Utentegoosecap

Nome vero

Teddy

La mia biblioteca

(June 2023) I draw cartoons with words.

……………………….

(February 2024) I enjoy thinking that what I write is sound, and that it is a good product I offer freely and for my own benefit and improvement, and this pleasure is no small part of why I bother using this site and reading and reviewing books. However, probably the MOST instructive thing, for me, is what I hide from you as soon as possible—my mistakes. I record my thoughts, and this makes it possible, almost easy, for me to analyze myself, to find not only the good but the bad—the things that are, in retrospect, glaring mistakes….

It’s that moment when you realize that you’ve been manifesting people that are shit, (to use the phrase loosely, not scientifically), because YOU are the problem, and that they, were, you, right.

And without this site I don’t know that I’d have that. It wouldn’t be as easy, anyway.

…………………………

(January 2024) Socializing is weird; it’s also weird how quickly my little dictums date (although I have to admit that’s part of the fun…. And the pain! 😵‍💫). Like I’m talking to my neighbor-friend, and she finds my Instagram—“in my mind I’m a very aggressive ballet dancer”— and she’s like, That’s so funny; and I’m sitting there thinking, I haven’t watched any ballet in months; that’s so random.

And then there’s religion, you know.

(Odin) To study the runes, you have to have Discipline; you have to have an organized, inflexible mode of life, you have to—I’ll wait.

(Hermes) No, I was listening. Hey, what was that.

(voice in the hallway) But my favorite cartoon character, Dad, is Hermes. We have a lot of fun. We talk about things like—(opens door, notices bind-runes everywhere) (beat, then) You’re a pagan god! You’re a Greek god!

(Hermes) I’m a transnational entity…. It’s like being a corporation, that’s all.

………………………..

(August 2023) The whole journey is to know that we never missed the mark, never left home, were never off the point.

………………………..

(July 2023) “It’s like a chief of police trying to find the arsonist, when the arsonist IS the chief of police.” ~Eckhart Tolle on you trying to solve your problems by intellectualizing/spinning your wheels

I don’t read Eckie as much as I used to, since he’s a little pessimistic about the ordinary world, I guess you could call it, even though he’s optimistic in other ways. A lot of the time I spent reading him I thought I was going to find the best knowledge or whatever, and now I realize it’s not that. Ironically sometimes I think about what he wrote now, and it makes more sense. I try to spend more time amusing myself now, and spending time focusing on how I’m feeling, and how to increase feelings of happiness. Everyone overlooks it automatically, but happiness Is the reason, you know. (I also think about money, but I think it’s really hard to make good money if you’re not happy. As well as rather undesirable, you know.)

………………………….

(late July 2023) I trust myself. I am safe.

……………………………..

(July 2023) And the other thing about reading Important Books—‘I’m going to read all the Important Books!’—is that it can create resentment when life interrupts your “free time” (Jack made fun of that, thinking you have title and deed to your time, and nobody else does), whereas if you’re not attached, if you’re reading some little book you can read but is a little silly, then you can talk to that other person on the bench, you know—‘Shit, I was reading that other book to be relatable, so’—and then he’ll tell you in intermediate English ten times that he likes friendly people like you, and you can ask him questions about New York or whatever, and you won’t say much, but he’ll insist that you are very intelligent, right. And how he likes it here even though he’s not a citizen yet. It’s kinda nice. Of course, people do have bad experiences sometimes, but sometimes people get along with the authorities and with people in general, and like being friendly and neighborly, and a lot of time it’s the people who—I mean, he didn’t make mistakes, but he had a very simple sentence structure, but it didn’t bother me. I think we attract things like that, you know. I mean, maybe you attracted the whole 21st century so it’s hard to undo it all at once, the sad people, but you’re interested in complicated life and bad things you meet people like that; you kinda drop that and take up the simple good people you meet the guy from Peru who, correctly if with a slightly discernible difficulty, says he likes friendly people, people like you.

…………………………

(March 2023) I’m in the process of overhauling, seriously, this profile. Partly a lot of what I wrote before was negative emoting, kinda the distant cousins of the core negative meandering thought trip I spent much of the last you know thirty years or so on, although it’s gradually been lightening up for a good seven years, you know.

But also a lot of it is, I don’t know, me thinking things and explaining, and saying things that I think are true and which are indeed my truths, but—and although obviously no one has to pay me for this—my internal concept is that I’m creating something of worth, something that will one day be recognized as being of value—worth something in money, even! Worth a book’s going-over!—but what I’ve done although perhaps true and perhaps honest and perhaps truly sincere, aren’t helpful to anyone and don’t accomplish anything or systematically (or non-systematically) solve any problem, and at least sometimes simply emoted negatively, and indeed were often centered around my own battle with negative emotions.

I’ve since received some help with the emotional energies, and the whole change is the culmination of my practice, but anyway the point is, although I write, from now on I have to seriously consider—at the very least, seriously consider—erring on the side of simple and dismissible positive emoting, rather than to explain in a way that only serves ego, and which doesn’t and actually which really /can’t/ help anyone else, or even me, really.

You know?

......................

(March 2023) On the one hand, I do try to include different sorts of books in several different ways, but on the other hand, if it’s bad enough I delete it. It’s only a record of all the books that I’ve read that are worth something; it’s not some legal document. If a book doesn’t have a redeeming factor and deserves to be forgotten, I’ll forget it.

…………………………

(June 2023) The three cultures: Not everything that isn’t science is really a humanity; some things are supposed to be just invisible I guess 🫥…. And much that isn’t scholarly is worthy, along with plenty of crap on both sides, and much that is simple has been claimed by scholars, and they’ve long since forgotten what they’ve done. And of course, as any of them can tell you, humanities and sciences are different—so there are three cultures, the popular, humanities, and science. In a healthier world, more emphasis would be placed on the people who have the ‘higher gifts’—if there are higher gifts, maybe Paul was wrong, ha, or else, being higher isn’t, //better//, you know, just //different//, higher isn’t always more //worthy//, although tentatively there is //that// sort of difference, if you’ll remember that people lie about that too…. And then if the “higher” people weren’t trying to look askance down at the others, the others wouldn’t be alienated and would find it easier to journey up, unless they didn’t want or need to, in which case they’d not be worse off, because the point of the thing wouldn’t be to please your faction and destroy your enemies, right.

Anyway, the difference between “the popular” and “humanities” is subjective and in some sense my division is peculiar to me—I don’t think that being “popular” means that it isn’t being “good” (eg mental health memoir), that it’s “popular” in the ordinary sense or culturally “normal” or whatever polite stigma I’m supposed to place on people who are freaky, right (a non-Indian reading the Gita; almost anybody becoming a Wiccan)—it is only meant to show whether something is, in itself, simple or non-simple, regardless of reputation. It is not the same thing as being a true thing or a lie. And, of course, some relatively good “humanities” general lit novels are popular, easy to read, and amusing, even though “school” and literary novels still aren’t quite like the other sort, you know. Science is usually easy to divide from humanities, although sometimes the intersection between science and religion can complicate it a little, and also I think a science TV show is still science, despite being accessible.

……………………………

(Pre-3/23) Just briefly: diversity is part of integrity; you still have to be honest about whatever you choose to speak about, and it’s nice to go deep into the abstract ‘nature of things’, but without virtuous action towards people of all backgrounds—to the extent humanly possible, just like we’re always limited, to some extent even in our honesty, (automatic, reactive instinctual thoughts that aren’t true) let alone metaphysics—without that diversity there’s no integrity, no morality….

……………………………

The forms of philosophy and psychology (and success), draft (April-May 2023)

I’ll try to describe how I feel about the forms of philosophy and psychology in the light of success and in a new way, correcting some of my earlier misconceptions and addressing the life-avoiding energy of pure philosophy in a less alarmist way. My one friend is a philosopher’s philosopher, and he’s made me see both the life-avoiding ways of pure philosophy (thinking about knowledge, etc.) through his dysfunction, and also to see it all in a sympathetic way, since he is my friend and we have history—actually since the moment we met, since he reminded me of my father, or rather, how my father sometimes imagined himself to be.

Aside from science, which in its non-psychological aspect isn’t concerned with the human personality, the most ‘academic’ or stilted topic here, perhaps, is philosophy. Then there’s general academic psychology (cognitive and biological), which uses science to investigate the human personality, and then there’s popular & applied psychology (and mental health memoirs), which can be difficult to distinguish from the former—cognitive academic or semi-academic psychology and formally written applied (non-academic) psychology, I mean—but the audience is different, and the diversity aspect in authorship is different, and it has a different way of being, almost like religious and new age people have different ways of being, although they can be confused, and finally there’s spiritual psychology, which although it can be true and profound, and even truer and profounder and even more practical than the secular psychologies, are not likely to be accepted as being valid by all, some of whom might dismiss it as vulgar or childlike or non-Western or mentally ill or something, and which sociologically has a ‘marginal’ character from the top-down perspective, even though it might be far more accessible for intelligent people on the bottom than scientific journal articles about the stages of physical development, you know. Anyway—

I call general philosophy that which is generally termed philosophy simply, the study of life based on the traditional Western texts and ways, which can either be ‘practical’—although, like becoming a vegan, only practical in one particular sense! 😸—and which is basically politics aesthetics and ethics—and theoretical, “knowledge”, etc. (I am very much an intuitive and not a formal thinker, and most modern philosophers don’t think as I do.)

Academic psychology has a strong link to science and biology, although cognitive psychology, also smiled on by the academy, has formal links to practical (individualist) philosophy, and can be difficult to distinguish from the more popular applied forms. Certainly once we reach mental health memoirs we are downstream from, or below, academic psychology, even though these forms of writing have been nourished by it, and are often seen as aligned by people on both sides of the divide, the way that unorthodox religion and spiritual philosophy are sometimes mixed together.

[Special note, May 2023: I actually had to redivide this; I tried kinda academic/prestigious vs. popular/applied (plus the memoirs), but the line between cognitive and applied (soc psych, for example, or just prestigious-popular), was always kinda arbitrary, and biological and cognitive literally Only have their prestige in common. Some things from the academy, like Albert Ellis, kind flow out in this grand hierarchy that’s nevertheless connected, cognitive to applied to popular to memoir, and some of it just kinda sits up by the window and sneers at passersby (biological and ‘pure’ stuff, you know, the textbooks). And then, everything that’s not set apart like that is one piece, all the psychology except for the biological, the spiritual, and psychiatry and psychoanalysis (I actually forgot to mention those last two before, I think), is part of that grand hierarchical yet connected stream of mainstream stuff.]

And finally, there is, for some of us, that very spiritual psychology (and various forms of eastern and shamanistic philosophy). The places along edges of the circle can be very far apart even if they are all the edges of the circle. Some new agers study the life after death questions or the spirit beings question or any question too large and insane for science; others simply challenge the idea that money is somebody else’s damn question to study, and has nothing to do with your feelings. Although, if there were no question of practical questions in a somewhat broad sense—all questions of practicality, background to practicality—then it would be outside the magic circle of psychology (interesting questions of your life and emotions) entirely, and be practicality itself (concretely, how to do your life).

………………………………..

(histories) (May 2023)

I’ve thought about this but I’ll try to keep it brief; history is less subject to a truly exhaustive treatment in terms of details than something like philosophy (although the details in philosophy are mysterious). There are two main forms of history/sociology: majoritarian (‘general’) and diverse. People of privileged and underprivileged backgrounds differ in many things; they actually have asymmetrical experiences. Where you are on this dividing line of the asymmetrical in some sense matters more (unfortunately) than mere legal nationality—American/non-American, for example. There’s a lot of diversity in most American cities, states, and counties, sometimes more than we imagine. Strangely it’s probably often easier to go to Paris, than it is to go to the airport.

Although I think most white people’s (or white men’s) assumption that diversity should be optional/peripheral, in society certainly and at times even in education, at least compared to the majority culture’s influence, is one of the main things that holds us back and divides us, for the sheer sake of not being driven mad, driven silly, by the madness of the world, I will try to include more majoritarian than diverse history/sociology, even if again I don’t think that “history” and “white men’s history” are synonymous, right. But maybe, say, 60/40 would work. Although I do think that I shall try to include IIs, IIIs, and IVs in the ‘general’ column to the extent that I can. Optimism, reformism instead of angry radicalism, openness to commoner experiences, these are all good things—exclusion, not so much.

……………………………………..

Miscellaneous notes, YouTube videos (May 2023)

Sometimes these are “like a book”, sometimes not. If they’re five to ten minute videos, or even less, then it’s kinda naturalistic, like talking; you don’t watch 149 of them and count it as a book, you know. But if they’re longer and more formal—5 or seven videos, or ten videos, of an hour each, or even longer—at least say forty minutes, you know; then it is “like a book”, because it’s like a formal class, right. One’s not better than the other; sometimes I over-emphasize “like a book”. Formal isn’t inherently better than naturalistic…. If I but knew.

Watching sporting events also isn’t “like a book”, although books can be read about sports, and doing this latter thing obviously implies the former, lol.

Miscellaneous notes, recorded music (June 2023)

Recorded music: Incidentally, I bundle together say five albums together to form a book-like bundle, conceptually. That’s not how it’s created or published, of course, but I don’t know any book that you can read in an hour or forty minutes or even less, you know; I want all my books and book-like bundles to represent a certain minimum investment of energy so it’s fair and meaningful.

And, yes, it’s all world music, basically, all the stuff I bought and kept and can listen to without ads. I don’t know the words, not even the Spanish ones, but I like non-vocal and non-English vocal music so that I can meditate or do affirmations, (I do have some guided meditations and affirmations too), instead of listening to song after song of bad lyrics, highly-pleasured miserable people spreading their bad life philosophies. Of course, I have started to go back to listening to regular Anglophone vocal music sometimes, a song or two on YouTube, but I’m not the kind of person who can sit down and listen to a whole album anymore, in a sitting. (And I wasn’t happy when I was that person.) And, of course, since I went through a phase when I felt this duty not to look down on popular music and popular people as though I were a critic or a Hugh Auden person or something, but didn’t really //want// to listen, I’d buy a bundle of stuff by artist after artist, listen twice to each album, but never have the desire to listen again, and then one day I was obsessed with the idea that I was using up storage space on stuff I didn’t want to listen to—didn’t want to //inflict// on myself again, you know. So I deleted it, and that was probably the stuff that I would listen to if I were to do bundles of popular Anglophone vocal music, you know—but I have listened to that stuff, which is why I’ve read books about perhaps the two most popular teen idols of the Millennial birth cohorts, and why I’m reading Bono’s book, and why I’d like to read about Bob Marley and the Beatles and Bill Withers, and some //real// female artists, smart ones!, and more phony white artists, and on and on you know—on and on. And BTS and the classical composers and jazz pianists, too, who are part of my “meditation” bundles. [Edit late June 2023: But I’ve decided that many of the music pieces are Not ‘popular’—mainly the classical pieces, which I like, but they’re more scholars being accessible, than ordinary people being “good”—and I’ve deleted many of the more strange-and-‘perfect’ ones, you know. Although I’ve still kept a lot of the “world” music, almost all of it, really, and that Is popular, even if it’s less familiar or whatever to Westerners than our classical music. Much of our civilization isn’t meant to be about the popular. That’s how Duckie designed it, you know.]

…………………………………….

nature & science: 15

I: 10 (1 ME)

II: 3

III: 2 (1 A, 1 B)

IV: 0

***

diversities: 24 (w/o audiobooks)

I: 5 (1 Q, 1 H)

II: 7 (1 J, 1 ME, 1 N, 1 w/I)

III: 7 (5 B, 2 A)

IV: 5 (3 B, 1 A, 1 H)

***

general history, sociology, and politics: 34

I: 21

II: 8

III: 4 (4 B)

IV: 1 (1 M)

***

general philosophy: 6 (n.b. not audiobooks)

I: 4

II: 1

III: 1 (1 B)

IV: 0

***

general religion: 52

I: 29 (1 w/II, 1 J)

II: 15 (1 Q)

III: 3 (3 B)

IV: 4 (3 B, 1 N)

general interfaith: 31

I: 15 (3 J; 1 ME; 1 w/III or IV, B; 1 w/III, A)

II: 5 (1 J) 

III: 9 (8 A, 1 N)

IV: 2 (2 B)

special interfaith: 22

I: 9 (1 H, 1 w/III or IV, N)

II: 12 (1 w/I)

III: 0

IV: 0

N/A: 1 (1 I/II N-B)

***

biological and ‘pure’ psychology and popular psychiatry: 5

I: 4

II: 1

III: 0

IV: 0

cognitive applied and popular psychology (and mental health memoirs): 20

I: 9

II: 9

III: 1 (1 B)

IV: 1 (1 B)

psychoanalysis et cetera (n.b.: books): 5

I: 3

II: 2

III: 0

IV: 0

spiritual psychology: 63

I: 23 (1 H, 1 w/A {PI}, 3 Q, 1 w/II)

II: 27 (1 w/I, 1 H, 1 ?)

III: 4 (3 A, 1 N)

IV: 5 (3 B, 2 A)

N/A: 4 (4 group authored)

***

“Practical”: 45

I: 21 (1 J, 1 w/II & IV, 1 ?)

II: 12 (4 w/I)

III: 5 (3 A, 2 B)

IV: 4 (2 B, 1 A, 1 N)

N/A: 3

***

Lifestyle etc: 8

I: 1

II: 3 (1 w/I? & III?, B?)

III: 0

IV: 1 (1 A w/I)

N/A: 3 (2 II/IV, 1 ?)

***

media studies: 7

I: 3 (1 w/III & IV, B)

II: 2 (1 w/I)

III: 1 (1 B)

IV: 1 (1 A, w/III, A)

***

general humor: 7

I: 4

II: 1

III: 1 (1 B)

IV: 0

N/A: 1 (1 w/I-IV)

***

ballet & opera performances; (pop and academic) visual arts: 11

I: 7 (1 w/IV, B)

II: 2

III: 1 (1 B)

IV: 0

N/A: 1 (I/II 1)

***

recorded music: 18

I: 7 (1 ?, 1 H, 1 J, w/III or IV, B)

II: 1

III: 10 (5 B, incl. 1 B, w/I & II; 4 A; 1 N)

IV: 0

***

general sports: 6

I: 3

II: 2

III: 1 (1 B)

IV: 0

***

general literature: 66

I: 21 (2 H, 1 ME)

II: 29 (4 ME)

III: 6 (4 B, 2 A)

IV: 10 (6 B, 3 A, 1 N)

general fiction etc: 64

I: 24 (4 w/II, 1 w/III or IV, N)

II: 31 (2 Q, 1 w/I, ME; 1 w/III or IV, N/A/PI).

III: 6 (3 A, 1 B, 2 N)

IV: 3 (3 B)

***

Audiobooks & YouTube etc: 14

I: 7 (1 w/ME)

II: 3

III: 3 (3 B)

IV: 1 (1 B)

***

general TV shows, total: 9

N.B. This notes the //creator(s) of a show, which obviously slants it towards the white guys at the very top, but that’s kinda the point: how much diversity is there, interpreted strictly, although because of this the numbers themselves will be very ‘I’-heavy, due to the nature of the age. My system makes sense, though, because although I allow that an actress exists in a way that a fictional character does not: and yet, we do not say that Emma Woodhouse has invented herself, do we?

Second note: Also, with TV shows, the ‘director’, to use the movie term, is an un-credited ‘show-runner’ who runs the show along with the creator or star or whatever. Since show-runners are generally white men, shows fronted by diverse talent (show creators/narrators or frontmen of non-fiction TV, although those shows are not included here), are actually probably a case of mixed parentage, if you will, with regards to background. That is not reflected in the numbers below (but only in this note).

I: 6 (2 w/II)

II: 3

III: 0

IV: 0

Films: 10

I: 6

II: 3 (1 w/III, B)

III: 1

IV: 0

***

language materials: 1

I: 1 (1 w/III or IV, A)

II: 0

III: 0

IV: 0

***

……………………………..

Fellowship of Isis books: (March 2023):

Fellowship of Isis ritual books—ie not the “Call of Isis” or the “Isis of Fellowship” memoirs, the pagan liturgy books, are So Short: they’re like movies or magazines or something in length, so I think that those will be the only books I have that will be like, bundled together in groups of three to form one, “book”, right…. (One imaginary bundle, lol.) They’re not like, proper-length books, and I wouldn’t have published them in that format. But, I can be a martinet for discipline about stupid shit like that, right. (shrugs)

……………………………..

popular vs “noble”, or popular vs humanities

(late July 2023) I want to try to get a sense of how much popular stuff I read—although you can think as much as you like about a decent popular book, if it’s written well—and how much humanities (I don’t read much science, but that’s a different story—nobody mistakes a book about the new physics for a Star Trek adventure), and to strip it of the whole popular vs noble claptrap. Homer is noble and a romance novel isn’t; fairy tales, folk tales, and the tales of the elders of the ancient nations are noble and a romance novel isn’t; Jane Austen is noble and a romance novel isn’t. Although of course, Jane’s books and at least half to two thirds of the fairy tales are romances, and all the books mentioned EXCEPT for Jane’s are the product of a popular imagination, simple people, and not the producers of the “good” art, you know. Jane deserves some credit, but, bless me, it’s like “the world as it should be”—the most “artistic” in its proper place, selling more than the median popular book, right. It’s a little artificial. And, La!—you’re not supposed to know how things are done, so the whole aspect of money is mostly hidden from you, although precious, precious, precious!, Pure! bastards like Hugh Auden thought that Jane showed a little too much of real life (the bare ankles of real life, perhaps), you know, like…. Can’t let the peasants know anything about money! They’d stop serving my soup! ~You know, like the <poverty thinking> of the traditional rich person, who couldn’t raise an extra hundred dollars above his traditional income on his mother’s life, you know…. ‘Noble’, that’s what that is. Yeah, it’s noble alright…. Noble as propping up a corpse behind a cheap desk in a schoolroom, you know.

(sighs) (British sigh) But I’m NOT disaffected, Mr Cherryderry; no; no; no—a thousand times no! (cackles)

………………………………

Pointless rant for a biased world, ironically: Friday the 13th, October 2023

So you do not like the world, Christian! Your many factions need only discover the why of it, precisely…. Of course, the day people out in public talk about the church the way that the church talks about the world when they are in private, supposing themselves alone with each other, and successful in their village schemes—on that day, the (admittedly unhappy) day that the world ‘talks back’ to the church, we have a piece for the newspapers, the roving problem-finders…. Well-schooled by theology, I suppose! Sin is everywhere! All is evil, like shit concealed by snow! (You can almost understand an African saying it, except you Know that the imitation is practically always rather the other way.)

So you do not like the world, Christian! The village oppression is thick as thieves; the library of museums is bringing me to my knees! But how well do you do, Christian, without this world you do not like? Would even a half hour of real discomfort bring a philosophy-of-poverty smile to your pious face? As if even the fortitude you probably do not possess could justify you stealing another’s joy!

You probably get the idea….

…. And it’s like: people will read these books about well-being, about money, and also health and relationships, and they’ll say that they didn’t finish the book, but they don’t understand the point of wanting the well-being, you know—for money they’ll just come out and say it; they don’t want well-being, they want a Higher Power, although for health and relationships it’s more of a liars’ game—I preach the Christ! If you think my ice-heart don’t got a relationship, just ask my beat-down wife!…. And it’s like, they won’t finish the book and on the book they don’t finish they’ll say that they don’t understand the why of having money—more than them, that is. You can have more money than people in some other country, or some other race or gender, but you can’t have more than them, because they’re the measure of all propriety and all okay and all grace and all truth, and all humility, really, and it’s like—ARE YOU FOR REAL? You know, like, is that your honest answer? I mean, I know you have to ride the village elder train with your patriarch ticket to where you think that you’re going to go, but gosh: where do you suppose that IS, right?…. Museum talk is this sickness, but whenever people see it, it looks So Normal to them, and it’s like: normal must be really really sick for us, you know.

……………………………….

(2nd half of October 2023)

Of course, even though I deleted/tried to forget a certain amount of Christian books, such as the books from the Most Unhealthily-Tempered Famous Men of the Christian Era series, (never my main go-to), but realistically, some Christians books have influenced me, some I even like, and it would be inaccurate to say I died became a new being overnight when I went back to the craft. Still, I feel less obligated now to waste my time, you know. The strange confluence of Christian Brothership & Total Acceptance I had before led to this situation where as a liberal Christian I felt I had to reach for those outside the magic circle of Christianity with one hand, and to the other for the conservative Christians, but now I just feel like the folk Christians, the conservatives, just want to be left alone, and will sin on anyone who gets too close, you know. Going through my old free samples which I’m trying to organize and trim, a review: “Liberals, blue meanies, anti-Christs, and woke people will probs hate this book. That’s why I liked it. Security blankie book! Let’s cuddle!” Hope you enjoy it, and thanks for the heads-up…. I mean, you should do well by all the children of men, but if someone just wants to be left alone in their isolation, isn’t the (passive) good deed just to ignore them? I’ve got a life to live, I can’t waste it on the people who negotiate in bad faith, consider all creation to be their own ego, etc…. It’s kinda like, although I hate to do this to the punk kids, the worst manifestation of punk, or snob, controversy with the pop kids. The problem isn’t what you do: it’s that YOU are YOU. If I put down “Harry Potter” and pick up an album influenced by punk, immediately suspicion falls on that punk artist, or when the ordinaries adopt parts of academic ideals, the academics just adjust their attack and change their ideals, you know…. People just do what they have to do to exclude. It’s a waste of time reading that person's book; it really is. Reading that person's book isn’t inclusion, it’s just wasting your time, and it won’t help you be at peace with them.

………………………………………

Religion & literature (and success), (April 2023)

Sometimes thinking makes me afraid, but I’ll try to say this once so I can figure out what I think, and then I’ll avoid saying it again and again because it’s “interesting” and difficult.

In the past I read a lot of religion and literature—it was almost my only gold and silver—and I was afraid of being a specialist, you know, someone who only does what pays, but now I see that I should still be a success (in that particular way), and not just someone who “deserves it”, right.

Religion, for example, certainly can be good, but it certainly shouldn’t become instead of the way of drawing all things together, the way of driving all things apart, and away. I’ve done a certain amount of paring down the religion collection, so I’m not left either accusing, or supporting the wrong things. (And it can easily start as the second and end as the first.)

…. I mean, if you have this memoir of the girl in the small town orthodoxy, talking about how she loves her friends there, (and this sort of book will certainly suffer in people’s eyes from being /her/ book), then the really difficult people will just cut her off for liking people, and she’ll wander through the book terrified because she knows this will happen. And if it’s some classic era guy’s theology of the global hierarchy, it might be scholarly and thoughtful, but there will be a certain amount of suspicion at the suggestion that anyone has a choice, when you’re there to fight the war in heaven, and the metaphors will be taken beyond the place where they work, and your only choice will be obey/disobey, so then, why protect the institution from its mistakes? (And with the liturgical liberals, you kinda wake up sometimes for a really good sermon, but then you go right back to autopilot, mumbling that you don’t really like Jesus because you’re afraid of him, and you don’t want him to get too close…. And that’s the main third group, really.)

And that’s not to say that religion can’t be a blessing—it can be the knowledge of God that leads to happiness and community. But nothing in that should make success impossible. Sometimes we have a habit of luring people in with ‘it will be better for you and your neighbor’ or you know ‘now you’ll have a real neighbor’, and then it gets switched to this resentment of everything that’s not fear and abstraction, you know—things that would certainly be the issues of my personality type, you know.

I love you; I bless you.

…. Community is important for people in general, but as religious people, I think we owe something to those who “don’t believe” or “don’t belong/want to belong” under our guidelines, and that’s the idea that we don’t just hang together out of a sense of party, you know. (Although sometimes clearly we do.)

But as for literature—lit isn’t as different from religion as it’s sometimes assumed, and it is something of a devotion for many of those relatively few people who read books. Not being able to believe enough in a holistic way to even read a novel (or for some people, to focus enough), is something that might be a missing positive element for a lot of people. But equally, even though as for myself, I’ve always had an extremely powerful ability to suspend disbelief for a story, sometimes this also has not made me happy. Novel reading isn’t productive in the narrow sense, and sometimes understanding how money or relationship would work isn’t as important as actually gathering money and doing relationships. Equally it’s hard to balance the demands (if you like) of different kinds of genres, and not trying can lead to a very unbalanced psyche, whether from some sort of high ideology or I guess religion in fiction, an over-devotion to the past, for example, or else a popular and highly gendered style where everything is about the nervous proving of identity, can be bad. I’ve been both contra-phobic and femme mystique ideology, both in very exclusive ways at different times, but I guess my greatest literature-illusion has been dreaming dreams and not making them happen, you know. And certainly a lot of dreamers and thinkers are like that, and although it is good to have a perspective on time and the classics, escapism and lacking a critical gaze or some sort of ambition, other than checking boxes on the grand list—that’s just marking time, in a way.

But I don’t want to take it too far; fiction is holistic, and a lot of good can come through ‘the telling of the good story’ (the gospel, if you like), and I know I’ll always read lit books. It’s just not the same as practical living, even if it is the most down to the earth thing they teach you in high school, arguably—indeed it’s too close to real life for some of the nerds, of whom I was probably one.

But there’s a lot they don’t teach you at normie school, you know.

……………………

(Dec 2023)

Ironically I had to get a replacement Kindle in August 2023, about a month before…. And it was very weird, lol.

Anyway; now it’s different.

(Knights of the Old Republic Jedi Counsel guy) I fear the Christians will lead Jesus down an all-too-familiar path….

I guess I’m dating myself. I found a (copper) 1981 penny today: older Milennial; that’s how I feel. Days are gone, days are gone, ah…. I remember being a Sith; I remember being an overweening naive Jedi tyrant—that’s how I started out; it’s a long way from the Right Way, the ‘right way’, you know…. I’m green and grey. Because I’m all this, you know….

……………………..

(Dec 2023) And all this is not mine, and not permanent.

I guess that I just think that “Christianity” is not a very good classificatory scheme, you know. (And some Christians think of it almost exclusively as a classificatory scheme.) I know that sounds weird or like a nonsense phrase almost, but what I mean is that saying, “I am a Christian”, really doesn’t mean much, one way or the other. You could be a Good Christian or a Bad Christian—a good witch or a bad witch, so to speak. You could be an isolated and/or muscular male Christian, or a codependent and/or mothering female Christian. And so on. It really just doesn’t mean much as a classification system. I also think that Christians are too rejecting of power in theory and too drawn to it in practice. But mostly, again, the problem I have with the concept in practice is that it’s supposed to be this One Great Thing, whereas really it’s many different things about which you really can’t say much universally. That’s what I think.

………………………

(religious memoirs, miscellaneous) (April 2023)

Sometimes religion memoirs are stories of Loss and Hardship; people are sold the idea that this will bring them bravery and resilience. Sometimes they get their money’s worth. But it’s also true that sometimes people tell stories like that to seem more profound than they really are, (even women do this), or to protect themselves—like people will like them because theyre unhappy; they’ll get pity or, at least, they’ll be protected from jealousy…. Or maybe it’s their ticket to the mainstream, right; “I may be an immigrant, but I got cancer! Anybody can get cancer! I’m one of you! I uphold your values!”…. And, sometimes, people tell stories of “loss” not because something terrible has happened to them—of course, oft-problematic human nature happens to us all, but sometimes the protagonists of stories of “loss” are unusually fortunate— but simply out of habit, they complain. So a story of loss could either create gratitude from terrible trials, or a sense of entitlement and pessmism from unusual good fortune.

…. (religion, history, etc— late May 2023)

I think about my parents a lot, not least my dad, even though my mom would probably be less scandalized by my opinions (although she’s not a great communicator, doesn’t like to engage with what she doesn’t like). Anyway, my dad always says or thinks—or at least tries to give the impression that he believes deeply—that religion is the ‘best thing’, the good, orderly thing, but realistically he talks about history, widely considered, in the sense of history, politics, fighting, and feeling poorly, much more than religion, and almost never gives an impromptu thing about Jesus the way he can give an impromptu thing about ‘liberals are bad’, you know. He also probably thinks that religion is the ‘best thing’, but he’s not the best-person, but if he sticks with history, at least he’s the good white man, you know. I don’t know; it’s a little hard to work out. But since I want the ‘best thing’, and since God is indeed the best thing, and history, politics, fighting, and feeling poorly is the noise of life, I tried to maximize religion as the ‘best thing’ and minimize history as the distraction.

Obviously very extreme mysticism where you don’t care about the difference between ordinarily different things as a matter of pride can be detrimental, so I would read a little history and even a very little science, you know. But that thing I had found kinda remained: religion is the ‘best thing’, and then something else covers it up. But I’m starting to think that religion—formal religion, as opposed to seeking God—is not really the ‘best thing’, even formally seeking God or consciousness is not always the ‘best thing’, and history and such, in a broad sense and not synonymous with feeling poorly, is not really the enemy—because there is no enemy. Don’t get me wrong, there are plenty of insecure, little-dick tyrants out there who feel sorry for themselves, and who want you to know that until their enemies are crushed more finely, they—the little-dick tyrants—won’t be able to deal with the undeserved scorn and terribly real oppression that they’re suffering under, you know. But there are really no enemies in life, not even people like that, so even “history” and other gargantuan things like science, but history is more romantic because it’s like a malicious boy doing the bad thing…. I don’t know. It’s part of the path. And so are, really at least as important as both those other things put together, making money and being prosperous enough to be like the Silver Hermes, you know; you’re Hermes, and then the Silver Hermes is like your dream-self, your guide-self, who has what you desire….

(shrugs) And that’s very different from history, politics, fighting, and feeling poorly, formally, science, formally, or God, religion, and consciousness, formally—but there’s no separation, really there is no dark god and light god, because they’re both one.

…. (May 2023)

Two brief and (mostly) unrelated thoughts:

—As I noted on the previous profile page in different words, there’s probably nothing I’ll say that I won’t come to disagree with later, either in an obvious way, or subtly. You either take a walk, turn around, and go back; or else you venture further into the crystal cave. That’s life.

—As I’ve also written before, if somewhat sloppily, I guess—and I’m a perfectionist—although I’ve worked very very long and hard on taming anger and not being weird and resentful or lashing out at people; at the same time, a certain amount of discontent at the way that normal people dump on the world and on each other, is satisfactory, in my opinion. You have to be a little sad that you’re angry and you have to take care of yourself, but you can’t just will yourself to be the sort of uncaring robot who is indeed one of the different kinds of normie who dumps on the world and on people. “Be ye angry, and sin not.”

(May 2023) But it’s never personal, you know. Others simply act in the way that some dream or some pattern suggests to them; whether it’s an artful pattern or not to me might not be a part of their reality. But ultimately I choose my own feelings in the matter, whether those of love or some other feeling, you know.

(September 2023) Sometimes I intentionally leave auto-miscorrect’s suggestions if it’s a nice turn of phrase, you know. The “prize of pretzels” is better than the “price of pretzels” as a metaphor for nervous workaday noise, you know.

(February 2024)

I once thought that enlightenment meditation was all I’d ever be interested in, but since I’ve turned away from that—and I mean, I suppose I’ve lost interest in, say, thirty minute mindfulness/guided meditations, for example—but there was the initial change in goal, and then gradually it dawned on me how much of the method has remained since I changed the goal and oddly enough kinda dropped much of the neurotic Buddhism that people give dharma talks to guide you away from, where you sit down and get afraid that the mind is going to make noise, right. Actually I still have some of that—it’s habit energy—but sometimes it can surprise me how different it kinda is now, really.

I mean, it’s like Starhawk talks about Talking Self and Younger Self. I love that, although I actually think it should be Talking Self and Babbling Self. Younger Self isn’t actually ~literally~ pre-verbal in adults. Small children are fascinating—can they figure out that you’re saying hello?—but that pre-verbal or semi-pre-verbal stage is not what happens when you let Younger Self talk, you know. It talks just as much—more, maybe; he doesn’t stop, doesn’t weigh phrases—but it’s wild, you know…. And sometimes, you realize that meditation doesn’t have to be, shouldn’t be, sitting down and waiting for Babbling Self to shut up, right. Sometimes you just gotta let him babble it out, you know. If you sit down for ten or fifteen or twenty minutes, and he or she is only quiet for a little space at the end, or little pockets of time, and the rest is just babbling, then that’s meditation, and not just because of the little pockets of silence. It’s nice to learn what you actually think, deep down, or outside in the wilds of your mind, right…. Not just what you get yourself to think, right. It can be nice to give Babbling Self some time to talk it out, without being told what to do all the time by his rigid older brother, you know.

Informazione su di me

(July 2023) “And what is MY identity? That’s one secret I’ll never tell.” (Gossip Girl)

🤫 😸

………………………

(August 2023) I identify myself as a Canada goose, but most people perceive me as a snow goose.

Some people, but not all, perceive me as a Mallard duck with a green head.

Please do not make me into a jacket.

…………………………

(December 2023) I have had a lot of bad experiences learning languages, which is why I gave it up for many years. I don’t regret mastering gringo-caveman Spanish, but I cherished more than one illusion along the way. At first, I studied languages because of power—every Tribe in Europe has its own Language, its own Speech. This was a little psycho, you know. Then I gave it up, but came back to it, almost and sorta, as Pure Learning, as Duty to Humanity. “There are ten major languages for me….” I never got far with that, although I started to become interested in dictionaries (like Malcolm X). (Before I read about—and was quizzed about—grammar. That needs a good joke, needs a good put down…. But if I need to tell THAT joke to you, I’m worried! “We can quiz people on grammar! Logistically, it works! Success!” There you go….) Obviously my plan to learn one Middle Eastern and one Asian language and about seven or eight others was a little…. Yeah. And in both those periods, (especially the first, which lasted longer), I was scared to do much learning because I was scared of the ‘necessary’ goal of ‘fluency’, you know. It’s usually unreasonable to try to become as good in another language as your native language, to never make language mistakes (which people can make in their birth language anyway), and just all that Kantian crawl knowledge perfectionism crap. Unless you’re a translator, or unless you live abroad or are culture-fascinated or a language freak—maybe not even then—you do NOT need to become as good at French as you are in English, as though you were an American actor in a B-movie, making a gratuitous display of ‘intelligence’. I hate to hate on the French—the Parisians, at least—but we should all have a little patience for immigrants, travelers, and unknowledgeable (try spelling that five times past) or imperfect people. Ditch the Kantian crawl, and try to live your life, right.

But my god is Hermes, and languages can be fun. I think the important thing is to look at it as a hobby, and have fun. Your worth as an American/white person, etc., is not in question. (You’re already screwed, lol. 😸) So pick fun languages, and make a hobby of it. I think I’ll pick Celtic, Scandinavian, and also Romani (Gypsy) languages. They’re all vaguely Wicca-y like I’m vaguely Wicca-y, none of them are important or ‘modern’/powerful/avant-garde…. They’re safe. I’m safe.

…. You learn ‘the way you’re supposed to’ until you wake up and grow up, and realize you have a choice, you know. Recently (post #2 Duty to Humanity language phase), I would think, you know, How would you decide which language to learn, right? How would one choose, you know, “Today I want to sign up to be with (Ethnic Group X), you know. How could you ever do it?” And the answer is: arbitrarily.

Like language itself.

Update, December: Though of course, Romani isn’t really as well documented as Danish or Irish, so maybe I’ll add Navajo to cement the ancient-strangers-among-us part of my little equation. If Navajo is hard to find stuff for, after a while I can add Nahuatl.

(January 2023) (languages continued)

Really one has to love a language to make progress. Spanish isn’t French, but when I chose Spanish, it was very much a matter of the greatness of the Spanish Empire (I was an empire person back then), and the many millions of people who speak that language in Mexico and elsewhere. But you don’t make much progress when you look at things like that. You learn a language because you want to dip into a particular linguistic culture, not because you are very anxious to meet people you are likely to meet but care nothing for. That’s the ‘statistical’ folly, the Greek/French thing is similar—so you can read books you don’t like, etc. Talk to people who hate you. That doesn’t lead to progress the way love does. So I’ll dip into Gypsy and Danish, and so on, because I’m a weirdo.

…………………………

(August 2023) (Obvs, …. Something, but:)

Life is a journey. You are the destination.

…………………………

(July 2023) One time a butterfly made me afraid. Well, not a butterfly—a picture of one in a book. It looked like a…. bug, and I was like, Oh save us mommy. Truly am I afraid.

Other times I can listen to metal and close my eyes and feel peace. Truly I love all people. The man gets to express himself; I’m happy. I love the man, mommy.

………………………….

(March 2023) Although I wrote the odd decent thing before now, like say the quote “I am one of those gentle ones who use the devil himself with courtesy”, and a lot of stuff that’s true but can come off as I don’t know, Harry Potter and the Secret of Death, because there was just too much of it—eg “The death of the dammed, that is the true death, the other is a passage only”, but because I was not always being courteous, even though I wasn’t being sincere to spite people or put them off as an end in itself, and because I certainly wasn’t living the life of the blessed yet, I’ve decided to start the process of deleting ALL of my pre-3/23 profile page sayings (some of the reviews obviously have opinion drift too, but the reviews are at least About Something), and I trust that if juxtapose Kenny G and the Brazil Jesus statue flying through the universe, or do another goose saying, it will come off at least as well now, that I see my life as going somewhere, you know.

[Except for the background count, that’s useful, and maybe someday I’ll actually finish it, too. It’s the one thing I’ve actually referred back to, and that’s organized.]

[The other kind of old thing when I, well one time I used Hitler as a verb—though we liked to Hitler away the Tainos and the Pequots—but, although that’s true, you know…. I don’t know. I do want to bear witness, but I don’t want to complain, and in the past with my negative emoting, I’m not sure I did it right. Nothing truly transformative can come from the old way of being in the world, you know, just the same “old man” instead of the “new man”.

It’s a hard line to walk sometimes. Maybe it gets easier, but you have to learn how in the beginning.]

[And it is true that sometimes mercy or whatever can come off as condescending—like I tell you that you can’t go to hell because I’m better than you, and it’s worse than if we had an honest fight…. But I don’t know.

It’s not an easy call, because either path can lead to isolation.]

………………

(June 2023) I know that recounting specific instances would only make the skeptics scoff, (they might or might not be trained as a scientist, a group that in turn might or might not be skeptical, and if they fulfill the stereotype it might or might not be a sort of cool kid conformism, you know), and indeed trying to make a little journal either here or perhaps on paper would be quite voluminous and distracting, and anyone else who saw it would probably—even if they didn’t go full on Downfall Dawkins on me, or even be skeptical at all—but it would just be like: random things in some other random person’s life; what do I care if you get little messages from God, you know.

But in a way, I do, although it’s not because I’m special. Wayne liked to say that nobody is special, and nobody is non-special, right…. But there’s a difference between getting schizophrenic, and having synchronous things happen to you. I’ve had both, and I know they’re different. The essential difference is feeling, your felt experience, and I guess that the ‘reason’ is the presence or absence of judgment. (To get schizophrenic is to be judged, by colors and coincidences, and words in books and characters on the television—and often it is to judge those real and imagined persons around one as well), and synchronicity is just…. Knowing that things are okay. It’s as though God were your big Black nanny who says, Honey, the people around you don’t tell you that things are okay for you, because they don’t know and maybe they don’t care, so child, I gonna go and tell you myself that you doing good, you know…. It’s a simplification I guess that if you’re not schizophrenic or ill or whatever that things are good, but essentially it’s basically true, you know. It’s just that there are different sorts of illnesses, and people aren’t grateful for their health because they’re ill and don’t know it…. But anyway, it’s like: you think that the thing you want isn’t here because you can’t see it, but you’re doing good, so it is here, you just can’t see it yet, and you will see it, too, and you’ll do what you have to do in the natural to see, guaranteed, but as Joseph the Prince once said, with Jesus it’s not him pointing at you, saying, Do! Do! Do!; it’s done; done; done…. I think that’s love, the love of our ancestors, the ones from before, whether they’re the Jews or the Hawaiians, the Europeans or the Africans: it’s all done done done, in that love that’s always been here, and obviously sometimes that’s been called grace, and grace isn’t always used to mean that you can’t and you won’t and you’re helpless: that’s not what done done done is supposed to mean. It’s supposed to mean freedom, a word ironically often used by various sorts of tyrannies….

But anyway, when you’re not ill, life is good and you do fun things; but the main thing is just that you’re not ill and there’s no particular thing that you really have to do forever and ever, you know. You’re not judged, because you don’t have schizophrenia.

…………….

(February 2024)

(Child Hermes) (eating a small cake)

(Isis) Hermes, who’s your friend?

(Child Jesus) (waves) (has the little nails sticking out of his hands)

(Child Hermes) He’s not my friend. (cake)

…..

(February 2024)

Christians can be wild; I’m telling ya.

(sign in parade) One God: One Sephirah

(book display) The Lamp Lit Under A Bushel Basket: How To Embrace Tifereth Without Leaving Malkuth.

(Hermes) What’s that mean? Oo! Naan! (naan)

—It means we suck and god doesn’t. There is one mask of god only: the sacrificed one.

—What’s the sacrifice for? (naan)

—It is for…. For unspeakable wisdom, which some must value, and other shun…. But really, the sacrifice is for normality. God’s job is to be sacrificed; our job is to be normal.

—Oh, my god! Mango slices! Mango slices, yay! (mango slices) I’m sorry…. What were you going on about?

Luogo

The Mists of the Atlantic

Connessioni ad altri utenti

Biblioteca interessante

BloodPriestess, BlueAchenar, bridgitshearth, divinenanny, drj, greytone, Hilton_Kaufman, John5918, KnownOats, LifeinBalance, LoriFox, melsmarsh, Silvernfire, SqueakyChu, TheNotitiaBookRoom