Something Bad, Something Sad...

In my last post I spoke of the joys a man may know that support him.  In this post I'm going to tell of the sadness that has re-invaded my life that others may understand the nature of what it is to truly forgive injury and trespass that healing may follow.  I am not claiming I've succeeded in such a work of forgiveness, but it is a work underway at best effort.

As of this writing I have no foundation under my life.  None.  I'm floating my life on the attitude control jets like a landing spaceship riding the rockets.  Fortunately for me I taught Sulu how it's done, as long as I don't have to do it for so long I run out of fuel I'll set it down flat and intact.  But this is totally nerve wracking work from which I can allow no rest, there is that fuel gauge to be considered. 

There is a folk saying that goes 'men are what their mother's make them.'  I hope, I pray to God that is not the literal and absolute truth.  Why?  Because in the last weeks I've been compelled to admit what I never wanted to admit concerning my mother, and deal with a lifetime's worth of ramifications for my self and my siblings. 

After forty some years of searching I'm compelled to admit the most likely answer for the cruelty I and my siblings suffered to the will of our mother is that she was a practicing member of the bdsm lifestyle from the late '40's coming forward.  As I've said in a recent post in the months past I've actually gotten to know several who are members of that world, and as my understanding of them has grown so have the inescapable comparisons to my mother. 

In every essence of her persona she was a perfect fit to their world of brutality and secrecy, their world of misery enshrined as justification for misery reflected onto all around them.  The fit is to perfect to deny.  There was —something— she confided to my wife as my wife was attempting to comfort her in her dying deliriums that Barbara would not tell me, said she refused to remember it lest she use it against her with cruelty.  There was the time my Uncle opened his mouth to say something, something rough enough to put his face into an expression I knew well as his combat mode, and my Aunt shut him down hard.  The hints have been there.  There were several comments heard from my father during my childhood  in a voice so cold as to burn that very well might have been his reaction to knowing as fact what I can only speculate as a forensic reconstruction.  In re-reading my personal journals I've realized I'd deliberately ignored this possibility at several points, I didn't want to think so low of my own mother.  I'd approach the obvious, and then back away.  My mistake, I should have had more courage.

The question now is do I have enough courage to forgive what was done in the name of love perverted?  There is a rage that has lived in me for many, many years.  Since the second grade to be specific, which is when the first of the blatant assaults occurred.  It has always been a submerged rage to hot to touch, to hot to acknowledge, a rage that tormented my dreams for years.  It has never been more than half a heartbeat away from taking control of my life and actions.  It is submerged no more, it is now full in the open and demanding satisfaction.

Satisfaction.  If my life has taught me one thing it is that there is no satisfying such rage.  Oh, the temptation is there in spades, the temptation to use any and every thing I've ever learned of the physical world to extract a blood revenge from the modern iterations of the same sort of perverts.  Twenty plus years working industry and I know plenty of ways to work wholesale lethal intent.  It would be so easy, so very easy.  But it would not satisfy the rage, all it would do is feed it and set me even lower than the most pathetic of the creatures I'd be ending.  After a whole lifetime of denying that rage I'm going to gamble what's left of my life, and theirs, that I'm strong enough to leave it on the surface and convert all that hatred and contempt, all the utter revulsion and bitter disgust into something non-destructive, hopefully something to be called positive.

How?  By always remembering that if my eldest brother Jesus was able to forgive the complete and entire fucked up mess of humanity then I should be able to forgive the minor percentage of perverts who worked harm on my family.  Once I'm convinced my strength is adequate to the task it is my intent to wage war on that perversion, not with lethality but rather with compassion and honesty, to walk among them and expose the lie that holds them to misery as a way of life.  To kill them would be to easy, to help heal them is by far the more demanding challenge, by far the more powerful stroke against the wickedness.  May God Almighty grant me to cool my rage using it to warm my compassion, that I might work such healing, may he grant me the wisdom to bring this intent to reality in His sight.  Such is my intent for whatever is left of this life.

Something Happy...

It never fails, at least in my life.  If some new joy arrives right along with the joy comes some source of sadness.  I’ve had a good woman come into my life as a friend, a woman and a child and the return of life to be lived.  And with something living came something dead back to life to be a torment and a torture as balance opposite.  I’ve been getting beat up by my past taking advantage of my present, and I’m tired of it.  I’ve been on the defensive long enough, it is time to give battle and counter attack. 

The question is of course how does one attack sadness?  To attack is to impose suffering, even death.  But more of the same does nothing to remove the first source, it may be superceded by the more powerful sadness inherent to the attack, but that is simply sadness replaced by that sadness, sadness remains.  No, you must dismiss sadness with happiness holding a more powerful place in your head.

What happiness's do I know that can overwrite the wounds of a lifetime gone by?  Oh, there's a few I know, a few…

To sit of an evening with a little one on your arm, cuddle the young one close and rock them to sleep, feel them go limp in your arms as sleep takes the day away and delivers them into dreamland… to see them smile, and curl into you… yea, that's a serious happiness that runs deep into your soul every time it happens… just like it does when you do the same thing for the little one's mother after she's gifted you those soft sounds of ecstasy as you were taking the needing from her with soft hands and kind eyes, set her into that place where the glow of her contentment will light the room around her… yea... 

It's close, to close to risk a shift, you reach for that last 1000 rpm and it's there for you, that minor key scream as your garage sweetheart pulls hard passing redline giving back to you all the hours of massaging parts and agonizing over split thousandths you spent building her… you don't have to believe you did it right, you know, it's a proven thing and that is a sweet thing as well…

The sun is riding the western horizon, you stop and look back on your day, what a day, and you see it is done and well done.  You turn for home weary, aching, the sweat dried to an abrasive on your skin.  You walk in your door, and are greeted with the smell of fresh bread baking, you don't even get your boots off before your woman is on you, her hands on you and she smiles as she helps you undress, silencing your thanks with a finger across your lips and a promise in her eyes… "no baby, no, tonight it is me for you because you earned it for both of us…" 

Yea, I've known a few of the joys of manhood, and it is those joys recalled that allow a man to stand on his own ethic and his own faith against what the darkness' of the world will throw trying to drag him down.  It is the good things that make it all worth the effort.

Neo Victorian Expanded

This continuation is being written in a quite different frame of mind than the first segment posted in mid 2011 (which has been moved to display just below this one).  In the months since I've actually gotten to know a few of the members of the bdsm community, heard their stories, observed their lives.  The first installment was written from simply observing and analyzing their offerings of art.  It was a bit to the intellectual side, somewhat emotionally aloof.  This segment is much closer to personal, I now know names and faces and hearts, aloof is an attitude I can no longer maintain on the subject no matter how much more comfortable such an attitude might be.  I closed the first installment of this subject with a question I can now take a reasonable guess at answering, at least in part.

Concerning those who are living in "the lifestyle" as the practitioners of bdsm often call it I asked myself "…why these individuals who do indeed seem to be fairly intelligent and a bit introspective would have chosen to reprise the qualities of a culture that in all fact was failing, dying, unable to muster the strength and flexibility to meet the needs of a changing world.  I do not know if this was simply naiveté on the part of these youth, or if they were seduced with malice into a misplaced romance with a failed culture to serve some other entities purposes..."

The Neo Victorian

Words tend to stay the same while the functional meanings of word often shift with the years. Take for example the word "pimp." In my youth I learned a definition for this word-symbol, it referred to the lowest form of humanoid life walking the planet, an abuser and a user, a heartless and cruel creature that preyed on destitute and desperate women compelled to sell sex to survive, a parasite robbing them of what they earned in the worlds oldest, and most damaging, profession. To the standards of my youth a pimp was well below human, vermin of the sort where the correct action was to puree its' innards with a large caliber round of hollow point and leave the carcass for the vultures. Now? Now the word has migrated in many places, particularly among the young, to mean anyone who sells things, simply a salesman, albeit a rather flashy one. Of course the word pimp is just a symbol, it has no morality beyond the definition people attach to it. My only objection to this change is that now there is no finite symbol to represent the vermin, they continue to operate, just as cruel and worthless as ever, behind the camouflage of the expanded meaning, at least until a new word is set to represent their evil excluding all other meanings.  Another place I've noticed such a migration here of late relates to two words currently in service among a growing counterculture, the various forms of the words "dominate" and "submit."

Marked...

see here world LOOK at me

see the way I am

bolted marred the open scar

wounds by mine own hand

REFLECTING what I think of you

your ways set sad as sand

scattered on an icy road

before my day began…

watch me world at my play

games of pain and shame

some feed my INSANITY

and some just hang a name

on moves among the HOPELESS

drones conforming to the lame

AFFLICTIONS as the coin earned

that buys a claim to fame…

oh doctor lover make me well

you with dirty hands

slice away with scalpel LIES

cut future failures stand

mantra molded to the SHAPE

of pauper parents bland

DESPAIR cinched tight as any wire

bound blood vain virgin clan…

NO… fuck you world go away

you'll never get it right

pale horse a-riding painted up in white

blindfold captive HOPE of love

will penance serve each night

in gleeful SINS of dirty sex

scream cum alone cum fright

pay terror for the children's HURT

your world deals for spite.

Harvested from among nightmares...

I've been re-reading my most private journal, the one where I record the range markers of my personal inner quests, the journeys of the soul usually conducted during episodes of lucid dreaming, and came across this little passage, thought I'd share it here,  since for the moment I don't feel quite as alone as I usually do...

From the first flickering of awareness in the womb the infant is not alone.  The sound of a heartbeat is always there.  There is the other, the one who is not me, and the other is all about me and keeps me warm.  And love is as guaranteed as it can be,  the system providing love with every calorie, every gram of calcium, every flicker of the endocrine telegraph.  And then, in a remarkable foreshadowing of old age, the universe becomes to small, and motion is reduced, and there is a time when pressure breaks the bond and we are alone in the cold.  So much like the end of the life we live on middle earth, here between heaven and hell.  The universe is to small to hold the deterioration of aloneness, where there is no umbilical to bring in the nourishment and the love to hold us in place.  And so we waste and wither and fail, slowly or suddenly, and then once again there is a narrow passage, with no certain knowledge of what lays beyond.  Does the infant have a clue that there is a life, an awareness beyond the vagina?  Probably not.  There has been nothing in the (to our perspective) little one's life experience to let it know for sure that there is more.  Perhaps muted sounds, dreams telegraphed from the parent, but little more, and no perspective to place them in.  Is this why we so soundly believe in an afterlife?  We all remember that first passage, and confidently expect the next to be much the same?  No knowing, not for such a little one as I.

I’m not in love...

No, I’m not.  And as of last week the Pope stopped being Catholic.  Oh well. *grin*  Down the rabbit hole again.  I’m not in love, but I do love her.  I feel... alive... again.  Yea.  Alive.

Give or take two weeks ago I took a woman and her child into my home to give sanctuary, it was needed.  I was fond of her, fascinated by her, well before this went down.  She can power the gift of the muse for me and in my world that is a huge thing of great value.  In many ways I am transparent to her, and she to me, the intimacy between us of surprising depth allowing for no longer than we've known each other.  We’re not lovers of the body, we’ve agreed that will be our farewell to each other when it is time to part.  What we trade are perceptions of each other, and benefit by what we share, ours is a strange affair of the heart.  She calls me her mentor, and I chuckle.  I’ve learned more from her than she from me, I’m sure of that, at least by the numbers.  But I do have twice her years, and from time to time that allows me perceptions of value to her as well.

While she was staying with me she did everything she could to earn her keep, she did far more than I would ever ask or expect of anyone.  Besides cooking some of the most delicious food I’ve had in a long time she stepped in as soft momma for my niece, doing in days what us clumsy boys hadn’t accomplished in years.  Sometimes it just takes a woman’s touch, you know?

She can’t stay, it’s impossible.  She has her man, she loves him.  Even if she didn't I'm to old for her, it would be unfair to her to ask her love what would be lost before its' time in her life.  Yea, I'm in one of those.  But... for what it is while it is I treasure her company.  And, when it's over I'm calling in several favors and throwing one hell of a drunk.  Just to give myself permission, you know?

Of Chopsticks and Bigotry...

It’s funny how sometimes things can lead you from odd into the obvious into the obscure.  I was sitting in the diner the other day, just vegging out of an afternoon when I wandered into one of those, been thinking on the event for a couple of days now.  One of the lasses on the crew was sitting across from me and eating the lunch she’d brought in.  Now that wouldn’t be anything of note under most circumstances, as a matter of fact I didn’t notice anything out of the ordinary for a couple of minutes.   It was Chinese type food, and what was unusual for the setting was she was eating with chopsticks.  Perfect posture, perfect etiquette,  plate on the table, but using chopsticks.  No problem at all, except of course for the train and chain of thought the event initiated.

I make no bones about it, I really don’t like the oriental cultures.  They always feel like slavery to me, a tyranny so deep the enslaved have no concept of just how deep their slavery goes.  They feel more than brainwashed, they feel soul bleached.  I really can’t remember a time I didn’t feel that way.  The funny thing is I’ve never really searched this lifetime to try and understand why.

Flying Wing for each other...

From the "Life at My House" series... No. 42

A magic man and a major muse

Went out to lunch one day

And over the tea and strumpets

One heard the other say

"Sweetheart we've a lot of power

In how these children think,

They who live within the walls

Their shamans twist and shrink

Until the little darlings crouch so low

In misery and drink

Crying for the faith they lost

Before they learned to think...

So lover shall we take a hand

In helping them to see

That all the things they're pining for

Are generally quite free?

Should we put it on the street

And dare the merchant man

To try and claim a copyright

On verse pen’d God’s own hand?"

*chuckle*  If I were to allow vanity more than 50 milliamp to work with I might come to the conclusion this poem was a tiny bit precognitive... and no, I'm not going to explain.

Concerning Steers, Queers, and the Catholic Clergy...

For more than a few years the debate has raged:  is it nature or nurture sets the most basic attitudes and orientations of humanity?  Is it genetics or upbringing that ultimately defines who we are, what we become?  I’ve never officially taken a side in the debate, I’m in the same position as the combat correspondent who gets close enough to the action to hear things flying by his head, but no, the pistol riding in my camera case is strictly for looters.  I’m just documenting the battle, not really taking part in it.  There was an interesting little firefight crossed my perception the other day, and it resulted in a small but potent tidbit of a thought I’d like to share with you.

IF (huge little word that one is!) there is some degree of validity to the nature side of the argument THEN there are some interesting commonalities created between rather unlikely components of society.  Consider what the three groups named in the title have in common.  What do the Steers (voluntarily childless hetero) and the Queers (homosexual) and the Catholic Clergy (celibate) all have in common?  They do indeed have something in common, as a matter of fact what they have in common is an error that could have destroyed an entire timeline, an error I first heard of concerning the awesome Ambassador Spock back in his youth when he served as science officer aboard a Federation starship.

Spock was there the first time a human vessel ever successfully emerged intact from a time warp.  Well, to be more precise he was there the first time a human vessel ever successfully emerged intact into its’ own time returning from such an adventure, there are always the legends concerning Leonardo DaVinci.  In the episode a twentieth century human ends up spending a few days aboard the twenty third century Enterprise.  He was a prime specimen of his vintage, he was the fighter pilot who had gotten entirely to good a look at the massive Enterprise fighting her way back into orbit from a dangerously low dip into the atmosphere, they had to beam him out of his cockpit or let him return to base and report what he’d seen.

Intelligent, well educated, physically and psychologically fit, orphan and unmarried, few  connections to his time beyond those he served with in a calling where it is known that sometimes someone doesn’t make it home and no one ever really knows what happened to them... if ever there was a candidate to make a successful jump three centuries into his future he would have been your man.  They almost made the mistake of taking him with them as they attempted what most would have called suicidal, a deliberate attempt to drive a starship though such a torture folded form of space as to emerge three centuries into the future.  But then Commander Spock realized their almost fatal error in time to avert it, he realized why he had to plot a trajectory where they could return the pilot to his own time a split second before he’d first laid eyes on them, closing the potential that could have resulted in there being no future of their own for the Enterprise to return to, leaving the great starship and her crew orphans of the universes.  Did you see the episode?  Have you figured out what the three groups have in common with that fine work of fiction from four decades ago?

Of course.  The issue at stake is in genetics, the unique pattern of DNA that results in more than any one individual human, it equally defines every potential human timeline that might ever come of that pattern blended with another equally unique pattern.

Steers, queers, and the Catholic clergy... what do they share in common?  What they share is that they are all voluntarily sterile, they choose not to reproduce.  With their choice they are essentially casting their vote in the nature/nurture debate.  If they believed that nature had any  major influence on what a person turns out to be they’d never choose sterility of their own volition, it would be counterproductive to their prime agendas.

All three of the groups in question are, in point of fact, genetic black holes consuming for all the eternities the patterns of those who comprise the groups.  Regardless of how you might feel about the relative ethical and moral status of these people the fact remains: they are each and every one of them the utter end and destruction of who can say how many possible futures based not on their actions but on the potential deeds of those who might have come into existence from their contribution to the human genome. 

Seriously.  She was a nun in the seventeen hundreds, a beautiful woman who retreated from the psycho-sexual-social manipulations of her world to hide her beauty beneath a habit in a cloistered convent.  But had she not retreated, had she stood up to her father and married the man of her choice from her loins would have come the line from whence came the man who touched the heart of Adolph Hitler’s grandmother in her youth before the bitterness and the cruelty became a matter of her habit.  How different might our world be?

Anyway, like I said in the beginning of this post, I’m just a combat correspondent and I think it is time for me to move.  I’ve got a serious hunch where I’m sitting on this issue is right about where a serious skirmish is likely to go down since there’s a counter attack due any old time now.  Frankly I really don’t want to be this close to the action when that goes down, once a bullet is in flight it doesn’t give a damn how many possible futures might be decided by where it happens to hit.

The Third Reality of Man Chapter Three: Tools, Bartered and Borrowed...

If you ask a stranger “who are you?” several times in a row you're likely to notice a strange pattern.  Try it sometime.  Ask someone “Who are you,” and take note of where they find their answers.  For example, who are you?

“I’m John Doe.”

“No, that’s just the name your parents hung on you.  Who are you?”

“I’m a design engineer for an aircraft company.”

“No, that’s how you earn your money.  Who are you?”

“I’m an American.”

“No, that’s the nation you live in.  Who are you?”

“I’m a Conservative Christian Republican!”

“Sorry, but those are all political groups supporting your vision of society.  Who are you?”

“I’m me!”

“Of course you are,  but who is that?”

The length of the list will vary, person to person, but the majority will offer quite a list before they’ll offer something defined from within their own self, something they created of their own thought.  If you watch their eyes you’ll likely see them get angrier with each repetition of the question, and a quick hot anger at that. 

What is provoking their anger?  The usual reason for anger of course, which is fear of one form or another.  They're  frightened of the nakedness you're compelling on them.  Their anger is in response to being stripped of the symbols they've always used to define their self  within the context of their society, and even more critically in the context of defining their self… to themselves.  As each component of their self definition shifts domains from being part of their self  to being part of their social environment they feel the foundations of their identity becoming weaker and more vulnerable, less complete, less secure... of course they’ll be angry. 

Consider the more subtle implications of what you’ve just seen.  You asking such a question is perhaps a bit rude, but still essentially harmless, and yet you frightened them.  In point of fact you are most likely totally powerless within their life, have no potential to do them any harm at all, and yet you still frightened them into anger, a deep anger.  Why?  What fear has such a secret grip on them?

What they fear is an entity who does have power in their life asking that question.  Consider what might happen if that entity not only asked that question but demanded a correct answer?  What if the consequence of a wrong answer meant being denied the right to continue to claim that part of their self identity? I'll assert to you that is exactly what they fear, even though they don't recognize their fear for what it is. 

I will assert to you that each and any element of society John or Jane Doe uses as any portion of their self definition is in fact a collective entity, a discrete and separate  entity whose life is hosted on a set of individuals defined by a common thought or activity, some common element of belief in their lives.  Should such an entity as that ask them a such question it could have impact on their life, for they are dependent on that collective for a portion of the definition used in the cause of self definition, the  critical ability to recognize the self from among the multitude in the perspectives mandated by abstract intelligence.

Each of the individuals included in such a group who incorporates some collective  definition (grammatically expressed as “we”)  as a part of their own self  definition  (grammatically expressed as “I”) is in fact a node within that collective entity participating in a symbiotic relationship where the collective provides a critical component of self definition to the individual, the individual in return providing  continuance and cohesion to the collective in the form of compliance and loyalty to the common definition in preference to the other collectives offering common value.  Just as the lives of the collective entities are hosted on many individuals any given individual will host several if not many such collective entities in their self definition, an interwoven structure of balance and compromise between the components defining the personalities of both individual and collective. 

To understand the human dynamic in full is to integrate an understanding of the structures and interactions of these collective entities in parallel with an understanding of the individuals, for while they are totally interlinked and interdependent they are in fact each a unique life form struggling for survival within their respective environments.

In that the collective entities are derived from, and composed of, individual humans many of their life functions are in fact analogous with each other, for both must meet the same three primal demands of life.  Since both are living entities both must procure sustenance, both must provide security, and both must arrange for procreation since both are mortal life forms that suffer attrition to biology.  There are many comparisons between the individual human and the collective entities created by the humans' answer to the challenges of hosting both imagination and an abstract intelligence.

In point of fact they are constantly trading with each other, borrowing or bartering to acquire the resources required for their respective survival.  Even a short contemplation of the thought will give a bewildering surplus of events to stand as examples.  In fact, even a short examination of the modern world can be confusing to the point of traumatic for the rate of exchange between the two life forms has been accelerating exponentially for approximately the last quarter of a century, which will be the focus in Chapter Four of this series, "Awakenings in Utero…"

…to be continued…

for convenience all essays in this series are collected on the page titled

"The Third Reality of Man"

On the Tour... like us?

The sixty four thousand millinea question might be "just how many branches of humanity have had reason to establish a tour, of one sort or another, to keep track of the children of colonists lost into the immensity of space?" 

All in the Family...

This post began as a comment I'd intended to offer to Anne of Carversville on her post "The Cult of True Womanhood and Female Cardinal Virtues" .  As it ran out though the thought got a bit to large for a comment block, and while inspired by her posts on feminism actually ranged a bit far to be an appropriate comment for that environment.  So I'll leave the full thought here where she or any others who might have an interest may read the thought in full. 

The majority of my focus in such matters is understanding the ongoing evolution and interactions  of the collective entities, those social forces so omnipresent that with the aid of modern communication technologies (serving as synaptic connection between the individuals who function as neural nodes of the collective mind) they have for all intents and purposes achieved the status of a self aware sentience in their own right. 

The 19th century writings and publications mentioned in Anne's posts would be among the first glimmerings of such consciousnesses awakening, a common thought distributed by technology to be hosted by many individuals as a portion of their self definition.  Such individuals loyalty to and dependence on the definition provided becomes the life force of the collective entity, and like all living things a collective entity must, first and foremost, assure its' own survival.  From that understanding it isn't so very hard to see how the irrational assertions printed to chastise any woman who ventured beyond the boundaries of the prescribed definition would be evidence of the collective entity using technology to defend its' host base from a competing collective. 

Of course ceReligion, the underlying authority cited in the  "Cult of True Womanhood" was undoubtedly the first and still among the most powerful of the social constructs to evolve into this new life form.  Among the collective entities ceReligion would have to qualify as Mother Eve, the original source setting the template for all who evolved from her lineage.  What Anne’s post brought to focus for me was the thought of parentage among the collectives, the linear descendents that in their maturity become allies, or competition, with the original collective for the same group of hosts.

The “Cult of True Womanhood” is an ideal example of such parentage. From the content of Anne’s post it would seem the same demographic of women who at one time were most likely to embrace the cult were in later generations the same women who would form the core of the Feminist movements. The transition from ceReligion's "Cult of True Womanhood" powered by the promise of heaven to ceFeminist's self willed existence powered by the thought of independence from any need for patriarchal justification makes an interesting case study.

At this point ceFeminism is a fully mature and powerful collective, many generations old and well defined.  Many women form a major portion of their self definition in structures defined as feminist thought.  For significant numbers of women what religion was feminism now is... the primary source of the vocabulary they use to define themselves to themselves.  How the women who host ceFeminism as their primary self definition fare as the collective continues to evolve will tell a great deal about the life cycle of a collective entity.  It will be interesting to see how ceFeminism responds when her daughters begin to challenge for primary control of the hosts.  It will be interesting to see if ceFeminism will follow the example set by her mother ceReligion and attempt to widen her definition to allow her to dominate rather than guide the lives of the men folk, as ceReligion did in the latter half of the twentieth century bartering her influence in the political arena as a means of shoring up a shrinking host base, or if ceFeminist will ally herself with the younger entities her life enabled and accept a position of lesser power but more stable tenure among the hosts.  It will tell a great deal about what kind of woman ceFeminist really is.

The Fashion of Freedom...

I'm currently doing something I very rarely do, to wit browsing the offerings on a fairly major fashion blog.  Fashion is something that is a non sequitur in my life, I'm about as far removed from that world as it's possible to be.  But fashion is a major power player in many people's lives, sets attitudes, defines directions, and as a philosopher I can't let the person I am limit the scope of my thought concerning the rest of the world. (ok, that one's a keeper, her eyes don't look like the others, and the hat is cool...kieiping a copy of a magazine cover… omg, is this stuff contagious?)

 

 

Anyhow, what I'm noticing most is a serious dichotomy between the primarily feminism inspired text and the commonalities in what seems to be reflected in the model's eyes, the message riding out to the world on their glance.  The feminist dialog is all about woman as a free creature, self willed, self reliant, responsible for her own actions and her own fate, and yet to my eyes the ladies in the pictures are usually projecting some mixture of a thought formed on a line running between the pathos of "help me, help me please, I'm being crushed by this endless meaningless charade"  and  the irresponsible arrogance of "I can do as I damn well please because you can't see me, I'm invisible, I'm safe, all you can see are my clothes." 

Seems like a pretty damn good jump between the two, the attitudes of feminism and the attitudes of fashion.  Yea, the kind of a jump even old Evil Knieval would have thought twice about.  Makes me wonder if fashion has become the foil of feminism, makes me wonder if the feminists of the world are totally exploiting fashion, and the women who are the slave victims of fashion, as the ultimate negative example of what feminism says a truly liberated woman is supposed to be all about.  I mean really, how can a woman feel herself a free and liberated creature if all society has to do to enslave her thought is have someone say "this is how you should look" and she is compelled by a lifetime of compliance into overhauling her wardrobe?  Hmmmm...

But then again, I don't suppose the jump between fashion and feminism is any more severe than the jump between the old male establishment's desire to marry a virgin so her ignorance will allow him to keep a veteran lady of the evening for his mistress.  Looks to me like the two contradictions run a very, very similar wave-form and polarity, all things allowed for.  People.  Give me a hatful of hot nitro glycerin, I know what to do with that.  But the contradictions society impresses on people are substantially less stable, and a whole lot trickier to work with. Oh, well.

Mitt Romney is who Dwight Eisenhower was worried about…

Social Recon Droid
by CDM.MMX

The first presidential debate of the 2012 election is in the history books.  I watched most of it, read all of it, and my conclusion?  Romney is the antithesis of what a genuine conservative is all about. 

Just for the record, I don't really subscribe to the established political stereotypes and so I call myself a pragmatic idealist.  In other words, do the most good you can with the resources you have to work with.  That's do the most good mind you, not do the most good for this group or that group, but just the most good across the board.  An attitude closer to good parenting than the conventional template of governing.  This usually puts me leaning a bit more towards the conservative side than the liberal, but not this year.  Romney doesn't represent what I call a conservative approach, I find him just an echo of the radical evil that exploited the internal naiveté of the conservative segment to attempt an economic rather than military coup on the United States of America.  The Republican's are not fielding a conservative candidate this year.  Their man is as radical as they come, in radical denial of reality if you want it defined.  In point of fact the actions and attitudes of President Obama come much, much closer to a genuine  conservative stance than any of the half formed, undefined pie in the sky emotional  euphemisms being offered by Romney. 

If I were an old school liberal I'd most likely be rather upset with President Obama, after all, all he is promising is that with forethought and diligence it is possible for America to pull itself out of the hole left in our history by an almost successful attempt to convert the nation into a wholly owned subsidiary of the global corporate establishment being used and misused as their  mercenary army.  He offers no miracle cures, no miracle programs, no glitz and glamour special effects on behalf of a few to blind the eyes of the many.  As a liberal President Obama is at best kind of mediocre.

But that is fine by me since I am not an old school great society liberal any more than I'm an obsolete soldier suffering the consequences of the victor's paranoia the world came to call the cold war. I find his pragmatic approach to restoring and maintaining the well being of the nation  quite in keeping with my own attitudes.  I think he's done a good job and see no reason at all to change managers at this point in time.  That is after all the job we hired him for, management. 

If I were being asked to elect a puppet king or an almost benign tyrant I'd vote for Romney, he'd be better suited to those jobs than would Obama, but thankfully those jobs aren't up for grabs, at least here in the United States.  I'm looking for a truly gifted manager, a finesse job blending fiscal wisdom and acute people savvy who can double in as an effective commander in chief.  That's the job of the President and there is no doubt in my mind President Obama is by far the better qualified.  He has my vote.  I'm willing to bet he'd get Ike's as well.  

Bad, worse, and despicable…

A kid shot himself in the head at our Junior High the other day.  Dead bang, took himself out ten minutes before the morning bell in a hallway in line of sight of the area where the cliques like to congregate.   Gave a lot of now very shocked kids their first real exposure to blood and violent death.  Movies just aren't the same.  My niece was around the corner from him at her locker, heard the gunshot but thought someone had popped a plastic bag in the cafeteria.  Maybe fifteen seconds later she turned the corner headed for class and got to good a look at the body, the spray and splatter on the wall.  Not something anyone needs, much less a fourteen year old kid.

Needless to say, she came home in a state of shock.  Her best buddy and I nursed her through the day as she rode across the waves of tears and horror as the shock wore off in stages.  The shock isn't fully gone, but it's fading, into the once every couple of days stage instead of once every couple of hours.  Tough kid, she's handling it very well.  She'll never forget what she saw, but I don't think it's going to be a lasting trauma, just a lasting sadness. 

That's the bad part.  A very bad thing, but still sooner or later almost everyone has to deal up close and personal with death.  It happens… a car crash, a shooting, a fight, sooner or later something shocking like that will happen and the living have to deal on the subject and then go back to living.  Like the saying goes, "they're history now."  The kids at that Jr. High are learning that lesson a lot sooner than they should have to. 

I'm going to keep a very close eye (and ear, and heart) on her for a while yet, but I'm not to worried.  Not for her.  But I am very worried for the kids who were not quite so close as to know the full and gory truth of the matter.  I'm worried for them because of what the damned grown-ups are doing.  That's the worse running into despicable part, the hip deep euphemistic hypocrisy flowing like a mud slide across the entire affair.  I watched the local evening news for a few minutes tonight, that was about all I could tolerate.  Watched the news media (damn them to perpetually inflamed hemorrhoids!) spinning plastic fantastic propaganda around the word-thought "school" to misdirect and overwrite genuine public concern, watched the sides getting picked out for the finger pointing political blame game, watched the kids who most desperately need the truth being shunted off to become victimized pawns as the surrogate psyches of the adults trying to white wash the facts into one form of political mileage or another (yea, three local stations, three networks, take your best guess as to which was playing which angle). 

Before all is said and done they'll probably do deep if not lethal damage to another fifty kids, and those kids will have to suffer a whole lot more than the kid whose unknown despair led him to end his own life.  At least he died quickly.  The others won't be so lucky, unless they take the same option he did.  And if they do?  There'll be no way to connect their deaths back to the initiating event, because after all, everyone did everything they could.  Yea, right.  They sure as hell did.  But it wasn't for the kids, that's for damn sure.

Sabotaged...

Yup, I was.  Blindsided. Teach me to make assumptions and not calibrate the instruments.  I do know better than that, at least in some environments.  The culprit shall remain unnamed until appropriate vengeance has been both executed and celebrated.  The point of the sabotage?  The *bleeeeepin* meat thermometer.  The confession?  The child (at breakfast) admitted one of her crew on a weekend sleepover stuck it into live flame to see how fast the needle would swing.  Several times, and it's mechanical.  At this point it's most likely about as linear as the bottom curve of a well shaped breast, and I ain't talking turkey.  Drat and phooey on it.  Down to the store where they sell such gizmos for another one.  I want some platinum dammit, a true RTD that checks it's own battery voltage and will read accurate to 1/100th of a degree, and that coarse only if they built a cheap circuit.  At this altitude water should boil at 211.85 or so, and I want a thermometer that will say so in so just so many numbers. 

Winners, Losers and Sphere of Empathy...

Sometimes it is the most obvious of things that escape being set into words.  But, sometimes even the most painfully obvious of things will trip, miss a turn, and you'll actually see what you've been looking at for literally years.  One of the things I've been overlooking tripped this weekend, I got a good look at it.  It's part of the human condition at such a low level, such a foundation factor in so many things I'll share it here, perhaps it will help someone else open an understanding of something they're looking at but having trouble seeing.

The title of this post is really kind of backwards, because the last term in the title needs a definition before this thought will make much sense, and that's the idea of the sphere of empathy.  The sphere of empathy, as I've come to call it, is a conceptual measurement from the realms of geometry applied to the emotional, a way to visualize and to a degree quantify and plot the emotional interactions between the various peoples of earth which might be summarized as "humanitarian."

Let me begin by asserting to you that "Humanitarian" is not really a mode of thought, not thought as a fully rational function, but is in point of fact a word describing an individual's spectrum of emotional response to the observed state of life of those who live within that individual's sphere of empathy.  Considered in this manner everyone is a humanitarian, everyone, where they differ is in the scope, the range within which they apply that word.  The most barbarian of them all, the most greedy, self serving, vile and vicious individual on the planet is still a humanitarian, and his definition of humanity, his sphere of empathy, consists of one individual… himself.  The rest of the world is outside his sphere of empathy.

On the other foot…

It's a very standard question I'm sure, standard world wide.  "What do you want for dinner?"  And of course worldwide the standard answer is usually "I don't have a clue, hadn't given it any thought."  Or words to that effect.  Until recently I'd always been the second voice.  Truth be told I was telling the truth, dinner was six or eight or twelve hours down the road, and between now and then there were dragons to deal with, of one sort or the other and shucks, I wasn't spending any thought on what I was going to eat for dinner, I was worried about not becoming dinner.  Food would be preferable to motor oil or ETBBA, but that was about as far as my thoughts went.  Generally by the time I made it to dinner I was really to tired to care.  But that was then, and this is now.  Now I'm the one asking, and compelled to a wry chuckle at myself (and others of my gender/role) for finding a bit of a "hmmmphhhh…" at the stock answer coming back at me.  Karma, particularly the instant variety, can be a bitch.  Oh well, food it is.

I'm now give or take two weeks into this "Mr. Mom" gig, and finding it an interesting comparison to the other things I've used to fill my days.  Name a trade and I've probably worked in that world for at least a few weeks, I used to change jobs every ninety days just to keep life interesting, back in the BC days when I was the only one I had to look out for, before the factory took me into isolation for a quarter of a century.  You can learn an awful lot bouncing crew to crew being strong back labor and a set of extra hands for the journeymen.  The gypsy days of my misspent and totally enjoyed youth when adventure was the unsung standard and boredom the enemy don't you know.  I'm coming to realize I covered a lot of turf in those days, I really did.   Only in my later years have I've realized just how much ground I did cover, and this Mr. Mom gig is tapping from virtually all of it.

Yea, the last bolt is tight (hopefully), there's oil in the pan, gas in the tank, all the odds and ends are clear of the rotating parts and someone says "contact!"  The starter kicks in, things start to turn.  A few seconds later there's a cough, things speed up, slow back down, two, then three coughs in a row, things are waking up… talk to me sweetheart, bring it to life… the guy on the throttle risks a bit of a pump shot, the guy under the hood brings the timing forward a bit to match… anyone who's ever brought one back up from a rebuild knows the scenario.  You don't want it to idle, you want it to roar, snap up to three grand or so and run in all those new parts before they have time to revolt and break.  You break 'em in like you want 'em to run.

That's about where I am with the Mr. Mom gig right now, except it's not new steel getting acquainted with old iron, it's a 14 year old child's old attitudes getting acquainted with new ways of doing things.  It's a rebuild on attitudes and expectations, attitudes on the world and attitudes about herself, her expectations about herself that I'm working on.  You look for different things, listen for different things when the job is turn a house into a home, turn a headstrong feral child in the general direction of a lady.   But hey, the idea is the same… bring it up quick, clean, don't let the old patterns linger on, seat it quick and solid.  Don't tell 'em, don't even show 'em, let 'em live the truth of the old saying "Today is the first day of the rest of your life." 

Tiss the Season...

Yup, it is.  The season of Podiatric Sex.  Yup, it's football time again.  Uooga booga.  Our gang gonna beat down your gang take all your food and females.  Drat.  Not that I mind the boys out knocking heads, what the whale, the young bucks do the same thing out in the woods.  You know, lock horns and wrestle so the does can decide who gets to father next year's fawn.  That's pretty stock stuff in nature.  But (you knew there was going to be a but…) what is not found in nature are the freaking fragging f*ing fans living on reflected glory, those identity challenged idiots flooding into town every other weekend or so hauling in mock malice and seasonally adjusted profits.  The  next four months are gonna suck… manic traffic, overcrowded everything, gas prices bouncing like bra-less whore on a trotting horse, drunk children of all ages howling at the midnight moon to show their politically prescribed loyalty to the tribe, the pack, the team.  What a needless nuisance.  Drat.  Double drat and damn.  It's football season again.