Some Of The Best Things Come When You Are Dancing

I felt inspired, and wrote quite a lot of material and I think it’s a great idea to share some of it with you all. It’s a series of statements I made from everything that I have learned and witnessed as a . As with tarot readings and other intuitive writings, at the very best, simply take what resonates with you and leave the rest. If it doesn’t resonate with you, I invite you to move on, this isn’t for you. None of this is for everyone, there aren’t any “new rules” here. These are presented as I wrote them, blocks of text, some of the prompts are responses and I’ve maintained the privacy of those folks out of common respect. Anyhow, on with the show…

A kind note, I use a lot of movie and GenX Saturday Cartoon metaphors in these writings, if you don’t know what I’m referring to, watching the referenced movies and cartoons might help.

“And all of these things are just “permission slips”, like all the rest of the rituals and beliefs that humans have. You can do all of it without the permission slips of whatever you are doing, all the cruft that surrounds the woo-woo. You can just do it, directly, without the getup and pageantry. People just use the getup because they think they need it, they believe it will work, and in a way, it’s kind of a placebo effect. If you believe it will work, it will. You don’t need it, but your ego does, because it just can’t believe that any one person has such power. Part of the poisoning of belief in your head. How much of what is in your thoughts isn’t yours. It’s someone else’s baggage. So you pick it up, like the Japanese husband in Airplane 2, just having one more camera slung around his neck by his doting wife, until he topples.”

“The getup works even in Christian traditions. You go to church, you pray to God, you tithe, all of it… all slips. Ways to get what you want because you were told that was the guardrails of existence, it’s how everyone does it, it’s how we all do it. It’s normal do this, this way. But it is all the same. Prayer in Church, a circle cast with an Athame for a high pagan ritual, putting Officer Howie in a Wicker Man and setting him on fire. It’s all just permission slips to clear some artificial hurdle you were told exists. You do the thing, and the universe responds accordingly. The same for a religious zealot as it is with someone in a New Age shop buying a Cassanova Candle for true love. LOL. It’s all the fucking same thing. How we all channel the power we all have but were never taught how to use.”

“And then taught that we are inconsequential little sprockets, individually as effective as a firefly in a meadow. Inconsequential, powerless, just a floating nothing, a wisp just transiting the void. Except, there’s that awareness deep down. The thing that the thoughts adore deep within you. Which then leads to the idea that thoughts are pollution, filling your head, robbing your attention and your awareness. I often times think about the double-slit experiment when I’m considering the power of human awareness. If we don’t attend, the experiment displays wave diffraction. If we move our awareness onto it, it suddenly bellyflops over to particles. Heh, I did this when I was a kid, maybe late teen years. I had three plastic light polarization filters, longitudinal polarizers. Set up a flashlight, shine it through a polarizer, dimmer light comes out the other side. Then position a contrary polarizer beyond that, and there is no light at all. Smiling and nodding, makes all the logical sense in the world. Then put another polarizer in any orientation in between and poof, light flows through all the polarizers. So you have a paddock full of chickens, put up a single fence and only some of the chickens get through it, set up the other side, and no chickens get through it. Put a third fence in the way, and now chickens can get through all of it. LOL.”

“So anyways, if our awareness can do that, amongst all the other neat things, like how awareness can alter how water crystallizes, and you have all this very subtle effect and all you do is just sit and observe. That’s your bit, that’s what you bring to the party. That awareness changes reality on a teeny tiny level. And we stand around, absolutely cocksure that we’re helpless little fireflies in that grassy meadow. The fuck we are. But we never figured out how to train ourselves to USE our awareness in any manner, so it went into an atrophy state, and we live our entire lives with vast untapped reserves of power because we were taught we are individually powerless little nothings and we let that belief just sit there, ruling us, thinking there is nothing to it because it’s “normal” and nobody ever displays anything truly amazing or bombastic, so obviously it’s the truth, we’re helpless, because look… nobody can! Heh, but can they? ;)”

“How much effort is put in, before they figure they did enough, link their caboose to the train of Hope and figure, hey, I gave it a love-nudge, obviously that was enough to get the engine chugging along, toot toot! Here we go! …. why aren’t we moving? ;)”

“Like why positive thinking really can’t make a dent. Positive thinking is sweet wine, it can do incredible amazing things. So you have a lifetime of despair and thinking-of-yourself-as-powerless, filling your cask with sludge and bullshit. Then, years of collecting this sludge and suddenly you stop and decide to pour in some of that positivity. A few drops of sweet wine in a cask of sludge. WHY IS THIS CASK NOT ALL SWEET WINE.”

“Yeah, pretty much. The constant drumbeat is still present… “You are not to ask how.” which is sooooo pregnant a statement coming from the great beyond. Don’t ask how. Okay. It sort of begs the question of why. What does the ignorance of how impact everything else? It feels like it leads to “don’t ask how, you won’t believe it anyways…”

“A lesson I found really speaks to this. A rather lovely presentation that links hardcore physics with the metaphysical art of manifestation. We all know that empty space is not empty, it’s frothy with virtual particle pairs, blipping in and out of existence all by themselves, so this level is wild and rich, but also has zero energy, because all the positive and negative particles created all tally up to zero. So in walks human awareness, thoughts and emotions plenty, and as the lesson goes, your thoughts create a empty structure in this quantum space, like an empty Energon cube, borrowing a metaphor from the Transformers, and then your feelings and emotions are a box of crayons, adding color, style, and actual “mass” to this empty “Energon Cube” until it fills up completely, then you pivot, and you draw this thought linked with feelings and pull it closer to you, lavishing it with attention and rehearsal and repetition. Do it enough, and supposedly, the Universe will render it for you, start the wheels turning, acting in the deep backstage, and the whole while, “Don’t ask how!” and… boom… you get what you created.”

“The trick of it is, sometimes you exercise your power by lavishing your attention on something, and sometimes you exercise your power by utterly ignoring something. HAHAHA Aaaaaand in walks so many Zen teachings I can’t even. “Do without doing, standing at the gateless gateway.”

“And you can see it happen for real. Countless stories of a small group of passionate meditators all sitting and lavishing their attention and awareness on peace and love, and then the city crime rate drops like a fucking stone. Inexplicably. Over and over and over again. Heh, crime, frozen water, stupid flashlights and plastic polarizers, yeah, we’re ineffectual little fireflies just floating around a meadow, totally inconsequential. Hah. And this is the shit we’re doing with all this atrophy. What could we do if we actually had a handle on any of it?”

“Just makes me wonder, if we all got together and agreed to manifest a world without all the ugly in it, really poured our hearts and minds into it… all the unlikely events that could pour out of such an endeavor humbles the mind. Imagining a world where we are all living in peace and harmony, manifesting it all, the more you exercise this part of yourself, the more effect you’ll have. Not even looking for results, but having such an outsized effect. LOL. And here’s the on-ramp to unity… the function of the dark in our world is to sow fear, uncertainty, and doubt across each of us, so we don’t unify. We don’t come together, we stay separate, little islands of light, flickering and doubting itself, easily cowed, easily controlled. Easy to manipulate for whatever ends you like. Fear is what keeps us all from unity, so if we simply elect to fuck fear, maybe through the LItany Against Fear maybe, a little handy saying that can remind us about the nightmare fuel that fear is and what it is doing to us all – if we could just get past it, and come together with one unified passion… All those little teeny lights all joining up, aligning with each other, crests matching crests, troughs matching troughs, amplification. Enough collective power, perhaps, to fucking change reality itself. Warping the past, changing histories, fingerpainting the future. We see many mandela effects, the past is a patchwork quilt that is constantly fading in and out of truth and existence.”

C2E2: Movies EVERYONE Disagrees With You On

This movie panel is jammed packed. It’s a Q&A and the fans flocked to the open Mic. Like half the room got up and went to stand in line.

1941, X-Men: The Last Stand, Spiderman 3, La La Land, Thor Ragnarok, Santa Claus : The Movie, Oceans 11, You Dont Mess With The Zohan, Logan, Alien 3, Fantastic Four, Where The Wild Things Are, Greatest Showman, Batman v Superman, Murder Party, Lion King, Up, Hudson Hawk.

Lots of groans, hilarious!

New York City Boy

Aside

Tonight’s dreams were sponsored by a blend of La La Land, a free ranging musical where strange behavior and boundless physical endurance meet a totally romanticized New York City where there is traffic where traffic is romantic and piers providing perfect picturesque vistas of the cityscape that obviously do not exist. Complete with the background orchestra that provides the structure for the dancing, running, and singing. And nobody is a fat tubby bitch who runs out of gas in the first ten minutes and can’t get past midtown without an oxygen tank and a blintz. Oy Gevalt.

Good Omens

https://www.reddit.com/comments/axv3go/only_this_unlikely_duo_can_stop_doomsday_good/

Here is a link to a trailer for a Good Omens. It’s one of my all time favorite books by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. If you haven’t read it, YOU REALLY SHOULD. I can’t wait for this series to come out! It’s on Amazon Prime, so thankfully I can watch it on a borrowed Prime account.

David Tennant as Crowley. I love it!

Captain Marvel

Aside

We went to the fan special release tonight of Captain Marvel. We thought it was standard, but Scott and his eagle eyes caught that it was Real3D. The movie is quite good, standard comic book fare. Fury and Marvel had great chemistry. Annette Benning did a marvelous job in her part, and Goose the Cat damn near stole the show. This one was a four out of five, for me. It was evenly paced and not a lot of shocks or surprises really. Mostly a bunch of “Ah” and “okay…”

The First Purge

The First Purge was an ok movie, kind of blunt and chunky. The plot was a ice-cream truck, you could hear its sing-song tune from miles away.
 
Pretty spot on themes, like ripped from the headline themes. America post Nero the Pigfucker, circling the drain, and what comes of that. Funny how they got a doughy-faced actor who bears an uncanny resemblance to Tucker Carlson to play the role of the political slimeball.
 
There is a bit of a conversation piece to the movie as well, a showcase for what could be a natural consequence/sink for trickle-down economics. Beyond all the gunplay and stabbing, it ties off trickle-down economics with a possible solution, especially trickle-down with the current seasoning of kleptocracy that we have now.
 
Reverse Robin Hood, steal from the poor, give to the rich, while the discontent grows in the poor class, they are too uneducated and dim to understand where their anger should be directed, so it just floats about like an aimless fog. Then you have the premise of Purge Culture thrown on top, an ignition and a tacit approval of lawlessness for one night. It’s almost downright poetic, after trickle-down economics strangles the economy and creates an immense sea of angry poor people, the 99%, encourage them to kill each other in one night of Purge.
 
The movie franchise itself doesn’t really stab at this, it only hints at it. Much like a lot of other things in our world, folk don’t really think it is that bad, because how could it? That’s not what America is. Until you trip and fall off the edge and catch glimpses that not only is it as bad as you feared, but it is much worse and much more pervasive and inescapable. In some ways, we are actually already past the drain-hole and heading down the pipe, we just don’t really get it yet.
 
With these movies, the culture is expressing this novelty, so it is a part of our common cultural discourse now. The media plays for us like a magic mirror, showing us aspects of ourselves in many different ways. You can see it in movies, like this franchise, as well as in popular news media with the monomaniacal passion for equal time and balance. There is good and bad in every story, good and bad with everyone, and a heaping pile of bad requires at least lip-service to something good, even  if it must be ginned up to get it over the hurdle.
I don’t really think we’ll ever have a purge culture, but it is fascinating to watch the magic mirror play this out for us as it does.

PAD May 3 2013 – Its a text, text, text world

How do you communicate differently online than in person, if at all? How do you communicate emotion and intent in a purely written medium?

Each medium has it’s own benefits and vulnerabilities. You can’t communicate the same way from one medium to another. When I’m online I find myself preferring email, iMessage/SMS, and Instant Message because you cannot beat the signal to noise ratio of text. When I’m using my cell phone, I prefer to only communicate over iMessage/SMS because the carrier I’m using, Sprint, has a terrible record of dropped calls and rather poor voice quality. Plus text eschews much of the wrappings of verbal communication, there is no need to preamble and no need for closure statements to indicate communications have concluded, usually. Generally, face to face conversations vary between formal and informal, and I have found that elaboration and clarity excel in formal face to face communications but are annoying in informal senses. When it comes to capturing backchannel cues and extended emotional content in media that doesn’t really have a good capacity to carry that information a wonderful shortcut is the cinema. I have found that it’s quite handy to refer to a common corpus of movies in which quoting scenes can convey everything from mood, through atmosphere, including sense and quite often, the message itself. The only issue is establishing that cinematic common corpus that those that communicate with me need to make sense of some of the shorthand phrases that I use to carry backchannel messages.

What movies? There are so many. Off the top of my head, pretty much anything Disney has produced because it’s ubiquitous. Comedies are rich with great scenes and raw material and I find myself referring to the classics such as Airplane!, Clue, Noises Off, Planes-Trains-and-Automobiles, Transylvania 6-5000, and the entire oeuvre of Mel Brooks, such as Young Frankenstein and Blazing Saddles. Also, worth mentioning is a classic comedy, The Kentucky Fried Movie. There are also other movies that lend detail and depth that aren’t really comedies, such as “Love, Actually.” and “Serendipity”. Then of course scifi movies like Serenity, the Alien series of movies, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Generally, since I keep much of this for the informal channel of communication the people who need to understand this corpus have likely seen these movies several times, likely with us.

PAD April 28 2013 – Cringe Worthy

Do you feel uncomfortable when you see someone else being embarrassed? What’s most likely to make you squirm?

There is two distinct levels of cringe. The first is rather quite pleasant and that is Schadenfreude. When someone gets what they have coming to them, usually in spades, it’s actually a delight. Few things are finer than being witness to a hearty comeuppance.

The second form, which I’ve witnessed in romantic comedies and certain other dark-humor comedies tends to trot out the agony and the awkwardness and projects it in full fidelity right into you. It’s unpleasant and usually breaks the comedic force that it was trying to carry. Movies like Bridesmaids and anything starring Will Ferrell pretty much fall into this category. At first it comes across as foolish and sophomoric and then quickly dissolves into cringe squick. If I can avoid witnessing this second form, I’ll take the opportunity.

Blazing Bright

Does the collision of beauty, attention, drugs and promiscuity always lead to suicide?

This was a question that came to me after reading a few reports in the news about adult entertainers who were committing suicide. I’m not sure if it is that their suicides are remarkable or rather that sensationalist reporting is to blame for concentrating the reports in the popular media. It seems to be a common thread in the adult entertainment industry. That people who appear to have everything have personal wreckage that they are carrying around and eventually they just can’t cope with what is unfolding in their lives and they shoot or hang themselves.

If its a natural extension of their lifestyles, an extension of the Hollywood dysfunction, where fame, power, money, attractiveness, and drugs collide in ruined lives then this post is just a subset of that, but to me it seems that this sort of thing appears to happen to adult entertainers with remarkable regularity.

I suppose the adage of the candle that burns twice as brightly lasts half as long. In it may be a lesson against the Adonis complex. Working so very hard to look like the people you see in the movies or on TV (or in more prurient forms of entertainment) is actually one more thing that is, in the end, bad for you. The best way to be is to be who you are. Don’t try to be like anyone else, just be the best you that you can be. If that best you carries around weight, or some other not-in-the-ideal characteristic it is likely best to celebrate that feature of yourself. If the Hollywood “clone machine” is any lesson, when you get what you think it is that you want, you find that it’s actually nothing and eventually that makes you sad. Does it lead to suicide? Probably not, but it probably isn’t good for you either.

This gets me thinking that fame should be listed as a negative life event, kind of like a self-defeating Trojan Horse. It looks good on the outside, but it’s jammed with disaster on the inside. Perhaps the feelings of “not being enough” is a healthy warning against the false gold of the object of your pursuit.

Iron Man 3

Last night Scott and I went to see Iron Man 3. The movie was a nice summer movie that came out too early. It should have been released in June or July. Generally the best part of the movie was the time spent in the dialogue between Tony Stark and the kid was the best section of that movie.

The movie was okay, it wasn’t as good as the first two movies and it squandered the Mandarin character. Sir Ben Kingsley was pretty much wasted in the role of the Mandarin, and casting the Mandarin as a shill ruins the central tale behind Iron Man. Tony’s primary battles are alcoholism, his relationship with his father, Pepper Potts, and on a grand scale the battle between Technology and Magic. The Mandarin is supposed to be in command of supernatural powers provided to him by the Rings of Makulan. Tony is the expression of humanity wielding Technology and the central story is this battle between the supernatural and the technological. This movie also trots out Extremis. The comic books and the Iron Man Anime forged a canon that Extremis was a tool for Tony to use to bridge the gap between the organic and inorganic so that Tony could be on-par with his technology as much as the Mandarin is on-par with his magic.

The movie pretty much squashed Extremis as a sideline curiosity, elevated AIM to primary villain status and squandered the Mandarin. In the comics AIM was always the bumbling army of grunting henchmen, they weren’t clever or particularly villainous, they were principally retarded thieves. But the movie pretty much just shat all over all of it.

Marvel’s excuse that they trot out to calm the criticisms down is that the movies exist in a parallel universe called the ‘cinematic universe’ so these issues don’t matter. That feint gives them an out to write whatever they want, essentially giving a pass to all this character mangling.

I would not see this movie again, once is enough, and due to a rather prolonged free fall scene I would definitely not see this movie in IMAX. The content is okay, but not worth 3D or DBOX prices. I would give it 7/10 stars. It is qualitatively worse than the previous movies.