Immanentize the Empathy
Added a page of my Flash experiments, if you are in to that sort of thing. Link is in the navigation.
Continuing to read Mishima. Now I am not sure if he is closer to Dostoevsky or Camus. In the “big picture”, definitely Dostoevsky, but he writes with a certain existentialism which tastes strongly of The Stranger.
Nethack calls; more later.
Where have I been? I’m glad you asked! I… have been working so much that the thought of looking at my computer after-hours fills me with fear and loathing.
And if that weren’t bad enough, I just downloaded Nethack . If you have never played Nethack, I cannot recommend it highly enough. It hearkens back to the days of Rogue, Telengard, Bard’s Tale, the early MUDs; it is The Original Adventure Game, and it has been constantly updated and upgraded for the past twenty or so years.
And it is free.
I expect I will be using it a lot as a distraction in the coming days as we gear up for war. Personally, I think Saddam needs to be ousted. His methods are on par with Stalin and his continued rule will be worse for the Iraqi people than any U.S. led war that doesn’t go nuclear.
Having said that, I will now say that I think the Administration should just come out and admit that the one and only reason we are even acknowledging Saddam’s existence is The Oil. Seriously. If the Middle East wasn’t chock-full of oil we wouldn’t pay any more attention to it than we do to the AIDS-decimated countries in southern Africa.
Think about this: If it was Catholic terrorists flew the planes into the towers, would we have declared war on Rome? Nope. After the Oklahoma City bombing did we declare war on Michigan rednecks? Nope. You know why? Not profitable.
Every president since World War II has been a sociopath to some degree or another. The kind of ego that would want to be president believes nothing other than itself truly exists. I don’t think Bush gives a damn about, or even notices the existence of, other human lives. They simply don’t factor into his reality. Those hundreds of millions of social security numbers are nothing more than assets in his giant game of Sim Presidency. I absolutely believe this about him.
And if he has this level of respect for the people of his own country, imagine how expendable he considers the rest of the world to be…
At the bookstore there is, in the back room, a fire alarm-type-siren which is so loud that to be in the room with it when it is wailing causes disorientation and nausea.
This morning at 4:00 I discovered that there is an identical siren on the roof of the local jewelry repair shop, less than a hundred feet from my bed. Apparently a glitch in the wiring set it off. It screamed for a good half-hour before one of the dozen or so police responding to irate phone calls managed to disconnect it.
No sign of the owner.
I can appreciate that the siren is there to make the building more safe and secure, but I feel that it should be mandatory that he have a duplicate siren in his bedroom, which can only be shut off from inside his store. Fair is fair.
In other news, I am considering, in my extravagant free time, performing a scholarly comparison between Dostoevsky and Mishima. If you don’t know what I am talking about, then click on the BOOKS link to the right and spend a little time browsing. I will perform the comparison on my trombone. I bet no-one has done THAT yet.
Charles T. Sell was a dentist for a number of years before he was arrested on over 60 charges of insurance and other kinds of fraud. He has spend the last five years in jail because he is suffering from serious mental illness and has been deemed not competent to stand trial.
Unless he is medicated.
Given his current state of mind, which includes the fear that the government is trying to kill him, this medication would have to be forced upon him. So he is appealing the decision.
Did you catch that? The government, in order to make him sane enough to stand trial, is trying to force medication upon a man who is suffering paranoid delusions that the government is trying to kill him.
The legal community is rather nonplussed. Adding to the confusion is the fact that he hasn’t actually been convicted of anything yet.
I don’t feel much of anything about this case, one way or the other, but wow! what an odd situation to be in. In order to cure his paranoia they need to feed it.
I have updated the Books page to include only those books which I am reading/have read during this year. Also, I have started on a new collaboration, this one a site about sloths.
This morning my daily ritual of repeatedly hitting the snooze button was interrupted by loud noises from outside, where several police officers were breaking down the front door of the neighbor’s house and hauling some of them away in handcuffs. An angry man stood on the street out front shouting “I told you he was a punk!!!” and something about a dog. Several young women with babies in carriers evacuated the premises at about the same time, and one woman, wither holding her stomach or cradling her arm, went away in an ambulance.
This is, I think, the third time that Grand Rapids’ Finest have come and cleaned that place out. The most recent was over this past summer, when one of the residents at that time had walked up the block and shot one of the employees of the local scummy convenience store in the legs.
Two weekends ago I noticed that that scummy convenience store, on the corner of Fulton and Diamond, has lost its liquor licence. “Until Relocation or Closure”, it says on the notice. The Powers That Be finally got fed up with them selling liquor to minors and looking the other way when drug deals and muggings happen out front and in their back parking lot.
This past fall someone tried to mug Master Lee at that store. As he was getting out of his car someone hit him in the back of the head with something and yelled “Gimme yo fuckin’ wallet!” and other such niceties. Master Lee turned and advanced on the guy, saying “You want my money? Come take my money!!!” The guy turned and ran. Probably the wisest decision he has made in his life.
Unless he has since decided to commit suicide, which would be a truly neighborly thing to do.
mmmmmmyep….
I recently finished reading The Red Hourglass, a nifty book about all sorts of predators like Black Widows and Praying Mantids and Pigs and Rattlesnakes. The chapter on pigs had some interesting things to say about humans, both physiologically and psychologically. The chapter on black widows had this neat description of how doctors determine if that ungodly pain you are feeling is, in fact, a black widow bite: They ask you if this is “the worst pain you have ever been in?” If the answer is Yes, then it is likely that you have about a year of painful recovery ahead of you.
If you survive the next 24 hours.
So for the rest of the evening, I will read Richard Dawkins, watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and eat Ethiopian food from Little Africa (the best food in the city of Grand Rapids, Michigan).
Oh! Before I forget: Fundamentalists are really necrophiliacs .
I am sitting in a concert hall, waiting for the performance to begin, I am not sure who or what it is, but the audience is well-dressed and well behaved. Directly in front of me is a mother and her two small sons, both in the five-to-eight age range. They are restless and she suggests they sing a song – softly – to keep them occupied until the curtain goes up. They choose “Down To the River To Pray”.
It starts with just the two of them, hesitantly, in the pure, crystalline, self- conscious- yet- completely- open manner of young children:
“As I went down to the river to pray…”
The people around them turn and look for a moment, then join in. Quietly, not at all professional, but with the same purity and clarity of voice. With each word, each line, more join in.
“O brothers lets go down
Let’s go down, Come on down
O brothers lets go down
Down in the river to pray”
By the end of the second verse the entire audience, hundred of people, are singing this simple, beautiful song. The performers come to the edge of the stage and join in
At the last lines of the song this moment has become one of perfect beauty; these two young children are the seeds, the nexus of something extraordinary, which never happened and will never be repeated.
I’m probably the last person on the planet to get in line, but Boycott the RIAA !!!!!
Insane, slavering rant to follow.
The kung fu/tai chi/chi kung demonstration on Saturday was deemed, by all participants, the best show EVER! We all had a great deal of fun, we were all relaxed and focused and exactly where we needed to be.
At my suggestion Virginia stopped out to watch the show. Sure, we have only been dating for a week and a half, but I wanted to get it right out in the open that This Is What I Do. She said it was intense and very cool, particularly watching Master Lee beat Rick and I with large sticks in the Chi Kung portion of the show.
She left so suddenly afterward that I was afraid I had scared here away (“FREAK!!!!”). That was, fortunately, not the case. We have another date on Wednesday. She wants to see The City of Lost Children.
On Sunday I went back to the farm where I saw Don’s left hand for the first time since his accident . The doctors did a great job repairing what they could, and now his hand looks just like a normal hand, except for the missing ring and pinkie fingers.
My brother was there with his girlfriend and the bunch of us went through a big box of old photographs, dating back to around 1965. I was a cute kid. My brother was a cute kid, but I was cuter. It was interesting to see the evolution of my Dad’s facial hair, from clean-shaven to mustache and lambchops, to fu-manchu-ish mustache, to full beard, to mustache, to full beard, to clean shaven, to mustache. And that was just 1972.
So now my free time is taken up completing the website for Master Lee. there was a design. It was not quite right. Now there is a new design, provided by the inestimable Mr. Bock . I am way late in finishing the thing. It should have been done six months ago. I blame it on… er… umm… me.
And so to home, and thence to practice.
You know what pisses me off more than anything in the world? The fact that every person on the planet has the potential to be an Einstein, a Gandhi, a da Vinci, a Florence Nightingale, a Dostoevsky, a Mozart, a Michael Jordan… This is what a human being is capable of.
Now take a good look around.
Kind of depressing, isn’t it?
Spend some time reading through The Edge . Think about the articles and conversations. Contemplate .
Realize that the minds here are not superhuman. The bodies and minds eat sleep work shit ache play relax laugh cry fuck create and destroy. Just like everyone else.
Perhaps they are a little more curious than most. A little more restless. Just a little.
If that is the case then the public opiates and soporifics of mass distraction are killing us all.