i have made a decision; "it's not natural" is not good enough reason to dislike something. if human beings lived in a way that was "natural", we would destroy the earth very quickly and millions of us would starve. not that that's not already happening, but it would happen more quickly. for example, farming is not natural. it is a manipulation of living organisms to suit our needs. without farming, however, providing food for six billion people would be impossible.
to logically disapprove of something, you should have reasons that its negative aspects outweigh its positive ones. emotional reactions are not sufficient reason.

CLICK

dalton+kushner

i learned recently that, in science, it is a commonly accepted fact that it is impossible to create anything. there are a certain number of atoms in the universe, and they are impossible to duplicate or destroy; they can only be shifted around. the amount of matter doesn't ever change, it's just translated into other matter.
so, it's not really possible to create anything. therefore, everything comes from nature. nothing is artificial. this computer that i'm typing on right now is made up of melted, hardened dinosaurs. so is the chair i'm sitting on. my glasses are made from age-old sand and metals. i am made from the food my mother ate while she was pregnant. it's amazing to think about, actually.

a similar principle goes for the imagination, i think.

"Imagination can't create anything new, can it? It only recycles bits and pieces from the world and reassembles them into visions... So when we thing we've escaped the unbearable ordinariness and, well, untruthfulness of our lives, it's really only the same old ordinariness and falseness rearranged into the appearance of novelty and truth. Nothing unknown is knowable. Don't you think it's depressing?"

-tony kushner, angels in america

nothing is new. the only revelations people can ever come to is to rearrange preexisting knowledge or facts into a different manner or form, so that they are understood differently.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M6wJl37N9C0

i don't believe in probability

i am always getting math problems on standardized tests that look like this:


what is the probability that the arrow will land on either yellow or purple?







or something like that. and i've been puzzling to myself, because i have a tendency to overthink things, what makes the spinner decide to land on yellow or purple? the standardized-test answer to this is just "probability; there is an equal chance that it will land on each color because each color takes up the same amount of space blah blah blah..." but there has to be a *reason* that the arrow lands where it does. we just aren't perceptive enough to figure it out. no, perceptive isn't the right word...i can't think of a word...a word that means, like, the equivalent of how much detail you can see, but in figuring out logical problems. for example, hawks can see all of you individual eyelashes while sitting on the top of a tree. the trouble is, we can't see or calculate or figure out the minute little chain effects and reactions and reasons for the arrow landing on green or red or orange. but there has to be some reason, even if it's a ridiculous ripple effect that was set off when a rat jumped up and down six hundred years ago (and then gave someone the plague. sorry. off topic.) that's where that meteorological idea of the butterfly effect, that the flapping of a butterfly's wings sets off a disturbance that can snowball into the destruction of planets or whatever. we can't possibly understand with our limited brains the exact process, or at least we can't observe it. yet. that's why we have this idea of 'probability', that events occur for random reasons. there are no chances.

have you ever noticed that little kids, when making games, tend to really emphasize (or make up) differences? like, it's really easy to put half the kids in blue shirts and half the kids in red shirts and make them separate. it's a game. it's actually a conscious decision to separate and divide, etc. at first, kids start making jokes to each other about how the people in the different colored shirts are not as good in some way, then they actually start to believe it. i, having been a small child recently, understand what this feels like. it actually feels like you're playing a pretend game where you don't like the other side, but you eventually start to believe it. i can't work out what darwinian function this instinct has. it's not beneficial to dislike what's different; it's beneficial to dislike what looks dangerous. i guess it's a side effect of the fact that different tribes of people would always be fighting with each other for whatever, so if someone looks or dresses differently, you're probably at war with them. but why did it turn out that way? that's the bit that i don't understand-why humans aren't communist by nature. when we have something and we meet someone else, we don't share it; we snatch it and hug it at our chests. i suppose it just turned out that way.

the symmetricals

a good name for a band.

There are as many ways to live in this world as there are people in this world, and each one deserves a closer look.

this is something i've been thinking about for a while--is there just one question? i mean, whenever i get into debates with my friends, we eventually spin so far out of where we have the capacity to argue that we have to stop. usually, the questions we come to are those cliched questions like, "what is life?" "what is the responsibility of human beings?" "how did life come about?" "how should morality balance with practical needs?". what i think is that maybe these are all the same question. all of art, literature, and science is trying to answer the same question. and i know that you are probably sitting on the edge of your sea waiting for me to answer the question, but i'm afraid i can't express it in our language any more than i can answer it. the question is somewhat like those listed above, but those are only a sampling. the trouble it that we (humans) are the first race on our planet to have gotten past the survive-in-nature phase. there is no template for what we are supposed to do. that's why future races in science fiction books are so disgusted with us--we are the test run. we are trying to work out what it is we should be doing with ourselves, but it's not in our nature to answer the question. perhaps that's because it is an unanswerable question. well, not unanswerable. it's like the equation x=y. there are an infinite number of solutions, and therefore it is unsolvable. you can't even simplify or reduce it in any way. you just have to plug in some numbers and see if it works.




LINK

i wasn't intending for this to be as smite-y and biblical as it turned out.

his eyes opened slowly. they were crusty with plaster and dirt and unwillingness to awaken. he knew, even before they opened, what he was about to see. he was in that state of consciousness when the mind is awake, but the body is not. he could not feel his wounds. he could not hear the silence all around him.
even after his eyelids opened, his eyes refused to tell him. his eyes were sympathetic, parental. his eyes didn't want him to see.
the ceiling was gone. blocks of wood and plaster and tile lay about him in the harsh, unchanging daylight. he felt that his weirdly twisted body was being pressed on passively. he looked down, and saw that he was pinned under a layer of what was once his roof. he sighed and closed his eyes, trying to extend the moment before he had to fight with the debris.
he knew just what had happened. he knew that if he stood up and looked around, the other houses would be untouched. he knew that no matter how hard he fought, he was dying and would not ever get up. he knew that he had made a mistake. he knew that no one was coming to save him.

this is truly the greatest thing ever.

happy eostre, everybody!

which is

my mind has come full circle in an attempt to think of a title so i must leave you with this, a lame excuse for a joke.

what am i supposed to do? you know, most people who look at things like this are either just lying when they say that they like it, or they're comparing it to hundreds of other things they've seen and therefore not really looking at the thing itself. art has to be accessible in *some* way. most would sneer at that statement, and my response to that sneer is, if it is not accessible, what am i supposed to do? you can have as much intent and emotion as you want when you're *making* something, but if you don't communicate to me what it is that you're feeling or saying, then you haven't really made art, you've made tissues. if you look at a used tissue, you can't tell what it is that the person was feeling when they cried into it. its just refuse. and you can make up perhaps what they were trying to say, but you could just as easily do that with any object in the universe. i guess that's not true. i guess the difference is that you know that the creator was trying to say something, as opposed to what the creator of say, a stop sign was trying to say. i think that's the reason that nature is, and always will be, more impressive to me than art. art is the spillover of someone's mind, or better yet, the mind itself. nature is not. nature does not seek to express a single thought or even a group of thoughts. it does not have a purpose. it was an accident. i guess that's the point of some kinds of art--to try to make something that didn't come out of your brain but that just happened. however, most art is just trying to express what it is that is going on in the artist's mind. and i don't think i'm interested in that unless it is expressed to me in a way that changes my point of view.

what is fair?

If everyone had the same opportunities and abilities, that would be fair. I don’t think that either ideal Capitalism or ideal Communism are the perfect fair world. I think that a fair world is one in which everyone is born with enough to be happy, and can get to a higher place without exploiting anyone along the way, but not too high. I think that a fair world would be one without inheritance, one where everyone starts in the same place and is given the same level of options.
In a fair world, no one could tell anything about you from looking at you except for what you had decided to make of yourself. In a fair world, everyone would be self-made. We would make everything ourselves or voluntarily for each other. There would be no need for charity, but we would give each other things out of natural generosity, not an attempt to be quote-unquote “virtuous”.
We would all naturally look basically the same, but we could alter our appearances however we wanted, and people would consider other people’s physical appearance the way they consider art in a museum; carefully, knowing that everything they see had been arranged to invoke thoughts and emotions in the viewer.
When I say that we would look the same, I do not mean that we would have the same features or skin or anything like that. People would look just as varied as they do now. But the difference would be that the body and face would be seen as a blank slate, not a collection of classifying traits that came with social baggage. I mean this in terms of gender as well as race.
People would travel all the time. We would not have this notion of “work” as a pointless task whose only purpose is to get money from an employer. Instead, our lives would function as a sort of tangible version of the Hindu and Buddhist idea of Karma, as I understand it. We would do something that helped another person, or moved foreword our human culture in some way, and, sooner or later, we would get something in return. No one would have one set employment. We would drift, volunteering to help whoever was nearby with whatever they were doing. For example, no one would stay on a farm for an entire lifetime. When you saw a farm, if you had nothing else to do, you would go and work there for a few hours, or maybe a few days, just to help. Maybe you would take some food with you.
Volunteerism and giving would be the rule. You help and work not because you are expecting to be compensated, but because you know the vibrations will come back to you sooner or later.
Our society would be much less clannish. We would be less attached to our families. Relationships needn’t go in stages; when you meet someone, you can talk to them just like you would talk to someone you had known your whole life. The main problem, I think, with our attitude towards others now is that we have a kind of “everyone is out to get me, better huddle close with the ones I’m not afraid of” attitude.
I said before that we would travel. This is true. We would be acquainted with many different cultures, not just our own. Cultures needn’t all be the same, but they needn’t be so segregated, either. If there were an element of some culture that we liked, we could adopt it. This would be the main advantage of a greater mixing of peoples.
The other reason that I say we would be less familial is that in a society where one associates with one’s parents, one is born with privilege, power, and an idea of where one is among the social hierarchy. In a world with no social hierarchy, one sees no reason to stay with one’s “own people”. If everyone is equal (different, but equal), then there is no reason not to be friends with everyone. People would not be afraid of each other as they are now.
The two main reasons that people are afraid of each other are this: we are afraid of what is different, and we rightfully know that there are dangerous people out there. Neither of these problems would exist.
People would not be afraid of differences for the reasons I have explained above; mixing of cultures, travel, an understanding that humans are different but equal, equality at birth, a looser familial structure, etc.
Also, there would be no need to be afraid of each other. Everyone in this world is born, like I said in the beginning, with equal opportunities and abilities. If we have equal opportunities and abilities, right off the bat there would be fewer people who hurt others and commit crimes, because they don’t need to. The other thing is that everyone would be intensely aware of that sort of manifest Karma that I mentioned above. We wouldn’t hurt each other because we would know that it was pointless; the bad vibrations would just bounce right back.

i have decided that the way to tell if someone has lost all of their childish funness is if they no longer are able to speak in gibberish. or if they are, but it's the common type of gibberish that is basically words, like "shabadabadadoodoodeeedeelalalfoofaa." it really bugs me when people call that gibberish, because it isn't.

when i was really little, i used to bang on the keyboard like sdklfsdfisdfksdfsdf49ewicnm,vnsa and print out whole pages of it and my dad read it to me. that was fun.

please read

this

parsley teardrops

what is it about human beings that looks at a pile of snow or sand or dirt or rocks or legos and decides to build something? we have this endless creative obsession--which is not to say that all of us are artistic, only that we want to create. we are endlessly prolific and we are never satisfied. and, to top this, everything we create creates problems that require us to create more stuff. in the myth of prometheus, epimethius gives all of the physical strengths to the rest of the animal kingdom. prometheus looks in the jar of good traits, and there is nothing left. so, prometheus gives the homosapiens this...thing. it's difficult to describe. i suppose it could be called curiosity. not pandora-type curiosity, but philosopher-type curiosity. have you ever seen the sculptures of early man at the natural history museum? we are so naked, so soft and vulnerable. we have no armor. we just have pointy sticks. but even in this, we are ahead.
there is another element as well, and this is the selfish one. human beings are selfish. there is no way to get around this. we may be idealists, but even the most hardcore communist is a little bit greedy. humans are naturally capitalists. we want to build stuff, get stuff, take stuff, get ahead, win, be the the alpha male, etc. this is why communism never works on a grand scale. people may agree with it theoretically, but instinctively they want to win.
this is why patriarchy won. from my small amount of knowledge of these things, matriarchy is a family-style society; everyone works for the greater good of the people. patriarchy is the opposite; if you can enslave people to build a really big house for you after you're dead, go ahead. good for you.
this is why i think that we still have problems. while our curious side is intrigued by the puzzle of human suffering and our matriarchal side wants to help, we don't want to give things up. we think that the idea of living significantly less luxurious lives for the good of abstract ideas or people we don't know is stupid. and i am not condemning us for that, i am simply stating that this attitude causes problems.

or perhaps this is just how we feel in america.

i haven't written a post this long in a while.

i was researching freeganism recently, because i find it interesting. so, i read the "why freegan?" page. and it said this:

Working Sucks - Where does the money you spend come from? You or your folks working long hours at a dehumanizing job, most likely. You don’t have to compromise yourself and your humanity to the evil demon of wage-slavery! Working sucks and if a little scavenging can keep you from needing a job than go jump in a dumpster! Even if you do need to work to pay your bills, think about how much less you would have to work if you didn’t have to buy food.

true, this does look a little too fanatical to take seriously. but i take everything seriously, so here is what i thought:
in a world where no one worked and everyone scavenged, pretty soon everything would run out. then, people would need to grow and make their own things, which is work in itself. this is originally what work was. however, as humanity got more and more complicated, all kinds of services began to be needed. thus, gradually, "work" became separate from taking care of oneself. actually, for most of history, people had to do both. no, let me rephrase that: men had to do one thing, women had to do the other. men would grow/buy food, make money, etc. women would cook the food, make the clothes, etc. however, quite recently, women (at least in some parts of the world) rejected this role and began to work as well. so now (in developed countries), everyone works. the cooking and clothes-making, and even some of the cleaning and childcare, is done by someone else as their work. everyone does one thing and one thing only. what if everyone, instead of "working" in the way that men used to, would "work" in the way women used to? actually, thinking about it, this is not possible. basic things like crops, cotton, etc. have to come from people working.
but what about recycling? what if we actually don't need that stuff, because we have so much junk lying around already that we could just use that? that still leaves food, though. although it is possible to do as the freegans do and eat recycled food, it wouldn't last for very long. thus, we would need farmers.
but, is it human to become more and more extravagant? to, gradually, think that we require all of these services and luxuries and advances? and i suppose, on a certain level, we do. we are weak. we cannot live just for ourselves--we must huddle together and move forwardforwardforward------->.
so this is my answer to the above paragraph by the freegans: work is human. the only negative work is that which undermines or does not progress society.

"i can't understand why people are frightened of new ideas. i'm frightened of the old ones."

the point of avant-garde art is almost always to challenge the idea of what it is (eg. is this a sculpture? is this a play? is this a song?). in other words, the point of it is to get people to ask, "is this art?"
so, people always doubt that avant-garde art is, in fact, art. but i think that the question is more, "is mainstream art art?" because, like, those paintings from the 18th century of lords and ladies who have paid the artist to make them look good, they're not really art. they're more a service. isn't the point of art to expand the viewer's consciousness?
therefore, if art follows all of the popular conventions of its medium of the day, but its only purpose is to entertain or to gain popularity for the artist, is it really art?

"they always say that time changes things, but you actually have to change them yourself."

you know, there are five billion people in the world. that's 5,000,000,000 people. and every single one of those people could do as much good in the world as martin luther king, jr. did. the only reason we don't is that we are fixed and bottled up into a situation where only quote-unquote "really good people" are supposed to help people they don't know. but that's not the case. i mean, there will always be problems. that i won't deny. there will always be catastrophes and desperate people and horrifying, near-apocalyptic situations, but people can actually help.
american teenagers look at the world, become disillusioned, and crawl into their bedrooms to smoke weed and worry their parents. THAT DOESN'T WORK. this does.

hands on ears and rocks back and forth in fetal position.

i can't decide whether or not it's okay to be happy.

i know, i know, as soon as you se that sentence you immediately think, "that's ridiculous. of course it's okay to be happy. what is the point of life otherwise?" but...
there are a lot of really, really really awful things in the world. and i have a kind of amazingly perfect life comparatively. see, i like to read cynical people's work. and cynical people love juxtaposing people like me with people like this. and it makes be feel realy badly about my life, because i don't WANT to be the one who escapes the horrendousness as others fall into the fire, but what am i supposed to do? survivor's remorse, i guess.

know what i'd like to do ("do you" is implied)?

lie on the cement in the middle of a thunderstorm, look up, and see a renaissance sculpture of madonna, only moving, floating above my head with all of these white robes floating around her as though suspended in space, then have everything around me explode and go swimming in lemonade.

would anyone care to interpret that?

this blog is really kind of devolving.

so if i were to do as i know you wish, what would become of me? how would i ever be able to face my beloved clown-friends ever again ? i know you do indeed hate the words they speak. this i know. i know you want to crucify us and eat us, but...sometimes i wonder if there is more to life than salt. why are you doing this to me? how could i possibly get you what you want?
very weary-looking woman pushes her stringy greasy hair out of her face and bites down on her old cigarette, looking out the window as weak blue light drifts onto her face.
what do you want with my life? i am not a silly human. i am a PERSON. i have a backstory.

UGH.......