Death has become a much more present companion of late. Maybe it was the deaths of multiple family members over the last few years, maybe the global pandemic, or even me getting to what most people see as the downhill side of the hill of life. 

I have always considered death as a companion on the road, that can show up at any time. I think maybe when we start thinking overmuch on the end it may be because we feel that the story so far has not been a good enough one. I don't know if I need a second chapter twist or a quiet evaluation of my goals. Option two is probably better, since blowing up your life may be exciting it is also not really all that much fun or healthy.

Learning to make steady, consistent steps and work hard is probably going to be more useful.

Drinking

I had in mind to write about bars and pubs but upon reflection I realize that I have spent far too little time in them to have an informed opinion.

Lightly Toasted

             Living in a land of endless sunshine seems pretty amazing. It does have a few drawbacks. Its very bright. Sometimes this is ok but it is tough to be properly morose in the blazing sun. This makes me wonder if there isn't some connection between fundamentalist religion and extremes of climate.
   Wine is fun too. I do miss Molson, it seems almost impossible to aquire here.

Dark Water

My dreams of late seem to be inhabited by the sort of dark fucked up stories you might get from guys like Faulkner and Vonnegut and M Night Shamaylan. I don't want to sound ungrateful but that shit is waking me up in a cold damn sweat. I just want to write good stories that people can enjoy. I do not want to be doomed to writing obscure and surreal but deeply subtexted 'literature' for the intellectual elite to sit around doing mental masturbation over. Fuck that. What is wrong with just telling a good and interesting story where people seem real even if they are not and you get a few thrills and a few laughs and maybe learn some cool shit whether you meant to or not.
Maybe you never get the muse you want. But always learn to be grateful for the muse you get. Could be worse. For a while they weren't talking to me at all.

I am sad and have good reason to be sad. Death, boredom, lack of sleep and lack of time with my wife are all reasons for being down.
The usual things don't seem to be pulling me out of the funk. Maybe some B-12 or a drinking binge.

Sleep is a refuge from the exhaustion of being. One can only hope that if death is not the start of a wild adventure in afterlife Disneyland that it is a gentle slip into an endless sleep.

I suppose to qualify as a blogger I should probably write something here more than a few times a year when I get insomnia. Ah well.
Death used to be a mystery to me in terms of experiencing it. This is sadly no longer the case. Less than a year ago I lost my father who was combination of John Wayne, Jimmie Stewart and Al Borland. Yesterday I lost my niece. She was a wee small baby but she affected the lives of everyone around her. Nobody is unimportant. There are no expendable people. Everyone matters and should be loved and treated with respect. I hope it doesn't take death for these ideas to hit home but sometimes it seems even death isn't enough. We lose thousands and go to war to lose thousands upon thousands in struggle instead of trying to understand what would drive young men to destroy themselves. I know introspection over action seems alien to a lot of us but without it we are at the mercy of those who value greed and power over either. Please start thinking before you leap to action...if only for a moment.

Why Fiction Matters

It may be that writing fiction can be seen as wrongful in the context of encouraging people to live lives not their own direct, present experience and therefore to sacrifice what is more real for the sake of that which is less real.
This would possibly be the case if one were to know with any degree of certainty that one will be reincarnated through many cycles of being and therefore able to live an infinite number of completely genuine and authentic lives. This not being known with certainty, reading the fiction of others becomes perfectly acceptable, or at least as acceptable as reading the fictions we label non-fiction. That is to say as acceptable as pretty much any human activity that isn't causing any harm.
Reading provides an opportunity to experience life from a more diverse selection of view points. It allows a period of rest from the most real of realities, the daily grind, the fear of loss, the actual suffering of loss, death and a host of other ills released by Pandora all those ages ago. It is as Stephen King said in On Writing a kind of telepathy, one that can take us into the experience of another life. As such, the stories we read to ourselves can bind us together as a society and as individuals on an intimate level.
How many marriages or even just conceptions have occurred because of the stories we tell ourselves creating a shared reality? We may all be alone inside our heads but we can certainly share a bit of that through our collective experiences in the tales of adventure, romance, and mystery we have in common.
Academics study these stories and analyse them to death. Why? Because it's fun, because it is part of the shared telepathic conversation and to try and find stories so universally relevant that they form the framework of our culture. These acts are useful to us as a society and therefore academic study of the humanities is necessary and enriching in spite of the excessive logorrhea that can be a hazard of the endeavor.
Public sports serve a similar bonding function in the formation of pseudo tribal groups worshipping the same heroes. If we can identify with our chosen champions then not only do their struggles and triumphs become our own but we share them with the other fans. Hell, sometimes the 'enemy' team has more in common with us than those who don't follow sports.
Whether it be sports, books, music, movies, art, or urban legends all the shared experiences of humanity can serve the goal of opening us up to other people and letting us feel the bonds of love, kinship and shared joys and griefs. They allow us to be part of a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
The Internet may eventually be the best tool of human unification we have ever made, so long as we can grow into its proper usage the same way we grow into the correct usage of language. Every form of communication has probably gone through the evolutionary process from idea to reality to cultural touch point and we are fortunate in being alive at a time when we can see the process in action and participate in its growth.
I know now that I will continue to study because i finally found the answer to the question I started asking six years ago.

Q. Why should I bother with more academic bullshit?
A. Because it is in fact an integral part of how our culture experiences storytelling and it is one environment where you can hope for someone who might actually sit still for a diatribe on the merits of comic books as modern myths or the nature of Hugh Hefner as a genius.

I will probably pick a different specialty since I seem to have more of an interest in the meta thinking on understanding the dynamics of culture than in the minute study of English literature.

Change in Employment

Post removed to the best of my ability since it was pointless and really out of date.

Morning Thoughts 8-6-8

The blank page as an obligation isn’t much fun and above all else writing should be fun. Even when I was writing a paper for my college professors it was fun. Figuring out what to write about and how to put it together was a bit of a pain in the ass but it was challenging and fun. There isn’t much I have found besides people and writing to be a challenge. I suppose if I wanted to I could challenge myself to physical acts of derring-do but that really doesn’t hold much appeal. I have seen and felt the results of physical stunts and challenges and for now am satisfied with the challenge of changing my diet and exercise levels enough to slim down.

Lunatics and Love

I am a lunatic. This is not to say that I am afflicted by any particular delusion of being a werewolf or Napoleon Bonaparte but rather that the onset of the full moon seems to bring with it an enhanced anxiety and desire to be in motion. A craving for action adventure and sex leaks into my fevered imagination and sleep becomes a distant second to the need for the intangible quality of being that the French wuss out on by calling je ne sais quoi which literally translates as “I don’t know what”. How lame is that?

In any case on this particular moonlit night my mind is bringing forth images and memories of you. Some painful most happy. All filled with a sense of longing and a bit of regret. Being of an analytic mind is a curse all its own. Did I do the right thing? What is the right thing? If there is no right thing did I do what was best with the information that I had? My life seems to be a combination of intuitive leaps fearful gestures and hindsight recriminations.

Romantic comedies are a bane upon human existence. Worse than fairy tales and more destructive to the popular myth than cartoons are movies that give us an idea of some ideal romantic convergence in which two people can meet…overcome some laughable obstacle and in the end realize that they are truly and deeply meant to be together on a level so cosmic that the audience has known it since the first reel. Life is nothing like that.

My romantic history bears a much closer resemblance to a series of horrible accidents than to a cosmically ordained fairytale. I hope things are going better for you but they probably are not. Sucks doesn’t it? Fear is of course the problem. It always is. Fear takes on so many forms that it would be silly to even attempt to list them. Fear of being weak and vulnerable is a big one of course. Fear that the person you are with is just who you have settled for because you are tired and your one true love is out there somewhere but you just lack the emotional wear withal to keep looking.

The truth is that this is a fairly legitimate fear. After all with 6 or 8 billion people on the planet it seems like there might be someone better than almost anyone you're with. Love is not buying a car. Life is not a matter of finding the perfect place or time or person. Life is just living and making the best you can to be the best you can. And life is short so stop putting it off.

How to justify your rebellion.

The irony of logic is that it leads to illogic. Logic, when applied to the unknown, leads inevitably to skepticism. Skepticism followed to its ultimate conclusion with sincere honesty about what is known leads to the realization that nothing is actually known. Descartes argued that thinking was being. Nietzsche said "what is thinking?"
Without even the presumption of selfhood as a basis to build on there is no proof of anything. All our information comes either from the physical world through the senses, which cannot be trusted, or through the intuitive and imaginative powers of the mind which cannot be tested.
So skepticism leads to the conclusion that not only does nobody know anything in any absolute sense but that nobody can know anything. Without that essential foundation of knowing we are left at the mercy of faith. Indeed faith becomes the foundation of all belief even that of science. We don't know that we have free will or that the universe holds any purpose and so all beliefs and conceptions of the universe become a matter of faith.
The justification of actions made so often in the last century that 'we know better than them' is complete nonsense. No one knows anything so all knowing is equal. Still...you have to do something or you might as well just lay in bed and rot.
So create a view of the universe that makes sense to you and set aside the fact that you are a completely ignorant and indeed unproven entity and just get on with living a bit eh?

Internalized Discipline

When we are children, if we are fortunate enough to have parents and the opportunity to go to school, we are made to get up and get ourselves cleaned and dressed and off to school. Later there is work. Same thing as school really your doing work for someone else without always completely knowing why you bother, and still you get up and do it every day. The voice of the parent waking you is replaced by the klaxon of the alarm clock and you groggily make your way to the shower and try to massage life into a body that would much rather be sleeping since you pushed the amount of sleep you get to a bare minimum for the sake of a some late night television. Cleaned up you head out the door towards the nearest caffeine and sugar and wolf them down on the way to The Job whatever that might be. Forty or fifty years pass by in this way with occasional interruptions for weddings, births, deaths etcetera.
What about being fired? What happens when you go on vacation? Without that little tug of fear to wake you and without that overhanging sense of responsibility what motivation besides urination is there to get out of bed? Is taking a shower and having a cup of coffee any less useful when your time is your own instead of someone elses?
Perhaps the enforced system of fear works fine. Maybe there are not many that view the world as operating on these lines. Wouldn't it be nice if we had a genuine desire to get up and meet the world?

Fiat Lux

It often happens that I am taken by a fit to write upon whatever topics come to mind in the wee hours. The discovery of Blog (a term whose meaning still escapes me) seems to offer an opportunity for responsive dialogue. So if you have any constructive replies to whatever I write feel free to reply. I have no notion of how popular this service may be but since its free...what the hell eh?