I'm feeling angry this morning.  So beware, if you have a desire to condemn me in the comments section, because this morning I might just damn well bite back.

Such a massive amount of grief porn in my social media feed yesterday, one thing after the other.  I was really saddened to hear that Robin Williams gave in to the whisper.  I get those whispers.  I've had them often in the last decade.

You know what?  There was a part of me yesterday that was jealous of Robin Williams because for him it's over.  The battle is over.  It's not the life that people who feel suicidal want to be over.  It's the constant battle, wearing you down.  It's the constant battle that gets in the way of being able to live life.

And so with these outpourings of grief yesterday, on the one hand I got it, but on the other it creeped me out and even angered me a little.

What gets me about article after article about poor Robin Williams is that nobody was thinking about him last week.  This is where this feels creepy to me.  This giant outpouring of grief isn't about Robin Williams the man, I don't think.  It's about how as a celebrity he is representational.  He is someone safely enough away from us that he is able to become a safe container in which to pour the massive amounts of grief we carry in our own life.  Sometimes, we can't see our own pain until situations like these.

If we weren't a culture in tatters, we would have, like all good cultures do, dances and stories and embodied ways of helping us navigate through life.  But we are at the end of one thing and the beginning of another, and so stuff lies in tatters.  We don't have a  public square anymore.  Somehow, we have allowed our culture to be taken over and turned into a giant warehouse for our stomachs that actually really only benefits a small group of people.  So what better stand-in than celebrities, right?  Robin Williams has become our stand-in, an icon.  What better symbol of our own hidden pain than the guy who many still can't quite believe could battle such dark demons rearing out of the shadows when he was so good at making us laugh.  As if every single person on the planet isn't so multi-faceted.

How about the people in our midst who are suffering as much as Robin Williams?  I used to talk daily with one who suffered like him.  She made the most awesome art.  Beautiful, intricate drawings that she would sell to the very, very few who walked past her on the street and actually saw her every single fucking day.  I am drawn to the weak ones, because I feel so fucking weak myself, and so I did stop.  We'd talk to each other every day.  Because I felt so weak, she was actually the safest person on the street to talk to.  She felt so much more human than the suits going to work at the bank, believe me.

Most people who are struggling like Robin Williams probably don't have the creative platform that he did to be able to demonstrate that they have valuables hidden in the folds of their jackets just because they're struggling with depression, or anxiety, or some other mental illness.  They're probably the same people we generally ignore unless we're forced to have to deal with them, or that we despise on some level because we sense their pain and it triggers our fear.  Because fuck me if we aren't stuffed up to the brim with fear.  Or we've tried to help them and they didn't respond in the way we expected and now we feel rejected.

Maybe some of the grief that we are pouring into the safe container that Robin Williams represents is about that as well.  Maybe we're grieving for ourselves, too, for what we have lost and what we don't even know we have lost.

Visitation

You perched yourself in the kitchen, getting in the way of meal preparations.  You have a fat, round body and a great deal of hairiness.  You are so ugly, you make me wish to shriek from some part of myself that may not know how to stop once it gets going.

Does fear travel?  Do you feel mine?  It's so ridiculous.  You're not doing anything except being yourself.

I opened the dishwasher door on Saturday morning, and there you were.  You fell out from where you must have been sitting, up near the handle, with only some steel between me and thee.  You plopped down onto the base of the dishwasher, and I felt like I could go crazy as soon as I saw you.  How awful, to be on the end of someone's completely insane revulsion. 

Over the past 48 hours, you have moved.  First you went from the inside of the dishwasher to its top, hidden under the bench.  If I bent down I could see your shape, your hideous eight limbs.  This morning when I woke, you were still jamming the kitchen up with as much silent discord as if three different multiverses had all deposited their own Slayer in the kitchen, playing all at once.  Just from sitting there.  You weren't doing anything wrong.  But you were sitting right beside the sink, forcing me to fill up the water jug from the bathroom, just in case I accidentally touched you and my grip on reality fled.

I got the packet of konjac out of the pantry in preparation for today's lunch.  When I ripped open the plastic to reveal a clear white rectangle of plastic with the konjac inside, you reared up your front legs a little.  I wonder if you would ever be able to believe that though I am so much larger than you and able to end your life 60,000 times over since Saturday, my fear wanted to flibbertigibbet me through the wall in response to your hairy reaction.  I think there are many beings in the world who are very small, and/or feel very small, and some of them find themselves in positions of power because fucked distorted dying system taken over by nasty nutjobs.  And they react out of their feeling-small space, which has a bulbous balloony ego crust to compensate, like a little fort, bulging like a spider sac.  And then they enjoy this false sense of power that has nothing to do with empowerment, and other people react to them and make them feel big and not powerless.  It is surprising to incite a feeling of fear in someone else, sort of the way it must feel when you cut yourself and you feel something.

The odd thing is though, humans can react with the same levels of fear to each other as we can to you, dear huntsman of the kitchen.  I guess in some ways it's probably not that hard to fathom.  Except we feel fear at people who aren't even doing anything.  They aren't launching drones, but we are still scared of them.  Because we're a bit of a fucking mess right now at this point in history, though I do believe we've on the upswing.  We are children in adult suits, and we need a big plethoric pile of lollipops and sunshine, pronto.

When it comes down to it, we just really don't know our own strength, or our potential, Ms Sparassidae, if I may take the liberty of addressing you a little more personally.  I'm taking liberties with your gender here, but your belly was so round that I can only presume it is full to the brim with others just like you.  Small ones, that will burst out of your guts on the kitchen bench and rush down to the floor, up my legs, and into my nose.  I turned my back on you in preparation for making my lunch and I kept getting this feeling that you were going to launch yourself off the bench at me, even though if you did most likely nothing would happen to me, even if you did.  Even if you did, I would just curl myself up into a ball, repeating over and over the phrase, even if you did.  But just knowing that you bite your prey to immobilise it is really way not cool.  I don't care about our size differences.

You crawled up the side of the toaster, across its face and onto the sandwich maker, which was sitting closed and upright on its side, perilously close to the saucepan that I stirred on the stove.  I could see movement going on towards your front.  I do not know if you have little smaller contraptions round there which you use to eat with and to be honest, I don't want to know.  I can't bear to look at the Wikipedia page any more.

And now you've gone.  Your absence leaves an arachnophobic shadow that looms 27 feet on the wall.  If you would be so kind as to position yourself on that space, where I can see you, I will then be able to do the dishes.  I do apologise for extending great ribbons of invisible web of revulsion towards you, if it does so happen that the universe is more alive and connected than our current dull scientific paradigm would have it.  If you somehow did feel my revulsion, then I simply must apologise.  I cannot seem to quite help it. 

Spirit and Matter

I'm trying to understand just what is is about a certain group of people that terrifies me so.  They feel like a certain kind of extremist to me, and I'm trying to understand what part of that may be correct and what part is projecting from my own flabby innards the fears that I'm still in the process of letting go of.

I think ultimately my fear is really about how terrifyingly destructive people can be at certain ends of extremes - at what they can do in the name of their own rightness.  It's an ongoing source of unfunny amusement to me that though the ends of the particular spectrum I'm thinking of contain people almost diametrically opposed to each other, people at extremes end up sounding and acting remarkably alike in their ugliness and narrowing of insight in defense of their space. 

Which of course both would take umbrage at, their tiny lens on proceedings apparently being the kind that enables them to know the whole world.  That is the way of these things, isn't it - we find truth in one area and insist on smearing it over everything.

I love science.  I don't love religion.  I'm amenable and open and experienced in the realm of life packaged up as "the spiritual".  And yet though I love science, love exploring the wonders of the beautiful world, scientific materialists stink up my corner.  They seem to carry behind them a large suitcase of preconceptions about how the world is and how it isn't, which is not very scientific;  it's the same surety that is displayed just as creepily in their opposing fundamentalist Christian counterparts. 

This part of human nature more than anything makes me wish to run away from this world and live on Pluto.

So I'm trying to understand why I react so hard to those who occupy the scientific materialist space - the idea that there is nothing beyond the physical or the measurable.  Their end of the spectrum is a complete flipside to those waaaaaaay up the other end, who tend to view the physical being on its way out and the spiritual being where it's at.  (The spiritual, however, in the fundamentalist paradigm does not give any kind of human-sized easy turning circle to a person.  It is a space full of restriction, of laws, of regulations, of fear). 


Do I somehow link that expanded side of living that some criticise and even refuse to acknowledge as existing with opening, growth, awakening in myself of the most beautiful, and so therefore if someone criticises that aspect of life as being unscientific and therefore not to be contemplated, I automatically fear them as potentially evil?  It seems so, though I feel a bit embarrassed writing that word "evil". 

It is hard to not look at both fundamentalist Christians and scientific materialists in their narrow rooms as being both fear-ridden and fear-mongering.  And yet my view of them is also fear-ridden and fear-mongering, isn't it?  All of this narrowness just perpetuates more narrowness and fear.  And how much of reality do I then see in this instance when so much fear abounds?

And I think we have had enough of fear.  Indeed, it's what drives the status quo of the world's imbalance.  Fear.


And yet also, if I get quiet and thoughtful, I can also awaken an element of ... I dunno, what do I call that?  Love?  Well-wishing?  Whatever I call it, I can awaken it and direct it towards those people who I fear and at times hate.  It can sit alongside the fear and even dispel it.  I know, because I do it sometimes.  

Acceptance.  The carpenter said it in a way that is a radical - almost insane - level of acceptance of what is:  turn the other cheek when someone slaps the first.  There is something profound that lies underneath the initial knee-jerk reaction of this being about the awesomeness of passivity and being a doormat.  I don't reckon it's about externals;  I reckon it's about managing internals, about managing what actually happens so as to not stay caught up in it.  It's about getting past resisting the bad shit that happens to us to a monumental freedom.  So monumental that we can fly way beyond the fear that is engendered by those who are doing the slapping, who, more often than not, are perpetuating the me-win/you-lose paradigm that is so destructive to us and to our earth.  So monumental that we are freed then to act out of something other than fear.

In our conceptions, so many of us end up acting with aggression rather than love towards those who may differ, though both sides are equally as capable as cultivating openness and understanding and a refusal to belittle towards those who differ.


When I examine the knee-jerk way I react to those of the scientific materialist persuasion I think I understand partly why there is such a mass level of fear and reactivity that comes from me.  Partly it's because I have found such great awakening through the aspect of life that so many of them dismiss with criticism.  And so therefore I feel defensive that they criticise a way of being that apparently, perhaps for reasons of temperament, they do not walk in themselves.  It is this way of being that has opened up so much in me and has given me the gift of seeing both me and the world as something special.  This side of being has made me a better humanist.  It is from its perspective that I see future change and possibility of freedom.

And so that's partly why I am so knee-jerk to scientific materialists.  It's also because this particular paradigm is a powerful one, and yet it is capable of much damage.  There have been many, many cultures in the past, each with their own paradigms of viewing the world.  It can seem a little befuddling to us learning how certain people saw the world the way they did, and the actions that stemmed from those worldviews.  It is much easier to see with a long-range perspective the absurdities that come from particular paradigms than to link our own causes and effects.  Ours of course is no different.  It's hard to avoid seeing how much damage the western style of living can do to the earth (though there is much conjecture around how much we humans are contributing to it) and it's hard for me to avoid concluding that it is this narrowly focussed version of seeing - from which the scientific materialist mindset directly springs - that is the culprit.  It is a way of seeing, a mindset - a brainset, really - that has vast and great and massive benefits, but which needs to be reined in lest it becomes a tyrant.

If you don't know what you're missing and what you don't understand, will you necessarily go searching for it?  If your view is unbalanced and skewed, sometimes you can sense that, and you go stepping forward in the dark towards trying to find something that you don't even know what it is.  But then what happens if what is required to balance is located in a giant container you have named Irrelevance?  What if balance gets located for you over there to the right that you associate with those hippies and those creepy druids dancing round trees and bleating about the sanctity of stuff?  Do you walk away then because for you the labels and the categories are more important than the contents?  Do you think that if god is dead then this whole container is dead?

Of course I'm caricaturising here.  Both ways of seeing the world are absolutely compatible inside the one human being.  In fact, it's the balanced amongst us that carry my hope for the future righting of the many wrongs we see.  Somewhere in the middle of these two spectrums of being and of defending our own worldviews lie people open to both spectrums.  And it's there, with the meeting if you like of matter and spirit, that the bestest and truest examples of humanity emerge.

Loop

Fearing the terror of adrenaline that courses through your body,
lighting up your fear like a bonfire

blocks

engaging with the emotion that fuelled the whole thing in the first place.

~

Engaging with and accepting the emotion lying beneath
and knowing that that is not the same as the adrenaline-fire

dispels and soothes
like some sort of magic

the adrenaline response fuelling the fear.

Crazy, huh?


"Without fear of negative emotions, there will be no anxiety".  Today's listening, to get me out of the latest anxiety loop, @ selftherapy.org. Good listening while I'm sitting around in my undies at lunchtime, trying to muster up the energy to get out there and actually do something :\

There's always a part of me that looks askance at these sorts of things and focuses on the wanky things about it that I don't like.  That's the style.  But the underlying information and knowledge and technique is what I'm after :)

Peace? by Ragnar1984 (free to share as long as you link to their page)

Stop Hating Yourself

As far as the internetosphere goes, there seems to me to be two camps of people when it comes to responding to others.

Actually, no - three.

At one end you've got trolls - deliberate antagonists who have bored and small lives and want to fuck everyone up.

At the other end you've got people who may be in opposition or disagreement with another person or group of people but who don't wish to spew their own internal crap over other people who have become their enemy by virtue of the fact that the other people are alien to them in some way, and therefore a threat (we have very flimsy egos in the early 21st century, as flimsy as chiffon which, as an aside, I have been told by reliable sources actually means 'rag' in French.  I'm about to get my chiffons has a nicer ring to it, although there's nothing all that romantic about having blood come from your vagina no matter what you call the appendage you use to mop it up so it doesn't spill onto the floor.  It is almost unspeakable in many circles, this having blood come from your vagina, being entirely not what some people still would consider feminine, a little vulgar, hence blue liquid.  But I digress twice).  So these people, though they are disagreeing with someone else, are able for whatever reason (generally self-examination and development of certain social skills) to put forward their view without condemnation or shame because they do not need to use the tools of the Empire ~ violence and oppression ~ in stating their case.


In the middle of trolls and people who can have a view without condemning those who don't are maybe a big lump of people who from what I can see have the mindset of the group above but who actually come across as trolls.  They seem to lack the discipline to behave kindly, to live and let live without condemnation because the opportunity to define themselves against someone else so they know they exist is too much.  The chance to assauge a tiny bit of the contents of the giant vats of anger and anxiety and ennui which reside inside of them is simply too much to resist.  Those vats are huge in most of us.  They are byproducts of living in the almost-unbearable-at-times death-throes 21st century.  The projectionists.

As far as I can see, there's an opportunity in every encounter that can go either way.  You can accept the differences of people and try to overcome whatever fear rises up in you at their differences.  Or you can perform the equivalent of online masturbation, or eating an entire block of Snack chocolate, by indulging in projecting your vats of understandable fear onto the person in front of you who has become your enemy by their difference.  For you, as for me (particularly if I've hit the PTSD freeze), this feeling about people is a regular occurrence.  It's a product of an entire species of tense and/or traumatised mammals communicating with each other in an ever-changing environment the changes of which their evolutionary processes haven't even caught up with yet.  It's the product of living in a world where every day we hear of how fucked up it is ecologically (or get to experience it firsthand, if you happen to live in areas that are inclined to the occasional deadly cyclone/typhoon/mass fires/or even ridiculous barometric drops that cover winter and summer in one week (that's us, Melbourne, this week.  Have you recovered)?

This fight, between the terrors that fuel our insides and the person in front of us (or in front of us on our screen) is the ongoing fight of the age.  The extent of its going on, especially on the net (where we wouldn't dare to speak to people face to face the way some of us do online) shows just how scared we are, and why it's necessary, for our own health and the health of our culture, to continue the ongoing quest to overcome the separation that we feel so often but which, as far as I can see, is really about as thin as chiffon.

Our enemies, whoever or whatever they might be, are an awesome way to discover what is going on within ourselves.  Because it's almost a cliche to say that when I hate you, I am really hating a part of myself.  Just because it's not immediately apparent what the corresponding part is in you doesn't mean you're not doing it.  Something in your shadow, some undeveloped or ignored (whether good or bad) part of you that you fear because of its unknowness, is projected out onto you hating that idiot over there because they are irrational in the face of your cool rationality.  Or they are a stupid trump falling for all that left-wing bullshit where you can see the hole they're about to fall into in the road they're taking.  Or they're an extrovert who loves partying so they must automatically be a bit dim.  Or they believe in God/don't believe in God ~ whichever way that mop flops, if you're a judgmental fundamentalist on the other end then that person is a fucktard who deserves to have their nose wiped in their stupid beliefs, right?

The real interesting part comes when we examine WHY we feel so strongly and react so strongly against people who have views that we consider are really so against the grain that they deserve our contempt and our disrespect (and don't think being polite but yet making snide comments is not a form of shaming and disrespect).  Are we really so in the throes of the idyll of control freakness that we think it's all neat and squared away and that everyone is on the same page as us or they should be?  Is there any need for everyone to see the world the same way?  Where does that leave paradox?  What would the world look like if everyone looked just like me?  It sounds good in theory but man, what a nightmare it'd be in fact.

I also find it interesting how so often many of us seem most alive when we're defining ourselves against something else.  When what I'm really interested in is if people would spend more time explaining and describing their own position, their own take, their own view, whey they hold it, what they love about it, what it does to them, instead of just blathering on against the shadow of what's-not-for-me.

Good discussion in this vid below with Robert Thurman and Sharon Salzberg about Working With Your Enemies, whether inward or outward (facilitated by Robert's own daughter, Uma).  The work for the ages ... 

<iframe src="http://new.livestream.com/accounts/1249127/events/2592106/player?width=640&height=360&autoPlay=true&mute=false" width="640" height="360" frameborder="0" scrolling="no"> </iframe>

Making Space and Making Excuses

There's a reason that it's a cliche that writing is simple, but not easy.  It is simple.  You sit yourself down in your chair in front of a terrifyingly blank screen and sweat some Hemingway blood out your eyeballs, and you write stuff, and that's that.

It really is simple in a way;  it's just not easy.  That's why there are so many people walking around who believe they have a book in them but they don't get nothin' writ.  They're waiting for the right time.  But the right time doesn't come.

The last uni class I did on-campus was a creative non-fiction essay-writing class where we were set 20 minutes to write something.  There was a very general prompt of some sort - I can't remember what it was now.  And of course I sat there in a mass panic for about 10 seconds thinking that I would never be able to come up with something, until I had an idea.  And of course it seemed like a shitty idea, not even worth exploring.  (In comparison to the ideas that seem totally amazing, and they're falling off the spoon as you jump out of bed or the shower and run to type them down and by the time you do, they've totally drizzled into the floor and you're just left with a mental spoon.  If you knew beforehand that this idea would be like one of those, you would have just stayed in bed and licked the spoon for your own enjoyment and been done with it.)

I'm worried that leaving Facebook isn't going to create the space that I need to do creative stuff.  I'm worried that it's not going to take that - it's going to take quitting the internet for hours and hours, plus going entirely through menopause, and stopping being depressed and anxious, and stopping feeling excessively paranoid so that I spend mass energy worrying that my friends hate me.  I'm worried that it's going to take my entire life and one day I will be 92 and I won't have any space left because I won't have any time left.

But that worry is really awfully foundless, and I know that it is so.  It is a worry that on my bad days I give in to, and on my good days when I have some sort of a purchase on perspective it is easy to smile at it as evidence of being Scaredy Scarederson and to sit down and write anyway.  

The bit from the writing prompt that I ended up writing in class that day became a My Word column that I sold to The Big Issue a few months later.  And really,  I feel like I've got a million of those ideas inside of me.  So quitting Facebook and trying to do other things to make space is a really good thing to do.  But in the end, it really is just making the time.  Not making up excuses that I can't do it because I'm too paranoid at the moment, or whatever the current almost-mental-illness is in vogue in my head (I must say, the paranoia has been in vogue for some time and I'm really rather tired of it.  Get here, menopause, and get here quick).


We really do make excuses sometimes, don't we.  (Some of us more than others.  A post talking about the struggles I have with getting myself writing and staying writing and doing other creative things is a replica.  There's probably about 50 others on this blog saying pretty much the same thing :) 

Really, it doesn't seem important so much that we're ready to do something creative, just that we need to make space and we need to make time, even if we don't feel like we can do it at all.  We can do more than we think we can.  That blank screen or canvas or page is always going to hold an element of terror.  That will never leave, like an actor's performance anxiety - and neither should it.  But neither should it stop you from getting there in the first place. 

Glowing Stationary by Ablipintime

Writer's Block

Public domain pic

My body has gone backwards.  I'm really tired of this.  I can't tell you how many thousands of dollars I have spent on supplements and tests over the years.  Thousands.  I am struggling to work enough to crack 200 bucks a week.  So going on sickness benefits will mean that my income will effectively double.  Woohoo!

Health going backwards and fatigue flaring at the time when my partner could do with me contributing my financial share, cracks open the guilt vault (and I could drown in there), makes me feel more stressed, and then my adrenals have to deal with more, and so the snowball rolls.  This has been a snowfield I'm used to playing in in one way or the other.  Being back here though in the midst is the closest thing to hell I can think of.

What do the Buddhists say?  There are four different sorts of suffering?  I can't remember what the other three are but the fourth one is "Not being able to get what you desire."  That's me, that's my life, that's the roadblock (which granted I didn't put there.  But it's my responsibility to move it).

How do you say internalised oppression?  That's me.  I think The Secret has a lot to answer for but I do think there is several glimmers in there that are relevant.  I do think that in a certain way the reality we have is the one we've created.  And I have created, against my own wishes, roadblocks to being able to live the way I choose.  Nobody stopping me.  Just me.  And so it's a couple of rounds of EFT tapping every day, homework from the therapist:  "Even though I believe someone or something will always stop me living the life I choose, I deeply and completely accept myself."  EFT rocks.  It moves and shakes things.  I don't really believe it's going to move or shake this issue or others.  Hence the other round of EFT tapping about "Even though I don't believe anything will change ..."

Learned helplessness, anybody?

I need to get my website up and running.   A digital container to put the work in, you know?  I have the idea for a logo.  Her name's Speedy Snail.  Lots of swirls around her.  Lots speeding on in her head, the body snailing along behind.  I went back to bed today and spent several hours reading.  Nice.  It's what I need to do.  But I fight it.  Because I feel totally useless.  I don't know how to not be well after 14 years.  I don't know how to do it gracefully.  I just don't.

I can feel this same sort of self-sabotage going on in my writing career.  Two different arenas have published two of my essays in the last six months.  Have I resubmitted anything to either of them?  No.  I feel a reticence to do so.  I even queried The Big Issue about whether they'd be interested in another My Word piece about roosters.  Yep, send it on through, Lorraine says.  Have I?  No.  Granted, I haven't written it yet and though I haven't done so, I've been writing a fair bit of other stuff, which is heartily inspiring.  I remember once, years ago, I wondered if I ever would clear the river.  I had writer's block - a desire to write but I didn't know what to write about.  These days, while I still have those times where I don't know what to write about, I know what fixes it - writing.  Anything.  And then within a day the river's rushing again and it's not so much not knowing what to write, it's choosing what I want to write most, and having the energy and time to do it.  Nice, eh?

But that self-sabotaging thing about not wanting to submit stuff to places I've published in before?  I don't know what that is.  It's in one of the deep caves of my unconscious where I see it's effects without knowing it's there.  Those unconscious beliefs are funny little things when they start to become conscious.  There's a part of you that is looking in disbelief at this thing you've just realised you think.  That you've thunk maybe for years.  And while part of you know that this is true, and that bringing it up to your conscious mind is the first step in clearing it away, another part of you sits numb disbelieving it all.   This being human is not only a guest house, it's a weird one.  A Tim Burton guesthouse with creaky bits and doors that open onto black holes and awesome oak staircases and coolness.  Sort of like that teddy bear video I posted on here yesterday - a little gross, a little creepy, but really, in one way, rather sweet (I mean, who doesn't want a bon bon layer?  Yeah, I know, I know, there can be problems with the bon bon layer, as teddy's operation so amply demonstrated, but that's what teddy doctors are for.  And good teddy nutrition).

That self-sabotaging thing about not wanting to submit stuff to places I've published in before is a known unknown.  It's one of the things I say to myself so fast and so deeply in the undergrowth that I don't feel it or see it or feel its swish as it goes by.  But I see the effects of it.  In this post, in the Virginia Quarterly Review, Erika Dreifus reviews the sorta recently released book by Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg.  Titled Lean In:  Women, Work, and the Will to Lead Erika has this to say in response to it:

In this chapter, the overall message is that women suffer from underestimating their abilities more than men do. “[F]eeling confident–or pretending that you feel confident—is necessary to reach for opportunities. It’s a cliché, but opportunities are rarely offered; they’re seized.” From refraining from raising their hands in the audience to sitting on the sidelines rather than taking seats at the conference table, Sandberg shares examples of women holding themselves back.

For writers of fiction, poetry, and essays, one of the ways to “sit at the table” can begin, quite literally, with sitting at a table of fellow students and an instructor for a writing workshop. I won’t comment here on the ways that gender dynamics and stereotypes crop up in these situations, because I’ll digress to a point of no return (besides, you’ll get a glimmer of this in the next section, “Success and Likeability”).

But the VIDA count reminds us of other tables and other seats. Where are women “sitting” in those venues? Where do they show up at in the tables of contents and bylines and within prominent literary magazines and book reviews? VIDA and its proponents seek institutional change, but what if that isn’t enough? Some female writers who may not habitually submit their work may realize that—like the woman whose tweet is cited above—they need to take some steps themselves.

But as Sandberg observes, even when offered opportunities, women don’t always accept them. One of the most eye-catching accompaniments to this year’s VIDA count was Amy King’s interview with Tin House editor Rob Spillman, who described that earlier VIDA statistics had prompted Tin House “to take a deep look at our submissions.” One of Spillman’s most attention-grabbing revelations was grounded beyond the slush pile: “Although we solicited equal numbers of men and women, men were more than twice as likely to submit after being solicited. This even applies to writers I’ve previously published.”

 Yep.  I sure get that.  

The News - 2011 Road Toll

Good afternoon.  This is the Discombobula news for Friday, 30 December 2011.

In our leading story, the national holiday road toll rose to 31 last night after a Victorian man in his 20's crashed into a tree in Wangaratta.  He was unable to be revived by paramedics and died at the scene.  His passenger was injured.

Insert here a paragraph about empty chairs at Christmas dinner tables to emphasise how awful it is that 31 people have died since we all went on holidays and 31 families are grieving (well, hopefully) for 31 people who died.

That above paragraph is contained in this news report because we the media basically think you are all too stupid to be able to work out that 31 people dying on the roads in the holiday period is a bad thing.  If we didn't spell it out in extremely large capital letters we are concerned that you would confuse it with the cricket scores and think that we need to raise the road toll, resulting in an anarchic nation of souls taking to the roads seatbeltless and pissed, to see how many old people they can run over in a 24-hour period.

Because we know, deep down in our market research, that you are a bunch of morons.  Our polls show that neither you nor we are capable any more of any mode other than fearmongering mode, and that giving you the colour and the shape of the whole story is a pointless enterprise, given that you would not know what to do with it unless we spelled out to you what to do with it.   And we frankly can't be bothered.

This last paragraph of this news report is not actually really here.  For all of the abovementioned reasons, we are too scared to paint the entire picture, which is this:  despite there being thousands and thousands more cars on the roads since the 1970s, the amount of people who died in road fatalities in 1970 was 3978.  In 2010 it was 1367.  That is good news.

May your news be good news, and good afternoon.

Your Scars are Beautiful

Sometimes it is a terrifying long lesson to learn to look and not look away from your own scars.  As an almost-teenager I suppressed a certain trauma so that I completely dissociated myself from it.  For five years I completely forgot all about its existence until at 16 it began coming up to my consciousness again.  Its rising had the look and feel of shards of glass, after being submerged for so long in the safety of the undergrowth.  I've never had such a repression experience again (... well, not that I know about yet, ha), and when I think back to how those memories felt after they'd come back up, there is nothing else to really compare them too.  While they felt like shards of glass, they also felt like they were covered over with moss and other damp things and had taken on some of the feel of the undergrowth they had been living in for half a decade.  Thirty years away from that, that mossiness feels like some kind of protective awesomeness.  At 16, though, I felt that if I looked at the shards, I would be cut open upon them and fall out all over the ground.  For many years just the knowledge that the shards were there was enough in terms of dealing and healing.  It needed to scab and then scar over first before I could get enough distance from it to own it (funny paradox, delightfully deep).

But you can learn to look your terrors in the face.  And you must.  That which over the ensuing decades you cannot and will not learn to have come sit and dine with you at your fireside can slither out the door when you're not looking and run amok.  

I came across this portion of a poem by Robert Bly, in a delightful blog post by Falstaff Was My Tutor on deformed beauty.

If a man, cautious,
hides his limp,
Somebody has to limp it! Things
do it; the surroundings limp.
House walls get scars,
the car breaks down; matter, in drudgery, takes it up.

~ Robert Bly

Takes half your life to learn to hide your limp, the other half to learn to display it.

Sometimes it is easier to acknowledge that certain things have caused trauma, and harder to acknowledge that they leave scars.  You do not want this horrid thing to be a part of your forever.  But it is, and this is where you must deal with it.  Dealing brings a wise and sweet surprise out the other side into the knowledge that scars can become beautiful.  Sure, people you don't know might snigger at you in the street with your limp and your deforms, but it is only those who first love you who have the proper sight and right to be able to name the beauty in your scars.

I like to offset the deep internal scars with the ones visible on my body:  the horizontal one along my chest, the vertical three down my right hand.  When you are eight years old and in love with your cousins' half-wild farm cats, it is a courage born of delight that compels you to try to pick them up :) 

The Yin and the Yang

I really do understand why it is we project our own hurts out onto the world.  As we think the world is, so it is, and while we may be thinking that we see the world objectively, is there ever really any such thing?  And does there need to be?

I have been roping in my projections over the past several years.  My problems lie, unfortunately, with males.  I don't want to and can't bring myself to speak in such a public place about my family's history, but suffice to say that the males are alpha and the females have most certainly learnt to be omega.

Perhaps that's why I read this post and tears ran down my face.  I cannot always readily recognise what I carry around within myself.  It is easier to see it when I project it out onto the world around me.  My partner is the one who most obviously receives the brunt of my projections.  I talk to him about these projections.  It is rather a delight to do once you get past the intense discomfort and outright embrassment and foolishness you feel, disclosing to someone else the sad state of your innards, disclosing the embarrassment of not being able to get past The Cast of Thousands enough to dispel some of them.

Perhaps the dispelling comes not in stopping of the ongoing projection, but in the refusal to let it stay there.  To speak of such projections to the person you are projecting them onto, who listens patiently and lets it be there, just lets it be, is perhaps the best way of all to dispel those projections.  It is certainly not the fastest way, however.

I have learnt to fear and mistrust male energy.  Like that post, male energy can be used for good or for ill.  I have taken on the ill effects, drunk them down, and archetyped them out into giant Goodyear blimps that have blocked the sun.

I wish to know what that male energy is in its pure form.  It is, after all, a part of myself.  It has laid hidden underneath the negative energy I have carried around for 30 years and more, which distorts, stops, hampers, criticises, abuses.  Which demeans the female energies, makes them cower, drains their light.

If my dreams are anything to go by, it does not need to be like this.  How to get somewhere better is another story.  An ongoing one.  A life's journey.  To do it with self-compassion is the far better way.  Helps you keep your heart open.  As within, so without.

The Strange Learning

The case for death (and the case against performing animals):

When in the end, the day came on which I was going away, I learned the strange learning that things can happen which we ourselves cannot possibly imagine, either beforehand, or at the time when they are taking place, or afterwards when we look back on them.  Circumstances can have a motive force by which they bring about events without aid of human imagination or apprehension.  On such occasions you yourself keep in touch with what is going on by attentively following it from moment to moment, like a blind person who is being led, and who places one foot in front of the other cautiously but unwillingly.  Things are happening to you, and you feel them happening, but except for this one fact, you have no connection with them, and no key to the cause or meaning of them.  The performing wild animals in a circus go through their programme, I believe, in that same way.  Those who have been through such events can, in a way, say that they have been through death - a passage outside the range of imagination, but within the range of experience.

Karen Blixen - Out of Africa

There is much to be said for learning to die well while you live.  You can go kicking and screaming all the way down, if you want, even if you know that life tends to lie out the other side of all of those deaths.  Even if they are not what you want, or maybe even not what you can see for months or years.  The possibilities that lie within one small seed, maybe they lie too in all our deaths.  Maybe even most in our most meaningless ones.

So you kick and scream all the way down even if you do feel life lying just beyond death because while you know that, you also don't know that, or you forget, because in those perpetual death places you can't for the life of you remember being anywhere else ever.  And then the life breaks in once more and again, you remember the meaning of perspective.

Learning to die to live feels part of the great circle.  Not a line, to me.  Not something linear that ends at some point (even though it will - or will it?)  Yes, a circle, a spiral.  Coming round and round back to the same places again, feeling like a breath of some sort of grace, the different angle examined, the new puzzle piece learned.  

And you come up over the hill and it all breaks open before you for the millionth time, like sparks, and you remember what you have always known, and have forgotten again:  it's love.  Love holds it all together.

Ten Steps to be More Like Me

It must be May, because I'm tired.  One of the things I'm tired of, frankly, is reading ten-point-plans on how to better myself.  Sometimes I wonder how much of that is really someone else's ten-point-plan of how I should make myself more like them.  Or someone else's ten-point-plan of what they want themselves to be like at some point in the future.  Sometimes I feel like what I'm reading are infomercials for one more person's enlightenment journey, packaged up to sell.

But hey, I'm pretty cynical today.

It feels like we are getting ever more homogeneous, right under our own noses, and I don't like what that feels like.  Instate anti-bullying laws all you like, but the playground still seems mean to me, just perhaps a little more sophisticated in its meanness.  Sometimes it feels like the breadth of humanity is becoming constricted down into diagnoses and pills we can use so that we are not made fearful by differences that we do not understand.

'Cos that's what it comes down to so often, isn't it?  People who are different from us, we fear them, don't we.  And so that's why the scale of what is considered "normal" becoming ever smaller makes me feel just a little bit edgy.

Unfortunately, I'm not anywhere near as immune to feeling fearful of others' differences as I would like, though my desire is to be as accommodating to just letting people be, in all their stuff, right in the middle of themselves right now.  But that is easier to type than it is to do.  Especially when I feel so scared and anxious so much of the time.  My partner and I have some  major, major ways of seeing things different amongst all our commonality.  Do I like it that when we discuss certain things, at times when I am feeling small and scared and tiny, that he can feel like I am rejecting him?  I don't.  It makes me feel sad.  I think it's patently unfair that all of those emotions we have when we feel small and tiny and scared manifest themselves as negative things like aggression out the other end, out our face, and hurt someone on the other end.

My partner and I both have some weird going on, I suppose, if you asked Taylah and Matty at Fountain Gate Shopping Centre what they thought of us.  Anxiety and depression and Aspergerers and old traumas that jump up at times to create some havoc.  Those things can always appear to other people as things to be feared.  Which often translates as things to be treated.

I think about Jesus' dictum to "love your neighbour as yourself".  It's easy to try to love your partner as yourself, though you fail many times, because you love them and you want to understand them.

But I wonder what life would look like if that "love your neighbour" dictum was in play - in my case with Taylah and Matty, for example.  I wouldn't be able to caricature them as bogans.  I'd have to actually look beyond the labels I slap on people to what lies underneath.  I think what love your neighbour would have to involve for starters would be a willingness for people to be prepared to be a little scared with each other, all of the time, while resisting the urge to pack each other off to counsellors and psychologists and Glaxo Smith Kline when there is any evidence of a difference in thinking that goes against the grain of what Channel 9 spouts.  Loving your neighbour as yourself would have to involve a willingness to admit that we are all a little scared of each other.

Sometimes I think our easy suburban living has taken us away from our own intuition and perception and understanding, and each other.  We are fearful of each others' frailty.  Sometimes I think all of theses things that we use to communicate - like computer screens and iPhone screens - are decimating our ability to be able to sit with someone who is messier than an avatar.

The things I like reading most online are those things where I can see the rawness inside someone's gut.  It is so much more thin on the ground these days, the courage to be real.  Even while we are all blogging.  The ironies and paradoxes of this age, and of our own souls (mine included) are never-ending.

It is easy to forget sometimes that thoughts and fears are not even an inch high off the ground, that in one sense they don't even exist at all.

But when they come in in the night, they take you in your innocence, and they wake you with worries about the chink in the curtains, the spider that is crawling across the wall but is not, the boyfriend that you call a liar but who is not.

When you wake, they are encrusted about you like sleep in your eyes, hanging over your head like 38 degrees in the height of February.  You wake, and you remind yourself for the eleventy-seventh time that they are not real.  They are not even an inch high off the ground.

You do things that people recommend, like take those voices of destruction and give them a Mickey Mouse timbre, or relocate them somewhere else in your body so they're further away, or closer.  Anything to displace them from the rut and help you realise again ... again ... afuckingain ... that they are wraiths.  That they are not the boss of you.

Never did you really realise that there were so many of them before.  They have come out from their recesses.  They come out whenever you are physically impaired in any way - an unfairness if ever you thought it.  They weave their way round your legs like demon cats, wraithing bullshit into your head.

They keep trying to get you to kill the wrong thing.  They whisper their lies that things are different than what they really are.  They whisper so insidiously that if you didn't know any better now you would maybe try to kill the wrong thing.  The things that they whisper to you about, instead of the whispers themselves.

They try to get you to kill the wrong thing.  But you're onto them.

You know it is a good thing that they have come out from the recesses.  Here, they are out in the pure air and here, you can melt them down, slowly slowly, just by staring at them, like a candle.  They dwarf just by you watching them, but it's a very slow process.  Longer than it took the Wicked Witch of the West.

You are very tired.  You want a holiday from your brain.  Because there's just so many of them, sometimes they swamp in like syrup and flood the room.

You think you shall take Jesus for your animus.  You do not know what you think of the way Jesus has come to be viewed by goober Christianity, but you sure do love the feel of him.  You ask him anyway to come and take them away.

You do the things that are required for you to do, the meditation, the exercise, and the fog begins to lift.  You understand what people say, that old cliche about suffering creatives, that you need the suffering to send you to the page.  You think it's bullshit, but you understand how the cliche came about.  Because it does do that, to a certain extent.  Because the page and the clay are two more things that quell them.  Somehow, the energy expended in these negativities gets to channel itself when you send it all off outside to play in the fresh air and make something creative.

You have this untenable thought that life will not be able to be enjoyed if any of these fears remain in any form whatsoever.  That if they ever return ever again, that life cannot be enjoyed right now because they are going to return some time.

As if you're not the boss of them.  As if a fear about future fear which is about past fear is anything to be ... well, fearful about.

Okay so yesterday's post was rather melodramatic.

But it was how I was feeling. I got swamped by this giant tsunami of fears yesterday morning. It sort of surprised me with its velocity. I read somewhere recently that 95% of our thoughts are unconscious. I don't know how you could scientifically come up with such a figure, but I wouldn't be surprised. The longer I go on, the more I grow, the more deep down I feel, the more honest I am with some of the crap that I think, the more surprised I am at some of the crap that I think (and deep-breathe at some of the beauty I think. Goes both ways).

When I am in a space like I was yesterday morning, it feels like an eternal prison, like it has always been like this and it always will be. It feels like you are destined to be forever in this particular position. There is just no hope there at all. Perspective buggers off.

While I was in that space, someone online was saying some good and wise words about the reality of things. Straightaway I could see that this was my golden thread to follow back to something like a "right mind". How I love the dispassionate part of me that sits observing my thoughts and dismisses the hopelessness that comes when my fears overwhelm me.

How I hate that dispassionate part of me when I am wrapped up in my own prison. I hate it so much that I cannot even acknowledge that it is there and I turn away to the corner like a child, dismissing the messenger as a fool. The way I react inside, when faced with the option of taking myself from out of this horrible, awful space? There is a part of me that just doesn't want to. It would rather sit in that space and wrap its fears and its pride and its giant ego around itself and rot. It doesn't want to hear any of that shit ... even though at the same time I know within myself, if honest, that shit is exactly not what it is. What a big baby I am in these spaces :)

Stuff staying there for a joke. I love the golden threads too much. They take me out to Rumi's field where I can breathe, where I can forget myself, where I can live.

Next Wednesday night maybe. We'll see. I have a newfound respect though for just how fearful I am about meeting up with people again. It is understandable, certainly. But it feels ill-founded. Like all my fears, regardless of how they came about. It's like they grow in the dark and expand beyond what they originally were. I do not want to be dictated to by them. They speak false.

Creative Conversion - Or, "When I Get My Hands on You, I'm Going to Kill You, Blob"

Conversion is a process of disenchantment with our small, separate self, recognizing how truly afraid and insecure it is. The only way people can ever be freed from this fear and this insecurity is to be freed from themselves. There is almost a complete correlation between the amount of fear in one’s life and the amount of attachment we have to ourselves and our own agenda.

The person who is beyond fear has given up the need to control or possess or be right. Their being is grounded in the Being of God. As St. Francis of Assisi said, “I am who I am in God's eyes—nothing more, but nothing less.” A truly converted/transformed person does not need to impress anyone because they know that they are not who you think they are anyway—or even who they themselves think they are! Thinking one way or another doesn’t make it so.

That's what St. Paul meant when he so shockingly said: “You have died, you're dead” (Romans 6:3-5) when you are truly baptized into the death of the false self—the self that you don’t need anyway. Conversion happens when you finally face the real enemy, and guess what? It's you!

Richard Rohr

Yeah and ow. This life growing into ourselves thing is sure painful, ain't it? How difficult it is to grow into what we already are in some respects. I'm feeling this on the creativity spectrum most acutely at the moment. Creatively, I feel like a very small child doing very shitty creative things. I am judging myself, criticising myself, stopping myself from writing. I am screaming at myself to stop doing this pottery class because it is dangerous to be out in public amongst peers doing things I'm technically crap at. It is no coincidence that the day after the most recent class I came down with a mild tonsillitis/bronchitis combo.

Occasionally I see it - how it is when the watcher is away from the gates of my mind - the writing that comes up out of me, that takes me by surprise upon rereading because it's got a lyricism to it, a wholeness. It's actually pretty good, even if I do say so myself. I can tell from 20 paces when I'm writing from the guts. It's about 100 times better than when I'm not. There is a feeling to it that feels so fresh and warm and just-baked-breadlike, regardless of the actual content. It is what comes out of me.

Acknowledging this watcher at the gates is one thing. Believing that it is something that can be either killed, or at least lassoed and told to sit down and shut up until draft time is quite another thing. Living life, going forward, is a terror and a joy and a faith because we have absolutely nothing except the blind faith and the blind hope that we are moving towards anything at all. I have no guarantee, except from those people around me who assure me over and over again about my growth. It is the watcher who jumps up and says I'm not growing, that everything I do is crappy. It is abjectly, completely and utterly terrified of me failing in any way whatsoever and to be honest, dear blogger, that's not enough for me to back down from this ongoing commitment to, if not kill it, at least let it know who's boss.

So yesterday I wrote a couple of pages, in amongst the sore throat and the congested chest that have been keeping me inside, sort of half enjoying the respite from the rest of the world. This morning when I woke up and I thought about that piece of writing the same old same old thoughts came to me. Not so much that it's bad, because it's not. No, it's more insidious than that. It just flat out tells me that I can't finish it. That I've run out of steam. That it's not possible for me to finish anything I start because look at the trail of evidence behind me. Half finished stories in folders in filing cabinets are testament to the fact that it is not possible for me to finish anything.

That feeling feels so real. And so it is with a very tiny-voiced part of myself that I say here that that feeling is just not true. It's you, Blob, doing your thing. Watching at my gates. Trying to keep me safe. I've been very aware over the past several years of my propensity to talk about creative beginnings at the beginning, and thus kill off whatever was beginning there. It's been one of Blob's more interesting ways of stopping me from finishing anything. But I'm onto that one now. I'm much more willing these days to keep my stuff to myself, where it belongs, fermenting, than to spew it out and talk about it and kill it off. So I'm onto you, Blob. You know that, don'tcha. I'm sure it's scaring the shit out of you. It's scaring the shit out of me, too, but I'm onto you and I'm doing everything I can to start learning how to lasso or kill you for my benefit, not yours.

Oh, and while we're here - I'm going to the pottery course until the end, so try whatever you want to try to stop me from going, but you're not the boss of me.

Or so they tell me :)

+++++++

(Last point in a typically way too long post: some people say the watcher must be killed. Some say it can be harnessed to its rightful place in the 3rd draft, or whatever. I wonder if people are talking about two separate things here? The watcher as a personality trait as a bit more pathologically different than an overactive internal critic? Perhaps the more pathological a watcher is, the stronger the medicine needs to be. Dynamite, as adverse to lassoing. I welcome your thoughts on that one, if you know anything about watchers at the gate :)

Pottery Class

So my second pottery class is coming up this Wednesday night. The dread is sort of overtaking the excitement. This situation is, for me, one that I know I will get a lot out of. But it patently scares the hell out of me.

Don't quite know why. Sort of understand why. But getting out with other people and learning something new and creative, has fears attached to it that are just waaaaaaay out of proportion when you consider that I am just messing around with clay. It has been a really long time since I have been in a class learning environment with something creative. If I was in a university tutorial I would be breathing easy and doing it with half my brain switched on. This is different. It's like learning to use muscles that I decided years ago, centuries ago, that I would not use because it was too dangerous to do so.

That's why this is really important for me to do this. But wow, I feel, like, 10 times more raw and exposed than I thought I would.

Made a bust the other day. Didn't get it finished. Felt behind the rest of the people. Felt like an imbecile, as if everyone else was getting it except me (where does this crap come from???) Still, for all of those crazy irrationalities, I made the beginnings of a cute little bust with really cool eyes, with eyeballs and eyelids and everything. I realised in the process how, without studying the anatomy of the human face in any sort of formal way, I nevertheless know a great deal. Pretty fun.

So yeah. Weird how threatening this feels to me. Can't explain it. Don't want to, really. But I feel terribly small and fragile creatively, doing this. Getting out of my comfort zone is a good, good thing.

A good side benefit: feeling rather overwhelmed by this thing I am doing for another five weeks makes work much more bearable. How nice to get to a known, safe, boring, dull place and be able to park myself there for several hours each day :) Which of course has always been what I've thought when I started this job - having such a boring job will force me out of my comfort zone to cope with it. A good, and uncomfortable, thing.

Eek.

Theorist or Practitioner

My blog bud Kel has a ripper post going on. I encourage you to head over and read it for yourself, but here is a snippet:

Recently I started a new job in arts administration at a regional gallery. To be honest, I wasn’t expecting to find such similarities between the art world and the church world.

The first thing everyone asks me on the job is, "What is your background in the arts?" or, "Are you an artist?" Because people like to pigeon-hole with definitions, I like to throw a spanner in their works. The conversation goes a little like this:

But you'll have to head over there to read the rest :)

Take Responsibility FFS!!!

Back at work. Listening to a particularly adept professional victim blame everyone else for his pathetic life and his horrible relationship and his shithouse attitude. It's so amazing how NO ONE is responsible for their actions. It's ALWAYS someone else's fault. She made me do it. He made me do it. It's her fault, it's his fault.

Take responsibility for being a tossbag like everyone else is a tossbag! What makes you any different from anyone else?

Thank you God I'm not like that tax collector/sinner/woman/Muslim/loser/drug addict. We all say it. We want to outsource everything. We want counsellors to counsel everyone else 'cos we don't want to get involved and we're not "professionals". We want police forces to maintain law and order because we're shit at relating with each other. We want schools to teach our kids to live out in the world but how can you do that when the world is not theory, not a goddamned book? We want other people to take the blame for the shit we do because other people have done shit to us. Where does it end?

My friend got annoyed at me the other night because I got annoyed at him because he was making a face in response to what I was saying. Okay, so I was talking about wanting to live in an intentional community in Eltham. He was screwing up his face like all people do at hippies. I couldn't help but respond to such an aggressive sort of response to what I was saying, and then HE got mad at ME for getting annoyed in the first place! But I couldn't see how I was responding to HIM, so I was probably just as aggressive as he was. And so when he retaliated to me retaliating to him, we both felt justified in doing it, and we both had a case. Every single police statement is different, every suspect sees things through their own filters. Everyone rewrites their memories and recasts themselves in candlelight when maybe they were standing in energy saving light instead. How does anybody get along ever, at all? How does anyone ever get along with each other when we are such stupid, stupid beings? :) When we all feel vulnerable and exposed, and we all behave badly? And yet we do.

This incessant ongoing blaming is so what the cross speaks to me about these days. There is a way that has been made for us to be able to be honest with God and ourselves and each other. Open hearted honesty from other flawed beings is so healing to watch.

Why is it so hard to admit our faults? Especially Christians. If a life lived in God is so good and wonderful, how come so many of us are unable to hold our shit, to hold the good with the bad, to admit our faults and our flaws? Because the stupid thing is, other people can see our stuff. We're not hiding from anyone.

Fig leaved people, just now we're wearing clothes, that's all.

Where is the freedom? It begins surely in understanding that even if bad people hadn't done bad stuff to us, we would most likely still be tossbags. And just because the bad people have done bad things, this does not mean that we get to abdicate responsibility for our own behaviour. Because unfortunately it seems to be so that being a tossbag comes with the territory. Why can't we just live in the reality of what is instead of trying to force it to be what it isn't?

That same friend and I had an interesting conversation driving over the Westgate Bridge later that same night. There's some sort of railings being constructed along the sides. We wondered if it was in reaction to that man who lost the plot and threw his child over the bridge to her death. Which was awful of course. And he said that he finally realised what the line in American Idiot by Green Day means when it says, "Where everything isn't meant to be okay."

We can't change the world to be different so that people don't throw their kids off bridges. This is what we are, folks, in all our mess and glory. You can't legislate human nature into something prettier than it is. That same legislation, trying to keep us from ourselves, is also what keeps us from the good parts of ourselves as well. Since when did the nanny culture get to prevent us from learning from our own mistakes? We're already good enough at blaming the woman, the man, the serpent. Seems the culture is trying to get us to take the searchlight off of ourselves too.

Anyway, that's enough ranting. I've given myself a headache typing this :) But I've also made myself laugh so yeah :) 'Cos of course the answer to all of this is love. Loving each other even though we're tossbags. Loving each other because we're tossbags and we all need it. Loving eaach other because we are way bigger than all the tossbaggery and we are even sometimes - often - beautiful.

And now, as punishment for writing that, Radio Susie has just begun singing Burt Bacharach numbers. "What the world needs now, is love, sweet love" Blergh :0)

This post was in part inspired by the God Journey podcast I listened to last night where they were talking about this new book that sounds like a good read: Mistakes Were Made (But Not By Me). I would link to it if I could, but I can't, because WebMarshall at work will not let me access it, being a time-wasting website I am not meant to be accessing during working hours.

But luckily, it's not like I need to read anything like that anyway. You, however, with your beams and motes, could probably give it a whirl :P

Swine Flu Vaccine

So. Swine flu. Out of the entire world, 92 people have died. NINETY TWO PEOPLE. And the US government has just paid 190 million bucks to have a swine flu vaccine developed.

One hundred and ninety million dollars. For something which is sending people into a spin and closing down schools and stuff. For what? For a flu. A flu that has killed only NINETY TWO PEOPLE IN THE ENTIRE BLOODY WORLD!!!!

But wait. The WHO warns us that this thing could mutate in strange ways. Who knows what might happen? Best to freak out, just to be on the safe side.

We're a real bunch of lily-livers these days, aren't we? Wonder how we would cope if we were living in 1918 when MILLIONS of people died from that flu pandemic. That's a pandemic to get worked up over, folks.

Come on, people, now, smile on your brother instead of freaking on him. Even if he is one of the 13,000 people in the world who HAS got swine flu, he's got a pretty good chance of living on to fight another day, seeing only NINETY TWO PEOPLE have died in the entire world.

NINETY TWO.

The world is creeping me out. What's the deal with people SO fearful? I actually think people WANT to be fearmongered. Why? Is it some sort of superstitious thing that if we worry about things then we will stop them from happening to us?

I dunno. The whole thing has me baffled. The media just grows fatter, feeding on our fear. Maybe one day it will grow so fat it will explode, like that Monty Python man in The Meaning of Life. Here's hoping :) In the meantime, it makes me vomit.

Exploding man - 6:01

BE FEARMONGERED! BE FEARMONGERED! THE SKY IS FALLING!

*Picture the robot from Lost in Space flailing its arms around.*

At work today have appeared bottles of antiseptic hand gel. It's taken me all afternoon to click on to why they've appeared now.

It's in reaction to the flu season that is about to be upon us and also to the swine flu that, if you listen to the media, is also about to murder millions of us any day now. Hopefully. The Australian media is having multiple orgasms about it even though there AREN'T EVEN ANY FUCKING CASES IN AUSTRALIA YET. Even though there aren't even enough fatalities worldwide to shove into one office of a World Trade Center building or one square kilometre of African starvation lands. It's not that I don't believe there could be an outbreak. It's that every single time there is a tiny chance that something catastrophic may possibly happen, it is the lead-in of news reports. But the reports aren't about anything substantial that is actually happening. They are about what might POTENTIALLY happen.

Yeah, well, an asteroid might plummet through the roof of my work and kill me. I might get spinal meningitis. I might get a job I vaguely like. I might ever complete and have published a piece of my own writing. I might die a slow and painful death by being driven mad by the fucking media. Millions of things MIGHT happen. Meanwhile, children starve to death all around the world every single day. And I was sick for over six years and never once in my life had I inoculated myself against it by fearing it, and it happened anyway.

Get a grip, workplace. Get a grip media. Who is holding you accountable for your detestable practices? And as an aside, and for future blog posts, when are we, the people, going to start realising that in a very real sense the reality that is out there is the one that we create every day, collectively and individually, by our fears and our insistence on everything being separated, and begin to make some real changes instead of being told we cannot do anything?

(Yes, I know my swearing count has increased again, but when it comes to the media - and the willingness of humanity to be fearmongered - you can't swear enough. )

(I had a squirt of the antibacterial hand gel just in case :)

Links: 'We need to be inoculated against outbreaks of panic': Deborah Orr
The Swine Flu Pandemic - Fact or Fiction?: Dr Mercola