14 Sunday Feb 2021
Posted in Anxiety, Brain Droppings, Change, Compassion, Conspiracies, Coronavirus, Corruption, Death, Democratic Socialism, Depression, Dingleberries, Ego, Emotional Intelligence, Environment, Existential Risk, Fear, First Amendment, Fucking Hannity, Grief, Growth, Guns, Hate, Healthcare, Human, Indivisible, Islam, Kids, Love, Making Sense of Guns, Male superiority, Memorial, Mental Health, Middle Way, Moscow Mitch, News, Open mind, Patriotism, Pledge, Politics, Putin, Race, Revolution, Sameness, Tax the Church, Terrorism, Trump-Hole, Women
Donald Trump and his new Republican Party proved something: That a Constitution written when indoor plumbing was actually cutting-edge technology, is not itself strong enough to withstand a manipulative assault on it by a modern day organized crime mindset that literally came of age in the dark gaps found between its words.
11 Monday Jan 2021
I’m just going to put these thoughts down for my own purposes. Predictions for posterity, I guess.
When I run this stuff around in my head, I time-trip and visit each scenario as it plays out, including each possibility in the multiverse of choices that branch off from it. It’s exhausting. Anyway, when I run this stuff through in my head here is what I keep coming up with. (Yes, I keep… Meaning I have done this a few times. I’m in quarantine like everyone else, so I might as well time-travel.)
Pundits and talking heads keep saying Donald Trump is going to fade away once he is out of office. I don’t see it, I really don’t.
Here’s the problem -— Some of his followers think he is the great and powerful Q, and then a bunch of other ones that think that he was sent by God as wrecking ball to help clear out the unworthy. And, as we now know, Trump will do anything to stay out of jail.
When those things get tossed around together, they add up to “He’s not going to just slink off into obscurity”. I just don’t see it. Not him, maybe someone normal, but not him.
10 Sunday Jan 2021
Like a lot of people, I have been looking at a lot of heartbreaking videos. I just don’t understand that much hate. I really don’t.
I can understand a verbal explanation of it, sure. But I can’t wrap my heart around what it takes to twist your soul into so many knots that the only explanations you will accept anymore are based on the idea that everything around you is really a deception. A place where secret societies pull all the strings, and where everyone wants to make everything about you and your life irrelevant. A place where the hope you have is that if we can somehow just eliminate all of the physical differences we find objectionable in people, then we can some sort of Super Utopian Alpha society.
But that kind of hate doesn’t just go away once it gets what it wants. Things would just end up playing out like all of the nasty parts of American history, but in reverse and way worse. Once they got rid of the first (and darkest) layer of people, you know they would suddenly discover some other social group to degrade. Bullies just look for new victims. And then who knows… But, left-handed people may want to quietly remain on notice.
Personally, I could not, and do not want to live in a world like that. And like a lot of people, there doesn’t feel like much we can do right now. We voted already. And we can’t fight this with violence. That’s exactly what they want. But there is one thing we can do. And they’ll never see it coming.
The next time we see someone that you really don’t like right now, say something nice to them. Something that reminds them know that we are all still neighbors. Do it for no other reason than that it is in forgiving that we are forgiven.
07 Thursday Jan 2021
Posted in Buddhism, Change, Death, Ego, Emotional Intelligence, Environment, Fear, First Amendment, Human, Indivisible, Meditation, Middle Way, Open mind, Patriotism, Politics, Revolution, Terrorism, Trump-Hole
One of the exercises that I found particularly helpful when discussing the concept of ’emptiness’ in Buddhism, was trying to figure out at what point a car is a car.
For example: We have a car in front of us…
If I remove the engine, and the leave the rest of the body, frame, etc., is that still a car?
What if I then take off all of the doors, is it still a car now?
Or how about if I took out all the wiring and stuff, is that still a car then?
You can see how the exercise goes. At some point the realization began to set in that all things are all composite. We ourselves, are not singular. And we really are not separate from other beings. We are all made of of countless other components, and those things themselves are made up of even smaller elements. You can follow this logic as far down as you like, ultimately splashing around in the quantum foam like are in a 50’s surf movie.
But what if applied this logic to other things? Like what happened yesterday at the capital.
At what point does a protest become a riot?
At what point does riot become sedition?
At what point does a sedition become an insurrection?
At what point does insurrection become civil war?
What I have discovered is that rarely are there clear lines showing separation in nature. We tend only to be able to identify things after a new form has become apparent to us. In Buddhism, I have found this very humbling. When it comes to public safety, things get very messy and dangerous very quickly.
24 Tuesday Nov 2020
What happens when Biden insists on getting the actually PDB, and not that pamphlet thing with all the pictures and Trump’s name on every other line…
19 Thursday Nov 2020
The molecule that makes people camp out for days just to get a new iPhone a few weeks before their neighbor, is the very same one that drives people to rapidly refuse to wear a mask the more we ask them to. We need to de-escalate the stigma of it somehow.
The ego is the non-Newtonian fluid of our spirit. The more we force this issues, the harder they’re going to push back on it. More PSAs, less confrontations folks.
19 Thursday Nov 2020
Posted in Anxiety, Brain Droppings, Cannabis, Depression, Emotional Intelligence, Grief, Growth, Human, Love, Medical Marijuana, Mental Health, Middle Way, Migraines, Open mind, Pain, Poetry, Prayer, Recovery, Writing
This used to be a cohesive blog to some extent, until a few years ago. A few years ago I started to get migraines.
Actually, based on what I now know about migraines, I guess I’ve had them for most of my life. So the fact that I say it the way that I do means they got pretty bad. Bad enough to have screwed with every part of my life, in one way or another.
I always loved writing, but as the migraines got worse, the ability to string two thoughts together has gotten more difficult. Add to that the fact that most of it is written on a tiny little phone screen, and I fat-finger things when I trying to ride an epiphany and get the words out as fast as they roll through.
Then there was this thing I learned about that can go with migraines, called aphasia. I can ‘see’ exactly what it is that I want to say, but its word isn’t with it anymore. When I am writing and it happens, I give up. In daily life, I just come out with weird shit, like referring to a cutting board as ‘the under-the-knife block’. I get frustrated because I want the writing to be good. I’m starting to not care about that as much as i used to. Fuck it. If my typos bug you, there plenty of other blogs you can visit.
I’ve written a lot, but I think I deleted even more.
Poetry has helped me though. Because I don’t have to string thoughts. I have to evoke images and feelings, and tie them together in some sort of dance. And so, that’s been the majority of what I’ve been writing.
Many times I have tried to write about what I had been going through, only to delete it the next day when everything seemed to change again. If you know someone suffering migraines, you know what that means.
Much of it is related to chronic pain, and so a great deal of this involves dealing with that, when I wasn’t in migraine. And often with both at the same time. Although migraines tend to take over the show. Back pain is kind of like a guy who follows you everywhere playing a harmonica. He would be obnoxious and drive you crazy, right? But imagine if he were to then follow you into a Lou Reed concert or something. If you were even able to hear him, even then he would at best be mildly irritating. Migraines are like that. They’re so loud, they drown everything else out around them.
And with pain, comes pain management. And with pain management comes medicines. And I am in recovery. And it’s at that point that Pandora’s Box comes apart at the seams, as the scotch tape repairs let go again.
That’s been the juggle lately, anyway. Or at least it’s a good jumping off point for a few things.
17 Tuesday Nov 2020
Posted in Brain Droppings, Coronavirus, Dingleberries, Emotional Intelligence, Healthcare, Human
It seems like the pandemic hot spots are mostly just collections of groups people who all thought, “Man, that sucks for those people over there. But we should be okay, we’ve been pretty careful.”
17 Tuesday Nov 2020
Someone needs to do a study to figure out if OCD people are less susceptible to COVID-19, just by virtue of all of the ways we’ve learned to interact with the physical world while avoiding touching it at the same time.
11 Wednesday Nov 2020
Posted in Brain Droppings, Depression, Ego, Emotional Intelligence, Growth, Human, Meditation, Middle Way, Open mind, Recovery, Sameness
It’s not so much that I’m naturally a negative person. It’s just that I am starting to figure out that if you avoid seeing the positive stuff in life, then you’re only left with negative things to look at. And, yes there is a difference. Ask anyone with self-esteem issues, it builds upon itself like compounding interest.
