I have a new entry as a guest contributor on Xaos' estimable 'blog, which all sensible people should be reading regularly.

My contribution is a tender reminiscence upon the late Steve Irwin, entitled What the Fuck Is Wrong With Australians?, and I believe it is Most Edifying.

I think I may have finally found someone more bitter than myself (other than my beloved, I mean).

He (?) is located at: 

Letters to Kalki, and appears to have a Himalayan attitude problem.

Most of the time, you can safely ignore any sentence that begins with "I", and any clause that begins with "but".

I'm appalled at how many epiphanies, renewals, fresh starts, vows, awakenings, etc., I have gone through - some of them even real, and possibly sincere - only to retreat back, again and again, to the same gray and hollow shell:  spent ammunition.

I recall a much-beloved and wise friend of mine once asking:  "Do you ever have epiphanies?" 

I replied: "Yes, sometimes, I suppose I do."

His response:  "Well, maybe you should stop."

Don't even get me started.

Here's a tale of abuila - and of a generation consumed by it ... by which I mean:  mine.

You show me yours, and I'll show you mine, okay?  Or maybe, I'll show you yours, too.

My generation were not apathetic.  As it says in the film Slacker:  "Withdrawing in disgust is not the same as apathy."   I think we were fairly perceptive in our day, and rather liberated in thought and behavior, as such things go.  I find people younger than myself rather narrow in many ways - we were often accused of being "Reagan Youth", or at least of harboring a few of same among our ranks, but the young now appear much moreso - no values but unenlightened self-interest, etc.  Everyone curses, has any sort of sex that they are inclined to, and all the inebriants they can afford; but no thought is ever out of place.  Everyone's such a "rebel" that they're all exactly alike, and ultimately, profoundly reactionary.

Probably one out of six people I went to high school or college with would have self-identified as anarchists, communists, social democrats, deep ecologists, atheists, neopagans, vegetarians, or, perhaps, fascists.  They at least might sympathize with some of these or with allied tendencies like the punk movement.  The point is - people dared to be what they were not supposed to be.  But, to be candid, we didn't do much.  We threw some great parties, and made a lot of art, even propaganda, and we spread among ourselves some wonderfully radical speculations and hypotheses, and some sublime pipe dreams (in every sense).  We made some decent music here and there.  And we printed up thousands, perhaps millions, of 'zines (a/k/a "what people did before there were 'blogs") - but, we didn't actually accomplish much. 

Some would say it was because we were too high to get off the couch, but really, it was more of a failure of will than anything else.  We had grown up under Reagan and Bush, which would break anyone's spirit.   And, though we did, at first, throw a million protests - many of them quite large, innovative, and even militant - these ultimately began to strike us as futile.  At some point, we noticed that only we read our 'zines, which we already agreed with.  We converted no-one, and really, no-one cares about art except "art world" scenesters, and they don't matter at all.  Protests don't change public policy unless they get very violent, or disrupt the normal functioning of government and business.  This was starting to happen with the wave of increasingly ambitious "anti-globalization" protests, but then 9/11 happened, and everyone chickened out, or went into shock, or something....  maybe they were all shipped off to Gitmo?  And then - nothing. 

And today's nothing has been brought to you by ... the generation that meant well, but did very little about it.

(But we did do it in style.)

Imagine that everytime you looked at someone, you would see their mind rather than their body.  That is, you would not see their actual physical appearance, but a visible metaphor for their state of mind.  That crabbed expression - a soul caught in one of the Hell worlds.  That dull, glazed-over look about the eyes - a mind gone dim from fleeing from understanding.  That hostile, tough-guy demeanor - fear re-written as agression.  That sneer - feelings of inferiority disguised as feelings of superiority. 

And so on.

How could you bear to live?

(This is a sequel to my earlier post concerning games, q.v.)

A few additional things games have tried to teach me:

1. Do not underestimate your opponent or your ally.
   "Trust your partner" is an axiom of bridge, and those who neglect it reliably do poorly in that august sport.  In life too, if one condescends to one's allies (actual or potential), one loses.  And one loses both in games and in life by playing on the assumption of the inferiority of others.
2. Play your best game.
   This is not so much in order to win as it is in order to show respect for those with whom one plays.  This implies concentrating, and mustering one's full talent, but it also implies not being overly conventional or predictable, even at the risk of losing.   Playing a boring game wastes their time and yours.  The word of Nietzsche:   "Live dangerously."   In other words:   Play the game in earnest.   Step out a bit, for, in the words of the Sex Pistols:   "You don't do what you want and you fade away."
3. Resignation is honorable.
   This is (I believe) an old chess proverb, but it applies everywhere.   Knowing when to stop avoids wasting your time, and your opponents', and allows you to move on to the next, presumably better game, or a new stage of the same game.   Our moving to the Devil's Litterbox, b/k/a the San Joaquin Valley, was informed by this sort of consideration.   In the literature, philosophical and economic, on decision theory, a lively debate has emerged on the issue of calculating on sunk costs.  
   So far as I can tell, the smart money says to stop throwing money in the well after it clearly establishes its disinclination to grant your wishes.   Some disagree with this, of course...

Comprising miscellaneous notes on 'life' in Central Kalifornia:

I am so utterly bored right now that I am looking forward to the prospect of doing random temp. clerical work in order to break the tedium.  What is wrong with me?

The San Joaquin Valley is flat.  It's so flat, the people don't even have quirks.  No convolutions are allowed.  There are so many churches here that God got offended and left. 

Speaking of which:  What kind of asshole goes into a building - especially a cheap stuccoed one - to ask some jerk in a dress to talk to God for them?  Those guys need to get real jobs, anyway.  I can talk to God just fine on my own - why don't you go pick strawberries or something, Father Spud?  There are mountains near here - why don't the faithful just go up there, where the view is better?

I am living in a town rumoured to have been founded by the KKK.  This is eerily plausible.  Nothing is open past nine, and there aren't even any bars here.  I don't want one for myself, but I am somehow discomfited by their absence - it seems a sign of a culture with very very wrong priorities.   I suppose people watch television.  Speaking of which - they report on high school sports on the television news here.  How empty does your life have to be for you to care about high school sports?   Maybe it's a pederast thing, to go with all the clergy.

Pray for me.

Willie Nelson - of whom no evil shall be spoken in my presence - once sang, "Still is still moving to me."   As for I an' I, moving is still ... still.

I have moved, and my emotional and physical functioning, and those of those around me, are all farblondget and yet, I am still here, and here, I am still.

I am like a hurricane; I always have been: whirling dysfunctional disorder and strife surrounding a hollow 'eye' of stillness - a core that is almost mineral in its inability to be touched.  Cool, high, and indifferent, I am lunar.

Or, alternately, I am so utterly disturbed by everything, all the time, that I am in a constant state of low-level shock.

Oddly, introspection yields no clues as to which of these competing self-conceptions is correct - if either is.

Perhaps there are two of me.