Bonus points to whoever knows what song I am quoting in the title, sans Google.

Well, another dull day here on Planet Earth. Had a little excitement of the not so wonderful kind earlier. Learned the hard way that cleaning up Zombie Finger is not as easy as it looks.

I got a little to close to the cuticle, tugged on something I really should not have in my quest to remove all the dead skin from the area, and instead gave myself a nasty owie that bled quite freely for a while.

So, lesson learned. Leave that area to heal on its own, even though it is all craggy and ugly and is pretty much the only eye-catchingly horrid area left on Zombie Finger at this point.

In fact, honestly, I think I will leave the whole area wrapped up in a Band-Aid just so I am not tempted to mess with it.

I have a lifelong problem with picking at things.

I am sure you all are really glad to know that.

Meet the Muppets

Here is a treasure from the past : a clip from the original pitch reel for the Muppet Show!

If I was a television executive, I would buy the hell out of that show. And not because I actually believed all that Leo there says, but because with just a talking puppet and some cheapo graphics, they demonstrated such wit, energy, and unstoppable charm that to me, they were obviously television gold.

Of course, I am a huge Muppets fan, so my impartiality might be questionable.

And here is the thing : practically everything Leo says came true. They probably thought they were exaggerating wildly, but they really did a lot of those thing. I am positive that they must have gotten that 40 share at the height of the popularity. The executives names did not exactly become household words, but I am sure it helped their careers big time. And money? Scads, darling. Absolute scads.

And the best part is, it also delivers all the businesslike show pitch info about demographics and pedigree and such at the same time it is being hilariously fresh and entertaining.

No wonder the whole franchise has such long legs. We recently got the latest Muppet Movie on DVD, and I just cannot wait to see it.

My dream is to some day, some how, make something that damn good.

Ethics and the Brain

Talk about a perfect article for me! This Psychology Today article presents a theory of ethical development based on brain science.

And ethics and brain science are two of my favorite subjects in the world!

And as theories go, it is not bad for something built from observation up. As a philosopher, I find it a little simplistic and ill formed, and lacking in rigor. But no doubt it was conceived by scientists, not philosophers or ethicists, and so I am willing to cut it a fair bit of slack.

And it dovetails neatly with a lot of my own moral thinking, which is always a plus.

For instance, this notion that early childhood problems can cause a tendency to favour Safety Ethics certainly fits with my observations. I have been pondering a fundamental life variable that describes how fundamentally safe you feel, and how that informs every single other aspect of your psyche. If you feel the world to be fundamentally unsafe or even hostile, you will tend to be psychologically conservative. This could easily lead to shyness, depression, anxiety, and so on in later life.

And if the trauma is severe enough and violent enough, then the oversensitive stress response will tend towards neither flight (anxiety) or hiding (withdrawal), but fight (aggression). The person will come to believe that the only safety lies in constant vigilant hyper-agression, making others too afraid of them to consider aggressing against them.

And that feeds into another recent line of thought of mine, that certain influences “counter-civilize” people, forcing them to adopt a more primitive, even savage point of view. This is as true of a violently abusive childhood as it is of soldiers returning home from war.

It is nice to know that modern brain science backs me up on all of this.

Canada Kicks Ass

I am a day late on this, but I still feel like I have to note it.

Yesterday was the 95th anniversary of the Canadian victory at Vimy Ridge, the day when Canadians, no longer just the colonials serving under someone else’s flag, did what 100,000 other Allies had died trying to do and took Vimy Ridge in France away from the Germans.

And we did it by doing something that sounds clearly insane : by shelling the German machine gun nests which had taken so many Allied lives, and then moving in directly after the artillery strikes, when the German machine gunners were still too afraid of getting blown up by our artillery strikes to even think about leaving the deep trenches for the relative exposure of their machine gun nests.

It was called a “rolling barrage”, and it took a brilliant mind to think of it, and a hell of a lot of guts, determination, discipline, and faith in your fellow soldiers to pull it off.

And though it cost us nearly 3,600 men, we did it. We took Vimy Ridge when nobody else could. And that made the world sit up and take notice of funny old Canada, and won us the respect of the rest of the Allies and gave them something to remember us for besides maple syrup and coldness.

And in turn, this gave Canada a sense of pride and worth in itself, and formed a basis for that most precious of all things, Canadian identity.

It must have been a heck of a day to be Canadian, ninety five years ago today, the day after Vimy Ridge. We had put our mark on the world, and Canadians from East to West must have been bursting with pride.

I know that today, 95 years later, I sure am.

Or at least, that is what it feels like I have right now.

Having one of my sleepy days, and you know what that means. I have spent the day asleep, I feel like utter crap right now, and I had lots of weird dreams.

Nothing worth writing down, though.

My head hurts like hell. The most likely culprit is my sinuses and attendant systems. I will make sure my nose is fully blown and my ears are clear of clogs. That usually does the trick, except in times of big air pressure changes in the weather, when all it does it make it slightly more tolerable.

My reality is such a messed up, unstable, unreliable places. No wonder I tend towards depression and tend to cling hard to the known constants of my life to the exclusion of other possibilities. I am just trying to cope with a reality in which my moods and my health and my mental state are constantly shifting the ground beneath my feet and I never know how I will feel or which door leads to pleasure and which to pain. So I become intensely psychologically conservative, just doing what I always do and blocking all thoughts of anything else, too scared of the world to leave my rusty cage, and run.

Of course, in real world logic, sometimes called “reality”, if I could pry my figners off my clinging post and deal with reality more often and more effectively, a lot of the instability would cease because I would both improve my physical health and give my psyche more input, and thus provide a psycho-sensual baseline for improved perspective on life.

Basically, I would be too busy actually living life and dealing with its challenges and rewards to dwell on inconsequential things and screw my life up with random napping and poor diet and so on.

Right now, I think a lot of my problems stem from the cavernous emptiness of my life, in wish small things cause enormous waves of terrifying echoes and the only peace comes from utter immobility.

And when I try to imagine picking myself up, dusting myself off, and starting, that enormous icy block of paralytic fear gets in the way. The drive shaft is not attached to the engine. The power is generated but it never makes it to the wheels. The linkages are broken, frozen, unable or unwilling to turn.

I am not sure how much of that is psychological scarring, and how much of that is defense mechanism to keep me from having to face the world and deal with what a fucking mess my life is.

And yes, I know the futility of ignoring life because it is too messed up to deal with when it is the very ignoring of reality that has let it get that bad. It is like not cleaning because everything is so messy. Well how did it get that way?

But knowing this does not immediately grant the strength to change it. That has to come from somewhere else, from recovery or fortune or some other extrinsic source of increased potency. Something has to act to shift that burden of ice inside me, to melt it down and let it flow to rejoin the sea, before I can regain enough of myself to make a difference in my life.

Until then, all I can do is make tiny bits of temporary progress in those rare moments when the tides and tornadoes inside me happen to collide in such a way that the eye of the storm passes over me, and I have the strength to pick up my rock and move it a little further along the path.

And I guess I should be content with that. It is not like this massive loathing of my own life is actually leading anywhere productive. Instead, it just fuels the chaos inside. If I could simply accept that I am a very sick person and hence I am not going to get all I want out of life right away, I would be far more content and a lot more likely to actually get better things in my life without the pain and chaos of self-hate and rage.

But again, know that would be the answer, or one answer at least, does not magically make it happen. I really do hate my stupid fucking life and I still cannot find a way to overcome the horror of an entire adult life wasted on depression and and sponging off others and not taking responsibility for my life and this making me an enormous loser.

I just cannot get over or around that fact. I try to forgive myself for it all, tell myself I have been very unfortunate in being a victim of mental illness for so long, and that I should not beat myself up for what I could not control, and that it is all in the past now and there is nothing I can do about it, all I can do is try to control the present to influence the future, and blah blah blah.

But here is the thing about wisdom. Knowing the smart, sensitive, wise, deep, true answer does not make the probklem go away. There is no Grand Teacher who puts a checkmark on your test, and praises you for how good an answer it is, and then you are free to move on to the next thing.

I am very good at knowing that wise and wonderful answer. But it does not fix anything by itself. There are some things no amount of intelligence, sensitivity, wit, intuition, and other mental magic can fix.

And it is these things, things for which no amount or kind of mental action with suffice, things for which even the question “So what do I do to fix it?” is meaningless because that too ask for a mental action, those things confound me.

If i cannot think my way out, then I am trapped.

There is no map for this maze.