With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion.
The good life, as I conceive it, is a happy life. I do not mean that if you are good you will be happy - I mean that if you are happy you will be good.
Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.
I enjoy paying taxes. With them I buy civilization.
October 07, 2007 - 1:23 a.m.
I'm not updating enough.
I've fallen behind and I can't get up.
I'll do the best I can and hope to do some catching up at some point. I have lots of pictures I haven't talked about yet. I just realized I'm falling further behind because I took more pictures tonight. OK this is what I'm going to do. I'm going to start catching up now but writing an entry tonight and another tomorrow morning.
I'll start with some photo recaps. Before the Mets lost the last game of the season there were some high hopes and I captured them on film. Well OK, I didn't use film. I captured them on pixels.
Great Picasa where my photos are hosted is having issues. I'll finish writing this in the morning. Hopefully it will be working better then. I'll just have to write two entries tomorrow. I don't want to fall further behind because I’m going to have more to write about after Sunday night and I'm going to have house guests, Iain Campbell Smith an Aussie singer/songwriter friend of his.
I’m saving this now and picking it up again in the morning.
On second thought I'm posting this stub and writing two new entries in the morning. If you read this before 11 AM EDST on Sunday go to WFUV and listen to John Platt's show. He said he'd try and plug Iain's house concert tomorrow and he'll play one of Iain's songs.
I changed my mind again. I'm not going to leave this as a stub. I realized there is something I've been planning on writing about and I might as well do it now.
I often get in a quandary about how to describe my feelings and end up simply saying that I'm lonely. I think I can go into a bit more depth than that.
By no stretch of the imagination am I a misanthrope. I have some friends that are misanthropic but I consider that part of the cost of doing business with them. Everyone has faults but for the most part I actually like people. I enjoying talking to them, I enjoy watching them, and I enjoy being around them. What I don't feel with most people is much of a connection. Now I have written before about dividing the world into Usz and Thems. For some purposes that's find but it is really subtler than that. It isn't a matter of feeling a connection with some people and not others. There is a vast range in the depth and breath of the connections. With any individual there will be some things I can connect with the person on and others that I can't. I have one long-time friend that has just about no chance of reading this so is a good person to use as an example. I can connect with him (remember that I pick the gender of my pronouns at random in these situations) on a vast array of cultural subjects and shared history. We have loads of inside joke, a level of communication I adore. On the other hand despite the best of intentions he is a total cipher if when I want to discuss an emotional issue. He'll be sympathetic but totally unempathatic. It is like talking to really nice brick wall that cares about me but seems to have no idea what I'm talking about.
With all my friends there are some things are some spheres where we have a great connection and others where there is none. I'm sure that nobody can connect on everything. That isn't my problem.
My problem is two-fold. The first is that for too many people my feeling of connection is not reciprocated. People that I feel strongly connected to seem to either not feel that way about me, or if they do, they don't value it nearly as much as I do. I feel the connection with these people but rarely communicate with them. For some it is just a matter of never reaching out to me, with others it is brushing aside my attempts to reach out to them. This is not a condition that I've had my whole life. It is a phase that I'm in right now.
That problem helps add to my second problem. There are some arenas that I really don't have an active connection about with anyone. That means there are things that I would and need to talk about but I can't. When I say that I’m lonely, that more than anything else is what I'm talking about.
I’m always afraid when writing about this my friends might take offense. You shouldn't. I'm not saying there is anything wrong with our relationship. To say that someone doesn't fill all my emotional needs is not a criticism. Nobody can fill every need of anybody. OK, I shouldn't say that. Universal statements are virtually always wrong but you know what I mean. If it happens at all it is a rare occurrence.
Being able to write about this helps. In some way this diary acts as a friend and when I find a way to write about something I couldn’t before it is like making a new connection. So in writing about the problem I am at the same time ameliorating it.
So now I’m really going. Tomorrow look for one and hopefully two entries.
The International Jewish Banking Conspiracy - October 07, 2008
On the Road to Westchester County - October 06, 2008
Inside the Madison Square Studio - October 05, 2008
I'm a Bosniac and I'm debating like I've never debated before - October 03, 2008
Islands in the Stream of Consciousness - October 02, 2008
Email me: GordonLew at gmail
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License. Horvendile October 07, 2007
