|
The night is thick, that darkness not banished by streaks of fluorescence from scattered streetlights whole. The light brings no comfort, serving only to strengthen that already claimed by shadow. The night is heavy, pregnant with the fears of those that dare traverse her, a fecundity that beckons to those who would inhabit her. The dark breathes, promising malice. The wind whips, and the very trees quake, rasping warning to all that would hear: Run! The reasoned mind remains so at a whim, reason itself perched upon a treacherous mountain of sand, it’s comfort an untruth, a security bought at the cost of instinct, of a myriad of conveniently manipulated falsehoods. The seeds of madness are not sown in carefully cultivated fields of righteous order as our epoch has come to believe, chaos is the garden untamed, abandon the default, it’s logic pure, cold, incalculable. So perch atop your dreadful mountain, traveler. Know though that when the carefully shaped bells of your hourglass break, the multitudinous grains unbound, you fall but to freedom, your screams of rage inviting naught but dry suffocation, for to deny chaos is death, to expect stagnation insanity. Found this:
Source: The Guardian Which reminded me of this tripe about the NBN. What both of these pieces fail to take into account is the considerably simple fact that technology can not deliver anything more than those sending and receiving via that technology use it to do so. For example, the author of the aforelinked writes;
Seriously? No, WTF – SERIOUSLY? 1: Don’t watch crap TV. (I’m sorry B&B, you know I love you.) 2: Tell that to Amazon. Or eBay. Or anyone who’s ever learned anything via the internet. (No seriously, I know like, 6 different words for “penis” than I did before it was invented. Before the internet was invented that is, not the penis. Just so we’re on the same page ‘nall.) 3: I have no words for this last. The statement is such “twaddle” my internal organs ache from the irony every time I read it. There’s this common statement that I both love for it’s accuracy, and despise for the ease with which it is used to misrepresent the potential of the digital realm. You may have seen it yourself a time or two: The internet (or derivation thereof) is (usually ‘just’) an echo chamber. Damn straight it is. But it’s a chamber in which those echoes are bound, contained, displayed and archived for the perusal of any and all so inclined, the echoes themselves the published thoughts, beliefs, questions and conclusions of whole generations, a repository of human inquisitiveness such as which has never been known in the history of our civilization, or those which came before. So yeah, the web, and the infrastructure that enables both its existence, and the participation of its users to it is kind of a big deal. “But what about the real world!” It’s still there isn’t it? Or has your proclivity for watching hours of online porn and daytime soaps gone so far as to have actually removed your ability to go outside and sniff a tree, talk (you know, with your voice) to people, to shave the next door neighbours cat? No? I didn’t think so. Technology was never the problem. Technology is incapable of making promises, let alone delivering on them. People screw shit up. Technology in any of its forms is just another way for us to do so. Edit: If you want a much better (and less ranty) slaying of assorted “down with the NBN!” catchcries, check out Marian Dalton‘s thoughtful piece at The Conscience Vote Said the parrot to the king So told the father to the son “Well I never saw this coming” “Wasn’t I that chose this path” The stars all smile knowingly Inspired the bard will wield her song “Holding a grudge is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.” I’d not heard this before, but I love it. Of course, you could point out that it’s only applicable if you don’t address the grudge but hey – who am I to critique bathroom wall wisdom? http://www.photoattorney.com/?p=1492 So, who owns the copyright if you use a timer, or if more than one person pushes the button, or if the dog accidentally takes a snapshot of your balls? (What? It could happen.)
It’s quite pretty really. It’s mnemonic even. Thanks brain.
Really? Because personally, I having scientists make me airsnort chemical compounds whilst I’m assessing the attractiveness of a picture of a woman really gets me going. “If you remain focused on the fact that there is noise, you’re never going to hear the damn signal.” Do you know why it is humans fear the dark youngling? Not the night – night is merely a cycle amongst cycles, just a part of the kaleidoscopic tumult of existence of which we are all of us a microscopically small portion. No, night is merely want of the sun. Darkness, true darkness, is born of the soul of the sum of those parts, it is eternal, and unchanging, it is infinity incarnate. And therein lies the nature of that fear. The dark is indefatigable, insurmountable, wholly unfathomable and unconquerable. It cannot be banished – no matter how many fires you light, nor how bright they be, no matter how many billions of stars burn coldly overhead, eventually, inevitably, fires die. You see, human beings have an infatuation with their own mortality. Some aspire to transcend it, whispering fervent prayers of devotion in the hope their pleas for mercy fall not on deaf ears. Some play at belieing their mortality, fearing death and the very passage of time that leads to it so much as to pour their efforts into appearing still young, as if this will persuade the reaper to pass them by, despite the decaying of flesh, the withering of body and mind that marks the journey to their inescapable end. Some sicken of their mortality, so much loth to see the path through it’s course, that they cast themselves to the unknowable, risking all for the mere chance to escape the vicious talons of the burdens life imposes. But there is fear here too, of the line they cross in want of freedom. Line of course, is far from an adequate term. Line indicates a separation, a division, darkness however knows no boundaries, no dimensions, it is, in all ways aphasic. Perhaps a comparison can be best made with Truth – a vista unattainable by observed or observer alone. Truth, like the Dark, both entails and encompasses, they are autogenerare. The subjectunt’s perception of truth is akin to the afeared’s apprehension of the dark; nought but a cresting wave atop an ocean spanning beyond all horizons, the full terror awaits below the surface, beyond and imperceptible to the meagre reckoning of men. Ripples above, currents below, such is the nature of Truth and Darkness both. You can’t watch the Dark, it watches, and is watched, insatiable, it swallows all. The very soul is birthed from this hungry Dark, all things matter and imagined emerge from it’s fecund womb. All light, all colour, all sound, all thought and deed suckles at Darkness’ breast, is sheltered under it’s arching wings. All that has existed, before time could be measured by any being claiming sentience, before sentience itself had emerged, in a primordial existence that age itself had no meaning, no measure known to gods or men, here the Darkness formed, here seeded the mater potentia of all existence. Here she waits, amid the chaos, death, destruction and rebirth of all possibility, the evolution all all as yet unformed, all discarnate potential, the recursive resolution of the very fabric of your reality, and the unmanifest reticentia awaiting the sprawl of time’s web to be woven beyond the barriers of space, outside the confines of the very nature of existence as you have come to know it. This is the Dark. This is the Truth. One can never experience it, one can nor presume to observe it, only offer oneself to it, to be consumed by it, devoured by the endless void, to embrace the Darkness, as she embraces all. Anyone can give an answer, and of those, some well. It is, however, in the formulation of their questions in which you’ll find the measure of a creative mind. One of the more interesting people I follow on “The Twitter” posted a piece today about Euthanasia, the story and some thoughts around her changed position on the topic. I’ve included an excerpt that summarizes the post, which in many ways, echoes my own viewso and reasoning on the topic:
Last year, I visited my own Grandmother, on her deathbed, drugged senseless so as to dull her pain, and no doubt the expletive laden demands to be left alone to die. Sitting there, by the side of one of the most charming, charismatic women I’ve known in my life through what would be some of her last hours, listening to the crisp rattle of uneasy breath pass over her parched lips and into her emphysemic lungs , I felt terribly ashamed. Those words in fact impart an undeserved levity, but down to my bones, I was sickened with guilt, with self doubt and a deep personal dismay. I’m an awful grandson, and a worse son. A pretty shitty brother, and the title of uncle, according to my own logic, may as well be stripped. The absolute worst part though, is that of all the blood relatives I’ve more or less dismissed from my life, Grandma was one I liked. She was an avid storyteller, an indefatigable fountain of knowledge concerning family history on my fathers side, and even though mostly immobile, financially impoverished, and cursed/blessed with a live-in 40 odd year old Trekkie (*hack, spit*) son, she never seemed to want for anything but the chance to share those tales. She moved from Melbourne to Ballarat with the express intention of being closer to her newly expanding family in what she no doubt knew to be her closing years, and although Dad and my sisters visited her semi-regularly, I get the feeling none of them could have gotten what she had to give in the same way I might have, had I not been preoccupied with my own whirlwind journey into adulthood. Kids, wife, debts, work, and the draconian control I felt I had to maintain over it all, at the expense of those who’s familial culture I felt (and still do, mostly) was not suitable for those young lives I ‘protected’ in that little bubble. But, for an inadequate, pitiful 40 minutes or so, none of that mattered. I asked my cousin to leave, and while what might be my last link to a heritage I’ll perhaps now never be able to fully appreciate lay staring, dull-eyed at a ceiling she probably couldn’t even see, I apologized. I wept, I held her unmoving hand, brushing the paper thin skin with my thumb, and I told her how sorry I was that I hadn’t gone to see her, that I felt guilty and ashamed because of it, that I was sorry she’d more than likely be dead before I would come to see her again now. I brushed the hair from her eyes and planted a kiss on her clammy forehead, wiped my tears, and laughed. I apologized again, this time for being such a selfish prick as to break down in some kind of mad impromptu clutch at absolution from a dying woman who could barely take a drink of water in the few minutes she’d been conscious earlier in the day, let alone provide a sense of comfort to her erstwhile conversant grandson. I laughed, because, hard arse Scottish widow that she was, I’ve no doubt she would have told me it was OK, then followed with a wickedly humored version of “harden the fuck up”, and then perhaps, circumstances being what they were, a less subtle “shut the fuck up, I’m trying to die.” She was a blunt ol’ biddy, my Grandma. The point, such as it is, is that while I will be forever grateful that if nothing else, I had the opportunity to say goodbye and apologise, in my case it was that very act which was the selfish one. It didn’t help her, it didn’t change a whole lot in terms of how I relate to my family (except for the increased effort in facebook-dodging my cousins) and I’m still concerned that if she did hear me through the morphine haze, that it was a terrible burden to place on her on the road to whatever afterlife she aspired to. So when I found out that the doctors were maintaining her life against her will, at the bequest of those family members that were having the hardest time with the idea of losing her, I was a little enraged. Who were we, outside of the suffrage she bore, to make such a decision. My auntie, who had worked as a nurse in palliative care, agreed, but it been decided by the three sons, grief stricken and unwilling to let be what would be. While I would never suppose to begrudge them that decision, it is not the decision I would have made if in the same position, and certainly not the decision I would want my girls to make if it were me on that bed, begging for the chance to die. So, though I agree the burden of an ‘easy’ death (if there truly is such a thing – I don’t plan on doing it for a while so I can’t be sure) should not be placed on medical practitioners, I think that if the question of a decidedly uneasy life should fall into the hands of family, that it be a decision that, difficult though it may be, needs be answered with a freedom from the begrieved’s own motivations to continue that life, should doing so be against the wishes of the would be departed. Huddled, ensconced, in contemplative woe Characteristically, when presented with the idea of being OBLIGED to write something, (even if the obligation is to myself only) I struggled to get so much as a word on paper, even doing the “write down random words and see what comes out” thing. Most often when I write, it’s a ranty response to something I’ve stumbled across, or based on one of the utterings of the little voice in my head. Well, one of them. Anyway, eventually, something did come out: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” While possibly an intriguing insight into the workings of my subconscious, it’s also clearly very stupid. I feel there’s a lot to be said for contentious arsehattery. In fact, some of the most insightful commentary I’ve read on any number of topics has been blisteringly sarcastic, ripe with dark innuendo and subtle digs. So why do we maintain this creed with our kids today? I mean, essentially we’re saying “Hey little tacker, if you’re opinion on something is likely to impose upon the ignorance or comfort zone of anyone else, thereby considered as ‘offensive’ shut the hell up, we don’t want to hear it.” For a society that supposedly values and promotes freedom of expression, it seems a little hypocritical don’t you think? What’s even more fun is that it continues well on into adult life – any online social media expert guru ninja meister worth their iPod will tell you to be careful of what you publish online, lest it come back for you, aimed at your posterior with big sharp, pointy teeth ready for the chomping. (Although recently I was treated to an example on Facebook of ‘Uni applicant bags out teacher to potential detriment of educational prospects’ playing out in real life. Nothing happened. No University social media police or ANYTHING. Disappointed, I am.) So what the hell do we do when there are rules, and then there are rules? Ultimately you, the producer of your online content have to decide, be it happy happy joy joy lovefest material, or snide, bitter and expletive laden filth that you publish – but in the context of Social Media, when you’re having a bad day (week, month, year or hell, incarnation) surely in this day and age we should be able to eschew Mother’s terribly unrealistic advice and just get our rail on for five minutes without having to worry about losing our job, the respect of our peers, or our right to consider ourselves a normal human being. However, because being human seems to be largely all about maintaining cultural dishonesties, we’ll more than likely to continue to dispense such valuable advisory gems en masse. Stupid it might be, but ignore them at your peril – what with the brewing storm around freedom of expression on the internet that is likely to well and truly crack open sometime into this year, you may have to pick which side of that particular white picket fence you enjoy most before too long. If you’ve checked out my blog recently, you might think I’ve completely abandoned the idea of writing nonsense on the internet. I haven’t, and there’s dozens of drafts, a few tattered “dead tree” notebooks and even some recordings on my phone as evidence to that fact, but that’s entirely beyond the point. Because what I have done, is abandon this blog, and the plan to keep the flow going, and for what it’s worth (should my little WordPress daemon be listening) I’m sorry. I haven’t been exactly quiet on the internet – I’ve just been… well, a little bit all over the shop. See, last year around this time, I told myself I was going to write more. It’s what I love, and what I want to do. To my credit, I have been – just not so much here. I’ve been posting elsewhere, and given this is my site, that seems a little silly. So here’s how 2011 is (planned as) going to play out. I’m taking up the WordPress postaday2011 ‘challenge’ – but with a few twists. For one, I won’t be posting daily musings exclusively here, in my own little bubble. Instead, I’ll be continuing with my trend of writing for (what I believe to be) awesome sites, blogs and services, and aggregating them here. It’s not exactly a groundbreaking concept, but with any luck, it’ll reinvigorate my muse, get me back into whipping this site into something less ugly and re-establish my learning curve(s) – which as you may have noticed, kind of fell by the wayside around the same time as my personal life exploded into a less coherent version of disarray than it already was. Also, I don’t much like the tag WordPress have selected for their plan to get a few billion more eyeballs campaign to assist bloggery. So I’ll be using ‘daily’ – clever, innit? Things will be messy for a bit – I have a… um… well, we’ll say “vast” amount of information bubbling away in my cranium at any given moment, most of which requires a level of context in order to have any hope of understanding. More on that “context” thing later – it’s one of the drafts I mentioned. So stay tuned world – vociferation awaits. In the meantime, to see out the year, I’ll be wrangling the site around a bit, throwing out some of those ‘posted elsewhere’ tidbits I mentioned and sharing some of my favourite links from the year. Make sure you come back, they’re all very good. Promise. |
|
|
Copyright © 2012 Prometheus Ink (ABN: 65 505 537 781) All Rights Reserved. All content published is authors creation/own opinion except where otherwise stated. See The Disclaimer for .. well.. the disclaimer. |
|
