Spikebravo
Tonight, I met Spikebravo from YouTUBE on Mill Ave. He’s a bald headed, spectacle wearing actor who has a penchant for teaching. When I came across him he was talking to Suzanne (one of the Way of the Master preachers) and had a strange depth discussion about Gnosticism.
I took him in a circuit around the Ave, talked about about HappyCabbie, and the total slump that the economy is in. With the way that things are going, people are being laid off on a fairly regular basis. In the past two weeks, three of my friends have lost their jobs to lay offs, downsizing, or other economic woes.
Susan
I re-met Susan (and go her conact info) on Mill Ave tonight. She’s a petite brunette, con-goer who I have seen on Mill Ave for many years now. She recently broke up with her boyfriend (lucky for her he did not take her copies of Vexations.) Although, I have not seen her in almost two years.
She says she hasn’t been to many Cons in the interim but is hoping to change that. I have been pondering changing that myself, having not a chance to go to many myself at all.
Break up with your SO, lose your Vexations
This one is a common litany I keep hearing! Sometimes when people are together they don’t ask for two copies of Mill Avenue Vexations—so, when it comes time to break up…well, one or the other ends up taking them!
Just tonight, I heard another story about how someone lost heir bookets. “But they were given to me!” “Wait a sec, some of those books are from before we even got together.”
As much as I’d like to advocate an idea of mixing certain property when together with a kaywng, people might want to think about stuff like this just out of respect for the fact that people do eventually go their separate ways.
Losing your stuff
A young lady at drum circle, with a hula hoop lost her canvas bags tonight. She described them as two large canvas bags, one black, one white, both with long spotted loops. They vanished around 11:15pm and although Susan and I scanned the area of the Tempe Government building, they were not seen again that night.
I hope that they get returned to her.
Suzanne’s daughter, mirror-speech and huggable gods
I had a bit of a talk with Suzanne’s wheelchair bound daughter—whose name still escapes me—mostly because she’s a writer and, being an author, other writers interest me. However, our discussion rapidly descended into mirror-speech after she asked me if my cane was purely ornamental. It’s not, exactly. It’s ornamental in that I don’t precisely need it (I can just sit down and rest more often) but it’s extremely useful in that it allows me therefore to stay standing for longer periods of time.
My legs weaken more quickly due to my congestive heart failure.
She took this as an opportunity to start talking about the afterlife and how this must mean that I’ve thought a lot about what happens after I die. Which is true, I came to terms with that a long time ago. She went on about her Christianity and how she thinks that my conscience should tell me that Christianity is true—can we say, “Culture Shock?”
“What you’re experiencing right now is something out of pop anthropology: culture shock. It happens because as people we have trouble separating ourselves from our own peer groups to realize that other people actually have different worldviews and cultures than we do.”
In fact, when I was younger it took me a while to realize that most Christians don’t get a chance to actually meet their gods like I do. Christians live their lives talking about how they know Jesus, and how they talk to God, or have experienced Satan, or other elements of their religion—but they’ve never physically met them. Not actually. Press them long enough and they’ll admit to sensations and feelings and not visitations.
My people? Our heroes are actually out there and we get to see them sometimes. Personal revelation in the grand scheme of empirical evidence of the Universe is inherently not compelling for anyone but the person who actually experienced it. And then, of course, we can readily elaborate that our experience with our gods and heroes involve hallucinations—with the intent to discover them. The experiences my people have may be very palpable and real, but these experiences are still trivially illusions of the mind—exactly like the experience of any Christian of one of their gods.
Wouldn't you rather have huggable gods? Rather than gods that only come through musty, aging books...
It consistently amuses me that the Way of the Master preachers like to use visual tricks as part of their tracts. As if to say, “the senses can be fooled!” suggests that there is indeed something supernatural and true. Yet, they don’t seem to follow therefore that their very own tests, the optical illusions, the linguistic trickery, all suggest that in fact their experiences themselves are suspect. That when they cannot corroborate them with other people or even with reality itself, suggests maybe that there’s a high chance that their experience is also illusion.
Instead, it become a reason to present a profound disrespect for everyone else, for their own cultures. A special pleading comes into play, “But we have the truth, ours is true, and yours is wrong,” making it a shadowplay of words and mistreatment. Where their illusion is more important, more true, and more proper than anyone else’s—say something about their illusion and they’re up in arms; they say something about mine and they stick their nose up at it.
Yet neither of us can readily deny the force of gravity. An empirically demonstrable phenomena—which they attempt, however idiotically, to equate their own non-demonstrable personal experiences with, ignoring that my personal experiences hold exactly the same weight compared to gravity. None. Chuchulain, the Morrigan, Bridgette, all of these gods are equally likely as YHVH and Jesus and Satan.
The difference is. I’ve actually met the Morrigan. I have never met Jesus. He’s invited, certainly, but he’s not once appeared at Concost. Anyone think that’s strange? It’s an open invitation for my ancestors, my gods, and my friends—yet the only gods that appear happen to be those that I expect to see, those that I’ve grown up with, those whom I know. And not a single one that I don’t expect to see. I’ve never met Zeus, Shiva, the Buddha, Amaterasu, or Quetzecoatal.
The saddest thing about all of this is that when people descend into this mirror-speech they’re not even talking about themselves anymore. It’s not even the witnessing type where people generate bad experiences that they have saved themselves from; it’s entirely an enculting meme attempting to encase another person. There’s no personality there—no person.
Nobody will ever experience a connexion with another human being with this sort of behavior, they will only build divisions and demands. When this mirror-speech is being employed there is a great deal of disinterest being shown as to the very person that they’re speaking. Sure, the speaker feels passionate or even concerned that someone else is going to Hell, or a lake of fire, or wheresoever, but that concern has hijacked their ability to connect with other people.
I may be dying, but I’m not about to dismiss the one best thing that I have this world:
Other people.
