Gladiators

I'll preface this by saying the following as bluntly as possible: I hate election years. I hate the bipartisal system. I am not a supporter of John McCain or Sarah Palin; I am not a supporter of Barack Obama or Joe Biden. I do not support some left-field party hoping to "break ground" and be the first real threat from a new ticket. I'm not Green, Libertarian, or Prohobitionist. I'm an American, and nothing more.

I really hate election years. They bring out the worst in absolutely everyone; suddenly, mudslinging is the new black, and everyone's a Paris-bound fashion mogul. I'm bombarded from all sides with tales of how Candidate X wants to tax the poor but Candidate Y wants to give them handouts and dive national debt. Debates fling across networks, campaign advertisements plague every channel, every lawn, every news article. Everything -- even new scientific research -- comes with a left- or right-wing pundit heralding the advancement of the human race or the degradation of its morals. There's not a single American news report, nor news report about America, that doesn't include a political sideline, footnote, or other jab; anything left untouched by the writers and editors is quickly picked up as a banner by one camp of commentors or another, and soon, it's as if any given website is the central hub for pre-election coverage of the rampant hatred seething under the skin of every principled American.

The real kicker, I think, is that everyone thinks they have an obligation to vote. An obligation to support one of the major tickets. An obligation to empower a half-formed opinion bolstered by party lines, colorful speeches, and media-frenzies based on half-truths (Palin book banning) or association (Rev. Wright) -- things with no real relevance to the task at hand. I challenge this obligation by choosing not to vote; this isn't a refusal or decision to not voice an opinion by any means. Voting is a process by which any given individual pledges their support for another individual based on their personal feelings about any of a number of various factors -- some people vote "party line", some vote because they believe in one candidate or the other, some vote along the "lesser of two evils" line, and some for reasons that I don't know or don't care to list here. Those are all well and good for those people, but I feel that it's just as valid an option to refuse to vote if there are no candidates on the ballot that I can support in good faith. It's like the conscientious objector for the new age, and damned if it doesn't carry a similar stigma.

The real thing that gets me irked, though, is just the increased level of aggravation, of spite, of spitting venom at one another. Everyone gets caught up in their own digs, in their own pseudoreligious fervor for their Chosen One to Whom All Truth Shall Bow, and we spark intense, raging arguments and fights with one another on things that are entirely unrelated! There's just such an overflow of sheer irritation with the Other Side that people are testy about any subject, and are willing to preach their platform on it, going so far as to sever ties that have outlasted several similar elections before. We forego the notion that we are all Americans, and we become only Liberals or Conservatives, drawing battle lines as clear as we did in 1861 with the onset of our nation's civil war. It's as if we forget that after the election, we're going to be forced to continue living with the folks that we've so strongly opposed in the weeks and months leading up to that magical date.

As for me? I'm not voting in this election, nor do I plan to in any election hence. Call me when one of the parties finally admits their facist regime and is ready to make it happen.

Gladiators

Drifting

Life comes at you fast, and if you fail to keep up, then the road is going to rise to meet your face before you even realise that your gravity is off. You have to keep on running despite any hurdle that throws itself in front of you, or you're never going to make it to the next one; even when you fall, you must do so with enough forward momentum that you can continue, uninterrupted, to the next event unfolding before you. There's no pause, no stop, no time for a Slo-Mo replay examination of your latest success or failure. This is the big leagues of universal participation and everything is on the line with each move you make; chances are, just by taking the time to read this paragraph, you've missed something that could have been vitally more important than doing so. Of course, reading this could also be the single most important thing you've ever done, or will ever do. Gotta take chances, I guess, if you're looking to find prizes at the end of the tunnel where the light fades off into the blackness of the unknown, sometimes referred to as 'tomorrow' or, stranger yet, as 'yesterday'.

I've been out of sorts lately. Work has been unkind, and life is curving like an acid-dosed python in a wind tunnel full of rat scent. Twists upon turns upon coils of what looked to be circles but in the end are only spirals further into some depth yet unfathomed by Man. Sleep is lost as the hours fade into days taking up the weeks that build and build and build to join up to some cataclysm that looms. I think maybe it'd be nice if the apocalypse happened, if only because then the chaos that is my head might splash out across the CNN website with vivid color and broadcast with unique theme music that captures the sense of not knowing what's going on. For all the uncertainty about the future, we still seem so focused on it. Projections, predictions, prophecies all, like oracular divestitures of ages long since passed and soon to come again.

This, too, shall pass.

All things must end. All ends must have a means. All means must have purpose.

When life is turned for the worst, it is important to remember that no matter how terrible, how depressive, how distraught, it will end. It will change. Things will be different.

When life is bursting with greatness, it is important to remember that no matter how wonderful, how elating, how fantastic, it will end. It will change. Things will be different.

The only cosmic truth is that there is no truth to the cosmos. Science disproves itself on a nigh-daily basis now, refuting the foolish predispositions and conclusions of great thinkers of the past. How much further before they all realize that no constant needs to remain? Seekers will always seek, and will never find, for that is not their purpose. Anything collected on the path of the Seeker is not a truth, but an evident footprint from where the truth may have stepped while sprinting headlong into wherever it's hiding now. Ask the quantum-theorists. They ought to know where it's gone by the time I've finished wondering if I should even bother asking.

I guess what I'm saying is that I know there are no answers, only questions. But this, too, shall pass! While answers may not exist, the simple fact of shifting truth must dictate to itself that eventually, the eventuality of events will evince the evident evidence of itself. I can't even make sense of it myself, but I can't imagine it any other way.

I think I'm just confused and confounded by the way that the path interacts with the traveller, inexorably editing the predestination percieved by the one who does the travelling, thus changing the place being travelled to. What we expect is not what we recieve. What we recieve is what we should have expected. We've been through it all before, but refuse to learn anything new about the processes that dictate the facts of the case. It's all laid out, cut and dry, but the jury is refusing to cease deliberations, and I'm pretty sure the judge paid the bailiff to block the defendant's entry to the room.

Drifting

Damnit

This once-a-month posting thing has got to go. I've been trying to hard at other things to even remember that I need to write from time to time to anchor myself to sanity; coping mechanisms have been one of the things I've spent a lot of time thinking about lately, and frankly, there's a lot to be said for having those things to which one turns when the weight of the world itself seems too much. With so many terrible things being splayed out across the globe and transmitted to us direct by satellite in High-Definition, it's easy to be overwhelmed, to find oneself lacking in means of dealing with the harshness of reality.

And so we cope. We drink, we gossip, we catch up on celebrity dirt. We write, we read, we go for long walks on the beach. We listen to music too loud, play sports with our friends, slice our flesh with razors; we cry, we laugh, we crack jokes that we secretly revile for their content. All told, everyone comes out equal in the end, and we're all just trying to make it through the day; the most confident man is still inspired only by his drive to succeed, and the loneliest still held together by the hobbies that fill his time to keep his brain from realising that it isn't pleased to be where it is.

What's curious to me is the variety of ways that people describe their coping mechanisms. Some people say that they just do what comes naturally; others fret over whether what they're doing is avoidance of issues. Some pursue their interests out of a stated goal to be healthy, or wealthy, or happy, while some prefer to maintain that they're only interested in making it through another day by whatever means necessary. We rationalize and analyze and break everything into neat little segments to make them easier to mentally digest; we all offer our own take on the things that we do, and we all have our own way of brushing off the descriptions that others use ("He says he just does that for fun, but it's obvious he's just trying to keep his mind off of what happened...") -- we invent labels for the actions and intentions of ourselves and others, because they're more easily tied down than the people themselves.

Actions can't lie; they can't be made to be false, even when the motives behind them are false or they are being done for reasons explained only in untruths, even when one is doing things that they would rather not be doing for whatever reason -- such as fitting in, or seeming calm, or just keeping up appearances -- the action itself is a pure thing, a thing which cannot by its own nature decieve. Whatever the reasons, whatever the justification, whatever the consequence, the action simply is. It displays itself without remorse and breaks the mold of simplicity in so doing; whenever one does something, that something becomes an expression of the self, which reveals some part of oneself. That facet may be conceived through falsity, but the action remains the same, and continues to remain the same, to carry the same result within its own confines; the difference is in how the world reacts to the actor.

So it is with coping with reality, for, like action, reality itself is intrinsically unable to lie. While I know from experience that my brain can lie to me about what is real (dreams, imagined sights in the corner of one's eye), reality itself is not the one at fault. What exists is what exists, depsite our best efforts to cloud our perception thereof, to make of any situation what we wish, to see only what we want to see and damn the rest. We lie to ourselves about reality and actions both, as a coping mechanism I think, because we need to be able to bring the whole affair that is what we experience into a cohesive focus, into a picture that is painted by our minds for our own eyes. To see the world as another sees it for even an instant could break even the most steeled mind.

How many times do we rewrite the past to arrive at a present that we can accept?

Damnit

Digital Wanderlust

It's, again, been a while since I had anything to say here, really. In the meantime, there's been birthday parties, housecleaning, and the Governator has started to ban trans fats from restaurants in California; some fires are still burning, but the sky is blue again for the first time in months (well, okay, it was a bit blue before, but now it's blue like it ought to be). Quitting smoking is not going well, starting a game up is going better than expected, and somewhere between all of these things, I'm slowly but surely being promoted at work, to a position that ought to pay more and certainly carries more things to handle while I'm doing it.

The simple fact of the matter is, I've gotta get myself fired up in order to say anything interesting, and that just hasn't been happening lately; at least, not in a way that's productive to comming up with cutting criticisms and witty insights into the world at large. I've been too self-focused, to internal, to let fly a rant, rave, or other diatribe about the state of the nation or the nation's states or whatever else might be stately or national. I'm waiting to see what the Beijing Olympics will bring -- not for the sports, mind you, but for the politics -- and until then, the Bush-bashing and political back-and-forth of an election year has really grown tiresome, leaving me more than just a little bit jaded about that whole set of affairs; national politics, it seems, quickly becomes short-term repetition of long-term ideologies played out over the last few decades but with nothing new to contribute to the conversation.

I think the real issue is that for me, it's all starting to come together. My family is growing together and doing well, the promotion has me less than concerned about the current state of the economy at most times, and generally, all the things that I would normally use to fuel my fire just seem trivial against the fact that, despite current apparent trends, I've got myself pretty much together and success is starting to form around me. It's like I've been paying off my karmic debt, and the office just realized that my last statement was overbilled; a cosmic tax refund for the terminally involved. They say that good things come to those who wait, but also that you reap what you sow -- that always seemed somewhat contradictory to me, as one seems to be rather passive (waiting) and the other rather active (sowing). Now, though I think I'm starting to see that these two images are one and the same; after all, one cannot harvest a field as soon as the seed is laid -- it must take time to grow, to be nurtured, to become that which it was intended to be harvested as, and one must remember to tend to the field rather than simply marching on and sowing something else in the next acre-block over -- that's the waiting for good things part, I suppose.

I've planted a lot of seeds in the past several months. I feel good knowing that it's harvest time right now; planting season will come again soon, though, and things will be tough, as they always have been through the history of humanity. I'm not about to say I think I've won at the game of life, or even declare a small victory for myself in any grander scheme; I will, however, say that I'm glad to have the life that I presently do, and I can hardly wait to see what's around the next corner.

Digital Wanderlust

Sanitized for Your Perversion

Last night, I watched a zombie flick; this, in itself, isn't too much of a shocker. We watch these with some kind of regularity, ranging from the terrible B-movie "is that guy supposed to be dead?" variety on up through the multi-million dollar major studio productions. This one, strangely, managed to tread the line; the real curiosity, though, was the morality of the tale itself. The point of the movie, aside from the standard-issue scares about people who should be dead deciding not to be, seemed to center around the effects of mass-media, desensitization of the viewer and the cameraman, and whether or not humans are, on the whole, worth saving in the event of, say, zombocalypse (zombie-centric apocalyptic scenario); there was also a heavy lean on not believing what the media sells as fact -- news reports and whatnot -- and the power of the internet to spread the "truth" of matters as seen by the eyes and camera lenses of those who are there.

I'm not a film reviewer, critic, or what have you. I'm not going to get into whether I thought it was a good movie for whatever reason; I'll even leave it up to you to find out what it was, if you're so compelled. I will say this, though; for better or worse, it got me thinking some, and that's an uncommon thing in movies these days. It really is an interesting phenomenon, to consider all of the regulations and social standards that we try to force across the board when it comes to our prepackaged news lunches and low-quality frozen dinners a la CNN, and then consider the pomp-and-circumstance that they use to "gussy up" the gems of what they bill as "real, raw" reporting, even though it still, at times, seems staged and so very plasticized. From there, we move on to the shock value that's capitalized online; the personal videos that people upload of some of the most horrific things that they can find, and the humor of the dregs of these here tubes that feeds on, and breeds, a sense of contempt and hatred for humanity as a whole, while exposing within it the very things which might make it contemptable and propagating the sense of superiority that comes from revelling in filth.

It's hard to measure the psychological impact of some things. Are we more prone to file away the things we see as less than appalling if we've been exposed to more gore-fests Hollywood productions? Does the fiction we indulge in, at whatever age, set the measuring stick for how we judge the reality we're exposed to later, or are we simply becoming more accustomed to the general attitude that "people die, things break, get over it" that seems so pervasive in the modern world, where we dehumanize everything, separate the essense of "us" and "them" so as to cope with the fact that we know that these things are happening, and that we seem helpless to change the fact that the world is a dark place at times? We cling to hopes and fantasies that force these realities from our mind, even as we admit knowledge of them plainly, and see their images plastered across our televisions nightly, in news reports of how many have died, in staged celebrity appearances telling us we can make a difference for pennies a day, in fiction and in reality, in our humor and in our tragedy; they all begin to whirl in to one entity, until we start to lose focus regarding the truly appropriate emotional response -- as long as it's not happening to us, it seems, we fail to connect with a reason to care.

Even in that, though, theres's a full examination to be done. Are we losing this connection with humanity because we so often see these things put into the wrong context, or is there something else at work here? It could be that the images simply begin to lose meaning as we see more and more of the horrific nature of the planet; perhaps the desensitization isn't a result of the images themselves, but an internal trigger meant to defend us from the surge of emotion that our brains would otherwise unleash; we lose that response not because we fail to care, but because our brain is not willing to allow such a powerful thing to overtake it based on the digital images of halfway around the globe, and so it tries to convince us that it's alright, that these things are normal or acceptable, that so long as there's nothing we can do, there's no sense in worrying about what is happening. So long as these carefully-crafted personalities are presenting the information with their flashy graphics and dramatic theme music, there's a sense of sensationalism that seems to equate what we're seeing with what registers, to the brain, as something aside from what is real; we candy-coat the blood and ichor so as to remove from it that sense of revulsion, making the whole thing easier to mentally digest -- for better or for worse.

In the end, I suppose there's too many variables in play; the fact remains, however, that we seem to use these vehicles to distance ourselves from our fellow man, while at the same time seeing that when these things hit home, the sense of community is nearly automatic. While we can easily endure to view the suffering of others, when our home is wounded, we bind together like so many blood cells pushing to heal the hurt; there's a sense of what we refer to as humanity when our own peace is destabilized. There will never be anything produced for television or internet broadcast which can capture the raw essence of what is experienced firsthand; and that, I think, is the true shortcoming of these media -- that no camera can capture the reeling mind, that no lens can reflect the soul of those in torment; images are easily processed, filed neatly away in lip-service categories -- but the scene of such things as we have already been made accustomed to is wholly a new experience when the filter of camera crews and streaming data is removed, and we're plugged straightway in to the dirt of the world.

Sanitized for Your Perversion

Catastrophic Awareness

The world is crumbling around our ears. Earthquakes, floods, and other disasters change the landscape like some mutating beast shaking the scars from its back. I can't help but wax poetic on the iconic metaphor in my area recently as raging wildfires screamed across the hillsides until the inferno licked at the foot of Paradise, CA. Over 23,000 acres devoured by the flames in a few short days as the acrid stench of smoke settled over the valley; I have family who was evacuated, though I believe they returned without a hitch once the blaze was contained. Some say that the end of the world is upon us, that the apocalypse is nigh; some say that we are entering a new age, where nothing will be as it has been, and the world as we know it will fade into distant memory against the troubles -- or the pleasures -- of a new global destiny.

Of course, some also say that they're the incarnation of a god, and build cults who, in blind faith, kill themselves to ride a comet to Heaven. I guess it's hit-and-miss, these things that some say.

For my part, I don't believe that the world is ending. Changing, yes, but that's nothing new; this planet has never known anything that was not flux -- the preconception that anything is eternal is a fallacy. Even a ballad of this change, 'Dust in the Wind', fails to recognize this, claiming that "Nothing lasts forever but the Earth and sky" -- these, too, shall come to pass, for nothing can be eternal when entropy is the order of the day and chaos springs from the wells of universal truth. Of course, ordered chaos it may be, and it could be our limited scope of realization which causes us to percieve some shift in things that we deem as important, ever forgetting that, in the grand scheme, even the solar system which houses the planet upon which we build our cities to surround our homes that we huddle in for safety is insignificant. We claim that catastrophe befall us, and yet, we have never even seen the thread of the tapestry that is The All. We have never known God, or whatever the nearest approximation to that being would be when translated from the breadth of our ability to know such entities, and we have never once gazed upon the merest reflection of a shadow of Truth.

That's why I can't believe that the world is ending. Simply put, I see limitless potential in humanity as a whole; unrealized, largely, to be sure, but it is there, and it screams through our own ignorance and incompetence in the most bizarre ways. I cannot accept that this potential will not be realized before its time is up; or rather, I believe that the end of our time will coincide with the actualization of this very essence, with the ascension of our own ability to perceive ourselves as we truly exist in relation to the Great Unknown. The depth of all mysteries must come to pass, and in that knowledge we shall find not doom, but something which we might now, in false assumption, consider to be doom, for surely it shall be the collapse of all we are able to consider in the Here And Now. Knowledge will be our end, and our beginning, for once the full potential is known, it cannot be said that anything can stop us.

And so, even as the Earth itself struggles to dispel our curse upon its flesh, even as we enter into petty wars and global conflicts, even as everything seems to hurl, crashing against the never, reckless abandonment sure to destroy all that we are and have been, I say that this cataclysm is not our end, but our beginning; we are legion, for our numbers are many, and our will can not be denied.

Catastrophic Awareness

Sputtering

It's difficult for me to fuel a rage at the world sometimes. It's not that there are not things which outrage me; every day, I find new things to inspire my spite for certain aspects of our world. However, at the same time, I find that I see so much around me that is wonderful, so much that is alright with the world that we live in. Somewhere, a voice inside myself tells me that all of the injustices I see are still peanuts compared to the injustices which have come before my time, to the crimes of global scale which predated my awareness.

Even as our economy falters and slips into god knows where, even as wars rage and starving peoples cry out for help, even as nature itself lashes out against humanity, relentless and unprejudiced, I find that I cannot hold anything but appreciation for the times in which I am, and for the life which I have been given the opportunity to enjoy. Even as I see friendships waning into nothing, even as I hear tales of abuse and ignorance, I can only be awed by the fierce manner in which these things occur; the sheer force of life that is required even in moments of destruction.

It is easy to be angry at the world, to be angry at life, at yourself. It is easy to breed contempt or jealousy or that seething, searing hatred by which we seek to elevate ourselves above the things to which we bear witness. It's a simple thing to click on the evening news and find new, scathing things to rail against to burn a fire against the rages of what is not fair and just and true. It is as nothing to let grow within oneself a fear or an aversion; to pour our own derisive comments out against the swelling tide of that which we percieve as wrong with the world. Mankind seems geared to creating this sort of emotional shell; we separate ourselves from those things which we despise by fostering that dark energy, we focus ourselves on being known to feel a certain way about certain things -- our social identity is almost never known by our actions, but by our words, and whichever of these is true, I think it is most interesting that we are not known by what we agree with, by what we believe to be the honest manner in which the world should turn, but that we identify ourselves by our anger, by those things which we would wish to be furthest from. Activism, political rallies, blogs -- we focus ourselves on making it loud and clear that there are things which we see as being incorrect, we exemplify the very things we wish to change, often in the name of social awareness and decrying the despots and infuriating realities that they envision upon the land.

This is not conviction. This is not belief. This is not virtue.

And so, even while I weather the storm which we all must face, even as the harsh existence of starship Earth tears at us, I say, we should stand not for what we refuse to believe in, not to bring to light those ugly things which we cannot abide, but to appreciate the things for which we live; we should forego our anger, at times, and breathe joy and appreciation for the very soul of ourselves and pierce light against a darkness not by bearing the darkness down with fury, but by embracing any glint of light that can be seen, by showing that no level of fear will be allowed to destroy the good in the world, that we, as people, are still capable of knowing that, while our situation grows dim, it will never be black, and we will never falter.

Sputtering