LOST Auction – Hurley’s lottery balls and winning ticket

I wouldn’t want to be on any game show. First off, the camera adds weight, and in my case I would look like Jabba the Hutt. Very bad. Secondly, no matter what you win you will have to face a IRS agent right after you walk off the set and have to pay taxes on whatever you win. So, “Yay! I won a car!” “Hello, we’ll need $1700 now.” It’s just not worth it.

In addition to that, there is the general idea that nothing in life is truly free. If you win something, then you are the product being sold. It’s filthy business and I want to have nothing of it. Plus there is the law of found money. You go on “The Price Is Right” and win the entire showcase package, then someone in your family contracts creeping entropy rot, your house burns to the ground, your car’s engine cracks in half and suddenly you are facing an IRS audit going back 20 years. The price to get out from all of that? The exact money you “won” on the show. No matter what you do, life is a zero sum game.

The real winner is the one who does not play.

George Carlin

My sense of humor is one of my most beloved traits. Laughter is a shield that protects all the soft squishy bits inside from being hurt by the utter craziness of the world that surrounds us.

My comedy inspirations are first and foremost George Carlin, followed up by a motley crew of other standup comedians who all approach comedy in different ways. From Jeff Dunham’s comic ventriloquism to Bob Saget’s blue-as-blue-can-be rendition of The Aristocrats. Nothing is verboten, nothing is censored, and there is a reason why we laugh at what we do even if on the surface it could make us feel very ashamed if we were asked in as sober a way, why did you laugh at something.

Laughter lightens the mood, brightens a space. It also can help people cope with uncomfortable realities and when it comes to satire, it is a vital channel of real information that otherwise would not be allowed to spread. Everything from dead baby jokes, you your-momma jokes all the way up to challenger-disaster jokes and dahmer-cannibalism jokes are all a part of this. Whenever we are confronted with something beyond our immediate ability to cope, laughter can rush in and help relieve tension and help people climb the tall slope of coping to help them get over whatever it is that they have to get over. There are only a few things that usually don’t have any jokes that surround them, foremost on my mind is a dearth of Holocaust jokes. There are some things that you simply cannot comprehend and even humor is powerless to help you even scrabble at the rockface of that steep coping cliff. What laughter can’t heal, time has to bury.

As for Satire, it’s vital in any working democracy. I would argue that Satire is vital even in working monarchies as ancient courts would always have the King, a Queen, and the Jester (or Fool) who would make satirical comments to the King and help check himself. Here I have to tip my hat to the two biggest names in political satire currently in popular culture and media, that being Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. It is important to be on top of world events and read the news, but I would argue that it’s even more important to listen to the Jester. Regard the satirist and listen to what he has to say. As Jon Stewart is fond of saying, The Daily Show isn’t a news program, it’s just a comedy show and he’s just a comedic monkey. If that’s how we sees himself, that’s his prerogative, however I for one regard The Daily Show as a true source of both entertainment and news. The Jester is so important to the health of the kingdom that it’s often wise to listen to him when you can get the chance. What makes you laugh, then makes you think.

Laughter is that one thing that can stave off a half-living banal death. We all carry around within ourselves a bundle of fireworks, or lightning bugs, or any number of other metaphors for the brightness and creativity of life. It’s when people stop laughing, stop seeking out the funny, that’s when they suffer that most unfortunate mini-death and then end up being cheerless machines trudging through the mechanics of life. Some people suffer this mean fate and all they have to rely on at that point is their weepy faith. At least in my opinion, it’s far better to retain as much brightness as you can and try to kindle it in others so that nobody has to end up having their faith as the only saving grace in their lives. Laughter is too important to allow it to be extinguished, even if you have to make people laugh at your expense – it’s worth it in the end.

Art: watercolour 2009:…light of a dream…or hope for a new love…

I’ve got very different ideas when it comes to consciousness, unconsciousness, and even leading into sentience itself. I see the brain being a part of the body, and because of that the brain is just another part of the machine. It’s responsibilities include survival and satisfaction of biological drives. Anything beyond those things, such as imagination, consciousness, sentience, and ontology are on the other side of the divide, a matter of the actual spirit itself.

It’s important to first state that I fully believe that the ‘spirit’ is actually a quantum-fluctuate-mediated expression of a universe-spanning holographic existence. Everything that people consider a part of the spirit or soul is actually the shine from this universe-sized hologram, we are in a way, actually and quite literally a function of the fabric of existence itself. Our souls have always been here, always done these things, and in this structural framework, God isn’t some father-figure in the clouds, he/she is instead all of us put together, I see God in terms such as “existence” or “Light”. God is all of us. The good, the bad, and the ugly, all summed up and even more. Our brains are complicated enough to ‘tune’ in on the quantum-fluctua that is a part of our spirits and when we are conscious the tuning is locked. We are occupied with living concerns, living, loving, eating, breeding, plotting, thinking. When we slip into unconsciousness we return to our spiritual holographic and quantum-fluctua based nativity. We in a way, each night, when we dream, return to a kind of spiritual collective, re-merge with the Godhead that we all ache to return to. This detachment from the biological allows us to access a greater existence than we possibly could if we had just a plain biologically based existence. That’s why time doesn’t exist in dreams, that’s why we can see the future, revisit the past, or have completely alien experiences while in the dream-state. Time only really exists for the material parts of us, the spiritual parts of us are timeless. That is why death holds no sway over us, because each night we taste it with our unconsciousness, we continue on after the body stops working. When we die, we see the Light, we see the glow from all the infinite existences on the other side of the tunnel. Dreaming allows us to day-trip to the Light without becoming lost within it.

It is the dream that gives us an advantage that we can haul back with us through the gates of unconsciousness as our experiences can color how we form memories in our biological existence. That’s why sometimes you feel that oddness of deja-vu, that somehow you are remembering the future. You are, you glimpsed it through your dreaming and carried it back with you. I also believe that it is in dreaming that we can get back in touch with our fate. Humanity is both fate-bound and blessed with free-will. But that is a whole different discussion that goes way beyond dreaming itself.

Red or blue?

I have two half-siblings. Whenever I describe my family and mention that I have a half-brother and a half-sister that always brings on the same odd head tilt that you usually see in dogs when they hear a high-pitched sound, in the faces of people I’m describing my family system to. Once we get beyond the baroo and explain how my siblings were first on the scene with one father and I with a different father the baroo naturally goes away on its own.

I love my siblings, whether they are aware of it or not. I often times think that the natural balance is off, my sister expresses her feelings much more easily than my brother does. Despite some technological hurdles I speak to my sister most of all in my entire family. She was born under the sign of Taurus and that stubbornness is absolutely implacable. Just try to ignore her phone calls! I don’t unless I’m driving or I’m otherwise preoccupied. Where my sister is very connected (and which I feel is a very good thing for her to be) my brother is just the opposite. I believe I last talked to him at the last funeral we all attended. Does this bother me? No. It used to, but then I grew up. Part of having family is being there even if they can’t or won’t, and in so many ways, being there despite their best efforts to encourage it any other way. I could of course saunter in and become a totally unbearable pain in the ass, but over time I’ve learned that if people are to change that it has to spring from within, it can’t be imposed from without.

Life goes on. Wether your siblings are totally absent or so present that they’ve got a lemonade stand in your head you can’t really ever escape them. Even if you are so upset that you want to hold a grudge, eventually instincts win out and you find yourself unable to escape these people. It’s as it should be. The only sorry part of any of this is the shame in missing out on how special and wonderful your family can be in the here and now. Assuming that they’ll always be there, seeing them as immortal is just a fantasy we use to chase away the fact that death will eventually come for all of us and all of them. It seems a squandering to not try to embrace them and all their obnoxious spiny-selfness.

Imagination of a Lucid Dreamer

It’s a commercial bonanza. Who really celebrates it? Catholics could, I suppose. It’s technically a Saints feast day, one would presume for a Saint Valentine. I’m not Catholic, I’m not really even Christian so I while I appreciate the message and whats behind it, I can’t help but grimace at the sheer commercialism of it all. I suppose you could have your cake and eat it too if you approached St. Valentines day the way that children do. They get some rough construction paper and some craft supplies and they MAKE something from their heart. I’m a sucker for emotional symbols like that and anything you make from your heart is more authentic and beautiful than something you pick up at a Walgreens.

I wish more people would take the core message and break out the paper, scissors, markers, crayons, glue and glitter and let their inner child out to play for a little while. I think it would be incredibly therapeutic and help break the banal frost that tends to surround most adults. They deny their inner child, keep them jailed deep down and they end up turning into dull gray husks.

In addition to St. Valentines Day, we really need a day to celebrate all the things we lost when we “grew up”. A day devoted to immaturity, mischief, play, irrationality, and imagination. A day at work when skipping down the hall isn’t seen as a mark of poor mental health. People need to get back in touch with their younger selves, to revel in the timelessness that you all remember from your childhood. To ring up your imaginary friends and let them know you haven’t totally forgotten about them.