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Archive for category Bad Personal Philosophy

So much beauty in the world

Jan 11

Posted by Zero in Bad Personal Philosophy | No Comments

This rose actually smells like poo

…it’s hard to stay mad when there’s so much beauty in the world. Sometimes I feel like I’m seeing it all at once, and it’s too much. My heart fills up like a balloon that’s about to burst. Then I remember to relax, and stop trying to hold on to it, and then it flows through me like rain, and I can’t feel anything but gratitude for every single moment of my stupid little life.

Lester, American Beauty

Seeing this movie in the theater in early 2000 was the first (and last) time I ever had hot tamales melted into my movie theater popcorn.  I loved it from start to finish — the movie, not the popcorn. It was quirky, witty, and able to blend pitch-black fatalism seamlessly with an almost spiritual reverence for the fragility and aesthetics* of mortal existence, the gleaming surface of a troubled planet.  Plus, it featured Thora Birch topless, a cool Eurythmics cover of an even cooler Neil Young tune, Kevin Spacey, and lots and lots of cannabis sativa. In my opinion, the absence of any disembowelment, evisceration, or maiming more than compensates for the part where Lester gets shot in the head.

During my own darker days of the early millenial decade, I often lamented the fact my breakdown was not as pithy, emotionally satisfying, or downright cool as Lester’s was**.

As usual, I digress. My point here is that the world is beautiful — painfully, heartlessly, gloriously beautiful.  It is easy to be enraged by the front pages and the headlines.  It is easy to condemn the brutality of both our own natures and the grander, encompassing Nature of which they are a part.  And it is easy to be appalled by the mean injustices and cruelties perpetrated on all sides, day after day, with the ceaseless and metronomic precision of a chicken processing plant.  What is difficult is to appreciate the beauty of the machinery even as it cuts into us.  We are human mulch for a forest whose scope we cannot fully comprehend or experience; we are aphids wandering the circumference of a single rose-petal.  We compost and nourish the world with our endurance and our structure, our pleasure and our pain.  It is beautiful.

*Please note that seeing beauty everywhere in the world does not imply that everything in the world is beautiful. To that end, see my previous post.

**Don’t forget about that bullet to the head, though.

What is WRONG with these people?

Jan 10

Posted by Zero in Bad Personal Philosophy, Music, Nonsense | 1 Comment

Idiots in Bad Stage Make-up

Okay, so I made the mistake the other day of googling Gwar. I’m not sure what made me think of it, really, but once it was there I had to look. Surely they weren’t as bad as you remember them! And the pictures — well, they’re hilarious! Nothing wrong with a self-respecting metal band dressing up like fantasy monsters with…  obscene codpieces and drawn-on abs, pracing around on stage, scattering fake body fluids over the audience…  right?

Well, then I checked out a video.  Not some videos.  ONE video.

It was this one.  Don’t watch it if you’re easily offended, like me.  Or if you’re my wife, or if you’re under the age of 13 without the written consent of your parent or guardian.  In triplicate. And please, if you are my significant other, DO NOT WATCH THIS VIDEO.

 

They are sick bastards. I mean, really, WHY? They’re worse than I remembered. ICK. It’s not realistic at all, but it arouses in me the same visceral nausea (cold palms, cold sweat, descending stomach as my transverse colon contracts in horror) that I felt when I made the mistake of watching the opening sequence from La Terza Madre. This isn’t art, it’s depravity.

I’d like to think that the big, dramatic, glory-drenched flash-mobs would be a perfect antidote…

…but I know too well that at least one of the people sitting at those tables, smiling and nodding as the universe breaks out with a glorious fruit of unexpected order and cooperation, is probably thinking about how best to stage a fake disembowelment at a concert.

So instead, I will cure myself with Goldfrapp and FC Kahuna. That is all.

Occupy What, Exactly?

Oct 27

Posted by Zero in Bad Personal Philosophy, Events, Politics | No Comments

The Occupy Wall Street movement (or the larger movement formerly known as Occupy Wall Street) has drifted on and off the front page so many times now it’s almost like deja vu.  I mean, didn’t we already read this headline?  But it refuses to die (2 of CNN’s “Latest News” category are devoted to it as of five minutes ago) and I for one am glad.  NOT simply because the opposition movement has generated such an excess of amusing imagery and countermemes:

I Am the 2%

My Father is with the 1%

99% of us died in the making of Episode VI

Although, obviously, it’s done plenty of that.  I approve of this movement because, if you peel back the thin layer of frivolity and pseudo-anarchist revelry that reflects back so much of the media light thrown its way, there are some truly novel features underneath. This movement has a sense of ambition I haven’t seen in public protests in my lifetime: they want to occupy EVERYTHING! And not just occupy it; they want to humanize it, make it serviceable, and to declaw and domesticate the systems they perceive as preying upon the masses. The confused but consistent impetus towards fundamental social and economic transformation in this movement is really quite quixotic. And quixotic is charming!

I have not slurped the delicious milk of humankindness for a long long time and I'm going to make sure you know it, punks

As always, idealistic missions collectively pursued are ready fodder for specific types of attacks: to individualists, they are often seen as “lazy,” to traditionalists, generally “impractical” or “wasteful,” and to political conservatives, they often appear (shudder) “socialistic.” Which is why counterattacks against the 99% meme tend to be so dour, so stingy, and so darn tootin’ self-righteous: they are usually aimed by very serious, generally self-sufficient people at folks perceived to be frivolous at best, and thieves and highwaymen at worst. Yet another example of the old robbers-of-the-republic myth. It is a sad disservice to the multitude of legitimate victims of one of the worst economic climates of the century that merely voicing their woes can lead to accusations of fundamental worthlessness, communist leanings, and congenital warts.

One of the hallmarks of the Occupation movement to date has been its vagueness about what, exactly, is being occupied, what exactly is to be accomplished. I must admit that I doubt the possibility of “success” in the terms an activist might paint them: the banks and moneyed interests will probably not be overthrown, recessions will probably prove immune to political exile, and the Universe will almost certainly not become a fundamentally kind and gentle place. Most likely, nature will remain not only amoral but generally damp and clammy as well. Even worse, regardless of innovations in antimalarial technology, mosquitoes will definitely continue to thrive somewhere on the planet.

However, I also doubt the movement’s detractors’ implicit claim that talk is cheap, useless, or even dangerous. We should talk about things, and at great length. And working together to make the world a better place isn’t just something for college students to theorize about between liberal arts classes: it’s an obligation of every major thought system the planet has ever seen, including capitalism. Experimentation is part of the imperative of our humanity in just the same way that self-improvement is a mandate of the gods of our mothers and fathers. On these precepts, any voice that says or implies “put your heads down and work” should be rejected. The work of free people should be done with heads up and eyes open. And any voice that says “be quiet, you have no right to speak” should be reviled. Speech is our birthright, and silence is death.

If the occupation has done nothing else, it has occupied our collective thoughts for a while — and that is, perhaps, the only important thing. May the Occupation remain thought-provoking.

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Critical Review

Oct 22

Posted by Zero in Bad Personal Philosophy, Family & Friends | 1 Comment

So, Cathy and I were just chatting idly about blogging while wrapping up a few evening tasks in the office, and she expressed a rather negative opinion of my tone and style in this blog. After a few back-and-forths nailing down what exactly she objected to, she finally admitted this:

Cathy: “Your blog’s tone is black and cynical.”

Me: “What? WHAT!? Can I quote you on that? Cathy McDonald says ‘this blog is black and cynical.’”

Cathy: “That’s understated. Let’s be more accurate. Your blog is depressing and it makes me want to stick a pencil in my eye and swirl it around.”

Yes, those were her exact words:  “stick a pencil in my eye and swirl it around.”  I was flabbergasted… I mean, I know I tend to posture myself as a fatalist (more out of habit than actuality, I think) but I had no idea that my tone read that bad.

The real question that keeps coming to mind is… should I consider this a victory or a failure?

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A Ridiculously Brief Defense of “Alternative Medicine”

Oct 13

Posted by Zero in Bad Personal Philosophy, Events, News | No Comments

Well done, Mr. Jobs.

Well done, Mr. Ritchie

Steve Jobs’ death has prompted widespread and popular sorrow (Dennis Ritchie’s death a few days later has been widely regarded with silence, which is sad in its own right). Steve wasn’t even 60. The fact that he succumbed to modern humanity’s scourge — cancer — instead of dying a “natural” death of heart failure or catastrophic aneurism, has provoked a sense of injustice from many people. That includes the fellow that penned this lovely little post in the immediate aftermath of Jobs’ passing, “Steve Jobs Succumbs to Alternative Medicine.”  With all due to respect to Mr. Dunning, Respectful Insolence’s post on the topic was much more nuanced than yours — but I digress.

I was shocked to see Steve Jobs’ untimely death blamed, without reservation, on the quackery that is “alternative medicine” — referred to here as though “alternative medicine” were a single, uniform entity instead of the rag-tag lost brigade of wishful thinking, innovation, philosophical excess, and common sense that it is.  As a number of voices chimed in with an excerpt from Tim Minchin’s Storm: “”You know what they call ‘alternative medicine’ that’s been proved to work? Medicine.”  Well said!

I can guarantee this will work... but only once


And particularly appropriate because, if you look back to the scientific revolution as it intersects with medicine — especially in the last quarter of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th — you will see an ironic trend.  Medicine — you know, bleeding, trepanning, the obvious truth that miasmas caused infection, and an extreme paranoia on the topic of masturbation — was confronted by an implacable sequence of “alternative medicine” based, not on the time honored tradition of the medical trade, but on scientific fact.  Many of these scientists were accused of quackery.  Many unavoidable deaths were blamed on “alternative medicine.”  The close-mindedness of traditional practitioners is often lampooned in costume dramas. They make quite excellent minor villains AND double as comic relief!

My point here is not that we should thrown down the walls of our skepticism and embrace every nutty theory out there (personally, I find the ideas that water responds to written words reflecting human intentionality, most purgative diets, and almost all homeopathy offensive in their nuttiness).   But conversely, discarding idea B or practice Y out-of-hand because they don’t fit into the canon of accepted treatment methodologies is by definition close-minded.  Everything must be proved and nothing can be assumed. And, no matter what the anti-mad-hatter types are saying in these blogs, the idea that diet and health are linked is an EXTREMELY SOUND medical theory. Can anyone honestly argue that Jobs’ belief in this link was nonsensical? Perhaps even more importantly, consensus in the medical community is a conundrum — developing the “proof” to determine whether a treatment is viable and productive can take, quite literally, generations. Let us remember that lobotomy, trepanning’s smarter, better-dressed city cousin, achieved its heyday in the 50s and 60s — the same time period that brought us widespread television, the first computing devices, xeroxes, and modern bureaucracy. This was “alternative medicine that has been proven to work.”

I’m sorry Steve Jobs is dead: I think he would have been well-advised to have pursued the Whipple procedure early instead of delaying 9 months, and as Mr. Dunning rightly points out, there is no evidence that diet effects the type of carcinoma Jobs was originally diagnosed with. Until a decade or two ago, the Whipple procedure still had catastrophically high mortality rates; enough to give pause. It is entirely possible that he was surveying exactly the history I’ve glossed above when he…. hesitated. But Jobs was never one to accept common knowledge at face value; Apple’s success can pretty accurately be described as an alternative technology being presented in an alternative way. I would sooner blame Steve (if blame is even necessary) for choosing to pause, than to blame “alternative medicine” — crackpots, visionaries, and pioneers alike — for daring to be alternative.

ADDENDUM: If you are an adherent of homeopathy, purgative diets, or writing love letters on your water bottles so your water will feel good, I apologize for targeting you above. I still think you’re crazy, but hope you won’t feel to bad about it =)

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Bad Philosophy

Oct 4

Posted by Zero in Bad Personal Philosophy, Family & Friends, Nonsense | No Comments

It has been an interesting week and a half.  I’m still coughing out the lingering cold that has been sucking marrow from my bones.  Last week a career opportunity beaned me out of left field and yesterday I gave notice to my friend and current employer, which was a good step for me pragmatically but not exactly what I would classify as a satisfying emotional experience (Poem, David, Nakey, Mason: I’m going to miss you).  The stock markets are a disaster area.  The federal budget is totally hosed.  Global warming seems intent on making Roland Emmerich look subtle.  Oh, and my house still feels a lot like a hotel: I have no idea where my clothes are, and I keep looking in the wrong places for dishes and the garbage bin.

My sister wrote a blog post today.  It’s title, fittingly enough, was “Fuck It.”  Her bitterness today makes my own look like the carefree ramblings of a gradeschooler ;-)

I have NO CONTROL over the bad things in the world, the shit that people do to each other, over cancer, and pollution and violence and that ASSHOLE DRIVING DOWN THE ROAD THAT DOESN’T USE HIS TURN SIGNAL…I only have control over how I react to to these things. (Emma Bush, http://emmabush.com/?p=946)

Strangely enough, this sounds a lot like the thesis I started writing for my final paper back at UW 8 years ago — the one I never finished, thus failing to achieve my all important diploma.  How droll.

Today, I went to my favorite beach — my place for walking in solitude, for contemplation, for stepping out of the world — and found that someone had tagged the shoulder with the phrase “Hello Coal.  G’bye Beach.”  Could my beach actually go away?  In any case, we’ll become strangers: I’m moving south this winter, with no plans for an immediate return.

Is the world ending?

Four Horseman, or Forty Bazillion?

The answer is yes, but not the way you’d think.  War, hatred, intolerance, stupidity, ignorance — these things are simply not the villainous forces that we have taken them for.  Do a google image search for the phrase “apocalypse” and take note of what you see.  Mushroom clouds, superheroes, zombies, and desolated cities — a lot of them.  No real people.  These notions of destruction are a distraction from the real force actively aging you, eroding you, and with almost imperceptible slowness destroying your world.  The truth is, most dramatic acts of distraction have the effect of stopping time, and slowing it down — keeping the real force of destruction at bay.  Organizational skills, indifference, distraction, and efficiency are the servants of the true destroyer.

Namely, Time.  An parade consisting of an infinite succession of horses.  Each horse signifies a moment passed, never to return.  Some of them will bring you gifts; some will carry your children to you.  One of them will nuzzle you insistently, and you will ride away with it.  They carry the world away, but no faster than they bring replacements for everything they take.  They destroy the world, and recreate it, one grain of sand at a time.

Eight years ago, I was philosophically distressed.  This sort of conception of the singularity of every life and every minute felt weighted, depressing.  I am thankful to have shaken free of this sort of fatalism, which did neither more nor the world any good whatsoever.  Instead, I am glad to be destroyed, to be part of the process.

If you live on the assumption that the world is constantly ending/ended/rebooting/starting again, that means that every day is new.  Slavery to the past, to history, to habit — these are all a misconception created by the illusion that you’re still living in the same world you lived in yesterday.  We are freer than we feel.

Embrace your freedom, and your time: appreciate every microcosm you can.

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