Archive for Zombie Philosophy
I am immature
I may be 44 (gasp) but I know that on the inside, I’m really nowhere near that age. Probably more like 20ies which is a huge gain from where I was a decade ago.
When I first started my recovery, when I was about 33, I was no more than a 13 year old on the inside, maturity level and all. And had all the trappings of a early teen; making the same mistakes, feeling the same irrational emotions and beating my head against the same walls a kid that age would beat.
But even with my recovery and all the excellent work I have done to be my own good parent and raise my inner age to something more appropriate for an adult, I am still immature and still feel more comfortable around people in their 20ies. And that’s frustrating when you are 44 and really should be interacting with professionals.
But I will carry on and continue to pursue my human revolution that will at some point, I hope, lead me to a time when my inner age reflects more closely with my chronological age.
Lambchop – Nothing But A Blur From A Bullet Train
This song…
Gray
Goodbye Gray.
Gray was my cat for 17 years and was an amazing animal.
Problems with Linear Time
Yet the great weakness of linear time is that it obliterates time’s recurrence and thus cuts people off from the eternal – whether in nature, in each other, or in ourselves. When we deem our social destiny entirely self-directed and out personal lives self-made, we lose any sense of participating in a collective myth larger than ourselves. We cannot ritually join with those who come before and after us. Situating us at some intermediate moment eons away from both the beginning and the end of history, linear time leaves us alone, restless, afraid to stand still lest we discover something horrible about ourselves. Most Americans would agree with Mary McCarthy that “The happy ending is our national belief” – but few of us have any idea what we would do if we ever got there.
“The Fourth Turning – An American Prophesy” – William Strauss and Neil Howe
Kim, Will and the Revenge of the Living Dead (9:47- Short)
Kim and Will live on neighboring farms, stuck behind the fences that keep the plague of zombies from killing them. Will they be able to explore their budding love or will they succumb to the revenge of the living dead?
Generational Mindsets
Baby Boomers, predominantly, believe that we are all singular individuals, unique ‘snowflakes’ despite the fact that we are part of a larger whole, 340 million people in America, 8 billion on the planet.
So the truth lies somewhere else. Can 340 million people actually be completely unique or is the fact that we share 98% of our exact DNA pattern with every other one of these humans, these pack animals, mean we share a lot of our behavioral patterns and need to make decisions based on the whole, based on the ‘pack’?
This, to me, explains why there’s such a divide in America right now. Boomers believe they can legislate for the individual and ignore the similarities of the pack animal needs while everyone else looks to collective action such as Universal Healthcare, broader economic models and things that help the whole.
Time to stop looking at the self and start looking at the whole.
Climb out of that hole
I forget sometimes exactly who I have become after years of work, after staring into the abyss and not blinking, I lose sight of the truth of my strongest aspects and fall victim to the weakest. As I have created my own healthy reality and pushed my life towards its own good goals and truths, I can still be blind sided by someone else’s dream, by someone else’s reality.
And this is an essential lesson and proof of old causes that I have not yet cleared from my overall karma. There are still a few aspects to my personality I have not yet ironed out. Those aspects need the light shone on them for me to be able to clear them out and learn to react a different way. And there are far fewer of these blindsides than when I started this process so long ago but, there they are nonetheless.
And nobody is at fault; I am not blaming the other for their dream and how it infected me. They no more intended to hit me with their mess than I did in allowing myself to fall under the spell. There is no blame just change and learning and responding to things in a different way. There is only the time when faced with the way you do things, to break free and try another tact. I am actually utterly grateful that I have these close and dear friends to show me the areas that still need work.
But we can never be done as there is always much work to do to fulfill the goals you set for yourself and break free from the patterns we all repeat, over and over, from our childhoods. Sometimes these are good patterns but mostly, they fall in the category of bad habits and most of the time we can’t even see these patterns because they feel so normal and are much easier to just ride out.
But what fun would that be?
Missed your window
Yeah, what if you missed your window, woke up too late? You could start over. You could push through and yes, start again but a forty year old man isn’t suppose to be waiting on his peers, he’s suppose to be blazing his own trail and blah blah.
My generation is full of nihilists and definitely not capitalists and stuck behind the cushion of life’s couch. I managed to squeeze out but I’m still picking crumbs and lint from my hair.
When I meet someone and they seem uncomfortably hard to be around, they are probably a lot like me. I’ve also noticed there aren’t that many general personality types, behavior-wise and it is possible to predict people’s reaction more readily than I thought it would have been.
Growing up is putting aside childish things and that is true when I consider my growth, at this late stage, and how immature certain aspects of my behavior were as an adult.
I have a chronological age: 42. I also have an inner child/emotional age that I can always check by just asking myself and listening to what that inner voice tells me (the first number that pops into your head). Everyone has this ability and the ‘inner child’ knows this and will give you that number. When I was 32 and started redoing my personality, my inner voice would answer ’13’ years old. I was an emotional 13 year old.
After 10 years of good therapy and rebuilding I have hit about 28.
Hating the government
Unpopular as this might be, we hate the government because it is a direct reflection of the majority of people in our country. We hate what we are and what we were. For us on reddit and the internet in general, this is a hard pill to swallow.
We, as a whole, are a war mongering bunch. We love sentimental platitudes of patriotism that stroke our distorted egos. We love law and order, wars-on-things and capital punishment.
We, until recently, love boot strap pulling tough guy cowboys and berating the unfortunate that happen to have been born poor, without structure and end up in crime – we want to lock everyone up and throw away the key.
We love throwing our weight around the world and pissing money away to make sense of our military industrial complex. We hate admitting when we’re wrong and will invade a country based on lies to meet vendettas and cover our asses. We love looking down our nose at older, more secure countries like France and Germany that have been through it before, have learned a sense of maturity and have insight to offer. We don’t need them, we know everything.
We take up sides like we’re players in a football game. Rah rah-ing and shaking our pom poms oblivious to the distortions each side is smacking us with and ignoring the truth as long as we win.
We are children of recent history, reveling in our ignorance and spinning around on our egos. We look up to fakes like Reagan and paint our history as some paragon of virtue while ignoring the horrors we have unleashed and the mistakes we make continually, repeatedly like parent-less children.
At some point we will have have to take a long look at our sick and bloated societal egos and relate that to our own existence. Many other societies do things the right way, care about their fellow citizens and aren’t nearly as susceptible to flagrant propaganda by the likes of corporations that fleece us dry at every step.
So when we hate the government, we are hating a direct representative of who we are, what we have allowed from behind the comfort of our cushy living rooms and we, the majority, have some serious growing up to do.
Taking responsibility is the hardest part.