to the local occupy-here people

Written this morning to the Chapel Hill fb page:

hi. i live in raleigh, my son in ch invited me to the organizing meeting for "occupy chapel hill," maybe i'll get there (i didn't), there might be a take-mom-to-the-hospital activity 2day (there was). i have some points i'll present in the form of a military planning hierarchy (grr): tactical, strategic, political.
tactics:
1. the occupy (& demo) proto-movement will only become powerful if it endures & grows through the miserable winter. it will be the test of commitment to the whatever-it-is & will have a chance to grow in the spring in the crucial election yr. obviously a chapel hill "permanent" presence will have less impact than in ny, but the demonstration must demonstrate that it has legs. once started it should be planned (planned!) to continue until - ... ... "something" - otherwise it is a wimp movement without legs.
‎2. if there is to be such a long-term demo in ch it must be initially attempted within parameters negotiated with the ch gov incl the police. there must be a committee (! - organized!) to interface with "them" - them being everybody else. permits must be sought. the police must be directly & publicly in the loop. cops are friends when they're not enemies. even when they are actively repressing/enforcing the liason committee must be negotiating.
3. security, infrastructure, supply must be considered & planned for first while the weather is still good.
4. any law-breaking must only be undertaken for strategic purposes. public scofflaw activity must be repressed by ourselves rather than the cops. no public drug use, find minors & protect them, no property damage, keep it clean, control wierdness, etc.
5. more of this kind of nuts&bolts stuff.

strategy
this is not yet a movement, for it to become one it must have goals. the goals can be anything: "civility," different approach to economics, "peace," "tolerance," etc. or more specific: youth party development, electoral college reform, make rich people do stuff... the ch contingent or any other place where this kind of action is contemplated can put out its own demands, the best of them may go national. if this becomes a movement it will become national & have potential appeal to the vast majority of people in this country who do not & will not participate. those people must feel some kind of kinship & solidarity with the demo people otherwise we remain a funny minority.
we see in egypt the youth have not coalesced into a formal party & they are frozen out. there must be a structure to deal with "the structure" otherwise one throws out a bad actor & the machine grinds on. in a revolution a faction takes over the admin machine & runs it according to its sectarian principles. if the admin is abolished what we get is instant anarchy in which the weapon wielders rule. think think think therefore. plan plan plan. what, why, how.
political
what to do if successful. what would success mean? then what? what to do with opponents? how to turn opponents into neutrals or adherents? how do we want to live? how do we want other people to live? what do we want to allow? what do we want to prohibit? how do we enforce stuff? what do we do with problem people? how do we deal with life & death?
people have been trying to work with these issues since ancient times. attempt is better than idle dreams. dreams are not nothing. they are better than nothing. go & try, maybe something good will happen.

governance, personal responsibility, etc.
if the "revolution" is to be accomplished there has to be a change of heart in individuals.  revolutionary forms can be enforced but the heart does not respond to force. the heart melts, that is the feel of the change. if people are to be allowed to be susceptible to change of heart they have to be comfortable in their bodies: pain minimized, adequate nutrition, degrees of freedom of activity, etc. the change we are looking for is the golden rule: everyone cares about everyone as much as they care about themselves, or pointed in that direction.

the first thing then is taking care of personal stuff as much as possible. "we" must be the truly self-reliant people. "they" are the ones who take advantage of people and call it virtue.  next is helping everybody else take care of themselves, thus is government born.

there are only 2 governing processes: force or bureaucracy.  without government there is anarchy which always devolves into the rule of force by dictator/gang leaders/warlords.  the thing about bureaucracy is that it is boring, time consuming, nobody wants to do it except the people who want to. following one's bliss is great, but bureaucratic government is like ass wiping, if you hired someone to do it for you maybe it doesn't come out the way you wanted it to.  so the revolution will have everyone doing a lot of necessary things that they wouldn't otherwise want to do.  everyone wanting to do things that they don't want to do.  because if we hire people to do it for us because we have "better" stuff to do we get what we get: a reiteration of the current structure.  martinets & enforcers & prigs & meeting junkies & yes-people running things, money playing angles everywhere, egomaniacs of every type prowling around looking for opportunities.

until a revolutionary governing structure that includes everyone emerges to replace the delegated-reprepresentative model the bureaucratic model will persist: we will pay people to do things for us that we do not want to do ourselves. efforts must be made to "tame" and "democratize" the bureaucracy & its apparatus while we await the evolutionary development of an as yet unarticulated system that more nearly approximates the golden rule in action.  at this time the thing to do with that is to want it, even if we don't yet know what it is.

cowering

that is what most people do.  when attacks come most people will choose not to fight & will try to get away.  they will try to lock themselves in the cooler while the thieves go through the cash register, gun to head of cashier held hostage.  it is company policy, if the company has one, to not resist nor to come to the aid of the hostage when faced with the threat or presence of violence.  our social rules formalize and train us to respond with submission which is what most of us want to do anyway, deep down inside.

back up.  the broken animal lying there, thrashing, gradually slowing, it will be delicious.  the cat knows what the victim is going through.  the cat has felt pain.  the pain of the victim is irrelevant.  the victim is a mouse, say, or a bird.  maybe it does not eat animals, maybe it does.  life of peace for the vegetarians, the only enemies are bigger/smarter predator animals (or parasites, etc.)  further, the pain of the victim is part of the overall pleasurable scenario that will culminate in a really nice meal.

it is possible for corticated animals to separate out that pain causing function and obsess on it.  the function is i perform an action (athletic, social, etc.) and it creates pain with or without physical damage to the victim.  for the pain giver there is the indrawn breath and the expiration on the hit, however the hit is delivered.  for the victim the (untrained) indrawn breath  occurs at the moment of contact (the gasp), followed by the expiration at the scream or the collapse if that is what happens.  i do something, the result is pain in you.  then the cat sometimes goes nuts, bites on the mouse, shakes it, growls, shakes some more, then the mouse is dead & the cat is pawing it around, maybe striking again, dammit, thinks the cat, stop being dead, i want to play some more.

so most of us humans would prefer not to deal with that aspect of our essential selves.  we don't want to be victims but we don't want to engage our kill-&-eat components.  we'd prefer to not do that.  people who do get into that, we think they're wierd, we don't want to hang with them.  or else they engage their violent in culturally standardized ways (authorized or criminal) and we classify them a little differently as heros or villains.

schoolyard fight.  crowd gathers.  if pulled into the fight most of the watchers will immediately cave and become victims.  in the baboon troop they will immediately grovel & display inferior status.  a lot of sympathetic chemical activity going on in the crowd.  echos of the agons going on in the visual field.  victor & victim releasing chemicals like melodies to give us internal shifts of emotion and we are secondarily joyed as those evoked chemicals flow through our bodies.

secrets in life

life seems to consist of a physical membrane surrounding a bunch of stuff that actively takes things from outside the memrane to keep the stuff inside going.  secrecy and selection are therefore essential elements of life.  life resists giving up and insists on taking and keeping.  it puts its personal interest before all other considerations.  environment is where the food comes from.

so where does compassion come from.  the personal body left to its natural tendencies will go on trying to acquire and burn food until it doesn't work anymore.  recognition by the living thing that there are others like it in the scene, a genetic rule not to automatically kill and eat some certain kind of life known as "us."  great chemical mystery, we preferentially don't eat "us."  baby spiders eating each other and all the other cannibalisms including the humans are special case oddities on the general rule.

inside the membrane the secret stuff goes on.  outsiders see the membrane, think that is what the life is but the secret stuff goes on inside.  otherwise it wouldn't be life.  it would lie there and break into pieces and blow away.

you know what we don't see?  we have a gundillion cooking shows but there is no hardcore foodnography which would have closeups of openmouthed chewing to arouse licentious phagic thoughts.  that kind of video is not happening.  chewed food is yucky.  why.  too real.

. 

different ways of getting excited

if it is indeed true that the root of all of the things that living things do is about getting food then everything else they do is a spare time activity.  all of those other exciting things that they do have the same essential "desire structure" as the food seeking.  symptoms of dissatisfaction variously in the system, rumble in stomach, wanting - something.  also, that these non-food avocational desires emerge out of food satiety or maybe out of surplus as in hey that was good, let's go out and do something.  burn off the food, hey, let's get some more food.  etc.

different things to get excited about.  tribes form: afficionados of this or that.  tribalism i guess comes from the bacterial level?  (are viruses evolutionarily "lower" or are they parasitic bacterial fragments?)  bacteria & viruses do not cannibalize do they?  anyway, not the norm.  tribalism - concept of us against them.  a recognition of the existence of a family.  things out "there" that are tasty but are not food.  you don't eat them even though you could.

the bacteria emit chemicals that others of their type recognize, i don't know what the viruses do to talk with each other.  chemicals?  electrical gradients?

the first thing living things do when there is plenty of food is reproduce.  

 no, i'm not done with the victor-victim thing.

different things to get excited about.  some of us hunt, shoot, birdwatch, people watch, tv watch, make things, drink alcohol, dress up, humiliate people, get angry, eat, make food, dance, build, scheme, collect, go fast, be alone, read, paint, exercise, preach, pray, shmooze, organize, write, joke, take care of animals, kill animals, etc.  something.  people who claim to have nothing, hey: that is a nothing-shaped something.  if you can read this you can recognize that empty what's-the-use mental place as a decorator style.  i watch myself watching my self in my lonely room.  it is a room, it is not me.  i can go out into another room.  i can.  frederick douglass woke up in jail.  all of his people: life sentence, every angle turned to keep them from waking up, he awoke anyway.  trying to stay awake, at any moment perhaps they will forget to lock the door.

a future of fully privatized water.  if you can't pay for good water you can get bootleg water, or maybe you can't afford any in texas and you can die.  a future of privatized oxygen.  the rich  live and the poor die.  too bad say the rich.  things are getting better now they will say.

the exact thing that's wrong with "education" is that it has the format of time-delimited failure.  something must be learned, that's fine.  there is a time-limit,  beyond the time limit there is "failure."  continued "failure" eventually results in abandonment of the effort, the student is rejected, good luck toots.

abandoning the time limit allows the student to learn at the student's natural speed whatever that is.  the pressure is off, the student can take as long as necessary to learn the thing.  lifetime learning as it were.  so everybody is always "in school," working on something someone thinks is necessary to know how to do.

sidebar: and in regard to things learned it is not the facts that are being learned, it is the developed structure in which those facts are deployed.

in a structure like that a third grade class could have adults & children taking the same "classes." 

invisibles

in some place and some time the carriers of alternative cultures live in deep hiding.  the cathari underground, the sufi underground, the thing that was goddess worship, the special use of special plants.  specialties of human behavior brought forward from parents to children, from teachers to students, invisible to the police.  outside they look & act like everyone else.  they create a safe zone in which they can do their thing.  through all kinds of despotism & war they bring forward their secret thing.  the responsible wine drinkers of islam, the sex positives of islam, freethinkers springing from the loins of the most rigorously enforced orthodoxy.  how dare they, say the squares, something must be done.  punishment does not deter them, they carry some kind of seed of liberation in them.  generations later perhaps it becomes possible once again to practice.

kids

it is not the fucked up stoner part that is the problem.  it is the don't give a shit part that bugs the squares.  if the fucked up stoners kept their shit neat and tidy and cleaned up after themselves and didn't cause any trouble they could find a place for themselves in society, some of them do.  so the habit that needs to be developed by the conscientious use of the drug is meticulous attention to detail rather then its opposite, which ranges from a learned augmentation of lack of focus, springing out of a deep aversion from reality as it is, through rituals of use that become eventually empty of all but consumption, all the way to static contemplation of the emptiness within, but even at that point discipline is demanded for proper relation with the outside world.  in other words, you need to train yourselves, soon as you get stoned, don't lie there & space out.  clean up.  immediately.  new ritual: stoned & clean.  you can continue to do the kinds of social interactions & stuff you like to do.  just clean & put away stuff & improve shit.  there is really no reason why stoners can't have the neatest gig out there.  neighbors start to imagine you're improving the tone of the community.  this can be done. 

2,
the night was full of smiles redux

something attracted to the commotion over there
things rubbed together something wants to investigate
wants to move from possibility to implantation
hanging around
pink carnation

membranes soften between things
something slips through
another me from a me and a you

a particular melting quality,
a particular angle of fall
gravity fold us in on our selves,
air wet with the breaths of the audience
hanging around, watching the opening
meeting of a here and a there

one in particular walks right in
holding the key, just the right
shape key, walks right in

9 months passed

obsession #4

anger as an addictive drug

threshhold rises

need more anger

like a sculpture can be seen from all sides

strange
the highest virtue always taught
obedience
practically speaking
shame

life lessens

to try to learn how to figure out if something is wrong.

surrender.  final surrender as the victim becomes food.  it resists and tries to get away then it can't then it gives up and the disassembly can begin.  it swells & starts to drip, tears, proceeds towards liquidity.  surrender, the process proceeds to juice, which is absorbed by the victor.  reds and pinks for us vertebrates. 

the victor cannot avoid sympathy with the victim because everyone knows what happens.  it is just the luck of the moment that i am the victor and it is the victim.to go through with the activity of killing and eating is the normal triumph of the basic level of will.  the thing wants to live and will do whatever is necessary.  it is just sorry, that's the way it is, the victim is going to die.

the celebrated flavor of the dead entity, the delicate artistry of the preparation, the convivial scene of the consumption of the victim, the satisfied filled feeling as the life of the victors goes on.  the victims surrendered long moments ago, their paths to the future broken up and made into the future of the victors.  the victors are happy.  the victims are gone, memory of the exciting flavor recalled and cherished.  those victims sure did taste delicious.

i grew up in enforcer times.  human history had been long millennia of you'd better do exactly what you were told to do, if you didn't you'd get in trouble.  there was only one right way to do everything, whatever that way happened to be.  nonconformity was comprehensively repressed, nonconformists consistently ostracized.  since the culture was based on enforcement the kid culture was an enforcer culture as well.  bullies ruled.  law of jungle.

in 1960s the idea of non-coercive society became very big, called "counterculture."  there was essentially no model for such a society, therefore many experiments.  since ultimate coercion is the basic element of life - we kill to eat - it may not be possible to be completely non-coercive until we learn to live on raw chemicals rather than corpses.  matter of degree, various things can be tried to attempt to minimize the damage.  us counterculturals immediately found our "movement" parasitized by various sociopathic ripoff artists who eventually overwhelmed the original intent which was something like looking for better things to do than what was being done, better ways of doing them.  the serious questioning of standard methods brought forth a rally by the enforcer types who have been beating us back ever since.  they have held the power to do things for almost all of human history, know how to do what they do, which is use force to attain personal ends, they are always winning.  when they lose they do not go away.  their impulses are the basic ones that seek victims to victorize.  ours are secondary, reactive, the attempt of the victim to rise to power with the victor, to transcend the zero-sum game.

i am going to stay with this violence-eating process a while longer.  it seems like it will be rather repetitive.  it is after all something we do every day.

mercilessness

mercilessness is therefore the basis of our bodily being.  body's going to eat, someone's going to die.  two approaches to that basic principle: feeling good about it or feeling not good about it.  the ones that have mercy develop culture, the merciless like to kill and eat so that's what they do.  violence and death appreciated for their delicious connotations, most basic desire.  let me tell you about that wild pig someone killed last year.  taste of fear.  taste of blood.  taste of triumph.  taste of pain.  taste of death.  taste of regret.  taste of food unroll in the mouth & fill the entire head & then the body so that it all disappears into the moving of the jaw, the flavors & textures of the victuals banging like bells in the mouth.

once inside the big dumb slow low metabolism cell the scheming mitochondrion divided until there were a bunch of them.  cell's going nuts, grown to twice the size, zipping all over the place looking for phosphorus.  cell can't imagine life without those little juice baby mitochondria tickling its tubes from the inside. 

of course all over the place there are cells without mitochondria hanging around, getting old, grumbling about the hyped up new cells with their superchargers, kids these days.

mitochondria found an alternative to death by eating, a cooperative venture that bumped up resource use and expanded the scope of mercilessness.  gigantic cell with all those hungry mitochondria, has to all the time hunt up food to feed them, they make that juice, it feels so good, i don't mind going out and hunting up someone and killing and eating it, it feels so good when i'm not hungry.  mercilessness.  some love it and parade it around, others feel shame and want to hide or abolish it, everybody does it if they want their body to survive.  the married bliss of the cell & the mitochondria harem requires way more input, the cell has to go out and work all day every day.  they make it feel so good, its worth it.

the esthetic appreciation of mercilessness leads to the roman games & all sorts of other public killing rituals, to various half-measure practices in which punishment is inflicted rather than death, thefts of various kinds, all subjects of possible study, systematization, critique.  someone make a museum of meanness.  do anything to them you want, bad as you treat them they're still better off than if you ate them, right?  you can't make me stop treating you bad its your problem not mine, better still its your fault.  its your fault you can't stop me.  i'm going to do what i want to do.  you don't like it security will escort you off the premises.

because we said so

the basic element of all interactions between all organisms is forebearance.  we forebear to kill and eat that one.  various reasons.  ways of life built to accomodate the presence of other autonomous units.

oh, but let me go back to the cellular times when parts of us were free swimming in the soup, happily eating the algae, bumping into each other from time to time, occasionally exchanging genetic bits, sometimes by eating, sometimes by being eaten, encapsulated bits put through someone else's membrane, it thinks its getting a bonbon, i think im infecting her with me.

viruses like mosquitos carry around bits of sometimes useful stuff, the canny and aware cell might catch a favorable genetic bit as it passes by.  back to the time the mitochondia showed up and we made a deal with them, we won't eat them, we'll let them live inside us.  cause it makes me feel so good.  so much more alive, so much more me, now i've got mitochondia, now i can really get something done.

the mitochondria gets an excellent environment with nice protective membranes.  it creates the stuff that we organisms use to burn the food we eat.  before mitochondria we only got to sip the energy of the food we ate.  mitochondria allowed us to be more efficient in our food use, we grew, got bigger, made more of us.

composite organisms, way down at the cellular level.  the "me" imagines its a single thing.  the basic premise of unique selfhood is a joke.  look ma, says the pile of stuff, i'm me. 

still, everything in behavior is things that are done instead of killing and eating.  we argue and fight about which alternatives alternatives to killing and eating are accepted in society, but all of them are in a sense creative endeavors compared with killing and eating.

we tell ourselves that killing and eating is creative too because it allows us to continue to live and that's good, right?  otherwise why are we here?  food preparation exalted.  but the killing of the food designated polluting by the purist religions, professional food killers considered low caste.  because we all know the score, the food wanted to live, we don't care, we're more important, because we said so.

the mighty cell bears down on the mitochondrion which pleads: don't dissolve me, i'll show you a real good time.  what's better than eating "you" ask the cell.  let me in, i'll show you says the mitochondrion.  few moments later the cell goes wow, can you do that again.  mitochondria settles into the cytoplasm.  yes, but first you have to feed me.  ok says the cell, whatever you say, just give me some more of that sugar.

i love you says the cell.  love you too says the mitochonrdrion.

embroidery on the doily of original sin

so our fundamental state of being here in the body is to use force to kill other living things so we can eat them and keep ourselves alive.  somewhere out there someone is thinking about how to expensively grow meat in a vat so that we don't have to kill something, the dream of tissue without consciousness but that is not a solution to the basic situation, we avert our eyes from the cells as they rupture, we have killed it, now we are eating it, it is delicious.

somewhere along the line we developed an idea that making distinctions between what we killed and why is important to the killer, the killee officially no longer cares.  the killer knows what it has done, it just can't help itself.  it is hungry, everyone knows what that is.  some degree of sentiment in the lives of the vertebrates.  they notice things, they form opinions, their grownups are smarter than their children.  reflective conscience, tip of the grateful hat to the nutritious dead.  a quick dispatch, a reverent prayer.  delicious.

licit & illicit violence then.  there have been times & places where if you captured someone in a raid you could do anything you wanted with it, your own business, the neighbors would not interfere, cut them up & hang the parts from a tree, your business, feed them to your dogs (like the Spanish in Cuba, 16th century).  we, with our culture, apply manners to violence, obscure sense of guilt.  we can't acknowledge that guilt though because we would have to stop eating then we ("we") would die.  so we avert our eyes & agree not to comment.  if challenged we bluster & display to cover our fear.  we know how it is.  what can we do?

violence.  guilt.  aversion.  justification.  moving right along.

comedy of terrors

you better behave or else
i'll smash your face
i'll kill you
i'll take away your food
or someone else will do that to you
you won't go to heaven
you'll go to hell
you won't be happy
it'll get worse

fate will smash your face
god will smash your face
your mom will smash your face
you only win if you smash it yourself

you better behave or else
people will talk, won't be good
people are mean, they like to pass it along
burn down your house cause they don't like your friends

ooh paranoia
all the time paranoia
can't be free always watching me
paranoia

knots, circles

the basic problem of governance whether social or unitary is to get the subject to do what it doesn't want to do.  for the unitary "self" the untrained "desire body" will do exactly what it wants to do without recourse to planning.  the restraint of the desire body is what makes possible activities other than the basic breathe, eat, seek fun, reproduce sequences.  otherwise the desire body will express in the normal organismic way, nothing will be built, we would only intend out of those basic needs, no civilization.

the objective conditions of the universe require that the basic needs be satisfied, it is correct that the body wants to keep itself alive, it is at this time necessary that the units eat other units, we attempt to deal with the basics and heroically try to make more of it than it is by romanticizing whatever it is that we romanticize, every one of us an artist in our particular field.

all day long for example, there is a small piece of the me that calls out from a childish bed of lassitude: hey, you just accomplished something, go take a nap.  me, if i lie down, i'm going to nod off.  i'll nod off in the chair it i'm not doing anything.  i'd rather do my sleeping at night, all at once.  so i avoid lying down mostly.

the various ways that an individual gets itself to do what it doesn't want to do, probably all opposed by the desire body which wants to do what it wants to do immediately and completely over the edge and into the mud puddle at full speed like a dog or a 2 year old.  as grownups we are lucky if we got us a paying gig that nicely engages the particularistic (; flavors of our desire bodies, but even then, where work is a delight, the desire body can only be allowed to express hemmed in by social ritual otherwise everything completely falls apart and we devolve to mostly helpless monads surrounded by enemies.  sub-primate at least, maybe sub-vertebrate, back in the worm brain.

i practice various ways of figuring out what i want to do, perhaps the expression of those desires can be more usefully/pleasurably turned in some different direction than had been previously the case, so the "will" can perhaps turn the desire just a little bit and everything works a little better in a slightly different social situation.

but i really need to talk about crime.  the desire bodies unrestrained by any social or personal "will," that motivating element of the basic needs undirected, the will bent to the satisfaction of the desires in all cases, the social machinery bent too, that asocial me-firstness brought past utility to propaganda so that body parts are used to "send a message."  that seems to happen everywhere in every culture: there is a violent element somewhere in it, certain various activities are "not tolerated."

so i need to talk about toleration and limits thereof.  later.  the next thing i'm going to write about will be things-that-are-yucky.  when i finish with food & death & aggression. 

now i have a question.  these libyan kids & grownups who were able to drive out their crazy dictator (with sufficient air cover by the capitalist overlords), there was all that horrible dying going on but a lot of them were having the time of their lives, now they've won, almost, they're war heroes, hope they can keep it together.  war - best thing that ever happened to the winners, sometimes, they think.  and us, here, on tv, we just lap it up, just like the romans did.  violence.  want to participate.  hungry.  want to eat.  hunt, kill, eat.

that's interesting too.  the romans had public spectacles of violence and death (and food).  they did not have public spectacles of sex, there were spectacles for rich pervs but not public.  outside of that cultural line there are some places that had high rituals involving sex, that's what they did for theatre back then, but there is essentially no human tradition i know that has its sex out in public, plenty where violence and death were and are.

well, might say scalia, there is this long history of us humans appreciating violence and death and repressing and making fun of sex, a conservative person would naturally want to continue along that path.  who's to say that's incorrect?

but the answers to the remaining questions is out there in the areas not yet charted, some will bend their will toward exploration because they are such slaves to their desire that they will go forward no matter what, can't help themselves, they have bent their will to their purpose, their desire has no choice but to follow.

educational pipe dreams, love poem

1. the shape of the deal with all deviants is that they will fulfil the basic duties of citizenship, however they are defined, and they will be otherwise left in peace to do their thing.  the definition of citizenship duties is never fully stated lest its administration become tyranical, but encompasses some kind of joint approach to basic functions: infrastructure, admin, defense.  whatever they do in their spare time their business.  the heroin user knows military service coming up, voluntarily kicks, not a problem, can get back to it afterwards: citizen junky.  an entire emergency response crew run as a nonprofit by the porn industry.  porn stars who are also birth coaches.

i am imagining that education is not only to teach kids to sit still & follow orders, few facts thrown in, but like every kid learns how to sew, cook, self-defense, military tactics, large object handling, how to build things, how to fall & not get hurt, how to bear pain, how to end fights, how to try to survive as a kid in a combat situation, how to try to deal with creepy grownups. how to brush teeth, how to grow food, how to kill & dismember animals, anatomy, massage, signs of various sickness, formal instruction in various ways of being nice, how to plan, how to study.  how to put up structures.  how to figure out problems.

when i was a kid we were all going to be drafted.  they would separate some gym classes into girls & boys: the girls taught to dance, boys taught to march.  that was military education.  in history we learned the dates of wars, what they were supposed to be about, who won.  i imagine military education: the military instruction team comes in and explains how the whole military machine works, analyzes engagements, everybody does some pretend combat & survival.  whole school: military week.  teach them how to handle weapons too.  that kind of stuff not for everyone but some like it, will go on with it in an organic manner. 

another week is cooking week.  how to handle fire, how to handle knives, how to clean & why, handling hot stuff, how to measure, how to time, how to clean up.  another is clothing week, how they fit, how to clean them, how to make them.  another is body week, how it works, signs of sickness, how to keep it clean..  another is you get the idea?  teach them useful stuff.  lots of it.  kids will like it.

2.
there is the messy aspect, it is definitely a chore
there is no question that i will be thinking thoughts
you would rather i wouldn't think
also that it is messy, and takes time

and i'm going to think those thoughts
while we do this and that with the bodies
until at a certain point you give up
and decide to go with it & you swoon down
into it, current carries us away,
bumping through the experience,
sometimes to end calmly in the bay,
bit of water in the boat,
other times smashed on the rocks,
you over there, i over here
sometimes one of us walking away on the beach
the other still in the water

that certain point, where you decide you'll allow
yourself to go toward melt,
like it.  like.  melting is nice.  wanting to melt.
nice

3.
you orthodox of all sects: you have only a single hope, all of you insisting that all the other hopes are false.  "i" see buckets of hope everywhere.  who loses?

food

1. there is social eating but it does not include much public interaction with the food after it has been chewed.  the food is there on the plate, or twitching on the ground, whatever.  it looks delicious, i'm going to tear it to pieces & chew it up into mush & swallow it, it will keep me alive.  i am so thankful for the victim, its death is my life.  we sort of honor this fundamental quality of food by trying to combine the eating with other fun stuff to make a fun feast, bonhomie, glass of wine in afternoon, nibbling at the delicious victims.

once the food gets in the mouth & starts to get slimed & chewed this love affair with the victim enters the flavor zone & moves out of the visual.  chewed food behavior involving taking it out of the mouth & playing with it, chewing it up & displaying it as it is deconstructed, sharing it dyadically or parentally, more or less odd in my culture, though i've heard of rugged cultures where the parents prechew the walrus blubber etc. for the kids.  on the cooking shows they eat the food but you don't get closeups of open mouths chewing.  that would be phagographic.  apparently there is no serious market for that kind of entertainment: no movies of people eating each other's chewed food, no closeups of the food as it turns into food.  we each eat too much or not by ourselves, sitting there at the table together, maybe sharing a dish, but each eating our own food.

2. the mighty worm crawling over the bacterial mat, devouring everything in its path, fearlessly processing lives into food, taking all the good stuff, leaving the junk behind.

3. the delicious joy of the mashed up and broken open body, slow drip of fluids

4. a rich subject, filled with pink tones & delicious flavors & textures.

tolerance

i heard my precise philosophy described on radio today as the "harlot movement."  all religions are one, peace & understanding, nonviolence, exploration, tolerance.  yup, that's me.  exactly what i want.  so that characterization of course from an end times paulian group that supposedly is trying to take over the world, involved in the uganda anti-gay bill & involved in the rick perry campaign.  harlot religion.  gotta figure out how to describe harlotry to little kids.  they are warning their followers against exactly what i'm trying to describe.  so there it is.  only political activity could possibly defeat them politically, historically the prohibitionists have made it very hard to be in any way deviant.  we have to define our social relations to encompass a broad range of deviant behavior.  why?  because we will encounter new situations for which the standard set of behaviors will not lead to success meaning continuation of the life.  the deviants will have somewhere the relevant behavior that will be adaptive in the new situation so that ability to catch animals to eat will not be required for survival but ability to handle machinery will be.  at one point everyone was a hunter & the farmer was the deviant, the weirdo, the guy doing girls' work.  now the geek is the pinnacle, the obligate hunter considered a pathetic endangered relic.  the people who go "hey, what if we try this?" 

we harlots will tolerate the non-tolerators but they won't tolerate us.  if they come to power they will attempt to repress any of us that they can recognize.  there are a lot more of us than there are them.  they are organized we are not. 

we have to define ourselves beyond our specialty, whatever that happens to be.  what we all are is tolerant, people are allowed to be different.  think about this: criminal violence aside are you willing to let other people be different from you?  then you are tolerant, that is your approach, as opposed, say, to enforced conformity.  i submit this is the fundamental political/social divide.  organize around the principle of tolerance and we will find the approach that we can all agree on.

fun, food, getting comfortable with being uncomfortable

1. for every kind of deviant it is all discretion all the time
2. victim victual
3. pushing into the discomfort zone & making it comfortable

3 things: this, that, the rest of everything.  subject, object, field of play.

1. some small part of the human population bullies, the rest of us just wish they would stop but does not want usually to fight them by their rules because they would likely win & organisms want to live.  the bullies by and large are stupid just like the passives so it is possible within limits to continue one's heresies if one's normal mask is good enough & one is smart enough to find a corrupt safe zone as will always be found in human governance everywhere.  there are the deviant acts that the deviants like, one thing.  the desire to bring display versions of that life style into the normal public with its bully component creates flash points of emotion, is that what we wanted, deviants?  no.  gotta calm them with our mutual humanity & otherwise competent ordinariness.  opiate user with perfect work record.  porn actor picking up kids after school, take them to piano lesson.
   the importance of these various behaviors is obvious to the practitioners, prone to abuse & obsession though they may be as can also of course such perfectly ordinary "normal" activities as doing business and eating.  in most periods of human history they did what they did in deep private, everybody knew, if they tolerated the weirdness it was because of the practitioner's otherwise pure & useful character.
   most of human history: any response other than "yes sir" was treason punishable by immediate death.  whatever they said.  bullies.  that's all that governments used to be.

2. victim victual
   there it is in the language.  the victor victimizes the victual.  it dies in delicious agony, its blood dripping onto my tongue as i crunch down on its throat with my teeth, tail twitching, ears back, growling,waiting.  it kicks at me, us lying on the ground, i kick back, claws rake belly, more blood.  it twitches, shudders, relaxes, i get up, roar, bat its head, roll around, pee, eat the victim.  it is delicious.
   that is what victory means.  all of the solemn heartfelt stuff is sentimental landscaping.  the victim lying there has stopped being a problem and has become lunch.
   so when we conquer our sins & the sin lies there relaxed, torn & dead, it has turned into food of a sort, we could eat it ourselves or we could be induced to give it away to the poor or to the lord.  it is delicious, delicious the agony of its defeat & death.  ready to be recycled, building blocks of the victorious organism.

3. the essential element of self-direction is to find the edge of the comfort zone & to probe past it & try to colonize some of the discomfort zone.  to not actively do that is the essential element of "normal."  "normal" doesn't like something & all it wants to do is not deal with it.  self-directed will examine the situation, see what its like, maybe something can be done, a way to function in a new situation.  new parents for example drop their otherwise culturally normal behavior around poop during the kid's diaper years.  they get used to it.  they learn to like beer, learn to like sex, learn to like celibacy, learn to like danger, pain, parties.

4. normal
   in phone conversation with a friend of my wife.  we are going on, me in a slightly absurdist tendency as is my well known wont, having a good time.  i convey some aspect of the banter to my wife, purely factual, wife does an annoy: i know about that, people don't like you to talk to other people while you're on the phone.  she likes to do that particular annoy, will on occasion criticize my behavior in public if she gets sufficiently self-involved.  faced with that kind of totalitarian "because i said so & everyone else agrees with me" the independent organism recoils & wants to do the thing deemed offensive more to "show her."  but no, just to go on with the show, actors all, each the star of our own play.

clarifiers, accelerators

it is a "place" not a method.  subtances may be unavailable.  methods may be undiscovered.  the "place" is still "there."  not a place, a viewpoint (a place as it were).  a rock on the ground, observed by an organism.  a certain angle, a certain time, a glint: a brilliant point of light.  the organism responds, perhaps with the chemical cascade it may refer to as elation.

certain substances taken into the organism may produce elation, perhaps temporary access to the "place" in question.  certain social situations as well, muscular exertion in certain circumstances.  the chemical processes brought about by "drugs," "crowd effect," exertion (the "zone") not the same as the "place."  the place not spatial, not mental, "feels" objective, is obviously not, but is not "conceptual" either. 

the "place" does nothing "by itself."  it is merely "there."  access to the "place" can produce various responses in the noticing organism including the range of emotional reactions from terror to joy.  some individual organisms hate "it," others love "it" obsessively, seek "it" to the detriment of the integrity of that organism. 

certain organisms find that action sequences of various kinds are more likely to produce the the viewpoint from which the "place" can be accessed.  certain substances, certain rituals.  crowd effects: coordinated activity of "many" organisms, will often mimic the effects of the "place," a few organisms may "truly" access it.  substances may similarly produce the viewpont, not necessarily reliably, there will always be the possibility that the "getting there" will be substituted as the object of desire rather than the actual "place."

if one is interested in the possibilities of the "place" one would want to find ways to extend the temporal duration of one's observation of it into a length of time sufficient to start noting its peculiar properties.  one can then decide to seek those properties rather than the method of getting "there."  perhaps something can then be done.

the controlled substances, the illegal or suppressed activities: special function agents that can in certain circumstances, properly used, to demonstrate the existence of other "states of mind" to the individual organism, perhaps some useful state will be demonstrated.  the various states not necessarily of equal utility.  that is why drugs are considered a different category than food.

it has become important to "me" to develop multiple access methods to the "place."  observation over decades has given "me" a perhaps more exact set of descriptors for it so that "i" can "know" it when it is present, rather than supposing that the ritual, or the feeling, or the sensory data set, etc. is the "place."  we may tend to think we "know it when we see it."  maybe that is true, or not, or sometimes.  most important for me has been to separate "happiness" from the "place."  happiness may accompany being in that presence but it is not essential to "being there."

for the society, the suppression of discussion of unpopular subjects is not helpful, means become confused with ends, all sorts of nonsense can become policy.  for the individual the safety factors are not to be ignored.  fear though is not a useful prime motivator: leads to paralysis in emergencies.

more specific than that i shall not at this time be.

the lunch is naked

1. there it is on the fork.  it was alive, maybe its still alive in the shell.  i'm going to eat it.  there it was out there in the sun doing its thing.  now it is stuck on the fork, in the shell, broken open, doused with acid, i'm going to put it in my mouth & kill it & eat it.  it tastes so good.  the plant seeds: i will steal their future & use it to make my own.  it is delicious, their future. 

2. to jump past the known limitations into the unknown limitations.  a guy on radio describing how he died: i felt my body shutting down then i died.  he did not explain.  they had brought him back.  there he was again.  as if he had switched off, not present yet not somewhere else.  a more comprehensive absence.

yesterday an associate was introduced to i think its called neural programming, i'll fix that apellation (skin, flagging data) later.  he was given a video game he had to control with his brain via applied electrodes.  there was of course no detailed instruction, he had to learn by himself, like riding a bike, only one way (unless of course one has learned how to examine & how to learn)  (how to learn how to examine?  examine examination.  learning?  find out what it is necessary to learn, learn it, make sure it is learned.)

the experience was described as "weird."  there were "funny feeling."  after the session there was fatigue but it was all "mental."  fassbinder said that peripheral vision takes more energy than central, brain activity uses a lot of our calories, the session involved use of previously not noticed mental "muscles" (pathways): extra energy use: fatigue.

weirdness said to have continued at low lever through afternoon until a nap.  upon awakening "disorientation" was reported along with "not nausea bit like it," not "anxiety" but like it, "not a headache but like it, etc."  and more.  we discussed the possibility of actual organismic illness: virus, etc.  then the possibility that "self-awareness" is the effect of a viral infection, the virus controlling our activities to further its viral genetic ends, a point of view not well received in a person who claims not to know what to do with the gift of life & carrying around guilt, etc. in attempt to balance the imbalance.  if however, the weirdness was actually related to the np session it could conceivably be likened to a serious physical workout session: various kinds of muscle soreness maybe some are never before experienced.  in that case it can be gotten used to, perhaps a new tool for doing things in life. 

but will it help to decide "what to do?"  one goes to one's pandora's box, tells oneself the thing i take out is what i'll be.  take the thing out: ew, yuck.  put it  back in, try again.  as opposed to other "mes" who just get up and go toward something, whatever it happens to be.  as opposed to happening to be born in a system that pre-assigned the unit before manufacture (or after treatment & inspection) & that was that none of that think-for-yourself stuff for us thankyou.  no, it won't.  still looking for the chemicals that will reliably produce raw volition.

multiple realities / multiple versions of same reality

in what world is it possible to completely do only what one wants to do & to not have to do what one doesn't want to do.  wake up in the whenever & it is just perfectly the way one wants it & that goes on all day long & at the end it is just perfect to lie down & nod off (the "me").  or to be always awake & it is all perfect nothing that's not perfect ever, constantly changing perfect because it has to change, keep us amused, otherwise we'd get bored, not perfect.

i'm going to write about sex eventually in this series.  it turns out that sex is like the raspberry on the top of the everything cake.  great simile: unmistakable flavor, some think its too much flavor, don't actually like it, can get seeds stuck between teeth, could be thought of as problem.  could neglect to clean it out, cavity develops, lose a tooth, get an abcess, go septic, die.  why never to eat raspberries.

so i'll continue poking around at the bottom of the experiential pile, the food layer, until it naturally evolves into a consideration of secondary activities. 

they are going to find chemicals that reliably turn off sexual attraction, or that change the pheromones to be repulsive rather than attractive.  women will be able to put on a perfume that will make men slightly nauseous when they walk by.  chemical niqab.  chemicals that reliably make people superbad & you just point them & they attack.  real aphrodisiacs of course, that the victim can prevent with a lotion or a pill.  chemical wars purchased at the chemical war store.  maybe cortical separators like the memory suppressants we have now.  take a pill, go to work, work all day or all year or the whole life, don't remember any of it, the self-aware "me" absent, the social me fully competent, an army of chemically compliant biobots. a nation.  chemicals in the water, everyone get up go to church sunday on knees and pray chemicals.  don't call them drugs.  medicine.  for antisocial tendency.

a cursory examination of yuckiness.  we did not shrink from poop when we were babies.  smells had to be damaging for us to try to get away.  ammonia.  the culturally determined set of smells & smell producing behaviors that we learn to go yuck to.  we did not start out yucking to poopy smells.  we learned how to want to upchuck in the presence of, say, shit on the floor, the smell as we are dutifully cleaning it up.  make me want to puke.  learned.  babies don't care.

i read that 95% of the mass of human poop is bacteria.  it is food for bugs, the bugs can be eaten by fish, we can eat the fish.  pigs would gladly eat it too, then the humans could eat them if they wanted to, or it could be composted, eat the peaches.  radio story today about how "the public" hasn't been able get its head around turning sewage into drinking water, it can't get the thought of the poop out of the thought of the water.  a set of people who will not consider the issue.  too yucky.  absolutely don't want to talk about it.

don't want to talk about it subjects.  how to deal with the other people & the self aspects of aversion.  that's what this blog is about.

a gambol in the garden of whimsy

because we don't talk about sex with our kids we convey no concepts of too much, not enough, etc.

because we don't talk about drugs with our kids we convey no concept of how much is too much, what they're good for, how to deal with problems in self/others, etc. 

a guy on the radio wrote a book, was a soldier, studied & practiced war, now a reporter.  he commented on how the libyan freedom fighters are untrained kids who don't know what to look for so they are ineffective and unsafe in battle.  study of war is a specialized discipline, but there is an organization that teaches it.  with sex and drugs there are only private mostly underground organizations and individuals that teach those things.  if one wants to discuss methods and ends with children, they being the ones who needs those data most, trouble proceeds, often to the point of legal issues.

war reporter described how the freelibs were retreating down a road & he observed how the mortar rounds were following them down the road, so he knew the kind & level of training of the mortar crew, but the freelibs hadn't had the training so they were making mistakes & some were getting killed.

never when i was in school did anyone ever come in & say: kids, i'm going to show you how the athenians beat the persians at marathon.  war was never discussed as such, they were part of history: there was this war & that war, the result was whatever it was, but the mechanics, tactics, strategy of war was never addressed.

and of course fighting was not addressed either, in gym for example.  not even from the standpoint of how to break up fights.  even we were never explicitly advised to go get a grownup whenever a fight happened.  the subject was completely ignored.  bullying was everywhere when i was in school, grownups only interfered if it got really bad.

anyway, all of this information could be freely available, and is more or less unfreely available, depending on one's location.  want to know something go to the experts.

a tweeter who is a legal sex worker & activist for sex worker rights i follow barfed all over about the presence of a nursing baby in what was described as an otherwise lesbian porn movie.  didn't see it.  don't know if a DA could make something of it child abuse-wise.  probably not useful.

i can imagine a society of sex without social consequences though i do not see a way to create such a culture with what we have.  the parental dyad becomes a parental level, every kid becomes the beloved child of all adults.  parents, kids, all circulate freely in their levels, bullshit & ripoff don't happen, everyone is safe & free.  people can have sex any way they want because everyone is smart about hygiene & conception & psychology & knows themselves.  no jealousy, no violence.

in that culture the mother & the lover make love while the baby nurses, the lover was part of the birth team, the guy in the kitchen cooking the food is the dad & knows both of them well.  his friend over for a couple of days, they all know him too.  kids come in from playing, see the mom thing happening in the corner, no interest.  If they did mom might hand them the baby to take care of.  there is a religion there that mandates intelligence & universal love.  they have figured out what to do with their predator tendencies.  they do not abuse each other.  they don't do jealousy.  they don't have rich & poor.  everybody helps everybody. 

the ethical progress is that something comes up with, you know, life that has to be dealt with & you put down the sex & deal with it (baby, etc.)   obsession is the problem: loss of balance, the not taking care of the business of life & rolling around in one's obsession to the neglect of that business.  not the object of obsession.  the obsession is innocent.  the gun just sits there, the drug, the sacred text, the ritual dance.

the loudest voices are those trying to sweep subjects under rugs.  the core issue is coercion.  we have two methods of coercion: violent & symbolic aka financial.  if coercion is not a factor then we are free to explore a lot more possibilities in life.  we do not live in such a world, so we have to be careful.  it is not actually possible to talk about some of those possibilities.  we don't have the words, the languages we use do not allow certain possibilities.

i think that there is actually a gradient between "me" & "us" & "them" & "it."

i'm going to experiment with a linguistic construct.  perhaps it will be useful to use the word "cortex" instead of "the me" to indicate that thing that "knows" itself as separate from everything else.  these past x months i've been using "the me" like that, the two words, to refer to that self-reflective function, the thing that knows itself.  my colonoscopy experience with the sedation that put "the me" out of commission while allowing the rest of the organism to respond to the staff in a socially standard manner sufficiently demonstrated that the self-reflective function is only a part of the package and mostly apparently not necessary.  The dream of dictators everywhere: a nation of talented but non-self aware slaves.  Interfering busibodies everywhere always trying to own other peoples' "mes."

the part that wants and the other part that notices that it wants.  the part that notices i'm going to call "the cortex," see if that approach clarifies anything.  because a fully functional socially interactive thing lay there and responded during that procedure when "the me" was shut down.  they told me when they asked that thing-that-was-not-the-me how it was doing it answered "fine."  probably it thought it was "me."  but when "i" came back i didn't have that sequence in the memory, so how was that "me"?  obviously it comes in pieces, the pieces don't all recognize each other.  "cortex" disengaged.  another level competent in social levels but separate from "cortex."  next time i should ask them to engage that thing in philosophical discussions or to characterize its emotional state, see what its good for. 

alternatively, is it possible to separate the cortex completely and go through life without that continuity of consciousness thing: "me."

i have a client in norway with whom relations exist in areas other than strictly business.  we briefly discussed the crazy shooter incident.  of course here in usa we have many such incidents, mostly much smaller, actually single murders by crazies, lots of them, essentially.  i was making my point about humans essentially never mobbing a dangerous human, reverting to absolute individuality, most submitting or running, very rarely an individual going against the danger.  he agreed, then he said that sometimes a leader comes forward, other people will join in.  that is true too, but relatively rare.  most of us engage in aversive behavior in the face of violence.  we shrink away, do not want to deal with it directly, wish we were somewhere else, what can I do?

origins of violence & curiosity

we think we want to deal with fact using ideas as tools but most of what we do is about feelings, the ideas are like makeup, the facts only impinge or compel.

participant-observer event types:
1. solo - i observe myself
2. dual - i observe another thing
   a. single observer
   b. plural observer (different dynamic, participant # gradient to be discussed later)
3. one can hypothesize interactions in more dimensions but they are difficult to notice, having to do among other things with relatively longer passages of time.  the essential element of multiparty events is complexity.

people can change.  i became an athlete.  solo.  per above scheme "athletics" is not about teamwork or theatre, rather a change in an individual's conformation (body, lifestyle) that brings personal benefits.  for me to do my athletic stuff for any reason other than purest "i want to" would be caving in to the peremptory conditional imperatives of others.  awards, recognition, social advancement, etc.  pah.  if it doesn't feel good i don't want to have to do it.  it has been the development of a craving for a feeling that makes me want to sweat every day, run through a session, makes me feel good.  that's why.

sleep schedule got regular.  bowel behavior too.

in school we learned a bunch of right answers, not how to figure out if an answer is correct.  math, the only subject in which how to find the right answer is the point of the thing, is taught so badly that most of us hate it & refuse to do it in life & that's why we have money problems.

beyond the hidden & untaught process of how to find out if an answer is right there is the extremely fertile and even more hidden & untaught process of figuring out why and how something is wrong.  this disinclination to intensively investigate failure stems i think from the behavior of our most primitive animal ancestors, whose method of proceeding through the world was to worm through the bacterial mat eating from the front, pooping from the back, unable to turn around.  leaving the poop behind is the most basic animal adventure.  only wierdo worms would go to the trouble of backing up to investigate its droppings.  normal worms would not understand.

but the wierdo worm would perhaps find out that the bacterial mat fills in the left behind tunnel with more robust & tasty bacteria, or maybe even that something growing in the poop comes chasing after them down the tube & gets into them, grows inside, itches, some of the worms die.  only wierdo worms might have a chance of finding these things out.  most of the worms are straight ahead normal worms, no interest in stuff on the side, or in back.

so - try to perfect the ever-onward quest function or go for the peeloff into unknown territory?

not what i started out thinking

the act of eating can be seen as lazily evoking pain & death in other life so as not to have to feed oneself like a platonic plant (platonic because plants make war too).  the platonic plant gives up mobility for a strategy of unreserved submission to fate.  its going to sit there where it is and whatever happens will happen (and watch that idea dissolve off into examples of plant volition).  If animals don't like the situation they try to get up and leave.  plants will secrete chemicals, grow out strangler roots, etc. but they sit right there where god put them.  animals will use mobility to try to produce what they want by going and taking.  here come the animals.  good luck.

predator animals like us have a history of big exciting athletic efforts preceding feeding.  we go boom then we go yum, the corpse of the victim twitching red before us, growl, roar.  we know what the victim is feeling, its destruction elevates us, we survive because it dies.  it can go ahead and surrender if it wants to, we're going to eat it anyway.  growl.  maybe lions have moral qualms about their food like some of us do, but those second "thoughts" don't get in the way of keeping the organism alive.  just go ahead and die, i'm hungry.  or don't, i don't care, stay alive, i'll eat you anyway. 

not all animals are predators of course and not all non-predators are helpless: depends on the situation.  they are all helpless against the top predator here: us.  we have no enemies other than our own stupidities.  the least they can do, we think, is surrender gracefully to our hunger, and some of them do, we call them "domesticated." 

just trying to figure this stuff out. 

annoyance

cat distracted in process of torturing still live mouse.  perhaps even distracted by iself: its dreams of immediate future: skull crunching, juices squirting, lost in dream, mouse stops playing dead, runs away.  cat flicks tail, annoyed.  dream dashed, nothing but more work to do.  no fun anywhere.

ants mob their enemies.  humans mostly run away, occasionally a mob forms, historically mobs often get stupid & violent, authorities typically don't like them except when they can control them, but mostly what we do is run away to try to preserve the "me" or its immediate relatives etc.  selfless types are relatively rare.  moral idealists of various kinds would like to create an infectiously transmissable selflessness to make "perfect" citizens who will organically defend the group but training is only partially and occasionally effective.

gunperson walks into crowded restaurant, starts shooting.  mob behavior, entire room converging on the shooter, guaranteed to produce casualties but gunner overcome & disarmed.  normal course of events is everyone gets under table or just sits there, gunner pics them off until cops come & shoot the gunner.  the 3 people out of 100 who would want to do something can count on not having any help from the unformed mob.  humans do not spontaneously mob carriers of danger.

usually they have to be worked up with speeches & rhythmic stuff into a "state" then the organizers show them the door & they walk through.  otherwise they'll just sit there doing nothing until the cat comes.  social self organization is not a genetic human trait.  it is done by hand, so to speak, through culture. 

the normal mob is an audience.  its main activity is focused observation on performers.  is it true that there is no history of defensive mobs?  that's what civilians are all about, right?  people who do not defend themselves?  even in citizen soldier countries some fight & some stay home with the kids, telling them not to fight.

squeamish

when fun is being had & instant violent disaster intrudes one does not say "hang on wait a minute i'll be right with you on that. lemme just finish my fun. one drops the fun & responds to the violence in some way.

there is a unique & self-defined esthetic in any genre of artistic expression.  certain sympathetic associations are evoked, favored flavors of experience.  predeliction.

some things we decide to train ourselves to like for various reasons.  i had to learn to like bitter things, like beer.  some things we decide we like them and train ourselves to call that thing something we like to do.  not drinking so much for example, learning to think of that hot burny feeling of a muscle stretch as pleasure, the inner me shrinking away from the intensity of the sensation, swooning somewhere inside, that thing, giving up to the pain of the universe, so long its been good to know you.

especially if part of the training involves fatigue to build endurance.  the reward is the conquering of sloth in any given moment.  on to the next challenge.  in a given discipline, in which the terms of success are self-defined.

back to feeding.  there is a utilitarian pleasure factor built into the act of killing things because in the course of vertebrate history it has mostly been if you kill it you get to eat it.  saliva's going to flow.  enough of that kind of luck maybe you get to reproduce.

it is possible to get inordinately fond of killing things, known cases of animals killing things for the fun of it.  rogue dogs, part of hyena culture perhaps, something humans can interpret as sin.  kids at shallow pond, catching pollywogs and throwing them up on a rock to die, many as they can catch.  someone thought up the idea, some are going along, some are competing with each other to catch the most, one likes to squish them in his fist, some other kid is watching them die on the rock.  over there is another kid looked and walked away, another crying in a corner wishing it was not happening, maybe someone tried to break it up and failed, out there no one is noticing any of that.  things humans do.

anticipatory digestive juices with the deer in the sight.  delicious falling down in darkness go boom as the thing is hit and events proceed.  if i got it i go boom inside, the pride balloon swells, i did it.  deliciousness awaits.  it can get to be a favorite thing to try to do.  in the ordinary way of it of course it is mostly quietly waiting, but the successful climax can become a favorite thing to do.

and humans can monetize and purify the desire away from its original function, the killing separated from the eating.  the wierdo cutting up animals, the rich person going to a resort to kill birds dumped out of a box with a shotgun, spanish style bull fighting.  just to see them die.  makes them feel good about themselves.  special.  uniquely in touch with their roots.

at that level the discomfort, pain, fear, death around the predator are part of the mix that is the joy of eating.  a glutton would seek a surfeit of those violent emotional condiments.  an esthete would seek their refinement.

what about in primate cultures where individuation has allowed the emergence of individuals who do not like to kill?  they make their way in society by other gainful activity, someone else gives them meat.  how did that happen, they emotionally turn away from the basic kill-eat sequence, the social system finds ways to keep them alive & reproducing.  why?

they provide different kinds of fun.  processes that satisfy and do not involve killing and eating.

that basic element of pleasure though: its ok that you die because i'll live because i'll eat you.  every kind of pleasure element is some harmonic of that.

can't you have the decency to do that stuff where i can't see it

proper.  the way i want it to be whatever that is.  i want everybody else to do it my way, that's the way i like best.  nobody else does it quite right, only i do, some people almost get it right, some are just hopeless, can't deal with them when they're that way, when they're doing that thing that they do that isn't proper.

for example it isn't proper behavior to become possessed of the holy spirit in the midst of an orgy or a massacre.  or really to be disagreable to the flow of things in any way.

back to violence.  the thing struggles, perhaps valiantly, perhaps fearfully, then dies.  stuff comes out during and after the death.  if i'm eating it eventually everything comes out including inhabitants (95% bacteria they say) of large intestine, there is gooey wet stuff everywhere, everything is a mess.  but i'm eating it, its delicious, who cares.  the thing tried to get away, i didn't let it.  i held it down and hurt it and broke stuff and it tried to get away and it leaked red stuff all over everything & i killed it and i'm eating it & its delicious.

i've killed a few small animals for various culturally sanctioned reasons, mice lately.  there was a time in another place i thought i had a deal with a family of mice, they stay in that room, we get this one.  it seemed to work through a winter, i left peanuts for them on their side, they didn't visit.  not lately, sorry about that.  anyway, but i think back to the big juicy pieces of meat i ate when i was a kid, chew, chew, chew, the meat juice, a different kind of gush in the mouth, animal chemicals.  something different happens.  growl.

when they get torn its very colorful inside, various pinks & reds.  there it is, twitching trying to get away but its legs are broken, red stuff, tasty, struggle, all in one fulfilment experience for the lion, hyena, fox, hominid.  fear evoked in victim->rapid athletic sequence->presence of redness, bodily fluids->feeding.  the essential satisfaction loop.

each element of the routine evokes & echoes the rest of the elements including the satisfaction of the successful end point.  red, for example, or athletic activity. 

that is the eater part.  it makes no apologies, none are necessary.  there's a body, what are we gonna do, starve?  we have to work on that draw our chemicals directly from the environment & not to have to eat life.  who's working on that?  there is also that curious part that "feels" for the other side, flinches in sympathy when the thing is struck, falls.  feels sense of loss for the thing that is dead even as it is eating eat.  every now and then an organism exhibits that compassion thing, not only humans either.  but still we all take part, even if we're strict vegans.  plants, animals, what's the difference?  we continue our organismic personal existence & protect our gene line by ending the potential of all these other organisms.  that is what they call original sin in some offices.

i want to hear from some hunters and butchers on this.  what's it like inside your heads, doing what you do?

social etiquette

heard on radio: look at the person's face at a point in the center of the forehead about an inch above the eyebrows, occasionally looking at one or both eyes, never look at anything below the neck.  so the clothing has to be appropriate, the body in whatever condition and conformation it happens to be and we are not "supposed" to look at or mention it ever.  in a "business-social" setting.  like damn church.  this is so 1950s.  but never mind, the chinese will tell us how to do business etiquette properly.

not supposed to notice: pain, pleasure, distress, beauty, disharmony, danger.  Chemical signals, discomfort.

nose to grindstone.  stick to business.

so i guess i'll look at violence first because it seems more basic, related more or less to food.  then things-that-smell-bad, the results of the violence that we must perform if we want to live.  then sex: the optional activity.  then money, the quantification of sin.

today is the day after the right wing crazy attack in norway, cruelly validating my decision to look at violence before sex.  sex "positive" people do not force people to do things.  violence people that is exactly what they do.  a coherent approach to violence takes precedence over liberties of license because the violence demands a response.  we may try to live our lives in ignorance but in the end that is not possible and attempts to do that are stupid.  stupid people can get smarter however.

the condition of creating deadness brings us all the way to the ultimate factor of our existence.  we kill to live, only the plants don't do that.

as an aside: the thought that males who have problems with female visuals might consider plucking out their eyes as mentioned in the christian bible instead of demanding modesty from them.  whose fault is it that they have that problem anyway?

**

2 days later the issue begins to clarify somewhat in the world out there.  in the general human population we have groups of people who like to do different things.  among the things they like to do are violence and accompanying crimes.  "most" people are not into violence as a thing they like to do, but the ones who do like it make trouble unless their culture has something to do with them, which is usually hopefully in the army of the democratic country rather than the local warlord but that's just my taste in things.

i think perhaps to go back of the mechanics of violence to the food level then maybe to evolve out of simple catching & eating to the development of meanness, maybe to get to something that can be attempted to be done about the increasing stupid violence and thoughts of same that is spreading in the world. 

you know how it goes.  fun people like to have fun.  the violence people go do a war, drag in all the fun people, put em to work, sorry guys, got a war to fight, you can have fun again when we win.

so, the animals that my ancestors kept and killed and ate, before that they hunted them and killed and ate them, before that they killed and ate them raw, smashing them with rocks, licking out the brains, all of the organs including large intestine and contents, where the salt is, condimental, yum.

saw some movie stills.  a chimp troop & a baboon troop cohabiting a zone.  toddler chimp is playing with toddler baboon.  adult chimp comes up & eats the baboon toddler from the legs up, it tries to get away until its dead.

the old way of slaughter is to go get the animal that you know and that knows you, you immobilize it for convenience then you kill it then you cut it up.  then you eat it.  it is delicious.  zuck it is said kills his own meat.  he does not want to deprive himself of the total food experience, which is to kill it yourself.  the being dies, usually with some resistance & distress.  some allow themselves that normal human experience, some that is their base condition, many these days get queasy about it, stomach knotty grossout feelings, killing animals, cutting them up.  they pay other people to do it for them.  Some other people turn out to really like to kill things, to make them die.  there should be a place for them in the meat trade.  all the little pre-serial killers, train them in butcher technique, that doesn't work, put em in the army.

hunger trumps charity for most of us, we will kill it and eat it if we can.  somehow the human cultures seem to be mostly designed that people will often voluntarily die rather than kill & eat each other, but that's certainly not universal practice, & past performance is no guarantee of future results.

the basic violent act is either agressive or reactive.  the agressive involves a preparation followed by a lunge and a series of strikes.  either can of course be done with or without skill & luck.  there are low-skilled animal predators who still manage to survive, demonstrating an acceptable range of skill in living.

in hunting the perfect strike kills the thing "instantly" it goes limp immediately, the eyes go out so to speak, some spasms, its gone.  eat it.  or more usually the victim (see "victual") is only caught, injured, has to be worked for a while to get it dead.  chew & choke & break bones, poke, stab, tire out, thing is scared, trying to get away, maybe it kicks, hurts, injures the hunter.  hunter gets really mad, starts to tear, dig into soft parts, if the hunter has hands reach inside and pull stuff out.  make it dead.  then it can be eaten in peace up in the tree.  with sweetie and the baby.

what do we miss and/or gain by outsourcing that life function, hire people to do that as a job, through live animals at them all day long, they kill them quick, throw them on the line, make it punitively bad work insultingly badly paid.  hunter running in the jungle, farmer praying before slaughtering the pig.

heightened senses of observers in the presence of death apparent only if the death is of an organism of certain size.  probably every dying organism releases some class of pheromone that throws organisms nearby into some alteration of attitude.  introducing a new class of type: watchers.  the crowd around the schoolyard fight.  plenty of them around.  they'd rather watch than do.  at a certain decorticated level they don't fight for themselves and they don't survive if their parents don't take care of them.  corticated animals tend to try to keep them around, maybe they'll be good for something, occasionally to force them to do stuff because they like to let stuff happen.  call them betas if you want.  there can be power but it isn't used. betas.

are there gammas?  in the social interactions of corticated animals are there like professional losers whose purpose is to be used as practice for the aggressive skills of the hunters?  i guess so.  i remember them from when i was in school.  i was low but i would fight if i absolutely had to so i was left alone to my peaceful wierd self a lot, there were easier kids for the bullies to pick on, they'd only try me if there was no weaker one around, if they were in the mood.

then there are victims.  the  position of the victim is that it is ultimately unable to avoid being killed & eaten.  it fights or it gives up, then it dies.  it is eaten, then it is gone.

lot of meat in this topic.  juicy. 

hiding in plain sight

all deviants must do this.  indeed, every individual is their own person so that everyone deviates.  the norm is platonic.

the various requirements of the evolved agreements of allowable ways to behave are meant to substitute for the application of force by personal whim.  some rigor is required by participants in such violence-reducing schemes in order to restrain and forestall the violence.  The hard edge of the inwardly peace-enforcing culture has to adequately deal with the potential for violence at its territorial & conceptual edges.  The required rigor is difficult to calibrate, easy to abuse, easy to do wrong. 

it is necessary to have this acknowledgement of an edge to a culture by its participants.  it is necessary that there be agreement at some level by the participants of a culture on how things are done.  the alternative is personalized violence on whatever scale the warlords happen to be operating on.  who are the warlords?  they are the people who like to make war.  either the peaceful people hire them or they go into business for themselves.  there are plenty of them around: people who like to fight, enough of them to force their way of life on the rest of us pretty much constantly during human history.  culture is an ongoing varied attempt to bottle the violent people and keep them within something otherwise they would take over the world and fight forever because that is what they like to do.

the peaceful people have to talk the fighters into not fighting.  the fighters would rather fight.  sometimes the peaceful people have to make up stuff to tell the fighters, other times they have to threaten to do something they declare to be "bad" that is or isn't violent itself, or they have to give the fighters something to do: give them some trouble to keep them out of trouble, maybe even make something up.  it doesn't always work.  fighters regularly take over governing systems, go to war, make messes and debts.  all sorts of problems emerge when one is working in an emergency.

we could kill all the fighters but that probably wouldn't work.  it seems to be a thing that comes out in the male gender.  would have to kill all the males.

predeliction to violence:
   step on the bug.  bug dies.  half step on the bug.  bug half dies.  front half tries to get away from squashed back half.  maybe it does, front half goes crawling off oozing goo from behind.  collapses, wiggles legs, twitches, dies.
   chop worms into pieces, wriggling pieces of worm pain as they try to get away from the monster who smears the pieces into the ground then picks up unsmeared wiggly pieces and shows them to a girl.  If the girl is a bird or maybe even a monkey she's going to eat the pieces, if she's a human maybe she's going to go "yuk" and maybe the 10 year old torture boy will take them and rub them into the hair of a convenient peripheral male or maybe he's so deep into pain creation that he tries it on the girl and trouble can emerge because maybe that's kind of over the line for that culture maybe (or maybe the peripheral male or the girl had training in the ways of war, it is not impossible that 10 year olds can have that training.
   public torture and execution wildly popular spectacles throughout human history.  public eating (of dead things) one of greatest human funs.  public sex (as opposite of violence, more on that later), very rare.  public pooping and peeing (as opposite of eating) essentially does not happen in human culture, when it does it is described as social failure.
   violence: some people that is what they live for.

megalomania: many of us have experienced that.  in 1979 i used an accellerant during the iran hostage crisis, right at the beginning.  i was as the facebook group "new to islam" was toying with the possibility of a muslim identity to wear.  the crisis brand new, that night a bunch of notables at sunni al-azhar univ in cairo issued a statement calling on the shi'a (dogs) in iran to release the embassy staff, one of the charges was that the embassy was a nest of spies, the azharis announced of course its a nest of spies, that's what embassies are.  and i thought in my accellerant modified state (annoying to people in the apartment who had to go to school/work tomorrow but i didn't care, accellerated was what i was) you know, maybe something can be done.  i was in nyc, i imagined going to the un to pray, people would ask me, i'd tell them i was there to pray for hostage release, come join me, it would spread, the whole world would stop & pray, the game players in iran would be melted gandhi-style & the world would be saved.
   next day i have enough oomph in "me" to sell that crazy vision on my girlfriend, we subwayed up to the un & did a couple of hours of prayer out on the sidewalk.  some people stopped to talk, some took pictures, none joined us.  we gave up & went on with our lives.  do you suppose if we had stayed there for 40 days & 40 nights it would have worked?  40 years?
 
  

avocations, experts

predelictions may, if the owner of that predeliction is curious and adventurous, lead to study, which may lead to expertise.  you want to know something you go to the expert.  the movie maker, the geek, the prostitute, the drug user, the money maker, the cook, the mercenary, anything.  the vast store of human expertise.

but really i must examine the yuk factor because that is where the trouble is.  that and greed.  we develop expertise in things other people find regretable.  people who don't share our minority predeliction can be induced perhaps to ignore us in our practice, if we refuse to let them ignore us there can get to be trouble.

shapes of desire

really all that is necessary is that rich people stop hoarding.  the "good" ones all say "soon as i get things where i want them for the family i'll go into philanthropy bigtime."  the "bad" ones just say "you can never have too much stuff."  the rest of "us" don't do that.  we tolerate these megahoarders in our midst because we are peaceful and they are militant about getting and keeping their stuff.  there are not more of "them" than there are of "us," the opposite.  but "we" do not have that fire in the belly about "stuff."  so we do not wipe them out.  "we" are passive.  most of us.  we let stuff happen.

most of us like to reference higher authority to justify whatever it is we do.  doesn't matter what it is, the habit is to allow someone else to take the responsibility: the boss, the staff, the saviour, whatever. 

predelictions: i found myself drawn to things.  small shiny objects, snakes, turtles, comics, ancient history, pictures of naked female humans, french fries.  i found myself not interested in: guns, cars, sports, meat on the bone, fighting.  first i didn't like horror movies because they were scary, later because they were stupid.  i was a beta child, picked next to last for the team, would fight but only if i had to, maybe i'd do ok, sometimes i'd definitively lose.

predelictions: things that make the heart go pitterpat, the senses become more alert, the body elevated into a higher gear of one sort or another.  that state of enhanced experience can be obtained by many widely varying methods, basic athletic activity is probably the easiest and most commonly used method.  problems can develop with any of them if recklessly engaged in.  food enjoyment perhaps the worst at this planetary human moment.  the thought of the delectibility of dinner bringing the sympathetic saliva, the enjoyable pulse surge, the slight flush of the cutaneous capillaries, increased secretions, turning into an arrow of desire: i want that thing.  want it again.  want again.  again.

catchers

people want what they want & thats all there is to it.  first desire then the explanation.

so there is pitching and catching.  it is possible to get real good at either position.

in sports it is mostly the pitcher that gets the worship.  the catcher job is to fend off the heat mostly, except in baseball where the catcher job is to catch.  imagine a game where the skill of the catcher would be to elegantly catch, you know, everything that was thrown at it.  balls, sticks, rhymes, machines, people, nature.  what would it be like if the catcher was the hero of the game?  like in, say, porn.  celebration/worship of catching.  exotically athletic catching. 

an olympic sport consisting of people punching their way out of specially constructed paper bags. 

we like to talk about what weve accomplished.  legendary feats of catching celebrated only over in corners of shared understanding, the rest of them concerned with pointy objects projected.

which makes sense because pointy objects can be dangerous but catchers do not damage except if they engulf & drown but thats food, where the two directions of flow come together.  later for food.  i want to start with outer layers: relations between membranes. 

catcher worship as the catcher accepts everything and transmutes it by that acceptance into a heartthrob echo of higher places.

why its better

secret ingredient.

it is not necessary to employ secret ingredients.  the tunnel through the darkness to the light can be dug by bleeding and torn hands with a broken heart but that is not required.  tools can be used, can be invented, can be found.  no sin inherent in use of tools.  always possible to abuse.  so what then, do nothing?

proper tool for particular job.  right size, right shape, right chemical composition.  carefully applied in proper circumstance, an enhanced result obtained.

because we are allowed in human culture to discuss only certain things and not others it is essentially not happening that users of certain tools are not able to speak in favor of their as it were responsible way of doing things.  the things they do or make that cannot be freely mentioned or even perhaps freely engaged in for whatever reason.  such usages perhaps riling to the neighbors.  working on a bunch of cars in the yard maybe, bottle cap collecting, certain controlled substances used in certain ways.  edge activity.

so: discussions of pleasure, crime, law.

handshake

they know we dont know the difference between right and left.  they know that we use paper.  they think that were dirty.  like the dogs we like to have as pets.  we wipe and maybe we wash our hands but still we wiped rather than washed and we probably used our right hand because we dont know the difference.  eew, and then we always want to shake hands.  its just gross all around.  they cant wait until we fall and they dont have to ape our manners anymore with that bs handshaking hugging air kissing public touching stuff.  ug.  they think. 

but i dream bonobo dreams.

national geographic of course.  lions are mating.  the camera is to the side and below them, we see mostly their faces.  hes snarling ears back just exactly like hes going to kill something and shes all smug and full of it.  we took a goat to get serviced and he jumped and jabbed twice and she got that look on her face: filled up.  i watched her skin tone change on the way home in the back of the truck.  skin got more turgid, lips puffed up.  body melted and reset.  smell of billygoat drifting off her body.

snarling lion.  the shared pathways of violence and sex. 

the 7 deadly sins:

• 1 Lust
• 2 Gluttony
• 3 Greed
• 4 Sloth
• 5 Wrath
• 6 Envy
• 7 Pride

• one might imagine that they are listed in some kind of rank order but that cant be right, can it.

and must deal with this silly multiincidence of "rightness" referring to a direction, an angle, the opposite of wrongness, and a political philosophy.  in my world thats all it is, so when i use the word i can use it any of those ways and itll be "right."  in context.  and its worse than that.  write, rite.  stupid language.  like chang chang chang.