cuatro

Finding meaning in life is a skill and some truly lack it. Some joust with God in a perennial game of cat and mouse, they're almost as bad as the Falwells with quarintined faith and barbed-wire fences. People picket against homosexuality for being unatural while drivers honk to agree in manufactured cars. On the bus are the Freewilling Fatalist Oxymorons still waiting for their soulmate to show, and Tom Cruise- sorry don't get me started. I'm just looking at the circus thinking, "Where the fuck did your minds go?"

We have the "Death is only the Middle" club and the "Reincarnation Nation", the "Dude, Where's my Souls" and that wierd contortionist lady who's just "Aligning my Chakra!". Some flung off their possessions because a book said "fuck desire", now they wonder why the want it all back. And at the end of the day there is no such thing as atoms in a flower.

We impose ourselves on nature in hopes it will bend and give us meaning. But where is our lesson in uncertainty? There is certainty about God, certainty about life after death, as if we forgot about the sheer willfulness behind our most valued beliefs, tailor fit to our most unfavorable dimensions. Our hubris is in thinking that for every question there is an answer simple enough to be understood.

Our beliefs mean more than the very things that make us happy; "What is" has come to mean more than what works. Yet there is love, friendship, lust, booze, family, sex, recognition, touch - it all works, it is down here, but they keep looking at the sky, as if what were out there was ever for the choosing.

Tres

I was listening to this lecture from some dude, talking about our evolutionary nature and how it applies to dating. We fuck like chipmunks, yeah that’s a given. But he was basically getting at how, in his words, “attraction is not a choice”. Meaning, in other words, that attraction is something influenced, we do not influence it. I could imagine this concept being universalized.

I agree that attraction has nothing to do with logic; saying “I should like him” or “I should like that” is an illustration of our want-to-wants vs. our wants. When attraction is felt, we sit passively and simply feel what we feel whether we like it or not.

But then it makes me wonder how much of our choice is merely an illusion, being that what we are attracted to in the general sense is not a choice. Sure we may see something we'd like to want, and cultivate some sort of desire towards it over time, but in the moment attraction is not a choice.

If I’m trying to choose between Busty Deviates and Missionary Crusaders at the porno store, well then let me think. I am a man of passion. I prefer B cups to D cups. Missionary Crusaders it is! As I’m thinking about it, I’m not using thought to choose what I should buy so much as I am using thought to figure what I feel like buying. Correct? "Hmm, what porno do I feel like today..." I’m using words to sort out my sentiments, but it is this exact progression of thought in which most people suppose they are truly in the process of making a completely free choice – as if they were dictating their feelings as opposed to being on the brunt of them.

So I buy Missionary Crusaders. According to the dictionary I have made a choice, but I’m not so concerned with words so much as I am the concepts behind them. And if my choice was based on unchosen attraction then I question whether or not I was simply acting, as opposed to choosing. Where is our say in the matter if we can't escape our feelings? Can it be summed up to say that our only choice is saying "no" or "yes" to our impulses? But isn't our willingness to answer that, strongly or weakly, influenced as well?

How free are we? I could go on for miles but I chose to stop now. I think.

Dos

I love how our own president said the words, "You're either with us, or against us". Oh really? What ever happened to being neutral, or disagreeing with both sides, or agreeing with both sides, or having slight leanings or inclinations. Life isn't black and white so naturally it scares me to know my own president thinks in those terms.

I love hearing different opinions, granted they're not ignorant ones, because I know when it comes to concepts, there are no universal indicators and nothing written in the sky to suggest that one opinion is true in the most absolute sense. Instead it seems like we're merely dealing with varying shades of better or worse.

As right and wrong seem to imply that some universal absolute truth exists; two rights is impossible, there can only be one right way, so naturally everything else is wrong. Absurd, damnit!

Besides the concepts of right and wrong sets the stage for pure fucking horror. Right and wrong thinking sets up a dichotomy, and it's quite simple really. People in general are affiliators, not free thinkers. They affiliate themselves with schools of thought (Republican or Democrat...) and because this is a black and white society, the schools of thought are usually fundamentally opposed as well (Republican or Democrat..). Opposed even if it's just to spite the other party. "You like Oreos? Well I hate them, just because you like them". But secretly everybody knows oreos are delicious.

So people treat the truth, or the way to the truth, as if they were tribes in an ongoing battle for it. That's not rational. The intellectually lazy and irresponsible take sides, fling shit at the other side, and it becomes a heated debate; people dismiss what the other side says, not because of what was said, but because the other side said it (ad hominem) and go about affirming their beliefs by the numbers that believe it - as opposed to reflecting on them, so that we're simply dealing with ways of thinking, as opposed to reasoned ways of thinking.

As long as people continue to think in black and white, linear absolutes the shit flinging war will never end. It's only entertaining at the zoo. With monkeys. Not humans.

Uno

I love it when I'm watching the news, a horrible story will come up and someone says, "What is this world coming to?". I just fucking laugh. What is this world coming to? Hmm let me think; the same thing its always been coming to - the future. And you know what's in the future? The same random acts of violence and peversion that haved been with humanity ever since our grunts turned intelligible.

My point being, why would anybody think the world is coming to something? As if life were like a plot outline i learned about in 8th grade. We just passed foreshadowing and we're on our way to the climax, aka the end of the world, the rapture, nuclear destruction, etc.

If anything life is sort of like a cycle, we're vicarious learners, we have to singe our fingertips to learn not to play with fire. Once we learn, the lesson will stick until the next generation comes, looks back, and being left with nothing but words, repeats the same mistakes over; because as always, we're vicarious learners and words are those things that don't rile our emotions quite enough to get anyone to stand back on their feet, unless of course it was in their best interest - otherwise known as the day they learn their lesson with their own eyes.

This is my sideproject blog. It's where I make fun of people and act a bit angrier.