The hot, molten core. Because it is hot, and molten… And because I am a fancy bag of water.
PROMPT: Never Visit
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Category Archives: Philosophy
PROMPT: Favorite Restaurant
I don’t have a favorite restaurant, but I do have a type: mom-and-pop hole-in-the-wall that only does a few things but does them all exceedingly well. I don’t care for frou-frou places, and it drives me batty when a place has a thirty-page menu and you have to play the “guess what they actually have” game. I always loved watching Monty Python’s “Cheese Shop Sketch,” but have loathed reprising the John Cleese part in so many restaurants.
Chains have their place in the travel pipeline or in a busy schedule, but I generally prefer a novel experience over a cookie cutter one.
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The Oldest & the Last [Free Verse]
Kipling called prostitution
The world's oldest profession.
Now, I'm pretty sure that it
Will be the last, as well:
The last professional endeavor --
The last profitable activity --
That humans do better than
Machines.
Whores will be the last holdouts
To shift from being workers
To being Artists of Humanity. . .
Or - maybe - they will be
The first in that, as well.
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PROMPT: 10 Years
If there’s anything that I learned in all those years of Social Science education, it’s that forecasting is a sucker’s game.
I don’t know where I’ll be, but I hope it’s someplace I never saw coming. #embracethechaos.
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PROMPT: Everyday Things
My wife, movement, new & interesting ideas, play, and epiphanies.
[I’m presuming we’re using the word “thing” in the broadest possible sense — as a stand in for any noun. If it is meant in the narrower common usage of trinkets, gewgaws, baubles, and tchotchkes, then I’ve got nothing.]
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PROMPT: High School
A psychology teacher taught us about what he called “the gestalt of expectations.” It’s when one builds an alternative reality in one’s mind (typically a worst-case scenario) and then one acts as though it is a reality, when – in fact – it is not. (Though sometimes it creates a self-fulfilling prophecy situation, which — of course — triggers selection bias in people of the unexamined life.)
It was my introduction to what I would come to know as the most fundamental insight of human existence — i.e. that one’s experience of the world is not the world itself, and while one has minimal influence over the latter, one can have tremendous influence over the former. One can even train oneself to perceive difficulties and sorrows as learning and growth opportunities.
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PROMPT: Positive Change
Daily practice of feeling gratitude. (As opposed to being grateful that one November day a year and wallowing in how horrible everything is the other three-sixty-four.)
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PROMPT: Character
Daily writing prompt
If you could be a character from a book or film, who would you be? Why?
Wu Song (武松) from Water Margin (水浒传.)
Because he’s a traveler with zero f#&ks to give. There is no more freedom to be had than that.
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PROMPT: Community
That’s a tough one because while I see value in communities, I’m also concerned that there is a rising trend toward tribalism and nationalism that will not be good for anyone — not to mention a shift toward virtual communities where anonymity and disconnect lead to people to act as though they were raised by hyenas. (I do know that, in reality, that’s an insult to the marvelous hyena, but I think it makes a sort of point for the non-hyena expert.)
I’ve been amazed at how India manages to have an intense sense of community in such a vastly super-tribal environment. (I’m using “supertribe” in Desmond Morris’s sense — i.e. a community which is too big for everyone to know everyone else, and which has a group dynamic that reflects that fact.) But it’s not as though there isn’t a dark side to this intensity of community — patriarchy, sectarian conflict, disempowered societal segments, etc.
America, by comparison seems to be experiencing a dearth of true community, which is driving people toward virtual “communities,” and in virtual communities people seem to fall into the shittiest versions of themselves. Not to mention the lack of community’s contribution to what I’ve heard called a “mental health crisis.”
I guess my preferences would be that community be: 1.) real and not virtual. 2.) that it exploit the advantages of diverse membership instead of wallowing in homogeneity and group think. 3.) that it doesn’t create overclasses and underclasses. And that, 4.) Community norms minimally negate individual freedoms.
That said, I’m not at all sure that the above criteria can be reconciled. Maybe the tradeoffs are too strong. Maybe – in our super-tribal world – the closest-knit society will always be the most xenophobic [fearful / disliking of outsiders,] and maybe tolerance and egalitarianism will always be accompanied by societal degradation. I have observed a strong inclination for people to think of compassion as a zero-sum game.
As I said, a tough one.
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“Once there came a man” by Stephen Crane [w/ Audio]
Once there came a man
Who said:
"Range me all men of the world in rows."
And instantly
There was a terrific clamor among the
people
Against being ranged in rows.
There was a loud quarrel, world-wide.
It endured for ages;
And blood was shed
By those who would not stand in rows,
And by those who pined to stand in rows.
Eventually, the man went to death, weeping.
And those who stayed in the bloody scuffle
Knew not the great simplicity.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 