nature of the artform


Watching and Waiting

or

Home Is Where The Heart Is


by j jackson


But, I wrote that in July, and I wrote this last January:

And now, it's late August.
I haven't been working steadily for almost a month.
I've got to stop making excuses for why I don't work.
I get motivated in both summer and winter.
I stop working in both summer and winter.
When I don't feel like working, I just don't work.

I think about how I used to work, at jobs, always having too much to do, moving from one project to another without pause, never having even the least amount of time between projects to take a breath, sometimes not even able to finish one thing before going onto the next, jumping between tasks at the demands of situations, completely unfocused, establishing a focus each morning in a daily plan that was impossible to execute, even when it represented the simplest of goals. Very unfulfilling work.
It didn't have to be that way, though. I made it that way by trying to do what my bosses wanted me to do. Others didn't try so hard, or they didn't try at all and determined their own selves what it was they would and wouldn't do, one of which seem to be not working too hard, not allowing the impossible demands to determine their (non)agenda. And the problem was, they weren't thought of any worse than I was. Or I wasn't thought of any better. I needn't have bothered to try to be so productive. In the end, it just didn't matter.
I compare that time to my life now: I go through life as if I'm in a dream. (I'm living a dream life now.) I encounter people, exist with them a bit, and then they're gone, off in their own direction while I go off in mine. We have no common purpose, except to co-exist. I act to my own purpose, and no one tries to impose their purpose onto me, or seldom do they try this any more, because I've conditioned myself so well to acting in my own self-dedicated manner that it must come across to others that I am not to be misled. I ease from one task to another seamlessly, and even when I jump around, it's because it's natural to do so and not caused by some externally imposed demand.
But there is a downside. Motivation sometimes lags, and then I have no reason to continue on, and so I don't, falling into ennui. There's something to be said for externally applied motivation, but not too much. Given the choice between the two lifestyles, I'll choose the latter. It's much more sane a way to live. But...

something's going to happen--sooner or later.
Things can't go on this (personally) peacefully.
Or can they?
A war is going to start, or end.
A natural disaster is going to occur.
Someone will die--or be born.
And I'll be ready, because I'm waiting for it.
Whatever it is. I'm ready.
If I never work again (I'm working now), I'm ready.
I'm observing.
Detached observation enables a peaceful life.

Mostly, I observe my dreams and fantasies, but I also observe the world. But then, we see what we decide (unconsciously) that we want to see, so that observation is usually not so objective a method as we want to think it is. Even trained professionals (journalists, etc.) are not so objective as they think they are. Even psychologists (a humble version of which I am), who should know better (who should have been trained better), are not so objective. Most of what we observe is subjective. So, instead of declaring that I'm observing, I should say, rather, that I'm subjecting. And the best, the most rewarding, way to subject is to dream.

6023, outside in the street. I have a car parked sideways on the hill. I maneuver it to get it out of traffic coming down the road, in particular, a car with two old ladies in it who are displeased that my car is not parked correctly. Apparently, I had been working on it. A new vehicle I just bought is sitting in the driveway. It's not an ordinary car, but a kind of advanced tractor that has, instead of tires, rubber treads that run on about sixteen steel wheels. Everyone is impressed with it, but as I think about the purchase, I think that it's not very practical. It can be very useful on a certain limited number of days during the winter when it snows heavily. I could use it to plow (it has a plow on the front), but the rest of the year, it's not going to be very useful for transportation, since it travels very slowly. And I worry about how much replacing the heavy rubber treads is going to cost. Dad is in the garage. He, especially, is very impressed. [The machine is my way of life, very useful in emergency situations, but not very amenable to everyday life. Dad would have appreciated this attitude/approach.]
In the kitchen/dining room: Mom is wandering around the house. We have returned here, but it doesn't feel like home. Mom, in particular, thinks this. I ask her where home is, and she says Sharpsburg (which is where she grew up). Dianne, or someone else, says it's Maplewood (where I spent the first twelve years of my life). I can't answer my own question. I don't know where my real home is. In the living room, Bobby, who is a baby, has been playing with my clarinet and has scattered the pieces all over the place. I can't believe he has been so careless with such an expensive instrument and is allowed to treat it as a toy. I slap him hard across the face. Aunt Jane isn't as disturbed by this as I would have thought. I think that she understands my frustration, although she doesn't approve of it. I feel no guilt at all about hitting the kid (although, awake, I recognize my guilt in the character of Jane, who, maybe, felt this kind of guilt herself because she had a kid who was not "normal" (slow). I can project my guilt at being non-accepting (which I certainly was, and not only of Bobby, but also of many other people) onto her, because she feels this (probably mostly unconsciously) about herself. I go around the room gathering up the clarinet pieces and putting them back into the case. I find pieces of two clarinets¥ (one that existed in real life and one that didn't). I put the first set into the (real life) case, and the second set into a wooden box that they were meant to be in. But I can't find all the pieces. I call one of the dogs to come to me, a huge black, longhaired dog, which earlier in the dining room had been in the way so that everyone, even I, had been displeased with it. It seems that I have trained this dog to find things. I let it smell a clarinet piece and tell it to "find what." He sniffs around the house and finds the missing parts under pieces of furniture. Then I let him sniff one of the parts and tell him to "find who," and he sniffs everyone and finds Bobby, indicating that it was Bobby who had taken the parts and hid them.
I awaken thinking about "home." Where is it? Nowhere. My house doesn't feel very "homey" to me any more. (It feels much homier in the winter, when I hide inside it from the cold.) I have no home, really. 6023 used to be my home, but I gave that up. 1728 has long since not been my home, and every other place I've lived has been temporary quarters, maybe even including my present home. (I often imagine that I will move one day to a better, more homier, place--but that is just a fantasy, I think.) I theorize that, maybe, I'm still looking for a home, which is a place where people who care for me live. I could feel comfortable, I think, in such a place. But none exists. I am comfortable in my mind, though--and, always, in my dreams. I am always "at home" when I am dreaming, no matter where I am. I never feel the discrepancies, the "separation," in dreams that I feel in the "outside" world.
I remember being on the road when I was younger and transferring in and out of colleges and jobs. I always felt lost and separate, but going to sleep at night, wherever I happened to be, was a refuge from the world. Awakening out of dreams then was disturbing to me, because I had to return to a "real" world from out of a "safe" place. I never think about being excluded, or separate, or different when I am dreaming, or meditating, or thinking in a "detached" state of mind, as if I am off somewhere else. My home is where my mind is.
I remember, later, when I was out in the world every day working at a job and generally overextending myself way too far. I'd awaken out of dreams feeling regretful that I'd returned to a world where I was having problems, where certain specific caustic events or conditions, caused by me or, more likely, precipitated from beyond myself, were impinging on my psyche and causing me to experience feelings of stress, anxiety, and/or foreboding and dread. Sleep and dreaming was a refuge from these conditions, and it was always with a great deal of regret that I would awaken out of a better world at these times.
Now, I never feel like this. Always, I feel whole, having achieved a balance between waking and sleeping life. There are no threats impinging upon my psyche, except those real world threats of war, terrorism, bombings, and the like. But that's a different matter entirely. I am not so integrated with the world yet that I experience its problems as so personally felt. Sometimes I do, but often I do not. By having detached myself from daily direct contact with the "outside" world, I feel safer. It's almost like I'm living in a dream that continues on for long periods of time, being awakened only when I feel that I need to go out. It's a nice way to live. I can "dream" about the world out there and report on my experiences without actually having to feel the stressful nature of the world. Some would say that this is escapism and/or isolation, but I call it sanity. It's subjective, but it feels more objective than being out amid that confusing mess every day.

I protect myself, from the "outside" world with money--a traditional defense mechanism. But the defense, lately, has been wearing a bit thin. I've got to get my money out of market sensitive bonds and into insured accounts, and then I can be free to criticize and revel in the unraveling of the system without worrying about what's going to happen to my future security. I got completely free of direct market participation some years ago, but I'm still indirectly vested. But now the bonds' return is not much more than a standard CD. The world's deteriorization is an interesting phenomenon, but it's not so much fun to watch when it could cause your own financial ruin.
I realize I hover between two modes of being: watching from a disinterested place as a chaotic world disintegrates in the distance; and engaging at the very edge of participation as that same world comes to its senses for a while and begins to straighten out, temporarily resisting entropy. Any fuller participation seems to negatively affect me too much to be worth the trouble, unless I must participate, for the sake of my survival or modest prosperity.
I guess it could be said that, in this sense (non-participation), I've fought depression most of my life--except that I don't fight it. From my behavior, I conclude that I must be depressed, but I don't feel depressed. I feel just fine. I sleep odd hours, often in short shifts. I often avoid people. I do the absolute minimum necessary, except what I want to do, my "work." I don't clean my house. Sometimes I don't clean myself, except as absolutely necessary. But I don't have a Howard Hughes complex. I don't abhor washing or meeting people. I just don't do it because I'm lazy and can't be bothered. Is this depression? It sure looks like it, from an outside POV. But it doesn't feel like it from inside me. And when I must, for whatever reason, adopt a "valid" lifestyle, adapt to a social schedule, I do just fine, although with an increasing anxiety as the stress builds up. So, why should I put myself under that kind of pressure when I don't have to? I've learned this from life: you don't have to put yourself under pressure. You can let go and take life as it comes, even if that means that you will die. As you get older, you learn to accept the fact that you will one day die. And that realization in itself can add years to your life.
People who say they have more positive views about aging lived an average 7.6 years longer than those with negative perceptions, researchers reported Sunday.
Being older now, having gotten to this point in my life, a place I never even imagined I'd be, I find myself worrying a little bit (not much, yet) about aging. But generally, so far, I feel like I have a positive view of the process. Yet I can see how I hover on the edge of allowing my beliefs and opinions to deteriorate. I've got to be careful. All my life, mostly unconsciously, I've maintained an anti-aging POV. As a result (I theorize), I've always looked far younger than I am. But the aging process affects everyone to some degree and, although I know that it's a counterproductive attitude, I have to admit that I'm beginning to feel it. It's just as unwise to maintain a rigid belief in the face of hard fact as it is to give in to an inevitable decline. You've got to insist on the best positive attitude while living in a "real world." Or do you? Maybe it's better, after all, to completely fool yourself. Maybe in that way, you convince your physiology that it's really still only twenty-five years old. In any case, I intend to live a long life. I have no intention of giving in to the inevitable process of death. (Even by stating it in that way (inevitable), I preprogram my self. Maybe I should insist that I'm going to live forever, instead of only until the age of 150. (If I insist on 150, I may make 100. If I insist on forever, I may make 150. But even that qualification is preprogramming.)

It may take living until I'm 150 to see the kinds of results I hope to, and am certain I will ultimately, see, but occasionally I observe indications toward that end: I think I see (feel) a turn in the world's psyche toward moderation and liberalism. Turkey abolishes the death penalty. Iraq invites weapons inspectors back in. Angola rebels disband. Rwanda makes efforts to solve their back-up of war crimes cases. A federal judge rules that U.S. must reveal names of detainees in terrorist investigations. These are good signs, but I'm not naive enough to believe that they can negate the warmongers who currently rule the Earth.
Then there are the other examples, the more absurd ones that indicate that mankind has its ignorant elements, like Peter Jennings criticizing Toby Keith for using the word "ass" in his new patriotic song. And he cuts his appearance on the July 4th show because the song 'Courtesy Of The Red, White and Blue (The Angry American)' is "too angry lyrically." What an old grandpa Jennings is. But he's got a lots of balls (but whattaya expect from someone with the slang name for a body part?) But he's right, of course, not to want to ratchet up the rhetoric another notch. Angry words provoke angry deeds. It takes a Canadian to teach us gun-toting Americans this kind of lesson. So it's not really a good example, because it has its positive side.
Still, though, there are lots of ignorant people, those who fall short of warmongering, but still fit into the category somewhere, the pushy people who will not take life as it comes, but instead insist on making themselves heard or felt at others' expense. People who interrupt others to assert their own ideas/opinions/positions are intolerant and/or they're insecure in their beliefs and so must attempt to force them on others by denying speakers who disagree with them the opportunity to present their own points of view. [You see them all the time as talking heads on tv talk shows.]
Some people interrupt others constantly to make their ideas heard, while others allow themselves to be interrupted and wait patiently for their turn to speak, if they ever get it. More and more I get the idea that these more laid back people are the more intelligent and people of the former type use their pushiness to make up for a lack in that department.
More and more I have a problem with people who put themselves out in front of the public in general, performers, politicians, go-getters, etc. (I have a problem with the strategy itself; that's my pathology.) More and more I feel that people who feel the need to "perform" are damaged goods, overly needy people who can't satisfy their needs within their own selves. (Some kind of) wisdom dictates to me that the most whole people are the least outgoing, that they wait, while their lessers grab the lead, that the people with the stronger needs drive the world, usually in the wrong direction, toward ego satisfaction and away from social concern, while the most healthy people sit back, watching and waiting for their turn, which they seldom get, crowded out of a crazy world that's pushy itself toward destruction.
And more and more I'm coming to the conclusion that some people (not necessarily of that former group of attention grabbers--but there is an overlap) are just not worth the trouble they create, that they are just not worthy of existence. Some people are so inconsiderate, or so obviously damaged [or so fat (I believe that gross obesity is a symptom of a damaged psyche) that they impose themselves on others by their mere physical existence, not to mention the negative psychology, an inherent part of their pathology, that causes them to project their hostility toward others; the idea that grossly obese people are jolly is a myth], that they might as well be put out of their misery now to save themselves and the world a lot of trouble. This is an argument for capital punishment, which I don't really believe in. But occasionally, I see the logic of the position. Severely damaged people who will never be rehabilitated might as well be killed. The problem is, who makes this decision? It's rather obvious in light of recent developments in DNA testing, that we've been doing a poor job of it so far. But although DNA evidence may prove innocence, lack of evidence does not prove guilt. People are railroaded all the time by envious friends and neighbors, by witnesses who see what they want to see, often purging the traits and even deeds from within themselves, by crooked cops with prejudiced agendas, and by overzealous cops and prosecutors looking to advance their careers. Often enough, the accusers are more guilty than the accused. And there are the more obvious cases, the people who, even if they are not guilty of the crime of which they are accused, are still pretty much worthless examples of humanity. But again, who makes that decision? What if one day someone chooses you or me?

Each year that passes leaves us with outrageous insults to the sensibilities of advancing consciousness. The accumulation of these insults is the legacy of humanity. What else but the Tribulation can this be?
I know that the same thing can be said of any epoch of human history. I know that in each century in human history people have thought that the Tribulation was at hand. But each century has really gotten worse.
So, the real question is, how much worse can it get? Well, we haven't, for example, experienced nuclear war yet, nor biological warfare, nor have we seen any but the most rudimentary forms of chemical warfare.
It can get a whole lot worse, and if history shows us anything, it is that it will. If we have the ability to do it, we will manage to do it. We always have. This is what the Tribulation is, the ongoing enterprise of war.
Each new phase of human technology brings a greater tribulation, and each phase comes upon us at an increased speed. "Progress" feeds upon itself, until a critical mass is reached, when the Tribulation occurs.
Can anyone doubt that it will be soon, now that we have the insight of history behind us? In 100 A.D., no one understood anything about nuclear energy, or even global politics. Now that we know, is there salvation?
Only in Biblical (New Testament) terms does the possibility still exist. But Old World religion is as antiquated as pagan rituals. Only a new age (scientific) salvation is possible. Christification ala nuclear holocaust.
It's a sci-fi nightmare plot from here on out. And we're in act three and nearing the point of crisis. Look at the evidence: epidemics (AIDS, West Nile virus . . .), scourges (chemical spills, pollution, Brown Cloud . . .),
terrorism and terroristic states (Israel and Palestinians, Iraq, al Qa'ida . . .), war (people, societies, can't resolve their differences without resorting to violence), escalating domestic violence (in any given country),
etc. The prophecies of the various religious texts seem to apply to this epoch of history as much as to any other. This is the "secret' revealed, that it doesn't apply to any given era, but to humanity. It's applied psychology.
[Prophecies like that of the Bible or Nostrodamus come true because they are created through an intuitive knowledge of an archetypal history of the human race and the potentiality of human psychology.
They're not given conclusions, but tendencies likely to come true because we expect it, given enough time for circumstances to play out--because, via this expectation, we prophesize self-fulfillingly.]
The "normal" world has never existed. Nobody's normal. In the depths of human psychology, just above the level of collective instinctual and archetypal behavior, abnormality is the "normal" human condition.
This is the cause of the state of the world today. We project our inner condition onto the Earth. We set out as a species of demigods to remake the planet in our (inner) likeness. And we are succeeding. Soon,
our heads explode, in proxy.

Somebody needs to stop us, before it's too late. Obviously, we can't stop ourselves. The crazy people who run the world won't listen to the sane people who watch. They think the sane are crazy, a massive case of global projection. If the UFO's aren't here to stop us from blowing ourselves up, if there is no such thing as alien invaders (and I don't think there are), then we're in a lot of trouble here. But what can I do except write about it? I couldn't even manage a simple low-level job in the corporate hierarchy. How can I be expected to make crazy people see the truth? I'd be crazy myself if I even tried, if only eventually, via social expectation. All I can do is practice my art and hope that someone with enough power to do something will take notice.
My art is to report my ideas and experiences and the ideas and experiences I come across during my daily life, logging them into my journal, processing them, and posting them to my website as blogs, various journal entries, pastiches, or fiction. I know I've written this before so many times, but I haven't actually done this in so long, several weeks now, and I'm trying to motivate myself into getting back to it again. I love to be on "vacation," but after a short while, it starts to make me a little bit jumpy, as if an alien is taking me somewhere against my will. And how do I know this isn't true, after all? Maybe I'm inspired to write these things by some alien spaceship circling the Earth, beaming "my" thoughts down to me. It's as good an explanation as any other, I guess. Motivation is such a strange phenomenon.

Believing in aliens is not any more crazy than believing in all of the spiritual entities that are supposed by our religions to exist. Angels and devils battling in a spiritual realm, dead saints watching over us, sons of God ascending into heaven, and their mothers as well. And the prophecies. My God! They expect us to believe that a coming religious regime was predicted two thousand or more years ago. And expection is a powerful tool, so I do believe it--sort of. I know the power of the human mind. I know what it can accomplish, especially collectively, when properly programmed, and this is what religion, above all else, attempts to do. But there's another side:
Preterists believe that the Bible should be interpreted in the context of the times in which it was written and that Biblical "prophecy" refers to the ancient world ending at the time of Christ, or shortly thereafter, and not to a period some two thousand years later. This is, of course, true. But it's the nature of prophecy, like history, that it can be re-interpreted, in the same way as it is the nature of the I Ching, the Tarot, or the Ouija board to reveal the mind/life/times of the user. The Bible (or, at least, the "end-time" parts of it) is being used today by many people as a text to "explain" the current devastating state of a world preparing for a final war. I fight in myself this tendency to interpret it this way. It is true, but only if we make it true via a self-fulfilling prophecy (which we may very well end up doing, even as our leaders see the idea as ridiculous. It is the nature of the collective unconscious to work unconsciously).
Last night on the Phil Donahue show, Studs Terkel proposed an alternate solution to a (self-righteous) war, a package of social programs similar to the CCC, WPA, SEC, Social Security, and all of the other social experiments spawned by the Great Depression. This was what was so great about it, that people came together and actually did something positive to resolve the problems they found themselves in, instead of projecting the blame onto enemies and bombing them all to hell (which we ended up doing eventually anyway, but that was for a slightly different reason; we were drawn into that after the fact, a strategy that Bush now says we must abandon in favor of premptive strikes). Studs says we eliminate terrorism by eliminating the desperation and helplessness that people around the world are experiencing that drives them to follow and empower people like Saddam and Osama. Well, in the same way, we empower the factions who believe in the inevitability of end-time prophecy by believing that it will happen and there's nothing we can do about it. When we bomb and when we attack, we buy into the terror that the enemy propagates, which is exactly what they want us to do. We enable their regimes by legitimizing them in a war and verifying the opinions that we are a hostile nation bent upon destruction. If we, instead, established programs to give them back their dignity, we would disarm the terror of the "tribulation."
We need to adopt a preterist point of view: the past is the past. But the future can be better, but only if we think it can be better for everyone, not just for Christians and Jews, but for Muslims and Hindus as well. But we won't do this. We'll go along with what we're doing, because we're led by warmongers who believe that the answer to our problems is to bomb our enemies to hell, thus propagating the myth of the end-timers, playing into their psychology, and creating the events that will cause it to become the psychology of the global organism. We can stop it, as Studs says. But we won't, because we're not that intelligent a species after all, not because we don't know what to do, but because we don't know how to elect the leaders to make peace happen. We're smart, but we're ineffective, we liberals. The meek won't inherit the earth, they'll inherit its ashes.

The civilized world is being progressively deconstructed. Advances made are being inherently questioned by forces intent on destroying them, with the eventual purpose in mind of redefining them in different terms. Large segments of the world population don't appreciate a Christian era world. Metaphors for this process proliferate. A Time magazine article on the non-indigenous nature of the Snakehead fish and why it should be poisoned says "The coyote didn't start here, nor did the hog, the sparrow, the starling, the rat or the pigeon." But neither did the horse, the cow, the sheep, nor the white man. And, for that matter, neither did the "Native" American. And now that I think of it, it seems to me that all of life in America probably originated somewhere else on the planet, so let's poison the whole damn continent. Wait a minute. I think we're already doing that. We're poisoning the whole damn world, the air, the water, the earth, and not only in the literal sense. As a species, we're poisoning our own psychology, divisively separating ourselves into armed camps, trying to undo the march toward centralization that began long, long ago. Will we succeed? Of course not, unless success is measured by our complete annihilation, which it cannot be. Say what you will about Cousin Georgie and his hawkish methods, he is the champion of centralization, however flawed and exclusive his vision may be, as he attempts to implement his father's 'New World Order.'
The terrorist 'cause' is doomed to failure, because they resist the new world order, which has always, throughout history, eventually succeeded. Their resistance is only for a time--unless they succeed in toppling the regime, which they will not, because even if they did, they would be doomed to ultimate defeat for failing to incorporate the dissident and disenfranchised masses into the centralization process. We (the West) face this same fate, if we do not incorporate in the same way. But the difference is, we will, eventually, incorporate. In traditional terms, it is our fault, our flaw. We have never lost a war (before Vietnam, at least), nor won a peace--because after the hostilities are over, we back off and leave the defeated to their own devices, as long as they pay homage to our more 'advanced' way of life. We win; we do not conquer. We assimilate, to the degree that our former enemies are willing to be assimilated, which they usually are, seeing the social and economic advantages. In this way, we lead the world along toward (our version of) a central world government (which the U.S. resists, but futilely). Terrorists are the snakehead fish and we are the lake poisoners. But the lake is a world that we do not exist outside of. We are not an external god.

Our religious heritage, Jews, Christians and Muslims alike, begins (if not earlier) with the Sumerians. Our primary myths and stories (Adam and Eve, Abraham, etc., etc.) proceed from that tradition. When we experience religious differences, it is not a matter of heritage, but of a more modern interpretation, or, more likely, a self-imposed sense of identity, that we are not like them, our brothers, sisters, and cousins of long ago--when in fact we are exactly like them, just as ignorant and intolerant. The real difference among us is not along these lines, but between liberal and fundamentalist traditions. Those of us who adhere to the strict observance of difference are fundamentalist while those of us who strive to transcend this age-old malady are more liberal. This is the real difference between us, a dichotomy that cuts across generations and religions.
One of God's first acts of discipline in the Bible is to banish Cain for killing Abel. He doesn't apply the standard Old Testament "eye for an eye" stricture that Christians suppose is the old-law way of doing things before Christ changed it. Instead, he even puts a mark on Cain to protect him when Cain worries that others [Who were they, if he was one of the first humans? They were infidels, because he wasn't one of the first humans, he was one of the first Semites.] will want to kill him for what he did. Right from the beginning God is merciful. It's not a Christian invention. God establishes the theme that runs through the entire Judeo-Christian-Muslim tradition when Cain asks if he is his brother's keeper. This is the whole impact of Western religion: Yes, He is merciful.
From this one story and its subsequent tradtion, we can conclude that our spiritual purpose here on earth is to watch out for our fellow humans. The basic dichotomy between conservative fundamentalism and liberal enlightenment is that, on one hand, from a purely rational point of view, we are all animals and must needs follow the laws of nature, which dictate that we suffer in kind for the consequences of our actions, survive when we are fit, and perish when we are not, and on the other hand, we can be helped along by others when we are weak, and we can help others when we are stronger. There can be no doubt that the latter course is the one approved of by our religious heritage, both old and new. It's the common theme running through our Western religions. It's this activity, helping, enabling, that our God approves of.
So where, then, did this fundamentalist practice of demanding that people pull their own weight or else come from? From the people who only want to be Christians when it suits them, when they can benefit from it, otherwise allowing those others who need help to wallow in their pain and degradation. There can be no doubt that, if there is a hell, if the Bible is literally true (which is what they believe, after all), fundamentalists who operate in this nonaccepting, intolerant manner are going there. Their basic position is untenable, rife with internal dislogic. It is they for whom the eye for an eye punishment was conceived. It's man's, not God's, perspective turned back on mankind: if you are not forgiving, if you believe that mercy should be subservient to justice, then so be it. That's the way you will be judged. You decide for yourself what the course of eternity is for you, by the way you treat your fellow humans here on Earth. Can there be any doubt that this is the 'fundamental' lesson of our mutual religious tradition? God is merciful toward the merciful and strict toward the strict. As ye sow so shall ye reap.

We are sowing the the seeds of our destruction. This is not a revelatory statement. This is not a unique discovery I've happened across. People have been saying this since the human race developed enough of a mind to perceive its basic nature. This is what we do, at least half the time. This is our lesser half. But being such, it's only half true. We're not destroying our planet. We're destroying ourselves.
The globe doesn't need to be saved by us, and we couldn't kill it if we tried. What we do need to save--and what we have done a fair job of bollixing up so far--is the earth as we like it, with its climate, air, water, and bio-mass all in that destructible balance that best supports life as we have come to know it. Muck that up, and the planet will simply shake us off, as it's shaken off countless species before us. In the end, then, it's us we're trying to save--and while the job is doable, it won't be easy.
Jeffrey Kluger and Andrea Dorfman
Time magazine, Aug 26, 2002
Yes, folks, there are still some optimists among us. Makes you kind of dewy, doesn't it? Me? I tend to be more of a pessimist myself. The world is nothing to get too misty over. Either we survive, individually or as a species, or we don't. It's just a fact of life. If we're too stupid to do what's necessary to save ourselves, then we deserve to die, to make room for another species to evolve and take our place. Dolphins maybe. It'll be a long wait, but waiting is. Meanwhile, I practice the art form. I don't really know what I'm waiting for, but that's the whole point, really. Life is waiting til you die, and occupying your time with diversion. One thing I do know I'm waiting for is the technology that will solve the aging problem. They say it's coming. When science will have eliminated death, then that'll have been something worth waiting for. Will I make it? Will this fragile body last that long? And if it does, a more appropriate question may be: Will I be able to afford the technology to save my life? Or will it be available only to those who have the money? Probably the latter. That's pretty pessimistic isn't it? But it's real. And reality isn't so nice as I used to think it was. Fantasy is better. Movies are better than real life. You can make movies end any way you want them to. Even if you didn't make the film, you can remake it in your mind. I do, all the time.
[from the Webmonkey newsletter]:

-> WEBMONKEY OVERHEARDS <-

Mike: Who would play you in the Jay Patrikios story?
Jay: Michael Rapaport!
Mike: But he's tall and blond, and you're ... not.
Jay: Oh yeah? And who'd play you?
Mike: Fred Savage.
Evany: Margaret Cho.

Who would play me in the j jackson story?
Hmm. Let's see. James Woods, maybe.
I'd really like to watch that movie.
I just can't wait for it to be released.