What Peeves You?
On the flip-side - what do you want?
Is America Boiling Over? Let’s Wonder Why
Our political atmosphere is a toxic-caustic hurricane of noxious name-calling. Our pop-culture a fetishized photo-op of fantastical fakery. Our institutions are ossified offices filled with fossilized octogenarians orchestrating official anarchy.
The human capacity to be simultaneously righteously outraged while being blissfully offensive seems only to grow in modern times. Is the ability to find fault in all things an inborn trait? Or is it learned behavior?
Is it merely human nature to bitch and moan about shit and then whine like a baby and get pissed off and treat others like the same shit you’re bitching about? I remember a married boss of mine who had an affair with his married secretary.
After messy divorces, they married each other. Two years later, he was calling her a cheating bitch, after she left him for a wealthier married man. Yeah, we didn’t see that coming, did we? So what drives that? Why humans cannot rationally comprehend irrational behaviour is a driving force in our evolution. Philosophy and Religion be damned!
We usually treat others to the degree that we treat ourselves. We project onto others what we want of ourselves. We highlight the faults in others because we’re familiar with them in ourselves. Takes one to know one right?
How then, and when, do we realize that so many of the issues that we suffer from or with or through are wreaking havoc in others’ lives as well? Yet, as we always put our own misery first, our collective recovery is too far into the future for me to see. I grow one day at a time, and welcome others that experience growth on a scale of their own choosing. How do you grow?
My good friend Valentina Petrova dropped a post this week that touched upon this weirdness we have. We’re all hitting the notes and banging the same drum when it comes to taking stock and determining where you are instead of wishing where you want to be.
Describing a real-life convo that I’ve heard countless times living in SoCal
Living on the Central Coast of California, I often hear people say, "We live in paradise," only to listen to them a few sentences later complain that everything is too expensive, people are rude, the local bureaucracy sucks, the neighbor is building a house obscuring the view, roads have too many potholes, people don't pick up their dog poop, the homeless make a huge mess in the middle of town, local supermarkets carry inferior produce, this is not a place for foodies, the night life leaves much to be desired, parking got too expensive, trying to build a house requires too many expensive permits and too much time, water bills break the bank, trash prices tripled, the fog makes people depressed, not enough rain, too much rain, the fires got right up to the edge of town last year, we flooded the year before, we could use a better police department, local politics annoy everyone, too many tourists on weekends, unaffordable rents and homes, too many bad drivers, bad cell phone reception, trash on the beaches, too many birds living in the trees and pooping on the cars parked underneath, healthcare is worse than in a third world country with people dying while waiting for an appointment to see a doctor, on and on. Basically, I wonder what exactly makes this place a paradise.
All we do is bitch about things. And people. And feelings. Pretty much everything really. This phenomenon has aroused the ire of many here on Substack and is driving some posts I’ve read today.
If you haven’t read this dude, you should. He pisses a lot of people off, including me, with some of the shit he says. But then, I like getting pissed off. It makes me feel alive. Wait. What. Just giving an example of the topic.
Warning: Call it a trigger at your own risk. Let’s just do a breakdown of the platform name - three words. Brevity-check. A= singular (one view); Convict’s= truth (never an inmate); Perspective= street corner (his story-not yours)
The first thing I read this morning with my coffee was this post, which I thought quite apropos, being St. Patrick’s Day on a Sunday. The turtle title titillated my early morning interest. On top of that, the dude that writes it calls himself a Polymathic Being, so I had to check it out.
By the way, if you don’t know the term, it basically means Jack of All Trades, but for geeky-smart people. This guy talks about main-frames and system-processing like I talk about splitting lobsters and slaughtering hogs. Same taco, different salsa, I guess.
Speaking of Polymathic Beings, another of my Sunday St. Paddy reading included this gem - both for subject and content. There is not enough written about this icon of alienography that speaks to Spock’s inherent genetic understanding of Human nature yet his Vulcan control over it.
Mr. Spock’s story is one of human intuition interpreted by logical alien. All in one being. Spock had something for everyone. He was human enough to be accepted, and alien enough to be exotic.
Spock’s iconography reveals our longing for more than acceptance. We crave love. Check out how Spock disobeys orders here. Shameful. Except that it isn’t.
Captain Kirk and Lt. Uhura had those Enterprise-sized expectations and human foibles that led to the first inter-racial kiss on TV.
Watching Terminator yesterday while vacuuming the carpet in my bedroom created such a gulf across belief systems. We live in the apocalyptic future because we are creating it. The 80-year-old today has time-traveled from prehistoric times into now.
The 50-year-old today has time-traveled from medieval times into now. The under-50s have not time-traveled. They’re living in now. When we think about the end of the world, we realize that we’ve been thinking about it at least since 1984.
Never forgetting the moment we live in and the time it takes to tend to oneself. That in and of itself should be recognized and valued, because it’s what makes functional human beings.
Our domain, as Humans, is and will change profoundly by the time Substack turns 20. That is one harsh pill to swallow. All we have is humanity at the end.
“It's not your job to like me - it's mine”
So says this lady with a hard-scrabble backstory to lend cred to her street-corner observations. She also said this, which made me just sit back and say WTF - she knows her shit.
I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn't believe them, I didn't suffer, and that this is true for every human being. Freedom is as simple as that. I found that suffering is optional. I found a joy within me that has never disappeared, not for a single moment.
I compiled this playlist to celebrate God basically. Whatever you think God is, that’s cool. It really is. The end of the world will look a lot like a bad prison. The advantage goes to people that have experience in that realm. Let’s say our prayers now.
You know how much I love you people. Let’s just get our shit together, ok?
Ric
I guess we've been thinking along the same lines! Must be something in the California air. Don't forget, Nostradamus was thinking about the end of the world and it was before 1984 :) Just saying, we humans might be predisposed to catastrophising. Me included. LOL.
I love the honest assessment! (both in general and about Polymathic Being) We do get stuck in a rut a lot.