Pop

Are you talented enough to create your own life, including your own novels, music, magazines, movies, paintings, architecture, clothing, food, transportation devices, travelogues, etc.?

If not, how self-sufficient are you?

Last night, I sat and watched the movie, "HAIR." My friend Helen enjoyed that movie so naturally I thought about her as I watched the movie. I used to think of her father as rather self-sufficient. At least he's a smart man, a former senior chemist at Eastman Chemical Company in Kingsport. He taught me how to coil a rope so that it doesn't get tangled up. To this day, I knot my extension power cords the way he showed me that he knotted his ski ropes so that I can quickly stretch out an extension power cord when I need it, spending an extra minute or two reknotting it before I put it away.

Today my thoughts are aimless. No stories to write. I am tired of immortalizing the lives of others for mere entertainment.

I made the mistake of going out to facebook and glancing at the minute-by-minute updates from the list of "friends." It's like putting up a mirror to my face and seeing me rapidly shrink up and die. The lives of others...uggh...vanity. And I thought the details of my life are uninteresting - that's why I don't feel like writing - whose life is interesting? Nobody's that I can think of today. In any case, I edited my facebook settings so I should get fewer if any updates from friends and vice versa, having turned off pulling these blog entries into my facebook profile. As I mentioned earlier, I've left old grade school photos on the facebook website for those who want to reminisce about the lives we lived 30 years ago so I won't delete my facebook page but one classmate created a video on his facebook page that uses some of my photos. Therefore, I guess I can stop visiting facebook now that I've posted notes on facebook stating I have no interest in corresponding with former schoolmates, and let them use the classmate's video to reminisce. Maybe I should eliminate my facebook page altogether...hmm...maybe later.

I've been reading a pop novel lately and maybe that's why I feel so worthless right now. If someone can make money writing drivel, even drivel which quotes quips from philosophers' writings that I once enjoyed reading, and I find myself buying a copy off the pile of discount books and later attempting to read it, then what's the point of me writing anything?

Since I'm only writing this to organize my thoughts, then I'll inventory here for myself what I'm thinking lately and not worry about its entertainment value or paragraphical arrangement: I'm tired of influencing others. I'm tired of using the word tired. I'm not tired. I'm bored. I don't give a damn about others, except how it affects the time I can spend sitting here writing to myself. When I'm with others, I'm like the guy in the movie, "Memento," who smiled at everyone because he didn't know what was going on from one minute to the next. In my case, I don't care what goes on from one minute to the next. I've lost my mind and interact with the world because I can still arrange enough words in a row to sound sane. I've had oxygen deprivation to my brain recently, which shows itself when I periodically get caught up and stuck in alliteration. I might have had a stroke lately. I'm not sure. I know I had to spend a few months rearranging my thoughts, using facebook as a means to reconnect my thoughts together. I used to care. The only thing I now care/worry about is the possibility of losing the control of my body and finding myself stuck in a wheelchair, unable to do anything but watch others take care of me while I live inside myself completely alone, communicating with the outside world through eye movements or eyelid blinks. The world can go screw itself because I can't screw anyone I want in the world due to my thoughts as a 10-year old who promised to remember his dead friend, Reneé Dobbs, which keeps me from wanting to have kids, and not to have unprotected sex outside a monogamous partnership because of my belief in some propaganda films about STDs. I'm a social animal but keep trying to deny it. I'm not crazy, I just have a set of detached thoughts that don't add up to a consistent worldview. sdfklwsetndbo uq3=335 Sometimes it's worth noting that random letters and meaningless equations have a place in our lives. I am tired of teaching students/customers and dealing with their hardships, whether real or madeup. I am tired of watching students/customers copy each other's homework but let them do it, anyway, because if they want to cheat themselves of a solid education, I don't care. It's their lives, not mine. I'm not their ethics/moral leader. They get to find out what real business life is like - I can only tell them how I lived mine - if they can apply their cheating/copying skills to their work, who am I to stop them? And why would I want to? I have no vested interest in society, whether for good or ill. We lie to ourselves all the time, making up stories about gods, so why not lie to ourselves that copying homework is not a form of peer plagiarism? Or how about I ask the homework originator to put a note on his/her homework that it's the source of the homework for X number of students in the class and those X students have to reference the homework originator on their copy of the homework? It sure would save me some time while grading - I'd only grade X's work and apply the grade to the other students. The same thing for tests. Ask students to put, "I copied my test answers from my neighbor, Y," so that I only had to grade Y's paper to figure out the grade for other students. If others don't carry their own socially-neutral moral compass, I'm not going to create/invent one for them out of thin air. Yes, I know that our socially-neutral moral compasses are shaped and finely-tuned by the positive/negative social influences that others have on us. Like I said, I'm bored with socially influencing others positively (or is it positively influencing others socially?). I've never been interested in social influence. I've done what I had to do to get by, barely balancing my innate desire to please others against my self-preservation survival instincts. Genes versus jeans (or nature-vs-nurture, if you will). I have paid my dues to society and owe nothing else. Let everyone else figure this out, too. The world is just this molten rock with a thin crust of hardened material that floats on top, supporting self-perpetuating sets of minerals that interact with one another. These self-perpetuating sets of minerals feed off one another. There is nothing else. No gods to fear. Nothing except what's in front of them or behind them. You're predator or prey but most likely both. That's it. Everything else is a lie created by illusion. Categorize and compartmentalize all you want to maintain any illusions you choose, including these words. I'm sitting here using them because it gives me something to do to justify the socially-mandated training I received in my youth. Otherwise, I know that I'm falsely projecting an image, using the mass-hypnosis technique of getting people to stare at these electronic scratchings and mentally picture the same thing as everyone else, give or take a little variation. If you're here, and I don't believe there's anyone else here but me by now (hopefully, I've pissed off enough people to turn them away from these words so that I can have this globally accessible blog to myself), then you're part of my illusion, too. I don't know how to live life. I only have a limited understanding of the capabilities of my body. I have a set of synaptic connections that I've been told are called thoughts in a superset of thinking that were once universally understood as a mind that I use to put my youth labor camp training (i.e., mandatory primary/secondary education) into action. All else is a waste of my time trying to comprehend or to help you perpetuate. I have nothing else to say that is useful or entertaining to me or to you. I put these words in this blog in order to rewire my brain after my recent loss of thought connections. That's all I'm doing. It's called rote work. Boring. It's all I have left to do. I am not self-sufficient or else I'd be living on a small farm with no computer connection, taking care of myself and not wasting my time with electronic social networks that I'm using at this moment to pretend that exist in order to make my brain create new neuronic networks that depend on the belief that I'm a well-balanced social animal. I'm recreating my mental illusions so I can try to erase the thoughts that I really am only just this over-educated bipedal primate which is really just a set of self-perpetuating minerals that doesn't even know or care enough to figure out how to be self-sufficient while wandering on top of a crust of hardened minerals that's spinning on a molten rock rotating through space that on a universal time scale has been relatively free of dangerous planet-sized debris for quite a while now. Unless you're doing the same thing, there's no need for you to be here. Over and out. Time to delete this blog and delete my facebook page. My re-education is complete. Yea!