Author Archives: Dan

Journaling

I’m kind of seen as a shiftless good-for-nothing living off the system when I can and cuting corners when I can’t. It’s not true though, I’m thrifty and clever and have gotten by on my own for the most part. I had a little luck here and there, but luck is the unexpected results you get from the work you put in to the world. I don’t want what most people think they want so to them it looks like I’m lost.

My brother told my friend he was worried about me, he thought I had stumbled and was ‘lost’ because I had given up on the faith I was raised with. HA I was more grounded at that point, post-faith, than I ever had been before and I told my friend that. My brother would be lost without his faith, I know that, and I know that’s why he thinks I’m lost.

I don’t want a career either, at least, not some bullshit 9-5 that has no bearing or relation to who I am. I’m a creative mind, WE ALL are creative minds, we’re all creatives! A fucking masters in business is such a sad waste of a mind, and our time, and our reality.

I don’t want a marriage, at least, not a marriage simply to get married. It’s the ‘next thing’ to do after college, you know? And something is wrong with you if you don’t, or at least, once you do you can see what is wrong with everyone who hasn’t found a partner to swear your undying filandering feality to.

Really though, it’s not that I don’t want what you want, I just see through the skin of our desires, and a lot of them are accumulating some really nasty vericose veins. Our desires have atrophied as man has gotten older and more connected so now we are standing on two planets, two planes. There’s the planet of our true desires, honest, red-blooded, passionate desires. And the Victorian, or the Protestant, or the conservative planet, the blue-bloods who have gotten to used to holding on to what they have to remember what they want or need. It’s not a one or the other choice, there is no red pill or blue pill here. We get so good at standing on both worlds and sometimes the red blooded experiences come out of nowhere and shake us wide awake. But most of the time we are so used to the blue blood, our hearts are beating slower and slower, and our senses atrophe and we don’t even notice the real world around us. We don’t notice ourselves in our numb march stepping stepping towards our ends.

I had a dream last night that seemed like an end, it was one of those cliche dreams you start a story with, espeically if that story is about the end of the world. Cliche or not, it had me contemplating what was real and what wasn’t, as I tend to do a lot anyway, because for a minute, it had me convinced that it was the real world and the one I’m typing in now is this silly dream I’m keeping.

The Stevens Assassination and the Hookup Culture

1. Stevens Assasination
2. Hookup Culture

1. Stevens, Romney, Dehumanization

Bilocation wasn’t meant for politics, rather for my attempted clever observations on the Maya and 2012 end-of-the-world armageddon cults. I won’t rationalize except to say that the real world has a way of grabbing the attention of the escapist and drawing them in.
With all the political games being played around it, the Stevens assationation was dehumanized before most of us even knew it happened. Romney’s early response to it is clearly the most to blame for this as has been noted in other places on the web — had he stayed silent the media could have focused on the things that really mattered. The assasination of Stevens and his colleagues is a small example of the mayhem in that region. It’s easy to miss the gravity of these things that are happening so far away. One photo hit it home for me. It’s one I’ve only seen in foreign media.

It’s a photo supposedly of Stevens, (link below) battered and unconscious, possibly already dead, with men struggling to carry him somewhere, chaos swirling around them. From that photo I was transported into the scene for a moment – blasts, gunfire, people running here and there.

And a man’s life — ended. A man who went to work like you and I, who was excited to see his family, who had favorite foods, who looked forward to retirement but feared getting older. Now we just have a hole where he was.

I can’t make a judgment on the situation in turbulent places like this but I do think it would the world a bit of good to reflect on the reality of the thousands such lives we are losing. Perhaps if we connect the ends of others to our own eventual ends, we’ll have less of a stomach for all of this.

link to Stevens photo – warning: graphic

2. RE: Andrew Sullivan’s blog on the hookup culture

Many commenters seem keen to point out the benefits of sex when speaking of a committed relationship while denouncing drawbacks when speaking of the hookup culture. As we all know, monogamous relationships have the monopoly on interpersonal connection, and the hookup culture has the monopoly on birth control.

As was pointed out today in Sully’s blog, we rationalize our reasoning to fit our beliefs.
To illustrate my point, from the comments posted later on: the Mormon decrying ‘sexual compatibilty’ because the sex that all their virgin marriages preceeded was fine. I, for one, am simply shocked that this is something they’ve never heard of! Inspired by that comment I decided to then find some student drivers to advise me on highway etiquitte.

Perhaps marriage is traditionally ‘normal’ in our recent history, but are social norms always the best way to do things? Can we agree to encourage each other’s freedom to make different choices rather than wasting our time defending harsh and ignorant ‘death’ comments?
I’m absolutely sure that the commenter who was happy his daughter was exploring sex was simply happy that she was discovering herself. In any facet of life, particularly the very human aspects, exploration and experimentatino, I believe, are the surest path to making ourselves better.

link to the Andrew Sullivan blog comment

Dream

This morning, another of the confused fogs that I’ve been waking up into more frequently over the last year. Mostly I feel disorientation, with a feeling underlying that, a fearful sense that I am being chased.

I make an effort to hold on to the dreams that lead to these mornings in search of understanding. It wasn’t until later in the day I started to have foggy images reveal themselves.

  • a calm tangible darkness like you might imagine a thick soupy fog on a black night
  • the awareness of an unseen dreamlike door, not physical, I was only aware of its presence in the way a blind person must intuit the locations of doors
  • a beckoning feeling, a reaching as if a hand was waiting to grab me and pull me through if I’d reach to meet it

I’ll post again if I remember anything else yet today.

Dream [con’t]

I remembered an important part of the dream just now, I remember the certainty I had that death would greet me if I were to take that hand. And I remember this strange sense I’ve only had in one other dream. A sense that it was just a little too real to be a dream.

Typing now, I feel that it was something more like annihilation, just ceasing to be. Which maybe wouldn’t be as bad. What if the Tibetan Buddhists are right and ceasing to be isn’t the end and complete separation from everything, forever. Maybe it’s the opposite, maybe ceasing to be as we know ourselves to be is instead the complete reunification with everything, forever.

Life ain’t bad but part of me wishes I had taken that hand.