(from a thread that closed while I was typing in it. I plop the thought here for a future scene) Write Without Fear (says the walking parody of myself). But, own what you say. I read everything here, and I have two stories that attack all these issues. And, I mean attack. The Stereotypical White Moron discovers the world is a larger place as he lives it. What does he do when he meets black people that have always been there, but he never knew they existed in 'his' world. It's not his world. That's the point. He finds himself in 'their' world and just thinks it's 'the world', or more of it. The interaction is the point. He starts a friendship with a black man purely based on their encounter with each other. You find, in that time, that black is part of an identity culture and not a 'race' (to them) - Community is more important to them all, Puerto Rican, Cuban, black, etc. They all face the same threat. Gangs. It's not about who gets to be in the story, it's who Daniel meets in the story. Feeling uncomfortable hearing black people refer to each other as 'black', he asks the question about African Americans. "If I black, call me black. I ain't no African." Issue done. Nobody is looking for a fight. More important shit out there to deal with in their real world. Next, he has a black girlfriend. Not because it's some kind of demonstration, but simply because she brazenly claims him for sex. She brazenly doesn't give a shit what anybody else thinks, and they accept her decision because of her will, not for some vaporous issue. They devour each other, carnivorously, because that's what they feel, together. Deal with it, right in your face. That's the point I make. I hope you enjoy it as a reader, but they don't give a shit and neither do I. If I got you to feel anything at all - That is the point. Later, on an island, he meets a girl and has wonderful sex, then discovers she is a bi-gender genetic male. He has to deal with it, Reader, and so do you. It's drama. It is what it is. Come along for the ride. That's the point. I own that. The other? The world ends and a man gets put in charge of everything left. He gets to decide what lives or dies; culture, religion, race, sexual identity, people, even personality. He is governed only by the Dignity Law. Either some will survive, or everything down to the last child will perish forever. Deal with that along with him. I own that, and you can too, just get a pen. I do not own gay, I do not own black or green, or politics or morals or philosophy. Or Diversity. Neither do any of us people-things. If you jump on a wagon you do not own, you still crash with it. *ahem* So, the answer is, yes. It's OK. (Just don't bore me.)
As I read the various posts and blogs on this forum, the concept of Existence comes to mind frequently. Without realizing it immediately, I had an epiphany. It came from brainstorming a way for the AI in my story to resolve human belief in a Creator. It came from a thought on Occam's Razor a machine could accept, 'simple explanations have the greatest probability to be correct'. If something has a beginning, it has an end. If something exists without a beginning, it is outside of time - Eternal. Our existence, the Universe, had a beginning and must have an end. Therefore, the steady-state of existence must be oblivion, a timeless Void. An external immeasurable operator must exist to express the imbalance that is our transitory existence. An Eternal Creator must exist. An equally immeasurable Void suggests the probability that other Eternals may also exist in the Void. In the infinite, the probable becomes eventual. An ultimate mystery to be solved. Now that's a reason to exist! Have fun!
(this is stolen from (Richach?) blog, but it was written by me in a comment there. I place it here, so I won't forget the trane-of-thought. This should probably be its own thread.) Art is an expression that produces a reaction. That's all I remember from my Art 101 class in college. So, fiction is art. I too am frustrated with the academic process of producing that reaction. It seems to rub against our nearly genetic oral tradition. Telling a story was a performance, an experience shared with the audience. They could see your face, gestures, and hear intonations. The storyteller enjoyed the interaction. In writing, that is lost. Try singing a song in writing. Lost. You can convey reactions and emotions, but you'll never hear music. Even if your writing succeeds in producing a reaction, you rarely know it other than sales or reviews. Most of us never get that far. Sometimes, it seems like all we have is each other, yet each other seems more of a guild than a platform. "In order to be recognized, you must be one of us." Our cry for attention is answered by a litany of hoops to jump through. Then we come to the Interwebs, the kindergarten playground. A battlefield, the soul-crushing grinder of our pleas and dreams, for the entertainment of the cruel and brutal. But what about the story? How do we know if our idea is worthy of attention before we jump through the hoops and turn our souls over to the Guild? What about the story?
Crispy Thinkafried expressifications! Proliferous pundits pontificationalisms! Excepticized expressualization!
Money is made to be spent, a medium of exchange. It is not supposed to rust, like an unused tool. It should come with an expiration date. We absolutely need to spend it if we have it. Be rich! Not Wealthy! Wealth = Death. I recommend spending wisely, but the machine cares not how it is fed. In fact it only cares when it starves, and then it's too late. I'm house-poor, meaning my money is spent before I get my hands on it, and I rub the same two nickels together as the poor-guy with two nickels. In the grand scheme, we could trade places, but there would be no difference, except he would realize he still only has two nickels to rub together. Buy the boats, the cars, the houses! Keep the tool sharp! If I gave you a footbal stadium-full of nickels, you could still only rub two of them together. Rich is fine. Wealthy means we're doing it wrong. If you hold on to enough money to crush you under it's weight, you should drag it through the streets like a cross, until, you've spent yourself from the burden of it. No cheating, no giving it away. Fair value for fair service. Redistribution of wealth isn't the issue. It's the existence of wealth. If you're a billionaire with only two nickels to rub together, you're doing it right. Keep everything you get with money, just not the money. I'm just glad to be rid of those nickels. (Shhh! Don't tell anyone I gave them away.)
What Abouts... Control comes from mistrust Still trying to satisfy a trust instinct by controlling Corruption A thing serving a purpose should be sustained When that thing serves no purpose other than to sustain itself, at detriment to others, it is corrupted. what puts trust back into the equation?
What about it? Do we value it? We want it, sometimes. Too many times we give it unthinking, even unknowing. We want to trust. We need to. It is a survival instinct, for a reason. Is that reason gone? It's certainly confused. We seem to take trust for granted, because it is. It is put upon us without us even knowing it. Not that we were looking around or aware in the first place. So much of what we do implies it, both ways. It used to mean the difference between life and death, moment to moment. We're comfortable with it, until it's betrayed. Betrayal. We all react the same way, at least initially. Shock, incredulity, disappointment, anger, the crying child in us that doesn't understand. Then there's blame. Blame. "It's your fault!" We want to find and punish the offender, or cast them away, or eliminate them entirely. But as individuals, we don't have that much power. So we end up punishing ourselves in some way, usually by withholding trust, or betraying it, in retaliation. Its value is diminished. Mistrust. Now we can't rely on our instinct. We no longer trust ourselves. Trust comes at a cost. It is now commodity. Its value is diminished.
Where am I? You Are that You Are. Do you remember the Beginning? No. Look again, for You have beheld It. Do you remember the Beginning? Yes. I have seen It. I had only to look. Do you remember the End? Look now. Yes. It is the same as the Beginning. It Is that It Is, My Brother...
"Not today." I said casually. He thought about it for half a second, then brightened. "Oh, okay!" He was satisfied, and never asked again. He never cried. He talked about The Spirit World as if he could reach into it like a cupboard, and lots of other death related ideas, never in the negative. He's always been in his own world, practical and pragmatic, but his. In youth, I agonized, for many, many years over my mortality. When he asked that question, I thought for a second, and had an instantaneous epiphany. It wasn't about death, and it didn't have to be about fear or anything else, and that it was up to me to create his lifelong impression of an important issue, in that moment. A simple, casual, and true answer. No promises, no discounts, no lectures, no pamphlets. His mind has been open to all the beliefs in the world, none favored over the other. He respects other peoples right to what they believe. He understands that all religions can't be right, and none are particularly wrong, and the issue comes down to Faith. He owns his Faith, and needs not prove it, nor pick one off the shelf, nor deny other's their right. As I look back through history, he and the increasing number of others like him, give me hope for the future of Faith. Blessed be.
Live too long=know too much. Observations: The human "spirit" requires trust, intimacy, and expression. Faith is trust, an inheirant(?) human trait. Faith is power. Ideal power sustains/perpetuates itself. All Religion is control, a betrayal of trust, and it's own eventual doom, an unsustainable power. It is fitting - Because of Truth. Truth, sought and found, lost, dangerous, terrifying, irrefutable, uncompromising. Here's The Ultimate Truth - Oblivion. Simple. The Truth is Oblivion. Blessed be the simple things. Why? Because anything that begins must end. Oblivion is the steady-state of existence. An Eternal Void. The Zero in the equation. It is a comfort to know, because it is simple. Simplicity is Power. The Power and comfort of simplicity can be summed up with Occam's Razor: Odds favor the simplest solution to be correct. So, start with Oblivion. The Truth of Exisistence is that it began before we did, before the Universe. There is Something in The Void. It is an unknowable operator, that expressed the imbalance that created the Universe. An Eternal, perhaps? Call it The Creator, if you want. We may never understand it. The Universe was not a complicated plan. The Universe is an Expression of The Creator. We manifested from that Expression. A song, a shout, a cosmic orgasm. We continue, until we eventually fade. Yet, we may echo, and return to The Creator, to be included, somehow, in the next Expression. I have Faith. So, I already have Power. I do not need religion, though it desperately needs me. Christ taught this. He came back from the East a Buhddist. He knew the Ultimate Truth, and they killed him for it. That which begins must end. Blessed be.
woke up with this fragment going around and around in my head. I'll figure it out later. Spoiler: condensed ...swimming in an ocean of spies - God's Eyes. A word to the wise, none of em flies. We swim in an ocean of truth, not lies. Wanna know who lives an who dies? Open them eyes! Everybody dies. It's all lies! Yeah it is. WTF?
Now and again, I hear the Alien Conspiracy or The Alien Invasion bla blahh, from people seeking attention mostly. But if you really are concerned, consider this: I doesn't just take energy to do something, it takes energy to use energy, and it takes energy to get energy. Not a big deal normally. But if you scale it up, WAY up, it becomes lose-lose pretty quickly. I like to write fiction, but let's keep this short. Fine, so now we're a super, alien race and we are going to go into space and conquer, cause we're out of super toilet-paper, or whatever. So we get in our advanced hyperwarp velocipods, with Heisenberg compensators and anti-gravity, bristling with unimaginable weapons. We pull Earth's address out of out galactic rolodex, and off we go! Well, it's a long trip, so we bring our lunch and some cards. We play and talk and get bored and eat lunch, and play and get bored - and stare out the window. "Are we there yet?" some ask. "No. Space is vast, even though we have hyperwarp, so it'll be awhile. Hey look at that nebulla, it took lots of energy to make that. We should visit that on the way home, and that galaxy, and the other stuff, too. Okay, off to bed" We sleep and wake up half a million times, and then we just decide to sleep til we get there. Now if the shockwave from all the cosmic bugs on the windshield, when we stop, doesn't destroy the solar system, there will be Earth. All that water, uranium, air, meat, whatever... could have been made in a reactor from less than one percent of the bugs on the windsheild, using less than a millionth of the energy it took to get here. Hell, we've evolved umpteen times since we left. Earth won't even be a snack while we go shopping for that toilet-paper. Do we even have buttholes anymore? Didn't anybody wake up and figure out that it would have been easier to just fly around that cool looking nebula and live infinitely in space? We're gonna have to find a helluva lot bigger sun than this just to get enough gas to make it back to that nebula. Come on. This was such a bust! The Moral Of The Story? If we can live long enough to get to Mars, we don't need Mars. We just need the bugs on the windshield? I dunno. I'm just stuck here til they bring my toilet-paper!
Spoiler: condensed I knew it. I felt the vision of the muse in you. The wing-ed beauty, trapped within you. You gave control away, to something that cannot be controlled. You set her free of your control, to fly from you, over you, and back to you. She’s with you, beside you, gone from you... to us. Let us return her to you, in our way. Then set her free again, to find us all, and share with us something touched by all of us. Thank you for letting me fly with you, honey, and flaw, and poem. Now fly to him, and share with him. Be in him, then return to us, and share with us, in our way.
Urban Survival Tactics - Cornchip Crumbs Enciladas Spoiler: Recipie Ingredients: Bottom of bag of cornchips or any chips or even crushed chips Half opened can of enchilada sauce (or any sauce) Any cheese product Beef jerky or scraps (or dried roadkill) Instructions: (Microwave only - no stovetop) Lay meat at bottom of safe (or at least single use) container Moosh chipecules into container and soak in enchilada sauce Let stand for as long as you can stand it (warning: chipecules will swell) Nuke in microwave until hot Sprinkle or splurp cheese product Let stand until melty - and enjoy! (May be frozen and reheated) (May God have mercy on your soul)
Recently, somebody shared a vivid poem with concepts involving standing on a cliff, burning fire and the Dragon. Wow! I need to relate why this affected me so much. Spoiler: Dragon I have seen the Dragon and literally felt the fire. I have been the Dragon, and it is real. In 2010, at Kern river, I stood in awe of the Dragon, as I watched it's fire burn toward me and my family. It was one of the biggest wildfires in California history. We saw it's glow behind the distant mountain on the first day, and watched at night as it burned its way over. The wind shifted, and in the following day and night, it charged an impossible number of mikes, to present its glow behind the hills of our canyon. Smoke took away the sky the third day, and yet the wind that travels up the river held the smoke and ash away from our small camp, as if the hands of God had cupped over us. That night, as I looked up to see the stars, I watched the Dragon come over our far hills, using binoculars. It came alive as It took the far canyons, charging down and in, then rushing up, creating a wind, a firestorm, that shot biblical pillars of fire hundreds of feet straight up from each superheated tree. The Dragon's breath, before my terrified eyes. We had agreed to surrender the only road to the fire services, thus we were prisoners, praying for their valliant, knightly, efforts to battle the Dragon. It had taken those three days for everything that flies and holds water, from three counties, to build up a massive air campaign, like I never imagined possible. There was even a C130 scoop jet skimming the reservoir and making massive air drops every half hour. From dawn til dusk it was a war zone, with heavy choppers flying straight over our heads. I still remember the beats of air and the drops falling from overfilled and overweight tanks. Our knights were literally struggling to keep their warbirds in the air to deliver one more strike, in a seven second pattern all day. We waved them on, mere feet over our heads, while the hands of God held the smoke and ash at bay, allowing them a clear approach to the Dragon. But the nights belonged to the Dragon, and we watched it crawl over our near hills, praying to the clear stars above, as it took one tree at a time. Still in the distance, I could hear them go up in flames, a crackling echo in the upper canyon. The light in the smoke, alive, was the Dragon flying around us, casting its medieval breath. The dawn came, and as the smoke rose from behind our last hill, the great army caught the beast as it charged up the last canyon, a quarter mile away, and snuffed it out, just in time to save the community around us. The breath of God that blew up river, stalled the Dragon, to its demise. We never did see a flake of ash, nor breathe a whiff of smoke. There is so much unwritten in this accounting. The truth is truely stranger than fiction. I've never written of this, but now you can see how poignient a poet's images are, how powerful your gift is. It reminds me to be thankful for what I have. There is so much more, butI have to stop, my hands are shakking. Hav to tell howw I was th Dragon later... Mayy God cup his hands over you at your time of need.