping company that Edward (Richard Gere, the gerbiler) is trying to buy is awarded a new Navy contract, and one of his executives dopily blurts, "Hey, if that's true, that stock could go through the roof!" Then, the slimy lawyer (George from Seinfeld) replies, "No shit, Sherlock," because the executive's comment is a dumb obvious thing to point out, especially as a professional who supposedly does takeovers for a living. The exec's comment was written for the benefit of the movie audience, and then the writers threw in "no shit, Sherlock" to soften the blow of a businessman saying something so amateurish, and that might have released the suspension of the audience's disbelief. Writers weighed a dumb unbelievable line vs. the audience not understanding that a new contract would make the company harder to buy, and chose...poorly? I don't know how I would have handled this as a script writer. Anyway, it's similar to Trump getting shot in the ear being a political gift: it's obvious, but if you say it right (at the right time, or soften its stupidity somehow), it's better.
It's so much of a political gift, in fact, that some lefties are saying it was a conspiracy, set-up, staged, etc. I admit I had that thought but mostly I was thinking of conspiracy theorists and how THEY would be thinking that. I have a long-time acquaintance who is one of those guys, but he's a QAnon Trumpie so his ideology probably will not permit him in this case to follow his usual "what you are told is not the truth" thought pattern; in this case he'd respond with PSHHHH DON'T BE CRAZY if you suggested Trump's ear was carefully blasted off so as to strengthen his chances at election.
I have three right wingers in my peer group, my sort-of friend group, my leftovers from high school. All three can be explained with individual psychology. One is a racist. The other is a radical individualist. And the third -- the guy I talked about above -- thinks the Ruling Elite are in charge, and therefor you can't believe anything you get from the mainstream media, school, scientists, etc; all of it is by definition lizard propaganda. Since the mainstream media does tend to shill for the Democrats, and Trump feels like the more outsider candidate, this makes him a Trump supporter. He told me with a straight face that he thinks Trump may be a time travelling alien.
Out of these three profiles, the least egregious on paper is the extreme (small L) libertarian, who resents being told what to do, grew up in an urban and progressive place, and so then extends a teenaged rebellion or oppositional-defiant disorder unflatteringly into adulthood. The QAnon'er is more an example of pure mental illness so we should theoretically extend sympathy or empathy or something to him. The libertarian is more personality disordered (schizoid, borderline), and the racist sorta defies my analysis. Most would say the racist is simply evil, but this person is not -- this person is generous and considerate and a good parent. Maybe if you are kind to your own, but still a racist, than that still makes you evil? To not love everyone? I dunno. I'm in dark waters and on thin ice.
I sorta think any and all highly expressed politics is a function of mental illness. If you're not a normal, quiet, center-rightist or center-leftist, you should be imprisoned in a padded room and stuffed with Haldol til you drool.
Both Biden and Trump are now calling for UNITY. Will anything come of that, or are Americans too rabid?
"The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer. It has never yet melted." - SOME GUY
HAPPY AMERICAN INDEPENDENCE DAY
Whence *WE* arsefucked the Evil Brits and kicked em outta N. America!!! No they ex-caped to Canada and waged further war on *US* in 1812. They remain there to this day, seething, plotting, drinking Earl Grey ("HOT!!!").
What does the Schmuddha say about sarcasm, hyperbole, comedy, ambiguity, bad faith text? AHHHHHH GRASSHOPPER...YOUR PP IS SMOL.
Speaking of the Schmuddha, I came to a REALIZATION yesterday: Buddhism is basically very simple, the core behavior being dualistically (!!!) NOT DOING or thinking or saying things that cause you or others to suffer WHILE SIMULTANEOUSLY DOING and thinking and saying things that cause you and others equanimity or joy or something. There are some real world, physical or verbal guidelines, like not stealing, drinking, or gossipping, but when it comes to controling your own mind (pathways #2 and #6) they say not to 'do' anything "that causes unwholesome states to arise." Then if you look up "unwholesome" in the context of Buddhism, it says "that which causes suffering." So...circular (SAMSARIC!!!). Basically the wisdom of the Buddha is to stop suffering. Fair, in fact.
Today, Barnacle the Fucking Genius continues on his path of Buddhist apologetics -- specifically, problem #4 from the previous entry, rephrased: how can we define Samsara such that its cessation is desirable?
Let's assume that Buddhism is Good -- that it doesn't have any tricks up its sleeve, and its metaphysics and cosmology exist to benefit the practitioner. If we do, then we can throw away the nihilistic death cult accusations, and go on to say that Samsara amounts to the painful cyclic attributes of existence that are, or would be, commonly agreed upon to be undesirable. Take it as a fait accompli: Buddha said Samsara is Dukkha, so if we believe him, then whatever it is, Samsara must be bad.
Making the same mistake over and over, a boring weekly routine that eats at you, etc -- these are samsaric. Keeping the focus on the transcendent/eminent and on my secret Advaitic roots, the EGO is samsaric because it is self perpetuating; it feeds itself with stories and thoughts so that it might stay alive in the face of THE TRUE NATURE OF REALITY!!! Right? Fuckit. Spirituality is dumb. Or, more accurately, it doesn't stand up to logical criticism, and its only way out is to say "You are approaching it wrong." It might be correct, though.
I was going to attend Sangha yesterday but did not. Buddhists are as dumb as Christians. Everyone is dumb compared to me!!! I AM A GOD!!! I AM *THE* GOD (YHWH)!!! I am not in any way kidding. Just kidding. No but seriously -- I have a considerably advantage over the common ugmanzee when it comes to spirituality, psychology, philosophy, sort-of art, sort-of music...stuff like that, and related text-wrangling. I have a considerable DISADVANTAGE over the common ugmanzee when it comes to following instructions, reading, reasoning, keeping my cool, head math, etc.
EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH EH*
*machine gun sound
Juuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuust kidding ^__________^;
I have problems with ego that I can't "play off" -- turn into a joke, haha, only serious. Some websites say this is a brain injury thing. Others say it's an autistic spectrum thing. I say I am in a completely different category of consciousness and all the rest of you are NPC bots. False modesty is a universal habit I think. When people are two or three they think they are the center of the universe, then their mothers say "no no" a few times and they come to conceal this notion for so long that the concealment becomes their habitual nature. Religious systems try to improve society using something like Kantian ethics -- a system such that if everyone did it, everyone would benefit. But if everyone else is avoiding parking in the handicapped space, then you can benefit more by parking there, questions of legal-type consequences notwithstanding.
Not very Buddhistic, am I? I'm in backlash mode. All the religions have some desirable psychological profile that practitioners are supposed to emulate: soft, breathy-voiced unflappability in Buddhism, back-slappy used car salesman WE'RE GLAD YOU'RE HERE!!! Extroversion in Christianity, the horrible fake beatific brainwashed smile I've seen on Muslim clerics, and I presume something like annoying detached playful bemusement, in Taoism. This might be the real essence of religion as opposed to cosmology or metaphysics.
Fuck you Phil Tamulonis. Fuck you Pyare Fortunato. One day....ONE DAY.
Like many in the liberally educated middle class, I was friendly to Buddhism as an emerging sophont, and thought there might be -- or even must be -- something about it that mirrors some intuitive sense of the great whole, or whatever other grand concept you like. For a birthday in my 20s, my mom gave me a Buddha statue, sitting cross legged, head in hands, "absorbing the sorrows of the world." I still have it and it's on my shelf of tchotchkes. A girl with whom I attended both high school and college, and then attempted friendship with as a real adult, is a Nichiren Buddhist, along with her husband. She introduced me to her religion and I came back at her with some contradictions, or one that I remember -- 'compassion vs. Remaining detached.' Buddhists are historically used to these types of challenges, although some don't deal with them well or with their supposedly cultivated equanimity and non-attachment (in this case, to Buddhism -- "if you meet the Buddha in the road, kill him").
I visited some nuns in 2021, some Theravada nuns, and they were not particularly wise, I didn't think. One of them seemed quite angry, reactive, sensitive, and teenagery. Maybe people compelled to monasticism tend to be a little crazy. Another nun said something about her "still being addicted to experience," as if this were a bad thing, which bothered me and still does. I read up on Buddhism then and discovered another conflict: the ol' Anatta vs. Samsara bug. I refer to it this way because it comes up a lot. Buddhism teaches there is no eternal soul or "self" -- basically no Atman, which is a Hinduistic or Bramanistic concept. Additionally, Buddhism teaches that SOMETHING immaterial is recycled after death into new bodies-of-beings. I suspect this was an error and they've been trying to wiggle around it for centuries. Apologists say that Karma (consequences of actions) or Mindstream (brain activity) is what is recycled, but the Atman still does not exist.
Finally, in 2024, I visited a Zen convent with something like formal services. These constitute "Sangha," one of the Three Gems of Buddhism that most Buddhists agree you have to DO in order to 'be a Buddhist', the other two being Dharma (wisdom text), and BUDDHA, which I find the most difficult, as I will state below. I read up more on Buddhism and my biggest problem moved from Anatta/Samsara to Samsara/Nirvana. Ahhhhh Grasshopper, this is a stepping stone along the path.
In order of least problematic to most problematic, here are my issues (turns out there are Four of them, Noble or not):
The central premise of Buddhism is broken up into "the Four Noble Truths": 1) life is difficult, unpleasant, imperfect, stressful, wrought with suffering, etc -- "Dukkha." 2) The root of this suffering is something like desire, or clinging, or attachment. 3) In order to make life better, quit clinging. 4) The way to quit clinging is to follow the Noble Eightfold Path, which amounts to minding your thoughts, words, and actions. How, specifically? You'll have to look it up...it gets complicated. And, turns out the Eightfold Path is not so universal as I thought; there are other methods, according to different sects. This part of Buddhism often rings true for modern intellectuals. But Samsara, and Nirvana, and even Karma, remain problematic.
A seeming religious scholar on a forum told me that the big sticking point for me and people like me was materialism or physicalism -- if you believe that there ultimately is nothing to the universe but elementary particles, then Samsara won't ever make sense because it relies on some ineffable self-like thing being transmitted from creature to creature. This is where Buddhism may be in disagreement with science although it purports to be in agreement (see: books like "Why Buddhism is True").
If you allow your theology to become very liberal, you can say that samsaric rebirth, the great recycler, is not so much being-to-being "stuff"-transfer but rather the law of conservation of energy. Buddhists assure me this is wrong, but I quit believing anything they say, and I now think any interpretation of Buddhism will be called wrong, as if I or someone like me were trying to discover a weak beam in Buddhism that when kicked will cause the whole superstructure to come crashing down. I believe Buddhism and Buddhists have evolved to use fuzzy concepts and be rhetorically slippery; there is scriptural support for this.
Buddha lived in his own time and place and so had to operate within those philosophical and cosmological confines. In spite of this Buddhism does offer some pushback on reincarnation, and corrects it to "rebirth." As far as I understand it reincarnation involves a soul moving from body to body. But since Buddha said there is no soul (which I nod my head along with), then this "reincarnation" is a different thing he termed "rebirth."
There is no "soul" but there are "beings." When one being dies there is one-to-one transfer of that being's "essence" or mindstream or karma or whatever you like, into a specific other being. I believe this is how most Buddhists think and it is incoherent because it describes Atman even in face of outward denial of Atman.
People on a forum told me this 'thing' being transferred is the aforementioned Mindstream/Karma. How might Mindstream be transmitted from one life to another? You would need to dumb it down into ultraliberal terms, or believe in magic: either people simply influence each other via culture (oral tradition, books, movies, art, etc), OR there is something like a soul you don't want to call a soul because Buddha said there is no soul, but then forgot about that and kept Rebirth from its Bramanistic origins to build his self help system around.
Remaining in materialism, how might Karma be transmitted from one life to another? That's easy: if you punch someone they get mad. That's the liberal version, and I don't think most Eastern Buddhists at least would like it much. Furthermore, how does Karma universally end up transfered from being to being, even if they don't interact? Grasshopper is confused and will hop along to THE BIG ONE:
Because it is Dukkha (painful), answer the Buddhists.
Problem is, there's already a method to stop Dukkha: stop attachments, via minding your P's and Q's (a lot of the points end up in agreeance with general wisdom on being a good person -- don't lie, cheat, steal, get drunk, etc, and be sure to meditate and drink your Ovaltine). We don't need to stop the universe from happening, if we have already resolved its inherent pain via the Eightfold Path or some other allowed method. Samsara and Nirvana seem to lift easily out of Buddhism, and I suspect Buddha only referenced them because he simply couldn't see around them, since they amounted to the pervasive view in his world. I read that Theravada does not stress Samsara or Nirvana as much as other sects, and is more focsed on the Four Noble Truths, the Eightfold Path, and Anatta, which I can get behind.
Who am I to think I've discovered irresolvable problems in a system that clearly works or else it would not have stuck around so long? Buddhism does what all religions do: provides a calming exercise to help brains, which evolved to hunt mammoths, to write TPS reports instead. "Modernity sucks," maybe should be the first noble truth. Modernity sucks, and the way through this is to modify your built-in instincts.
I remain agnostic on scientific materialism, but I think I think that the universe is one fundamental substance or thing. So, I guess that'd make me a neutral -- balanced between spiritual and material -- monist? This balancing allows consciousness to make more sense than it would under materialism, whereas spiritualism is seen as daft by Western microprocessor and internal combustion engine users. I feel like all of this -- along with theist vs. Atheist debates on Youtube -- is the kind of text aliens laugh at humans for producing when they could be cheaply desalinating and covering the Sahara with solar panels.
Vedantic Hinduism seems to take consciousness to be Atman, which according to the "great realization" is the same as Brahman, or the godhead, or the encapsulation of all that is. Basically there *is* only consciousness. Buddhism diminishes consciousness into merely one of the Five Aggregates, which are passed as Mindstream from being to being. I think the first part of that is correct in that what people generally THINK of as "consiousness" is really sensory impressions, thoughts, and the "I" sense, which are 'only' parts of the brain buzzing to other parts. Maybe the claustrum, or the cerebral cortex, or the hindbrain could be the seat of conscsiouness, but neuroplasticity teaches that THE BRAIN in itself with its numerous connections functions as a whole. My guess would be that if you had a "General Grievous from Star Wars" cyborg-type situation where you put a central nervous system into a robot body, that "person" would have a very different experience of self, if they had it at all. So I do think Buddhism is right to 'diminish' consciousness into mere neurology, as opposed to Hinduism, which says it's the one big important thing. But as far as I know Buddhism is monistic rather than nihilistic -- there is SOMETHING, but Buddhists decline to name It or acknowledge It, let alone worship It.
Anyway, you don't need Samsara and/or Nirvana; they are philosophically problematic and get in the way of non-attachment.
Hello. I'm sitting here at the computer with my ice packs strapped to my upper forearms, but not wearing my pressure straps. I think my tendinitis MIGHT be getting SLOWLY better but it still hurts, and hasn't improved much in a month, so I'm going to call the doc. I might as well do it today I guess. Blah. I hate medical care. I'm always getting billed for it. I made my butter chicken for family dinner tonight.
*Add salt timidly and taste at every stage.*
Cut up a package of chicken breasts into bite sized pieces. Fry them up in a stick of butter, draining the buttery chicken water occasionally and adding more butter. There might be a better way to do this so as to not waste so much butter. IRREGARDLESS, you don't want chicken water hindering your brown. To be honest, browning isn't really necessary, ever, almost, although this isn't slow cooked so little things matter more. YMMV.
Add curry powder and/or whatever you want (a few red pepper flakes???). STIR, fry for a bit. Add a chopped onion. STIR, fry for a while or til soft and brown. Add garlic. STIR, fry for a bit.
Dump in a can or two of tomato sauce OR blended crushed tomatoes, about a cup of heavy cream, about 3/4 cup of sour cream, and a generous squirt of lemon (or lime) juice. I bring it to a boil and let it reduce some, then take it off the stove, but so long as the chicken is no longer raw, all is vanity.
Recipes say one is supposed to marinate the chicken first for official Indian Butter Chicken (actually, this is a mistranslation and it's more like "buttery chicken" -- chicken so rich and creamy and yummy it's like butta) but I make it like this, in the morning, then let it sit fully cooked in the fridge all day, and finally heat it up at dinner time while I make the rice. It's good...can't complain. Maybe it could be better though.
Me!!!!!! I'm trying to get used to my foam wrists rests, still. I never will probably although I do notice that hitting the p key is easier than it used to be. I used to do it with my ring finger but now I can use my pinky as is perfect and proper, piss on your piddly primroses you paddywank piggle-puss! PPPPPPPPP
Jim is away at a UCC conference so again now is the perfect (pppppppp) time for you to murder me. I recently got another record scrubbed from a people finder site. Writing to people finders and/or filling out their removal forms is probably a futile exercise, but I do it anyway, and have been doing it for a long time, and I dunno...it may do something. I'm hard to find, even if you know my name and hometown. My FULL NAME is on this site but you have to dig for it. Get to digging! This is my bait.
We're in our first heat wave for 2024: only in the low to mid 90s yesterday, today, maybe tomorrow, then it'll cool off. It's nothing compared to The Valley, which is enjoying 108F in Fresno and elsewhere. Fresno is where Jim is at his UCC conference and I hope he doesn't suffer ill health.
What am I supposed to DO?
me.
I know recently I said church chips away at turning me conservative but I think the opposite is the case and I am now a FULL BLOWN LEFTIST. Next I'm going to work on being a full blown Christian. You can do it...foh yo kids...so you could raise em. But I don't have to sell this and you know it because this here shit sells itself.
JUST KIDDING. But no I think I need Jesus. Who doesn't???? I would guess that for people who have a history of social difficulty, Christianity is a particularly unsuitable religion because it seems to draw from the character of Jesus and how great he was, how kind, how this, how that. It seems to me that the big deal with Jesus is basically a classic leftist position: that the grand hierarchy of society, with the rich and powerful on top, should be upended, and the lepers and prostitutes will come out on top in the end. This is really only attractive if you're a loser yourself or a highly compassionate winner, which I think may modern progressives claim to be, but I have my doubts.
The modern LGTB-oriented UCC or Unitarian church is in a really good position, in terms of Christian ethics, because they champion oppressed groups. A conservative might answer back that no one is in fact oppressed in the First World, at least in terms of laws or government policy.
HELLO FUCKWITS. I am Wonko!!!! REEEEEEEEEEEEE. It seems like I friggin blogged but I guess not. 9 days! UN...AC...CEPTABLE!!!!
I am on a course of physical therapizing, icing, and theoretically resting my tendinitis-stricken upper forearms, but right now I'm typing without my foam wrist rests. I need my monitor to be closer and there's not enough room for them, so I decided that they weren't helping that much. Do you see how this works?
I had something I wanted to write about but I forgot it. The weather is nice...65F outside and sunny, of course, as it will be until next November if we're lucky (as in, we will be lucky if the seasonal rains do indeed come in force). I kinda think quitting coffee was a mistake and maybe I should cut back if anxiety strikes; I'm not sure I had a good reason (anxiety? Debatable) to quit coffee other than not wanting to feel addicted. It seems to boost my mood and creativity, and suppress my appetite. But weed is definitely the devil's lettuce: it makes my joints hurt, makes me overeat, makes me behave strangely (not so much anymore but the potential is there), and triggers suicidal depression. In fact it's responsible for a lot of destructive events in my past and I should probably be more averse to it than I am.
I have a lot wrong with me, physically. It's starting to add up. On top of that I'm socially awkward and often say the wrong thing. Plus I look bad. In related news I'm making a pizza. I will post a recipe because it's pretty good and pretty easy, if you have a bread machine and a hand blender.
I finally found a pizza dough formula that works consistently. For the longest time I couldn't get my dough to form at all -- I'd put ingredients in the bread machine according to instructions and they'd turn out as some cancerous multi-colored multi-textured diarrhea slop. I struggled for weeks to get it right, tweaking little parameters. Finally I tried a totally different recipe and had no problems after that; perfect dough every time. I wish I had a better brain so I could know what was going on and what I corrected but meh.
Dump 3/4 cups water, 1 tbsp olive oil, and 2 cups all purpose flour into the bread machine. I believe it's important that you measure the water, flour and yeast precisely, but other stuff can be fudged.
Finger a hole in the flour above the bread machine blade deep enough so that the water below seeps into it.
Pour 1 tsp sugar into the hole, followed by 1 tsp active dry yeast. Add 1 tsp salt off to the side far away from the yeast.
Set bread machine on DOUGH, and press START. If you discover at this stage that your bread machine does not have a DOUGH setting, kill yourself.
These dough instructions sound ritualistic and they are, a bit; it might not matter where you put the sugar and salt, and I feel it should not matter whether you make aforementioned hole or not because it all gets blended up by the blade pretty quickly after you start the machine's dough-making process, but I couldn't make it work before, so there it is. Pizza dough is more chemistry than cooking, although I don't precisely measure the olive oil, sugar, or salt, but do "a few splashes" and "a pinch."
Brown 2/3 of a coarsely chopped onion in olive oil, saving the other 1/3 of for toppings. Add salt, pepper, basil, paprika, oregano, hot pepper flakes, and garlic. Splash in maybe 1/3 cup of red wine, a squirt of lemon juice, and some Worcestershire sauce. Add 1 full can of tomato paste, and about as much tap water as the volume of said can. FINALLY blend it all up ril gud with a hand blender, and let it simmer on LOW while your dough forms.
Thickly dust a surface (wooden cutting board is good) with flour, and thinly spray or brush a cookie sheet with some kind of oil (I've been using PAM olive oil spray). See how much time is left on the bread machine and set another timer for that, minus 12 minutes.
When your timer goes off, preheat the oven to 500F, then wait for the bread machine to ding. When it does, stretch out, using secret technique, your risen perfect warm protoplasmic wad of dough on the floured surface til it's roughly the same size and shape as the cookie sheet. Place one on the other, stretching the first out at the edges to cover the second in its entirety.
Penultimately, spread the sauce on the dough, then top with enough shredded mozarella plus a bit of shredded cheddar (or whatever you want) to please your intuition. Add pepperoni (I keep mine in a ziplock bag in the freezer), the remaining 1/3 chopped onion you've been saving all this time, and parmesan cheese if you want. Hot pepper flakes if you want. Whatever you want. There are no rules!!!!!!
Bake at 500F for 15-18 minutes or whatever works with your oven and your personal aesthetics; I spergily do 16:30. Cool the pizza in its cookie sheet on a rack for 10 minutes, cut on same floured surface, EAT, and GET FAT. Ha! Mongo wan chee kospah ooh. HO HO HO.
I devised a method for believing in an afterlife. It has to do with thoughts and lives leaving cosmic nudges at the fabric of spacetime that transcend the speed of light, aliens detecting these nudges and then using them to replicate brains, and my one experience under general anesthesia in which I closed my eyes then opened them, and was told four hours had supposedly passed.
They hint at this in "Gladiator":
Maximus: Three weeks from now, I will be harvesting my crops. Imagine where you will be, and it will be so. Hold the line! Stay with me! If you find yourself alone, riding in the green fields with the sun on your face, do not be troubled. For you are in Elysium, and you're already dead!
[Cavalry laughs]
Maximus: Brothers, what we do in life, echoes in eternity.
The stand-out counter to my afterlife is, "why are humans so special?" -- why not painstakingly reproduce all the craneflies that have ever lived? That seems more outlandish, and we may not be all that different from craneflies to some alien super-intelligence or super-technological civilization, except craneflies don't write blogs about the afterlife and spacenudging (that I know of).
The universe was born yesterday, on a timeline of the far future. They say it all will eventually experience heat death and deteriorate into particles so far apart they won't do anything to each other, but before that some intervention into physical reality might take place, or even is likely to take place, given the universe's propensity to give rise to occasional technological civilizations.
Of course this is all very hubristic, not only in thinking we are interesting enough to replicate one by one, but also in thinking there is a "we" to begin with -- that we are somehow separate from the universe. It might be that being replicated in the far future is a nightmare rather than a dream. Still though...if I were allowed to choose death at some point I think I'd like to maybe try it out, although I might regret it. I wanted to type "ragret" there as a funny misspelling but my ego would not allow readers to think I *actually* misspelled it. REEEEEEEEE
In the bible, the threat isn't hell, but death; "For God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son, that whoever believes in him shall not perish but have eternal life." I guess if you don't want to live forever but are somehow convinced of Jesus's divinity, then you are in for a bad time. A Tillich-caliber liberal might interpret John 3:16 as "if you believe in the redemption of humanity, then you shall have it."
I chose craneflies because they are beautiful, conscious to a degree, as well as extremely stupid and exist only to make more of themselves -- no offense intended if any craneflies or cranefly allies are reading. Wasps and bees and ants are pretty smart -- their behavior is complex -- but craneflies, not so much. I've been over this before, and I first deduced that humans are special because humans create art, art being defined as activity or production with no overt evolutionary purpose, but then I backpedaled and said no, craneflies also do art by sitting on the wall and existing; by basically doing anything other than eating or mating, which in fact constitute a relatively small percentage of a given cranefly's lifespan, including both larval (eat) and adult (mate) stages. It's possible philosophy is a better candidate for tagging human specialness than art, especially post-photography.
Still getting used to new typing. Maybe I never will, totally. REEEEEEEEE #2
Good morning. I'm (MEEEEEEEE) still getting used to new typing ergonomics. I haven't blogged that much in part because of this, and in part because I am lazy. It's the same thing with walking: ostensibly I don't go because of mountain lions, but really I don't want to and the mountain lions are a good excuse. But this morning I changed into my workout clothes and am now waiting for sunrise. Once the workout clothes are on, there's no going back. Tendinitis still sucks. Why am I announcing all this to the world? What kind of fucked up person am I? I am a BLOGGER, that's what. So I have a diary but I can't say really personally resonant things because I can't have the public reading it, and then at the same time a bunch of people read the thoughts I do put out there and JUDGE ME. The whole web thing has been perfect for me, and not in a good way: it's a lazy place where I can do lazy stuff and have it feel like I'm productive. There are no standards and everything is low effort. Well maybe not, but there's a serious "no one gives a shit" problem with websites. But then I was saying that I want more privacy! I dunno. WHY
Once a month, eh? Thass wat u got goin?!?! K. FINE!!! I'm trying to acclimate to typing with a wrist rest and it's not going swimmingly. I have dreadful debilitating tendinitis, and yes I am spelling it right, even though it looks wrong. It seems like it should be "tendOnitis," because it's an inflamed tendOn, but for some reason it's "tendInitis." HOWEVER "tendOnitis" is acceptable, although less correct. REEEEEEEE
I guess typing is doable and I have to get used to it. I'm worried about my tendinitis: will it ever get better? Am I doomed? No more guitar? No more serving hard ice cream? If I ice it and wear pressure straps then I can sort of manage it and make it not-worse, but it's not getting any better. I hope I don't need surgery but if I do then pile it on to the shit of life, I guess. And it gets worse, until you die. I'm brain damaged, have vision obscuring floaters, occasional ocular migraines, periodontal disease (supposedly, or maybe LONG IN THE TOOTH), obesity, tendinitis, a broken leg...and mildly ingrown toenails plus weird unexplained pains in the feet.
I've been reading about "sealioning" and I don't really understand it. Near as I can figure, it means bad faith debate in the form of unimportant or diversionary questions. This is fine, but I think autistic types get accused of sealioning when they are not actually in bad faith but only trying to clarify, understand, or have a fun conversation. It reminds me of the term "gaslighting" (attempting to cause someone to question reality): if you tell me you are not gaslighting, you are gaslighting. If you quibble with the definition of sealioning, you are sealioning. Both terms rely on assessment of bad faith and as such could very well be misapplied. It doesn't help that "sealioning" was coined in a webcomic so if you question it you are not only a sealion in bad faith, but have no sense of humor to boot. Being in bad faith means not being honest in intent; trolling, basically, or even teasing or comedy could amount to bad faith. Anything that's not assembly instructions is in bad faith.
You can find Reddit comments that are way better than my blog. That may be the issue: the kind of thing people did on personal sites in the early 2000s moved onto other platforms and if you keep it up on a personal site, there's a sort of redundancy there. Or am I seagassing?
I have been realizing more and more that I am not as good a guitar player as I thought. I've written about this, about how it's easy to think you are a genius at guitar because you can make a noise that sounds like guitar. There may also be some ego there, inasmuch as it's ME making the noise so it's harder to evaluate fairly. But I can listen to Matteo Mancuso and then listen to my own SOUND SHOW archives and realize I'm not in that tier. It doesn't help that I have tendinitis now and am slower and clumsier, and that this is compounded the less I practice (play).
WTF is "practicing" anyway? Maybe there's noodling, which is playing, and then practicing, which is more deliberate and seeks to improve deficiencies. My deficiency is that I am not Matteo Mancuso and I do not believe I can practice my way there. I guess I have "practiced" before, like when I learned jazz standards, but no matter how much I play I can't go any faster than how fast I go and I can't train myself to 'deeply hear' and replicate more advanced music (maybe). Perhaps the point is making little improvements on your own playing such that you "level up" yourself, regardless of achieving some standard. It reminds me of posts I saw recently about the New York Times mini crossword puzzle, where everyone in the thread was talking about solving it in 30, 15, 6 seconds, and there I was thinking I was doing well if I solved it in under a minute.
These new typing ergonomics will take getting used to but I think it's doable and I think it's better for my tendons. Small improvements, right? The problem with the internet is you're immediately exposed to THE BEST in every field. Maybe I should go back to painting; I think I have more hope of winning there. Wow it's 5:30am and getting light outside. Lots of mountain lion sightings lately and they say not to walk at dawn. Meh. I wish I didn't live in fire country and/or mountain lion country. It's pretty and empty here, but I think those are the only advantages, the second being questionable as it carries with it every convenience being a half hour drive away. Furthermore I think I've seen enough trees although I'd probably miss them if they were gone. In fairness it's not the trees: it's the rolling hills and lack of people and wildlife (not so much the bugs and bears and lions), that contribute to the prettiness or grandeur or something. Unspoiled landscape. AWOOOOOOOO
I should start planning tomorrow's show. Maybe I'll say FUCK FUCK FUCK FUCK for the full hour.
Once a week, eh? Thass wat u got goin?!? K. FINE!!! I went to church yesterday and it was ok. Not great. I sort of hate it. I think it chips away at turning me conservative. This church attracts unconventional people (gay, trans, poly, general odd fish) and it makes me wonder about the endgame of non-economic leftism, where every behavior is permissible and there are no standards at all -- one day people may show up to church naked or in dog costumes, or spray everyone with water guns filled with their own urine, and we all have to accept it and be comfortable with it, or we run afoul of the tenets of diversity, equity, and inclusion. What about me? What about what I like and don't like? Can I have preferences without being labeled a counterrevolutionary? Probably not. I read an article on the split in Democrats between social justice leftists and liberals, and I think I may be more liberal. Of course this is an identity narrative and as such is false.
Probably I'm just old. Something else I've been thinking about and wanting to attempt to flesh out more: the voices in my head, a lot of people's verbal responses, and maybe thoughts in general, are a lot like chatGPT. Everyone has been exposed to language their whole life -- they continually parse an enormous database of word and phrases, such that some are more likely to occur than others, based on the previous word or phrase. Our brains are then left in this kind of autocomplete situation where stuff comes up, and it has little to do with the unconscious mind in the sense of someone's TRUE identity, or any kind of solid target for psychology. These auto-playing words are confused with "the self" or personality, when in fact they only amount to brain echoes due to over-exposure -- some kind of neurological repetitive stress injury via text. Insight psychology, or therapy, or semi-Freudian analysis, is easily, maybe unavoidably captured by this phenomenon. I've written about this before and no one cares but briefly, what the therapist thinks is an insight based on observation of the subject is really an insight based on having seen too many movies. We're all running on autocomplete, and this is largely a cultural, rather than psychological, phenomenon.
In other news, cities are, in large part, shitholes. Take a city that people generally agree is not a shithole, like Montreal -- still a shithole. I recently found my old hood in Hampstead (a small enclave on Montreal island, surrounded by Montreal proper), and it's depressing: ugly apartment building after ugly apartment building on a street with cars and very few trees and no hip cafes or anything like that. I dropped my streetview man down in another, supposedly better locale, in central Montreal, and yep still a shithole: grafitti, boarded up windows, etc. There are portions of cities that are nice, usually claimed by rich people, and I suppose it's a truism that to have a conventionally aesthetic urban experience you need to be rich, but the scenario where you MOVE TO A CITY and plop down somewhere random and have everything look and feel good, is extremely unlikely; the hip cafes are far away, clustered together somewhere, and cordoned off from the hoi polloi by land value. The cuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuntry (gyelk), on the other hand, specializes in this mythological universality. And of course, the obvious: who gives a shit about hip cafes? If you break it down, you're sitting in a building with art on the wall and buying sugarwater for $10 a glass. But it's in th'CITAAAAAAAY so everything is cool. It's all status games. Status games and autocomplete! No, in theory, all the smart high earning aesthetes move to a city with the promise of hip cafes, and even if they are disillusioned, they find themselves next to other pioneers, marry them, and make high status babies. That's how it works.
TODAY IS EASTER. THERE WILL BE A MAGIC SHOW AT 09:30. CHAPLAIN CHARLIE WILL TELL YOU HOW THE FREE WORLD *WILL* CONQUER COMMUNISM, WITH THE HELP OF GOD, AND A FEW MARINES!!!
Happy Zombie Jesus Day, as they say or used to say in internetland before the internet was mainstreamed around about 2008 to all the Facebookers and DMV clients and high school reunionites. I told my aunt recently I'm not a devout atheist, but I may have been fudging. I was less an atheist before but I don't really have spiritual experiences anymore, at least none that I recognize, and so I think it's more appropriate to discard the "God" concept as useless, meaningless, empty, etc. SORRY. I suppose peak spirituality was around 2014-2017.
There's plenty of material around Easter for liberal Christians: spring, rejuvenation, a new start, and any number of metaphors around being born again. There are a few rational AND conservative theologians in modern Christendom, and I think for them, the life of Jesus encapsulates the only supernatural events on the universe's entire timeline (virgin birth, resurrection, and then the minor sort of embarrassing magic trick stuff like walking on water and water-to-wine).
I'm going to church today. When I do that, I sometimes try to have some kind of 'spiritual' experience...some kind of deep meditation or some such, on the pew. Christianity is by far the weirdest (requires acceptance of implausible events) contemporary mainstream religion, and I believe it is also the most popular. No one else claims God Himself was here on the earth, walking around, trying to free Palestine. You have to admit, even if you believe it, that it is a standout. But what I like about Christianity, theologically, is that this "Christ" concept that says "man was god" or "god was man" harkens to Hinduism, which is a much older and more inward turned philosophical system. In Hinduism, YOU, or the consciousness we all feel, is the same thing as the entire universe, or Brahman, which is the sacred godhead. So, in a sense, in both Hinduism and Christianity, man is god. You are god! But the connection ends abruptly before that, I think in most cases -- maybe a few very liberal Christians could go with "you are God" and cite concepts like "the inner Christ" but I think mostly Christian faith is more "supernatural theism" than "panentheism."
Marcus Borg presents these concepts as two polls in his book, "The Heart of Christianity: Rediscovering a Life of Faith." Supernatural theism means a bearded man in the sky, basically, although stated less crassly -- God is a person-like spirit who thinks and feels like a human. Questions around where God is or how big he is are accepted as meaningless and juvenile by spiritual theists, but questions around God's wrath, love, mercy, etc, are not. "Oh, so people designed this god after themselves," a smart little kid might comment. No! It's the other way around: God is human-like, and he made us to "look" like him. That's the party line, anyway. Furthermore, the Frances Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore Maryland is available for purchase now for a limited time at a very low price.
The other end of Borg's continuum is panentheism, or "all in god." Paul Tillich's "ground of being" is a related concept. Basically, God is the most fundamental "thing," and He encapsulates all else, including (but not limited to!) the material universe with its stars and planets and galaxies and humans and pets and farm animals. But even in the case of these types of theologians, they will still read the bible and talk about God as if he were a spirit person. So I think there's a little bit of confusion there, or at least acknowledged inconsistency.
I'm pretty much an atheist, at least for all common definitions of "god." It's likely humans have a built in theology such that they want or need to think about what's behind everything, what the ultimate cause is, or what to name the great whole. And sure: you can call that God, for what it's worth. At least that way you won't get into trouble at family dinner. The last three questions my Grandpa asked me before he died were 1) have you accepted Jesus Christ as your lord and savior ("yes"), 2) do you go to church ("no"), and 3) do you have a job ("no"). I was put on the spot and decided the best thing was to lie about #1, in part because accepting Jesus Christ as one's lord and savior is kind of a loose concept and you can't really prove that I have not done this, whereas church attendance or putting on a McDonalds uniform is more concrete. Nevertheless I sometimes fantasize about having truthfully answered "no" to all three queries.
I'm doing an experiment where I try computing without wearing my glasses. I can sort of see, although it's blurry. I'm listening to "The Wall," by Pink Floyd, in its entirely, front to back, one track at a time, on my local app, via mp3s (no streamin'). I wonder how many mp3 hoarders remain among us netizens.
I decided to give reading another try, and I checked out a teen novel from the library -- easy reading. I haven't attempted it yet.
But the good news is that I've been feeling pretty good lately. I gave up coffee, and I have a walking schedule (M, T, W, F), which fulfills the "most days a week" requirement of the learn'd astronomers. And, also according to the learn'd astromers, I've been more conscious of the "5 servings of fruits and vegetables a day" thing, and I'm trying to do that. It sorta seems to help me eat less during the day, maybe, possibly. I don't want to jinx anything. Oranges, bananas, strawberries, pears, salad. I'm not sure if eggplant parmesan counts but I don't see why not. I did read somewhere that eggplant parm is not all THAT healthy, as far as vegetables dishes go, but it does have some of those ANTI OXIDANTS, which no one understands, sorta like magnets and batteries.
In other news I have terrible tendinitis in both arms. I dunno how this happened. I think I'm prone to it -- I've always had a defective muscular system such that it gets indjured easily and randomly sore and I'm always pulling muscles, sometimes while sleeping, and I feel random pains everywhere. It's been about 3 weeks now and it doesn't seem to be getting any better so maybe it's time to call the doc and get some steroids and learn some physical therapy exercises. I dunno.
I wrote to my grad school friend, Robert, today, and he wrote back, but I couldn't really make sentences that sounded smart. I sorta babbled and nothing made sense. I think the conversatin is over now. I think this is what will happen now: I get dumber and dumber until I die.
WE DON'T NEED NO...EDUCATION
WE DONT' NEED NO...THOUGHTS CONTROLLED
NO DARK SARCASM IN THE CLAHHSROOM (Wat? This never happened that I noticed)
TEACHER LEAVE THEM KIDS ALONE!!! (I think this song misses the mark here; the problem isn't undue attention, but rather neglect)
In other-other news, aNONradio is fucked up: it now splits all archives into 30 minute segments. I might change my show time to 30 minutes. Or, I might totally leave SDF and go off on my own, with my own domain and my own podcast, elsewhere!!!! FAME AND FORTURE AWAIT!!!! SDF is holdin' me back, man. I'm kidding. OR AM I? Yes, I am. I'm not as talented as I thought I was. To illustrate, I will not spellcheck or edit. No, I will. Somewhat.
I sorta thought I would do this for a while: simple stupid content-free entries that take up space. At the end of my life my bedside nurse will ask me what I did in my life, and I will answer "I HAD A WEBSITE." Unless I migrate off the metaARRAY or get my own domain, prepaid for centuries, or something, that will be the end of the story of Me. I have this ongoing bug in my head that I'm not famous...that I'm not some kind of writer or artist or movie maker or actor or etc. Something creative, such that I appear all over Youtube. I spend my life here behind a screen watching my superiors: guitar players who are good, actors who are thin, etc, and I fantasize about being on the other side of the screen.
OH WELL. Greatness can't be for everyone. In fact the world desperately needs losers and will probably pay losers to exist such that they make winners feel like winners, because it really is all relative -- the working poor today live better than royalty in the middle ages [CITATION NEEDED]. I'm stuck though...stuck here.
WELL IT'S BEEN 10 DAYS AND MAYBE MO'
SINCE I FIRST LAID EYES ON YEW
SOMETHING SOMETHING
GO 'WAY HEARTBREAKAAAAAAAAAAH
*riff*
I'm sorry I gave you the middle finger. But you deserved it!!!!
Good fuggin' LAWD time flies!!! Already the 10th and I have not written, in...*head math*...6 days. 10-4=6. Logic!!! I have awful tendinitis in both forearms and can't do much. I tried physiotherapizing myself with weights and made it worse, and later swept and mopped the kitchen floor and made it worse still. I suspect I'm continually making it worse by mousing, typing, playing the guitar, and even iphoning, but meh.
I read a very discouraging article on CNN about how obesity changes the brain and how weight loss is perhaps not impossible but certainly physiologically stacked against fat people. Basically I would have to embark on a titanic lifelong daily minute-by-minute struggle in order to be thin, or at least not obese. I would like to be 5% body fat with veins bulging from sinewy arms. I would like to be a highly paid and respected professional. BUT...I am brain damaged and obese, and long term unemployed.
So, fuck all of you. You offer me nothing, and I offer you nothing.
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I came out of a 3 day weed bender, which consisted of only 2 grams...not much of a bender by societal standards. I feel better sober. I feel bad while I'm smoking, I feel bad immediately afterwards, and I feel a notable relief after the green wizard is mostly out of my body, and yet I continue to buy it and smoke it. DRUGS. Better than crack I guess.
I am making ham and scalloped potatoes for dinner tonight but I saw I have no white flour or cow's milk, so it will be a hippie version with whole wheat flour and almond milk. It'll be edible. I almost drove out to get those missing ingredients but decided I'd rather do the poverty simulator and make due; the poverty simulator can be fun, and who knows what will happen in the future -- we all may need to MAKE DUE when civilization collapses, food falls short, Russians sneak over the hill, etc. Only a few more years to go though. I can do it! I CAN MAKE IT. I CAN HACK IT.
I was going to go for a walk today and my narrative at this time is still that yes, I will, but I feel laziness creeping in. I kinda want to go down and see the creek after this big rainfall. We got an inch of frozen precipitation on the ground but it melted quickly. Nasty and cold and wet, though...I skipped church because of the weather even though I'd have been in a car the whole time (I admit there were other factors).
I guess it's ok to do mediocre art. It's not like I have a choice unless I put REAL MONEY into it. Hmm. I guess that's the answer, if I want to do something grand: buy a ton of stuff and set it up somewhere public. I think I'm only concerned with greatness because I am such a failure. If I'd enjoyed some normal middle class success such as a mortgage, career, and family, then I probably would not fantasize so much about aliens granting me superpowers so I could take over the earth.
Everyone is talking about the blizzard we're supposed to get, but the Wunderground forecast for my elevation says RAIN, which will be heavy, supposedly: 2 inches on one day, and every other day for the next 10 days shows RAIN in different amounts. They're saying 10 feet of snow high up in the mountains but my stepdad says PSHHH to that. I say "idk man." I wish I had some weed. I've been smoking a lot lately, having kinda said FUCKIT to abstinence or moderation or etc. I don't smoke every day, but a joint once every few days or every week...something like that. I smoked a half-grammer Tuesday and as a consequence slept basically all day on Wednesday (yesterday). So last night I underslept from 9pm - 12:30am, and then again from around 5am to 6:30am, when my alarm woke me up for grocery shopping. I did that and here I am. I bought chopped ham for scalloped potatoes and ham, on Monday, for my neighbor.
I also bought what I thought would be an inexpensive token breakfast at McD: two hash browns and a coffee, but it was friggin' $8.50. $8.50! I feel like it should have been $3. I think I can't eat out anymore. Driving to a building and buying food was sort of a big part of my life and I might have to replace it with something. Walking the earth? But then when I arrive at one of the earth's buildings I often want to BUY SOMETHING. That may be the thing: addiction to consumerism. I might make more coffee in a few minutes which is REALLY the thing: general addiction syndrome (GAS), or a need for some kind of rush.
I suppose this would amount to a dopamine hit, but I dunno about that term as sub-in for "anything you enjoy," which is the way text seems to be going now-a-days. I was thinking last night that this is the age of information, the age of intelligence, the age of dimwits talking about globalism and dopamine. It's funny how everyone has to have a world view, has to do politics. Has this always been true? Maybe some people are inclined to politics while others are not. I like to think the second group is not so power hungry, but of course we seek status in other ways, like believing we are superior for not engaging or even wanting to engage in politics.
I've been playing a lot of Super Mario Brothers 2 lately and I've gotten worse at it, compared to my performance as a teenager and even a younger adult. One extremely clear example of my decline is Mike Tyson's Punch-Out: I used to be able to beat it -- beat Mike Tyson -- and now I can't get past the second Bald Bull. I'm pretty sure the main problem is slowed reflexes, although I used to blame the PC keyboard vs real NES controllers, which may in fact be a partial factor. At any rate, struggling through SMB2 is about my speed now. I remember thinking that game was too easy, and it probably is. But videogames, like martial arts schools, need to cater to a wide range of abilities and inclinations: real fighters as well as folks looking for something to do.
I play Nintendo on my Mac emulator, and a few games on my iPhone, including the free-to-play New York Times set: Wordle, Categories, and "The Mini," a small version of their crossword puzzle; pure IQ tests, these are. Then I have Stratego, sorta like chess but not as smart, Snake, where you navigate a snake around the screen to eat pellets which make the snake grow and harder to navigate, Doodle Jump occasionally for a bit til I invariably die somewhere before 30k points, and...what the fuck else? My phone isn't near me so I can't look. Oh yeah: Hangman, and I sometimes look the word up on Google afterwards if I don't know it.
Family dinner tonight: KOREA. KO-RE-A!!!! KO-RE-A!!!!
I've been working on the entry two down below, on "The Exorcist," for the past few days, making changes. There are more I wanted to make but I'm not seeing them now. I guess it's fine. I think it didn't help I was stoned when I did many of the edits. I can't even remember when I smoked weed. Everything is blending into one! HELP ME I AM IN HELL. Well it's right in the blog: February 18th, is when I got weed and smoked it. It hasn't been all that long since then.
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I kinda realized what's wrong with my work, my ouvre, all my shit here on this server that I feel is unly ignored: it's a website!!!!! And by that, I mean, it has been "websitified": the projects here are mediocre and teenaged and underdeveloped, except maybe one or two like my Japan photo-journal, possibly. But the rest is low effort crap bolstered by the existence of tons of other low effort crap right next to it. That's the thing: it looks like a huge sprawling website, a lot of effort, wow one guy did this???, etc, but it's an assemblage of turds. I mean, look at this. Actually that may be brilliant.
My podcast amounts to a mediocre guitarist noodling and then talking in an uninformed way about the news. My writing can be boring; I am good at crafting sentences and expounding on ideas but I am a bad storyteller and lose sight of FLOW easily. My music can be awful, like obviously awful -- it is what is is: a riff, extended to a 2 minute song with repeats and guitar solos and trucker key changes. Not in all cases but some or many or most. My 2D images and animations might be the best, or ironically, this blog might be the best. Where did I get this idea that I have to make things and show people? Maybe my MFA but that's not the whole story. An MFA gives you a lifelong license to say LOOK WHAT I MADE, LOOK WHAT I MADE, and not be dismissed as a childish narcissist, out loud at least.
I think about deleting my site and moving on with my life somehow but it can stay up in part as a testament to 'website syndrome': where you collect a great many low level projects and then they have sort of a bolstering effect on each other, giving the impression of a massive body of work, but when you look at each project individually, the impression is underwhelming. This is not as true about some projects as it is others; the Stupendous Chrissy Parker Project seems pretty interesting I think. Maybe someone some day will go through it all and pick one thing they really like.
Maybe what I need is some curation. The lack thereof is part of website syndrome: there's infinite space and you can queue up a massive list of things you've done and feel better and better about yourself the longer it is. And no one looks at it, because it sucks, but also because it's so fucking enormous no one wants to take the time. And who cares about music, art, and writing? Almost no one. I'm up against "Breaking Bad" and a limited number of hours in life and there's no hope.
In a way this website has ruined my life. It sits here, existing in space and time and AS A THING, and with it I hold on to a bit of identity and ego: artist identity, professional identity, all the turn of the millenium glitz and glamour of HAVING A WEBSITE. I'm not sure it does anything good. Google certainly doesn't think so and punishes my pagerank accordingly. I don't have a choice though.
When I run out of things to write about I can default to people, and movies, which are equivalent in some way. I think about how I would feel if I discovered some person from my past blogging about me, and I might not mind so long as my last name were withheld, which is what I do. But who knows; maybe I'm a hypocrite. Do Unto Others as Ye Wouldst Havest Others Do Unto Thee, amirite gaiz gaiz gaiz??? And, relatedly, behave in a way you want others to behave. Not the same things, though! The first is the golden rule, and the second is the categorical imperative; the first is based on how you'd like to be treated, and the second is based on what is best for society. But they are similar.
Changing the subject, here is a paragraph that was full of point-counterpoint that didn't add anything to the overarching concept, from a few entries ago, that I took out, but didn't want to delete because it HARKENS to something interesting:
Thinking of famous actors, not all are strikingly manly even though it's possible a majority or a slight majority are seen that way, for expanded definitions of "strikingly manly." Jim Carrey and Tom Hanks are compelling performers but aren't known or recognized for masculinity, in particular, unlike De Niro and Pacino, I uncontroversially claim.
Are male movie characters distinctively manly, compared to the general population? What IS 'manly' anyway? Bravery, mostly, I think is the main object here -- facing and overcoming fear. And more broadly, not being put off your feed by every little thing. I suppose you can FEEL fear and FEEL discomfort, but so long as they don't deter you from the mission it's fine.
Mike Tyson, paraphrasing his trainer Cus D'Amato, talks about fear and how it can be a good thing, how instead of pretending you are not afraid you can actually use and channel fear. Tyson was and is a smart dude. I remember in high school my friend talking about how dumb he was, which is I guess pure racism, or maybe "big tough boxer"-ism, but I suspect mostly racism. Listen to Tyson interviewed by Dick Cavett in the mid 80s: he's obviously thoughtful and sensitive, even at age 20. In fact now Iron Mike is a little messed up I suspect due to the constant weed smoking (or possibly punch-drunkenness; I think three knockouts and one TKO is enough to do that).
But anyway, bravery along with something like insensitivity/non-reactivity, and also competence: being effective out in the world, getting things done, making a difference, effecting a change, etc. And especially these things in conjunction. That is MANLINESS!!!!!!!! So women can't do that? And if women do that, are they then betraying their gender and being masculine? This is the problem: that positive traits are seen as manly and negative traits are seen as womanly. This is not universally true though; compassion is womanly, but positive. But other than that, mostly to be effeminate is to be childlike, not a real man, and women are seen as underdeveloped men.
What's another movie?
Denzel being AMAZING, as a compelling villain, a real scumus bagus. Ethan Hawk is also good as the rookie, the naive squeaky-clean losing his innocence. Lots of bad guys in this movie: the Mexican gangsters are scary, and the corrupt cops are scary. Everyone is scary! OOGA BOOGA.
I give up. Should I go get w3333333333d today? SHOULD I??????? I need to take tomorrow off from hiking as my leg is starting to hurt a bit. Only a few more years then I can die. I'm looking forward to my Maryland trip, coming up this fall. It will be strenuous, though.
I haven't wanted to write lately I think in large part because I've been smoking a lot of weed. But not "a lot" -- only about a gram a week. But that's enough to diminish me. Weed seems to have that effect: I speak less, think less, do less. Luckily I always come back although what if one day I don't? I'm looking at my list of movies and there are things I could say.
The main purpose of the Catholic Church is to provide psychological and cultural resonance for horror movies. If it weren't for that, wax tits and a dick on the Virgin Mary would not bother us. Well...bad example. Come to think of it, a little girl spewing vomit and sadomasochistic profanity while her head turns all the way around isn't dependent on Latin phrases to be off-putting, but they do add a certain special something, and I maintain my claim: Satanic horror is rooted in Christianity, which is uncontroversial put that way.
"The Exorcist" scared me the first time or the first few times I saw it, but I was scared of a lot of movies. The first one I remember was "The Horror of Dracula" (1958), which I saw on my granny's black and white TV in the 80s alone in the middle of the night. What set me off was Aunt Lucy: a nice normal loving family member transformed into a monster, but still a recognizable one, residing in "the uncanny valley" (altered enough so it seems off, but still looks kinda basically like the thing in question). Probably this harkens to deep human instincts around diseases, drugs, mental illness, etc; how someone can look almost-right but still be dangerous if they are afflicted in some way, such as with fangs. Every night for a while after watching "The Horror of Dracula," I'd demand to check my mother's teeth after she tucked me in so I could be sure she was not a vampire.
"Exorcist" is scary in the same way: this is a little girl, who looks like a little girl but who is clearly demonic, according to an expanded definition of "demonic" -- not necessary possessed by the fallen angel Lucifer or his minions, but behaving so profanely, disturbingly, violently, that she's no longer human. "That little girl is acting demonic," an atheist might remark after that little girl says "YOUR MOTHER SUCKS COCKS IN HELL, KARAS, YOU FAITHLESS SLIME" and slaps a doctor hard enough to knock him down. What a tough movie for Linda Blair, age 12, to star in. I would not have allowed it, if I were her father or in charge in some way. Blair was 12, on screen, stabbing herself bloodily between the legs with a crucifix and then shoving her mother's face in it yelling "LICK ME!!! LICK ME!!!" Who argued this was acceptable, back in 1973? Artists, I suppose.
Later in her life, Blair posed for a nudie magazine. She believes in the paranormal, according to her Wikipedia page. She's 65 now. I read she is something of a free spirit type and perhaps that, as opposed to trauma, was responsible for her nudes and drug problems and so on. But there was stated, printed, then and I suppose now, concern about her 12 year old self and what it went through during the filming of "The Exorcist." No one says Linda Blair was unconvincing as Regan MacNeil.
The interesting thing about "Exorcist," and what makes it scary apart from uncanny valley zombification and Catholic tropes, is that we never REALLY see the supernatural or unequivocal proof of Satanic/demonic possession and it's sort of plausible that this is all neuropsychopathology in the little girl. Objects do move in the room but this is not that strange a claim: "The furniture moved on its own" (earthquakes, imagination, forgefullness, being moved by someone else, etc); it's nothing like "there's a flaming horned demon in the kitchen demanding my soul." Things like projectile vomiting, feats of strength, etc, are not impossible. And there are even moments that I think were built in to suggest this sort of tension or balance between the supernatural and the earthly, between the implausible and the possible: Karas tells Chris, Regan's mum, that Regan speaking a language she's never studied could be a sign of possession, but when Regan does speak Latin she does so in a superficial way: "Ego te absolvo," "Mirabile dictu," and then in French "La plume de ma tante! ACK" come out of pop culture and are within the domain of an intelligent 12 year old, maybe.
At the end, the demon appears to exit Regan and enter Father Karas, whose eyes turn yellow and who then jumps out the window onto the now-famous Georgetown staircase, rather than strangle the now un-possessed Regan at Pazuzu's command; at least we in the fandom have come to identify Pazuzu as the culprit, but Regan says she's The Devil Himself, and maybe it's all mental illness/bad behavior, in spite of the floating girl in a room made icy by evil itself, a head on a neck turning 180 degrees, and Father Karas's snake eyes.
Pazuzu is so tricky he claims to be Satan, to throw the exorcists off, and speaks Latin like a midwit trying to prove they speak Latin, to throw them off some more. I thought the scariest bit of "The Exorcist" was at the archeological dig near Nineveh, where Father Merrin unearths a Pazuzu head and sees two dogs fighting under a statue of same Pazuzu, as if his evil permeates forth and causes bad things to happen. I will have to spellcheck Pazuzu later.
Pazuzu is the head of the evil spirits of the air (storms, locusts, B52s, etc -- "death from above"), and was invoked by Mesopotamians to fight Lamashtu, another evil spirit who harmed mothers during childbirth; "evil against evil," as the unnamed Iraqi says to Father Merrin. Why did Blatty pick Pazuzu, of all available demons? Just random maybe, or he found that little stone head and went with it.
Turns out that a small medallion, not the Pazuzu head, was responsible for Regan's possession. I didn't understand this for a while, and it explains Merrin and Regan both being afflicted by the same demon. Regan shows her first signs of possession vis-a-vis an Ouija board, so we think maybe that was the thing that did it. "Exorcist" has uncertainty about Regan's possession built in, but I'm pretty sure we can finger the Pazuzu of Merrin's experience, because the medallion was Pazuzu's vehicle, passed from Merrin to Regan through some evil happenstance, and Pazuzu/Regan yells "MERRIN!!!" when Father Merrin walks in for the first time. Merrin hears of Regan's possession from Karas via Catholic channels, and he goes to fight the same demon he faced years ago in Iraq. Did Pazuzu orchestrate this coincidence? Maybe it was Satan, pretending to be Pazuzu, rather than the other way around.
Two more things:
1) "Exorcist" shows up modern medicine, the kind of BS doctors say when they don't know the answer, and put patients through painful, damaging procedures on a hubristic hunch; in fact neurology isn't a whole lot more concrete, advanced, or understood than demonology, and we replace filler words with other filler words, often both in Latin.
2) This is a high level movie: it's expensive, accurately researched, sensitively directed, balancedly cinematographed, naturalistically acted, and takes place on culturally resonant sets. I suppose there are a few horror movies that are up to standard like this but not many.
I will write about another movie today. I like to use movies to write about broader topics, like ego, masculinity, and race. Today I'll do...
...and continue "masculinity" and perhaps "ego" (and/or whatever comes up), because I AM A MAN!!!!! Eam and I were discussing finance movies. He brought up "The Big Short (2015)," and I remarked that "Margin Call" was better competence porn (see previous entry) but "The Big Short" was a wiser movie. "Margin Call" seems to valorize the financiers as competent, masculine, smart, and even ruthless or sociopathic in a positive, necessary, or secretly admirable way, like Patrick Bateman. On paper men will agree they don't want to be ruthless or sociopathic but in fact being a nasty SOB is part of evolution, part of the war machine, part of the human experience...certainly part of capitalism, which is a fundamentally sociopathic construct. In "The Big Short" the financiers are clueless and greedy, and these things lead to the Crash of 2008; both movies are about that event, which caused grad schools to be harder to get into for me, supposedly, I was told.
I like "Margin Call" because of the competence porn, which is compelling no matter what the subject, but especially because it is about finance, something I'm afraid of and that can make you powerful and respected. Supposedly the best and brightest end up in the financial industries instead of as scientists, professors, doctors, or whatever idealized society-building role they should end up in. In "Margin Call" we see one of these, a rocket scientist, who goes to Wall Street to be a quant, because of the money. Another guy, his boss's boss's boss, is so sociopathic, remorseless, etc, that this places him in his competency rather than smarts: "kid's a fuckin' killer," says another character, about this character. And maybe that's "Margin Call"'s theme: that the finance world, although purported to be run by smart people, is actually run by people with no sense of social responsibility and this is what engenders its success rather than intelligence, strategy, etc.
I saw on Reddit that finance people are not in fact super smart but I don't know that I believe that. I suppose the quants are, like my friend's wife -- she has a PhD in statistics. But maybe the sales guys aren't. I said I am scared of finance and it's true, but in fact I have firsthand knowledge of that world: I temped as an administrative assistant for a company selling mortgage backed securities, but I can't remember when...it was either pre dot com crash or pre housing crash. Anyway the guy in charge was sort of quant'y, and had an electrical engineering background, but the salesmen were big loud schlubs who could have and should have worked at a used car dealership.
MONEY and INTELLIGENCE are two resonant areas of human experience, often intersecting, and there's no way the finance world would not be rife with ego. Anyway I think I need a break from doing movies. The past few went well, I thought, but I could easily get myself into a slump. Happy Black History Month, to change the subject. Without Black people, the USA would be as dull as Canada! That's the new slogan.
I gotta go make dinner soon. I will at least start an entry and then finish it before the movie. Speaking of movies, I will pick another from my LIST to write about.
I've always thought this is the manliest movie ever made. The masculinity of and in "Heat" is so overbearing, like the stench of an elephant in musth, that it can present as a kind of parody to the self aware and correctly educated, but I think "Heat," like "Good Will Hunting," is an earnest movie; it takes itself seriously and won't stand for mockery. "Heat" would beat you up if you laughed at it. Or no -- "Heat" wouldn't even notice if you laughed at it; "Heat" is nonreactive.
Research tells me Robert De Niro and Al Pacino have enjoyed four collaborations: 1) The Godfather Part II (1974), 2) Heat (1995), 3) Righteous Kill (2008), and 4) The Irishman (2019). I had never heard of #3 and apparently, supposedly, it was not a good movie (Rotten Tomatoes tells us only 18% of critics and 37% of audience members liked it). The other three, though, are highly regarded.
Not only does "Heat" have Pacino and De Niro, but also Val Kilmer, Tom Sizemore, Danny Trejo, Jon Voight, Henry Rollins (!!!), Wes Studi, Ted Levine, and a few others I recognize and who generally play tough guys, mean guys, angry guys, bad guys, stoic guys, antiheroes; it is a cast of swingin' dicks. Then there are the Women of Heat -- all of the ensemble cast deal with some woman in their life who serves to complicate things and take them away from their work, but I think the lesson is that this is worth it -- that relationships, with women, are a fair trade for a slight reduction in masculine efficacious competence, in work for work's sake ("Well you know for me, the action IS the juice," says Tom Sizemore's character in agreement to rob a bank in spite of not really needing the money).
In "Heat," we see another arguably masculine quality, or subject, or theme: I call it "competence porn," amounting to people doing difficult, dangerous, stressful, highly skilled work that I and most other popcorners would never be able to do; "Heat" makes me wish I were a supercop or a supercriminal. Of course competence, or doing your job well, or employability, is what we are told, or perhaps what we observe, most women value about men and what most men value about themselves.
In another universe we find Dr. Cox, another hypermasculine character but one written with some self awareness and self parody, telling his protege JD in an episode of "Scrubs" that the only reason he is there, that the only reason anyone is there, in medicine, doing a difficult and thankless job that doesn't really pay THAT much or confer THAT many advantages considering the sacrifices that are made (an arguable point), is...to woo women. Amen! That's why men do anything, amirite??? If you cut off everyone's cock and balls they'd sit in their room on their computer blogging and cooking and eating and napping and playing the guitar instead of engaging creatively and productively with the world.
The psychologists in my head sneer at me after I write all this and say, "So you feel unmasculine and the movie 'Heat' seems to illustrate how." MAYBE. But this touches on something else: you know how men will use the word "bitch" to insult other men? It's as if feminine = bad, and masculine = good, oftentimes in our culture. And even those behaviors and traits like compassion, that are sort of begrudgingly seen as positive by men even though they personally would not want to express or even experience them (Al Pacino and Robert De Niro hold hands at the end), will get you called a bitch, or a fag, if you're in high school, or a punk, if you're in prison. All of this amounts to GENDER -- behaving as a man, or as a woman, is supposed to behave. In "Heat" the men work for a living and the women love them for it, and at the same time hate them for it. But they'd rather have a distant, unavailable, emotionally broken Al Pacino than some chubby ass-kissing lazybones, although on paper and in the abstract, many or most women might disagree, or say "are those my only two choices?"
"Heat" is nearly three hours long, might be called "noir," and has a tense, haunting, understated, classy, beautiful original soundtrack. It was written and directed by MICHAEL MANN (seriously). It's just another heist flick.
G'day m8. I have been fixating on IQ lately, like Trump, and like my Nazi Friend. It's unflattering but I can't help it. The truth is I am broadly concerned with status/class/hierarchy and who is better than WHOM. As I said my IQ is around 120. But in addition to my midwit ranking, I have cognitive impairments: I can't remember or focus or proceed logically very well. I can write, though, which fools administrators into taking away my welfare payments. They say IQ doesn't change much after a TBI and I can believe it. I've never been totally clear what IQ is, and what cognitive ability is. Nearest I can figure, with the help of ChatGPT, is that IQ is a kind of cognitive ability; that CI is broader than IQ, which is pretty much defined as the ability to do well on IQ tests. And the thing is, these are all soft terms that are describing physiological and physical processes: neurons firing and brain chemicals seeping.
I think, "How can I contribute with a midwit IQ?", and more importantly "Should I be writing essays and blogging and so on?" I guess the answer is "sure," but no one will pay attention. And maybe that, rather than bad luck, changing cultural values around websites, residing on a subdomain, being weird, or whatever, accounts for the fact that my OUVRE, here on dis website, has been almost entirely ignored; there's nothing special about me. I do art therapy, blogging therapy, music therapy, then friends and family clap their hands and say "very good!, A+!".
My Nazi Friend cancelled our visit, scheduled for today, because my Genius Friend is sick and NF is kinda too busy anyway. So, next week, maybe, but people are always cancelling and changing plans, and atmospheric rivers move in and threaten snow. It drives me insane because I am autistic and have a low IQ -- if I could FLUIDLY REASON better, changing circumstances wouldn't bother me because I could adapt quickly. I should find the hardest book in the house and force myself to read it. I wonder if these friends who are one or two standard deviations above me look at me like a chimp or a dog; if they dumb down their speech and concepts, maybe unconsciously, for my sake, and when I leave the room they resume calculating infinity. I guess I can extrapolate from the way I am around "slower" people: I only try to relate and largely this is an unconscious process. My sense is that I do involuntarily dumb it down when I'm talking to someone I experience as less able to understand, or not well educated, or any number of related filler concepts, but I'm not thinking "HAHA THIS PERSON IS STUPID" the whole time.
In fact it sort of feels like a stupider person is "smarter" in a way, because they can be harder to talk to and harder to make understand. So you put in more work; it's more of a project. But all of this talk makes me feel dirty. Who am I to jump on board the IQ bandwagon, and think that this single number defines human mental ability and capacity, and, more darkly, human worth? As I said before, I don't think it can; cognitive tests are cognitive tests, and they aren't everything. But this is all something a midwit would say.
I'll get over this fixation soon and then I'll resume reviewing movies and sharing recipes.
PYARE IS A PIECE OF SHIT. Funnily, he always felt like the dumb one, he said, hanging out with Nick and me. There's levels to this game. Maybe P charmed the pants off the high school guidance counselor with his dark eyes and curly locks and persuaded them to enroll him in AP English in spite of a lack of credentials; I would not put any of that past anyone.
I drank a McD cawfy dis morn and had to get that out of my system. I've been called a narcissist, repeatedly, so there must be something to it. I used to admit to it happily, which was taken as another red flag. But I think I've changed. At least, I'm more aware of those tendencies. As an attacker pointed out, I don't have much to be narcissistic about -- I am an ugly narcissist: obese, on welfare, live in proverbial parents' proverbial basement, and flop around most of the day doing internet, guitar, napping, etc. This is what happens (do you see what happens, Larry?) when you are raised as an only child by an overly-attentive mother! No, I dunno; Freudian psychology is out the window and it's all neurology now, right?
I felt bad about writing about Pyare (another friend and I called him "Pra," or P-R-A...pee-ARE-ay...get it?), and so edited until I felt legally and morally safe(r). I've written about Serena on dis here blawg. Today I can write about...TIM. I knew Tim in junior high school and then early high school, before he moved to Florida. He was king of the nerds -- he fully embraced his nerdery and was not socially anxious or ashamed of it. He held get-togethers at his house where we played role playing games and watched classic nerd movies like Heavy Metal. He was kind of ahead of the nerd curve, like Pyare was ahead of the "alternative" curve. I think Tim was dyslexic or ADHD or etc because he really had SOMETHING to him: some kind of creativity or intelligence or humor, but never really found that one thing where it could come out shining. He drew, but was frankly not a great artist. He tried writing but couldn't spell or form grammatical sentences. He did bad in school. I think he would have made a good comic book writer -- someone who teamed up with an artist. He had good concepts; he was an idea man. I still have electronic copies of some of his comics, really horribly drawn, but that's part of their charm ("Why Must I Kill At Night?" and "Me From Shallow Grave"). And really they are more ideas or concept art rather than full comics; I don't know that he had the focus for larger projects, which may have been the main issue.
Of course he ended up on the internet, where I found him in the early 2000s, and we enjoyed a brief AOL Instant Messenger relationship during which he sent me lots of ironic heavy metal, such as Grim Reaper - See You In Hell, in which the vocalist jumps an octave plus a minor third. Beavis and Butthead did "See You In Hell," which may have been where Tim got it. I don't know what happened to him but he may be a lifelong NEET like me, although ah got mah degrees, mang. That was really my one accomplishment in life and on paper, at least that the masses agree with: getting not one, not two, but THREE higher education degrees, AFTER my traumatic brain injury and resultant retardification! AA, BA, MFA, boom boom boom, like that.
Today I'm going to write about Pyare (pronounced "pee-ARE-ay"). His is an uncommon name, and if you search for him on the web, you see miscellaneous stuff, but perhaps oddly not his own website, where he posts professional info and a couple of small photos (there's a better picture of him on his IMDB page). The name means "one who is loved" or "love" in Punjabi, and comes from the Sikh religion. Indeed, everyone loved Pyare; he was popular. My other ex-friend Serena, in high school, didn't believe me when I told her I used to be Pyare's best friend. "OH, EVERYONE WAS BEST FRIENDS WITH PYARE, HAHA", she mocked. What can you answer back, at that point, so I let her have her way.
His parents were hippies, was his explanation of his unusual first name. I've met them both. I slept over with him at his mom's DC apartment overlooking Rock Creek Park, in the 80s, and I got in trouble for putting my dirty socks on the radiator and stinking up the place. His dad didn't say much to me over our acquaintanceship but he seemed tough-but-expressive in a workin' class Eye-talian sort of way, friendly, etc. I'm remembering now I did see his dad in town once around the turn of the millennium, and he told me his son now had hair like Kramer from Seinfeld. Pyare told me his parents liked me, and that I was their favorite of his friends.
I met him in 1986 in 6th grade through our mutual friend Nick; this was so long ago I'm having to think back and look off into the distance as I recollect. I wrote to him almost 10 years ago in 2014 telling him what's been going on in my life, and, perhaps more resonantly, that I remembered he ditched me and that I still hold a grudge of sorts; it was a creepy, stalkery, serial killerish email to write and probably a better empath would not have written it. He may not have seen it; who knows. I have on my calendar "write to Pyare" on the upcoming 10 year anniversary of this last attempted contact, but probably I will not; instead I'll write this blog entry and be done with it, like my high school reunion. In fact, I haven't seen Pyare in the flesh since senior year of high school, 30 years ago.
He's a big time cameraman now -- a Steadicam operator, according to his website. From Wikipedia:
Steadicam ... Was designed to isolate the camera from the camera operator's movement, keeping the camera motion separate and controllable by a skilled operator. ... The operator wears a harness, the Steadicam vest, which is attached to an iso-elastic arm.
Maybe there's Steadicam discourse about 'the space between heartbeats,' as there is with target shooting; it seems like it could be one of those things, like getting a PhD in playing the guitar, where a mountain is made of a mole hill. But, it also seems like it could be a pretty interesting way to make a living as far as things go, maybe. I told Nick, whom I've kept in occasional touch with, that Pyare had ended up as a cameraman, and Nick replied that this made sense inasmuch as they used to shoot lots of play movies together back in the day.
Pyare the Steadicameraman was my best friend for maybe a year. He and I conspired to ditch Nick for being uncool and a jerk, and then Pyare ditched me I think only for being uncool although maybe there was some other reason; I would like to know except probably he never really figured it out himself, and in fact, shockingly, has not been thinking about it much since 1986. I remember when things started feeling iffy between us, like when one romantic partner wants to break it off and starts acting out instead of ending the relationship: he called me "disgusting" in a movie theater because I ate too-large handfulls of popcorn, and the last time I saw him in the context of friendship was one day, during the summer between 6th and 7th grade, when he biked over to pick up something, and affected being so out of breath he was unable to talk to me. And then that was it. He joined the skateboard/metal/punk crew, and I joined the nerds. It's possible or even likely that he remembers our severance differently, more as a natural falling out rather than a conscious betrayal.
Ditching me worked and Pyare became a lot cooler vis-a-vis the aforementioned skateboards and adjacent punkery. Then I, like many others, was privileged to watch his further flowering in high school, where he became sort of an aesthetic celebrity, with ridiculously long curly hair tied back with a fat girly headband, being the lead screamer in an alternative rock band, and taking AP (Advanced Placement) English, which was just fucking unfair: a fully enlightened modern day hippie-hipster. This was the 90s, and the rock band "Nirvana" had come along and transformed many wallflowers into long-haired flannel-wearing counterculturists, but Pyare had a head start.
He was never unfriendly the few times he was aware of my presence or sort of semi-interacted or responded to me, after a coffeeshop concert in DC one day, and in the high school halls one or two times. But then finally at the end he spoke to me outright at some end-of-school art show: he approached me and told me in good humor that his mom had attended and had seen me, and I had seen her, and that each of us had sort of pretended not to recognize the other (in fact, I believe I remember seeing what might have been her, and being actually unsure it was her, because she looked so different). I suppose I responded with something like "heh heh," and that was the end of it. So after all those years in public school, Pyare finally fully acknowledged me and our friendship, at the last minute. THANK YOU PYARE!!! Just kidding...fuck you, Pyare.
What we did when we were friends was typical stuff: ride bikes, have sleepovers where we fantasized about the prettiest and most popular girl in school, made food and ate it, played a few RPGs and vidya gambs, did some drawing/video/writing stuff, watched movies, blah blah. I'm NOT ANGRY AT YOU ANYMORE, PYARE!!! I FORGIVE YOU!1! As I intimated and am now more aware of than I was before writing this entry, it's not QUITE so clear he outright and consciously ditched me like a bad habit, but for the record I think he mostly did.
The thing about the web is, it's easy to get totally wrapped up in your own bubble. By that I mean, there's no curator or jury telling me that my work is bad, so I keep posting it and doing it over the years. No one in art school told me what I did was bad, or good for that matter. And I wasn't doing REAL art, like painting, clay pottery, etc -- something conservative and established and crafty like that. Instead I did my undergrad in "imaging and digital arts," and then further drilled down into the "interactivity track." Basically, this meant making game-like projects in Macromedia Director, some expressive or unconventional web pages that didn't make sense, and then some sound work. This kind of scratch pad stuff flew around the year 2000 because of the newness of the web then; people kind of ooh'd and ahh'd at it regardless of how it compared, in terms of complexity or care or cost, to big oil paintings or bronze sculptures or etc.
In grad school, every once and a while someone would blurt out that my work wasn't very "good," audibly pronouncing the scare quotes as if they knew very well that speaking on quality or standards was a no-no and a no-go, but most of the time no one said anything like that. My work was experimental and avant garde and that's what you're supposed to do. I was aware enough of myself, the culture of fine art, and the culture of my school, to sneak by.
And then I kept on doing it. Not a good enough writer to publish, or not a good enough musician to play in a club? Well, shelter under the umbrella of "fine art" and no one can say anything; art re-writes all pre-existing cultures under its own postmodernistic non-rubrik. This is also the hallmark of culture studies, which has been married to fine art so it can be academically rigorous enough to support university degrees; culture studies purports to understand everything, while actually understanding nothing. In a way I feel like I was the only one in art school who took what I learned seriously, and you're looking at it now; everyone else paid lip service to the theory and then made what they could. I guess I did too. THIS IS MODERN ART. LOOK AT IT!!! LOOK!!!
There's something I was trying to talk about yesterday but it didn't come out right, so I deleted it, and I'm going to try to tackle it today. This whole year, 2024.html, is very RACE focused so far. I hope I don't get attacked but I have a plan: "So I post stuff for 25 years and no one says a word, but suddenly now, when I try to give a very reasoned, compassionate, nuanced take on a topic everyone avoids out of fear, you jump on that? FUCK YOUUUUUU"
Anyway the thing I was avoiding is inspired by a relative. Being smart is very important to her, as is her belief that people are equal, and so when she's confronted with race and IQ research that tells her Blacks score lower than Whites, on average, she can't accept that part of the reason might be genetic -- it ALL has to be cultural, or cognitive dissonance results. But, her view may in fact be true or mostly true -- cultural issues may be mostly, or even 100%, responsible for these disparities. My intuitive clue supporting this has to do with human neurological evolution and time scales; the human brain evolved over millions of years, whereas migration from Africa to the rest of the world only took place a few thousand years ago. Furthermore, the tasks and challenges of primitive people in Europe vs primitive people in Africa don't seem that different -- they don't seem like they would require different brains to accomplish. But I'm mostly speculating; I'm not well informed enough to draw conclusions.
It may be that we will never know the answer and that it's unwise and unethical to pursue this question, because, as I said yesterday, it doesn't matter what the group differences are; it has no bearing on how a given individual performs. It seems to me like there must be (perhaps slight) neurological differences across biogeographic groups, as there are other physiological differences. The brain doesn't get a pass because we modern people cherish intelligence so much, and at the same time cherish notions of human equality so much. HOWEVER I think it's more a 'different brains for different tasks'-type situation, rather than one set being "better" than another.
Western white people happen to be dominant in the USA, in Europe, and to some degree in the world, so their rules, their tests, and their ranking systems prevail -- their CULTURE prevails. This dominance is related to "white privilege," a concept that a lot of people don't like, because there exist poor white people, disabled white people, etc, which contradicts the notion that ALL white people are on top. But "all white people are on top" is a misunderstanding of white privilege; WP means that because you are white, society confers certain advantages on you (people don't avoid you at night, your kids get better pain management in medical situations...there are tons). You can be poor and dumb and covered in pustules, but if you're white and have these issues, your experience out there in the world will be better, easier, less painful, than a black person who also has these issues.
Let's say the worst is true, and sub-Saharan Africans and their descendants have less brain power on average and by certain measures -- that there are inherent, genetically determined neurological differences, as there are skin color differences, that cause the average IQ of Blacks to be lower than that of Whites. Would the world end in that case? I don't think so. I think the issue is our fixation on groupings of people and on differences between these groupings. So what if people with curly hair, or people who like "The Cure," or any arbitrary grouping, don't come out exactly even with their counterpart? 1) Why would or should they, and 2) it doesn't matter -- group differences are a statistic that is called up mostly by racists -- people who WANT "Blacks" to be less valuable than "Whites." STOP TALKING ABOUT RACE AND IQ, commands Slate.com, and I basically agree. I guess there's a 3) -- why is intelligence or "intelligence" equated with human worth? Don't answer that -- I know IQ leads to programmer jobs which lead to money which leads to status.
In practical terms, you have two job applicants, one identified as White, and one identified as Black, and one can do the job better, and you give the job to that one, regardless of abstractions like supposed group differences. But I run into problems here -- my efforts to be non-racist paint me as a racist in some eyes, like when Steven Colbert's right wing pundit character says "I don't see race!" This is bad, because historical inices lead to modern inequality, so we have to do a reverse course on that, with affirmative action and so on, to get things back up to par. I don't necessarily disagree! Furthermore, intuitively, I don't think this worst case scenario, one paragraph up, is true or even can be true, considering human neurology and human evolution. Instead I think that culture and neuroplasticity can and do account for a lot.
One thing that's interesting that doesn't get talked about a lot I don't think, is that all this identity stuff, with race and gender and so on, pretty much flies in the face of Eastern "no self" wisdom, and in fact, Western "ego is ultimately counterproductive" wisdom. Why do you have you tell yourself a bunch of stories about who you are, or about who other people are? The demands of capitalism, perhaps?
HAI.
I quit coffee again. Today is my second day without it. Usually the headaches start on the second day but it's possible I've quit and restarted coffee drinking so many times now that I no longer get them. Last time they weren't bad; I barely noticed them in fact. And this time, so far, knock on wood, they seem entirely absent. I gave myself a pay cut because I was tired of mooching money. We'll see how that goes. Mostly it means I can't comfortably drive around and buy restaurant food anymore, which is probably a good thing. No coffee, no eating out, no weed. I also put the kibosh on bible study with my stepdad/housemate and McD with my aunt. Admittedly I was in a terrible destructive angry depressed mood when I made these decisions, but sometimes I think that's not entirely a bad thing; in that state one can chop away fat that might be hard to do under ordinary circumstances.
So all I have left, really, is walking, and cooking. I had better make the most of it. Some brain injury clinic has as its slogan, "Making the Best of It," which is depressing, in my opinion.
Petey said my movie reviews were interesting *blush* and that I should do more of them. Specifically, he wanted me to write about...
When I first saw it, or the first few times I saw it, I was thinking that Verbal Kint fabricated his entire story told to special agent Kujan, and the whole movie then became only a pointless exercise in fleshing out Verbal's imagination for the audience. But then I realized the story was true, and Verbal changed the names and other superficial details based on what he read on agent Kujan's bulletin board, along with creating filler and embellishments to lull Kujan to sleep. Obvious, maybe.
There's something "too cool for school" about "The Usual Suspects," inasmuch as I don't think anyone really talks or lives that way, even in police-world or crime-world. I think maybe we should be watching "The Wire" for realism, if that's what we want.
One funny thing about "Suspects" is some people online don't seem to accept that Verbal Kint definitely was Keyser Soze. I think it could not have been clearer, but it goes to show: if you don't OVERTLY STATE something there will always be at least a snippet of uncertainty. One thing that should have tipped us off is that Kobayashi, or in fact "Kobayashi," lifted by Verbal from a coffee mug, is a Japanese surname, and the character is played by Pete Postlethwaite, an Englishman, with an inexplicable Indian accent. I guess he could have been adopted by a multi-ethnic couple. I sometimes wish I were a cop, or a criminal -- something manly and ultracompetent and risky like that. I guess I've seen too many movies, which are, to me, oftentimes, "competence porn": people doing stuff I could never do myself. Most of the time I can do the grocery shopping without losing my temper. That's the movie they will make about me.
I took another online IQ test recently and I got 117, which about matches my other online IQ tests, one paper test given by the Scientologists ca. 1995, and my SAT scores, ca. 1992. They all point to my IQ being *about* 120 (the average comes out to 122, actually, but...you know). This puts me in the range of "upper midwit." But the story I tell myself is that IQ -- pattern recognition and problem solving -- is not where my strengths lie, as a ponytailed creative. In fact it does seem like a narrow way to measure mental ability.
I've thought about the whole race and IQ thing and I'm hesitant to write about it, of course. One thing I CAN say is that based on the IQ findings for (much of?) sub-Saharan Africa, the people there should be nonfunctional, which is obviously not true. So from that I might conclude that IQ is in fact a narrow measure of real world competence. IQ tests are what they are -- "which one of the following shapes best fits with these other three?" But also, I have heard that it is difficult to design a test of IQ-like mental ability that does not correlate in scores closely with all other similar tests. So IQ or "IQ" is somewhat robust -- call it cognitive ability, maybe?
But I think that "cognitive ability" might itself be a fairly narrow attribute, designed by a particular culture (Western science or academia?) and then applied to other cultures. Probably sub-Saharan Africans could design a test that White Americans would do poorly at.
I made plans to drive 2.5 hours WEST, then another hour SOUTH, to visit FRIENDS. FRIENDS!!!! They both have higher IQs than me, but you know what they say: if you're the smartest person in the room you're in the wrong room. I sit there and chew my hamburger while they talk about coding and stuff.
Greetings fellow ugmanzees. My heart does better when I exercise. I was born to be active!
I was going to write about "Goodfellas" (mid 90s?) but I don't know what to say about besides "I RILY LIKED IT."
Fuck my movie review project, for now. Fuck this blog for now! I can't think of anything good to write.
FUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU
Here is the second entry for 2024. AS YOU CAN SEE, I implemented the same system I have always done for bloggin' -- namely, make every page an archive, and then readers click the most recent one to get the news. It's not the way the pros do it, with the blog root pointing to the last entry, but watevz. Back to the movies:
My favorite thing on this movie is a Louis CK bit:
Matt Damon plays -- great performance! -- he plays a very complicated young man, wearing a tight t-shirt for a whole movie. And here's the thing...here's my issue with "Good Will Hunting": Matt Damon also wrote the movie. Ok? So he basically sat down, and he's like (Louis CK makes typing gestures and affects a mock creative inflection), "First of all, I'm AMAZING. Mmmmmmm. I'm a CONSTRUCTION WORKER, I'm like WORKING CLASS. And I DRINK BEER, and I get in fights, I get in SO MANY FIGHTS. My friends are like 'You're outta control, man!' And I'm like 'Shut up -- this is the WAY I AM.' Mmmmmmm. But then, also, I'm a GENIUS. Ooooo. I didn't even go to school! I JUST KNOW THINGS. I dunno why, I JUST KNOW THEM. And all the nerdy geniuses that studied for years are like, 'HE'S SOOO MUCH SMARTER THAN US, IT'S MAKING US UPSET!'" It's insane! It's fuckin' insane! It only makes sense if he wrote it for himself to be the guy.
So yeah...GWH comes across as kind of a cliched masturbation fest, but it's still fun to watch in spite of or because of this. Ever since I heard that Louis CK bit, I have wanted to know if Damon or Affleck did too, and if so, if they were able to laugh at themselves. I don't know. "Your ego is showing" is a brutal takedown and "Good Will Hunting" is a very earnest movie; it feels like the writers are bearing their souls, for better or for worse, so hearing and accepting this, in my opinion, stark and now-obvious criticism, might sting.
The theme of GWH -- a misunderstood and misplaced genius -- is resonant because we all [CITATION NEEDED] like to think of ourselves that way: as somehow special but the world doesn't see it; we never got our shot, and the only reason we are not great is due to circumstances.
It's easy to feel like a genius. A lot of guitar players think they are fantastic because they can play the guitar -- they can make a noise that sounds pretty good. They don't or can't or won't compare their playing to Steve Vai's or Andres Segovia's, but picking up a guitar and executing an idea in a recognizable way sounds and feels good, like you're doing what the pros do. And, I suppose, the grand error here is being unable or unwilling to appraise your own output, but instead immediately putting it with Vai's or Segovia's playing because it's BASICALLY the same; Vai and Segovia are playing a guitar and making some sense with it, and the amateur player is doing the same thing. He must be a genius! The only thing keeping him from fame and fortune is bad luck.
"If I only tried hard I'd do well in school...I 'don't try', and that's why I fail." On a deeper level GWH is about this kind of self congratulation or consolation. But superficially it's a feel-good story about social status and talent and how the first can affect the second, which is also undeniably, uncynically true. So, take your pick, I guess.
HAPPY NEW YEAR, 2 days late. I had wanted to blog on January 1st but decided my final entry for 2023 needed more time on the index page. Now, as you can see, the entries for 2023 have been moved to 2023.html, linked above. I'm not 100% sure about my DESIGN SOLUTION to all of this, but fuck it...there's only so much I am willing to do, and that I *CAN* do, with websites dually designed for mobile and PC browser. I pat myself on the back, in fact, for doing as much as I have done with static HTML.
I think I have SOME ability in coding. When I did a bit for teachers and projects and hobbyist stuff and so on, I got comments like "hm I guess you could do it that way" (NEW APPROACH), and I managed to write a Perl script that was shorter than what some other people did ("Perl golf"). I'm not sure what I'm missing; I think somehow programming gets too hard when I try progressing.
I wrote a BASIC program to randomly generate sentences from parts, and then I had a CS friend do it over for me in Javascript. When I wanted random hex colors on my main index page, I asked Randy to write that script for me. I dropped Pascal class a few months in because it was getting to be too much. Maybe my programming roadblocks amount to my learning disability somehow kicking in. Maybe I'm lazy. I dunno. But I have, or more had, PHM'ish fantasies of "I coulda been a genius at this."
I had a cuppa real joe today and not that decaf shite. I discovered with this mornings headache that I have grown dependent on the minute amount of caffeine in decaf. So, then, I suppose, my next thought was "screw it, I'm going to have the REAL THING." Real coffee makes me jittery, but it seems to taste better; there's an umami richness to normal coffee that decaf seems to be missing. Or, maybe I'm full of shit and like the caffeine.
I thought today I might continue my movie review project and at least write more about:
...the civil war movie starring Matthew Broderick and Denzel Washington that I glossed over back in '23. I accomplished said glossing with "really beautiful movie," I think, and I suppose that's true. It's about the 54th Massachusetts Infantry Regiment, an all-Black army division that fought for the Union. I don't think you're going to find a better justification for fighting than former slaves doing so for the very real freedom of their own people, so right away, audiences have a moral cover for enjoying a war movie, as the 54th enjoyed moral cover for killing. The plot comprises the 54th in formation, then in training, then not being taken seriously, and finally in proving their mettle in a battle to take Fort Wagner in which they fight valiantly but are all killed in the attempt.
"Glory" is a pretty perfect movie, I think, and perhaps there's not a lot to say about it beyond "beautiful movie," so maybe I was roughly on target back in '23. Some good quotes: "YOU ARE ALL UGLY, MEXICAN, AFRICAN, FUCKING WHORES!!!!" (by the drill sergeant) and then, relatedly, "The Irish are not noted for their fondness for the coloreds." The drill sergeant in spite of his language turns out to be a good guy with everyone's best interests at heart, which illustrates my main criticism, only now emerging: there's not a lot of REAL racism to be seen in this movie, whereas I think back then, people dehumanized Blacks in a way that's now hard to comprehend; even Lincoln did not, maybe could not, see them as equals.
I'm not sure racism was so much worse, in the sense of mental attitudes, in the South than it was in the North, during the Civl War Era. You had abolitionists in Boston, and people opposed to slavery, but that doesn't translate into thinking of slaves and escaped slaves and free men as equals, as fellow humans, as being the same as you and yours. This is not to say that we're "there" today, but I think the kind of inequality back then was considerably worse, and pervasive, and completely saturated American society to the point where it's hard to imagine and hard to communicate with a modern movie script. The dominant world view, I believe, even among otherwise good, normal, moral people, was that Blacks were some kind of lesser species and were suited if not for slavery, then for menial work, deportation to Africa, or some such.
You can't get inside someone else's head and ascertain how they actually think -- see how racist they are, or are not. But, as the little Amish boy says in "Witness," "I can see what (people) do." Remember that Harvard racism test a while back where they showed you black faces and white faces, then positive and negative words, in quick succession? I took it twice and got two different results ("not racist" then "racist"). My friend's neonazi father would get angry when called a racist, which illustrates the kind of power the word has now-a-days; even if you secretly think racism is fine, you know that society has made the grand decision that it is not, and unless you want to be an outcast, you will agree out loud.
When I moved to the USA at age 10, I lived in an apartment complex with tough little black kids, whom I came to fear and mistrust, and hate. Later I had more experiences with Black people and sort of realized on a gut level that they are humans -- they make the same faces and have the same feelings, and you can relate to them and talk to them and go over to their houses and have dinner and so on. This is not to say that I am some perfectly open hearted non-racist now...as recently as 2007 I was giving Blacks the "white people smile": a sort of tight lipped fake mouth smile a White person gives to a passing Black person because they don't know what else to do. I haven't been put to the test much now as I live in a place where I rarely see someone who looks like their ancestors resided in sub-Saharan Africa, but I hope I can behave more naturally or normally or whatever in the future.
I've heard if you look away and avoid eye contact, that this constitutes a "micro aggression." So, it starts to look like there's no good solution and as a result people throw their hands up and say "whatever, not my problem." I once got semi yelled at (by white people) at a Black church event in DC -- I think it was something like a Black-White race relations symposium -- for suggesting that things were getting better, slowly. Admittedly stuff like this makes me want to avoid the issue rather than tackle it headlong and get called racist for my efforts to be non-racist. And then frustration at this is mocked as "white fragility." But we soldier on, like the 54th! Right?