I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
Edgar Allen Poe

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.
- H. L. Mencken

Many people would sooner die than think; In fact, they do so
-Bertrand Russell

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 ...
-James Branch Cabell

June 03, 2014 - 1:43 p.m.

Natural History

Once again I am starting very late to write. It's 11;49. I have to get back to writing early

OK this is on the test. It was Monday so what did I do? Right I went to therapy. I had such a late start yesterday I just made it with a few minutes to spare. So for the first time in ages I wasn't depressed and the session was just a stream of consciousness of things I was happy about. It went very quickly. I'll share here something substantial from it, one of the things I prepared to tell her. It's not that I'm still not unhappy about what I had been unhappy about. I don't want to stop being unhappy about that. It's the appropriate response. It's just staying in its room not running all over the house jumping on the furniture.

After therapy I went to get bagels. Bagel Bob's was closed for renovations! The horror! no bagels for a few weeks. I hope they still have half-priced bagels on Monday when they reopen. I soothed my disappointment with therapy gelato and a place across the street and down the block. I forgot the name and I won't be going back. A large cone was more than a sundae and Sundaes and Cones and the ice cream was not as good.

then I headed up to my PO box near school. I had checks! how exciting. Then I went back down to Chelsea to go to Fairway and Trader Joe's I get my peanut butter at Fairway now. It's cheaper and better than Trader Joe's. I also go a couple of chicken legs, one for dinner and one to freeze for another time. When I got home I was going to eat immediately but my nemesis was in the kitchen. One of the things he does to be my nemesis is ignore that I'm using the kitchen and start cooking when I'm there cooking. There isn't enough room for two people to cook at once. I won't do the same to him so I just went in long enough to put my perishables in the fridge.

Dinner was great. I had sopressa salami as an antipasto and had a Caribbean dinner of jerk chicken and baked plantain. I put cinnamon on the already sweet black plantain. It's wonderful. Gustatory therapy is the real deal. This wasn't even that unhealthy. Oh and I had a chocolate egg cream as my drink. I know how to live

Now on to the idea I had in storage I just have to find a segue, a natural one. That's it! It's a natural.

No I'm not going to talk about my favorite baseball movie The Natural.. I've done that before It's about people's concept of what's natural. Let's start at one of my favorite places in the world, The American Museum of Natural History. I fell in love with it the first time I went, I was four or five. There are dinosaurs! Does a kid need more than that? But there are all the animals and rocks and minerals and gems and meteors. It's filled with natural wonders. Then there are the parts that we always concentrated on, in school trips. We never ever ever went to the dinosaurs. We went to the dioramas about Eskimos. I could never understand what people were doing in a museum of Natural history. Aren't people history? I can see human evolution and always loved that part. But not modern people. Some halls in the museum are; South American Peoples, Mexico and Central America, African Peoples, Asian Peoples, Northwest Coast Indians. Plains Indians, Eastern Woodlands Indians, and Pacific Peoples. Notice what continent and people's are excluded? Europeans. Everyone else is on exhibit like the animals and minerals, Only Europeans are "not natural?" Am I the only one that thinks this is racist? All that stuff belongs in a museum of anthropology, not natural history.

At the same time many people think of natural as synonymous with good They want natural remedies and to eat natural foods, and to live naturally. Of course they really don't As Hobbes observed, Life in the state of nature is "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short." Want to live naturally? then why are you living in a house? Why are you wearing clothes? Why are you eating foods that are products of genetic engineering? Oh you think you avoid GMOs? Everything cultivated and raised has been engineered through thousands of years of selective breeding. It has the exactly the same result as modern molecular techniques, it just takes longer. We have altered the genetic code of all food crops and animals. Their natural ancestors are often unrecognizable. And of course don't take antibiotics or have your broken bones set or even take those herbal remedies as they are processed and therefore not natural. And don't cook your food. And don't read or make music on instruments or paint or use any tools. That's not natural.

There's a word for unnatural things, civilization. And the thing that defines humanity is that it's unnatural for us to live naturally. Many doesn't just adapt to the environment he gets the environment to adapt to him. Does that mean that everything man does is right? Of course not. That's as stupid as saying everything natural is good. Natural botulism toxin is bad, so is manmade sarin. Things are good and bad based on effect and even then it needs context. Is fire good? It keeps us warm it cooks food it smelts metals. It can also kill us. Shortcut answers tell us nothing. Stop worrying if things are natural, worry about their effects in the setting they are in.

And OK The Natural is an amazing film that gets baseball exactly right, mythic. This scene is perfect, the cinematography, the music, the acting, and the writing. It's the world not as it is, but as it ought to be.

And just so I can use it in the preview.



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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



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Horvendile June 03, 2014
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