if i keep linking him, you might give up and listen

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My life has always had to be a balance of research and creativity. I think maybe I was not as traumatized by school as most people because I could engage with it in stellar ways and ignore it completely, as suited the moment. So I didn't end up allergic to reading and learning and social engagement. I didn't end up afraid not to be an android... or even to fall for the I'm-not-an-android faction of consensus trance. I have spent many years deeply immersed in books and periodicals and lectures and interviews, dipping into intensive periods on one thing or another—a couple decades of the Zen—but mostly just going after the shiny bits that fell into my orbit one way or another. It's not really anything you should call "learning". You should rather think of it as seeing. While it is perfectly true that everything is a teacher, it really is only one's sight that gives rise to the insight that signals learning.

For all the having to learn things the hard way I do, there is one here who knows. She just waits for me to get over myself and I have to keep pounding on my desk with the necessity of that happening completely sooner rather than the already humiliating later going on. I have to get used to the real world not being any more worthy of my serious participation in certain spots than school was, not let that distract me from the stellar part.

I don't know about you, but I am so heartily sick of this rapid succession of nerve movies playing everywhere I turn that not even my fiddling with images is taking care of the creative outlet part anymore. Maybe it's just because it's winter and I spend more time in cyberspace when it's uncomfortable out there, but the regular evidence of insufficiency of even the best we've got begins to drag on me pretty badly. I want to think well of people. They make it very hard. I want to be a reliance for them. It doesn't go well. And I do have to mention that for however long I have been about my doctorate in Out There, one very strange thing keeps popping to mind. Time I mentioned it.

Even the most ridiculous of them is radically more sincere than just about everyone on the tubes, and many of them have genuinely great things to impart, even when it's mixed in with folderol. Who do we love? All kinds of people. But I think the only one who hasn't disappointed me yet is Assange. Paul Craig Roberts only disappointed me a little bit once or twice. Jeremy Scahill really mostly only gets on my nerves by unerringly using "that" when he means "who" and so might be slightly more perfect than PCR. Glenn Greenwald has about 30% needing to step up a few notches, but compensates by manfully engaging with issues instead of just laying back in a bath of punditry. Others have their impressive days. Still others have impressive days if you don't think too hard about what they said.

But mostly, mostly, mostly it's total crap from start to finish. The ones who mean it are so exasperatingly few. Sure, plenty carry on as though they are 100% committed... but it's not the subject matter or our benefit that is the genesis of their commitment. It's popularity. It's money. It's trying to be one of the shiny bits in the bastions of consensus trance, groupthink in designer jeans. I have given my time and quite a bit of effort to a few of them now, the ones I thought had promise or were stumping for a good cause, but it turns out being really a case of me not having any business interfering in someone's nap, or getting so steamed when they keep nodding back off. I remember this! I swore off it when I was thirty!

It was different back then. The oceans of dharma were not part of it. So silly me to take it back up when they were! And then to get decked by that surgery! OMG. I don't think I can describe just how disorienting being clocked by an extraterrestrial neurosurgeon god really is. I've had surgeries before in my life. Not like this. So I can identify with the notion of planetary trauma screwing up the human mind. OUT. GONE. Beyond the beyond anesthesia. Wiped my hard drive. He saved me from spending the rest of my life in a wheelchair, but, heh, the price was really high. I remember I had a bad crush on him for about three months after he strapped me onto a special operating table that would angle properly and started pulling down hydraulic drills and scrapers and cutters and screw drivers to trick me out with a highfalutin titanium plate to hold my head on. I remember thinking decades ago that the thing about sex for a woman has something to do with the animal knowledge that he could actually kill you, maybe even with your consent, but instead makes you feel damn wonderful. It strikes me that perhaps that's exactly why I was mad for my surgeon god for a little while. He had my consent to kill me, and he didn't. He kept me walking around. He also permanently pissed off my already darn grumpy thyroid, but, hey, there are pills for that.

There are no pills for this, though, and so I'm loving listening to Tsarion especially. I like Neil Kramer pretty much, too, but you know what? His accent makes me nauseous. I notice that I can only stand listening to him when he's really on it. When he's just talking, even though I know the guy is no dummy and has good stuff to think about, I gotta snap it off or his accent will make me kick over a chair. I think it's the British equivalent of Ebonics... doesn't improve with the mere insertion of big words. That stuff only fails to rile me badly when the speaker is perfectly genuine about something important, something really good. I guess the point I might already have made but still don't feel I've gotten to is that YOU CAN'T FAKE IT!

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love, 99
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