This Is The Original Purpose of This Blog (In Pathos Form)

Blind the Soul

We paved over our months and our hours

The same time we covered the forests and flowers.

The calendar directs our time

With lights and signals, man-made lines

That leave our fourth dimension lamed,

Though culture's not alone to blame.

The world – the wild and the paved –

Appears before us every day

Until, as though behind a cloud

The sights don't come through quite as loud.

Life's less than human, less than whole.

Routine and habit blind the soul.

Institutionalized

Your concrete jungle's stiff to rise –

No leaves or creepers, just straight lines.

The constant bustle holds them fast –

Planned obsolescence built to last.

Your money pays and takes its toll.

It's half convenience, half control.

The banks and buildings, roads and cars

Are really all the same thing – bars.

I Hate It

This post has nothing to do with the stated purpose of this blog.  I just need to vent.

My everyday social life is guided primarily by the principle that "indiscriminate niceness is overrated."  (Thanks, House.)  I really hate it when, to achieve my own ends or reveal an interesting fact in a discussion, I have to do something that makes it seem like I'm being nice to somebody I either don't know or barely know.  Sometimes I write poetry for people, even on request.  Unless you're my good friend, I only do it because I enjoy writing poetry.  At best, I'm saying you had an interesting idea for a poem.  A lot of times, I shed light on some fact or convention that seems to excuse a belief or behavior.  That is almost never the reason I do it.  I do it because facts and old conventions of writing are interesting.  So I have to choose between making an interesting point or not giving a false impression of myself.

Being nice isn't that fucking interesting.  For the most part, I only like what's interesting.  Unless you're a good friend of mine, I'm not gonna be nice to you for the sake of being nice.  Don't think of me that way.  It'll only get you ticked off and thinking I intentionally deceived you.




And then sometimes I'm nicer than I ought to be to someone because I wouldn't mind having sex with her.  But I'm not really deceptive about that.  I say nice things about how she looks before I'm nice to her, which is as transparent as you're allowed to be without becoming awkward and repellant.

Tame Plants

This in reference to a previously asked question about whether or not certain hypothetical trees are wild, which I will not actually answer.

Though the wildness of those trees is something I have still not come up with a theory to solve, I do have a tentative description of tame plants, which do indeed exist.  Any plant growing in an environment in which it will not survive on its own, and which is kept alive by intentional outside actors, is a tame plant.  This may not be an exclusive definition of tame plants, but it is a subset of plants which are tame.  A colleague of mine brought up houseplants, which are certainly a good example.  My description originated with my own thoughts about lawn care.  We feed the grass, we bring it water, and we groom it.  It's essentially an inanimate pet, a fair analog for the "enslaved" class of pets like fish and insects, rather than communicative pets like cats and dogs.

Interestingly, lawn care is also strong evidence of human culture as one single hive, by way of the ridiculous lengths we go to in order to live in a superficially homogenized environment throughout what I would call the "macroculture" or the "superculture".  If we really lived in many hundreds of national or regional cultures, we would acknowledge that a grass lawns are a waste of time to support in much of the world.  The only one lawn care is good for, besides a few privileged species of grass, is the economy -- expected, as all encouraged behavior in a hive is to the benefit of the queen.

This IS the Original Purpose of This Blog

1. All “advanced” human cultures are a hive.

Our culture exhibits many characteristics that are found only in hive animals, including exclusive dependence on large scale harvesting and agriculture, individuals who represent replaceable parts in the society, rather than indispensable contributors, being awarded our means of sustenance by the culture overall rather than producing our own means for survival individually or in small groups, and living space that is both organized & regimented and awash in masses of other individuals with which we have few or no dealings.

1.1. The economy is the queen of the hive.

All of our work goes toward the benefit/growth of the economy. It sends us signals to entice us to work, called "money," "advertising," and "peer pressure," though encoded culturally rather than chemically. Thus, it occupies the role of queen.

2. Humans are psychologically unsuited for this lifestyle.

The only other animals known to live in hives are those with unintelligent, indistinct individual automatons. Just on its face, this seems like an unlikely or unsuitable lifestyle for a highly emotional, individuated, opinionated species like Homo Sapiens. Quite logically, humanity, for nearly all of its history, lived in various variations on family, pack, tribe or troop structures. In simplified, metaphorical terms, we grew up living one way and don't really know how to live in this other way. The formation of groups, cliques, fandoms, subcultures, political parties and gangs, each variously positive or negative, is an attempt to return to our native cultural structure by creating new tribes to replace those that were destroyed by the rise of the human hive.

3. Popular culture as a distraction

Regardless of any arguments about its quality as a whole, or that of any of its respective elements, popular culture's primary function in today's society is to distract us from the hive nature of our modern life, and to advertise and normalize it through fiction and semi-fiction in which salaried or wage work figures heavily. Its secondary function is to serve as an outlet for tribal tendencies via the formation of fandoms and subcultures, which may divide further into 'ships or cliques. Any other function may be valuable, but is certainly tertiary from a cultural standpoint.

3.1 Definition of popular culture

Politics, fashion, hobbies and sports also fall under the heading of The Distractions, because they serve the same primary and secondary functions.

3.2 Relative popularity of The Distractions

The Distractions can be grouped by their popularity, and this popularity will correlate very strongly with the potential commercialization of the particular distraction. Television, movies and music have the highest commercialization potential:  people pay for them, they are easily accompanied by advertising, and they are easily used to normalize the hive lifestyle.  There is actually a social stigma attached to not following these things.  Conversely, think of fanfiction:  one needn't pay to read or write it; advertising potential is minimal; unscreened individuals retain creative control, meaning the message can deviate significantly.  This sort of Distraction has a social stigma attached to it.

The Best Baseball Story I Ever Heard

This has nothing to do with the stated purpose for my starting this blog.

The best baseball story I ever heard was in a Sports Illustrated article about a little-known pitcher who had used steroids in the 1980s and 1990s.  The subject of the article was waiting out a rain delay in the clubhouse when the rain stopped and the team was told they were going to play that day.  Centerfielder Bernie Williams was excited by the prospect; the subject of the article, for whom baseball was just a job, much less so.  "You want to play?" the latter asked.

"Of course," said Williams.  "What else would I want to do?"

I found this so endearing that it is my very favorite baseball story, even though it's about the Yankees.  Williams articulated how I feel about class most of the time, how I virtually always feel about my writing, and how I feel about watching baseball more often than not.

The Wild Animal

This blog will mostly serve the purpose of refining, articulating and explaining my insane cultural theory.  This first post is not that.

In the course of attempting to articulate and explain my insane cultural theory, I was asked to define wildness of both animals and spaces.  There were two specific examples, one of building a subdivision in a copse of trees while leaving the trees standing (are the trees still wild?) and the other of a bee.  It lives in a hive, but is it wild?

Wildness of spaces or plants is something I am not presently prepared to define, and I will make no attempt to do so here.  This post will address only the definition of a wild animal.

It is my assertion that wildness in animals is defined by perception and by communication.  An animal can be defined as wild with respect to any other animal with which it can not sensibly communicate.  In the case of the bee, it is wild from the context of a human observer, but not in the context of observation by other members of its hive (bees communicate).  To a bee, though, we are wild animals.  We cannot communicate effectively with bees.  Dogs and cats sensibly communicate with humans -- using their tails, ears, eyes, and using touch.  In fact, some humans will even learn these signals well enough to consciously emulate these behaviors to converse with these animals.  Such animals are not wild.

Note that this definition does not require a communicative observer.  There are some people who do not understand how to communicate with cats or dogs.  They do not know that a cat closing its eyes is a demonstration of trust or affection, or that a cat who flicks its tail back and forth is agitated.  This does not mean the cat is wild.  It means the observer is liable to get bit, that's all.

This said, wildness really has nothing to do with my insane cultural theory.