Tag Archives: sadness
Do your neuronal connections have labels?
Do you know what your neuronal connections look like?
I think I know mine:
What does the Indian man in your life think about rape?
Cultural attitudes shape our actions.
Does your man in India reject rape?. If so, what is he doing to protect women from roving gangs of rapists?
The hacks, they keep on coming — are you a “one hack” wonder?
When you want honey, do you make the bees angry before you pull out a piece of the hive?
The universe is here because I am here just like a paper cone is only paper until it is a speaker and what is a speaker without an audience?
Take two groups:
- The first group believes in the open and honest discussion of scientific methods.
- The second group believes in the civil discourse of sly competitiveness.
Both groups believe in the betterment of their respective societies/[sub]cultures.
However, a little problem occurs when one group uses the other’s subcultural norms for advantages within their own group.
Is it miscommunication? Misappropriation?
How do they, together, benefit our whole species?
Because I believe the universe is here because I am here, I want, as long as I am happily able to think so, the species, our species, within our Earth-based ecosystem that has nurtured us for thousands, no, billions of years, to use this brief period of peaceful coexistence with the rest of the solar system to expand into the galaxy.
When I am gone, the universe is gone and none of this will matter to me because my set of states of energy as a recognizable entropic confluence will disperse but remain temporarily as memories in a small number of members of our species and even smaller number of members of other species, barely a footnote in the yellowed pages of old newspapers.
Does the universe make me happy as is?
I have learned that very few people change their behavioural patterns when allowed to wallow in their sorrow or anger, let alone convince other, happy, people to join them.
Yet, happiness for its own sake, like art and humour, does what, exactly?
If burning down a forest makes me happy, there will be a lot of people and members of other species who disagree, adamantly so.
If destroying an economy makes me happy, there will be a lot of people who agree as well as a lot who disagree.
What kind of happiness should we attain?
After all, we are a competitively cooperative species, sharing and hoarding, fighting and loving, all at the same time.
Our lives are short in length, some brighter and louder than others, some sadder, some happier, some kinder, some meaner, some in-betweeners.
Is there a shortcut to happiness that makes the universe beneficial to us all, regardless of our physical/mental condition(s)?
We are a nearly-fully connected species, the fractal spinoff of rudimentary central nervous systems, remodeling ourselves on bigger and bigger scales because we have no other workable model against which we positively compare ourselves within the known universe.
We talk about revolutionary and evolutionary changes in our socioeconomic activity on sub-sub-subcultural levels when the grand scheme hasn’t changed one iota: a species competing against itself because of a myopic view of the universe.
We realize, in rare glimpses, that we are part of the universe rather than living in an us-vs.-them scenario, “them” being you/self/God/universe/other.
Rather than bemoan, bedevil and punish people who hack computers/life/universe, let us look at the hacks from a species/universal perspective.
What am I gaining from those who circumvent my subcultural norms, the rules, both states and implied, that define me and the people happily living and perpetuating the subculture?
What am I losing, instead?
Can I turn the circumventers on their heads and reverse any damage they’ve caused?
How do I absorb the lessons they learned while they took/stole/[ab]used information from my open society?
Some people like clover honey and some people like sourwood honey.
How we get to the honey without disturbing the bees is the first step for any one of us to feed our wide variety of happy tastes and preferences.
Meditative Moment
As the fresh, raw feelings of loss subside, more days between now and the death of my father than a week or a month ago, as I grow stronger because I savoured and relished the emotional states that passed through my body, I face the future in these words, more than in drawn images or recorded sounds.
As ethnicities spread across the planet and mix, their subcultures subsequently subsiding, the global culture defines itself spontaneously.
How do languages and their speakers survive in a homogenising dough machine, the yeast rising, the bread ready-to-make in the oven of a world in transition?
Do you like the flavours in an “everything” bagel full of wheat, pepper, curry, onions, potatoes, garlic and salt?
Where once the survival traits of one’s gene set ensured early death due to birth defects, lactose intolerance and gluten allergies, the current cultural fixation is to cure us of our genetic abnormalities when normality is a moving target on a Möbius strip of the toroid of life.
One may feel full of God’s love and empty at the same time — the louder one has to shout the words of one’s religion, the less one is believed to have internalised their meaning.
Thus, one may hate the world and love the world simultaneously.
The intersection of subsets of thoughts may clash but innovation and invention arise from the need to mate incongruities into harmonious patterns.
Humour is a single part of an artist’s palette if one is free to express oneself free of coercive commercial interests intent on generating more income than debt.
When a population is mostly freed from survivalistic needs, can the population long survive while pursuing selfish interests in opposition to population [re]generation?
Where are the protectors of the faith that the world is full of purveyors of the emperour’s new clothes that must be declared unsavoury and unhealthy to sustain a population which wants to be around thousands of years from now?
Humour for humour’s sake is a fool’s folly.
Art for art’s sake is a loser’s game.
An uninformed populace will obey the uniformed police without reasonable cause to question authority.
What are we producing to improve our future?
Every day, I wake up and ask myself, “What am I doing today that I’m here for because I didn’t die or kill myself yesterday?”
Some days, I don’t have a good answer so I research the reasons and ask again, knowing I’ll find the tiniest part of me that I improve that day to better answer the question tomorrow.
Some days, I state a plain ol’ platitude, let it sit for a day and look at it from a different perspective the next day, learning most often that I never know everything that I think I did the day before.
One day, I’ll die if I don’t kill myself first when I’m an old man whose tunnel vision prevents him from seeing the car heading into his path as he turns to drive across oncoming traffic on the way to his favourite watering hole, assuming I’ll be driving an antique automobile not retrofitted to stop me from making a traffic mistake in the first place.
There are a lot of days in-between to see how I, despite the errors of myself within the subcultural training I received along the way, can get from here to the Moon, Mars and beyond, one set of states of energy in a population of seven billion and growing.
Last night, my team of subsubsubbasement scientists showed me a new gun they had invented that senses the emotional wellbeing of the shooter and locks the trigger until one’s emotional state of misplaced anger has been subdued with neutralising pharmaceuticals embedded in the gun’s grip, thus preventing many murderous acts of passion by firearms.
As my blog fades into obscurity…
[Thoughts after watching the movie “Robot and Frank,” which portrays a depressing image of my future?]
As my blog fades into obscurity, I go back over the sensations in me right now…
…the emptiness…
…the muscles and tendons shivering…
…the joints aching…
…looking at a clock which indicates 13,593 days until whatever I want to say is supposed to happen in that 24-hour period…
…glad I am happy being me, observing and reporting in an online diary the same way I have talked to myself since I was at least five years old…
…retiring at age 45, ready for my life to end at any moment, no more mountains to climb, or impossible dreams to make real.
I am a tired, old man, weary of the ways of our species, always left with just me to entertain myself in my thoughts at the end of every day.
If the universe is supposed to be a projection of my thoughts, then I can close down this movie theatre of my mind and say the show has run its course.
My desire for social engagement is limited by the boredom that quickly seeps into hearing yet another combination of people talking about their lives that I have experienced or heard in one form or another for over 50 years.
Why live any longer and watch my mind disappear, my body decay and my life at the mercy of professional caretakers, human and/or robot, who we can plug into each other’s lives as needed in socioeconomic interchange because our wealth, not our thoughts, define us?
If I’m merely the combination of trillions of cells, sets of states of energy in synergistic, symbiotic relationships temporarily, how do I let go of the “I” and disperse these states of energy into other sets and combinations?
If we can legalize abortion, then by extension we should legalize murder and suicide, should we not, because there’s nothing sacred about life anymore, is there, the wonders of the universe fading into the simple facts of rational scientific methods and erasable memories?
I am tired of participating in the competitive marketplace of ideas, tired of finding no one who agrees with my thought patterns, tired of being tired, tired of being tired of being tired, and ready to close this blog except I’ve pretty well memorized its location as a globally-accessible online diary I can get to just about anywhere so I might as well keep writing here in obscurity.
Out of obscurity and back in again — the definition of life?
Question
Q: Have more members of our armed forces committed suicide in a year, much less during Obama’s whole term in office, than children have been killed in random acts of school campus violence?
Where is the outrage about that? The U.S. has invested far more in our warriors than to brush their senseless deaths under the rug of a populist president’s pet gun control issue.
According to sources, al Qaeda cheered the U.S. president’s decision to limit soldiers, planes, ships, Secret Service/DEA agents, and drones to the equivalent of seven bullets’ worth of firepower each. Russia has hinted it might seek new nuclear weapon restrictions holding the U.S. to its pledge to lower nuclear bomb capacity to the gunpowder equivalent of seven bullets.
Quentin Tarantino announced his retirement because he can no longer have access to special FX equipment that simulates more than seven bullets being fired at a time in any one film scene due to new film industry rules aligned with presidential executive orders.
Video game producers are outraged they can no longer offer their first-person shooters with weapons containing more than seven bullets.
Road construction companies were upset they will no longer have access to rock-blasting explosives stronger than seven bullets. Same for demolition crews.
The TV show “Mythbusters” was canceled due to lack of access to good destructive material.
Fireworks companies announced a run on their products as people were finding alternate means for making their own bullets, no matter how effective.
Vaccinated for diplomatic immunity
SO, here’s the story so far…
The Urbanki Bureaucracy, fearing its populace, has fallen right into the hands of the Ruralites’ plan to demonstrate they’re being oppressed by “The Man.”
How?!, you might ask.
Let us look at the recent facts in the storyline and tell you what could happen next.
First, paranoid suspicion of an indefinable entity such as a large bureaucracy is, like fear of the dark, a natural reaction by many.
The imagined hierarchy of bosses in a large corporation.
The terrible police and paramilitary troops that patrol your province, their faces hidden behind uniforms and equipment.
The social hierarchy and anarchy of insects that swarm in dark spaces underneath your domicile.
These fears are as inbred in us as any tribe isolated in the densest forest.
Where there is fear, there is also the chance for escape.
Let us take two data points from the same source, for an example.
Look at this guy, James Yeager, who exercised his free right to express himself but, the local state bureaucracy, so full of itself and fearful of its people all coming to the same conclusion, decides to take away the guy’s gun ownership permit.
Well, a funny thing happened on the way to the forum comments afterward.
James has many options.
First of all, the ACLU can step in to defend James’ rights.
Second, James can accept an offer from the “country” of NSK for immediate citizenship and a diplomatic position in its tiny bureaucracy, which leads to James having diplomatic immunity for ownership of his arsenal.
James might have to give up his U.S. citizenship and move his property into an estate or trust but…
Guess what!
As a martyred exile in his former country, James becomes a beacon of escape for his other oppressed patriots.
As more and more patriotic exiles join NSK for the sake of protecting themselves against the entrenched tyranny of bloated, overtaxing and indefinable bureaucracies, the NSK will be the first nongeographical country to declare war on a geographical country, opening up the door for the Inner Solar System Alliance to publicly announce its existence in order to declare all nonEarth territory offlimits to claims of ownership or protection by Earth-based bureaucracies, to prevent further land-based wars.
Wars based purely on ideology will continue unabated.
Meanwhile, a secret executive committee commissioned for consideration of calamities to cause after the next Urbanski Bureaucracy inauguration has released a preliminary agenda that shocked the pundits who were allowed to briefly glance at the agenda written in 2-point font.
From what they saw but cannot officially talk about, the Bureaucracy plans to incite the anger of the populace more and more and then, at the right moment, divert attention from itself by saying the primary goal of its first administrative term of office was to flush the LGBT and illegal immigrant community out into the open so that angry, armed citizens could easily identify these communities as causes for whatever problems the citizens believe are inflicted on them by the Bureaucracy. The Bureaucracy will imply but not state that no harm will come to armed citizens if they take the law into their own hands for a brief time to eliminate the “cause of their problems” as long as it’s not directed directly at the Bureaucracy.
The Bureaucracy did not detail whether NSK citizens were included in the announcement.
One of the signals they will send to signify this brief window of opportunity will appear in the classified section of one of the few profitable newspapers still being printed in the U.S.:
“In The Loop” + “Salt” = “Falling Down”
Gang-style Assassination (not gangnam style, unfortunately)
Leave it to my neighbours to make Friday nights exciting.
Just over the hill from my house, a man died in front of his house, presumably shot gang-style while trying to drive away in his car.
At least, we think, Tiger Woods was luckier — a golf club is potentially a lot less deadly at long range than a gun!!!
For years…
For years, I thought an intellectual conversation had to include dissecting the meaning of the universe and debating the [non]purpose of life.
Then, at the suggestion of a friend, I checked a few books out of the library, books written by or about David Foster Wallace.
After reading the material, I came to the conclusion there’s no reason to read his writings anymore because DFW committed suicide, which in itself is the logical conclusion of all the arguments and observations he made in his writing.
Thus, as I have thought before but never articulated, an intellectual conversation can emphatically state or totally ignore the meaning of the universe and the [non]purpose of life.
I won’t go as far as saying that the writing/artwork/music/biographies of people who committed suicide should be banned, burned and/or buried.
I do suggest that we take into serious consideration the conclusion the suicidal people reached in their thoughts, less so for those within a short, miserable ending of a terminal illness, whatever we may [not] wish to call a terminal disease.
If a person created anything — a bridge, a computer, a spaceship, a novel, a quilt, a child — and then later committed suicide, the creations are part and parcel of the suicidal thoughts, are they not?
It is one thing to muse on the futility of our individual lives, and quite another thing to end our lives, regardless of our auspicious or suspicious beginnings.
What, next, about career suicide or similar forms of cutting off oneself from societal ties?
There are no failures. There are no successes. There is only what we choose to do next.
For me, there are 13,637 days until the next big step, despite momentary distractions that loom large in temporary comparison.
If a person ends his life, there is no “next” left.
DFW’s writings are absent from my future because he chose to absent himself from the present — I respect his right to say goodbye to my life. I say goodbye to his.
treetrunkdings 