Shit puppies. I just turned back on my Facebook. What the hell was I thinking? Now all that shit I write is going to show up in front of muh ex gurl and a bunch of web randoms who got added up when I was trying to rule the web last. Blocked her so she won’t be doing that shit where she’s seeing someone but wants me in her home twenty-four seven to see how long it takes before the good old days explode on us in a giant pile of drama.
Being an incredibly sexy poet is just so hard. Whine and dine with me.
That damn thing happened again. This uncontrollable entertainer slash wannabe author has exploded inside me again the moment I started the life hacking away from the catering, home repairs and yards — odds and ends bullshit — and back toward my old way of being a hardcore nine to fiver giving up every day off I could to squeeze every drop of green out of the whole deal. It’s a problem. In one mindset it is key at this job app’d up point to go do the face-time thing anywhere where it’s not just a “blah, whatever” type resume submission.
But instead I’m in the process of opening a Patreon centered on my writing and just finally bought a web-cam of merit to adhere to the “best practices” guidelines they provide. Probably a new YouTube channel before long too. The thinking here is that, as I have whined about before here into the blogs, there really isn’t any good reason for me to online-publish things like pieces of upcoming fictional works and poetry anthologies. Don’t get me wrong, I love doing this style of free-flowing Web content and this style of post would always show up on this blog.
However, when I look over my hard drive there is a lot of pieces on here that are better suited for a Patreon feed than just sheer live blogging potential future IPs so third-parties can just come in and give zero credit to the author while using a level of ads that is obviously excessive. People should get paid for their best work and art is work like any other. If I were to guess the objections some raise about this style of crowd-funding it’s that they don’t see writing, music, and art in general as something valid to pour money into unless it comes pre-packaged by the existing industry involved.
What I think many are unaware of in this matter is that in the “old days” a writer of merit would receive an investment in the form of a large lump sum directly from the publisher then given a deadline to produce. This investment was expressly for living expenses, research materials, leisure time, and anything else that might enhance the final product. No going back from the Digital Era, obviously, so e-publishing is just a beast all serious writers have to tackle to ground or be eaten alive when you try and call yourself that in public. But there are many projects going on here and no time at all to finish all of them unless I do that thing where the heady stuff and the final draft prose is paying for itself.
Enough about that. My neighborhood was popping off a second ago. Live music from up the hill and little kids singing some pop song I don’t recognize from over the fence. Out here in the backyard after running around town a bit. This is Santa Cruz, CA by the way or “Surf City USA” or as I want to be known as the birthplace of NHS and Santa Cruz (Brand) Skateboards & Clothing. No I don’t work for them it’s more that you might have seen those stickers around and those are referring to my little surf / skate town here.
Think I liked San Francisco more but the housing costs are just stupid high so that’s off the table unless I could network that shit. Oh what else? All this poetry explosion going on in my head is probably because I’m in love again, which is nice but complicated when these new feelings are for a long time close friend who is keeping at a distance most days. Always been a fool for love but thanks to serious bumps in the road in my youth I can speak very openly and directly about these topics if people are comfortable enough with me to do so. Often the things left unsaid in romance can be sexier than spilling your guts twenty-four seven but oh doggies do things get complicated sometimes and the need for honest communication shifts into the foreground so strongly that it’s almost slapping you in the face.
Okay, that was a “rant” they call them in this box of digital expression that is linked to other boxes that occasionally do this creating unique ideas stuff. Peace, love and chicken grease.
Barry White’s ghost gets jealous when we talk on the phone.
He says my voice is too low and sexy for him to listen for long without a cold shower. Maybe two.
Any time Dr. Love Song calls you must pick up the phone.
Ladies, you know who you are, no games now that school is in session.
Alright we have taken care of the two essential points to understand: first that I am too sexy so you can’t have it, stop asking, and second that women everywhere have to stop everything they are doing and listen to me like the words are gospel.
On to the business of the day:
Can it work for men and women to be just friends, and can a friendship survive an attempt at romance?
Oh Dr. Love Beats don’t play around so listen up while I crank that dial.
First we got sexy friends and how they don’t end up pants down with feet kicked up the second the doors closed behind them. It’s all about just what this person is to you and how you act around each other.
If you act like brother and sister, even if neither of you thinks of it like that, then no harm can come of it but keep in mind now that this means things like that person could come walking out of the bathroom in nothing but a towel, their birthday suit and a single lifestyle for both of you but you still are not on the hubba-hubba-hubba train.
Never really know something like that until you test it and it’s not recommended to test that one out wildly.
Good friends the answer is: yes. Just people you know barely well enough to call friends probably not, and if anyone is spending a lot of time away from their honey to be with someone they barely could call a “bestie” then it probably means they are in the process of checking out of the relationship but of course every situation has unique factors.
Then we have sexy, long-time friends trying to figure out if kicking the romance tree will drop poisonous snakes on our heads or maybe rain a bounty of delicious apples.
That is a very tricky one and where the romance is so easily sucked out of the room like a giant vacuum cleaner set to the no-sex-in-the-champagne-room setting just got turned on every time it comes up.
First you have to think yourself out and if the friendship gets permanently threatened in your head by something like cheating or dishonesty then this not a friend that is solid enough to consider this for.
Nobody said it was easy but adults actually manage to handle these big feelings in mature fashions, but that’s where the romance dies and rots in the corner of the room.
You can’t really take it forward with a friend without risking the friendship unless you can be sure they also share in a policy of time apart healing wounds, in so far as being civil with the next man or whatever the situation might be.
That means talking it out, which is great for couples to keep open lines of communications but is doing it ass backwards if you are trying to pitch some woo.
So the answers to today’s life questions are: yes if you’re good and close friends who know limits, and nobody ever won the love game without taking a gamble but at the same time dumb bets never break the bank.
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Some parting words for the men of the audience before Dr. Love Cakes retires for the evening to my silk bedding and multiple wives.
Never met a woman yet that I had a worth talking about relationship with that didn’t try and push me away in one form or another. But if you already got that figured think on this one: don’t become that overly pushy guy or she’s going to push you right out the door one day.
When they say “space” or “time” or just ignore your fucking txts / calls then stop fucking bugging them for awhile even if that girl has you so in a twist right now.
You can man it up for a few days, don’t give me this shit about how you just had to do the million calls thing.
If she wants it and you want it and she knows it, all the stuff is as set as it gets without you there to fuel that fire like we love to do.
So go do something else for awhile before you make that poor woman break her phone against the wall.
I don’t feel like writing anything too serious today. I’ll just keep typing into this laptop to fill up the space in my head that creeps and crawls. I have plenty to say, too much in fact. But it’s not going on the Internet. Sorry but my ever so interesting life story is not something I’ll put on here. I know all about tearing my heart out and wearing it on my sleeve for complete strangers. I’m the master of TMI (“too much information”) and I ramble as bad in conversation as I do online. But the person I am changes too fast to even keep track of anymore these days. I will say this though: for someone so young I’ve lived a rather full and complex life. Even though I’ve barely lived at all I could die with a smile on my face today, I’ve made my mark and changed cold hearts with my compassion as well as hardened hearts with my malice. I can finally view existence as something that makes sense and remembered that believing in myself is the only thing that ever made sense to me.
The concept of “Swiss-cheese morality” is coined by Dr. John Van Epp in his book “How to Avoid Marrying a Jerk” which he points out could be conversely titled “How to Avoid Marrying a Jerkette” for jerkdom knows no gender.
This matter get’s my goat, in that certain kind of way. Speaking from personal experience.
A person appears normal enough, polite and appealing, but with time you become aware that there are gaps between this person’s very moral fabric.
They might hold certain standards quite ardently but when it comes it other types of standards they simply lack any ability to recognize their callousness and lapse in values, or are in heavy stages of denial about it.
There are little early warning signs: the inability to admit personal faults or misbehavior, hiding friends and past relationships from you, not disclosing important things that you discover later in a less than pleasant manner.
We are looking for phrases like:
“Actually, I was kind of less than honest about that. It was actually more like…”
“I was wrong, that was a stupid move.”
“I got upset there, I can get a little hot under collar / frazzled sometimes.”
It’s not about seeking out people who just roll over and immediately take all the blame unto themselves. It is more about recognizing a person’s willingness or unwillingness to confront the reality of what they are putting out there. The ability to link their actions with consequences, not just sometimes but all of the time.
Anyone can make a mistake, but some people appear to have “Swiss-cheese morality” in terms of recognizing certain kinds of mistakes. It is as if they simply cannot imagine they have poor standards, so they simply declare to themselves that they do not. Therefore, they fail to learn from the mistakes that fall within the holes of their “Swiss-cheese morality.”
If I could insist that as long as bombings of innocent civilians are legal in the US that we show the results of these campaigns to the public through the imagery of the dead children and the dead bodies of unarmed civilians published in newspapers and televised in the media.
Until we were so sick and tired of seeing the injustice that we would do away with it altogether.
Maybe then we might value all life, like we value American life.
Maybe then we might hear angels signing as we dismantle our blood-soaked war machine.
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My request is illegal in the US.
You cannot show the bodies of the dead in US media.
I am convinced that if we changed that law, and had a free press in a country that grants Freedom of The Press, we would see an end to war-profiteering and an end to American Imperialism.
But that life doesn’t matter to Lila Rose.
All the corpses of those killed in the name of finding WMDs don’t matter more than dirt to her.
All those murdered by contractors and tortured by interrogators don’t matter more than spit to her.
The only life these sort of people care to protect is unborn life. And in the process they want to harm, imprison and in some cases kill anyone who does anything but resoundingly agree with them.
—
“Lila has since launched several successful undercover investigations exposing racism and statutory rape cover-up at Planned Parenthood. Her brave work has revealed new evidence to build a strong case against the abortion industry and lobby.”
In other words she has waged a slander campaign like that of the one James O’Keefe waged against ACORN. Most likely she lied to people and targeted this group that she personally feels animosity toward until she found what she wanted to find. Exactly like the false campaign on ACORN. These people are nothing but McCarthyists and propagandists.
And there is no such thing as the “abortion industry” nor the “abortion lobby”. That’s just political spin to make it sound like groups that are Pro-Choice are in fact pro-abortion.
You wanted to go on a bike ride today. Unpredicted heavy rains have come to your area and are not expected to leave for several days.
In a positive outlook, this is a chance to catch up on reading, housework or perhaps to spend time with friends and family.
In a neutral outlook, this rain has no effect on your day and you may go ride your bike anyway or you may stay indoors due to the rain and both events are equally desirable to you.
In a negative outlook, this rain has ruined your day and no matter what activity you engage in you will resent deeply that fact that you are not riding your bike.
The ‘bike riding’ example is more or less what we most often from motivational speakers and self-help books. The concept that if you change your outlook on life you can attain happiness in your life now, instead of waiting for the perfect job or the perfect mate to fill that hole.
I don’t fully subscribe to this logic. I see all people as first and foremost human beings. And human beings have all three of these reactionary options available to them no matter what choices they have made prior to this moment in time.
I don’t condone negative and destructive behaviors, but I see them entirely human acts to commit.
I don’t condone utter apathy and ignorance of your emotions, but I know most have strong and often private reasons for behaving as such.
And finally I don’t support viewing all the world and your part in it as purely positive and affirming. We must strive for such a goal, must reach toward such heights without pause or question. But to believe we are not flawed nor perfectly capable of destruction and causing pain unto others is a flawed perspective.
I see a lot of people using different words to describe the same thing.
I say positive and negative, someone else says ‘evil’ and ‘good.’
I say creation and destruction, someone else says ‘angels’ and ‘demons.’
In my mind it is all the same elements expressed in different fashions. Humans trying to paint a picture using symbols but failing to recognize the source of these ‘evils.’
We are the source. We drew the line in the sand that says what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong.’ Whatever religious beliefs a person might have there is a serious need to recognize that negative elements in all societies such as greed, hatred, violence and slander are acts committed by human beings.
My perspective allows no one to excuse their unkind and hostile behavior as acceptable in any way. I only seek to point out that all of us work within the same confines of human emotion and human irrationality. Rather than try to define our species as something it is not and never was, a perfect race.
An anonymous man once impressed this image upon my mind:
I was doing one of these things awhile back and there was this guy in the room with a huge chip on his shoulder as soon as I said the word ‘God.’ This guy was huge, almost seven feet tall and arms like a gorilla. He told me there wasn’t no such thing as God and on top of that since nobody in the room could do a damn thing about him that he was God as far as it mattered. So I put a challenge to him. I emptied out a dresser, moved it out into the center of the room, and had everyone help me fill the bottom drawer with all the training weights we could. Then I told him to lift it up high. He struggled and moved it around more than I thought he would. But he couldn’t get it off the ground. Then we had everyone in the room, with him, try and lift the dresser. It came up from the floor so easily we almost hurt ourselves, surprised at our mutual strength. When we all sat down again after replacing the dresser and the weights he asked me what was the point. I told him that when he walked in that door today he thought he was God and now he can see that some things are outside his power. The God in everyone else with himself included was stronger than he could ever hope to be alone. So he was not God. But God was still present in the room, between all of us and stronger than any of us.
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If you change the physical nature of this image of the huge man proclaiming himself “God” for a more intellectual design, one might evoke an image of a high-brow scholar scribbling out a formula that disproves the existence of God.
This is my impression of many atheists, and certain agonistics, I encounter. It seems to me that many have ‘thought God out of existence’ in the course of earnest and worthwhile studies. To my perception all science, and the nature of all knowledge itself, provides us with a constant ’unknown.’ Even in the absence of any religious background there is more than enough room for an understanding of the universe and life beyond simple reasoning’s of black-and-white logic.
While science shatters dogma and begs the eternal question simultaneously, it still does not negate the concept of a higher power.
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