a capitol call

 Last weekend was in DC…with cold hands and warm hearts.

“The sweet taste of liberty in your mouth”

“I’m not afraid to say it. Dessert has a well-known liberal agenda,” Colbert said in a statement. “What I hope to do with this ice cream is bring some balance back to the freezer case.”

my kind of holiday

Yeah, so it’s just another phony hallmark holiday, but it doesn’t claim that it’s anything that it isn’t. Unlike Christmas and Easter which are grotesque representations of holidays that once were, Valentine’s Day is what it is. A chance to say, “I love you, I care about you, I’m happy you’re in my life”.

Things that we should be telling each other every day anyways. And it just so happens to be good business for flower and chocolate shops, two of life’s most simply sensually enjoyable retail establishments. Happiness is walking into See’s candies and being bombarded by a bevy of blue hairs’ with a chorus of offers for a variety of chocolate delights…

a new swimmin’ hole

                                 

I’m not a swimmer, not big on water sports in general. But today was my first day swimming for exercise. It was a blast! They have a nice big lap pool at my school that is kept at 80 degrees year-round. I went there this morning and hopped in. It’s much healthier for your joints than jogging, so I’m going to start going everyday, to the pool, instead of pounding my knees in on the pavement. 

When you are finished swimming it is a much different feeling than running. Rather than energizing you, as a run does, a good swim leaves you feeling very calm, relaxed, and refreshed.

Grey to Blue

Stepped outside of my apartment building, this morning, into that transition in the weather that occurs when the rain clouds have done what they meant to do and the sun is struggling to break through but is not quite there yet. In times like this, I think about how our minds thrive on opposition and difference. I am so hungry to see the sun finally triumph as I’m guessing it soon will. Within about two hours the streets will be dry again (which I will take full advantage of by riding my bike)!

 

Living in a place that has 300 sunny days a year you really do lose appreciation for the world of possibilities that a sunny day can open. But not today!

Information Overload

I spent two hours in a coffee shop, yesterday, conversing with an employee of that particular internet search engine whose stock values continue ever-upwards into new stratospheres, on a monthly basis, with no apparent end in sight. 

           

I am both fascinated and repulsed by the wonders of information technology. I have been filled with a lust for constantly acquiring new knowledge for as long as I can remember, and I don’t see that changing anytime soon. But knowledge is merely a thing in itself; it is how we choose to use it that shows whether we are imbued with moral purpose or not.

 

As I continued to speak with him, I began to feel that I was looking into the eyes of utter nihilism, speed, and destruction and began to be repulsed by the irony in his laugh when he spoke of “revolutionizing” the way we live, work, play, etc…It’s the same feeling that I have when I step into a Wal-Mart and gaze upon the utter human depravity of 350 pound human beings who cannot move without the help of electric wheelchairs.

 

Our friendly techie’s mythology of speed for speed’s sake, and the shoppers’ mythology of gluttony for gluttony’s sake, are one in the same. They are the unwitting adoption of unreflective ways of living one’s life. Stasis and reckless abandon are two moral poles to be avoided. Every time the latest gadget appears, that is going to “revolutionize the way we live”, we must step back and think about what effect this new tool is going to have on our lives. Will this invention help to foster an environment that is most conducive to the flourishing of the unique human spirit which is within each of us? This is a question that we must constantly ask ourselves, as we guide ourselves to new experiential ports of our own creation, sailing across a vast directionless sea of apocalyptic capitalism.

As we have done with the earth, we assume that our minds and bodies are indestructible. We can pump the atmosphere full of carbon dioxide and our brains full of codes, images, and fragments of mediated sound and light and movement at an ever increasing pace. But like the earth, we too have a breaking point. When it will come I don’t know. I have begun to see that one of the primary challenges, of the times we live in, is how to have some amount of control over our lives, as the flows of people, and information, and goods continues to quicken at an ever accelerating rate.

The humanity that one feels looking into the eyes of a teacher, or a farmer, or a mother is so much more tangible and fulfilling than the eyes of a morality wedded to production for production’s sake: divorced from a moral compass and sense of what it means to be a human being living among other human beings in an un-mediated environment. The medium is indeed the message and with each new medium that we embrace I feel that we are losing bit by bit our humanity. There will come a point when we cannot continue to keep up with the pace of life, or the destruction of our natural world, and most importantly, the destruction of our souls by blindly following those celebrated prophets of speed and waste. The prophet of our friendly techie is Steve Jobs, and that of the Wal-Mart shoppers’ is Anna Nicole Smith. Oprah might not be so bad after all…

Every reaction has an equal and opposite reaction. We must be ever mindful of this as we continue to horde knowledge, enabling us to conquer ourselves and our world more efficiently. The seers of wisdom, the moralists, and the ethicists must stand side by side with the technologist in crafting the world that is to come.

green chard

‘the friendliest flower’

i bought some daisies, the day before anna came to visit, a week and a half ago and they are still looking lovely.

el primero blogo

“Dear Venus, If what they say is true, and my country is dying, then I think I may be able to tell them why. You see, kid, the conscience is a vital organ, and not an extra like the tonsils or the adenoids….You are as well prepared as any young Westerner could hope to be, equipped with good diet, lavish health insurance, two degrees, foreign travel and languages, orthodonture, psychotherapy, property, and capital; and your skin is a beautiful color. Look at you- look at the burnish of you.”  Martin Amis, House of Meetings. 2007.

Starting off the whole blog thing with a passage from Mr. Amis’s recently published work of fiction about the Soviet Gulag, that I had the fortune of hearing him read from and discuss a few weeks back. The above qoute is from the beginning of the novel when the narrator is introducing the current Russian malaise to a member of the younger generation before leading into the Soviet era.

The house of meetings was apparently where those ghoulish and ghostly walking visions of death that were Stalin’s political prisoners, working in prison labor camps, were allowed to meet their wives and girlfriends to share a night of intimacy, together, after they had suffered from years of malnutrition and were bereft of all libido. This opportunity to meet your lover, at the house of meetings, was both a blessing and a curse: you were fortunate enough to see the woman that you loved, but you couldn’t get it up. (The impotence of modern man in a mechanistic and totalitarian world?) As you left the house of meetings, your ego shattered, the other prisoners would give you understanding nods. The comradery of the dispossessed.

Mr. Amis’s next book (non-fiction) is to be entitled “The Pregnant Widow” and is based on the metaphor of a revolution giving birth, to a new idea or movement, and then dying off itself. It is said to focus on the sexual revolution as the primary social movement of post-war Western society.