My latest posts have been pretty melancholy, angry, depressing, not to say suicidal, not to say apocalyptic... That's a weird uh what would you call it a writing conceit? Saying "not to say" when your meaning is what you just promised not to say. It reminds me of those but sayings like, "I don't wanna play hard ball..." "I don't wanna complain..." "I'm not one to cause trouble..." "I've never been one to focus on the negative..." You know the ones. They're all suffixed with "but" and then the very thing the speaker seemed to be promising against. And since those are all really just some of the voluminous devices our deceitful culture has conjured up through necessity to make talking out our asses easier, let's just call them what they REALLY are, shall we???? - BUTT phrases.
That was not a trundle. I have not forfeited my time-out by losing a video replay. I reserve the right to go on my one trundle per post at a later point in this post. I may not, but I might. I still get to. Because the butt phrase is a genuine part of my topic today, or rather the foil to the main character of this post, as it were. Now there! I could go on a trundle about "as it were," a fairly disposable phrase we commonly attach... never mind. I'll keep my trundle in reserve for the late stages of this game when I might need it most.
So in case you feel concerned about me losing hope in humanity, removing myself from it, or worst of all - gasp! - discontinuing this blog, have no fear dear reader. My hope in humanity is re-confirmed daily in so many ways! In fact it so spectacularly illustrates the spirit of this post that ANY of us can skillfully stave off the flow of positivity with which we are daily bombarded! "Okay, now he's gone too far. Is he saying this ironically? Is it time to alert the Funny Farm?" Do we still send people to the Funny Farm or is that a phrase that has been erased? Dare I say "cancelled?" I think if anything it's a term that has more and more relevance as we march confidently and defiantly forward to personal and global backwardness.
I say this because if there existed an actual Funny Farm, I have to believe its denizens would be none other than the happiest, and most likely the funniest (in both meanings of the word) people among us. I don't mean to be negative... [I DON'T, honestly! Look at the way I started this post! I'm shooting for a glass-half-full topic today!] BUTT, I can't be the only one who is aware of the countless ways our "society" forces us to be dull, dreary, robotic, stay-at-home, do-as-we're-told, compliant, anal retentive, BORING consumers, can I?
So, what am I talking about? What are these things that we overlook/ignore all the time that might make us feel a bit cheerier as we slouch about our self-imposed wage slavery? Geez, yer gonna hafta bear with me. I'm not the best at positive posts. It's my spiritual goal to find a way to take joy in my suffering as I've posted before, and I'm doing my best to explain a few things that help me, I just, like most of us frogs in pots, am being slow boiled into opposing mentality. Okay, a few rapid fire examples of what I'm talking about: As trite as it sounds, if we should learn anything by the time we reach adulthood it's that we should never trust anyone, right? It's childish. Naïve. Simpleton sort of stuff. It's the kind of stinkin' thinkin' that gets you taken advantage of. And rightfully so! Who can blame the first person who sees your trusting nature and exploits it for personal gain? If he/she didn't do it, someone else would, right? It's just business... right? Kindness = weakness - RIGHT? This is how the frog water heat goes up.
I say all of those rodent shit phrases are so common BECAUSE they are wrong. We trust a million people a day. It's what keeps us from Armageddon. If you describe your dull, dreary, inhumanly routine daily grind I am confident you will see what I mean. If you don't... YOU are the next contestant on Who Wants To Go To The Funny Farm? Since I don't know your routine, I'll describe what I did yesterday. I woke up, got out of bed trusting the carpenters who built the floor of my apartment believing I would not fall through the floor, step on a nail that hasn't been hammered down, or something like that. I turn on the light and exhibit the same faith in the electrician. I suppose in Canada I am also trusting the makers of the building codes and their enforcers too. Walking to the kitchen-same trust. I fill a pot with water trusting that the water that comes out will be potable. (I don't have a kettle) I boil the water trusting the manufacturer of the stove and pot. I put coffee and cream in a cup with complete faith that I won't be poisoned. That's high faith in a LOT of people and a cow if you trace the coffee and cream from origin to cup. Any of those people could have tampered with my coffee or cream along the way, but they didn't. Or the cow. She could have had a bad day. I've said it before, when are cows going to revolt? We steal their milk, we steal their babies... She could have just said, "That's IT, I've had it! No more poisonless milk from me humans!"
I can say the same for the hundreds of people in the supply lines of all the food I eat for breakfast not to mention the insulin I inject directly into my system. That's extremely intimate stuff! We put food and medicine directly into our systems! And other drugs. Some people trust their dealers. And let's face it, if you can trust them... Are we foolish to trust all these people? Are we insane? We MUST be!
I walk to work and it has given me a lot of faith in my refusal to give up on people in general. While I am walking with traffic, not even facing the motorists, I have yet to get run over by one of them. So far nobody has said, "Screw this life, I'm tired of it, but I'm not going out alone" just as they approached me walking to work oblivious to their pain and my impending death. So far that hasn't happened. Not only that, the vast majority give me a little extra room by steering around me leaving their lanes to do so in most cases. And I would say on more than fifty percent of my walks to work I have been offered rides by friends, co-workers, and absolute strangers! Two yesterday. I'm not lying. Trust me :-) I tell you, it does me just as much good as the exercise to see the kindness of everyday people. And I don't wanna put too fine a point on this... BUTT this is when most everyday people are at their very worst. You put a windshield in front of most people and it's a lot like putting a computer screen in front of them. They discard about half of their common courtesy. Am I right? Don't take it from me, take it from my favourite living comedian, Louis CK:
The more I listen to that guy the more I love that overweight, ginger, stained shirt wearing, masturbating mothafucka! At the Dolby. It's his most recent and maybe his best. He's the guy Oscar Wilde meant when he said, "If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh or they will kill you." You can't tell people they have road rage. But most of us have at least a little, no? Far be it from me to ruin comedy by analyzing it... BUTT is that what makes this so funny?When did our culture become the stick-up-the-arse serious, defense mechanism laden spoilsports who can only admit to this voluntary state of being if a really funny joke is made about it? There's probably no anthropologist who can accurately trace its origin or progression, but it was not natural if you ask me. What we had before and what some cultures we call "primitive" have preserved in the face of global opposition... okay a little trundle. A mini one.
Do you suppose the word primitive suggests something from a time closer to the era of primates? I suppose it would be spelled primative if it did, but... Closer to monkeys? Maybe we should aspire to that. I don't know. Start by eating more bananas and regress little by little.
Okay, trundle over. Now, take a look at this primitive little boy exhibiting primitive behavior. To be honest I was going to type "monkeyboy" but that's another example of our restrictive society. I didn't want to offend. Oh well it's out there now. If you want to believe I'm racist what do I care?
I'm not a gambling man... BUTT if I were to bet on this pic, I'd say this is a little Zulu kid. Or at least an African kid practicing the Zulu Ubuntu philosophy. Yeah, another primitive, outdated, naïve, childish way of thinking. At least that's what most of the people in former Ubuntu cultures feel about it nowadays. "I am because we are." That is a rough translation of this silly old witchdoctor hocus pocus that could probably save our planet if it doesn't completely disappear. Read up on it, it's worth it. According to the article it's something that still exists in South Africa but is considered a bit of a dinosaur and a philosophy that is not compatible with modern life.
What do we have in North America that is similar? Hmmm.... I don't want to flog a dead horse... BUTT if there is one thing about native culture I wish we could revive it's the Wendigo philosophy. Natives of Canada and America believed (and rightly so) that the worst possible attribute, one that a person should be ashamed of and shunned if he/she had was selfishness. The Wendigo was a monster that personified insatiable greed. A MONSTER! Now insatiable greed is euphemistically called "upward mobility," "business savvy," "critical thinking," "street smarts," or some such positive sounding phrase. I remember reading old books and Shakespeare plays in my salad days when I was studying literature and the word "ambitious" had a negative connotation. Ambition was that "lean and hungry look" in yon Cassius's eye. Member? The dude who hatched the plot to kill Caesar? But you'd scarcely find a villain more villainous than Richard III and ambition was his primary vice. It was uglier than him. This, my friends, is proper thinking. But what we have now is Wendigo psychosis. It's a positive we've turned into a negative. If you share like the little African boy, you're a psycho. Look it up. It's not really true. I just lied to you but look it up to make sure. Hee hee hee. Now you REALLY don't know what to believe.
But is our world a Wendigo apocalypse where there are only a few of us fighters with uncontaminated brains? I don't think so. That's the positive point I'm trying to make. I think we are being socialized to believe this sort of thinking should be reserved for the primitive, but I don't think we've abandoned it as thoroughly as our owners want us to. (The owners I've talked about in my latest posts)
So, I don't want to be a dimwit... BUTT consider this a red lollipop of philosophy I'm entrusting you with. People are not generally bad. We are good at heart and the world proves it every day. The monsters are the people who exploit the general kindness of people and while they are the ones who run this circus, they are not the norm. They are the zombies whose brains need a medical procedure you might call a cranial chainsawing. A cerebral axing. A shotgun encephalogram. Or maybe something a little less violent like people being nice to each other instead of being scared of each other or even worse, treating each other like possible patsies to exploit for personal gain.
I don't wanna preach... BUTT it's a thought...
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