Philosophy: Martin Heidegger's METAPHYSICS part 1. (appendix)

If you liked my story about my encounter with the metaphysical thought of Martin Heidegger and you are interested in this topic in a more general way, than I highly recommend that you go to the library or order 'Basic Writings' and read it for yourself. Also, when reading philosophy it is easy to drown in labyrinth of language, this can make your reading experience feel like a waste of time, downright terrifying, or extraordinarily exhilarating. For me it's most often all three at once, and I happen to like this ‘emotional cocktail, so that’s why I do it, but if you find yourself overwhelmed while reading such a text and you don’t happen to like being overwhelmed then I recommend you get some help.




There are a lot of modes of help out there; you could enroll yourself in school, but that’s a big commitment, and you might just end up in a pile of debt, you could get yourself a study guide, (introduction, idiots guide, for beginners est.) or you could utilize the wide array of on-line recourses, the most imfamous of which is Wikipedia, who cares what experts say. It’s great. as you probably know YouTube is another great resource (it's not just for cat videos, and watching idiots puck on themselves, or whatever people watch on YouTube these days).



There are quite a few philosophy commentators on YouTube many are quite good even inspiring, but probably the most prolific of these would have to be 0ThouArtThatO and John David Ebert. These two guys have pretty much opposite styles; 0ThouArtThatO is casual and seems to spend a good deal of his videos improvising, it's clear he's brilliant, and he will leave you with more than just a basic understanding of each topic, but if you are over the age of 30 I must warn you if you have any taste propensity for ageism he will surely dish you out a healthy slice of humble pie (he looks very young I think he's got to be like 14 in some of these videos), and he is brilliant. Then there’s John David Ebert, he’s very thorough! He presents quite possibly the greatest summaries ever to exist. Both of these guys have hundreds of videos, if you watched them all you could be a smart ass philosopher king in no time.




Here’s John David Ebert on Heidegger's Intro to Metaphysics ½ to get you started:

Philosophy: Martin Heidegger's METAPHYSICS part 1.

Chapter 1: Mississsippi.

It's often said that Heidegger's great philosophical achievement was the murder of metaphysics, and of course whenever I heard this statement I took it at face value, assuming it meant that he had developed a mode of thought that needed no recourse to ideas outside the physical world, "ideas “such as God, soul, or platonic forms, to explain its true existence, or something to that effect. But one day this notion was shattered to bits; it was about 3:30 4 O' clock or so and I was waiting for the neighborhood bee man to call me back, he told me that he could introduce me to some people that had been farming some land owned by Toby Hemingway, the Permaculturalist, I have a deep interest in Permaculture for its practical meditation of the interconnectedness of organisms, and its application as a sustainable food production system. I like Heidegger for the same reason actually, for Heidegger, we human beings, what he calls Dasein, only have our being in the way we relate to others, organisms/things ect.. Dasein means Being-there, and is an indivisible unit that implies that our very essence is defined by the way things and people appear to us, or in other words we are nothing without other, people and things.

The Fresh Pot on Mississippi Shaver--my neighborhood.

Now, it was about 3 or 4 o-clock and I work grave yard so I had just got up, and was still pretty groggy so I figured I would go to the fresh pot on Mississippi and Shaver while I waited for the Bee Man to call me back. I get there and get my coffee and sit outside and start to read a book, when this guy Cody comes by, Cody's got a blue baseball cap, and is holding a copy of “Hi-fidelity.” Cody is kind of an enigma to me because he speaks with an English ascent but he says he's for South Dakota, or I could be getting the state rung but it's like some mid-western state obviously vary far from the British isles. Anyway, the whole thing doesn't add up, but he's a cool guy so it's not like I'm suspicious, I just don't really get what’s going on. Anyway he studied philosophy in collage, and was really turned off by the whole rigmarole of it all, but still really like's Deleuze and some of the other guys I like so I like to talk to him about such things, I mean I like to talk about philosophy any chance I get, but really not a lot of people get Gilles Deleuze, or Heidegger so I think it's kind of awesome when someone gets it. We got talking and I was comparing Heidegger's theory of temporality with Burgeson's, and D&G's (Deleuze and Guattari) theory of the plain of imminence with Heidegger’s referential totality. Then I asked him what he was reading, he said that he was enjoying hi-fidelity and that he tried to read some Heidegger recently, but he just couldn’t get his head into it, he said the Heidegger was called, "what is metaphysics?" from his Basic Writings. Hmm, I thought, didn’t Heidegger spell the end of metaphysics? and really what would metaphysics even mean to Haidegger any way? how can there be anything outside of the physical world when all meaning comes from our being-there in the world? It was about that time when the Bee Man called me back so I had to go, but as I was living I remembered that my house had Heidegger's Basic writings on our book self, and thought I'd check it out after I went to the garden.

I kind of forgot about the whole thing for a while, but then I came accuse a certain blog that proclaimed that Gilles Deleuze was responsible for reviving metaphysics after Heidegger had left it for dead, and I remembered that conversation I had with Cody and decided to investigate, so I went to my house book shelf, found the 'basic writings,' cracked it open, and as I read I came across this passage;

 "Our inquiry concerning the nothing is to bring us face to face with metaphysics itself. The name "metaphysics" derives from the Greek Meta ta physical. This peculiar title was later interpreted as characterizing the inquiry, the Meta or trans extending out "over" beings as such."

Reading this passage it accord to me that Heidegger associates metaphysics with nothingness and that in this way perhaps he is destroying metaphysics, a startling thought I know but as I read it started to make more and more sense to me.

It all starts in anxiety. Kierkegaard called anxiety the dizziness of freedom, but Heidegger says that "in anxiety there occurs a shrinking back before....that is surely not any sort of flight but rather a kind of bewildered calm." This calm sort of anxiety is the opining up of possibility, it is the same freedom that Kierkegaard is talking about, but Heidegger calls freedom nothingness because he wants to express it as an 'opening' of possibilities. This might sound startling at first to equate freedom with "nothingness" but it makes sense when you realize that if the future already exists then there could be no freedom in the present.
If the future doesn’t exists then it is "nothing," and is therefore a pure possibility for the present.

Heidegger Says, "Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom," by which he means that nothingness is the opening up to meaning in the world, and is essential to Dasein’s being in the world and its freedom. So we see that not only does "nothingness" provide the possibilities of freedom it also grants us our "selfhood", this is because once again if the future or our identity where already fixed then we could have no control over our actions and we would then be strictly speaking like cogs in a machine.

This anxiety that provides the possibilities for freedom and identity is not necessarily the same as what is meant in its normal usage, infect for Heidegger's anxiety need not even be unpleasant; "the anxiety of those who are daring cannot be opposed to joy or even to the comfortable enjoyment of tranquilized bustle. It stands--in secret alliance with the cheerfulness and gentleness of creative longing." Anxiety is joyful because it is the limitless possibility in art and of life itself, because it "Anxiety", "robs us of speech (...) as a whole slips away, so that just the nothing crowds round, in the face of anxiety all utterance of the "is" falls silent. That in the malaise of anxiety we often try to shatter the vacant stillness with compulsive talk only proves the pres-immediately demonstrates when anxiety has dissolved. In the lucid face of which and for which we were anxious was "properly"--nothing. Indeed: the nothing itself--as such --was there."

So it’s through anxiety that we, Dasein, come to the nothing, and it is the nothing that opens us to other beings making their meaning possible for us, for "human existence can relate to being only if it holds itself out into the nothing. Going beyond beings occurs in the essence of Desein, but this going beyond is metaphysics itself." Because "nothingness" is none-being Heidegger makes the surprising conclusion that in order for being to be free it must stay open to none-being, a kind of Hegelian twist that brings harmony to what would ordinarily be conflict.

So there we have it in the connection between anxiety, nothingness, and metaphysics; the possibilities of free will. If there was some definite future then freedom would be imposable, if the future is open, that is nothing, then it can become anything. If the role that each person will play in our lives is already defined then our relationships will never change, it's only the nothingness that is an open possibility which make's new love or collaboration possible. Heidegger proves that nothingness is necessary in order for the state of things to exist as it does.



Chapter 2: America.

On another occasion I was at a party with my friends Andy, and Ben and Chrystal Anderson, we were all excited to see each other because it been a while, and on a whim we decided to go see the movie Moon Rise Kingdom by Wes Anderson--no relation. The only theater that was playing it was Clackamas Town Center, now as I wright this I get chills realizing that this would later be the site of an unspeakable tragedy.

It's vary interesting to me the way places hold certain moods, some places are cheery, while others are profoundly sad, still others send you into a state of emotional vertigo, most places have a degree of chaos to them, and then there are places where you have never been that somehow hold a degree of nostalgia, very mysterious--but there isn't even a single place in the universe that doesn’t hold some mood even if that mood is a very bland one.

We were out in Vancouver at the time so it was a long drive which gave us plenty of time to catch up. Unfortunately when we got there the theater was closing, so we just wondered around the mall. Clackamas Town Center is an outdoor mall and all the shops look like old Victorian aria houses (in a really fake way) so it kind of felt like we were walking through a ghost town, I'm sorry if this word choice sounds crass, honestly this is the way I felt at the time, but it really wasn't all that scary just kind of lonely, all those empty buildings. We found a play gound and started climbing on it, and pretending we where kids again, we tried special challenges like climbing up the later with no hands. I remember one time when my brother went down a fire pull upside down, it was a worm spring day I think it had just rained, safe bet in the Willamette valley. It was at a video shooting for a political campaign advertisement, a conservative senator that was running at the time. One of the other kids keep going down that fire pull over, and over, and I could see it in my brothers eye's, he wanted to give it a go, so he did; he hit his head real hard, then got up walked around screaming, all the adults where like see shouldn’t do that stuff, and eventually he just got over it and ran back to the play ground.

After we finished with the play ground we just walked around, and I think someone commented on the ghostliness of the seen, "think of all this empty buildings, and all the people without a home to go to, you think some one would think of something to do about this!?" I just staired at the items in the windows. One store of sunglasses had all these weird futuristic modals that I had never seen before and really couldn’t picture any one wearing them, and this profound anxiety came a pone me and I realized that this was the emptiness of Capitalism commented on so often by leftist social commentates. It certainly wasen't a pleasant feeling but it did have a kind of calming effect, perhaps it was one inflection of what Heidegger meant by "anxiety," it certainly was disconcerting (If this was what Heidergger called anxiety then bumer it was the unpleasant kind). I don't mean to say that Heidegger was talking about commoditized identity because I know he wasn't, but perhaps there’s something about "emptiness" as Heidegger speaks of it that is somehow at the heart of capitalist dissatisfaction. For Heidegger the anxiety is supposed to make an opening to a new possibility but for some reason in our society the opening leads to no possibilities, it's just one product after another each failing to deliver on its promise of fulfillment.

The ride home from the mall that night was a quiet one, I wander if my friends where feeling what I was feeling, like this immense opening to God knows what, like standing over a great chasm, dizzy with disappointment. I tried to talk, but I instantly realized that if I did I would enviably begin to cry. No! Thats not right. I felt as if I could never cry again, and this saddened me all the more. I tried to grasp my memories and ring them for whatever bit of refreshment they may have held, as if perhaps maybe just maybe, then I would see that it's all connected, that somehow the opining of time, the great void swirling with anxiety might perhaps lunched out at me some hidden gift of meaning, and in a way it did, but I was so tier, and it still wasn't time for me to see it.

Joy Division (Review of Unknown Pleasures)

Music review: Joy Division - Unknown Pleasures (Full Album) [HD] 

John Rotten snarled out, "no future", and Ian Curtis declared a resounding question. "Where will it end?" Joy division is not joyous to say the least but it is ecstatic none the less. Ecstatic? This might sound like the wrong word for them, usually when one thinks of ecstasy one thinks of enthusiasm, or fun, or something joyous, but while the music of Joy division is none of these things it is ecstatic...It's an ecstatic sadness.

The thing about Ecstasy is it’s a loss of control, but there is no band that is more in control then Joy division, from the never ending sprawling linearity of Stephen Morris's drums to the high flying register of Peter Hook's melodic bass lines, to the stiff church choir chores of Bernard Sumner's desperate guitar voicing’s, to Ian Curtis's lonesome sorrowful heart sick pronouncements, it’s all to in control. But isn't it true, that the mark of a psyche out-of-control is its strong focus on what can be controlled, an obsession with little details. That’s what I've heard any way.

The unknown pleasure is known, according to the logic of the mystic. What is the unknown pleasure? I think it’s the pleasure of remembering future projections of a past disconnected from the present, it's a lost dream, and not a good dream but not really a bad dream either; It’s no man’s land, the unknown pleasure is an anxiety that sets a soul free, free as fire. It's this memory that makes Ian Curtis announcement, "I'm not afraid anymore!" what it is, a pronouncement of lose.

As I ponder the unknown pleasure I realize that it is in us all, at least I think so. It's not as scary as it sounds. Or maybe it is! I hear that Ian Curtis was an epileptic, and maybe this has something to do with the unknown pleasure. I was an epileptic once myself. I discovered my epilepsy before breakfast one morning. My family was staying at an RV camp ground with a small store on the property where us kids would go and buy cheap toy's and candy. One morning I was coming back from the store with a box of cereal in my hands and there it hit me, I lost control. I was standing in the door way of our motorhome blank faced, later my mom told me that she was yelling at me to shut the door, but I just stood there. I was rushed off to the hospital in an ambulance; I remember that they cut my shirt to take my vitals. That’s pretty scary stuff, I couldn't imagine that honestly being called pleasure, but I do get some pleasure recounting the story, maybe that’s the unknown pleasure. Ian Curtis sings "I could live a little better with the myths and the lies..

When the darkness broke in, I just broke down and cried." I feel these words, indeed, the affect of the unknown pleasure radiates out from an experience, and finds new forms in the sounds of albums like this one, I feel it now as in the affect of wright my story. The unknown pleasure is like the joy of listening to this album and even the fun of singing it.

The last word of She's Lost Control is,

"When the change is gone, when the urge is gone,
To lose control. When here we come."

 The will to lose control is the will to be changed by somthing more powerful then you, so maybe that is also the joy of the unknown pleasure. Maybe when this urge is gone something yet even darker is on its way. To will the loss of control is to will life, becuase life does as it pleases. Do we dare to will the freedom of life its self. I think the unknown pleasure is a safety net, but it’s also a catalyst for new possibilities, the point is though that it becomes most apparent when old hopes, or dreams start to fall apart, and is there for also like a warning sign warning us to recollect our self’s before the darkness settles in. No good thing will come with out risk, risk is the lose of control, risk is the true love of life.

The music of Joy Division always makes me want to sing along, but when I sing along to Joy Division I scream the words, I can't seem to help myself. I'm over taken by the unknown pleasure of it. And you know I always thought that Ian Curtis was controlled in his delivery of his words but when you see him on stage he's a total spaz, and somehow when you sing along to these songs you take on a spastic affect and somehow all the control is burnt up in an offering of an unknown pleasure. Yes! There is something of the austere in this music and yet there’s also an ecstatic heart at its core that is trying to get out, I can hear it, and it is powerful and true! God Love's Ian Curtis!

Toshiyuki Honda

Toshiyuki Honda's Sky (a critque)

Lament by Japanese composer Toshiyuki Honda, but is it really a lament? OOOO, Lala laaaaa la la the voices sing! What kind of lament is this? That frolics in air Fields of Japan sky, like sugary sweet butterfly’s sweeping the white dust reflections of the cold spring sun into some tight voids on the edge of time abduction. It's no lament at all, that's what, a true contentment.

So is this irony? Bad, stupid, irony again? No! It's the sweetest joy of lament, a serpent eating its tail, being fulfilled and consumed with insatiable hunger all at once! It's the joy not of regret, but of no-regrets at all. The true antitheses of Nietzsche’s eternal return. Where what returns to you is always a specter, and the life most unbearable - the life worthy of return. A pleasant past always out of grasp a momentary memory reseeding into infinite obscurity, who's presents never completely vanishes from a tactful fingers of the ear.  

Honda's "Lament" is high flying, yes, but if you listen real close to those first electric guitar chord strums you can hear the depths of pain beyond Hondas joyous loly gaggery, but alas, it can't be ignored, that this sorrow is entirely eclipsed by a silver moon of shimmering shaker sand sound and quick cascading guitar Melody.

Honda's "Lament" invites you in, says hello, and sends you on your way with a sack lunch and a tiny plastic surprise. That's how it is.

What this music most reminds me of is the feeling I used to get on top of Mount Hood, snow Board strapped to my feet. We used to call it the pre-snow board jitters, and it was just that an ethereal mood that would literally make your body shake with anticipation. Those car rides up the mountain, staring out the window tell it fogged with your heavy breath, then drawing the face of the mountain in the glass. Then gazing down the steep ravine on the shoulder of the road, and seeing nothing short of the face of death in its great void! And knowing you would soon be sliding down another such face with bodily reflections maneuvering the soft crystallizations completely unfathomable to the wordy ticker tape type thought you are having now.

Toshiyuki Honda's Metropolis

Toshiyuki Honda composed my faverit movie sound track, the 2001 animie remake of Frits Langs Metopolis. The sound track to metopolis is a brite shinging arangment of Rage-Time dots and big string dream skapes.



destroying fearless ideology

One thing that will turn you into a genius overnight is to hold fast to your ideology while deliberately embracing its retractors. This is not that uncommon in our time. Well--that’s not really true--it remains uncommon as its ever been, but I think it's more often attempted now, but most attempts at it today result in failure, either by destroying all ideals, or by protecting the ideal by masking it from the menacing grasp of its retractors. Oh and there’s a 3ed, by making difference an ideal, ironically, this unchecked proceeds to destroy all the identities that made the ideal and its retraction possible in the first place. A genius though, somehow avoids all three of these traps then proceeds fearlessly beyond the event horizon.



Here’s a poem:



I am a monster made of your liberalization; I am your curse and your prize

Jackal lop dancing on your walls

Sad silent shrine to your lost sense of security

You are free and enabled to succeed



And a journal entry:



I sat in my room today and thought of how boring I am

When I entered the dining room I was greeted with interest

don't you know I'm a boring man why are you smiling

Liberty

I got to play my guitar today, it was at my friends where we practice, and I didn't realize how much I missed it, I love playing my guitar, it is made of planets, and is very heavy to me. I attack it with my sharp teeth like Jimi Hendrix, just to get the juices out of it. It burns me bad, and I cry and cry and cry tell I have forgotten all my sorrows, and am just lying there in a pile of sweat and tears.

My friend Andy called me. I told him to come over. while I was waiting I decided to go to Albania press and get a cup of coffee, by that time the sun was setting and my skin was getting colder, after I bought my coffee I thought I would walk to the bluffs. Andy called me on the way. He was at my house I told him I would come back, he said he'd meet me half way.

After we meet up we stopped at the comic book store, Andy bought the final issue of amazing Spiderman. By this time it was already dark. I looked at a comic called animal man, it was grotesque, there were a few indicators that it may have been influenced by Gilles Deleuze's concept, Becoming-animal, one there were many intermediate forms stuck between one animal and another, and 2 there was a character that was just nerves or maybe blood veins, a rhizomic figure to be shore (even if not intended), intention is only one tiny dimension among everything, often over estimated.

If you don't know what Becoming-animal is then I should tell you it’s a figure in many Gilles Deleuze's books, it’s a way to understand identity. Identity for Deleuze like Jean-Paul Sartre doesn’t come before existence, it comes with existence. Only for Deleuze identity isn't purely a human construct, but is one thing standing with everything else, and everything  here is just the some totall of all the interactions.

You are nothing without the things you interact with, so in a sense you are equivocal to all these things, and when you interact with something you share in its identity. For Deleuze ever thing bleeds together. One way to sense this oneness of becoming is to think of how the sensitivity of your senses changes when you interact with something. Like how if you garden you learn the smell of healthy soil, and when you hunt you learn the call of a buck and maybe the smell, this is sometimes called entunement, but it is also what Deleuze calls Becoming.

I think one of the reasons Deleuze uses this terminology is because it plays well off Plato’s concept of becoming and passing away and Heidegger’s dasein, Being-there, the later makes a persons’ Being the way objects in the world appear to her while the formal makes ‘Becoming’ a mere shadow of the real eternal form. The difference for Deleuze is that there is no stable way of interacting with objects in the world, just flux, and becoming and no eternal forms by which to judge that becoming.


So to me one of the "practical" applications of Deleuze's becoming is to actively tune your senses to the world around you in-order to become more then what you are, who doesn’t won’t to become more then what they are, if only for the fun of it.

Any way back to my story, after the comic shop we walked to the Liberty Glass, a bar on Mississippi Street. Andy mentioned the new "add ons’", benches on the road adjacent to the entrance of Mississippi Pizza, at first we made fun of it, but then concluded that the world would be a better place if everything grow that way, by addition up and out, over and around. In this way the world could flower into a more exotics form.

When we got to the Liberty Glass I ordered a shot of whisky, and Andy got a Pabst Blue Ribbon, he asked for chocolate milk, like Kindergarten Cop, but they didn't have it. The Bar tender was one of my crushes from about a year ago, Cute, petit, brunette with a soft patient demeanor. I used to walk over to her house in the mornings and chat about theater and film, then just as it looked like something magical was about to happen she quite returning my calls, and that was that, I was confused and heart broken, but alas this is not a rare story for me, and by this time I've all but excepted this treatment as my fate.

Andy and I sat out on the patio, and I was telling about this, eliciting him for a possible remedy, and she came out and sat with us next to the fire place and visited with us. The topic of new year’s parties came up and she said it was better to just stay home on a night like that one, me and Andy suggested that there might be a good way to participate in the festivities if one where grounded and eager to bring something positive to the world around them. Andy brought up Andrew W.K. and his positive approach to partying.

On our way home we stopped at Mississippi pizza and got a couple of slices of Hawaiian.

After that Andy went home and I recorded music on my power book until it was time for me to go to work.

New Year

It's the first day of the New Year, and it looks like we survived the Mayan Dooms day clock. I never really put much stock in it but now that it's over and done with I suddenly have a faint sense of intrigue, needless to say for most people things work the other way around. I don't often feel compelled by claims of extreme cosmic calamity, but now that it's over I'm starting to wonder if maybe, just maybe we've all been changed in some inexplicable way, like we're all going to live an extra 83 years more than we would have, or we're all going to wake up tomorrow with super human strength, or polymath genius or something to that effect.

Na!

holiday

This is a late entry from the 23th of December. I changed all the names because the events turned out to be such that those involved might not want to be disclosed. Never the less if you know me and my friends it may be easy to pick out who is who, I can't help this, this is my life and I won’t slow down for petty shit like this, for fear that if I continue to hesitate I won’t have anything to show for my life in the end, also I left My brother's and his wife's names the same because if you know me then it wouldn't pay to change their names any way.


The daily flood of ill-logical syntax of events continues to work me over completely.


The truth has been said in this dark place, it's not exactly chaos, not exactly absurdity, but

life making its way pure and simple. Is there a totality to evolution, and can you map the mind of God from a satellite in the sky?

In both cases the answer is unequivocally NO! So there you have it, life is its own meter, and that’s just the way we like it, carry on folks, nothing to see here, the usually polite girl says to the onlookers as they walk past the weeping pile of sparkling dreams usually known by the name of Zarathustra, "carry on!"

And life will.



Today I got back from tri-cities where I spent the week end with the extended family for holiday festivity, we picked this weekend before Christmas because that’s when the largest portion of us could show up. Now I am so far beyond exhorted, working the night shift after a long day made even longer then it had to be by screaming kid siblings who just had to wake me up at 8 in the morning instead of letting their ever graces oldest brother get his much needed beauty sleep. Now I zombie type my journal entry.



I rode back with my younger brother and his new wife. It was a fine drive through the gorge, lessening to the radio fade in and out with holiday tex-mex and classic rock. The snow of the radio was a fine complement to  the skys oun bellows of the soft weight stuff. We where worried that this could have spelled trouble for my red Volvo but apart from getting damped up from overly cautious traffic, the snow represented no real tubal at all.



To pass the time I just basically blabbed my face off, I made a point of it, I wanted to see how loose I could get the wheels turning, and I got them pretty dame loose. Not in a bad way just filling the dead air, with all manner of none sense. At one point I pontificated about the tragedy of the taming of the great Columbia river; as Gregy, an earnest old man I came to know through my work as a free lance care giver, had told me once, "the river used to be free!" He showed me pictures of it and said they used to fish there with nets, "so many fish in those days it seemed you could never make even a dent in them!" The river was so wild then that it was like nothing you'd ever seen, just picture the Colombia as wide as it is now only as a rapid barreling down the gorge with great force. I asked Rolland if he'd ever seen anything like that, he said, "yeah on the top of Victoria falls". I was like "yeah, parity much likes that only for the whole length of the river. Just as that conversation was winding down he was like "do you want to get some McDonalds fries, and I was like, "no, but if you want them then I'll pull over", and I did.

Neither my brother nor I ever really eat McDonalds, he's really into health and fitness, he's a cross fit trainer, and I don't like to support weird clowns who's names start with a syllable that sounds like my own, but I think it was the kind of thing where when you're on the road you have to do things you wouldn't unusually do.

A kind of hedonistic rite of the vagrant traveler, a mass of the holy ass kind of a thing.



So my brother Rolland and his wife Jessica got out of the car, Jessica had previously been sleeping in the back so she was a little drossy, they mumbled in to get their frieze, and within a short moment Rolland came back out, "come in here I want to show you something," I followed him and it was a couple of 5 by 5 pictures of the river taken before the construction of the dam, not a shock that any restraint on the river would be decorated with touristy, historical things of this sort, but when my brother looked at the pictures he said he realized what Gregy said was true, the Colombian was a much more mild river before the dam’s went in, allot more beautiful too. Leave it to a desolate McDonalds franchise to lend light to the plight of the ever torchered northwestern contrary side. Hm, strange bed fellows if you ask me, lady Gaia and Ronald McDonald clown face idiot. Oh well whatever.



I ended up eating a hand full of frieze and they made my cankerfide gums burn. I monde and ground as we go along the road, until my brother suggested we stop and get some kombucha, we did and it did soothe the ache.



Things went pretty much this way, with my complaining, moralizing, and pontificating, until we got to our folks where I was dropping Rolland and his wife Jessica off. When we got there we went to the barn first. The barn isn't really what you would think a barn is, it looks like a barn on the outside but when you go inside it’s a folly furbished apartment and church with all the amenities, running water and wall to wall carpeting, bathrooms and kitchen. Once we got to the barn we noticed that there was some kind of party going on, so we went in, and there where a whole pill of people lessening to music and opening presents around the tree. The occupants of the barn, all 20 something’s loosely affiliated with the Christian missional organization YWAM. They where opening presents that they had pulled together from stuff that people had discarded in the burn over the years. The barn was kind of a place where people would bring things they didn't want but also a place to find truly magical threshers. I sat in a char diagonal from one young lady that I find particularly attractive. She is so wonderful! Quite spiritual in the sense that she excepts the miracles without even the slightest surprise, and when she looks at you, you almost thinks she can read your mind, yet quite in touch with the wonders of the natural world as well, this is the most impressive thing to me she intuitively understands the wonder of incarnate life. And funny too, she has a great sense of humor! she's also quite cute, her lips are like little ovals, light olive completion with light frecals on her nose, sort dark blond hair with fiant red high lights in the simple bob style, in terms of height she's sort a’ short with a soft build, just as cute as a button, and always has the best attitude too, the best attitude I've ever seen, spunky and friendly and kind in all the right ways. Basically I think I'm in love with this girl. She and her fiancé just broke of their engagement, which is sad in a way, but you might think this would be an opportunity for me, only her fiancé is one of my very best friends in the world, an old story, "Jessie’s girl... where can I find a woman like that?" That whole thing, trouble! But I was talking to her and she was petting the cat which was melting in her arms, because she knows the secrets of the natural order. She was talking about going back to Colorado, and the logistics of calling off the wedding. After a while it started to get to intense for me my head started to spine with love sick annihilation, I couldn’t take it anymore, so I left the room, and went up stairs to talk to my cousin who was packing to go back down south to stand in his brother’s wedding.

He showed me all the presents the he got for his family, cool stuff, 60's vintage everything, the stuff was great: high healed shoes with neon highlights in the sole, and a tan wicker purse with a floral weeve and rollers studs on the bottom for his oldest sister, these incredible matching erring and necklace set glistening multi colored round jowls for his younger sister, and 60s British style cream mod diner cote for his mother. It was gorges stuff, a real thought filled testimony to his loving care for the women of his family.

After he showed me this stuff we went back down stairs where all the tables had been rearranged into one long banquet table, with fruit arraigned along the entire surface of it, and an assembly line of sandwiches, one guy was putting on the peanut butter and another was putting on the jam. At the far end of the table was a bunch of people around a young women about 25 years old, they where praying for her quite loudly and she was scheming even louder, it certainly was a spectacle and I'm shore for some who hadn't seen this sort of thing before it would be quite shocking, I have to admit even for me having been around this sort of thing quite a bit it was a sight to behold, but don't get me rung it wasn't anything to get concerned about, I do believe the ritual was quite helpful, just saying it was surprising is all. I guess by this time in history these things are pretty well known, being a regular feature of Christian network programming for over what 40 some years now. Even if someone hadn't ever in there enter life actually tried to watch one of those programs I couldn’t imagine a regular TV viewer could go long without stumbling a pone this sort of thing on their way from the Saturday football game to the Saturday matinee made for TV movie.



So yeah this charismatic stuff, as far as I understand, is a house hold thing, and has cote a great deal of flack over the years from a wide range of different factions of society. I think most people just think it's weird, and part of me understands way--it is certainly out of the ordinary, but another part of me asks why this sort of thing gets the kind of flack it gets considering the positive review so many similar rites get, as well as just the al around weirdness of human behavior in general. You know? I don't know, I guess at the end of the day everyone gets flack no matter who you are, but I guess it could also be somewhat of a political thing, its common knowledge that this particular type of Christian votes conservative, and is vary out spoken in terms of making converts.



As this situation unfolded the Colorado girl looked over at me, and asked if any of this weirded me out, I said no, she probably noticed a look of discomfort on my face, but if there was such a look it wasn’t in any way authentic, I think somewhere along the line I picked up this bad habit through mimesis, it’s true there is such a thing as society and if you’re not carful it can swallow your individuality. We must fight to keep from allowing these little imitations to over ride our truest understanding of the world, be you’re history not just the most adventitious persona for the moment. We all know from experience far more then we let on, we let social protocol decide how we respond to other people. Really you don’t have to relate to any of this, nor do you have to ever take a side on issues that you don’t understand or even stick to the script on the issues you happen to feel passionate about.

In the midst of all this ‘craziness’, and out of the blue, Max looks over at Jary, one of the guys who was living in the barn and, just asked him point blank, “do you have a problem with me?” It was abrupt, it was a chilling effect, but it didn’t stop the prier situation, that just keep on rolling, but the rest of us where taken back, Jary protested, “I don’t even know you!” “What are you talking about!? I started singing silent night to distract the two interlocketes, Max responded to Jary, “I’ve been living in the same barn as you for 3 months!” Then Jary accused Max of “listening to the lies of the enemy”, at that Max just got up and left. Later he told me that he would never entertain or try to respond to an accusation that he is being contraled by the devil, I definitely agree with him on that, it be a literal “holy war”!!

True this repersents an abuse of religen and a sad missunderstainding, but really we all need to face it these things happen, in religes groups and otherwass, albeit calling on the authority of God in resolving a petty disput is like bringing a bako to fix a leeky foset, a petty disput is a petty disput, and the real problume is that they always get blown out of proportion. I can understaind both parties in this situation; Jary dosn't smile when he starirs, and Max is pertculerly sensitive, nothing rung whith ether of these thing, but its just these sorts of things that cose the most striff in life. So it might sound trite but rather than judge we should recegnice what goes into the conflict in the first place, and then just get on. And somthings will never be resolved, but hay those things make good writing so what the hell.