I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
The trouble with fighting for human freedom is that one spends most of one's time defending scoundrels. For it is against scoundrels that oppressive laws are first aimed, and oppression must be stopped at the beginning if it is to be stopped at all.
Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
What I have been telling you, from alpha to omega, what is the one great thing the sigil taught me — that everything in life is miraculous. For the sigil taught me that it rests within the power of each of us to awaken at will from a dragging nightmare of life made up of unimportant tasks and tedious useless little habits, to see life as it really is, and to rejoice in its exquisite wonderfulness. If the sigil were proved to be the top of a tomato-can, it would not alter that big fact, nor my fixed faith. No Harrowby, the common names we call things by do not matter — except to show how very dull we are ...
January 12, 2016 - 11:59 a.m.
I often start writing with what's on my mind at the instant I start writing. That was going to be about it warming up enough that I have to take off the long underwear I'm forced to wear inside since my space heater broke. But then a friend of mine made her second totally clueless post of the day just as I switched from Facebook to Word. Problem is I can't write about what made them clueless. I can't even tell you if it's really a her. All unidentified people are referred to by feminine pronouns according to the Wise Madness style manual. When the references are negative I'm tempted to make them male but that's sexist. I'll be consistent … except when I'm not.
I have been on the go since Wednesday, that's when I hopped on a bus and went down to visit LORi and Steve. That evening I helped set up the Lansdowne Folk Club for Christine Lavin's show. The next day we went to the show and then did the breakdown. On Friday I took the bus home and went to see Madeleine Peyroux with Kathryn. Saturday I went to see Villa Palagonia and the Levins at Coco and Bruce's house. On Sunday I went to First Acoustics for Scott Wolfson's CD release and the open mic where I performed. So yesterday I needed a day off. I went to therapy, my PO Box then went home and relaxed. I listened to a lot of music and watched a movie on my computer.
Therapy was interesting, I was no honest with her the week before because I couldn't handle dealing with something. I resolved the issue so I dealt with not dealing with it this week. I know honesty is vital but my anxiety level was too high to even talk about it the week before. Now I'm being lazy. I had a take on anxiety I wanted to tell you but it requires that you know the graphs of specific equations or I find pictures of them. Can I do it in words? Math is so much easier. I'll try. Oh you can skip to the next paragraph and read about music if this gets you uncomfortable. When I try to do certain things the anxiety increases the closer I get to doing it. It not just rises but it rises at an increasingly faster rate. It becomes physically painful. If I knew there was a peak after which it would go down I could handle it but it doesn't feel like there is. It's like putting your hand closer and closer to red hot metal. If you touch it your fried, well roasted. So what I do is just pull away and go back to the ambient anxiety that I can deal with. It's really more fun with talk of positive second derivatives and asymptotes.
Now that I scared you with anxiety and math I'll talk about music, that will make you happier. I talk a lot about how easy it is for people to fool themselves. I worry that I fool myself all the time. When I hear a song by an artist do I like it because I "know" I like the artist or is it about the song. It never lives in isolation but sometimes I get some evidence that my likes and what really got me thinking about this, my dislikes, are real. When I'm listening to internet radio I'm usually also doing something else online. So I often tune out the announcing, I don't hear what songs are coming up so they hit me by surprise. The artists I don't like I often don't recognize immediately or at all. Hey I don't listen to the people I don't like except when they play with the people I do or on the radio. So twice songs came up where I said, "ew that's terrible." It wasn't that the singing or playing was bad it was that it was insipid. Then when the songs were announced I heard it was artists that I think are insipid. So yes I really don't like them, it's not prejudice.
This morning I'm listening to John Platt's Sunday Supper on the WFUV archives. He played some bands I loved but I thought he had announced somebody else so it took me a bit to get who they were. I was thinking, "these guys are great, Oh wait that's ¬¬____" It was Darlingside and Bobtown. Now that's two of my favorite bands and Bobtown I know as well as I know anyone so perhaps I actually knew who there are and it just hadn't bubbled up to where I could verbalize it. But I'm also confident that those are two great bands.
I know my life is a mess but the one thing I get right is being aware that I can be prejudiced and making an effort to see if that's what's going on. I'm not talking about just racial prejudice. I mean things like my opinion of bands. It has to do with evaluations of anything. I emphasize this often because it's important. There's a huge difference between what you want to be true and what is true. For instance, a friend posted on Facebook that she thought she had a medical condition and wanted to know what to do about it. I had never heard of it so I looked it up. It's a fairly common disease with a standard and effective treatment. I guess she didn't want the safe and effective proven treatment. The only reason I can see for that is it not fitting her prejudices. It would be like having a bacterial infection and not taking antibiotics that you have not had a bad reaction to or not taking insulin for type I diabetes. Hopefully the consequences won't be as severe.
Hey if you missed yesterday's blog please go back and read it. There's a video of me singing an original song. Today I posted a video that will quickly tell you who it is and where it was taken. I'll post it here.
D'oh, once again I bought bagels and forgot to freeze them. I hate when I do that. Well I'll have one now for breakfast. Omelet time? We'll see. Nah, breakfast sandwich.
I never wrote what I planned on writing about, "Mad Max: Fury Road." OK here's the quick version, everything I heard about the movie was wrong. It was not an insult to the Mad Max franchise with Max made subordinate to a feminist centered film. It was also not this great ground breaking feminist film. It was like Beyond Thunderdome an unnecessary addition to the mythology which emphasized weirdness for the sake of weirdness. So much of it just struck me as fake. It's like the CGI people forgot to check how things move through space. And at times the cinematography would become herky jerky I assume for a reason but I just found it annoying. Max was not deemphasized, as in the best film in the series, Road Warrior he became part of somebody else's fight. It's just that the actor playing Max, was not nearly as charismatic as Mel Gibson and they forgot that Max has a sense of humor. What I objected to most though was how it ruins the symmetry of the first two films. In the first Max is a well-adjusted person with a family who is transformed by the murders of his wife, daughter, and partner into a god of revenge. In the second film Max gets his humanity back and stops being mad. In this one he starts off madder than he ever was, he has hallucinations. It was still fun of course. Miller knows how to create excitement, but that's all he did here. I found the ending unsatisfying. I couldn't see things working out as easily as they showed.
OK now for the breakfast.
I signed the Pro-Truth Pledge:
please hold me accountable.
Memories: Not that Horrid Song - May 29, 2018
Wise Madness is Now In Session - May 28, 2018
The NFL and the First Amendment - May 27, 2018
On The Road Again - May 26, 2018
Oliver the Three-Eyed Crow - May 25, 2018
creative commons
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.
Horvendile January 12, 2016
| site search by freefind | advanced |
Follow on Feedly
