There's really nothing higher to reach for,...
"When a man is asleep, he is no better than if he were dead; and he who loves life and wisdom will take no more sleep than is necessary for health."I'm having insomnia issues, and they're throwing my schedule all off (check out the time signatures on the previous posts). I don't need a whole lot of sleep, five hours tops usually, but when I find myself up at 6AM and I haven't made it to bed yet, it's pretty clear the next day is going to suck a little, probably with mental issues and a nap making everything screwy.
"There is no use of a sleeping man, as there is not of a dead man. ... But whoever of us is most solicitous for living the true life, and for entertaining noble sentiments, will keep awake for as long time as possible."I'll have all these brilliant ideas and then - *poof* - they're gone, so I've got to remember to write them down,...if I can remember to write 'em down. I've got brain farts, skips in time, and a need for constant backtracking. I'm being extra careful while driving. It's all very tiring. Not like drugs. No, it's nothing like drugs.
"Come - come on in. It's not - it's not like that. Down - down we go. Fall through - fall through the crack."When I was young, in the '80s, I could stay up for days at a time - three or four, easy. Riding in cars filled with ants and empty fast food wrappers. Holes in my jeans. Cowboy boots - with spurs. I had to drink myself to sleep because I just wasn't going there. Sleep was for the dead, and it still is, compared to those of us who have work to be done. Creativity requires diligence. That guy or gal standing sentry on the fence. If you're not awake or aware, shit'll get past you.
"I stopped sleeping and I consider that the grandest tragedy that could occur. At all hours I walked the streets like some kind of phantom. All that I have written much later has been worked out during those nights."The first show I did in the 80s, before anything had started for me, I did with a German named "Z-Snot". He had teeth that looked like Dresden after the bombing. (I'm probably going to lose mine early, so I'm one to talk.) We'd rehearsed this show for weeks, staying up for outrageous amounts of time, getting our moves down ("Alright, you do this and then I'ma do this, and then you reach under my arm,...there!") and coordinating 5 turntables with keyboards before we'd ever heard what MIDI was or anything. Then we finally got onstage and he forgot everything as soon as the music started, abandoning all that preparation for momentarily hogging the spotlight and acting out to the point of catastrophe. (You've only got a "show" when you're actually doing something, right right?) The crowd was polite until he fell off the stage, blinded by the lights and propelled by adrenaline. We went from cool to fools in minutes.
"You enter into a conflict with the whole world, with sleeping humanity. You no longer feel like one person among others, because others live unconsciously. One develops a demented pride. One tells oneself, 'My destiny is different, I know the experience of the uninterrupted vigil.' Only pride, the pride of a catastrophe, gives you courage then. One cultivates the extraordinarily flattering feeling of no longer being part of ordinary humanity."I was sporting five small very tasteful and cool orange day-glo mohawks at one time back then, because - though I loved the machine music of New Wave - I was a Punk, and the lead singer of The Exploited had everyone beat for height. So FIVE mohawks. Oh yeah, I was so fucking hard. Spikes and everything. A human porcupine.
"Insomnia, you ... in a single night grant more knowledge than days spent in repose, and, to reddened eyelids, reveal yourself a more important event than the nameless diseases or the disasters of time! ... I appealed to philosophy, but there is no idea which comforts in the dark, no system which resists those vigils. The analyses of insomnia undo all certainties."Like kids today, I never imagined I'd grow up, or could become the person I'd be, writing this. I didn't even know what "divorced" meant, and definitely couldn't picture myself married. I guess I'm lucky to have never had kids. I lived for late nights, and music, and Johnny Rotten had already said there'd be "No Future" so who was I to doubt it? Getting both my ears pierced, with a red hot needle, was more important than getting older. It proved I'd endure. And I have.
"We begin to live authentically only where philosophy ends, at its wreck, when we have understood its terrible nullity, when we have understood that it was futile to resort to it, that it is no help."Now I'm on some new and improved shit, shaking off everything that's ever held me. Including Punk, and old fucked-up friends, and apparently sleep. I'm working on music but it's coming from a whole different place, incorporating everything I've ever known, every style I've ever heard, all of it. I can't go wrong with music. I'm just as cocky as I've ever been. I know who I am. All I've got to do is stay alive.
Part of the problem is that the American distrust of intellectualism is itself not the irrational thing that those sympathetic to intellectuals would like to think. Intellectuals killed by the millions in the 20th century, and it actually takes the sophisticated training of "education" to work yourself up into a state where you refuse to count that in the books. Intellectuals routinely declared things that aren't true; catastrophically wrong predictions about the economy, catastrophically wrong pronouncements about foreign policy, and just generally numerous times where they've been wrong. Again, it takes a lot of training to ignore this fact. "Scientists" collectively were witnessed by the public flipflopping at a relatively high frequency on numerous topics; how many times did eggs go back and forth between being deadly and beneficial? Sure the media gets some blame here but the scientists played into it, each time confidently pronouncing that this time they had it for sure and it is imperative that everyone live the way they are saying (until tomorrow). Scientists have failed to resist politicization across the board, and the standards of what constitutes science continues to shift from a living, vibrant, thoughtful understanding of the purposes and ways of science to a scelerotic hide-bound form-over-substance version of science where papers are too often written to either explicitly attract grants or to confirm someone's political beliefs... and regardless of whether this is 2% or 80% of the papers written today it's nearly 100% of the papers that people hear about.And why should we? Especially now that we stupid folks - the real Americans - are getting the upper hand? Remember when I used to speak of the opposition and Alice In Wonderland, back in the New Dark Ages, and I told you they're nothing but a deck of cards? Well now we've fully arrived, and can see through their lies, so all they've got left is to flail. Or I should say, all the Left has is to flail.
I simplify for rhetorical effect; my point is not that this is a literal description of the current state of the world but that it is far more true than it should be. Any accounting of "anti-intellectualism" that fails to take this into account and lays all the blame on "Americans" is too incomplete to formulate an action plan that will have any chance of success. It's not a one-sided problem.
If you want to fix anti-intellectualism, you first need to fix intellectualism and return it to its roots of dispassionate exploration, commitment to truth over all else and bending processes to find truth rather than bending truth to fit (politicized) processes, and return to great, foundational humility that even the press could not overplay into hubris. And they need to drop their blinders whereby they excuse away the damage that intellectuals have done while ignoring these ancient precepts and only crediting themselves their successes, because it cuts themselves off from the very object lessons that could help them return to this time-tested approach to science, which they still flatter themselves that they follow. If you fail to fix the intellectuals first, then all your effort to fix "Americans" is going to fail; you'll bend your efforts towards getting them to look at intellectuals seriously, but they'll end up coming to the same conclusions they already have about the value of intellectuals and you'll have wasted your shot.
I'm not holding my breath.
The voodoo grandma who stood by while her 6-year-old granddaughter was set ablaze in a bizarre demon-casting ritual was sentenced to three years in prison on Wednesday.Man, you guys love this shit. You weren't trying to kill her, dearie, you did it because, in the year 2011, your dumb ass still believes in "evil spirits" - lock her up. Throw away the key. Let's do lunch, her treat.
Sylvenie Thessier was led from a Queens courtroom in tears after Justice Richard Buchter scolded her for not getting Frantzcia Saintil medical attention.
"That child deserved to be cared for and deserved to have her wounds treated," Buchter said.
Thessier, 71, pleaded guilty to reckless endangerment for the June 2009 incident.
The child's mother poured rum over her head and lit her on fire to drive out evil spirits - and Thessier only doused her with water and put her to sleep, prosecutors said.
Thessier, a native of Haiti, admitted she was negligent. "But I didn't do it on purpose," she said.
I mean, why do women even deal in religion?
That's never made sense to me:Former President Jimmy Carter says much of the discrimination and abuse suffered by women around the world is attributable to a belief "that women are inferior in the eyes of God."But rather than saying, "To hell with this!" women will either try to change religion (good luck with that) or they've invented their own wacky shit.
Carter said such teachings by "leaders in Christianity, Islam and other religions" allow men to beat their wives and deny women their fundamental rights as human beings.
One of India's best-known spiritual leaders, famous for his apparent miracles and long list of influential followers, is on life support in a southern hospital, officials said on Tuesday.Yeah, like all the rest, the old pedophile can do every trick in the book - especially fooling the lamers - but he can't perform the most important one:
Satya Sai Baba, 85, who has devotees in more than 100 countries, was admitted to a hospital funded by his organisation in the town of Puttaparthi with lung and chest congestion on March 28.
His condition has since deteriorated and he is now on a ventilator and is receiving kidney dialysis, the most recent health bulletin from the hospital said on Tuesday.
He remains "critical," although his "level of consciousness has considerably improved" and his vital systems are "stable", said the update from the Sri Satya Sai Institute of Higher Medical Sciences.
Saving himself.
You fools will catch on one day,...