Volition

Most of my posts will be for friends only at this point forward, and anonymous posting is now off.

Why?

When do people feel unconstrained by the usual socially-accepted norms of civility? In short when are people most likely to be assholes? When they feel like they won't be called on it - for example - drivers often feel anonymous and drive aggressively, honking and fingering other drivers, cutting people off and playing other traffic games. They feel that in their car, no one will know who they are, or be able to discuss the matter with them. In person, or on the phone to someone they know, these people are usually courteous. There are always exceptions but this is a generality, after all.

The Internet has spawned a whole new world of places to be anonymous. Usenet - home of the original flame wars...has now spread to a myriad of other places. Blogs, web portals, usergroups, you name it - there are millions of places to be anonymous. This allows people to drop all social rules and be jerks to people they don't know. They can stand on their higher authority, and make bold, sweeping statements about people they've never met. You can't prove them wrong because they have no face and no credentials to question. They can pretend to be experts, be as arrogant as they want and all without fear of being known and called on it.

Generally it isn't something that gets to me - but people who want to make statements should be bold enough to do so without being anonymous.

And since it's my blog, I prefer to interact with people that I know.

Or is it the People's front of Judea?

http://www.cbc.ca/story/world/national/2006/05/08/palestinians-clash.html

For FUCK's SAKE. If the palestinians are killing each other when they aren't busy killing Israelis, how are they ever going be taken seriously?

Whether the faith is Christian, Jewish or Islamic, the Abrahamaic religions seem bent on destruction. The various splinter groups in these religions just kill time shooting at or murdering each other when they can't find victims from another religion to kill. Keeps 'em sharp and weeds out the fairies, an unnamed US general would surely say.

And the Hindu/Sikh split has it's little outbreaks of violence too. So far I've only heard of one buddhist who went on a killing rampage but I think his mistake was listening to Nirvana instead of seeking Nirvana.

I haven't heard of any pagan rampages, or those of Zoroaster's followers...maybe, I'll get really different and join the Norse religion or perhaps Egyptian. Then I could hate almost everyone else....and those religions knew how to party.

Has the world had enough God/Allah/Shiva/Whateva yet?

Edit: I left the Jewish people out ironically - corrected....they are such fun at parties in the stress of occupied Palestine....

At a high level, we share little with animals. They run around, try to survive, eat food, procreate and generally don't build complex civilizations. They also DO NOT ACT contrary to their own good, except in extremely rare instances.

Humans - on the contrary, often act in conflict with their own best interests. Examples abound, none are needed. Find some in your own life.

Where is this going?

We are still animals but have way too much complex thought going on to listen to our instincts a lot of the time. And yet....sometimes we tap into something a lot more primitive, and a lot more fun.

I marvel at being able to look at a sunset and try to describe what I'm feeling in a poem, or debating politics/science/whatever with someone intelligent, and yet still being able to be in touch with my inner animal at times. It's good for you.....

The question of course, is what qualifies as the peak of decadence. How will we know when our society has reached its apex of being soft, weak and ridiculous. What would replace our society?

Take the following story:

http://www.cnn.com/2006/SHOWBIZ/TV/05/05/tv.us.dogwhisperer.ap/index.html

This would seem to indicate that we are getting close. When a 'dog psychology clinic' is sued by a wealthy patron (and you'd have to be wealthy to waste money on something as ludicrous as this) for damages due to injuries and emotional trauma inflicted on a dog - the dog required $25K in vet bills so far and needs more operations - well, there are so many things wrong with this that it becomes difficult to begin evaluating it.

$25K in vet bills? For what? Throat and leg injuries? $25K? A dog psychologist who speaks on TV?

Can we please develop nuclear weapons in Canada? I'd like to use a giant catapult to throw them into the US. I can just imagine the lawsuit for $2M plus legal fees for this one. ARGH.

First let me say that while I despise chain letters, and usually educate or block the senders, I view Blog ripples differently. First - a chain letter (via email) is both a veiled, new age threat (thou shalt be cursed by the withering of thy sex organth) and a way to waste bandwidth. Bandwidth is your friend. Never waste bandwidth lest we boil the ocean seeking more. Further it clogs mailboxes and usually is based on a hoax. They're also vastly impersonal because YOU MUST SEND THEM TO EVERYONE ON YOUR CONTACT LIST.....or (insert new age cursey threat here).

Ahem...

sorry. Being singled out in a blog ripple is different - it's more personal and smacks of someone actually wanting to draw you out a bit, so I shall play.

I've been tagged by my 'lil friend Hermenia (who has vast amounts of personal charisma tucked into her tiny frame) to play along so I shall....

To paraphrase her blog:

"Once you are tagged you MUST write a blog entry about your 6 weird habits/things as well as state this rule clearly. In the end, you need to choose the next six people to be tagged and list their names."

Six weird habits/things....hmmm....I am going to go with a PG version - no sexual stuff here. I don't kiss and tell anyway.

1. I can't go to bed before 11pm. If I do, I will wake up at 4am feeling like shit.
2. I used to be haunted by a demon/ghost who tried to kill me nightly when I slept. When I moved to Vancouver I left it behind. Occasionally though I fear it's found me again but it doesn't have the same feeling. If it was 'night terrors', why did it stop when I left that house?
3. Almost all of my friends are girls - I have very few male friends. Despite this, I have no gay tendencies. I don't even shave my back.
4. Painting and music, art in general, fascinates and eludes me. I am learning slowly because I have patient friends.
5. I am addicted to history. I don't know when it started but I can't read enough.
6. I believe that we set our own limits and define our reality. I also believe that we select the misery (indirectly or directly) that afflicts us to provide us with sufficient challenge to force us to struggle against the day. I believe that our conscious mind is only vaguely aware of these things but could become more so. I also believe that people who simply expect life to be fair for everyone and hold out for that end up with far more misery by working against the system. I have seen some evidence of this and will continue to examine this part of reality until I sufficiently annoy my zookeeper and become overloaded in misery. Then I promise to be good, watch TV and eat fast food.

As for tagging six others....let's see.....Hermenia only tagged 3....seems like a more reasonable number so I'll tag: Dominique, Nereid and Stephanie

EDIT: Oh my God - click on the location. That is so funny.....

Now for a live report from Lonsdale Quay....

A large container ship tore free from it's anchor and was blowing sideways at a pretty fair clip resulting in four tugboats racing off the dock and eventually slowing, stopping it and turning it into the wind....it took them about 10 minutes by which time it probably moved another half km - before then it had probably moved 3-4km under wind power. The people on the barge attached to the side and servicing it probably were unhappy at the ship's abrupt location shift.

Meanwhile one of the harbour seaplanes made several aborted attempts to land. One of it's engines was smoking pretty hard due to the excess strain and the 2nd engine started smoking before he veered off and headed west. They simply couldn't drop enough speed to get the plane down. I have no idea where they were planning on landing it but I've never seen one of those planes with that much smoke coming off them.

All of this was over 15 minutes of observing the chaos in the harbour. The harbour master's boat was doing it's best imitation of an active fishing bob the whole time...it's probably hard to sound authoritative when you need to barf.

Sinfest....

Negative....still dominates my life. My polar opposite is stressing me with massive negative energy.

My current SO has tonnes of positive energy. Sweeping bits of her fairing off her shoulders, she gets back on her bike and rides. Nothing can stop her and for this and so many other things she has my admiration. My will is undone, my mind overthrown, her sweet song I can't resist.

Still the taint from my past haunts and disturbs me, changing paradise into a too-loud club with good music and drunk people hitting on everyone or a motel room with a cheap, too-hard mattress and smoke filtering in from the open window because it's too hot.

Still despite the lesser vision, I am determined to enjoy myself and ignore the weight of the past.

Morning induced stupidity is probably the cause of a lot of motorcycle-related injuries....there should be sensors in vehicles that prevent sleep-addled or caffiene-deprived individuals from driving. Twice this morning I bleeped a motorist awake just before they were about to drive over me.

And what the hell kind of sound is bleep? Sounds like an amused sheep or maybe an annoyed duck. I am going to by a massive aftermarket horn with serious power that'll make a semi-truck driver wet himself if I fire it in his direction. I want to see glass fracturing and people screaming in pain if I have to play mobile threat warning every morning. Or maybe I just need a huge amp and speakers playing Wagner's Ride of the Valkyries wherever I am....that'd be cool.

Note to self: Avoid driving near starbucks. Wait. That's impossible.

On one side the pressure mounts - the end of my marriage lingers like the slow death of a small star....never quite gone, the specter of what is completely masks the beauty that once was as the core slowly cools and the light slowly fades. Why couldn't she just let it end quickly and peacefully? Jealous love isn't love. The tattered ends of something do not make up a whole no matter how tightly you bind them.

Yet the other side of my life is rife with joy. In seven months I've done more new things and met more people in the previous seven years. I've fallen in love with someone beautiful, inside and out and won her heart as well. Or perhaps she won mine - it's hard to say who kissed the other first since the emotion was so high that day. I have so many cool, supportive, intelligent and even - diverse - friends that my social life is fun and satisfying for the first time in more years than I care to count. My life is not isolated from others - I can dance in the crowd. My kids have 100% of me when they have me - not some distracted, discontented person. That is different for them and it's beginning to work well for all concerned.

Today an example of how different my life is - rode into a motorcycle show with Nereid and was awash in people and motorcycles pressing from all sides - Nereid called it the human/motorcycle wash and it was like being at a crowded club where bikes were allowed. The noise and press was overwhelming. We parked our rides side by side and then realized that we were actually part of the show too - people came up and checked out our bikes, asked questions - it was awesome. Five months ago I didn't even know how to ride but now - well, the ride there and back were filled with some of the nicest stretches of riding we'd had an opportunity to do together.

The good does outweigh the bad - soon the bad will dessicate and drift away, like a skin no longer useful to its host.