poetry about brains
success is just being better at your brain
than your brain is at you
your brain is not a muscle
in that things that strain your mental health generally don’t make you stronger
they just weaken you the way a concussion does
so that the next hit doesn’t have to be so hard to do the same amount of damage
(being exposed to the truth!)
things that exercise your brain
make it hurt
when it’s out of shape
your brain needs to be a perfect ten
to make religion work inside of/for you
(busts out the miss brain USA ribbon)
(God judges people by the brain they
were born with the same way men
judge women by their faces and bodies)
YOU need a fountain in your brain
chemicals running over
to make the cognitive tricks you play in the middle
so that you can sense God loving you
then you have to astroturf the bad things
and forgive the bad people
in your life
in an effort to make things make sense in hindsight
(of course romanticizing suffering is mainly done to
make those who suffer less [who generally have power]
comfortable with your suffering)
(forgiveness is just a cognitive trick you play to try to
get over a wrong while defering to the person who wrongs
[who generally has power])
people can bring you to religion
but only your brain can use it to find (conjure?) God!
(praise the brain!)
suffering coats your brain with teflon
so the stuff before it happened sticks
and the stuff afterwards just slides off
(for those trying to proselytize)
if you aren’t going to be the one there to
scrape my brains off the walls after i blow them out
your sales pitch doesn’t mean jack shit to me
Close Call
Just had a close call with a tornado warning. A strong system was headed towards us but luckily it didn’t touch down in the city proper.
We had to go in the basement and the only thing I took from my upstairs room was my medication. Not my journals, diaries, computers, or letters. I guess I’m not really attached to anything besides what sustains my sanity.
Jesus Submarine
The U.S. government was going to fake Jesus’ second coming to overthrow Fidel Castro.
Not So Different Than Young People
Great comment on a NYTimes article on elderly life hacks:
Once you are elderly, I am 72, you realize that you are not so different from younger people. You still have your desires, creativity, enjoyment of life, brains, resilience, sociability, love of beauty, love of life.
It’s only from the outside that we seem different. Inside, we’re the very same people, a little slower perhaps, a bit more pain perhaps, a chronic condition or two, but the same.
Pokémon Creator
The creator of Pokémon is on the autistic spectrum. He really liked insects as a child and didn’t like all the violence in video games. I have noticed a lot of my friends on the spectrum love Pokémon, the video game and the card game.
So now even millennial suicide bombers are too narcissistic:
Mustafa Hamid, a former high-ranking Egyptian volunteer with the Afghan mujahideen in the 1980s, described his own frustration with many of the later waves of volunteers arriving to that conflict. “One of the negatives that emerged from the jihad, and which continues to have severe consequences today, was the tendency for the youth to focus not on success and achieving victory and liberating Afghanistan, but on their desire for martyrdom and to enter paradise,” Hamid wrote. This overriding preoccupation with becoming a martyr meant that participation in the conflict, “became individual instead of for the benefit of the group or the country where the fight for liberation is taking place.”
The stench of unanswered prayer
There is little Christians, particularly Christians that prescribe to the prosperity gospel, hate more then people with disabilities. The stench of unanswered prayer precedes us. We make prayer look bad but since Christians aren’t allowed to attack God they use us as a proxy to take out their anger on him. Heck, Trump is on board with the prosperity gospel and look how he treats us!
Guilt Drowned Out By Shame
I think I have a poor capacity to process negative emotions. For example most of my life my radar has been jammed by shame (for looking/being different, not having a job, a place, and SO, etc..). This has drowned out the guilt I’m supposed to feel that would goad me towards Christianity. The Christian message, at least in the traditions I’ve been in has gone something like this:
- You aren’t perfect and should feel guilty about this
- Luckily our religion will wash away your guilt with Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross
- Well not really, we were kidding about that. Guilt is the lever we’ll use to keep you in line (because you’re still not perfect and you still should feel guilty about this fact).
(Christian traditions vary mainly by how disingenuous they are about the facts above)
The problem with this whole thing (at least for me and I suspect a lot of people) is that our negative emotion “radio” is not well developed enough. Shame comes in on the same channel as guilt and drowns the guilt right out (because, at least in my case, the shame is felt much stronger). I suspect that in earlier times when Christian mores were more prevalent, shame was used a lot more in keeping people away from things like fornication and alcoholism. However that’s receded, now shame is pegged to mostly consumeristic metrics like money, status, pleasure, etc…
BBF3
This Godspeed You Black Emperor! song was written in 1998 but it feels like it was written for 2016.
Stigma of Joblessness
There is a chart from a Pew Survey that asked the question, “is today a good day?”. Richer countries scored lower than poorer ones, by large margins. A lot of countries that scored high had very high unemployment. I think people might be happiest where they don’t have job stress and they have less stress of joblessness. In rich countries you choose between the two. Even if your physical needs are met, being jobless makes you an object of scorn. In poorer countries employment is so low that there is a critical mass of people not working which makes for much less stigma.