Month: April 2020

https://www.fort-russ.com/2020/04/robert-f-kennedy-jr-exposes-bill-gates-vaccine-dictatorship-plan-cites-gates-twisted-messiah-complex/

Bill Gates is a sociopath.  I think that conclusion has become inescapable.

The real crime of “Capitalism”, from a Leftist perspective, is it deprives atheists of a raison d’etre.

Is it better to spend an hour a day reading good books, or listening to good music?

It’s not a necessary choice of course, but the priorities involved are interesting. To me.

In my understanding, based on a John Stossel (please work forever, sir) piece, the Swedish equivalent of Social Security is indexed to the GDP.  Logically, if the GDP took a huge hit, then so too would payments to retirees. 

If true, this has to have been a part of the (successful) calculus.

I am so glad they stuck to their guns.  They are giving the lie to all the fascist bullshit going on in the rest of the world.

No, I don’t want to be like China.  Fuck you for not asking, and fuck you for taking this a minute longer.

When people speak of “the problems of life”, they usually mean lacking a job, or having a bad job, or having an insecure job, or a bad boss, or being in a bad marriage, or illnesses of various sorts, or the various inconveniences we encounter every day, like traffic jams, bad weather, being unable to find a parking spot and the like.

Have you ever stopped to consider that feeling unloved is really the primary problem of life?  Followed, perhaps, by doubt about the purpose and point of your life?

How often do any of us say this truth out loud?  It only just occurred to me, even though it is obviously true.

Our society really does not exist to meet our true emotional needs.  It’s not built around that.  It is built around meeting our PHYSICAL needs, and it is superlatively good at that.  The best in history, many, many times over.

So I GET the people who are saying “oh, this Great Pause is really a spiritual opportunity.”  And it IS that, for some of us.  It’s been great for me.  But not for everyone. 

And here is the thing: the nature of this particular beast is that it combines economic dislocation and ruin with loneliness and alienation.  Our various governments have ensured that.  They have built alienation and social disconnection into their solution.  They have made existing problems much worse.

In my own case, I can honestly say I have never seriously considered suicide.  There were periods of time where my drinking certainly could have killed me, and periods of time where I was reckless in many ways.  But doing the thing on purpose, it was never really on the table, for any reason.

My father was a relentlessly negative man.  A determined Eeyore, who could find reasons to complain about a blue sky and perfect weather.  I once asked him why he didn’t just kill himself, and he told me “I don’t have the courage”.

I think that answer is part of my own emotional architecture.  It’s really a contemptible answer, in many ways, particularly directed at a young man–his son–just starting in life.

But returning to the main point, I wonder how we will all be when this is done.  Won’t we be glad to see our friends in the bars again?  To go to concerts, after the nation finally tells Fauci to go fuck himself?  Will we be closer, listen better?  I don’t know, but it seems likely.

If learning is climbing a steep hill, then sometimes you have the opportunity to reach some particular point where it makes sense to look back.  And in general a present self which knows better has to feel some regret looking at a past self which did not.  I think it was Maya Angelou who said something close to “when you know better, you do better.”  That’s close, but not quite right.

Here is the thing, though: there are no shortcuts.  And when you understand something, it can seem like it is obvious.  OF COURSE you say to yourself.  But you can only say this because you did the work.  There was no wand you–or anyone else–could have waved.

I look at my own life, and think of all the paths it might have taken if I was not carrying around a dozen wounds I couldn’t see for really all the time I can remember.

But this learning was the path.  There was no other way.  And the difficulty of the path made my learning richer.  If I might say so myself, at times I can be a pretty damned clever fellow.

Oh, I feel something about this.  Not quite the futility of words, but their occasional redundance where my own next step is concerned.

The push behind my words is melting.

A lot of the time learning is a creative act.  It involves milking the new out of the old.  It involves coming up with yet one more way to look at something you are very familiar with.

There is no moment of any day where it is not possible for some new insight to strike you.

I don’t think it is immodest–or in any event inaccurate–to view myself as fairly creative.  My main “talent” in this regard is that I am just very, very curious.  I’m always taking things apart in my brain and reassembling them.  I have a very powerful imagination.

And physically I literally spend time wondering about things as banal as why cracks are where they are, how the floor was built, why that wire is laying over there, why the clouds look the way they do, how and why that tree fell over, etc.  It’s endless.  I am never, ever bored.

What sparked this particular thought was buying two bean burritos at Taco Bell. I was thinking “dear God is there any more corporate thing I could do? And I got to thinking about how there was a Taco Bell near my high school but I never had any money to eat there.  Then what a dick I was back then.

Then: I’m changing.  This is good.  And this whole thought train started looking at the garish colors of the new Taco Bell branding, and wondering what was going through the mind of the drive through gal who opened every interaction with “How’s it going?”  I was wondering what that job is like and how I would make it fun if I had to do it.

Etc.

I’m doing more and more “moments”.  Those don’t get written about.  This idea of learning as a creative act, though, that is properly intellectual.  I have some more thoughts on all that, but I’m easing back into my moment for tonight.

Worry is productive up to a point.  It is the emotional energy that leads to planning, if planning is going to happen.

But particularly right now it is easy to look at a beautiful sky and to feel good and say to yourself (if you are me, or someone like me) “oh, but it can all be taken away.”  This is true.

There is another truth, though, the moment you say that, IT’S ALREADY HAPPENED, AND YOU WERE THE THIEF.

It is a truism, but if you want to live efficiently, live as if each day were your last. The next one is another world, another century, another you.  It doesn’t matter.

And here is the miracle: quite generally, the things we fear do not come to pass.  Some do.  Communism happened, and continues to happen in China and Cuba and North Korea, and elsewhere.

But even there, there must be hidden miracles in every day for those who learn how to look for them.

Don’t shrink in fear.  It’s easier said than done, like most things, but it’s a good goal.

The best way to learn to face death without fear is to learn to face life without fear. Death is just the last thing on this trip, before the next thing, on the next trip.

I think my arguing thing is about expended.  It was always an outgrowth of anxiety, and I’m beginning to deal very effectively with that trauma based anxiety.

I don’t know if I will post less on here, but it seems unlikely I will post more, and I may well stop for a while.  Dunno.  Feeling it out as I go.  I never do well making promises in any event.  If nobody but me is hurt if I don’t keep them, then fuck me.  It’s not a great philosophy, I will admit, but shit we don’t all wake up in life having figured it all out, either.  Some of us muddle, stumble, ramble and roam, and finally get to the end of the road and don’t have a fuck where we are.

I guess being lost is a skill, in that you can get used to it, and in any event being lost is more or less a prerequisite for going places you have never been and don’t have a map for.

There are, to be sure, lots of maps out there, but most of them are bullshit.  If you have not figured that out yet, pay closer attention.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=07WfDVN1asc&t=4s

Here is the thing: if you require LARGE experiences to feel alive, you are stupid.  Coarse.  Undeveloped.  The goal is this sort of thing every day.  Just feeling good, feeling alive, feeling connected to life, and not even necessarily in any lasting way to anyone.  Just life.  Your life: they only one you have right now, as far as any of us can tell (I’ve had some odd experiences, but not getting into that right now, possibly ever).

All the hippies were chasing big thrills, big highs, big Samadhi’s.  As George Harrison put it, presumably referring to a personal LSD or other drug experience, “feeling every atom in your body alive”.

I have no complaint with this.  But how do you reintegrate that into ordinary life?  Is it not smarter, wiser, and more practical in every way to gradually move your life, your ordinary life, in that direction?  You get a lot more special moments.

This whole focus on “enlightenment” is really silly, I think. There are countless enlightenments, and none of us are smart enough to really be able gauge the caliber and depth of any claimed enlightenment on the part of anyone else.

Particularly superficial, in this regard, in my own view, are the many  Zen stories where someone was sitting next to a stream or something and “achieved Enlightenment”.  No, they just upgraded a qualitative level.  That’s good, but that’s not the end of any story I personally want to hear.

Tantra just says that God is everywhere.  You can’t look anywhere and not see God.  You can’t feel anything and not feel it in God. Or creation.  Or reality.  The terminology doesn’t really matter.  You go out to God through where you are. 

The alternative is for God and “enlightenment” to be Out There, somewhere.  Over some mountain.  At the end of some endless path.

Why not reach out and arrive home, right where you sit?  That’s my vote.