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When Tucsonans say, “Stay cool,” that is no comment on the city’s notable hipness. That is a comment on the city’s heat. Today it hit 108F/42C, equal to the hottest day in of all 2014. And I didn’t turn on the A/C, either. Do I pass? Do I get a merit badge?
E Pluribus Unum…
The nice guys over at ISIL have got it backwards. Fear may indeed be the starting point of religion, but not the end, and certainly not the means. That original fear is something like existential dread, whether in our ‘primitive’ ancestors’ realization of their own mortality, the danger from enemies or the self-conscious knowledge of our human predicament, struggling for survival.
Regardless, that is something to be mitigated, not exploited. Organizing fighting forces on the principle of ‘kill or be killed’ with a God or a flag riding ‘shotgun’ to provide symbolic leadership and moral justification is a practice best relegated to the annals of history and the back pages of the Old Testament. (More …)
Religion was founded on love. Love for God and love for people around you. Religious people are not all filled with images of hell or worried 24/7 about Sins.
Religion is here to stay.
Old Testament could use a bit more love for my tastes, but I agree with your conclusion.
I remember when a ‘hashtag’ was called… a ‘pound sign’ to be exact, or maybe ‘number sign’, and I still use it to mean ‘number’, not ‘look at this’ or #look at me# in some so-called social medium neither rare nor well-done… the rest is history…
It’s a sad commentary when the broadcast network evening news is nothing but a re-hash of the day’s You Tube highlights long since published on Internet and social media; that’s why I watch BBC, and al-Jazeera, anything but Russia Today, RT for YT, day for night, that’s entertainment…
I prefer three dots over hash-tags any day BTW, used to be called ellipses and have the limited function of substituting for the missing parts of discontinued narrative, with no change in meaning, until they came to represent the missing synapses of disconnected narrative, with no similarity in meaning implied whatsoever… #Twitter got nothing on Herb Caen, much less L.F. Celine, the writer and doctor not the solution…
Trader Joe charms me, a little bit of hippiness in every four walls, no matter whether downtown Hollywood or suburban Tucson. Just walk in and get a little jolt of the 60’s, in a heartbeat. So when a customer asked me where to find a certain product, “You DO work here, don’t you,” I don’t know whether to be flattered or disgusted so I guess I’ll just be amused… I was carrying a basket BTW… They’ve always got a good selection of wine, of course, and beers, and other rites of passage from youth to adulthood, spring into summer, Europe into America, not to mention free shots of coffee, and hors d’oeuvre, sweet nothings, side jobs, no-brainers, baguettes and blog-ettes…
I listen to at least three different public radio stations in three different cities on any given day, mostly for music but also for news, and can’t help but compare and contrast their differences and similarities. Why public radio stations play the Grateful Dead on Sunday evening I don’t know any more than I know why they play EDM late night or reggae on Saturday morning, or sometimes country and western, but I smell conspiracies, and they smell like mind-control to me, as if Saturdays somehow imply stoniness of the gravel road sort or island sort, while Sunday stoniness of the 60’s sort is somehow more Left Coast or Godly. But does anyone on NPR in LA have a name that can be pronounced, or better yet—spelled? That’s what I want to know… and you gotta’ love those pledge drives…
Statue of Buddha in Kandy, Sri Lanka
I figure if you’re not getting more religious as you’re getting older, then you’re doing something wrong. I thought I’d be a Buddhist monk by now, ensconced in some little corner of the globe hanging with the brotherhood and speaking Tibetan or Pali or even just Thai would be okay, doing the business of no-business, begging for alms in return for my purity and compassion, just trying to provide the world some moral compass, without desire or desiderata, without percussion or repercussions, ni meringue ni compas, life as lived in the latter days of ambition, no ambition just breath in breath out occasional fuel and oxygen fanning the flames of non-consumption…
I suppose that those plans are on hold by now, as long as my 1954 libido has a first gear, a clutch, a power train and a love of transmission, not something you take for granted in the fourth semester of life, the will to power and all that rap, or even the will to succeed and all that jazz… (More …)
Tsarnaev’s brother lived next to me in LA, not the real dead brother but the spitting image brother from another mother probably the same DNA but for an accident of fate Tsarnaev’s Dagestan and my neighbor’s Armenia would’ve been within the same lines on any map right there where civilization first broke out of Africa and then sat around for a few thousand years deciding where to go next…
Many of them got stuck in the Caucasus where Dagestan and Armenia exist today, though it’d probably be Hell to go from one to the other since the USSR broke up and ugly lines reappeared on the map’s face that hadn’t showed up for a few generations…
So, but for some accidents of fate Tsarnaev and my neighbor would’ve played in school together and dated twin cheerleaders, drunk cherry Cokes at Pop’s sodium shop and traded quips and quickies at the Quick Lube on MLK Blvd…
As it is Tsarnaev sits on Death Row for flipping the bird at a surveillance camera and for the struggle that caused him to identify with Allah’s assassins, smoking hash instead of drinking beer instead of getting a job and bringing home turkey bacon in lieu of the real stuff…
My neighbor is Christian but could probably care less, probably can’t even speak Armenian or Russian, much less Arabic, he dyed-in-the-wool American, using synthetic fibers, no doubt, and no Woolite required, banging bimbos for breakfast and spiking the punch for lunch…
Americans don’t do religion when sex is available and the coeds are cute, the liquor is flowing and Med Mary’s available with a dose up close up for those of us with long-term afflictions and habits to feed…
So now Dzhokhar sits on Death Row for killing Americans instead of Muslims, guess he got the play books mixed up as a child, so the score is settled and it seems like a tie…
They’re screwed up and so are we, eyes for eyes and teeth for teeth, trading body parts for God’s little vouchers, pie in the sky, begging for alms and arms, all of us third-eye blind sh*t-for-brains useless best occupied when sowing the seeds of Abraham in fields of barley…
Worst of all: He showed NO REMORSE. For that, there is no forgiveness, heart for a heart and cheek for a cheek… But where’d he get those bedroom eyes? Fifteen minutes seems like an eternity…
Clickbait’: I like that word. Doesn’t that describe most of what passes for the so-called ‘social media’ these days? People are even starting to write—and talk—like HuffPost: “You won’t believe what happens next.” And then they pause—dead stop. You have to ask what happens next while looking around to see if you’re missing any important advertisements or coupon specials…
But videos are the worst. It’s no wonder advertising loves the medium. I don’t know of any official figures, but you must easily spend twice the time watching a video as you do reading the same information at your own chosen speed…
That’s the key: waste time shopping. Department stores in Thailand rearrange the whole store once a week, just to mess with your head, and make you waste time shopping–and buying. But, of course, in Thailand the ‘Psychology’ section of any bookstore is full of marketing tips. “I’m okay, you’re okay?” yeah, right. Pay in advance.
Yes, we’ve certainly advanced past the primitive days of TV, that dinosaur medium long since surpassed in the effort to see who can watch a movie on the smallest screen while acting the hippest and coolest in the process. Monetize it by multiplying it. Revolutions per minute = sales per minute, consumption of precious resources while flying through the air firing two guns simultaneously… you won’t believe what happens next…
Most war movies recount battles like so many trips to the dentist, or play-offs to the World Series of War, but some fortunate few break down the horror into the individual traumas that constitute the one mass trauma that sometimes defines our existences, and if left unattended, our world. ‘The Notebook’ doesn’t do that—recount the battles, that is. ‘The Notebook’ is a war movie without battles, except the internal ones that end up making us into something different from what we were before it started.
The worst thing about ‘The Notebook’ is the title, it so easily confused with the Ryan (‘Abs’) Gosling and Rachel (‘Dimples’) McAdams vehicle of a decade or so ago that attempted to expand the favorite American ‘Love is All/All is Love’ theme into maybe the one new direction it’d never gone—senility. That’s fine, of course, but this is not that. This is war, and you could be excused for concluding that maybe the overriding theme here is ‘War is All/All is War’—close, but no cigarette.
Or if you were to conclude that ‘Sex is All/All is Sex’ then you might be even closer, but you’d still miss the point of the movie. Now, I’m not hung up on themes, but I am annoyed at reviewers who insist that this must be all symbolism and metaphor. Have you ever gone out of the house? Have you seen the world of hate and cruelty that passes for post-religion ‘secular humanism’? Have you ever seen someone killed right before your eyes for the crime of—nothing? Welcome to the 21st century.
Spoiler alert: The deal is that two male Hungarian twins are sent to live with Grandma during WWII, who turns out to not only have never met the strapping youngsters, but who is also a real b*tch, known locally as the w*tch. Life’s tough in the WWII Hungarian countryside, and dignity is at a premium, especially when Granny refers to you as the ‘Bastards’, not too surprising considering she went decades with no word from your mother/her daughter (and will meet another before the war—and movie—is over).
There is a basic love to be found in people, though, if you look hard enough, even though it may be hidden under layers of basic sex and humiliation, but let’s not chastise ourselves too badly for the basic reproductive fact of existence, and any reasonable facsimiles, and the ridiculous things we do to get there, but rather rejoice in the moments of transcendence. Eventually the boys steel themselves to hardship, even bonding with their captor granny w*itch, and manage some coming of age lessons in the process, like frolicking in the tub with a rocking knockout maid. Hey, poverty has its perks! You get to clean up in hot steamy tubs with cute steamy girls!
But that’s not the point. The point is almost Buddhist—life is what it is and it’s up to us to make it better one act of kindness at the time. There you go. You wanted a theme. I recommend. Directed by Janos Szasz. Available on Netflix and elsewhere.
Today the temps touch 104f/40c in Tucson, right on schedule, just like clockwork, welcome to June, welcome to summer, four more months exactly like this, they say, but I wouldn’t know, to be sure, even the Gila monsters go looking for air conditioning, and I go looking for Prozac, or some suitable substitute, as this could be rough, not like a couple months ago when hopes were long and days were short, when nights were cool and the smell of honeysuckle signaled the end of winter, even though they probably don’t have honeysuckle here, so mesquite blossoms or something like that, desert flowers and spring showers, and all that rap, so far from God, so close to Mexico…
Forget the prozac, find you some sativa, it will lift you up out of those blues.
Esther Fabbricante are discussing. 
mary is discussing. 
streaming consciousness... 
Esther Fabbricante 2:17 pm on June 18, 2015 Permalink |
I would definitely turn on the A/C.
hardie karges 3:43 pm on June 18, 2015 Permalink |
I’m holding out for 110…