my crush on tim grier

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I know you've got to be sick of me falling in love with guys every time you turn around, and I'm usually just kidding, but this Tim Grier thing has me by the throat. For about the last 48 hours, suddenly, I've gone Tim Grier crazy. It started the night before last. I am so going to get over it. Rest assured of that! It's just throttling me right now.

I think it's part of enlightening being, of karma, of shedding delusion once one has gotten a gander at truth.

I'm just kidding about Davis. I think he's a doll. I love most of his videos and seriously dig his readiness to action. I really do think he's a dancing god, and don't think I can stop calling him my boyfriend, even though he's married.

But the Tim thing is of an entirely different character. I found out about him on another website a few weeks ago. I've been skimming over news of his various battles with local authorities, and Tim was just a bit of news to me, a guy trying to fight the good fight and catching flak from a bunch of self-important local poobahs. What nailed me was going to his website for the first time a couple nights ago, finally finding out exactly what he was doing, and noting that there was no trace of whining or self-importance there at all. Just the facts.

It's ridiculous, really, that I should get nailed by someone over twenty years younger than I am, but seeing what I saw, as I saw it, made my knees go all wobbly and that warm front moved in. It's really not appropriate to have such a reaction to someone merely doing what he thinks is right, but, truly, don't you think hearing of such a person these days is too much like a breath of air to a drowning person? Yes. That's just precisely it. Someone merely doing what they think is right is water to the one dying of thirst on the desert or air to the one drowning. In the best of times it is too infrequent. We tend to make those guys into heroes damn fast, but, lately? Am I missing something?

Yes!

THAT.

Now that I've watched a couple videos and read some news about him, I see he keeps being identified as an "activist". That's how I was once known too, before that surgery clocked me. Maybe soon I can go back to it, but it's a seriously silly way to describe anyone who's only doing what they think is right. I mean, if we live in this world we have to be active or the world gets done to us. People who want what is everyone's, people who do have the will and the energy to act in furtherance of that goal, can just take it if we do not act. The laws we've let be turned into total shams hardly slow them anymore. It's like taking candy from a baby. You just have to wait till nobody with any backbone is looking.

Always seems to me that maybe three people on the planet grok this. Can't work with anyone because their failure to assimilate the bare bones of real life on earth, true humanity, fundamental humantude, always leaves me searching wildly for ideas about how to take everyone's blocks off with one cosmic swipe. And. Ka-ching. A heavily tattooed one of those three pops up in the arrangements of pixels in front of me and it plum bowls me right the heck on over.

Pfeh.

It's the buddhas working to get me back on the razor's edge.

Okay. Okay! Give me a break! I hear ya! Sheesh! He's too young! This is silly.

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No. REALLY. Doing what is right is ORDINARY. It's just that when everybody isn't doing it, it seems so outrageously vital. It's just that when everybody isn't doing it and nobody can even tell that they're not doing it a couple of us feel like we're being held under water, like we're crawling on our bellies across the Gobi in a sand storm, on the way to dead for so long we almost couldn't identify LIFE anymore.

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I remember my teacher hollering about when people would gush about my teacher's genius. "No!" my teacher would holler, "I'm just normal. I'm just ordinary. This is what humans do." The ticket, of course, is that people are out there not letting themselves be normal, be ordinary, do what humans do. Too risky. Someone might see you fail. You might have to work at something on top of how much work life already is. Better to just say stuff. That will cover it.

It doesn't cover it.

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Walking in the County Clerk's office, or the Registrar of Voters office, or the Board of Forestry office, wherever, slapping down your complaint, or whatever is going to actually bring them up short and make them attend to the problem, and sticking with it for as long as it takes, for as much as it takes, covers it. EACH of us not only knows that is right, but we make ourselves ever more ashamed every time we don't actually DO what is right.

The ones who take what is everyone's are not even partially fazed by any number of signatures on a petition, or letters to our senators, or floods of emails to the local station. Sheets flapping in the breeze of a freight train.

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God, I hope there are enough decent people in Wilkes-Barre to make sure Tim's complaint doesn't get buried. How absurd is the term "activist" anyway for doing what you think is right? It means everyone else is a "passivist" fer crapsakes... which seems quite horribly to be the case. Is it really any wonder so many who consider themselves elite condescend to be our "leaders" while they very obviously -- to each other -- are only there to rob us blind? We can be relied upon to prefer the safety of flapping like sheets while they drive their freight train right over us.

Does it occur to you that most everything is almost exactly backwards?

It is. And you are as responsible for it as the kleptocrats running the world. Until you will up and do what it takes to bring them up short, you are a passivist enabler of planetary doom. Whatever fantastic excuses you have, this is so.

We are in charge of the world. All of us. If we do not perform, this is our world.