392 RESPONSES TO SOMETIMES MY OWN GENERATION CONFUSES ME
via Sometimes My Own Generation Confuses Me.
Check this out, a rather amusing look at Gen Y
392 RESPONSES TO SOMETIMES MY OWN GENERATION CONFUSES ME
via Sometimes My Own Generation Confuses Me.
Check this out, a rather amusing look at Gen Y
Pieces of a broken past reside with loves long gone,
Moving forward with pieces of a fractured future.
Carrying the weight of the world, moving forward, but hardly moving on.
Persistent pains of constant torture.
But he holds nothing but love in his heart.
He uses sheer force of will,
To ensure the world never falls apart.
Ashes scattered to the wind, he loves you all still.
His heart bleeds love, but is often ignored.
All because you’ve all become complacent, or bored.
So as he pours his crimson red paint,
Pay your homage to the pieces of a broken saint.
Love is a lofty concept, and in a sense it is something very concrete to the human mind. It is something we actively seek and yearn for, and yet, very few of us make an attempt to understand it. I could write for days about that notion alone, but today I’d like to talk about platonic love. The way we understand it, it is a friendship devoid of any erotic or romantic components and undertones, a sort of relationship composed of a kind of distant affection. But is that actually what Plato intended? After all, he is the man for which the term platonic is used. It indicates a concept that comes from his school of thought, and I don’t think that our contemporary definition of love in its platonic form would not make any sense at all. In fact, I think Plato would indeed gasp in horror and maybe even mild disgust at our rather severe bastardization of his notions on love.
It is important to understand that Plato was first and foremost a philosopher, a lover of knowledge. His ultimate concern was to create a fellow lover of knowledge, but lover is a more important word than you might think. What do you think of when you think of a lover? A midnight tryst? A night of passionate sex? Perhaps that feeling you get when your in the arms of the one you love. For Plato, all of the things that we normally associate with eros, more commonly referred to as romantic or erotic love, are an important part of one learning to cultivate a love of knowledge, to becoming a philosopher.
Plato sees eros as being an absolutely central part of his love equation.
Think of falling in love. Your heart races in the presence of the one you love, you might even tremble slightly in anticipation of their passionate embrace. That feeling that you can do anything, that adrenaline rush, that feeling of complete rapture and euphoria, that feeling of complete love… Along with that comes something equally beautiful, an all consuming desire for them, and the drive to make the life of your love better. Through this process, through loving an individual in all ways; physically, mentally, emotionally, and even spiritually, we gain a truly deeper appreciation for that person.
It was Plato’s hope that we would experience this kind of love, and we would learn to extend that love, and its associated feelings of total goodness, and in turn learn to love knowledge and humanity in the same way. He had hoped that through eros, we would learn to love all. So platonic love the way we see it, is quite the opposite of what Plato had originally intended. Platonic love is indeed wholly erotic, and it is that element of the erotic and romantic that, in his mind can lead us to a love of both knowledge and humanity.
The Ruckus of alarms always assaulting like buzzards waiting for the Breath of life to leave a once vibrant being,
The tendrils of an invisible tether slowly securing themselves to the soul of of a weary, slothful man.
Until those tethers become natural like our eyes, a new way of seeing.
Total dependency, like an addict on crack, or some other illicit contraband.
Feeling ever-connected, always plugged in,
But when one stops to think, they are ever more alone
Interaction? People? Conversation? Now one hardly knows where to begin.
Sitting there awkward, with a desire like fire and a stare as cold as stone.
An isolating force is this digital tyranny,
Eventually, I know it’ll be the death you and me.
Books replaced by google, with no intellect to be found.
At the end of this techno-age I will scream, but will my soul make sound?
Before I begin, I would like to say a few words in preface to the weird chain of thoughts that dawned on me during a particularly stressful moment in my life. The chain of thoughts I am about to espouse may seem to be merely nonsensical ramblings of an idiot on the surface, but I implore the reader that if they should find this worth any of their time at all, to consider carefully what I’ve said and try to see beneath what seems like the ramblings of an angry man. My goal is simple, to find something that most people in the world can at least agree on enough, that we are able to strengthen one another in times of difficulty regardless of individual religious convictions. I write this with the deepest sympathies for all of my fellow man, and it is my hope that in this brief exploration of mine same train of thought, but some may find and a sense of enlightenment.
It is common knowledge that things live and die, in a continuous cycle. When confronted with this thought as I had been so many times before, I simply thought of the clichéd song Circle of life found in the Lion King and tried to laugh it off. This time however was rather different. I was confronted with the thought of a human embryo that grows into a fetus, which grows into a baby, and is born into the world. From the moment that child is born, it begins a slow descent into death and decay. This presented me with a single thought, that the only thing that is certain in life, is the eventuality of death. This is a grim prospect to any human being, and when faced with it myself I began to despair. I began to wonder if life is simply futile, and is not worth living, and then contemplated suicide briefly. I then began to wonder if this sense of futility was simply a product of my own depressed mind, or if there was indeed some nugget of truth that could be gleaned from such a thought.
The thought that everything is in every descending state of decay is a rather depressing one. But even more depressing, is the thought that because of this perpetual decay the only other thing certain in life is suffering. From this thought I moved on to evolution. I’ve often wondered if there was a reason humanity had come into being; if there was perhaps some purpose humans served better than any other animal on the planet. Upon closer examination, I came to the conclusion that humans are the only species hardwired to dominate their surrounding completely rather than make some adaptations to it. Think about all the high-rises we’ve built, all of the amenities that exist in everyday life here in the West, do other animals really seek to make their environment as comfortable as we seek to make ours? Do other animals pollute their environments for the sake of the mining of natural resources, or in order to simply increase daily comforts? Do other animals hunt for sport, and simply leave the carcasses of their prey to rot in a wasteful ritual? In my mind, the answer to these questions ended in a resounding no. Humankind had simply become a parasite upon here, and a disruption to the natural flow. Why then should humans exist?
My answer was that they should not. Human beings should simply kill themselves and cease to exist. Or at the very least, cease to procreate until the species reaches some sort of natural extinction. The problem that presented itself however, was that human beings, like all other animals, have a biological imperative to procreate that is hardwired into every man and woman. So, by the very nature of our biology, humankind must continue to exist. And if humanity must persist, there has to be, given all of these futile outlooks on the existence of human life, some reason humanity should be allowed to persist. But why? Why should humanity be allowed to exist? If we have not learned our lessons by now, how could we possibly hope to learn them in future?
Humanity has a history of treating its brethren with utter contempt. The solution to this is simple: we as a species must realize we’re in the same boat. But if life is shit, and there is no point. And if there is no point to life, why can’t I do whatever the hell I want? The answer is also simple. Once we realize, that the only two things in life that are permanent are the eventuality of death and that everyone suffers, why not take it a step further? Why not let better understanding lead a man into compassion for his fellow human being?
We only have this life to live, at least in our own capacities to be certain. If all life must eventually come to an end, why not make the best of the time we have? It is the enlightened one’s duty, the one in whom this truth resides, to show his fellow human being that though the suffering of this life may be great, every other thing besides death, is impermanent. The hurt we feel when a loved one breaks our heart for the final time, the pain we feel when we lose someone dear to us to death, the anger we feel when we are betrayed by a close friend; these are emotional states that are impermanent. And by being kind to one another, we can show such things to be impermanent, that they soon will pass. It is important to remember, that we all suffer together as a people, and as a race. I know these thoughts seem scattered, but please bear with me as I try to make them more clear.
Let us look at an example. An enlightened man, one who has realized this truth is walking along the freeway one day, and he notices Someone has a flat tire. After seeing that the individual with a flat tire is becoming increasingly frustrated, comes to the aid of the person with a flat tire, in an age where helping one another is no longer the norm, the formerly frustrated person with a flat tire asks the enlightened man why he stopped to help. The enlightened man simply replies, there is always someone who has it better than I, and always someone who has it worse. But the one who has it better than I can sometimes have it worse, and the one who has it worse than I, can sometimes have it better, of this I am always mindful. The enlightened man seeks to help others for the sake of helping them realize the broader context in which they live. By doing so, he helps them realize that in the broader scheme of things, we are all the same, we are all suffering. And by alleviating those things which we are able, we have managed to in some small part make the world a better place. And if a man should act in accordance with this teaching, if people begin to realize that their mental states are impermanent, they will cease to worry about inconsequential matters and work toward a greater positive change.
Some of you may notice that I did not bring in any real talk of how one ought to behave, nor did I talk of God. There are reasons for this which I will briefly attempt to explain. A belief in God is not requisite to live by this knowledge. The only problem I really see in the world today, is an attitude of environmental dominance, and dominance over one’s fellow man. This requires a shift in attitude to change, not simply behavior. If one can understand the attitude that one ought to have, then the behavior ought to change in accordance with attitude.
The other main reason I chose not to talk of God is because I have seen many atrocities committed in the name of a supposedly kind deity. Condemnation of homosexuals simply for living as they were born, racial persecution and discrimination, discrimination on the basis of religion, all of these are ideas that stand firmly against the foundational principles of the country in which I live, and for these contradictory ideas, I cannot in good conscience stand. I am not saying that belief in God is inherently bad, nor am I saying that it is inherently good. I am saying that people are responsible for such a horrid treatment, as well as kind acts of charity as exemplified by people like Mother Teresa, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and many others. Please think on what I’ve said with an open mind, and an open heart. And it is my sincere hope that one reads this and sincerely understands will find peace. If some of you find this to be a perversion of spirituality, remember one thing, I am the Perverted Sage.
Love drizzles down like rain on a winter’s morn,
The flower opens to accept its most welcome drink.
Sweet petals shiver, pierced by a lone and wonton thorn.
Both reveling in each other’s blissful cosmic link.
The drizzle becomes a torrentially passionate storm.
They pull in close,
Simply allowing mutual passion to keep them warm.
Willfully ignorant of the chaos, enveloped in an ecstatic overdose.
Writhing in sweet yet agonizing pleasure,
The two become one seamless gleaming treasure.
A single torrid night, better than any porn.
And the delicate sweet rose at last unites with her thorn.
Don’t simplify me into a perverse fraction. It is a gross oversimplification to pigeonhole me as such. You stupid imbeciles! You stereotype that which you do not understand. For who can declare a thing perverse? The champions of virtue always judge those who live in the muds of the abyss; cold, empty and meaningless. All the notions of hope and the striving for the ultimate happiness falls into the decaying maw of Time. Time is immortal, she consumes all life, all emotion, all worlds; the masks you create are useless in the aloof gaze of fate. If one stops to think, it becomes apparent that Time is a perverse maiden, and that term is employed loosely here. She is the grand sadist of the ages, as she wears away the fortitude of the human spirit with her patient and detached cruelty.
She takes a profoundly perverse pleasure in robbing us of our youth, our vitality, and than at last cradling us during our age of senility, and bedding us before our eternal sleep. Where is love? The eternal mistress of salvation, the goal of aspiring romantics and sighing virgins. Love values us greatly; if Time is cold, Love is passionate about us, so passionate that she delivers pain in our most isolated moments. While the nations of the world reduce humans into numbers, Love keeps us sane, even if its just a fragment of a whole desire; it teaches us the value of fighting in a passionless world. If one must kill, let him kill with a purpose, with vengeance against the coldness and cruelty of Nature, and not the empty ideals of avaricious machines.
It is not the pain of an agonizing death that Love bestows, but rather the persistent dull nagging of a building desire, an insignificant flame, biding its time until it can ignite its kindling, and the whole world be set ablaze in its fervent glow. It reminds us that pain is the only true way to understand, appreciate and indulge in any kind of real pleasure. It is like the mix of writhing in a mild discomfort whilst ecstasy builds, delivering its gift of a little death, a palatable release of useless tension, a true transformation.
Not the glitter of Maya’s illusions, but a liberation that is equivalent to orgasm, servitude not to the protean changes of Time, but to an unchanging, flowing Tao. If there is even a hint of positivity in slavery, let it be slavery to one’s own nature, abandon all hope ye who enter into the womb of the Earth. Hope is a fantasy for an event that will never form; decay is inevitable, death is certain. Don’t be lost in the fetal stage, and don’t simplify me. Through servitude to one’s nature, a new kind of knowledge brims to the surface. The shadows and dark caverns of the human psyche no longer relegated to the dark recesses of shame and self-doubt, now allowed to roam freely in the light of true self expression. The theology of man is born, master and creator of the self. Through this newfound godhood of self mastery, man is at last liberated from his bondage, and free to live at last and seize his day.
Years ago in Germany, a national zeal and his vehement desire gripped the nation. Chancellor and failed artist Adolph Hitler rose to power, on the wings of a promise to bring Germany back from an age of decadence and blatant moral bankruptcy, and restore it to its former glory. It was under his regime that Germany would see tightening business regulations that targeted a select group of people, along with the elimination of Germany’s free press. Of course, we all know the rest. Germany descended into darkness, with the genocide of millions of Jewish people. Now, I’m not saying that that’s what’s happening here, but what I’m about to talk about should give cause to the American citizen to be cautious in their further dealings in our country. While history may not necessarily be doomed to repeat itself, historical patterns quite often do, and it takes a certain amount of vigilance to ensure that the atrocities of the past do not find their way into our present.
On September 11, 2001 the nation was sent into a turmoil that it hadn’t known since World War II. A terrorist organization known as Al Qaeda took responsibility for two planes crashing into the World Trade Center, bringing down the twin towers, and leaving a scar in a country that will likely last for generations. In the aftermath, we saw an increasing national fervor. And in that newfound nationalistic fervor, we began to mark dark skin and foreign sounding languages other than Spanish as being the mark of terrorism. As a nation, we saw a rise in the reporting of hate crimes against Hindus, Sikhs, and Muslims. And sadly, the overwhelming justification for such things in the minds of many Americans was simply “I don’t feel comfortable with a terrorist in my backyard.” This reminded me of the anti-Japanese sentiment in the United States during World War II. During that time Americans of Japanese descent were forced into internment camps without any sort of trial to ascertain whether or not they were part of the US-born ad hoc spy network for the Japanese government. Shops were vandalized, people raped and killed, and thousands upon thousands of Japanese American citizens held in internment camps without being afforded the basic rights that are supposed to be extended to all citizens of the United States of America. Our new target was now of darker complexion, and out of American ignorance, many times people began to confuse the turbans worn by adherence to the Sikh faith, with the kind of headdress that Osama bin Laden was seen wearing in the media.
Fast forward to 2012, and things aren’t all that much better. Congress recently passed an act that would allow extrajudicial detainment of individuals “suspected of terrorist activity” who are American citizens both at home, as well as abroad. This practice of foreign nationals being detained for suspicion of terrorist activity is often referred to as rendition, and now the concept of rendition has been extended to US-born citizens. If you stop to think about it for a second, the prospect of this being a possibility flies in the face of everything that the Constitution was drafted to prevent. If we’re not careful, our paranoia could run so rampant that we could literally see liberty die within our lifetimes.
The other thing I’d like to talk about today, is the prospect of the Stop Online Piracy Act and the Protect Intellectual Property Act passing into law. I grew up on the tail end of an age before the Internet. And as a child, I had many ideas about what the Internet should be. The chief among these ideas was that it would be a new way of gaining access to information that would otherwise be very difficult to obtain. For me, I saw the prospect of the Internet making education not only more accessible, but cheaper due to the ability to reduce printing costs across the board. With information available online, education would both cross geographical boundaries that it could not before, as well is diminish a piece of the economic barrier that kept so many people away from academic enrichment. Apart from that, I also saw the Internet as a means of connecting to other people I would not otherwise have had the opportunity to connect with. And with these new laws, the Internet may fail on both fronts.
There have been movements to create what one could call open source textbooks to make education more accessible. With the passage of the aforementioned laws, we could see such websites shut down by big textbook companies such as Pearson and Prentice-Hall, all because somebody who says something similar on such open source textbook projects could be seen as violating copyright laws. Search engines could be shut down merely for providing links to websites that may or may not be providing access to copyrighted materials. A world where results from a search engine and access to information can be dictated by US corporations in the United States government. We have to remember that the interests of the former is maintaining control over the release of its intellectual property, namely information that should remain free to begin with if our goal is truly to create one of the most educated societies on the planet. And the problem with the latter remains that the vast majority of the people in charge of our government have no idea how to deal with a medium like the Internet. Imagine a world where social networking sites like facebook becoming virtual copyright law police states, for fear of litigation.
What I fear, is that with the current trend in legislation, this country may simply have a democracy in name only. I fear that we will become a nation ruled by paranoia and national fervor, rather than the light of reason and in the spirit of democracy. The Internet was supposed to be the great democratizer of information, but if we begin to place restrictions upon it, it will simply become another division between social and economic classes. And if we allow the government to continue to enact laws that circumvent the brilliance of the Constitution out of some desperate need to give the American public some newfound sense of security, then we are truly lost. And if I may borrow some words from the Star Wars prequel trilogy, I fear that I may one day say, “so this is how democracy dies, with thunderous applause.”
I look around me, somewhat timidly, however. The sounds of random, disjointed conversations flood my mind and drown out any semblance of cognitive clarity I may have hoped for. Like Noah’s flood, all hope of life continuing, seems virtually nonexistent. with the noise of the coffee grinder, slicing through the burnt flesh of that delectable roasted bean, the whirring noise of the industrial espresso maker, that produces God-awful noise that one assumes would only belong to the pressurized air hoses of an auto garage. And last but certainly not least is the very thing put in place to relax the patrons of this “fine” local cafe; the music. This corporately selected hodgepodge of random sounds from days gone by. Jesus! This music is enough to turn any self-respecting human being into a zombie, completely lulled into total submission to the will of the now-famous mermaid, a coffeehouse sex symbol… She is the Kim Kardashian of caffeine, and everyone seems to have their blood-filled genitals on display for her, waiting for that supreme orgiastic pleasure.
It’s quite peculiar what people come here for… Some come for the coffee, which, let’s be honest, has been horrid as of late. Others still, come for the freedom of the internet, sans the bloated cost, another example of Corporate America’s “generosity, if you consider generous being given access to a digital leash in exchange for Yahoo putting it’s web finger up your asshole whilst you blow AT&T and say with a smile on your face, swallow, and say, ‘THANKS, it was FUCKING DELICIOUS.’ Even still there are those who come for job interviews, or to partake in the proverbial human mating ritual. Both are virtually identical, you sell yourself like a common street corner hooker, hoping that someone will invite you into there own private little corner, where you put yourself on display, spread your legs and say, “Come in.” Hoping you get something more than a soul-crushing beating for your trouble. Ahhhh… The wonders of the coffeehouse.
Life is often thought of as a series of tomorrows
Full of room for joy, but far too many sorrows.
Do what makes you happy, and makes you come alive,
Something for which you’ll continue to strive.
Feel your sadness and let it go,
You may miss a happiness you’d otherwise never know.
Treat life like a series of todays,
Rather than ever-arriving tomorrows.
