firstly, i must: - apologize for the quick yank of Amazon.com's dangling carrot (as many may not have had the chance to completely experience Ron Paul's audiobook)
- and thank Brother Yama (friendID=20184197) for bringing this wellspring of empoweringly powerless information to me ...
yes. it is partly for me, so that i can be expressive and take pride in my own ability to understand. but clearly, it is also for you. let me explain ...
a good friend of mine recently told me: "there is no point in talking if no one will listen." quite true, is it not?
but the simple act of listening, clearly, is not enough.
at the risk of exposing myself as a pretentious and self-assured pedagogue, i would like to use a parable to make this point.
a good conversation is like a primitive shower, shared by two people. the purpose of this shower is to cleanse one another within the power of words.
one person takes the time to gather pure water, even heating it to a comfortable temperature, then, a pail is filled with this water and held up for the other to step under its flow, and be cleaned according to the purity of the water, and the vigorousness of their own scrubbing.
meanwhile, the person holding the pail above the head of the other has an arm that grows increasingly weary from the weight of the bucket. this is, of course, after going through the exertion required in preparation ... which must not be overlooked.
this person, this temporary human fountainhead, does so, so that ideally, once clean, the other might hold up another pail in reciprocity.
[the temperature aspect of this metaphor is a tricky one, but can be thought of as the level and type of emotion carried by words. angry words make for a crappy shower because they burn. contrariwise, a cold shower, though still ostensibly effective, is not as enjoyable as a warm conversation with, say, an old friend.]
you may use my words, but only as inspiration for words of your own ... in which others, like you, might also bathe. [put another way:] you can borrow my strength, but only if you will use it to make both of us yet even stronger.
the "simple" act of listening turns the priceless act of sharing into a commodity taken for granted and is, therefore, abusive to the speaker.
i am not a pedagogue. i am just as dirty as anyone else, but would like to use my knowledge of where and how to find pure water to help the world, ... and in turn, myself.
cos my arm is getting really fucking tired, and my BO has not improved much since i began this great path ... (as only a tiny [but precious!] few have bothered to find and hold a pail for me. YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE - Thank you!)
so, as proud as i am of this ostentatious simile, i will only really be satisfied with the effort once someone uses it ... ... to make our world a better place.
didja get that? you can be amused, and thats OK. you can be appreciative, and thats fine. ... even embarrassingly approbative, [with showers of praise for my wisdom] BUT, it doesnt fucking matter AT ALL (from space, that is) until you, ... at some point ... put these words i have shared to a good use. at last.
such as ... go out, buy a Flobots CD from an indy music store and share your headphones ... with, say, a stranger. and learn something from the experience, and then share that with everyone you know.
i have been reading lately. reading a lot of really amazing things written by the likes of fantasy authors, samurai, censored journalists, gnostic apostles, accidental philosophers, punks, economists, punk economists, and especially a jesuit priest (named Balthazar Gracian) uniqely gifted in a "born-outside-of-time" kind of way with the ability to afford equitable thoughtspace to everyone worth hearing - greek philosophers, Jesus, and nascent rennaisance scientists alike. in deed, it was in his spirit of investigative contemplation that i shaped my current self. with my newly crafted perspective and the occasional serendipitous profundity of my local public broadcasting station, it became clear that i have painted myself into a box.
i will explain; the profundity mentioned above refers specifically to an episode of Tavis Smiley on the anniversary of the death of the beloved Reverend King. His guest, a "hip-hop intellectual" teacher [with an Ivy Ph.D.] said some sad, great things about Dr. Kings' legacy and the state of society. Here is the one most relevant to my point;
"[H]e'd still have his fire, his resistance and his rebellion and he would be marginal. People would say, 'Dr. King, you used to say something great. You used to tell America to love white brothers and sisters. Now you're speaking about the economic inequality, social injustice and the persistence of white supremacy' and they wouldn't want to hear him"
Ouch, huh? ... the hypothetical people criticising our imaginarily undead Reverend sound, to me, like "media pundits" and the people *not* hearing him sound a lot like the lock-stepford idiots to whom the 24-hour news cycle panders, known informally as "the Jonses." i really do hate to say it, but it looks like this gruesome fantasy holds up when set in our everyday reality.
This might say more about my naievity than anything, but it pains me to think the most luminous spiritual/political leader [in modernity] cannot be held above the muck and slime that is "coverage" by our postmodern media establishment.
in fact, though, this luminary is dead. and our death worship extends as far as prohibiting the kind defamation of character that assails current heroics, but not so far as to hold any of his charming ideas or "dreams" close enough to our own hearts to understand why remembering him is important. i guess we dont really consider turning someone into a caricature defamation, do we?
Murdoch's minions must [have] master[ed] all movement and noumena.
by dying, Dr. King became immortal, and therefore exempt from personal scrutiny, though still subject to a "re-coloring" of his ideas into something easily digestable to the common viewer. his impact cannot be changed for what it was, but for what its worth anymore, once enough of his believers have died or forgotten enough about what he stood for to allow the wholesale repackaging of a dream for social justice into a quick sound byte on "historical social movements" his impact certainly can be softened a bit around its edges ...
well I AM alive, and i dont have the luxury of some post-humous exaltation before my own ideas are devoured in this shark tank that we call "united" states. hell, people have been trying to tear this down since i began writing.
is wanting my compatriots to be-fucking-have themselves anything like that cliche about getting greedy with cake?
What good can come from my tiny outlet within such utterly disasterous prognosis of our own future?
That much is up to you, my cherished reader.
chances are, we'll all hang either way, anyway.
oh, and also ... randomly; i decided on my next new years resolution . its for 2013. in itself, it is nothing spectacular. the important part to remember is that time has slowed down [to our perception] because vital information is speeding past our senses too fast to actually register, and so we are left in a zoetropic haze of confusion and amnesia. time will resume its normal pace, but not a moment too soon. until then, i will continue to pollute my lungs with the assumption that they wont even exist as a memory in a few short years ...
after witnessing the single most hopeless thing to ever be displayed on a screen, [specifically, nothing. busy inactivity. endless confused computations, (at startup!)] i thought to the computer; 'youre not very much fun anymore' and picked up my trusty online auction acquisition. this [very] pc has brought me into the internet more than any other device (with the possible exception of cell phones.) so here, i recline, (guiltily for not sharing my best ideas) thinking that i would like to share a quote from a most unexpected source (at the time of viewing, i was not aware that the film quoted was based upon truth)
"Our greatest fear is not that we are inadequate. It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us.
Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you.
We were all meant to shine, as children do. It's not just in some of us, it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, unconsiously, we give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others."
Cruz, in Coach Carter really threw me a curve with that one. i almost flew off, struck out, went down or lost it all together. [depending on how you take the metaphor]
that based on truth thing probably doesn't go so far as to put that in the mouth of a real readvantaged ball player from the hoods of the east bay, but it does kind of put a lump in my throat when people ask me why i havent written lately.
i realized that i must be very careful. [it happens all the time, to me, it seems] again.
[insert aforementioned cares' current logic here]
there are many ways to [act selfishly, violate, commit crime, break the rules, &c.] strangely, it occured to me that there may actually be only two reasons for anybody to decide to join in with the general swindle.
hunger and greed are difficult to contrast, [given that needs become wants and wants can become needs] but the morality of each is completely different.
i hope i dont need to say that it is better to be hungry than greedy.
now that i have, think about the saying; "money can't buy happpiness"
[besides the daring, if not also shifty and self destructive few who are prefectly content to say, live in an abandoned car by the riverbank, ]
the truth of this is speakable only by bored wealth. ironic that people most likely to understand the law of diminishing returns are unlikely to ever apply it to happiness, and are thereby unable to grasp their source of inner decay, ... often ... until, of course, its too late.
the bored rich, who coined the phrase, remain subject to its truth.
also, in the consideration of such matters, lets say that time is still money, and less of either is still less, and that anyone with a surfeit of either is likely to experience just this type of "heavy-is-the-crown-wearing-head" "what will i do" despair.
prisoners, who have much time and little money, the working poor, who have little time and increasingly less money, and the overworked upper/middle class, to whom time is more precious than cash are all unrepresented by the currently common paradign of the saying.
with the [unsaid] parts [of the rest of the world] the saying might go like this: "a little bit of money can buy a lot of happines, but a whole lot more will bring very little." ... i heard something like that on NPR recently, which was cool.
in addition to financial shifts, [things like] charitable acts are social contributions. [its all institutional.]
even though the unspayed, noisy, feline paintball target might not grasp the philosophy of it, a bit of institutional help ending that stress transmitters output very much changes the overall life dynamic for the region.
we have dollar votes and timekeeping, both are powerful.
NPR is cool ... indeed.
what does that mean i am supposed to tell the guy who wants his computer fixed ... tomorrow?
1/8/7 4 am several hours ago (9 or 10 i think) i started up the game that had intrigued me all weekend, and promptly beat it. without really noticing that i had nothing better to do, i began a 2 player session. in this case, a split screen race across a map of obstacles. realistically, you could say that im still playing this game, even as i type this ... or, perhaps you could say that its playing itself. either way, at this point ... its playing with my mind.
to start; three paragraphs of explanation:
each player races around the map. if a player flies into an obstacle, the game restarts the player on the course on its former trajectory, but a little ways back. ive arranged the game so that both players are repeatedly crashing into the same wall, but at different angles. oddly, this has proved remarkably entertaining on a surprising number of levels.
at first, it was simply amusing to see. with absurd, yet palpable pride i watched my doomed racers demolish themselves, in turns, over and over again. eventually, i intuited that a pattern existed. its complexity and the tantalizing prospect of intelligibility transfixed me, and i underwent a battle of wits against the processor until i convinced myself that i knew how the patttern repeated.
the most interesting aspect of this monotonous event was the philosophical metaphor therein. two players, both doomed to die and be reincarnated to see the other pass by before smashing to smithereens, or being swept into a vortex, and then smashing to smithereens. conceiveably, this could go on until the end of time.
eventually, my roomate woke up for work. were it not for the fatigue i might have sensed his bewilderment at the sight of my intensely focused effort, now occupying every computer under our roof. he asked what i was doing. "statistical analyses," was my dry reply. my answer was funny to him. i was too busy trying to search out the pattern to think about why.
[as you look over my results, our setting shifts to the present] 11001001100100000110010000011001000001100110100000000000000 11001001100000110010011001100110010011001000001100100000110 01000101001100100100000000000110011001001100100110011001001 10011001101001000100100110010000011001000001100100000110011 00100010010010001001001100110010001100100100110010011001001 10011001001100110011001001100100110110010101001011001100100 10000000000011001100100110010011001100100110011001100100110 010011001100100110010010
now, almost a year later ... this is an utterly meaningless pile of characters, even to me.
at the time i recorded it, it was the manifestation of pure scientific investigation. the kind of research that does not see fit to justify itself, but moves on under the loose hope that something valuable may [not will] eventually result.
my hope shifted from the intellectual to the philosophical when i grasped the unlikelihood of reverse engineering the random number generator of the program i watched all night. i do not see this as a waste. i reinforced the character traits that make me proudest of being myself; patience, curiosity, and flagrant disregard for conventional research.
prior to finding that blasted game, my existence was, for lack of a better term, normal. productive. i was expressive and sometimes even interesting to others. once caught in the transformation that the game catalyzed, i became my own prisoner and warden. developing only in very small, tightly controlled ways while re-inforcing my own ideas of virtue and incentive. once i was done mindfucking myself, i had produced little of value. once i ended my own inexplicable exile, i found a world that again, as always, demanded my attention and interaction.
for something like a year now, ive done a bang up job ignoring my friends, myspace, and the internet et al. i left my telejournal (which may now [seeing as how i managed to baffle everyone, including myself, with what can only be pidgeonholed as; maturity] be called, again, simply a blog, if you like) shelved here to age, inspire, digest, squat, or rot (depending on one's perspective.) the idea was, at best, a hazy blend of self-loathing/fear of success, rejected inspiration/dire circumstances, and pride with a splash of disenchantment at the direction of the world.
put another way: i got sick of sharing all my wonderful ideas with a world that wouldnt, for fucks sake, stop shitting on me (present readership excluded - i owe you all my profound gratitude.)
i stopped writing and started living my damned life.
i still see no point is sharing the trivialities, of this life. nor will i stop living it. however, my hunger for your attention - or more precisely, the desire of my self-sustaining impositions to share themselves - has, again, found its time.
you may soon see another, slightly more developed, chapter in this disorganized mess of haughty rants. my current bend is no less critical of the idiocy we americans endure, but now tempered by experience and knowledge once lacked. somewhat broader in scope is my gaze, and i hope the fiery icicles i once shot at idiotic bargoers will find their way to the hearts of people that may actually benefit as a result.
if that needs further explication, have this:
the kiddie gloves are coming off. [yes, i was wearing them] i might get arrested. [or historical] lets watch,
