It's April 16th and we had some snow here in New England last night.
Dunno 'bout you, but I'm pretty much all set with winter. Looking forward to seeing my Cherry Tree blossom and feel the warmth of spring sun.
It's been an interesting and long winter. I remember when I was a kid that I loved winter. Digging in the snow making tunnels like a groundhog gone arctic. When I was little I'd sometimes loose my mittens or they'd become too wet to wear and the freezing pain would be excruciating. Anyone from the north knows what cold pain is like.
The pain was only because, well, in those days we didn't have cortex or any of the new stuffs that parents buy for themselves and their kids, so in my time once the little paws became wet, well it hurt.
Working with the public I see strollers that cost more than I paid for my first car, make that my second car...my first car I paid 50 bucks for and was a red Rambler American station wagon, and everything costs more than that. You can't even buy a winter coat for less than that now.
Kids wear all sorts of expensive clothes that made my 50s era wool coat and hat look like something from another era...never thought I'd live long enough to see the history of the world in my life. But then, I never really knew what the history of the world was.
I have a pretty good idea now.
I was reading a pretty good essay a while ago that noted consciousness was determined by the subjective feelings of our experiences, and that aspect of our life separated us from other life forms. The writer said that well, as far as can be known, rocks don't have a conscious life, and well, other life forms have limited or no conscious understanding of the world, driven as they are, by instinct. Our particular problem, by our I mean anyone reading this, is that we also have instincts but they are also framed by our emotional world, and sometimes that emotional world overwhelms those instincts making them seem like greater than they are. And because of that, we try to understand the before, the now, and the future.
Thus, history is born.
Now, in a world where popular culture teaches us how we are suppose to feel about things and really, why worry about what happened before and no need to think about the future, this can all be very confusing to any Buddha-like understanding of what is of real value to us, individually speaking, and to a larger extent, to us in the village sense. We are bombarded with things of no value.
Cotton-candy anyone?
We have become the caged monkey who has learned to push the blue button to get food, because we know the red button gives us an electric shock.
Kids are exposed not only to the cold of Mother Nature, but to hyper-sexualized images through a culture that has no off switch and we get it 24/7/364. For a teen, there is some pain in this, if they have any sense of thought about who they are and what they want.
Think self-consciousness.
Really, in such a world going crazy, where do the kids fit in? In a culture that diminishes social responsibility by saying that anything goes, well, it can be all very confusing. They look like adults at an early age, but they aren't adults.
It's still confusing to me, but it doesn't mean as much to me as it once did.
I look at other human forms, and they struggle with what their instincts tell them they want, the liberty to take what they want, and the sense of doubt their consciousness burdens them with.
It's all very disjointed.
Popular culture tells us we should be a certain size, wear certain clothes, live in a certain type of house...I watch HGTV a lot and it's amazing to watch young couple deciding whether or not they want a four bedroom house of say 3000 square fucking feet, or a a Chateau in the suburbs.
Popular culture is its own religion, and it craftily undermines the values of the old faiths and traditions, then wonders why kids go nuts because teaching them values and traditions might upset somebody. Sometimes the kids are just nuts. I know I had a "nuts" period in my life.
As culture becomes more disjointed and driven by the false conceptualized world of some marketing scheme, by say, Abercrombie and Fitch for example...I mean, can anyone over who has gone through puberty really wear they pants that low on their hips...we learn from this, and now that kids have access to the electronic world, they for the most part don't need parents anymore, because they are parented by the web, tweets, Facebook, and the larger social village that has no moral or ethical values to teach them, except to want certain things and to act a certain way. We are creating a future of zombie-people hooked on electronic self-gratification.
We are all creatures of our self-consicousness, tempted by the apple of the bright colors that represent not what we want, but by what the culture tells us what we want. It's hard not to be seduced by it all, no matter what age you are. But there are somethings that are wrong and somethings that are good, and they have nothing at all to do with one's waist size or the credit limit on one's credit card. Not to be too Greek or too much the Siddhartha on the river bank, but finding the middle in this morass is a good thing, balance is a good thing, perspective is a good thing, but in a culture dismayed by acts of senseless violence, we have no answers.
We are soften by all the stuffs in our world, and we will loose these things because there are stronger forces of want in the world that will take them away from us, because we will be busy looking into the white light in our palm, while the barbarians of need will come, take our shit, and make us primitive once again.
The conceptual world of the marketing giants continue to Balkanize the world with little corners of consumerism and self-indulgence...I think the world will eventually be controlled by Brands and oligarchs and not nations...driven like Ahab to track the white Dick, we are on a voyage of self-discovery and destruction, just hope the one happens before the other. If we try to hold onto values, we will be the lonely Ishmael floating in the wider world that knows nothing of our self-interest, or like the lost race of the Krell, we will destroy ourselves, victims of our own hubris.
Thoughts from the food-court, Logan Airport.
Tim
Dunno 'bout you, but I'm pretty much all set with winter. Looking forward to seeing my Cherry Tree blossom and feel the warmth of spring sun.
It's been an interesting and long winter. I remember when I was a kid that I loved winter. Digging in the snow making tunnels like a groundhog gone arctic. When I was little I'd sometimes loose my mittens or they'd become too wet to wear and the freezing pain would be excruciating. Anyone from the north knows what cold pain is like.
The pain was only because, well, in those days we didn't have cortex or any of the new stuffs that parents buy for themselves and their kids, so in my time once the little paws became wet, well it hurt.
Working with the public I see strollers that cost more than I paid for my first car, make that my second car...my first car I paid 50 bucks for and was a red Rambler American station wagon, and everything costs more than that. You can't even buy a winter coat for less than that now.
Kids wear all sorts of expensive clothes that made my 50s era wool coat and hat look like something from another era...never thought I'd live long enough to see the history of the world in my life. But then, I never really knew what the history of the world was.
I have a pretty good idea now.
I was reading a pretty good essay a while ago that noted consciousness was determined by the subjective feelings of our experiences, and that aspect of our life separated us from other life forms. The writer said that well, as far as can be known, rocks don't have a conscious life, and well, other life forms have limited or no conscious understanding of the world, driven as they are, by instinct. Our particular problem, by our I mean anyone reading this, is that we also have instincts but they are also framed by our emotional world, and sometimes that emotional world overwhelms those instincts making them seem like greater than they are. And because of that, we try to understand the before, the now, and the future.
Thus, history is born.
Now, in a world where popular culture teaches us how we are suppose to feel about things and really, why worry about what happened before and no need to think about the future, this can all be very confusing to any Buddha-like understanding of what is of real value to us, individually speaking, and to a larger extent, to us in the village sense. We are bombarded with things of no value.
Cotton-candy anyone?
We have become the caged monkey who has learned to push the blue button to get food, because we know the red button gives us an electric shock.
Kids are exposed not only to the cold of Mother Nature, but to hyper-sexualized images through a culture that has no off switch and we get it 24/7/364. For a teen, there is some pain in this, if they have any sense of thought about who they are and what they want.
Think self-consciousness.
Really, in such a world going crazy, where do the kids fit in? In a culture that diminishes social responsibility by saying that anything goes, well, it can be all very confusing. They look like adults at an early age, but they aren't adults.
It's still confusing to me, but it doesn't mean as much to me as it once did.
I look at other human forms, and they struggle with what their instincts tell them they want, the liberty to take what they want, and the sense of doubt their consciousness burdens them with.
It's all very disjointed.
Popular culture tells us we should be a certain size, wear certain clothes, live in a certain type of house...I watch HGTV a lot and it's amazing to watch young couple deciding whether or not they want a four bedroom house of say 3000 square fucking feet, or a a Chateau in the suburbs.
Popular culture is its own religion, and it craftily undermines the values of the old faiths and traditions, then wonders why kids go nuts because teaching them values and traditions might upset somebody. Sometimes the kids are just nuts. I know I had a "nuts" period in my life.
As culture becomes more disjointed and driven by the false conceptualized world of some marketing scheme, by say, Abercrombie and Fitch for example...I mean, can anyone over who has gone through puberty really wear they pants that low on their hips...we learn from this, and now that kids have access to the electronic world, they for the most part don't need parents anymore, because they are parented by the web, tweets, Facebook, and the larger social village that has no moral or ethical values to teach them, except to want certain things and to act a certain way. We are creating a future of zombie-people hooked on electronic self-gratification.
We are all creatures of our self-consicousness, tempted by the apple of the bright colors that represent not what we want, but by what the culture tells us what we want. It's hard not to be seduced by it all, no matter what age you are. But there are somethings that are wrong and somethings that are good, and they have nothing at all to do with one's waist size or the credit limit on one's credit card. Not to be too Greek or too much the Siddhartha on the river bank, but finding the middle in this morass is a good thing, balance is a good thing, perspective is a good thing, but in a culture dismayed by acts of senseless violence, we have no answers.
We are soften by all the stuffs in our world, and we will loose these things because there are stronger forces of want in the world that will take them away from us, because we will be busy looking into the white light in our palm, while the barbarians of need will come, take our shit, and make us primitive once again.
The conceptual world of the marketing giants continue to Balkanize the world with little corners of consumerism and self-indulgence...I think the world will eventually be controlled by Brands and oligarchs and not nations...driven like Ahab to track the white Dick, we are on a voyage of self-discovery and destruction, just hope the one happens before the other. If we try to hold onto values, we will be the lonely Ishmael floating in the wider world that knows nothing of our self-interest, or like the lost race of the Krell, we will destroy ourselves, victims of our own hubris.
Thoughts from the food-court, Logan Airport.
Tim
