Tag Archives: philosophy

Taken By The Wind (A Personal History, Part 3): The Beard of Loneliness

When things never get better, when do you give up hope that they will?

I’m not there yet, but I’ve been on the edge of that chasm for a long time.

For most of my life, I’ve alternated between times when I have to struggle to get anything at all done, and times when I was on task, organized, and convinced I could make permanent change. Note that these have never been “manic” times, just times when I was operating closer to the norm, closer to what I should be, what I might have been had it not been ripped out of me as a child.

But those productive times are always followed by collapse. To-do lists curl and die like leaves in a fire. Lonely chapters gather virtual dust on the hard drive, awaiting fellows who’ll never show. The bed forgets what it’s like to be made. And my chin thickens with whiskers, a barometer of my efficacy in my own life because I do not want a beard.

I have one now. Continue reading →

Just How Selfish WAS Jesus, Exactly?

It’s not often you see a true man of faith who’s a public figure in our culture who actually walks the walk.

Stephen Colbert is exactly that.

A devout Catholic (who actually teaches Sunday school), he not only bases his political views on principles like compassion and rationality, he’s extremely active with a long list of charities. He’s clearly a much better man than the buffoon he lampoons, Bill O’Reilly (who this week hilariously tried to one-up an atheist on his show by telling him we don’t know what causes the tides to go in and out).

With Thanksgiving Done…

It is now acceptable to start talking about Christmas.

It is also acceptable to talk about “the holidays,” Hanukkah, the Solstice, Kwanzaa, Yule, Ashura, the New Year, December, or Thursday.

Don’t take it personally.

Taken By The Wind (A Personal History)

Okay, so here’s the deal…

I suffer from depression.

To the unenlightened out there, that means I’m moody or lazy or mopey or too sensitive or whiney. I’m none of those things. I’m not even really sad, for the most part, though after suffering this affliction pretty much all my life, there is certainly a constant hum of melancholy way back in my mind. And despair. And anger.

On the plus side, I’m 6′ tall, naturally fit, agile, and strong. The baldness that colonized my father’s head has found no home on mine. I’m blue-eyed, square-jawed, and apparently reasonably attractive. I’m highly intelligent, and can write very well. These things and others I’m grateful for.

In onerwhelming opposition to those blessings, I apparently have the genetic bug that makes you vulnerable to depression. Apparently, though anyone can get depressed (usually through some sort of trauma), most people are innately capable of recovery. But when you have the gene for it, it’s harder to recover, and if you are repeatedly traumatized, the depression can settle in for good.

Kids, especially very young kids, with this neurological fuck-up are particularly susceptible. Their brains are still forming and such trauma can do permanent damage. Kids who lose a parent early or who are abused are at really high risk.

I was both. Continue reading →

To Our Soldiers

A toast to America’s soldiers, past and present, to those who avoid thuggery even in dire straits, to those who serve and die with honor even when vilely misused by their leaders, to those who fight but recognize that war is not a holy crusade.

Frank Schaeffer: On Fundamentalism, Atheism, & American Life

A fascinating interview with Frank Schaeffer, one of the founding members of the modern religious right in America, who has since recognized the dangers inherent in the worldview he once espoused.

 

The War of Art

In my advice to writers, there are two books I always recommend. One is On Writing by Stephen King, the other is The War of Art by Steven Pressfield. Immediately after I first read the latter, I plopped down and wrote my first novel, Doc Wilde and The Frogs of Doom, and I re-read it regularly (easy to do, as it’s a short book).

Pressfield’s deal is getting us to overcome the resistances within ourselves and just getting down to the friggin’ work. His book is a self-help book that’s really helpful and not full of homilies and crap like “You are the captain of your own ship.”

(Which a therapist once told me in what was, inevitably, our one and only session because I damn near laughed in her face).

I recently became aware of Pressfield’s blog for writers, Writing Wednesdays, and it should be required reading for anyone wanting to make it in the arts.

Here’s one gem I found there:

The Muse, if she’ll forgive me, is kind of like a mailman. She makes her rounds every day, cruising past our offices and studios and peeking in the window. Are we there at our easels? The Muse likes that. She likes to see us taking care of business. And if we’re there with our hearts breaking or tears streaming down our cheeks, all the better. The Muse says to herself, “This poor bastard is true to me; I’m gonna give him something in return for his loyalty.”

And into our heads pops the solution to Act Two, the bridge to that song we couldn’t lick, the breakthrough concept for our new philanthropic venture.

The lesson is, if you’re not at the place you do the work, at least trying to do the work, the work won’t happen. And if you are there, and getting down to business, you will discover wondrous things, gifts from the Muse, that will surprise you and enrich both you and the work itself.

But you’ve gotta be working for it to work.

“Livin’ the Lie” (aka “The Republicans’ Pants Are On Fire”)

A Rant. I say mean things about Republicans. If you’re a Republican friend of mine, rest assured I’m not talking about you. Or at least I hope not.

♦

The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality — judiciously, as you will — we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.” (Ron Suskind, NY Times, quoting a senior Bush administration official in summer 2002)

We all know that politicians lie. Left, right, up, down, didn’t have sex with that woman, Iraq was involved in 9/11, God hates the gays (except, maybe, the ones getting head from self-righteous congressmen)…liars. All of ‘em, to some extent. Continue reading →

It’s A Hard Knock Life (for Kev and Alice)

Now here’s something you really need to see.

A blog by Robin Burkinshaw relates the poignant ongoing tale of a homeless father and daughter trying to survive in a harsh world. But the harsh world in which they live is inside a computer, and the pair exist only in that virtual realm:

This is an experiment in playing a homeless family in The Sims 3. I created two Sims, moved them in to a place made to look like an abandoned park, removed all of their remaining money, and then attempted to help them survive without taking any job promotions or easy cash routes…

I have attempted to tell my experiences with the minimum of embellishment. Everything I describe in here is something that happened in the game. What’s more, a surprising amount of the interesting things in this story were generated by just letting go and watching the Sims’ free will and personality traits take over.

Apparently The Sims has evolved to a point in which the artificial intelligence and social dynamics systems are damned near organic. The Sims have dreams, goals, and emotions and their behavior is driven by those qualities, resulting in complex relationships and interpersonal drama.

This is Kev and his daughter Alice. They’re living on a couple of park benches, surviving on free meals from work and school, and the occasional bucket of ice cream from a neighbour’s fridge.

When you create a person in The Sims 3, you can give them personality traits that determine their behaviour. Kev is mean-spirited, quick to anger, and inappropriate. He also dislikes children, and he’s insane. He’s basically the worst Dad in the world…

His daughter Alice has a kind heart, but suffers from clumsiness and low self-esteem. With those traits, that Dad, and no money, she’s going to have a hard life.

Continue reading →

The Souls of Dogs

Travis 1995-2007

Travis 1995-2007

There’s a good short piece in the Seattle Times about the ethical/emotional lives of dogs. It’s not going to provide any groundbreaking insight to anyone who has ever lived with a dog, but it’s a nice break from the usual Cartesian philosophy that animals are guided entirely by instinct and have no emotions.

One thing I was very interested to find out:

“Dogs apparently laugh,” Page said. The same brain structures show the same activity in laughing humans and in dogs that are enjoying themselves. A dog’s laugh is a rhythmic pant.

I know that pant. You naturally know it means happy, but I had no idea it’s actual laughter, physiologically speaking.

Go here to read.

The Truth about the Columbine Killers

An interesting article in the USA Today updates our knowledge about the two losers who shot up their classmates at Columbine, and puts the lie to much of the information that has been parcelled out over the years:

“These are not ordinary kids who were bullied into retaliation,” psychologist Peter Langman writes in his new book, Why Kids Kill: Inside the Minds of School Shooters. “These are not ordinary kids who played too many video games. These are not ordinary kids who just wanted to be famous. These are simply not ordinary kids. These are kids with serious psychological problems.“

The whole article is quite interesting, and can be read here.

Joss Whedon’s Dollhouse: Smart as Hell, Kicking Serious Ass

dollhouse

If you’ve been following my reactions to Joss Whedon’s new show Dollhouse, you know I was luke-warm toward it at first, then really annoyed with it, then after seeing episodes 6 and 7, I really started to like it and said it was good, but not quite Joss good yet.

Well, now I’ve seen episodes 8 and 9, and I’m loving the show.

Since episode 6, “Man on the Street,” they have fixed the anthology-show weakness that plagued the first five episodes, and each episode has focused on the Dollhouse and its people rather than on the misadventures of their clients-of-the-week. The evolution of Echo as a character is fascinating to watch, considering there’s not supposed to be a character there, but there most definitely is. Those are some still waters running very deep. And the development of relationships and character backstory gets more and more compelling; in this latest episode, “A Spy in the House of Love,” we find out the major secrets of a couple of characters, one of which is a complete surprise and leads to a much deeper understanding of that character, leaving incredible potential for the stories ahead.

There are many themes at work here. This latest episode played brilliantly with matters of trust, from the first conversation between Echo and her handler Boyd, to the implications of their final scene. And seeing the Tabula Rasa Echo step forward as an instigator of significant action was a masterstroke of storytelling and character; I literally got goose bumps.

That a character with no agency develops agency through her own innate strength, even while devoid of her past and identity, is an incredible dramatic device. This show is all about how people use people, and issues of power and responsibility and all that, but the most important thing it’s about might just be the re-enfranchisement of the disenfranchised.

Who on earth could be more disenfranchised than the dolls? Their very selves ripped out of them, programmed and reprogrammed to serve the desires of others, they are the ultimate slaves. And here we have one of them somehow growing as a person right before our eyes, and you just know there are big things ahead.

And hopefully we’ll get to see all of the big things Whedon wants to show us. Fox is playing its usual bullshit games with the show, and now for some reason has decided to show this entire season (and a tenuous “kudo” to them for doing that, at least) except the thirteenth and final episode. Apparently the 12th wraps up the season tidily, and the 13th is sort of a coda after the fact…but still. It doesn’t indicate that the network is supporting the show, and doesn’t bode well for a second season.

But, hopefully they’re watching the reviews, which have been excellent since episode 6, and will recognize they have a gem on their hands and will allow it to grow. This is not just a damn good show, after all.

This show is Joss good.

[NOTE: As of this writing, you can watch episodes 5-9 at www.hulu.com. The show started really getting good in ep. 6, but 5 is pretty good and has some impact on events in later episodes. If you haven't seen them, catch 'em while you can.]

Podcast Adventures (aka My Life As a Meme)

My post about optimism and action, pulp heroes, and the roleplaying game Spirit of the Century has proven to be one of the most popular posts I’ve ever written. It seems to have become a small-scale meme, bouncing around from reader to reader, echoing in other blogs, other places…

One place it echoed was on the gaming podcast Canon Puncture (if you don’t want to listen to the whole thing, the pertinent segment begins right around time-mark 24:34):

Canon Puncture Podcast

I really enjoyed these guys’ comments.

Optimism, Action, and How To Be The Neighborhood Pulp Hero

You never know where you’re going to find a nugget of crystalline wisdom, something that gives you pause because of its brightness and clarity, that makes you think about how you’re living your life, and how you should be living it.

I found one of these nuggets recently. The unlikely place I found it? Continue reading →