Moderates United

I can’t remember it, but it seems impossible I have not mentioned this song here somewhere at some time.  It destroys me every time.  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3O1Ap41ptU&list=RDt25SpC5pQtE&index=2

Sweet the sin

Bitter taste in my mouth

I see seven towers

But I only see one way out
You got to cry without weeping

Talk without speaking

Scream without raising your voice
You know I took the poison

From the poison stream

Then I floated out of here

You know, this woman is the target of my salvation.  My problem, is that I am crying alongside her.

My job–I feel this clearly–is to find the fucking way out.  It’s my job.  It’s why I’m here.  I feel this grief and alienation so clearly, so cleanly.

One day I hope to be useful.  I will not ever try to claim I am useful, though, until I know how to sleep through the fucking night without shaking and screaming.

My work continues.  You know: I falter often, but in the end, I don’t quit.  Ever.  Ever.

And you know, I would offer my body up in a moment if I could put an end to this.

I rewatched Wes Anderson’s “Rushmore” again a few days ago.  Max Fisher did not become any more likable.

Here is my own thesis: after some early actual success with Bottlerocket, I think he (and perhaps Owen Wilson, who cowrote it with him, and who seem to share with him somewhat similar prep school backgrounds) was trying to proactively exorcise a particular self important “artiste” demon within himself.  He filmed it on the grounds where he went to school, where he put on plays, where he himself was perhaps even hyperactive in school activities.

I think he has, or had, a little Max Fisher in him, and he wanted to put it on screen in a way he would not forget.  I also think some of his best artistic ideas came from some of his worst ideas when he was a kid making films. In his satire of mediocre plays he is perhaps mocking himself, too.  As he says in the commentary, he once staged a three act reenactment of the Alamo that consisted of nothing but battle scenes.  He also tried to stage Star Wars in I think it was second grade, with predictable results.

Out of all his films, this is the one where I get to the end and still feel little sympathy for the main protagonist.  Even in Bottlerocket you had to admire Owen Wilson’s enthusiasm, sort of.  In any event, you couldn’t see him screaming at waiters thirty years hence, and throwing things at his girlfriend, and having meltdowns in public following bad reviews.

And I think most of us had crushes on older women when we were teens.  I know I did.  When you are a fifteen year old boy, you are not thinking clearly.  But with Max, it wasn’t going to get much better, it seemed to me.  He is most likely a narcissist, perhaps even a sociopath.  He has a great father, but I didn’t get the sense that his father was an influence so much as someone he sometimes spent time with to make himself feel smarter.

Who knows?  They were young when they wrote this.  It’s definitely my least favorite Wes Anderson.

Sign up to play on a professional men’s team.  Problem solved.  All the women have to do to get equal pay is to play with the men.

I don’t know why anyone hasn’t thought of this sooner.

I have spoken often of pain, but I have also concomitantly spoken of the ENDURING of pain, and its slow translation into something better. I fight for years sometimes for an inch, but if I am honest, in my heart of hearts there is hope. I would otherwise certainly be dead by now.

This is a bit of an unexpected discovery however.

I am not even close to doing the best I can, but it’s also true that every fiber of my being wants to do worse.

Faith represents, formally, an enduring personal order in the midst of chaos and change.

Faith, therefore, represents a qualitative alternative to chaos. It is above, where chaos is below.

And living by personal rules in a consistent way is a type of faith: it represents the notion that things will be better over time with organized, ordered behavior, relative to doing every last little thing that pops in your head, consequences be damned.

From this perspective, the dictum “do what thou will” is a rejection of faith, and of order.  It is a descent below the level of the animal, since even animals, acting by instinct, act always with purpose.

I have seen enough demons to say their shared essence is chaos and formlessness. This is why faith and trust represent their  antithesis.

https://www.infowars.com/report-alex-acosta-said-he-was-told-jeffrey-epstein-belonged-to-intelligence-and-to-leave-it-alone/

Whoever it is, I think it is very clear large segments of our intelligence and law enforcement apparatus has been, as they say at least in the movies, “compromised.”

Put another way, a massive purge of these Augean Stables is needed.

For my part, I wonder if Epstein was not arrested in the main to try and find or create dirt on Trump. The FBI is plainly not an honest organization, so the fact that his crimes were awful, obvious and sustained means little.

Should not so much be viewed as a terrorist group—although they clearly are that, albeit not seriously yet—but rather as the public “face” of a political cult. Look at them: they ARE faceless, but they are all matching to the best of the same demonic, anti-human drummer.

Cults of all sorts proliferate when the old beliefs fail. It would not, I think, be overstating the case to say that the goal of Communist infiltration, subversion, and propaganda is to enable such cults, because they betray a complete failure of common cause and common purpose.

Communists dictate, and shoot or torture those who disobey. True Liberals negotiate and persuade, and any force which can disable that process helps the actual fascists, who the Antifa cult support and publicly embody.

And somewhat tired of talking.

To talk much is to see and feel little.  

Think back to the happiest time in your life.  For me, it would probably be at one or another theme parks with my kids.  We had so much fun.

Were you you, then?  What I think happens is that we have moments where we open, and allow joy to happen.  These moments, in turn, tend to solidify and become a part of who we “are”.  We treasure them, and in treasuring them we calcify them, and in no small measure kill them.  What was living in them lives in us yet.  What was joyful in them lives in us yet.

But being open feels like rolling the dice, doesn’t it?  You can’t get lucky forever.  We all know that.  So we stow away what we think we have, and take it out from time to time and look at it. I was talking with a guy in a bar the other night the high point of whose life seems to have been a Little League game that happened 50 years ago.  It still makes him happy telling the story.

Growing old, though, is I think ideally about learning to value life itself, to value each day, to find links today with old joys.  With Acceptance, perhaps, above all.

I feel deeply sad sometimes.  I am an Empty Nest-er, but without a wife.  My kids are gone, off doing their things.  They are healthy, happy, successful.   I did my job.  I talk with them, I see them sometimes, but it will never be what it was.  This is sad.  I can’t get those moments back.  My task, as I see it, is to become wise, which is what I am trying to do here.

There is so much sadness in this world.  This has not changed in 3,000 years, even if our physical comforts and life spans have vastly increased.

I cannot continue to be who I have been.  This is a clear conclusion.  This, too, is sad.

But there are gates we all have to pass through.  And there is an other side.  That is where the hope is.  It is nowhere to be found in who and how I have been.

Pray for me if you are so inclined.  I could use help and wisdom.  I am slowly remembering who I once was, so very, very long ago.  What was done was awful.  It shattered me.  But somehow something endured, and if I can cross this desert, I will have something useful to say to everyone.