I have read a few thought provoking articles recently, and I thought, for today, that I would share some of my thoughts and reactions to them.

First of we have this interesting piece that Ursula K. LeGuin wrote for Book View Cafe called A Band Of Brothers, A Stream Of Sisters.

First of all, disclosure time : while I have only read one of her books (The Dispossessed), I love that book enough that I consider myself a fan of hers. Anyone who can put that much fascinating political, sociological, economic, philosophical, and psychological content into one book is clearly no dummy, and jakes in my books.

Now on to the article. One of the more interesting ideas she presents is that because women do not have the same drive to challenge and dominate that men do, they paradoxically do not have the same pressures to form extremely close knit and loyal groups as men.

This jibes with my observation, although I had never thought of it that way before. Male subgroups might seem cold and standoffish and taciturn to women, but they are nevertheless extremely close knit, especially under pressure. Hence the “band of brothers” phenomenon alluded to in the title. I think we men are programmed by evolution to react to danger and stress by pulling together and facing it down, whether it is a dangerous predator on the Serengeti, or a sudden crisis at work. These bonds are very strong despite (or because of?) being mostly unspoken.

I am reminded of an incident I witnessed, when word of an attempted rape spread through a bar I was at, and with amazing speed, every man there, myself included, was a posse, ready to find and punish the offender. A line had been crossed and it did not matter that we had never met one another and had nothing in common with one another. A Threat had emerged, and until it was dealt with, we were no longer individuals. We were a posse, a mob, for good or ill, until the Threat no longer threatened.

So far so good. But then she says this :

So, when the interdependence of women is perceived as a threat to the dependence of women on men and the child-bearing, child-rearing, family-serving, man-serving role assigned to women, it’s easy to declare that it simply doesn’t exist. Women have no loyalty, do not understand what friendship is, etc.

I have never heard anyone say anything like that. Women have no sense of friendship? Who on Earth has ever said that? If anything, it is assumed in our society that women form close knit groups of friends and men just have other men they do stuff with and occasionally grunt at primitively.

I think here LeGuin is falling victim to the trap of oppositional thinking in identity politics, specifically the simplistic “man oppresses women to keep them down” mindset that forces people to filter things through a notion of Group A does things to Group B to keep them down, therefore any problem of Group B must be caused by the overt or subconscious actions or intentions of Group A.

I do not see that as the case in this instance. Men do not systematically attack female interdependence in order dependent on their men, at least, not in the modern world. She speaks the truth when she says it is invisible to men. The gender walls that enforce homosocial bonding remain fairly intact despite a century of feminism. The two sides rarely notice one another, let along attack one another.

But it was this question of LeGuin’s that really grabbed me :

Can women operate as women in a male institution without becoming imitation men?

That is the sort of question that haunts me. Like George Carlin said, “Mindless careerism? Is that the best women can do? “. It bothers me to think that all of 20th century feminism might boil down to essentially, “It’s not fair that only men get to be men. Women should get to be men too!”

That is why I am highly encouraged by the recent generation of feminism’s strong interest in the reclaiming of femininity. Somewhere along the line, feminism internalized a great deal of misogyny, to the point where you had women who were obviously doing everything they could to look exactly like men and stomp out any trace of femininity in themselves and other women claiming to know what is good for all women everywhere.

I mean, imagine the absurdity of a man in full drag screaming about the evils of women.

Luckily, that madness ended, and now women can finally face the question of just exactly how one is female in a world where a lot of the old male-driven definitions are still in place.

I can not claim to have any particularly useful insight to offer the ladies. I know that I value the unique difference of femaleness and I sincerely believe that the genders desperately need one another in order to maintain psychological and spiritual balance. Both genders go crazy without the other, and I say this as a gay man who does not “have to” deal with women in the traditional sexual at all.

Nevertheless, I think we go mad without one another around.

And for what it is worth, my idealistic milk and honey humanism tells me that the most important thing is to be yourself, whatever that happens to be, and eschew false and restrictive binaries that cannot possibly plot your true being on their simplistic and poorly labeled line graphs.

But as someone who feels he falls between genders himself, perhaps I have no choice but to think so. I certainly lack a great many (but by no means all!) of the attributes ascribed to the “typical male” in our modern world.

And yet, I am not a woman either, despite traditionally womanish traits like sensitivity, volubility, desire to nurture, and so on.

Perhaps the best thing we all can do is throw our hands in the air, admit that the whole thing is in flux and elusive, and just try to leave the labels (and the desire for them) at the door.

Confessing your own ignorance is the first step towards wisdom, after all.

Wonderful. After days and days of having trouble sleeping because I was just not sleepy at all, when does my brilliant brain decide to give in and let the sleepiness hit me?

Just as it’s time to sit down and do the day’s writing, of course.

Sure. Why not. I can take a joke, Universe. Right back atcha.

Oh well, remember Finagle’s Law : the perversity of the universe tends towards a maximum.

Or, to give props to that early pioneer in pessimism, Murphy : if anything can go wrong, it will.

His early formulation is less scientific and rigorous than Finagle’s, but I like it anyhow because it makes a case for very careful and thorough planning.

So here I sit, eyelids heavy like they are carrying luggage (the bags under my eyes, perhaps?), wanting nothing more than to succumb to the alluring entreaties of the king sized bed not four feet from me and slide under the sheets and into the soft and sure arms of Morpheus’ sweet oblivion.

What I am saying I want to go to be with Lawrence Fishbourne

Apparently, part of being sleepy like I am right now is losing the ability to stop myself from waxing poet at the drop of a hat.

Oh well, the news is not all grim, dark, and inviting. My dear sister Anne sent me a $75 gift certificate for Amazon.ca as a belated birthday gift, and I have spent it on a brand new Sunbeam bread machine plus a book of 300 bread machine recipes. Yay kitchen gizmos!

A bread machine might seem like a mildly eccentric choice for birthday gift, but I had acess to one when I was living in Silicon Valley and they are a ton of fun.

For one thing, to me, it is always a miracle that it can be that easy to make bread from scratch. I have done it by hand before, and while it is a lot of fun, it is also a lot of work, and a lot of mess.

But with a bread machine, you just put the ingredients in, tell it to do its thing, and a couple hours later, you got fresh baked bread. It’s like magic.

And of course, your living space smells fantastic. The smell of freshly baked bread is one of the best smells in the world, bar none, and the bread machine makes the whole place smell like that as a mere side effect of making you tasty, tasty bread.

And I am a man who loves his bread.

Once I have the thing (it should arrive between June 4 and June 7, says Amazon), it will be a loaf a day for a long time, I think. And with all those recipes, I can make a new bread every day if I feel like it. So very fun!

I am in particular looking forward to being able to make sweet dessert type breads with Splenda instead of sugar so that I can finally have desserts. Within reason, of course… sugar or no, bread is still a starch on the old Food Pyramid, and that means carbs, and that means blood sugar.

Still, it will rock the block to be able to make myself gingerbread or cinnamon bread or spice bread or whatever, all in versions that I can eat without it putting me over the red line.

Of course, that means I will also need to stock up on basic baking ingredients. Flour, baking soda, baking powder, milk, eggs, and so forth. Eventually, such things can be added to the Costco list once I have made a case via my excellent breads that such expenditures will benefit everyone in the apartment. I will in particular be looking for feedback on various breads to see which ones make Joe and Julian the happiest so I can be sure to keep those on hand.

What can I say… I love to feed people!

I knpw we always have salt around, and Jennifer left us some cinnamon and ginger behind when she moved out, so I won’t need to buy those. I think we have some flour somewhere, but if we do, it is not labeled, and there are many reasons to always want to know which white powder is which in your household. Plus, if we do have flour, it has probably been there forever, and not exactly springtime fresh any more, so it is probably best discarded anyhow.

I see a trip to the bulk section at Save-On Foods in the near future.

So, yay, new toy. That should be a lot of fun. I hope it turns out better than the slow cooker. I have used the thing maybe five times, and never to particularly good effect, and now it just sits there next to the rice cooker, reproaching me for my lack of industry and commitment every time I make a pilaf.

The problem, I think, is that my slow cooker plans rested on me somehow becoming the sort of person who finds a recipe, goes to the store to buy the ingredients (which he can totally afford) and then comes back and spends time chopping and dicing and browning things before putting them in there and leaving them to cook for a long time.

I am not sure who that guy I thought would be using the thing was, but he sure ain’t me.

The bread machine is more manageable. I can stock up on tons of flour and yeast and whatnot, and then putter away happily with no extra trips or extra work involved. Just measure, put into bread machine, and push the big happy GO button.

And then, my friends, we will start making some serious bread.

Who knows, if I can manage to get some more income in, I might be able to get both bread machine and slow cooker going, and fulfill my dreams of making bread and soup at the same time, and having very pleasant meals of soup and sandwiches all made from scratch.

Not all dreams are about leaping over rainbows, ya know.

Some of us just want nice bread.

Oh hey there. I didn’t notice you come in to my readerspace. Glad to see you. Pull up a metaphorical chair, grab yourself a theoretical drink from the existental bar, and relax.

Just for a change, let’s talk about me and my psychological issues.

I realized today that the primary thing keeping me from realizing my real creative potential is my unwillingness to be inspired.

Or rather, my unwillingness to let inspiration move me. I am inspired all the time. I get all kinds of amazing, wonderful, creative ideas, and it makes me feed good to get them.

But they don’t go anywhere. I just stuff them away somewhere in my brain with the vague notion that I will use them “some day”, and that is it.

Basically, I am an idea hoarder. Having them and stuffing them away gives me a feeling of warmth and security. It is like the feathers that should become feathers in my cap instead go to further feathering my nest against the cold and unfeeling world.

One would think my nest would be damn well feathered by now. And it is. And yet, I still feel cold.

Maybe the cold is not coming from outside the nest.

And why do my ideas never (well, hardly ever) move me to do something creative? Because nothing moves me to do anything, more or less. I have such a deep emotional inertia that almost nothing can convince me to suddenly do something I was not planning to do, something out of the ordinary, not part of my usual routine, not something I have had time to think about and adjust to and move my energies into.

Certainly, no mere internal impulse is going to break the doldrums. I am emotionally dependent on the hyper predictable ordered life of sameness and nothingness and boringness that my life has been for a long time. I might complain about how my life has slipped away from me for my entire adult life, and how dull and unfulfilling and pointless my life is, but I truly fear change of any sort with a fear that lives way, way below the conscious, intelligent level.

So I can not, it seems, generate the sort of change I crave from within, even though every pop psych book in the world tells you that this is only way it can ever happen. If opportunity just happened to fall intop my lap, I would probably pull my shit together enough to take advantage of it.

But left to my own devices, nothing happens.

Because as it turns out, I have truly terrible devices.

In some ways, I would love to be the sort of person who gets truly inspired. It would be great to be the sort of writer who gets an idea and is so full of the spirit of the idea and enthusiasm for its execution that he simply must run to the computer and write the thing before he can do anything else. Someone for whom creativity is a driving passionate force that drives them to release their brilliance upon the world and build up a massive body of work and huge success.

But, you know, not if it is all sudden or anything. I don’t do sudden very well.

And that is the problem, isn’t it? A lot of life is sudden. You go with the moment or life leaves you behind. And so far, life has left me so far behind that I am starting to wonder if I will meet it coming up from behind me some day.

If I do, I will probably just get out of the way, watch it go by, shrug, sigh, and continue to go nowhere fast. I mean, it’s not like there was anything I could have done, right?

Life is not helping at the moment. Or maybe it is. I am going through a period of hyposomnia, where I just cannot seem to get to sleep or even get particularly sleepy. It is the exact negative of those days when I sleep all day. I must be living on one seriously weird long unstable circadian clock due to my shut in lifestyle.

And the thing about not being able to sleep is that it means lots and lots and lots of time to fill, and a chance to get really god damned bored and tired of your stupid fucking life.

But this can be a good thing. Discontent is the herald of change, and perhaps if I am lucky, this dissatisfaction will gnaw through the layers of callous and rust inside me like a rat desperately trying to gnaw its way to freedom, and lead me to the sort of personal change I both crave and fear.

Certainly, there are pressures building and growing inside me, and I am doing my best not to fight them, but to let them change me. It is not an easy process, and the increasingly erratic nature of my internal moodscape is deeply frightening to me.

But the more rigid you are, the harsher the conditions of change become and more you are setting yourself up for disaster when change becomes necessary, all in the name of predictability, stability, and order. The tougher the dam, the more violent the flood when it breaks. You have to have the flexibility to change when the time comes.

And arguably, for me, the time came ages ago. It came, in fact, way back in 1992 or so, when my parents told me they were taking me out of university. That would have been the time to decide just what the hell I wanted out of life after that, what kind of person I wanted to be and what I wanted to make out of the materials delivered to me by fate.

Instead, I just went back to my hometown, and sank into depression, and I have not come back out of it since. Maybe I never will.

But I hope I do.

I am truly sorry for this folks, but I am afraid there will be no Friday Science Whatever this week, because there sincerely has been no science stories that I find interesting thing to share this week.

I am boggled that this is even possible, but I look at my folder, and my websites, and absolutely nothing strikes me as worth mentioning. It has, apparently, been a bit of a slow news week in terms of science and discovery. Either that, or I am just being too fussy because the heat is making me grumpy.

But either way, this is not going to be your usual Friday.

The closest bit to science news that I have on hand is this rather well executed bit of science fiction satire about Life in the future :

Now I warned you it was satire, and hence, it’s a tad on the dark side, but funny in it own dark way, and just plausible enough to be considered legitimate science fiction. And well done, too. I am always intrigued by what can be done with just voice and graphics, no “live video”, so to speak, and I would say that the person who did this, Tom Scott, has done a great job of using writing and simple, iconic graphics to create an all too plausible corporate dystopia.

(Seriously, Windows Dictionary? You don’t have the word “dystopia” in you? The closest match you could come up with is “dystrophy”? Seriously? Sheesh. )

Of course, like with all science fiction, questions are left unanswered. Like, if there is no money in it for them, why is the big bad corporation bringing you back in the first place? I am guessing that some kind of government mandate would have to be involved. Something that legally compels the Life corporation to revive everyone who dies with a backup, but which does not guarantee that you will enjoy it or have anything like a decent virtual existence at all.

The real issue, thought, to me anyhow, is one of identity. Who says that pattern of electrical activity in some computer somewhere is really me, just because they were in some sense based on me? Even if my entire brain has been simulated down to the lowliest quark, is that really me?

My gut reaction is, no, it is not. That is very clearly not me. I am me. That program is something else. To me, the clincher is that, presumably, the computers could run a simulation of me without me dying at all, and then which one of us is the real me?

I might be biased, but I would say it is the meat and gristle version of me that was born from my mother and father’s genetic data and walked around being a live human being for all those years before I met my end. The one that had all those experiences, memories, opinions, idea, and so on for the computer to scan in the first place.

And to be fair, I was here first!

But then you have to ask, well, what exactly am I, me, Michael John Bertrand, in the first place? Certainly I do not consider myself to be this sack of meat and bone and adipose tissue that is the current host of my consciousness. If I lost an arm in an accident, or if I lost all my excess fat and hence lost enough mass to make an entire other person, I would not consider myself to be a whole different person. I would just be MJB, reduced, but still here.

So if all I am, deep down, is a pattern of electrical activity running in a glob of fatty tissue we call a brain, what is the big deal whether it is running in a brain or a computer? I am no mystic, I do not insist that there must be “something more”, something magical and special that no computer could reproduce. I am, in that sense, a materialist. We are just stuff, matter, substance. We no more have a soul than our computers do.

We are just extremely complicated and marvelously adaptable and potent biological machines. We are special… amazingly special. Just being alive makes us special, far different from all the other matter in the universe. We are living matter, matter that increases order within itself, matter with mobility and reproduction and opinions.

And being sentient, we know it.

But that specialness is a function of the same rules and processes that apply to everything else. We have no special set of rules that apply to only us and that safeguard our uniqueness against the uniformity of the universe. We are a part of it, and it of us. We are inseparable.

So I cannot claim that the version of me running on a computer is not the real me simply because it lacks that certain special something that makes us human. Given sufficient computer power, everything about me, the person, could be reproduced and simulated to all meaningful degrees of fidelity.

Yet identity insists on uniqueness. There simply cannot be more than one of me. One of the fundamental truths of conscious existence is that we are here, in our bodies, right now, and nowhere else. We cannot imagine being in two places at once. That other thing cannot be us. The mind simply balks at the very concept. No matter how accurate the reproduction, that thing over there is not us. It’s someone else. We are, at best, close relatives.

And speaking of relatives, perhaps I will be repeating this conversation some day when the young people are badgering me to upload my brain into the WetWeb and I keep insisting that I do not want some simulated version of me hanging around after I’m dead claiming to be me.

Perhaps I will die without ever availing myself of the new miracle of technology. After all, I can be hellaciously stubborn sometimes.

Or maybe I will have a deathbed conversion, figuring a simulated me around is better than nothing at all. I am devious too.

If a future virtual me is ever reading this, hey, good going, you lived long enough to live forever! Don’t feel bad about caving in at the last minute.

We always kind of knew we would, didn’t we?

Another scratch on the wall
Of my self-made cell
Keeping track of the days
In my personal hell

So yeah, I am in a great mood.

This is getting to be my lifestyle now. I am always in this exact mood when I do my writing, because I am always coming out of sleeping all afternoon and into the evening. And it is never happy good wonder sleep, that elusive and wonderful sleep where, as legend has it, you actually feel less tired than when you went to sleep when you wake up.

No, it is always that hot sweaty confusing dream laden sleep that feels like I am going through some kind of intense drug trip every time and leaves me feeling depressed and confused and hopeless and heavy and lumpy and disgusting and unworthy, and like I want to just crawl into a hole and disappear.

And so I end up writing about the same stupid pointless crap day after day, a thousand words of futility at a time, banging the same old tired dusty drum because it is marginally better than doing nothing.

It makes me wish I could do something really meaningful. Like this guy did.

Hey, it’s the World’s Meatiest Sandwich. That has to count for something, right?

Actually, now that I think about it, that is pretty stupid. I mean, the thing is a foot tall. So unless you can unhinge your jaw like a snake, there is no way you can take a bite out of the thing. Arguably, that is therefore no longer a sandwich. It is a vertical smorgasbord with the bread inconveniently placed on the top and bottom. You could only eat it by putting a slice of it on a plate sideways, and then it is just basically a plate full of meat with a few garnishes. Stupid.

Wow, you know, taking it out on others really does make you feel a little better. I totally see why mean people do this all the time. Good thing I am a nice guy, or this could get addictive.

Plus, you know, I mean what I say. That sandwich is stupid. So there.

Or take this guy, Nick Hanauer, and “the idea TED didn’t consider worth spreading”.

Apparently, this guy thinks that the idea that the middle class are the real job creators, not the rich, is his alone, and the fact that his talk was ultimately rejected by the TED conference was rank censorship of an idea just too radical and earthshaking for even the famously open minds at TED to handle, and so they rejected it out of close minded fear and desire to maintain the status quo.

Give me a break, dude. I have not watched your talk ( I feel like if I did watch it, somehow he would win) but from what was said by TED head curator…

“Our policy is to post only talks that are truly special. And we try to steer clear of talks that are bound to descend into the same dismal partisan head-butting people can find every day elsewhere in the media.”

… it sounds to me like your speech was simply too partisan and polemic for the rarefied air of the TED conference’s Olympian point of view.

And you know what? I am totally cool with that.

Full disclosure : I love TED. It is an outstanding forum for truly good, interesting, world shaping, significant ideas. It is a center for the encouragement and dissemination of truly excellent thinking, and that is something I can get behind one million percent. I am all about the quality of thought. Better thinking leads to better solutions, and better solutions lead to better tomorrows.

And as a lover of TED, I am quite happy that they keep partisan politics out of it. And I am hardly apolitical. Odds are, I would agree with a lot of what this dude said. But not all denial of access is censorship. Sometimes it is just plain selectivity. If someone sent a badly written, poorly spelled, childishly scrawled and obscene racist diatribe to the New York Times and they declined to print it, that would not be because they cowered in fear before the power of the ideas contained therein and feared the wrath of their all-controlling masters.

It would be because it sucked. Think about it, Nick Hanauer.

There has to be a place beyond the thrust and parry of politics, above the day to day concerns that keep us from seeing the big picture, someplace where there are no teams, no sides, no cliques, no groups, just people and the quality of their ideas.

TED is such a place, and I love it.

Like how about this idea : just plain canceling the massive personal debt that came from the 2008 crash.

That is what Iceland is doing, and it is working great. Its banks have written down (or forgiven, canceled, erased) debt equal to 13 percent of the nation’s GDP, and it has worked wonders for their economy, which has bounced back amazingly well given the crippling blow dealt it in 2008.

Now the economist lackeys of the banks and the corporations and the powers that be say that this would never work, that by canceling debt, you are taking money out of the economy, destroying wealth, and that can only lead to utter ruin and disaster.

After all, when you worship wealth, what could be more sacrilegious than making it go away?

But the thing is, that already happened. That is what the whole 2008 crisis was about : a bunch of high finance charlatans convinced the world that trillions of dollars of value existed where it did not, and because everyone was eager to unload the worthless assets to bigger dogs than then, the scam lasted just long enough for the world economy to truly believe that money existed before they woke up one morning to find it all had disappeared.

All personal debt forgiveness does is make it so that the average person on the street does not have to suffer because of that high level con job, and hence, suddenly relieved of massive debt, the people’s consumer confidence skyrockets, they spend more freely, and the economy bounces back.

Ta da! And they said it could not be done.

What they meant was, it could not be done without the people who caused it suffering.

And they were right.

One cell at a time.

Or least I hope to hell that is what is going on. I sincerely hope that all this time spent in deep and potent sleep is leading up to something. That it’s a painful process, but a process nonetheless, one that will lead to a brighter happier stronger shinier me.

It certainly feels like I am moving heavy furniture inside myself these days. The prep work is over, the small stuff has been thrown out or moved, and now the big stuff can be tackled because there is room to move things around now.

And I am eager to do so. In fact, I wish I could just get it all done at once in one enormous effort, and then deal with the consequences after. But no, as tempting as the idea of burning the house down rather than cleaning it might be sometimes, the truth is, these things have to happen slowly and gradually in order to maintain stability and not drive oneself crazy in the name of sanity.

So as tempting as it can be to just release my grip and fling myself into the void, I am too damn sensible to actually do it. Instead, I will slowly and painfully make my way down the mountain via the smart and wise method of finding toeholds and handholds and suffer all the way down.

Sometimes it sucks to be sensible, ya know that?

For one thing, it means that even if the crazy solution is the best one, you will never recognize it, or if you do, you will never have the guts to actually do it. You will instead cling to what seems smart and sensible and safe to do, all the while patting yourself on the back for not doing crazy irrational things like some people do. You know, those irrational types who cannot control their emotions and just do whatever foolish thing their hearts tell them to do.

Yeah, well, if we’re so smart, me and I, how come we are not happy? Could living a more spontaneous and emotion based existence really be all that much worse? Impulsive people can be happy people too. How long can you go on thinking you are better off than them because you are so sensible and clever when you are miserably depressed and the “stupid” people are happier and more productive and fulfilled?

I think of myself as a rational pragmatist, and if that is true, then I am forced to admit that the evidence clearly shows that my current methodology is producing extremely poor results.

And I am all about the results. Right? Results are all that matters. Not doctrine or dogma or form or aesthetics or any other irrelevant distractions. Just results. It works, or it does not.

Well, my life sure as fuck does not work right now, not on any parameter above mere subsistence.

SO by those sensible and rational and oh so reasonable grounds alone, I should be wide open to the idea that my methodology is deeply flawed, my basic assumptions are incorrect, and large quantities of error and useless data have corrupted the entire experiment. This leaves no choice but to star the experiment over from scratch, incorporating lessons learned from the failures (and successes) of the first one.

Unfortunately, there is no reset button on life, no just starting the game over again with the idea that you will do a lot better this time because you will make smarter choices and avoid the mistakes you made the first time through.

There are no do-overs in life. No margin for error either. And I am not good in situations where there is no margin for error.

I mean, one little mistake can mean so much. Like this, for example :

To be honest, it was probably both.

Um, whoops. What a difference a single letter can make, huh? Makes me wonder if the proofreader fell asleep at the switch, or if the writer was thinking about something else, or if they made the fetal error of trusting the spell checker to do their proofreading for them.

Spell checkers only flag non-words, not the WRONG words, people!

Makes me want to read the original, though. “And this band has Orinoco Jones on lead vocals, Tim McBluth on lead guitar, Boby Smith on bass, and Eric Lyday on drugs. ”

It would look like it was the first time a band actually included their dealer as part of the band. A touching tribute to someone who means so much to them, but probably a tad inappropriate.

And hey, I might have had a lousy day, but at least I did not have the cool looking rocks I picked up on the beach explode in my pockets.

That is what happened to a 43 year old Orange Country woman. Her kids picked up some perfectly harmless looking rocks on the beach, and she stuck them in a pocket and went home, and then they… ignited.

Here is what they looked like :

There they sit. Quietly. Patiently. Waiting.

I do not see what the kids saw in the big one on top. That just looks gross and ugly to me. But the little green one on the bottom is COOL! It’s like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle Green! It looks like it could be a hunk of something that fell from space.

And given what happened to their mother later, maybe that is not so silly an idea. The woman is severely burned, with second and third degree burns between her right hip and her right knee, as well as second degree burns on her right hand.

I am assuming those are from when she was frantically trying to get the rocks out of her pocket, or trying to slap out the flames.

Gee, and I always thought amateur geology would boring.

I feel bad for the woman, and especially bad for the kids. Those kids probably feel horrible about what the rocks they picked up did to their mother. And what a bizarre occurrence. What could seem more harmless than rocks on a beach?

I hope she recovers fully and everyone puts the whole weird thing behind them.

I mean wow. Fortean happens.

I should probably be talking about therapy, or my life, or whatever, but then again, I also have fun stuff from the browser to share, so what the heck, I will do both.

Right about now, I feel like this cat :

Grumpy Kitty shows off his ET impression

Because, as you probably can guess, I am not feeling that great because of bad sleep. I am wondering if I need to just plain avoid afternoon naps. Those seem to be the ones that really brutalize me. I don’t know if it is a circadian rhythm thing, or it is because that is when it is hottest out, or what, but those sleeps are the worst in terms of how I will feel waking up.

I wonder if some party music would help.

Well if it's going to be THAT kind of party...

Hmmm. Or maybe not.

Bravo to the person who was willing to be seen in public with that CD. Even if it was just to snap a picture of it in the music store with your cell phone. If they actually bought it and brought it home, bravo sir. I cannot imagine the kind of looks you get from the dude at the counter with the piercing and the Hipster glasses when you have to get that particular items rung up.

“Um, it’s for a friend. Well, not a close friend, an acquaintance. Someone I know from work. But not very well. I think he’s Jewish. I mean, we all are. We are, in fact, Rabbis who run a deli and do some accounting on the side. In Israel. In town for a… look, just ring it up, OK?”

It is really wearing me down that it seems like I am destined to spend at least some of the time feeling like this every single day. In the beginning, it was easy to pat myself on the back for keeping the proper philosophical “hey, shit happens, the sun can’t shine every day” attitude. But when that rain just keeps falling and falling and falling, you lose your chipper attitude and just want it to STOP.

I feel like I have not gotten any decent sleep in at least a week. It is always the brutally intense stuff, or nothing. Plus my nose is running all the time, leading to clogging, leading to filled sinuses, leading to sinus headaches, and that is no fun at all.

So that explains why I am failing to be entirely upbeat.

Oh well, at least it is only part of the day. All this morning I felt quite hale and hearty. Maybe I am just sleeping like normal people, the ones who need a cup or two of coffee to get started in the morning and who always wake up feeling like crap. I don’t know. I can’t tell.

If that is true, then my sympathies, coffee people. I had no idea how bad you had it. Most of my life, I have been a slow but happy riser. I did not exactly bounce out of bed smiling, ready to take on the day and meet it with a big happy grin, but I never woke up grumpy.

But lately, waking up with a headache and dehydration and disorientation and a runny nose and so forth and so on, the only reason I am not grumpy is that I am alone, and grumpiness requires a target.

Maybe I should talk to my imaginary friends.

Pumba, not in front of the kids!

Wow, I knew there was a reason I loved that movie so much. Well, honestly, there are tons of reasons. But it’s nice to have still one more.

After all, Simba not only turns out well, he becomes King of the Lions, and roars on Pride Rock, and everything. All after being raised in part by a same sex couple.

At least, I always assumed they were one. They do seem awfully close and it is not like they have other members of their species to turn to when the nights are lonely and cold.

Of course, the fact that one of them is voiced by Nathan Lane probably does not hurt either.

Then again, maybe I am just not approaching life the right way.

On the road of life, I am totally that guy

Or worse, I am the one driving perpendicular to the traffic, always changing lanes and risking T-bone accidents and mayhem, just because I want to know what is on the side of the road more than I want to get where everyone else is going.

And the commuter can be pretty pissed off at you for messing with the flow of traffic.

Oh, fun site to share with you, a bit of current events satire done well : God Hates Shrimp.

And he does, you know. As the site show, the Bible quite explicitly says that you are not to eat any kind of shellfish, for it is unclean to you. Therefore, anyone who eats shrimp, clams, oysters, lobsters, or any other sea creature that has no fins is a filthy degenerate sinner.

Of course, it also condemns pork. Both of these admonitions have nothing to do with holiness and everything to do with keeping your followers alive and healthy. Both shellfish and pork can kill you dead if not cooked and cleaned properly, and in the days before refrigeration, it was probably best to just stay away from such hazardous cuisine entirely.

In the modern world, these admonitions make absolutely no sense. Pork and shellfish are perfectly safe to eat as long as you cook them well and, in the case of shellfish, know which months are safe for their harvesting. And no raw clams! They are not an aphrodisiac and you are playing Russian Roulette, but with a far slower and more painful and humiliating death.

And on that happy note, we end today’s blogging. If these shadows have offended, fuck you.

Another day, another long slow Tartarus of deep and troubled sleep with brief intervals of confused and crumbling consciousness to punctuate an otherwise endless morass of mystical meanderings through the magnificence and filth of the overflowing, overburdened, overactive, overwhelming, overbearing, under-expressed avenues of my taut and tortured mind.

I should have been a poet.

And this trip through the underwhelming thrill ride of my inner mind was made bonus sucky because my friend William was visiting (hello dear!), and I really wanted to spend more time with him, but this feast or famine sleep schedule of mine (far more feast than famine lately) has demands of its own, and so the poor dear spent 20 hours in this apartment in order to spend at most 3 hours in my company. Sad.

And he says it is fine, but I still feel terribly guilty about it. I hate feeling like I have disappointed people or let them down. That makes sense, because I absolutely hate it when people disappoint me or let me down, and so by the simple algebra of empathic projection, I especially hate to be the source of those feelings in someone else.

So that is going to bother me for a while, but I will get over it eventually. After all, we all make mistakes and have regrets, and you cannot go through life dwelling on them, stuck looking backwards while moving forwards in time.

That is no way to live, never looking in the direction you are actually going.

Sometimes I think you should live each day of your life as if you are a new player for the same character in the RPG of your life. You still have all the same stats and resources and so on, but you are a brand new person who comes to the challenges of playing that character fresh and ready to tackle the next part of the quest with vigor and enthusiasm.

I get so tired of being the same humdrum old person every day. I think that is part of why coming out of sleep into the real world is so jarring for me. Part of me simply does not want to come back to reality. Leave the dream realm with its unlimited expression of self and broad and creative reality? Coalesce my enormous churning crackling whirlwind of mind into the tiny confines of this all too human life again? Get stuck being this one limited and frankly kind of pathetic person again? How depressing. Do not make me go back in that box!

Come to think of it, maybe that has a lot to do with why I sleep so much in the first place. I get to shed my burdensome and confining singular identity, with its narrow ledge of possibilities and heavy weight of physical existence, and instead be a multi-probable cloud of energies and influences and emotions freed of the lead dead onus of physical existence.

In a way, the dream world is the perfect rationalist slash idealist environment. No physical limitations, just mind, spirit, and imagination.

But not being a rationalist/idealist myself, I recognize that being all mind with no physical reality to ground you can be nightmarishly horrible. No stability, no consistency, no reliability, just the coruscating chaos of the subjective world. That is, in fact, my definition of Hell : to be locked forever within the dirty waters of my own mind, without any solid land to stand on, doomed to tread water until I drown.

And drown I would, and from thence on, I would be nothing but a lunatic madman bashing his head agaisnt the wall of his cell just to have something to feel for a change.

I have felt this intense fear of going completely insane for a long long time. I remember being frightened by my own weird moods and how reality seemed to shift around me in invisible but important ways even when I was an elementary school student. How a sift inside me, maybe some brain chemistry shift or something, could change the entire flavour, the entire feel, of the universe around me. And how am I supposed to know which of these seemingly random frequencies of reception represents true reality? Subjectively, they all seem real at the time.

Perhaps that is what makes me such a philosopher. I cannot trust my direct perceptions of reality because they change so much. My mood filters my perceptions too much to trust them. If your entire opinion of the nature of the universe can turn on a dime any moment, what is a poor boy to do?

Sit still and try to deduce that which remains regardless of the shift in the tide, I suppose. Seek out the most durable and reliable truths, and anchor your boat to those shores. But always be ready to weigh anchor and set sail should your current island prove unreliable.

No point in sinking along with Atlantis if you can just float away, right?

Bur why are my inner seas so restless? Why must my mind be such spinning nebula of vibrating chaos? What keeps the cauldron of my cerebellum constantly churning and burning and yearning? Why, to put it bluntly, am I so fucked up inside?

All this chaos and motion and stormy creativity must serve some kind of purpose. There must be something great and terrible lurking in my mind’s shadow that would emerge if the merry go round ever came to a complete and total stop.

And that must never ever happen. So the whole thing spins on every axis, and things combine and are broken apart and combine again like primitive proteins in the primordial goop, and somewhere in there is little old me, with a self ten times smaller than the massive metamorphic mind it dwells in, just trying to keep my head above water for another day.

And I guess that is roughly what it is like to be me.

I think maybe I need to go read my new narrative again. It is not sinking in yet.