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aRrAeaRrAe Blog (18)

120 Blog Comments25 Forums18 Blog18 Blogs1 Quizzes1 Threads

For Lora48

Hi Lora,

I’ve been busy with depression and reading these past few weeks. I have only managed to post short blog comments through all of that. I have been away from my reply to you longer than I originally thought I might when I sent you a quick flower in acknowledgement When depression hits me time gets lost inside my head. I have my thoughts and they clichéd battle for “dark v light,” which goes way beyond an outlook of pessimism or optimism. I tend to sleep through it, and surround myself with art that gives me positive messages.

Thank you for the very kind words about my self-expression. The saying goes there are only two voices of critique a writer must not trust: his own and his wife’s. The former voice will be too harsh and the latter will be too gentle. So yours is a welcome reliable voice to me. I only hope that my writing as a novelist will meet with your acceptance and praise as well.

I just wrote to another person today (I have not written to anyone this month) that
honesty is the best policy and I think this is the only way we, at our ages, will find the real love we deserve. It may not be the most successful if someone is counting numbers but I have only ever been concerned about meeting one. I wrote: “two minds, two lives, focused on the same questions is what I understand to be described by two halves of a whole. If life is a painting by Picasso, I need another perspective to help me grasp its meaning and to paint it.

“I am engaged in the scientific process of life, and I need my partner to be asking the same questions with her life as I am with mine.”

But I fight the feeling that such a person does not exist for me. Certainly having debilitating depression develop in my later life is unhelpful to my search. I disagree with your mom about being too open but I suggest not “settling for compromise” either. I suppose that would make us both old virgins if we followed my advice and we would not avoid the judgments on us as “sour grape spinsters” either when we’re really observing the truth. Everyone has an agenda and self-interest to protect. Few people really know how to value actual principles, and fewer still know about character, I figure. It’s a minority report on the dating scene it seems.

Or, maybe, this is just the way I see it because I was raised in a home where absolutes were a virtuous part of character and relativism was the gray area reserved for crooks, peddlers, the godless and statisticians to justify their claims? Life, my life, has turned into quite the cubist art form the longer I have lived it.
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Corporate Feudalism: The New Economy.

So, the very purpose a computer exists for a writer is going to cost $6 a month by subscription only.

Microsoft replaced DOS. The new disc operating system, the OS, became a saleable product rather than being the engine supplied with the shell. (unlike Apple OS, or even Linux). This led to the anti-monopoly hearings that brought Gates to Washington for a slap on the wrist before the less-government pro-business (anti-market) Republican legislature loosened regulations on business. MS bought Netscape, and killed it. MS bought WordPerfect/Corel, and killed it. The mentality that did away with DOS, its initial competitor had not changed.

Now you will get the (d)OS for free. But everything else is priced to you in perpetuity under nomenclature called services, a misnomer for manufacturing. Presumably to continue the practice of upgrades from releases, which becomes more Charlie than Beta at Alpha prices (in perpetuity). You are not going to buy an Alpha version for $6, lest you need it spelt out.

It used to be you could go to a store and buy an Alpha version of software you then owned – like Wordstar, or Lotus 123, or Corel Draw, or Spycraft: The Great Game, or Wizardry, or MS Office…. Copyright and patent law protected the OEM software manufacturer from competing pirates’ reverse engineering their own version of the product sold in China.

Now, Microsoft simply wants to become the multi-device OS platform for leased software. It becomes too clear for anyone paying attention to this company that MS is not the wisest use of your money unless you like to become a slave to consumption and/or dislike saving money. To me, this smacks of tithing and corporate feudalism and not healthy market competition.

SOURCE LINK:
https://ca.news.yahoo.com/heres-why-microsoft-wants-everyone-150000294.html
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Why I Will Never Admit I Was Ever On A Dating Site

REPRINT OF A LETTER, A GOOD LESSON IN GENERAL FOR THIS PLACE.
Hi,

Would you flip me the bird or something polite just to let me know you're not interested in corresponding same as if I were a real person standing in front of you please? Because, basically, I am a real person standing in front of you only the fact that you disappear before I realize I am standing there talking to myself to I realize you do not respect me like you would a real person.

I would prefer your rejection to apathy to be honest. A politely worded rejection would be so much better if it would not drain too much of your energy to muster. There is no way to duck rejection, and it is kind of insulting (when you think about it) that the rejected has to take the responsibility for the rejecter as well. It is rude. I mean, it is not like you have received me as a form letter, some junk in the mail. How would you feel if you basically only received form letters here? If I had sent you a form letter, I would not mind so much being treated like some assembly line garbage. I looked at your profile, commented on it, and offered you an opening for dialogue. Instead of feeling gratitude for a dilemma of choice, you react with apathy that puts the rejected into an awkward position socially to realize he or she is basically having an imaginary conversation with him or herself.

That is a sad feeling apathy amplifies to the lonely. I would guess there are a lot of lonely people here for apathy to hammer down like so many nails. Scammers never reply, so there is that apathy bringing down the mode average of communication here, by the numbers. The weight of apathy can be oppressive if a scammer is successful filling the void real people leave here with their apathy. A "real" person should act real, IMHO of course.

By “real,” I mean adult.

I thought I would explain this to you because you're not an unintelligent chick.

Cheers,
R. A.
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Why I No Longer Take Blogging on CS Serious.

When I first arrived here a couple of years ago, I was completely enchanted by the functionality of the site but I have since learnt that it’s not the instrument but the person using it that creates the enchantment. This site is impressive: a place to think about who you are, where you wish to go with your life; and to equally consider who would make a good partner on that journey for you, and to consider what might naturally (one might say “organically”) interest that other person on such a shared journey with you. At the very least I thought the blogs would be good writing exercise if I kept up regularly.

The strength of a blog section on a dating website cannot be overstated. Writing a blog should clarify the writer’s thought either because of the rhetorical process or from the interaction with readers in the comments. I have travelled the last 20+ years of dating websites and I have never come across one with a blog space – or found a truly free site (that’s another double-edged blessing here perhaps). What an opportunity to put one’s best foot forward, mingle with others to be seen and heard, even meet someone off-site through a recommendation from someone on-site. In short, blogging on a dating site is a resource of exponential value, and a gift to appreciate no matter its cost, which happens to be zero here.

The amount of negativity and fear mongering going on here, all of which is detrimental to my search for a partner opposite to that, is off the chart. Petty bickering gives the impression that this site is a closed forum for a vocal minority (or is this the entire collection of all the real profiles on this site?) that have nothing better to say or do here than to create a kind of feral atmosphere. I suspect no-one engaged in finding a good partner would knowingly put a new boot into such a muddy churn of teenage angst and adult disrespect. I am loath to express my thoughts to people here whose sport is to drudge up fear and stir up a negativity that simmers just, and I mean just, below the surface. I feel I am in the wrong place unless I want to marry a troll.

Add my experience of CS blogs to the numerous instances of fake profiles, scammers, women (I cannot vouchsafe the men) using the Online as an emotional stop gap because they feel insecure in their current real life relationship, and the general discourtesy of receiving a note but giving no polite reply and the sum arrives at a minus. Maybe were I still 28 or were I an immortal, I would not be so predisposed to give all this so much weight, but at 48 wishing to have my own family (now seeking a younger woman from a smaller pool) it does tend to weigh more heavily.

If writing about myself here is supposed to attract someone whom I will love and respect, I just do not see it happening here. Moreover, the time I spend to think through what I write and articulate it in the best manner I can for such a readership becomes a waste of my time. That, plus I see myself as drawn into a larger association of CS bloggers’ negativity, which is a connection I do not wish lurkers to make for me.

I have had enough difficulty finding the right women that I do not need that kind of help.
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Everything You Always Wanted And Less.

My search labeled “True,” when I use criteria that is honest with myself, has always come up with zero matches. ZERO. This startles me. It provides empirical evidence to support the long dreaded conclusion, year-after-year, that there is no match suited to me. I do not know but maybe you have tried the same thing as I have: plugging in search criteria you know appeals to you but finding your search results are better when you fill in as many “Any” answers to search as possible. This type of search does not make me feel good because I know I am not deriving the best value from the search technology I can, and, in settling to slake the momentary need, I feel I betray myself. I do not need a computerized matchmaker to help me settle. Your mileage how you might feel about all this may vary, of course.

My search has had zero results for years here, and for much longer in my real life. I am happy to be alone but I do not expect to be alone. I would rather share my life with the right person. Steel sharpens steel so, being alone, I miss being sharpened, more defined, and more refined – yet being with someone with whom I am incompatible is frustrating. If you have ever been stuck in an incompatible relationship, you know what I mean: it is better, at least more honest, to be alone.

And a whole industry on dating websites targets people unhappy to remain alone, who are desperate to find someone for validation. AshleyMadison comes to mind: men talking to other men (it turns out), unhappily married to their choice of partner, trying to find a mistress. I can only imagine the women must be as unhappy with their husbands. Profiles here, too, are baited hooks for the clever to extort money from the lonely not unlike a kind of cerebral or emotional prostitution. Profiles of blond and blue-eyed Californians identifying as “Native Americans” are always a laugh as are the profiles with poor English - easily picked up by a native speaker. If loneliness or desire is willing to forego such signs, then the sharp mind can pick up cold reading techniques in letters that are long but manage to say nothing unless it is to parrot back the needs of the lonely and desperate: here I am, all that you want me to be, and nothing for myself.

I was going to reprint one such letter I received and critique it: the strong opening that lays the foundation for future demands of financial assistance; the flip-flop statements that jig the line for the fish to bite; the contradictions between description and photo, the poor standard English from people born in an English-speaking country… It is quite a list. But I realize the space of a blog post is to limited for such a literary critique. Such a letter to me is disheartening to read as it was meant for me and, yet, not meant for me.

It is shocking how transparent it is; how wise I am to see it for what it is; and yet how alone I continue to be. It wearies me.
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Is Happy Monogamy A Thing?

This is part three of an on-going topic begun here:
www.connectingsingles.com/blog_60997_1/48th_year_10_days.htm


As I wrote in my last post, I have an inheritance from my father in terms of understanding relationships, which is one-part guilt mixed into a solution of learnt religious sin; cast into a vessel of 30’s sentimentality; stirred by fairytales of a prince, a princess, and happy ever after. It’s a kind of Arthurian Romance worthy of the appellation “so goes the health of the king, so goes the land.” That is quite a potent cocktail (if the software governing such words as “s3x” allow me to publish a word like c0cktail) for an impressionable boy such as I was to swallow. At 566 months of age, now, I am firmly positioned as “too old” in the minds of fertile women but – remarkably – I still retain something of the impressionable boy in my heart.

Putting aside my indignation at life’s unfairness, or recalling my patience in relationships with 35-year-old women who once considered me “too young” and no more than a Boy Toy as one so-called partner gently put it, I am left to wonder what wonderful experiences remain for me relationship-wise. Am I really fighting a losing battle not to live my father’s mistakes and to share in his guilt?


If I have not yet met the right woman, as simple consolation speaks, will the right woman be able to bear my children? Or should I just consciously chuck this whole idea of monogamy altogether? The major problem I have with dropping this idea is the simple fact I was not taught to be a compartmentalized person. Yet, if my father’s mistake is actually the self-harming guilt he accepted as a price for his womanizing, maybe I have misunderstood the lesson from life? If relationships are all a series of Machiavellian transactions, as personal experience shows me, maybe it is time I stop tilting at windmills. Maybe I can and should accept an alternate idea and set aside the romanticized one, namely: my father’s first wife existed because of a transactional relationship where she had little power; my mother existed to bear him a child, which his first wife could not; and subsequent women sought a relationship with my father based on a transactional value.

In this paradigm of understanding, my father’s guilt was of his own manufacture and anything the women might say against him is merely their own sour-grapes projection of low self-worth?

Maybe the time for a site like this one – a site where people earnestly fill out a profile and use a search function to find a compatible person who has also filled out a profile and is interested in finding a compatible partner – has passed. Maybe a site serving a more transactional nature of relationship, more concerned with finding someone to fulfill a foreseeable short-term role, would be a more congruent reflection of a modern reality of relationships. If you are one of the handful of people who will read my post, then you are likely to think my observation does not apply to you. But then what has life taught you about relationships that has brought you here to be reading my post in the first place?

Have you filled out your profile honestly? How has that worked out for you? Can you quote me anecdotes that are better than just the exceptions to prove the rule of what I am thinking? Are sites like this no more than a kind of electronic self-help island where romantics at heart drift in, castaways from the real world, carry on their emotional burden and die, and occasionally cling to one another for solace while the world continues to reign in reality?
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A Relationship Lesson My Dad Taught Me

This is part two of an on-going topic begun here:
www.connectingsingles.com/blog_60997_1/48th_year_10_days.htm


An acrimonious custody battle finalized my parents’ separation when I was six-years’ old. Even as my personality was in its final stages of development, it did not escape my notice how happy my parents seemed to be apart. My dad missed my mother: washing, cleaning, cooking all of which were accepted as a wife’s duty by men and women born in the 20s. He missed her in other ways, too. He felt the financial burden to raise a child alone as well as those worries accompany a new father at 47 (my mother was 52, by the way). This was the new normal in the Me Generation days after the Summer of Love (the year I was born) and the advent of the Women’s Liberation Movement.

I had a front row seat to a drama of two people who were moving in opposite directions and did not belong together. It did not escape my notice that my father was often mistook to be my grandfather; my ideas were precocious next to those of my peers; my ability to articulate was more mature; or that expectations placed upon me by my parents were higher than those placed upon my generation with younger Beatnik-Hippy parents. I learnt a few private lessons from all this.

I loved my mother or my father and, being partial to both & neither at the same time, I became aware of a simple truth: relationships do not simply work between two really nice, loving people. After my parents’ marriage imploded, they formed another relationship around me in which they worked well together, separately.

What I failed to comprehend though obvious it was to see (perhaps because my critical thinking had not yet developed) was how compartmentalized all these adult relationships were for my parent(s): an adult for companionship and sex; an adult for minding a child; an adult to educate a child; and many adults as friends and colleagues offering different kinds of support. I look back on it now and hindsight makes everything appear obvious and my childish notions of monogamy rather silly.

The lesson on relationships my dad taught me was filtered through our Judeo-Christian-Sophist-Edwardian era religious beliefs that every man has one woman created for him (and visa-versa for the woman one presumes, if one is as egalitarian-minded as I).

My dad was married 20 years to a woman who kept his house while he enjoyed extra-marital affairs. Like I am, he was a handsome man but, unlike me, he was faced with a difficult choice with his first marriage. To leave his hometown he married a woman worldlier than he; but this opportunity only came with a woman no one wanted. In my estimation of her from photographs, she fell from a great height off the ugly tree and hit every branch coming down. She was extremely intelligent and loving because my father, who was riddled with sinful guilt, repeatedly told me admirable stories of her. She had died abruptly while my father was carrying on with my mother. And once my father was a widower, my mother revealed she was pregnant and, four weeks later, she married my father.

It was a shocker for my parents’ time. But what shocked me was how poor a match my mother was for my dad and, yet, so beautiful in comparison to his first wife who had been so good to him. Even at six years of age, I realized I would be frightened to awake to the face in the photograph - like some children are terrified of clowns.

Now, worldlier than a 6-year-old, I can better understand the feelings I can articulate how uncomfortable I would be wearing a bag over my head during s3xual intercourse. I am sure less superficial people wouldn’t mind it as much as I.

But the lesson my dad taught me was to make a wise choice and seek some one more in balance with what I wanted. The egalitarian in me informed me that I had better give as good as I take. Know thyself is an imperative for such a balanced relationship to happen.
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48th Year, 10 days.



So I am now officially “old” being summarily rejected based on my age by young (if mid-thirties can be considered young) women who also hang out on a dating site; which would be quite a sad situation for me were it not for the fact that such a place as this one is where I chose to intellectually belong when I was, in fact, still young – if pubescence in a man can fall into the same category as a thirty-year-old woman. It still hurts me emotionally if not my male ego.

In fact, the situation ruptures my Christian "Order-from-Chaos creation" sensibilities when I realise, as I march onward to fifty and begin the downward slide to centenarian, I will not find someone in my youth who was created to be my complement (Genesis 2:18), my soul mate (Plato’s The Symposium), or the person who is simply right for me (a line used by my mother, my father, and a consoling number of suitors). I know this same realization can horrify you. You are well within your reality to reject what my experience revealed me. Nevertheless it is 100% accurate for me to state, even as information on The Internet, that I will not be rejoicing in the wife of my youth (Proverbs 5:18) though I truly did seek her out while I was still very young.

I was not one of those young men who objectified women; never a calculating lothario slaking my desires and exploring myself through the eyes, mouth and hands of another. Knowing myself was my task and a matter of my disposition and my self-determinism. This is the intellectual self-honesty of existentialism, rather than biological determinism, that won the West! The Age of Reason was borne on great introspection, and the only person I needed to manipulate in order to know myself was I. Who am I? What am I? Why am I? I am not denying the pleasure it would have been to share my life, looking back on the nearly half century of it that has past, with a woman who would have been there to partake of my many firsts and offer her own firsts to me; we, sharing the wonder of living. And I am not saying I am some 40-year old virgin who held back on principle awaiting my ideal of perfection to arrive, while floodwaters rose around me and I rejected the ones God sent. (
http://www.ahajokes.com/reg28.html
You know that old joke, no doubt.)

But, alas, I regret so many of those wonders are now behind me and shared with people whom I will never see again even in a photograph.

It pains me to realize how mistaken I was to take the women of my past so seriously. “Do unto others as you would have done unto you” is a philosophy that does not best serve the naïve no matter how sweet the teaching. Teaching such thinking is downright dangerous to the thinker. It does not carry the practicality of appeasement framed by “do unto others as they would have done unto them,” which is less naïve and in practice in politics the world over. Thinking everyone wants the same treatment at their incorrupt core is, according to my nearly half a century of experience, unwise.

So a long time ago I chose to be on sites like this where I focus myself on what I want and my articulation on what I have to offer in return. On my profile is my emotional, intellectual, spiritual, social, and even physical representation; and my eyes become attracted to your profile and trust in the integrity of your words and your intellectual honesty to know thyself. Yes, mine can be classified as a theory of exchange, or pejoratively called computer dating; but it is not so simple as that as anyone who would know me would also know. My wisdom in this matter comes from a lesson I learnt from my father when I was 6 years old....
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Bittersweet Valentine

Good morning Tuesday;

Yesterday I mused about my observation, at the McCartney show, how nostalgia, while in the actual moment to be lived, tends to impair life’s forward movement. I thought about how people were busy capturing a moment about a moment being related to the present by someone who had lived it in the past. I noticed how some persons danced and sang while a great many more persons held their mobile phones high capturing some poor quality video. And I wondered, who captured this moment better? This quickly brought Escher’s paintings to my mind: the one (below) or the two hands drawing each other.
Embedded image from another site

And I wasn’t really inside the stadium at that moment. I was neither dancing nor recording. I was observing, and my mind was quiet despite the commotion around me. I was the fish in that fishbowl realizing he was in water, trying to imagine what was outside. I was looking for answers within to see myself from without. I was inside myself rather than outside with the crowd in the stadium.

Paperback Writer was the next song. This is the coda of my retirement, which a younger man would call career transition. I do not want to think about career transitions let alone admit to having one at 46 years of age. I should be driving around in a new red sports car, picking up 20-year-olds and abusing my established power at the office: enjoying a scripted mid-life crisis not walking into a wilderness. What I did for 22 years was a passion before I retired at 43. But my passion before that was writing creative stories, and I have to redevelop it, which is why I decided to keep this blog.

I used to watch people from my kitchen window on the third floor of my building as a kid. Then I would write about other people inside my stories. This was all about the time I kept a diary. I read some of that diary many years ago. I was impressed with what I had managed to convey despite a lack of polish and spelling so bad I had to sound it out. I was reading about a young boy’s adventures that were every measure as good as any story published. But I always liked to watch people and wonder what they were thinking; where they were going; whom did they know.

It is a snap to know then what I am thinking as I read some of your profiles.

But the next song, I recall it as a solo on piano, stopped my reflections. Its simple, lush soul filled with emotional depth brought tears to my eyes. I recall saying aloud: this is the best song at the concert in spite of the fact the concert was just 6 songs into the evening. And I was right. The song is new McCartney: My Valentine.


It reminded me of what I have sought from a valentine of my own ever since I, as a young man, sat at my kitchen table making the effort to articulate my own giving and receiving relationship needs list. And, as I listened to what this boy-faced old-man sang – about his confidante, his consoler, his optimistic reassurance of relief – I was moved to tears realizing I had not yet found my own incentive in the face of all the disincentives and counterfactual arguments so thoroughly distilled into a culture like a potent, 95% vodka. The tears mourned my passing of hope, and certainly the death of a marriage lasting 60, 50 or even 40 years with such a person – whether or not that marriage contributes to household tax deductions or merely a household of peace.

My next thoughts briefly concerned having children who, as I steadily age, become more likely to be my grandchildren or someone else’s children than my own. I had just finished high school when my mother turned 65. So while it is possible to be pregnant at 46, I am certain the idea of being middle-aged parents is not well thought out. It is something I push back into my mind so as not to be overwhelmed.
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A Test Post

This is written in Word, so I am wondering how the formatting I use on my word processor will look on this site. Writing in Word will be easier for me to keep a weblog regular. I cannot imagine that I have to write while online. I have tried to write regularly on a blog before but I found myself constantly pulled away and lacked the commitment. It was not my priority, frankly, and I had not structured myself to make full use of my capabilities like I will plan with an offline word processor – provided this does not look like a dog’s breakfast and result in me spending more time formatting (or re-formatting) than I spend in writing.

That would be a bummer.

While I figure this all out, listening to the Smiths Greatest Hits,
wondering what the restriction against HTML is and how it will affect me and whether I can link to the music I am listening or not, I am not really motivated to write anything meaningful. Meaningful expressions would reveal my thoughts on different topics of my choosing. I have spent my adult life thinking about my industry but that is not what I want to share here. This is not about “thought leadership” but more about pealing away my façade (note to self about special characters) and letting others in. This is not about being right on The Internet or defending positions against the anonymous but more about a shared interest we have in getting acquainted with others in similar situation as we. Ultimately, it is not about I.

It is about we.

But I cannot make that mental shift while my thoughts are pulled one way and another in concerns that only centre on me. So let me see what I can figure out about the gears of this blog before I get going and make my astral walk into the electronic ether, leaving myself behind if only for the space of one blog post.

Testing one, two, three… is this thing on? I ask myself.

edit: this was my first edit, noting that URLs do not work.
edit 2: "Formatting: How to use? click for instructions" actually works. Tags do not show on the post.
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Nostalgic Myalgia

Good morning Monday;

I saw the McCartney Concert Saturday. Wow!

I am not a fan. I like his music and, like everyone of a certain age who grew up around a radio, I can sing along to a fair amount of it. But I have not collected his music beyond a Greatest Hits album. (I still like the sound of “album” as opposed to CD package, which sounds more like a financial instrument for my retirement.) I like the man from what I know. I like his loyalty to Linda. I know all I want to about his troubles with that other wife. I discovered he has recently remarried to a friend of his first wife this time.

Having never gone to a Beatles' concert, I did the next best thing on Saturday. From my standpoint of concert going it was not to be missed. The music sound was not as clear as it is when played on my computer. My seat was not as comfortable as any in my living room. The commissary was outrageously priced compared to the stock in my refrigerator. And, of course, I had the usual total-strangers-interrupting-my-enjoyment-of-what-I-can-hear-of-the-music experience. Yet I had wanted to see Paul McCartney and my preferred choice to observe someone is in a group situation. Besides, I am not in the right circles to invite him over for a quiet get-acquainted chat. So I went to the show.

I observed a man on stage who thoroughly enjoyed what he was doing. He was relaxed when he sang off key or when his voice cracked. He had a lot of emotion in his tributes to his late wife, and late band mates, John and George. When the crowd sang Happy Birthday to him, I noticed a humbled man. But, most of all, I noticed a man who knew how to live in a state of appreciation – a virtue that, from my observation of Polish culture during the last 12+ years, is entirely lost to a prevailing local culture of worry. Somehow, the mob of concertgoers were unconcerned that he did not fit with them and were enjoying themselves despite the obvious recurring worry of the passage of time. My observations gave me something to think about.

One of my thoughts took me back to my first play on a jukebox – fittingly a Paul McCartney song in the summer of 1973. I was an avid writer back then. I was a terrible speller but enthusiastic writer. I kept a diary, not unlike what I have started to do now. It was easy to write about parts of my life 40 years ago especially about the summers spent at the lake. In those days, I could find many things to appreciate. And, as this 71-year-old musician played to a packed stadium Saturday, I actually saw him grow younger.

McCartney’s music was inescapable in the 70s. It created a soundtrack either because it was audible somewhere or because people around me were discussing it/him. Being precocious as I am, I associated myself with the older kids and adopted many of their attitudes without my own foundation for their beliefs – kind of like how we accept the religion into which we were baptized; only cooler. So there I was, surrounded by people on all sides with whom I could not communicate, assessing myself while Paul McCartney reminisced.



Have you ever noticed how many people at a concert are more interested in recording the occasion on a poor quality cell phone (“mobile” we say in Europe) rather than in living the moment? This is nothing more than a thirst for future nostalgia. It is a statement that this moment is so precious that I am going to do nothing but record it. The irony is these persons are pre-planning a reminiscence about recording a precious moment when they did nothing – learnt nothing – listening to a musician reminisce about his actual experiences meeting people like Jimi Hendrix and playing his guitar. It is a jarring epiphany to realize, standing there surrounded by underwater electronic sounds, that you are a fish in a fishbowl too.

It was most Escheresque.
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All For Everyone Or None For Anyone?

Good evening, Friday;

My thoughts today are still on yesterday’s blog entitled Gays and Lesbians, and my comment that members of the GLBT community are no more and no less entitled to their human rights than any other human being; and the constant drum beats of these special interest groups are divisive tattoos blaring out from one speaker to another in the media circus. I do not need to be a member of a special interest group to defend the human rights of another person, up until those rights impinge upon the rights of others. I only need to be in touch with my own humanity.


Some people are trapped within ideologies from the distant past when feudal Lords represented God on earth; men with the Divine’s right to deflower wedding night virgins; keeping slaves as chattel when power was measured in man-hours before a godless science invented steam engine and electric light; Machiavellians rising to power by putting their interests ahead of a common, and commonly understood, societal good – a practice stretching further back to before Cain killed Abel.

A society without its people’s heart is no more than an empty shell, a kind of dance macabre theatre, working the last few Uncle Toms on its plantation stage. Both parts of the equation are sequestered by a dance done long ago. Let us not aid this intellectual and moral sequestration with soothing lyricism reminiscent of a time when basic human rights in our society belonged to a few vocal interests, be those voices possessed by communities of GLBT or Bankers. Let us not reward the master’s practice of quietly slipping a few silver pieces into the hands of a vocal minority to shut them up even when what is paid for is a basic human right because such practice begets a cacophonic system of inequality rather than recognizing what contributes towards a just society for everyone. A society has to stand for something greater than a system of gatekeeping if it is to participate in a democratic process that later redefines, reshapes and remakes it better.

No one likes to be reminded of out-groups in society because that heralds back gatekeeping power elites. The Gay and Lesbian communities recognize this to the extent of including Bisexual and Transgender groups in their voice, but their words only raise “GLBT issues” rather than issues of human rights and justice that affect our society as a whole. Where does their message reverberate in relation to other groups interested in furthering a just society? Why are the airwaves filled with groups spouting different messages that, in turn, sprout a cottage industry of professional communicators and lobbyists, when a simple unified message would better focus and serve every group within society?

We are all human beings. Let the haters hate and the lovers love and let the weight of these two arguments fall on the people to decide, not in an ad-hoc hodge-podge of sound bites from various groups but from two contrasting groups: those opposed and those for. It is time the voices of special interest groups lifted up everyone within society rather than push down the out-groups by unloading their noise and relieving their pressure of being master and man upon society so as to appear better empowered than they are.

That strategy plays right into the hands of the current brokers of power who benefit from a message reminding us that government is too busy caring for all the special interests to be effective at governing and regulating what is already in place for a just society to function. Meanwhile a system for the people, by the people and with the people becomes lazy and inert until even the cacophony of injustice from so many segmented groups desensitizes us and passes unnoticed.

Being in Poland, with all my personal travails, I recall a poem. Perhaps you’re familiar with it?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/First_they_came...
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