May 2006

-- Posted by OtterVomit on Tuesday, May 16 2006

BREAK THE BIGGEST SHACKLE: THE FOG OF LIES SURROUNDING ROMANCE & LOVE There was a time when there was no care in the world more important to me than that of finding true love. I believe I told my ex once that "some people want to be firemen, some want to be accountants. I want to be a great lover and that is really all." And, it was true. That's all I wanted, and when my love life was going well then everything else was going well. When it was going bad, everything else fell into a mass oblivion. And why was this? What was the motivating force behind the desire for a great love in life and not much else? The love of a man for a woman and a woman for a man is often the great fallback to which people retreat after the collapse of other delusions. It is held to be solid when nothing else is, a great refuge from the cruel and draining world. Even though it frequently gives way and dumps us into a basement of despair, it still enjoys a reputation of dependability. It seems to be of no concern that this reputation is illogical — it still flourishes and will continue to flourish regardless of anything I say here. Love, or rather the myth of love, is the first, last, and sometimes the only refuge of the confused soul. What else makes our hearts beat so fast? What else makes us swoon with feeling? What else renders us so intensely alive and aching? The search for love — the sublime, the nebulous, the consuming — remains sacred in a world that increasingly despises the sacred. When heroic figures and moral role models are all faded, when religious institutions fill up with bureaucrats and social scientists, when nobody believes there is a sky beyond the ceiling, then one seems to find no other comfort except in the great idea of love. With a gray age of spiritual deadness upon us, we love, or beg for love, or grieve for love. We have nothing higher to live for. We take it on faith that romantic love is the highest thing to live for. Popular literature, movies, art, and music tirelessly celebrate this as the one truth accessible to all. Such love absolutely obliterates reason, as poets have long lamented, and this is part of its charm and power, because we want to be swept up and spirited out of our insecure lonely little caves inside of ourselves. "Want" is the key word here. The wanting of love becomes increasingly indistinguishable from love itself. So powerful, so insistent and ever-present is it that we seldom notice that the gratification is rare and the craving relentless. Love is mostly in anticipation; it is an agony of anticipation; it is an ache for a completion not found in the dreary round of mundane routine. That we never seem to possess it in its imagined fullness does not deter us. It hurts so bad that it must be good. Despite this easily observable truth, practically nobody questions the ever-present notion of the supremacy of romantic love, which frankly is a good enough reason to do a little poking around. Who is entirely satisfied with the romance in his or her life? Who has found the sublime rapture previously imagined? And if one has actually found such a thing, does it last, or does it not rather change and decline from the peak of ecstasy? And if it declines what becomes of one's purpose in life? If a purpose is achieved it can no longer guide or sustain us. Does the taste of one fruit satisfy us forever? When we tire of crass, material goals we may go searching for love instead of, say, religious insight, because love seems both more accessible and more urgent, and because so much of institutional religion in our time has degenerated into insipid humanism. Some claim refuge here but many more, longing for authentic and moving experience, turn to the vision of the "lover," that source of wonder, joy, and transcendence of rational occurances, who, it is thought, must be pursued and if captured perfected and if perfected then enjoyed forever — or until some other lover lights up the horizon. Love is its own justification, especially for the young who have no other inspiration or no career or responsibilities to dull themselves with as their plodding elders do. Longing bursts through this one channel that seems open, dizzily insisting that the life of unreflecting passion is the highest they can aspire to. They do not reason, but fall. Their elders do reason — obsessively — but fall all the same, thereby admitting that, with all their thought and experience, they find, when driven to extremity, they have nothing but love to live for. "Man Kills Estranged Lover, Then Self." "Wife Stabs Husband in Domestic Quarrel." "Love Triangle Leads To Shooting." So read the headlines with depressing regularity. The stories behind these are only the most shocking of countless tales of passion, but they do forcefully suggest that romantic love is not always a blessing. One might object that hate, not love, spawns such tragedies, but where has such hate come from if not from a prior attachment now broken? We should know from experience how easily what we call love can turn to bitterness, jealousy, and malice, and though we protest that this is not the fault of love, we ought to notice that where one passion arises another is likely to follow. Passions are unreliable, volatile, dangerous, and a poor foundation for happiness. Divorces, suicides, dissipation, violence, depravity, fanaticism, and other miseries great and small follow from passion, and yet passion is still, in the public mind, considered commendable, a mark of vigor and liveliness. Though everybody will admit that passion gone awry is dangerous, few realize that passion is by its nature likely to go awry. Romantic love is a volitile passion that may result in the opposite of what is desired. Hey, it may have happy consequences, too — else it would not be so popular — but it raises the stakes in the gamble of life and makes us more vulnerable both to our own weaknesses and to unpredictable fortune. As most of us count the joys of successful love (however we define it) worth the pain involved in its pursuit, we must learn to step lightly and with intelligence. We believe, with some reason, that love can ennoble and redeem us, and call forth our purest energies, but we are slower to see that when the lamp of love flickers out, as it tragically tends to do, we might lose our way in a fearful labyrinth of suffering. One must put the delights and torments of love into perspective, so that we can break the illusion of love as the highest of aspirations and most essential of desires. Henry Thoreau wrote (when young): "The only remedy for love is to love more." Sorry Henry, but we must amend this to say: The only remedy for love is understanding. The understanding and the strategies described here do not destroy one's capacity to love or enjoy love — far from it. Rather they purge the grasping, selfish qualities from our love and makes it purer and nobler: a much better love arises which is free from insecurity, free from anticipation, free from longing & craving. A love that is free to extend everywhere.

Six foot, Seven foot, Eight foot, bunch! -- Posted by BalconyDive on Friday, May 12 2006

Here comes another post about my pets because I have no real life of my own. Yesterday morning I had two dogs who were running around and being jackasses as per usual. This was a good thing because CuJo, the mini daschund, who had just been neutered had finally been behaving like himself (last Wednesday he got clipped and came home, sat around all day Thursday and most of Friday and was slowly ramping up to his norm after that). Now yesterday (Wednesday) I was sitting on the floor in the living room throwing a disgusting piece of fabric that used to be a snowman for them to catch and all was well. Later that very afternoon CuJo suddenly just wouldn't do much of anything. In fact he wouldn't even come to the door when it was time to go outside and he loves outside. When I finally did get him outside he wouldn't get up to come back in. Poor creature. I'm feeling bad for him at this point. So this morning he's off to the vet, after having to be dragged out the door. Most of his tests have come back negative, but the bloodwork showed high white cell and low red cell count. Of course this means he has some kind of infection he's trying to fight. Poor doggy.

-- Posted by OtterVomit on Monday, May 8 2006

MY UNCLE: ANGER MANAGEMENT CANDIDATE So one of the running gags in my family (all 4 of us) has been my uncle Paul's inability to control his temper. He'll go to a store, get unsatisfactory service and scream and yell such gems as "IS IT AGAINST YOUR POLICY TO HELP SOMEONE IN A TIMELY MANNER??" and "I'LL RUIN YOU!! YOU JUST WAIT!! YOU'LL HEAR FROM ME AGAIN" and then he storms out never to be heard from again. And so it came to pass that my father came down from his palace in Indiana to visit me, his humble son. And stemming from this visit was another visit, with the aforementioned uncle Paul. My father demanded that we go see Benchwarmers, and despite my pleas for mercy, we started on our way to see it. I should mention at this point that the town sinkhole of Louisville, Tennessee has not yet perfected the design of highways where you can both turn right and left at any given intersection. Thus to turn left onto the highway from my place, one must take a detour through the parking lot of the world famous GREEN ACRES FLEA MARKET. Knowing this, Paul turns into the parking lot and is immediately slowed down by a large truck in front of us. Instantly, his rage meter goes from zero to ENRAGED. "GET OFF THE FUCKING ROAD!! GODDAMNIT!!!" Me and dad did our usual and laughed. The screaming continued "JESUS CHRIST WHY WON'T YOU JUST DIE OR SOMETHING ALREADY?!??" Other anger induced diatribes erupted towards the slow moving truck, which we could have easily passed from the start since we were traveling through an empty parking lot. Finally Paul realizes this and begins to pass the truck, still yelling and cussing, when the side of the truck reveals it to be a humanitarian company with the tagline Feeding Hungry Children. One may think that the revelation of this noble goal might soften the heart of my angry uncle. Alas, this was not the case. Even upon seeing that the truck was on a mission of mercy, Paul was not to be derailed. "GET OFF THE FUCKING ROAD!! YOU DON'T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH FEEDING HUNGRY CHILDREN!! LOOK AT YOU, YOU FAT SLOB! YOU STOLE THAT TRUCK!! GET OFF THE ROAD!! YOU DON'T FEED ANYBODY BUT YOUR DAMNED SELF!! GET OFF THE ROAD!!!!!" At this point me and dad were nearly unconscious with laughter, especially since that entire last diatribe came after we passed the truck and it was just a memory. Paul got in one last shot before moving on to some other concern: "YOUR HUMANITARIAN BULLSHIT IS MAKING ME LATE FOR MY MOVIE!!!"

That takes guts and optimism -- Posted by BalconyDive on Thursday, May 4 2006

I think I have Malaria. Or Mono. Or maybe I'm just bored. I haven't been able to do anything for the last two weeks or so, I've been constantly exhausted and confused and often times regular ol' sick. Whatever. Death comes for us all. CuJo was taken to the vet yesterday (Tuesday) afternoon and brought home today (Wednesday). While he was gone he uh...got Bob Barkered. I feel for the little guy. Ever since he got home he's been unusually quiet. Like...he didn't bark once for five hours. He also wouldn't randomly sit on his hind legs, which he tends to do for no reason now. Perhaps I'm projecting though. I know I'd be a tad different and modify my behavior some if the people who claimed to love me took me some scary place (even though I slipped my collar, attacked the people there and pissed myself when I realized they were leaving) and did that to me. Hell, I'd probably sit quietly for the rest of forever too. Poor guy. In more projection, I'm fairly sure Pestilence was mildly depressed all day when he was alone. The cat, however, enjoyed the day off.

-- Posted by OtterVomit on Wednesday, May 3 2006