Category Archives: History

Post-a-Day 1/2/13 – Resolutionistas

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Daily Prompt: Resolved | The Daily Post.

Have you ever made a New Year’s Resolution that you kept?

I have been quite successful in losing a lot of weight, but I didn’t really start it as a resolution. It just started when I made up my mind and took a very long while to accomplish. I went from about 300 at my heaviest to about 230 where I am now. My goal is to reach 200, but that’s taking far longer than even the first seventy pounds did to lose.

There have been other resolutions, but again, they were made because I was very tired with living some other way and just decided to change. One of the only other things I did was to stop biting my fingernails. Once I did that, they started to grow in nicely and I no longer have to hide my fingertips and be embarrassed.

I’ve found that resolutions can be made anytime and to stick to them, all you need is an effort of willpower and to make up your mind. Not waffling around helps a lot, and not backsliding into old habits.

Myers-Briggs Typological Test

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Well, the results are in, and I’m an ESFJ. Yay! 🙂

Your Type is
ESFJ
Extroverted Sensing Feeling Judging
Strength of the preferences %
1 11 44 44

Description of the ESFJ:

Guardians of birthdays, holidays and celebrations, ESFJs are generous entertainers. They enjoy and joyfully observe traditions and are liberal in giving, especially where custom prescribes.

All else being equal, ESFJs enjoy being in charge. They see problems clearly and delegate easily, work hard and play with zest. ESFJs, as do most SJs, bear strong allegiance to rights of seniority. They willingly provide service (which embodies life’s meaning) and expect the same from others.

ESFJs are easily wounded. And when wounded, their emotions will not be contained. They by nature “wear their hearts on their sleeves,” often exuding warmth and bonhomie, but not infrequently boiling over with the vexation of their souls. Some ESFJs channel these vibrant emotions into moving dramatic performances on stage and screen.

Strong, contradictory forces consume the ESFJ. Their sense of right and wrong wrestles with an overwhelming rescuing, ‘mothering’ drive. This sometimes results in swift, immediate action taken upon a transgressor, followed by stern reprimand; ultimately, however, the prodigal is wrested from the gallows of their folly, just as the noose tightens and all hope is lost, by the very executioner!

An ESFJ at odds with self is a remarkable sight. When a decision must be made, especially one involving the risk of conflict (abhorrent to ESFJs), there ensues an in-house wrestling match between the aforementioned black-and-white Values and the Nemesis of Discord. The contender pits self against self, once firmly deciding with the Right, then switching to Prudence to forestall hostilities, countered by unswerving Values, ad exhaustium, winner take all.

As caretakers, ESFJs sense danger all around–germs within, the elements without, unscrupulous malefactors, insidious character flaws. The world is a dangerous place, not to be trusted. Not that the ESFJ is paranoid; ‘hyper-vigilant’ would be more precise. And thus they serve excellently as protectors, outstanding in fields such as medical care and elementary education.

Okay Okay Okay, this does seem to fit me. It’s uncanny how plain I seem now that I’m just 4 letters. 🙂

Take the test yourself, maybe we can be fast friends or bitter enemies… Jung – Myers-Briggs typological test

Day One Migration

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My Day One Migration is moving along well. I’m grabbing low-hanging-fruit and copying in those posts from my old LiveJournal that didn’t have comments attached to them. I’ve decided to include comments as one of the most frequent commenters on my LiveJournal was my dearly departed friend Ryan. Seeing his words on my LiveJournal help bring him back to life, if only in a very small way, but they are important to me as are all the other people that I love. So far, with some original Day One entries, the copied in Notes from Facebook (Where my blogging went between LiveJournal and Day One) and LiveJournal so far I have 547 entries, spanning 327 days with items spanning back to 1999.

Once I have everything moved over in Day One then I can search more easily and look at different posts and maybe repost some things from my old LiveJournal that I think are either still relevant today or at least entertaining enough to share once again.

Knackers

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So, a secular humanist goes to Midnight Mass and the holy water basin doesn’t burst into flames. Yeah, Catholics are weird. Also, someone changed all the words, came up with really odd “Carols” and apparently Michigan Catholics are really quick on the sacraments. But I enjoyed myself. Lots of up and down. Some genuflecting, which I skipped out on. Also, a lot of fear. I reflected during midnight mass and this is what I came up with: original sin created a context of inescapable failure. We’re never good enough or ever without sin, because of this pesky sentience thing we’ve got, so in a way, since there is only fail, being rotten is kind of expected. We’re wretched and hopeless, because we’re always bad and there is never any chance to win. At all.

With the game rigged in this fashion, no amount of love, forgiveness, or (and this is the best part) mercy will ever be well spent on the awfulness that is humanity. Or at least, that’s what’s being packaged up and sold.

What if humanity was good from the get go? What if we judged ourselves when we died? What if God is in every single thing, the good and the bad. The grace and the sin. What if sin is meaningless? What if we don’t have to always be losing out? Always afraid, needing to commit blood sacrifices or cannibalism in order to assuage our guilty consciences?

Then again, that’s picking a fight with Genesis. Perhaps it’s the best thing, the most adaptive thing to leave all of this mess for the Catholics and Christians to figure out and I can go back to feeling better about myself as a secular humanist. I don’t need God. I like Jesus, think he’s a fine fellow and a knackers teacher, but that’s as far as I’m gonna go with that. I don’t have sin. Sin is stupid.

Ta-dah! I feel better already. Knackers! 🙂 Merry Christmas. 😉

Off To The Races

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Today we went back to exploring graveyards in the local area. We stopped as Weedsport Rural Cemetery with an educated guess that we’d discover some family there. My mother informed me that I should be able to find my great grandfather Charles Race there as well as my great great grandfather, Fernando Race there as well. After some wandering around we spotted the first grave. It held Fernando, Josephine, and Helen. Helen was only five years old when she died and so she was buried next to her parents. I never knew any of these people, but seeing that they buried their lost little girl right next to them started to color in the vagueness. I imagine Fernando and Josephine to be salt-to-the-earth people with huge hearts and kind dispositions. They had MANY children and when they lost one too early, they made sure she would always be with them, even in the hereafter. I had to pause and take it all in. Helen was born in 1907 and died five years later in 1912. As I paid my respects to my long dead super-great grandparents I started to look around their headstones. I immediately ran across Clinton C. Race. Clinton served in the Navy during the Korean conflict and his headstone (rightly so) proudly had his military plaque on the obverse side of his headstone marker. On his headstone he made reference to a lost brother, Leroy. Leroy was 1 month old when he died. Looking at the records of the family, Chester Race had twin boys, Charles and Leroy. Leroy didn’t survive. Chester went on to have many more children including Clinton. The kicker was, I didn’t know any of this and worse, I couldn’t prove any of it. The only real thing I had to go on was that I had a gaggle of Races all buried together, like arm-spans together. Clinton was feet from Fernando, and there was another grave for Mark Race right next to Clinton.

So I had Clinton and Mark and no way to link them, nor any way to link them to Fernando. I know that Fernando is related to me, and I suspected that Mark was Clinton’s son, but linking Clinton to anyone else? Nope. Fernando had a lot of kids, but never a Clinton. So I did some research. Ancestry.com wasn’t very useful as Clinton didn’t apparently show up on many public records, like censuses or anything like that. For hours Clinton was a lost lamb. I knew in my heart that Clinton was related to me, why would anyone with the same surname elect to be buried next to another person with the same surname? To punish future lookey-loos like me? Nah! It was a mystery. That’s a central carrot to this genealogical obsession. You know you’ve got kin but you can’t connect them up, until…

Thanks to the Fulton Historical Society, they placed a newspaper scan article on the Internet from 1964 which was an obit for Chester Race. Chester was the missing key. Fernando was Chester’s father, and brother to Charles – my maternal grandfathers father. So I was related to Chester. In Ancestry.com all I knew of Chester was that he had one girl child and that was it. Turns out I was wrong. Chester had Clinton as well! And Chester had his own Charles and with him came Leroy. That halcyon moment was so sweet and reverberated for hours. I linked Clinton Race with Chester, with Fernando, and with Charles and then Allen, to my mother and then to me. The cousin relationship is thick, but it exists! Right after that the rest of it fell into place. Clinton had two boys, Mark and Timothy. Mark was buried right next to his father. The obvious next step was to look at Mark. He was alive up until 2010, he died in an accident. Mark had two children, Rebecca and Brian.

Hungry for more discovery I started to concentrate on Mark, Timothy, Brian, and Rebecca. I know that Rebecca moved to Florida and maybe got married, so we hope a happily ever after for her, and Brian (thanks to the apple-not-falling-far-from-the-tree when it comes to looks) has some fame with him. Brian Race works for Sea Shepherd. It was a weird feeling, looking at a picture of a man who is definitely related to me, doing work I find incredibly impressive and courageous. Now, how related is he? Not really at all. We really share Fernando and that’s many generations and cousin-bridges. Is there any point to knowing about Brian Race? Probably not. But in the same way that I can claim some ancestral link to A.G. Spalding (of the baseball-and-catchers-mitts Spalding company) I can also claim a connection to Solomon Spalding, which if you are a Mormon should be a name you recognize and hiss at, like throwing holy water on a vampire. If you don’t get it, do a Google search for Solomon Spalding and Joseph Smith. It’ll be a good read, I promise. So, back to the Races – Fernando, Chester, Clinton, Mark, and then Brian. Five generations of people that connect to me.

Mark’s children, as well as Timothy (if he still draws breath) and any of the other Races, if you somehow happen to read this blog post and I am right (or even if I’m not!) about Clinton, I encourage you with all my heart to please make contact with us. I would really love to share our family tree with you and maybe help you get to know your greats and get to know them and appreciate their lives through the scraggly bits and pieces that we have collected. I don’t want to personally interfere with anyones lives, so I am going to put this message in a bottle and hurl it into the great abyss. Leave a comment or write me an email at bluedepth(at)gmail(dot)com. I’m all over, Facebook, Twitter, and WordPress. If not, no biggie.

Buddha's Fingerprints

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I was midway through “Mastering the Core Teachings of the Buddha: An Unusually Hardcore Dharma Book” by Daniel Ingram and decided that I really couldn’t finish reading that book. It wasn’t because the author or what he wrote was difficult to understand or really any concrete reason honestly, however as I was reading there was a mounting feeling that continuing to read the text would somehow damage my recent spiritual explorations. This isn’t the first book that I’ve cracked open on the subject of Buddhism, and it isn’t the last book that I have either slogged through out of some sense that if I start something I really ought to finish it or in the rarest cases, stop reading half-way through.

I’ve also run my toes through other books, most notably some core Zen books that I found free online. I didn’t really get along with Zen either as I didn’t have the chops for it. As I read along with the Zen teachings I discovered that a large part of the foundation of Zen is wound up with cults of personality and pretty hardcore physical abuse. Teachers are pseudo-deities and they are fond of beating their students to a pulp. Uh, no thanks.

So it brought me back to this book by Mr. Ingram. The writing style of the book was very conversational, very colloquial, and around page 140 or so it became exceptionally particular and rather obnoxiously dismissive. What struck me in the earlier chapters was this feeling of threat from this particular book. Not the general threat in the sense that the words were in themselves threatening, but threatening to my own spiritual development. I started to feel a kind of chafing as I was reading about how there were all these steps, and these stages and how everything was so meticulously laid out. It started to upset me, in a very deeply spiritual sense. That any random persons spiritual journey can be laid out with such rigor, such structure really repels me. That people are just machines playing back music and that the music never ever changes from person to person. I suppose I was chafing against dogma, and that dogma was of the core teachings of Buddhism which I don’t necessarily ascribe to. I’m all for the cessation of suffering and a lot of what the Buddha had to teach makes sense, but it’s one thing to see the morality as waymarkers versus seeing the morality as a pair of manacles tied to a chain and led through a machine.

It comes down to reading a buddhism book and not believing in buddhism. I suppose any book and faith could switch places. I have no interest in the Koran because I have no interest in Islam. I have no interest in the Torah because I have no interest in Judaism. And really, why exclude the 800 pound gorilla in the corner? I have no interest in the Bible because I have no interest in Christianity. The big three are stultifying. So rigid, so structured, so planned out. There is no soul in these faiths. Nothing to explore, nothing to discover. Everything is safe, paved, prepared and many of them have little rest areas in which you can get off the road and have a snack. Even as it appears Buddhism is very much like this as it turns out. Everyone reads the texts and then goes about mindlessly following because, really, what else is there? So you learn all these new words and vocabulary and you notice names that ring dim bells in the other texts you have read and over time you come to the stark realization that the author is beating around the bush and in a way, brought on a crisis of faith in a religion that I don’t believe in. For Buddhists it’s all about being and not-being, ultimately the realization of Nirvana by becoming enlightened. It’s all very important sounding but my problem is I know too much about the structure of the Universe. I have more than a passing idea about QM, Brane Theory, M-theory, String Theory, GUT, TOE, the list goes on and on. Ontology and Cosmology and, well, lets face it, I’m too smart for my own good. I’ve dabbled too much. I’ve in a way, seen too much and imagined too much. When I read about the cessation of dualities I can’t help but think of Bohm’s Implicate Order, and when I think of that I think about the potential of living in a holographic universe, which then brings up threads connected to the Everett Interpretation for QM, that each observation causes a split so that every potential possibility is realized. The raging undercurrent of all of it is, that as I read about the experiences this man, Mr. Ingram has with meditation I think about his brain. About how it processes information, so up along with this goes what I know of behaviorism, Jungian analysis, and the real thorn-patch of quantum neurodynamics. So I see all these learned sages going on and on about attaining this and that and getting teachers to teach you this and that and I find myself wondering "Don’t these people know that what they are seeking is actually extending their consciousness into the quantum foam that exists between their synaptic clefts?" And then I imagine David Bohm looking all sternly at me and giving me a ‘tsk tsk tsk’ gesture. If it wasn’t for anything else, I have Tielhard de Chardin on my shoulder like a little angel whispering in my ears about the noosphere. Perhaps Eckhard Tolle is a little devil on the other side, I haven’t made up my mind. But this is what gets me. How can anyone know what another persons spiritual path is going to be? Just because 2500 years of people all referring to each other and repeating each other lends some small credence that there is something worth exploring, there is a part of me that blanches when told that this is how it really is and that in a way I could obtain a map of what is to come and follow it.

I suppose in this sense, following a map is what dogma is all about. If you reject the map, or you don’t follow it, then you should feel bad or foolish because you aren’t doing it right. You aren’t doing it the way 2500 years of much wiser people have done it in the past. And how dare anyone buck a 2500 year tradition? Uh, well, hate to break it to you, but I’m kind of a pain in the ass if you haven’t noticed yet. I’ll ignore 2500 years of learned thinking if it means I get to explore on my own.

And so we get back to faith in a central pillar of spirituality. I knew when I lost my faith in Christianity, when I was 8 in the library of my grandmothers Presbyterian church, that my faith, that my entire spirituality would have to be formed not from things I could find to follow but made up of the experiences of my life. That the only really honest faith, the only true spiritual path I could ever know and feel any amount of strength in would have to spring up from deep within myself. I can’t hear God from without, I have to hear him (or more entertainingly, her) from within. And when I mean God, I don’t mean some objective father(mother) figure in the sky, somehow judging me as I lead my life, but really God as a handle for really what can only be regarded as my own soul. In that way I am a proud secular humanist. Secular in that I reject all faiths, humanist in that the only faith left is whatever I find when I turn my sentience inward. So in a way, coming back to this book, I had to stop reading it because it was pushing me too hard, offering a map, dogma, too strongly.

So I have questions, and the answers I seek seem at least on first glance to shimmer on the horizon like a mirage in front of the Buddhism banner, but then as I approach the mirage falls apart and I find myself wandering around again. Funny how much real human spirituality includes the notion of wandering around in a desert for a very long time. For that we can blame Moses, who apparently needed a map! Getting back to it, the best way for anyone to find, well, actually, I haven’t the foggiest idea what they should do. I know what I should do, and for me, more specifically and clearly, it’s exploration that has to continue forward without structure, without a map, without dogma. So I can’t read that book any longer.

Does that mean I will stop meditation? Absolutely not. There are answers in meditation, I just know it. I can feel it. But like everything in life, nothing comes free and easy. This pursuit will take me probably the rest of my life, but in the end I can sit back and laugh and notice that it was right all along because it was mine. True, it’s a frankensteins monster made up of things I’ve picked up from wiser men than I, but at least it’s my monster. This monster not only sings “Putting on the Ritz” very well, but also dances. I couldn’t very well leave out that reference, now could I?

This also pretty much concludes any other readings or pursuit in the direction of the banner of Buddhism for me. It’s not for me. While I respect Buddhists more than the other faiths, they all are hamstrung in the very same way. Too much structure, too much plan, too much dogma. In a way, when I ask myself “Am I doing it right?” the only honest answer is “Absolutely, because it can’t be any other way.” Now when I say I won’t follow the Buddha it doesn’t mean I won’t raid his tent for neat ideas and shiny bits. I rifled through Jesus Christ’s footlocker, I have no compunction with dashing the Buddhas tent and sorting out his goodies. It’s just, I’m drawing my own map, and I’m drawing it as I walk along, french curves, spirals and mad meandering squiggles all.

Faith is like a fingerprint. No two are alike. Dogma is meaningless because of this one central idea. How can you share what can’t be standardized? What you need is 30 kiloqualms over there. What is a kiloqualm? That’s a silly question! It’s obvious! (to me) 😉

Lepers of East Main

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Kalamazoo has a section of road that I absolutely detest. The road in question is at the foot of Eastwood Hill. It’s East Main Street as it drops with an almost twenty percent grade downhill. The reason why I hate this section of road so much is because just to the left, as you are going downhill, there is always (or at least it seems so) a cop waiting in the unused parking lot just in front of the DQ on the corner of East Main and East Michigan. What makes this road so awful and uniquely suited to attract cops? The entire downward slope is set at 25 miles per hour and the cops are very fond of detecting oncoming cars with radar and pulling them over if they were in excess of this limit.

For those that are wondering, yes, I did get caught going 35 down the hill. It’s an evil hill because to go down it at 25 you have to chew up your brakes the whole way down. This got me to thinking about alternatives to this route, heading downhill. I started to explore the local roads and discovered that if I select Humphrey Road instead of East Main to make my way downtown I have three choices to make from that point and they all have minimums of 40, except for one which doesn’t matter. If I turn on Bixby then I’m guaranteed a red-light-signal which may or may not give me clearance to make an easy left onto Gull Road and head downtown. If I don’t do that, I can run to the end of Humphrey and brave a left onto Gull from that position further along, it’s more dangerous because there is no controls on the flow of traffic on Gull Road from there. Another path I’ve found is to turn right and head into the residential areas. If I turn right on Charlotte, then I can turn left on Bridge Street and that has just one dangerous intersection. The safest path is Bixby with the light, the quickest is actually a split between the end of Humphrey and Bridge Street.

Throughout all of this it bears noticing that I never once suggest following East Main downtown. It’s just not worth the trouble. The worn out brakes, the aggressive cops and their speed traps, or the stop light that always seems to catch me at the most time-consuming parts of it’s cycle. As I traverse these roads every morning I get to thinking just how much that particular section of East Main is kind of a taboo section of road now. Nobody should use it, it should be a one-way heading away from downtown. That would eliminate the brake wear and make it that much harder for cops to set up their damned speed traps. It’s much easier to have to scale a hill starting out slow, noticing the cop, and progressing slow with an assiduous use of the accelerator pedal instead having to endure watching dollars peel off your brakes as you use them up to slow yourself down.

If anyone else who reads this blog likes this intersection, all you have to do is get caught once in the speed trap and you’ll change your tune. If the city turned the entire affair into a one-way, that also would solve the issue. One can hope.

Making Sandwiches

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I was raised with an appreciation for the simplest sandwich possible. The venerable Peanut Butter and Jelly Sandwich. It’s something that my father makes, some would say it’s the only thing he knows how to make, beyond fudge, and it’s something that I’ve just refined.

The refinement I’ve made adapts something my father does but always seemed unusual to me. He adds butter to the sandwich and as far as I can remember, he butters the side of the bread that eventually carries the peanut butter component. I’ve noticed for a long time that when I make a PB&J that the side of the sandwich that carries the jelly (or in my preference jam or preserves) always ends up being slightly soggy because the bread sucks up the water from the jelly/jam/preserves and carries that mush through, so you’ve got a dry slice and a damp slice. This makes for an okay PB&J, but it can be better. I’ve adapted my fathers use of butter to act as a water barrier on the jelly/jam/preserve side of the sandwich. By spreading a thin layer of butter on that side, you create a waterproof block against that slice of bread. After the butter, then the jelly/jam/preserves go on and you join the sandwich together. It can stay that way for a while, or at least until lunchtime and the bread isn’t damp or soggy. Plus the butter adds a little extra something to the sandwich that I like.

So if you are also fond of PB&J’s then I suggest you explore adding a little butter to the side where you spread your jelly/jam/preserves. You’ll be glad for a equally dry bread-edged sandwich.

Abandoning Google Plus

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Yesterday I opened my Google Plus page and discovered to my surprise and initial pleasure that Google had brought a new interface to their social network system. As I started to explore this new interface I started to immediately notice that things had changed not for the better, but rather for the worse. Google had unilaterally included their chat system on the right side of my browser window, it’s something I rarely ever use so that system is all wasted space. I noticed that the stories in my circles, the things I really care about are now shuffled off to the left in a column that lost 10% of space on the leftmost and 50% on the rightmost, being moved over for some controls at the very top of the page that now occupy this dreaded whitespace region on my Google Plus page.

It’s this whitespace, and the meaningless chat talker system that I can’t stand. Facebook attempted a similar move by presenting me with a chat-talker screen on the left side as well months ago, when I still used Facebook. When they made the changes to their interface, along with privacy concerns and workplace issues with social networking I left Facebook. Now it just languishes as an identity marker, if content gets on my Facebook page it’s wholly accidental. Twitter’s web page also underwent this columnar approach, as they reconfigured the entire interface out from underneath their users. For Twitter, I stopped using that because it was more noisy than useful, the people I wanted to engage with were just human billboards, and the interface changes were really the straw that broke the camel’s back.

So what is there to do? Complaints about the interface changes are really the only channel you have to express how much you dislike when a service does this to you – but you have no real power. Just complaining is one easily ignored tiny little voice in the darkness and doesn’t amount to anything at all. The only real power that any single user has is the power of choice. In the end, the only choice I have to make is, do I want to still use the system? It’s actually a matter of abandonment. I abandoned Facebook. I abandoned Twitter. Because they changed the interface and made it less useful to me, I am facing the idea of abandoning Google Plus. I don’t need these social network systems to give my life meaning. They need me, or rather, they need aggregate me’s, lots of people, to give what they do meaning. The less people use a socially networked system the less appealing that system is to everyone else. Facebook is only compelling because everyone uses it. There is no real value inherent in Facebook itself. This is a lesson that the classic business models these companies use can’t take into account – that their popularity defines their success. If they make a grossly unpopular change to the interface, then people will flee and their success will go tits up.

I don’t care to encourage other people to abandon these systems if they like them. Each of us has to make these kinds of decisions on a wholly personal level. I find it obnoxious that Google, and Facebook, and Twitter for that matter all force interface changes on users without giving the user any control whatsoever. It would be more elegant if there were a batch of controls we could select from and build our own interface. Put the bits and pieces where we want, opt out of things we don’t care for and make the interface work best for us, as the users. None of these sites have done that, they all behave as if they have global fiat to make changes willy-nilly. The end user who has to contend with these changes can’t do anything really except make that singular choice surrounding the issue of abandonment.

So where do I go now? It’s comic, but in many ways I am looking forward to going backwards. There is one system that I’ve used, mostly as a category but the people behind what I currently use I regard as being the platonic form of that category, and that is WordPress. Going back to blogging. What does the WordPress infrastructure have that attracts me? It’s got stable themes, the site looks very much like it always has. There are changes, but they aren’t as gross in scope as these other systems have perpetrated. I can share links on WordPress, I can write long posts, short status updates, and WordPress has a competent comment system already in place.

So I will give Google Plus until May 1st to do something better with their interface, to recognize the value in the stream and give us users the choice of what systems we want to see on our Google Plus page. Google should give us the ability to turn off the whitespace region, we should be able to turn off the chat talker region, so that we can maximize the stream region. If they fail to correct these glaring human interface deficits I will do to Google Plus what I did to Facebook. I will abandon Google Plus. I will keep the account running but I will no longer actively use it. Things that end up on Google Plus will end up being the same sort of things that end up washing up on Twitter, specifically links to content on my WordPress blog. Google’s loss will be WordPress’ gain. WordPress has always done right by me, and I respect them. I do not respect Twitter, nor do I respect Facebook. My respect for Google is quixotic at best. I used to believe in their “Do No Evil” company mantra, but that has been shed as Google has done some very evil acts, they aren’t what they once were and this sullying of their image makes the pending abandonment easy.

Will my abandonment hurt Google? No, of course not. I’m not so full of myself as to think that me leaving will change anything about the service, that Google will even notice my absence. However if I can inspire other people to give another look at WordPress, maybe see that progress forward can be achieved by regressing to earlier systems may be a worthy pursuit if what you get in the trade is interface stability. That this single raindrop encourages others to fall. The raindrop doesn’t believe it is responsible for the flood. I can only hope that I help the flood along. These massive changes that these social network sites perpetrate on their usership should be punished! We want it all, we want to use the service and we want to control it as well. We want the interface to be regular, logical, useful and static. When we want to make a change, we want to be the ones making it. We do not want to be victims of someones good intentions, Google! I would say this for Facebook as well, but that’s a lost cause.

So time is ticking away. If Google does not act, then the stream on that service is terminal. If that comes to pass, I will be migrating to my WordPress blog.

I hope to see some of you there.

Easter Tidings

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It’s Easter time, which is one of the very-important-so-lets-go-to-Church Christian Holidays. Many Christians, well, the good ones, have been involved with some sort of lenten fast for the past forty days and it doesn’t end until Easter Sunday, which is in two days from today.

As a used-to-be-Christian who now regards himself as somewhere between a secular humanist, a buddhist, and a neo-pagan this holiday is much like all the other Christian holidays, which is to say, a giant batch of goof in order to facilitate cultural assimilation. The big holidays for Christians are Christmas and Easter. The birth and death and resurrection of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. Now, Christmas has it’s own special sort of silliness. We chop down trees and dress them with baubles and we have figures that occupy popular consciousness and the “Baby Jesus” only appears as a sideline player in that yearly conflagration of economic stimulus and material goodwill. The other holiday, the one we are adjacent to now, is Easter. Once again we have a cultural hodgepodge of really goofy things all colliding at the same time. At the core of it should be, but isn’t, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. I’ll get to the silliness of that later on, but bear with me. The holiday is supposed to be solemn with a celebration of this one mans ability to somehow pop back to life after being dead and through resurrection cleansing our sins in the eyes of God. Except none of that matters. Children don’t give a flying rip about Jesus Christ, he’s just a suave white guy (usually) who appears in quickly flashed artistic impressions of historical events and kids just get a general sense about all the hocus-pocus behind it all and just shrug because for a child the notion of death and resurrection are meaningless concepts. To Children, summer lasts forever and nobody dies. What kids associate with the holiday is the exact core of what the Christians tried to subvert by laying their tripartite-dead-notdead-heavy_mystery_time-God on top of pagan rituals. Like Eostre. A pagan germanic tradition that occurs in April and involves candy, rabbits, brightly colored eggs, and a host of deities from faiths that Christians find distasteful, like Eostre herself, a goddess, or Freyja, a teutonic goddess. So, in order to culturally assimilate the unwashed barbaric hordes you don’t try to kill them off en-masse, instead you co-opt their rituals and you pretend that it’s always been this way. You get to their children and before you know it, after a few generations come and go, the entire backstory has been whitewashed and a new narrative has been put in it’s place. The problem with whitewashing an old narrative is that it quite often hangs around. People still do the same things even if they don’t really know why any longer. So Christians assemble (like the pagans), they celebrate Easter (the pagans celebrate Eostre! Wait, it’s so close!), people assemble Easter Baskets full of candy, dyed eggs, fake plastic grass and a host of rabbit icons… holy crap. We’ve fallen completely off the Christian wagon kids! This is all dirty no-good filthy pagan crap! Where did Jesus go, we misplaced him, oops. But at the end, after all the egg-hunts and eating of chocolate rabbits, which, I must say is about as pagan as you can get, turning an icon into something edible and sweet, BOGGLE… and then to eat an Easter Ham, which I think is a really mean thing that Christians do as Jesus was a Jew and !@#$ KOSHER and last I checked PIG WAS NOT KOSHER oh whatever. After Easter dinner then everyone gets in their finery and toddles off to Church. Then and only then do we get heaping helpings of the steaming pile of Jesus Christ narrative. It’s a lot like Jesus Christ the cannon, being packed with Jesus Christ grapeshot and aimed at the belching rabbit-icon-eating/pig-eating/non-kosher horde of barbarians and fired with magical Jesus Christ gunpowder of guilt.

Even the timing of the holiday is annoyingly pagan. The Christians really don’t get how to whitewash and properly murder and cannibalize mythic narratives. They establish that Easter is the Sunday closest to the first full moon after the vernal equinox! What the HELL does the vernal equinox or the !@#$ MOON have to do with Jesus Christ? Huh!?! Oh wake up! It’s got nothing to do at all, it’s just a bunch of confused old men trying to retain control on what amounts to being an uncontrollable herd of sweaty messy barbarians. When you go to Church next, look around. Now imagine what it looked like 1600 to 1800 years ago. Never mind, it’s the same thing, only now you all think it’s true and believe and that’s really all that matters. You’ve bought the Christians cart of goods that they have for sale, but you still do quintessentially pagan things! If belief gives godlings life, then Krampus, Santa Claus, and Eostre are very much alive and well. Keep being good, keep eating rabbit icons, and keep on futzing about with dyed eggs! Eostre needs all your belief energy to even stand up to Big Daddy, JC, and the Spook.

Speaking of dead things coming back to life, the resurrection itself. What a monumental pile of hocus-pocus if I’ve ever seen it. We have never seen anyone go from well and truly dead to alive all on their own, except for once, 2000 years ago. Sure. What’s more plausible? That Jesus Christ died, went through hell, and then was resurrected, OR that he was nailed to a cross as a form of capital punishment, where he lapsed into a coma from exposure, malnutrition, and poor hydration then when “dead” hauled off the cross and then laid in state. Then after recovering from being in a coma, got up and wandered off?!? What if that was really what happened?

So Christians elect to believe that a dead man suddenly popped back to life and then they see the miracle of that and then tacitly agree to suspend all rational thought thereafter. Accept it, it’s the word of God. Accept it, it’s in the scriptures. Accept it, you have to if you believe. Accept it, or you’ll be a sinner.

Get off the collective cross, we need the wood.

So, enjoy the Easter fantasy. The pagan rituals you still perform without knowing why. Still buy into the narrative sold to you by the Christians and never feel any hint of awkwardness that you’ve suspended your own rational thoughts and given control of your actions over to old men who don’t even notice your existence. It sounds so silly, but, there it is.

And people wonder why we haven’t been visited by aliens or have mastered space travel. If you were an advanced alien culture, and you saw the kind of hocus-pocus that we humans readily believe in, would you elect to just do nothing or would you watch us very carefully to make sure we never leave the third planet from this unremarkable star on the edge of a very unremarkable galaxy?

So embarrassing. We aren’t ready, at this rate we won’t ever be ready. Not really.