What’s in a name
So I’ve just been doing a mile a day basically. Today I managed about 1.25, my ankle is very sore and my legs are not feeling good either. It has not been fun, as far as running goes that’s for sure. It didn’t help that my watch wasn’t picking up the satellite today and that my headphones have decided to stop working in one ear. Certainly things have not been getting easier. Someone mentioned I seem to carry a lot of weight around with me. I mentioned I may be too appropriately named.
I think I’ve discussed that before, St. Christopher being a story akin to Hercules, Atlas, etc. I try and help others who I see trying to take that weight on themselves, but they never want to listen. So this gets me thinking about Conspiracy Theorists again. I know I’m not easy about it, but I see so many otherwise intelligent and well-meaning people wasting their time, efforts, causing me and others unnecessary anxiety, hurting their own goals by wasting time and wasting energy on this nonsense. I get it though. I get it, because there was a time I fell into the conspiracy theory hole. When I was a teenager, when I thought I had a good handle on things, when I thought there was this thing we call control.
The problem is, you look out on the world, and you see all this pain and suffering and you can’t reconcile it without some sort of evil force behind it. There has to be something more than a made-up value system. So you look so hard for it. You look everywhere you can, and you find whatever adheres to your own ideas of how the world works and what you think the evil should look like. Just as our Gods all too often appear to have a will which matches the things we wish the world to be, often our Devils adhere to the same principle.
But we want a greater meaning to our suffering, or the suffering of others. It’s normal and natural, and why because the nature of the horrible things people do to people, do to animals, do to the planet in the name of wealth. So you look for people who tell you, it’s not really the money, it’s the power, it’s this deep conspiracy of these types of people. They twist the names and meanings of things, or they don’t, they let you twist it because you are desperately searching for that great evil, and then just let it go. The Earth is flat, vaccines cause diseases, man didn’t land on the moon, aliens visit us, the media is out to get “so-and-so”, airplanes are equipped with chemical dispersal devices to make you sick, control your mind. It’s all a load of bullshit. Like all good bullshit, there is sometimes a grain of truth to it. Yes, airplanes are used in agriculture, at low altitude, to put down fertilizers and other chemical agents, not all bug sprays are safe. Yes, sometimes a live vaccine can cause complications, it’s rare but it happens. The fact is, dispersing chemicals at 35,000-50,000 feet in order to damage people on the ground is about as effective as spraying your Windex bottle at your mirror from the other side of your apartment. But let’s not bother with science. There’s a conspiracy here! People are out to get you.
And that’s the thing, if you can personify it, you can get a better purchase to try and combat these things. You can maybe gain control. That’s what I wanted. I wanted to try and get control, to get ahead of these things, to find a way to “bring them down.” But there isn’t any way to do it. You could literally kill every single “person” you think is involved in whatever conspiracy, Or at least jail and ensure those people have no phones, no way to contact others, each and every person in the intelligence community, media, military, politics, pharmaceuticals, whatever area or industry you think has a conspiracy, you can get all other people, from the CEOs, Leaders, Middle Managers, down to the damned Janitors, you can take them all, put them into little isolated cells, even just let them sit there and never even feed them. Other people (assuming the system itself remains) will merely slot right in and continue doing exactly what the “conspirators” were doing previously. Not because it’s a conspiracy, but that’s simply how the system works.
How do I know this? Look at history, look at all the times we have claimed to cut off the “head of the beast”, the shit always rises to the top again, doesn’t it? Because the system never changes. We change the name, we change the lexis of how we speak about it, but the system always remains. And people will do unspeakable things in order to find themselves at the forefront of that system. People will manipulate others into thinking they are fighting the system, where those people are merely serving it by harming others just so that person in “control” can have just a little more. The problem isn’t even really “capitalism” the problem is profit. The problem is the same regardless of the socio-economic controls you put on, communism will have the same problems overall, because someone will manipulate to gain control of the system, for their own profit.
We need to go back to a more primitive way of life on a micro-level, with people growing, building, working for themselves. We can mitigate that with a progressive macro philosophy, where we go out and discover and explore like we are supposed to. I firmly believe both ways are the way forward. We need a comprehensive system which is fundamentally different from everything else which has come before, we need it much sooner rather than later, and that is all. If there is a conspiracy here or there, that is not the problem, that is a symptom of the disease. Stop wasting time on it. Focus on what we need to do to survive now. Finding a new way to live which works. By buying into conspiracy you are only serving the system, in attacking a symptom, not the disease.
Have fun, keep running, and remember; if Gil can run then so can you!
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All these years…
So I’ve been keeping up with my club running streak and put in 5k this morning. Next week and the week after are going to be really difficult, and I started out too fast today and now my ankle is really sore. But that’s neither here nor there, I need to stay focused and on task.
To that end, I really have to start working to break out of this depression. I can’t decide if it’s because I haven’t had a drink in over 3 weeks now, or if having a drink would make it worse? But I noticed something while I was sleeping that I have never noticed before. My dreams are more vivid, more bizarre, and way more disturbing when I am depressed. I don’t know how I have never noticed this before, and I don’t read up on symptomatic expressions of things. I’m not a doctor, I just know how things go for me and how my body acts and reacts, and that’s that. But after last night’s weirdness, I realized that whenever I feel like this is when my dreams are at their most distressing.
I don’t know if other people feel that way too, but it was a very interesting observation. Like my mind is working harder to try and escape its own prison. I can’t just rely on running to mitigate these things, like now with my achilles still in pain every day, what if something happened and I couldn’t run anymore? I’ve been trying to diversify my activities. Yoga, video games, funny TV, movies, video, things I enjoy. They do not create the same conditions.
At least now I recognize another indicator of trouble, really off-the-wall dreams/nightmares. The more things I can identify the better chance I have of mitigating and alleviating this issue. It’s been a long process, and it’s been a long time since I’ve been this down for this long. It’s been since just before my birthday really, and it has nothing to do with the birthday itself. In a time keeping system centered on a solitary planet orbiting its star, which even gets that timing wrong (hence why we have leap years and leap seconds) I’m not particularly concerned about “age”. I think I’m just truly tired, I’ve been battling personally, professionally, so much this past year or so. I think it has just caught up with me. People who witness me work think everything I do is effortless. I think I’ve discussed this before. I make things look easy. But that is so far from the truth. It’s a constant swirling torrent of doubt and worry, study and work. One thing is for sure the work is never done until it is done. At that time I’m sure I will wish for 5 more minutes, 5 more hours, 5 more days, 5 more months, 5 more years of worry, of doubt, of struggle.
That’s why I try to stay positive even when my mind is attacking itself. Because when it’s done it’s done, and so we have to our best to make the most out of every moment. That’s why I talk about treating people better. Everyone should have a chance to make the most of every moment they have. People’s ability to make the most of things shouldn’t be hindered or inhibited by artificial systems of resource distribution and the lies created therein, that some people are deserving of more based on whatever convenient criteria those who have the most determine will solidify their grip on their supposed wealth.
And that’s the thing. Life is hard enough to be a modern human being without people piling on and deeming some “deserve it”. This is why if fight as I do, as long as I have the strength to handle my personal battles. I can only ever imagine how much worse it is for someone who didn’t have the advantages I’ve had in life and yet have the same inherent disadvantages. Even when I was very young I recognized how lucky I was, even as bad things were happening to and/or around me. I’ve always had that basic empathy, to understand that the world is not mine, and there are things happening outside of my view that makes what I am going through absolute child’s play to someone else. If you cannot understand that, or if you do not want to understand that, then you need to search for your empathy. You are at fault, and it will lead you to faulty philosophies and ideas. If your ideas about how the world should work place the blame of the problems onto other people based on pure prejudice and judgement of how you think “other people” act and think, then you are at fault. The only time blame can be assigned to other people is when you can demonstrate that their actions have caused injury to society at large.
Case study: Trickle-Down Economics, or “Supply-Side” as people like to call them. It simply does not work, the wealthy hold onto their tax breaks, the poor pay more and get poorer. It causes an injury. The people who support and enforce this regime are under the assumption that the poor are to blame for their lot in life, due to laziness, irresponsible behavior, things like that. Even though you can see the stagnation in the economy, the increase in debt, the increase in pain and suffering among the vulnerable, people still continue to enforce this faulty ideology on others. People who support trickle-down are wrong, we have the statistics which show them to be wrong, and we have the empathy to reach out and see the suffering of people caused by it, to know that it is wrong. If it worked, it would not increase suffering at all.
This is a problem in general with the United States though, and the rest of the world to a point. But I have used this example before. Back in the days of the Dust Bowl, and other more minor but still troubling droughts, there would be travelling holy men, the people who became the pastors in mega-churches today, their ancestors. They would go from town to town promising that it would rain. They would seduce the women in the town (seriously, there’s a great description of that in John Steinbeck’s “Grapes of Wrath), they would take as much money as the town would give, promising they could make it rain. They’d have a huge event at the town’s expense, and when the time came and it didn’t rain, they’d tell the townspeople that it was their lack of faith, it was their sinful ways which caused the rain not to work, God didn’t abandon them, they failed God. Why we allow these people to continue to treat us this way I will never understand. We need to change.
Have fun, keep running, and remember; if Gil can run then so can you!
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Busy Times
Work has picked up significantly. But I’ve been keeping up with my run streak, even if my ankle is back to the level of pain it was before I took my break. I’ve just been plodding along most days, just getting a mile or so in. I am fine with doing that for as long as I have to for now, it’s ok. Did a little more than a mile today, originally I wanted to do at least 5, but I was just sore and tired in the morning.
I was going to talk about people who don’t pay attention, but I realized they don’t pay attention, so it doesn’t matter. People who think they’re the arbiter of what is what, that they have secret knowledge that other people don’t. I have no time for that mess. Otherwise intelligent and good people wasted with their head up their own ass. I don’t have time for it. This world doesn’t have time for it.
As I get older, as I see the pattern repeating itself, I ask myself if it is truly worth the effort expended. Is there hope left, I ask myself? My heart says yes, but in my head I’m pretty sure we will just keep on pretty much this same trajectory, with a few course corrections until the world’s demise at our hands. Simply because the “most powerful nation on Earth” lacks any and all humility or sense. Not just the politicians, the people, the politicians are a reflection of the people. Don’t mistake my lack of patience for a lack of humility. People just piss me off because while I’m well aware I’m an idiot, they all think they’re smart. Again this idea that they hold some secret knowledge.
Like I stated the other day, truly strip away everything, really see how deep your conditioning goes. How even your supposed “awakening” is just more bullshit. You’re no less a commodity than anyone else, and if you don’t think you’re buying into the system when you spout your nonsense about different conspiracies, even if the conspiracy ends up being true at some point or some level, you’re a bigger fool than I can put into words. There are so many feedback loops to the way things are, and I’ve yet met another person who said “Sure I’m a giant hypocrite, but so is everyone else.” Everyone seems to exclude themselves from the “full of shit” class. I don’t understand how others don’t see it. But that’s the way it is. Constant self-doubt, self-criticism, re-examining, re-adjusting, yet moving forward with the best possible information you can, all the while knowing you’re probably wrong about the whole thing. That’s the only way to be. Once you learn something, then know that you know it, but be prepared that it may be wrong after all. But here’s the thing, with virtually everything we argue about, everyone’s wrong. The problem is there are things we do know, and people intentionally cast doubt on that in order to further their own agendas, but whatever.
I’m going to keep on this. Take everything away, ask yourself what you truly need, and how you truly feel about all other people having those things. Ask yourself how you feel about other beings having those things, not just human. Ask yourself how you want to interact with the world, as yourself how you want to be interacted with understanding that you have no control over that. There’s a great video I saw of this woman who encountered what looked to be a brown bear in the somewhat wilderness, and she was “talking” to it asking it to leave her kayak alone, then proceeded to pepper spray the bear. The bear then goes to the kayak and destroys it while she yells and screams. It’s by far one of the most annoying things I’ve ever seen. First the woman’s voice is truly irritating, secondly who does she think she is telling a bear what to do. Third, if she hadn’t done something in the kayak (I’m going to guess she ate in it and ended up dropping food in there) to make the bear interested it would have left it alone. Fourth, why did she interact with the bear? There was clearly some sort of construction there, surely she had some sort of edifice to protect herself from the bear. Let the bear be, I’ll bet if she had just stayed inside and let the bear go about its business it would have left the kayak alone, bears generally don’t want to mess with humans. Unless of course, there was food in the kayak.
But that’s what people do, they yell at you like you’re the bear, but you’re not a bear. But they think they can control you, like you are an animal, because they see other people as being “controlled” by someone else, when in reality we’re all merely a product of the collective, unyielding conditioning. What they don’t understand is that they are just as controlled. They think they are above it, they think they are in the Matrix and have taken whatever fucking pill it was that “Neo” took. But none of that is true, they’re still just as conditioned, because they refuse to look at themselves, even the ways in which they do look at themselves, aren’t anything meaningful. I don’t know everyone, I’m making general statements based on my own experience. There are ways in which my conditioning alters my behavior that I am sure I, myself, am not aware of. It’s ok. It’s ok to not know, it’s ok to not be in control. Stop thinking it’s not ok. Yes, it’s also not ok for people to treat other people shitty, it’s not ok to be racist, classist, sexist, it’s not ok to be shitty in these ways. It’s not ok to think you’re better than anyone. Even the people who are shitty, even the people you know are dead wrong. You’re still not better than they are.
Have fun, keep running, and remember; if Gil can run then so can you!
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