The Embarrassment of Having Stuff

Once a peasant, always a peasant.

It's amazing how one can be sculpted by life into a certain mindset. We were nothing close to destitute while I was growing up, but, let's face it, my dad was a trumpet player/arranger/composer and my mom is a singer and worked as a hairdresser while I was growing up. We weren't exactly swimming in money. We ate. We got college paid for. We had a nice house. But, we never had lots of stuff. Family vacations were rare. That kind of thing.

But, we rarely had "extras."

Which is why I had this absurd feeling last night. Keep in mind: we are anything but rich, but, we're fortunate to be okay and maybe a little more financially flexible than my parents were.

I was fiddling around in my little music studio, arranging things. (Not literally "fiddling" and not musically arranging; like, just moving stuff around.) It is a studio that is funded, mostly, with the money I make as a musician. Once in a while, I cheat and throw in fifty bucks or even a hundred from the teaching income or from our collective money, but most of it, as a result of my silly personal code of not "stealing" money from the family for my own needs, is music equipment with music money.

Whatever Can Go Right, Will

If "whatever can go wrong, will," then I think it is also true that whatever goes right will be under-appreciated. I also think that "whatever can go wrong, will" implies that more stuff goes wrong than goes right. Right?

Does more stuff really go wrong than right? -- or, does it just seem that way because our demands on "rightness" are a little unreasonable? All of this stuff is connected, I think. We want many things -- maybe too many things -- out of life and when we don't get them, we feel conspired against by the fairies or by God or by the machinations of Fate.

Sadly, for some -- and at some times, for all of us -- it is true it rains problems and people find themselves existentially adrift. We can't deny that. But, all things being normal, most of us lead lives on pretty solid, dry ground.

In the woods, on a "snow day"
with my Wiffleball Warriors

"Appreciate what you have" is another popular mantra, whether from a religious or a from secular spiritual perspective. It is good advice, really, and it implies the need to thank some higher power for all that is good. But I would bet that the "whatever can go wrong will” perspective comes from the failure to do that on a small scale; not to the lofty level of saying “dear God, thank you for keeping my baby healthy” but from breezing past the many small, fortunate occurrences in our lives. In short, whatever can go right, will, but it will be under-noticed and soon forgotten about. The bad air sticks in our lungs like cigarette tar, but the bad things are breathed in and exhaled to dissipate and to mingle with those iconic molecules of Caesar’s last breath up in the ether.

Reality in a Holographic World

Love. Touch. Sight. Sound. Scent. Taste. Pain. All of these are filtered through both the conscious and unconscious mind and they all manifest themselves in an individual's own interpretation, for him or herself. That interpretation is that person's reality. That reality is not something whose validity can be argued against, because it is what has taken root in the individual's mind through the routes of taste, touch, sounds, sight and scent.

I'm not talking about the ideas surrounding the feelings, I am talking about the feelings themselves. My love is mine and yours is yours and they are different, though they are both true. My pain might not be pain to you, but, to me, it is what it is. That is real.

For that reason, I think reality only exists inside of us or between us, when we experience each other through the senses above.

The rest? Unreality. What Holden Caufield would call "phony." What drove his creator into a shack and into a jumpsuit. All of the things we label as "real life" from money to government are nothing but constructs. They are not real, in the cosmic sense, though the impact of their phoniness can be felt in many real ways. This is what drives those who can sense true reality insane; or, at least, to the fringes.

The old fellows were right: transcendence is the only path to reality. We need to live for ourselves without hurting others and to seek reality and be conscious of our impact on the reality of others. Reality exists in our thoughts and it extends no farther than our nose, ears, tongue, eyes and fingertips.

The rest is holographic.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent or Portrait Painting in a Photoshop World

I had other ideas for a post today, but then I saw a post by a Facebook friend about some moronic candidate for office who openly claims that children are born autistic and that storms occur and kill innocent people because God is mad at us for our immoralities. Same old crap, different moron: a "Christian" who likes to think of God in pre-flood terms because it is dramatic and because she thinks doing so will absolve her of her own cruelly-twisted mind: "Oh, but it's God, not me." (People like her never do seem to bother with the little conundrum of how unbelievably [damnably?] arrogant it is to presume to speak for the deity in whom one believes...but that's another story.)

But what struck me is that when I followed the link, I saw a reference to her fellow Republican opponent for candidacy, that said this:

Her opponent in the Republican primary is no prize, either. David Earl Williams III, a politically moderate Navy veteran, has a history of alleged domestic violence. An ex-girlfriend  filed a domestic violence protection order against him, saying he stalked her online and tried to get her fired by impersonating her online. Williams is currently fighting the ruling. 

So...is it a ruling or is it an allegation? Didn't it used to be that to be a writer, one would, at least, try to be precise with one's words? There is a big difference between an allegation and a ruling.

Richard Sherman's Freak-out: Frankenstein's NFL?

By now everyone's heard about the Richard Sherman freak-out after an NFL playoff game. Soon after it happened, it became a hot topic on Twitter and people started throwing around accusations of racism at anyone who criticized the guy; others criticized him mercilessly. Sherman tried to play the incident down by L-O-ELLING about it on Twitter.

The long and short of it is that the guy acted like an ass on national television. He flipped out so severely that it left Erin Andrews blinking with the ancient fear-response. 

The problem is, almost everyone is attacking the guy for what he did: he acted like an ass. On the flip, people are defending him: "Well, remember, he is a Stanford grad and he talked real nice afterward."

Why, in this increasingly tolerant society (one that, in my opinion, might sometimes tolerate too much bad behavior) do we want to sum up this guy by the way he acted after a playoff win? 

I repeat: he acted like an ass. He should be embarrassed. But does that make him a piece of garbage?  Of course not.