selfishness gone awry

Sometimes when you're feeling down, the universe provides you with all the uplifting positive energy you could ever need. It has also been known to provide phenomenal amounts of negative energy as well, but in my mind, energy is energy and it doesn't matter where it comes from so long as it fuels the machine. To think of it another way, insults and compliments are both forms of observation. Someone notices something about you and remarks upon it in a positive or negative way. Since it isn't an actual charge, who determines that value?

I write like a "selfishly driven, narcissistic, overly sensitive woman, who has been hurt a lot" and I couldn't be happier. That's one hell of an observation and what different does it make how it was intended to be received? It's energy of exactly the type I need for this here digital endeavor. After all, I'm certainly selfishly driven. I've never shied away from that label because whenever I can wear it proudly, it's a nice fit. When it's a bit shameful is when it's offensive. 

Selfishness is a necessary survival trait, obviously, you need to consume enough energy to survive another day. That energy needs to come from somewhere. Ultimately, all energy on earth comes from the sun but the only truly selfless entities in the chain are plants. They absorb the freely given sunlight and carbon dioxide and turn it into stored energy in their leaves and roots. Along come the animals that consume these living creatures in order to survive. Then come other animals that consume those and so on and the life cycle is interesting and all but not the topic of today. Every thinking creature exists at the expense of others. A little bit of selfishness is necessary, a lot of selfishness can be a bad thing. 

It's like anything else in life, moderation is key. However, experience and Oscar Wilde have taught me that "nothing succeeds like excess." Like the raptors in the original Jurassic Park documentary, you gotta know your boundaries. If you never test your boundaries, how are you going to know them? Can you know yourself adequately enough without knowing your true limitations?

truth to power

 The phrase "speak truth to power" originated in 1955. It was about pacifism and love. The root of the saying comes from the heart. "Our truth is an ancient one: that love endures and overcomes; that hatred destroys; that what is obtained by love is retained, but what is obtained by hatred proves a burden." It is also from the Quakers and their horse and carriage riding friends, the Amish/Mennonites. Speak Truth to Power: A Quaker Search for an Alternative to Violence written by the American Friends Service Committee. 

The notion of speaking truth to power has far outgrown the humble roots it has in pacifism and blossomed into something more. I guess I refer more to the phrase, because the idea of speaking truth to the powerful is timeless. It's inherently human to question and challenge and fight. The irony that the phrase comes from an argument for pacifism is not lost on me, so I'm all right with continuing its use. Life is a struggle and at some point we all have to fight for something. I understand the desire to be peaceful but, a peaceful man can still avoid conflict while not being a pacifist. I'm somewhat peaceful now and it was a struggle to get here so I can respect pacifists even if I don't understand them.

Ghandi, MLK, Mandela, Tutu, and the actual Dalai Lama are all included in the introduction to the Wikipedia article. Obviously, these people would have still done what they did had the phrase "speak truth to power" not existed. The declaration of independence was a wordy way of telling the King of England, one of the most powerful at the time, to "kiss our ass" and there have been plenty of other instances across our history where truth comes at the powerful pretty fast. The ides of March is remembered because of the swiftness with which the Roman senate needed to speak truth to Julius Caesar. The "shot heard round the world" took out Archduke Franz Ferdinand to kick off the first world war. These are violent acts and while speech is not actually violent, I know some folks have felt violated after speaking with me. I know because they've told me so, and then cried, as if physically hurt. That acid tongued killer's instinct with words is what has cost me a lot over the years, but it's exactly what should be aimed at the powerful. It took me a while to realize it, but words can hurt other people though they may roll off me like water.

on loss and love

 Family. We all have one, or had one. I don't think there's been any successful test tube babies gestated fully outside of a human but who the fuck even knows anymore? Human parentage can be a bit ambiguous with science playing a large part. If two genetic parents provide their samples, or whatever, and they're mixed up and added together in a lab. I imagine there would be vigorous shaking involved followed by a turkey baster of some sort? I'm no scientist so I can't be sure. Well, however it is done, if they do this thing, who are the parents? If you're genetically from two parents but you gestated in another, which is your mother/father? Does it actually matter?

This isn't a science post and it's not even going to be about the other kind of jeans. This is going to be one of those personal posts, where I just kind of type for a while and see what shakes loose. As opposed to the ones where I have a general idea (or singular topic) and just kind of type for a while and see what shakes loose. These types of posts here actually take some thought, not now though. Earlier today, or I guess it would be two days ago now. I decided it was time to talk about this stuff with myself and with whoever is reading this. 

About a month or so ago I started writing again. There are loads of reasons and I've gotten into some of them already in that time period but one of them is this notion that I carry a weight. It's akin to guilt but a lot lighter, like a Halloween prop ball and chain. My actual guilt, the things I feel most sincerely about, I've never spoken of here and I still debate whether or not I want to re-live them, again. Maybe I will, maybe I won't. This will be about some of the stuff that makes my weight lighter or heavier, to me.

archaeology adjacent

 I remember one time, years ago when I was smoking a bit more weed than usual and had a somewhat steady supply of shrooms, I convinced myself that the lost city of Shangri-La was real and could be found if sufficient research was given to the subject. I spent a few weeks or months in the pursuit and eventually gave up because the internet doesn't have nearly enough information and I wasn't about to fly somewhere to be swindled by some counterfeit monks. 

The whole thing left me with a bit of a sour taste for a while as far as cryptic lost locations go, then I'm pretty sure I got real into Lost and my interest was renewed with my palette cleansed. The focus shifted towards more reasonable lost locales such as Atlantis or Mu. Most folks may have heard of Atlantis because I think they filmed the Justice League documentaries partially in the actual city, but I doubt many have heard of the lost continent of Mu in the Pacific.

It's easier to lose an island or a city than an entire continent, so I'd personally like to try some of the drugs the folks who lost a continent were using. That's some super charged ayahuasca they were brewing, and they probably lost the recipe too, considering the continent. There's actually loads of people clamoring about a large landmass or something of the sort in the Pacific. It would explain (to them): lemurs, snake people, snake people and Maya hybrid languages, Egypt, Greece, India, Burma, the civilizations of South America, shape shifting humans, rosicrucianism, and the Turks, among others I'd assume. This is all stuff I read in that Mu article. Different folks think those things and peoples and cultures came from Mu, the lost continent in the Pacific that may have been up to 50 million square miles.

Mu is pseudoarchaeological, in the sense that it hasn't been proven to exist. I have absolutely no idea, personally, whether it does or not. I'm going to make some jokes about it here for a while and then conclude with something I think is insightful and hopefully you will too.

joe exotic tried that same shit

I had a run in today with a bolshevik sissy, Nikolai Bukharin. Well, I guess I kind of did and I only think he's a sissy because I'm searching for context as to why I'd write his name down in a notebook years ago. He was a typical bolshevik of his time: he rode the popular wave of snitching on his comrades until he didn't have anyone left to snitch on. Then, of course, conspiracies started to swirl about him which eventually led to his imprisonment and execution.

I'm trivializing the era of upheaval in Russia from the 1917 revolution to the great purges under Stalin in the 30s. It reads a lot like a soap opera and there's some serious thinkers thrown in the mix. I'm only saying Bukharin was a sissy because he wrote letters begging a paranoid autocratic lunatic (Uncle Joe Stalin) to spare his life. It's like asking an ice cube not to be cold and then becoming increasingly crazy as it refuses to cooperate. Anyways, I got caught up in reading a series of essays Bukharin wrote to Vladimir Lenin who was kind of like the first head crazy in charge over there after the dust settled and he was one of the least crazy of the time. It's interesting and there's some stuff I need to finish reading before I can explain to myself why his name is written in a notebook of mine. 

Anyways, I took a break from that bullshit and decided to do a softball post about Viracocha, the Incan creator god. Or, kind of. "Viracocha created the universe, sun, moon, and stars, time (by commanding the sun to move over the sky) and civilization itself. Viracocha was worshipped as god of the sun and of storms. He was represented as wearing the sun for a crown, with thunderbolts in his hands, and tears descending from his eyes as rain. In accord with the Inca cosmogony, Viracocha may be assimilated to Saturn, the "old god", the maker of time or "deus faber" (god maker), corresponding to the visible planet with the longest revolution around the sun." 

I'm gonna quote again from the Wikipedia after the page break but it's only partially because I said this was a softball post. And also, sometimes softballs can be hard, like when you take one to your soft... spot. I think it's important that I present the summary unedited because I want to explore some of the similarities between other gods and the like. Not in an entirely Joseph Campbell kind of way, but somewhat, enough for me to include this sentence with that link. There are similarities between creation myths but it's pretty clear that there needs to be because we all observe what seems to be the same reality that supposedly needed created at some point. Personally, I think the issue is beyond our scope, which is just a polite way of saying it doesn't matter.