thegrowlingwolf On Being Blinded On His Road to Damascus

Foto by tgw, New York City, November 2010
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Shocking Realizations of a Cynical, A(theistic), Highly Pessimistic, Bottom Class, Rather Elitist, antiAuthoritarian, Rugged Individualist, Advanced White Ape
A barrage of sudden realizations struck me like a enfilade of lightning bolts as I was walking by the Empire State Building--probably similar to the experience Old Persecutin' Saint Paul in the Christian Book of Holy Babble had when he was blinded by the Jewish God as he was going up to heathen Damascus to look for some Jews to persecute--I think stoning was Saint Paul's favorite way of persecutin ' anybody when he was Saul of Tarsus, before he was a Christian. Except this wasn't any God who struck me blind, just my own deducing mind. I suppose my mind had been working on these realizations for many moons back before it decided to blast 'em loose on me like this suddenly. What brought about these realizations? Several things, the main one, this attack on this WikiLeaks dude, Julian Assange. Recall: Sarah Palin was saying if she were president she would "hunt him down," leading to his being shot like Sarah shoots them moose, I assume. And then, this traitorous asshole, this shy retiring piece of crap, Joel LIEberman--Grandpa Al Lewis used to call his kind "worthless pieces of crap"--was saying WikiLeaks should be declared a terrorist organization and Assange arrested and charged under the US Espionage Act as an agent provocateur against the USA. I mean, you know what that could lead to for this poor ass Aussie? How about the president by executive order ordering him assassinated? That's one executive order President Obama kept of G.W. Bush's in his arsenal, an executive order carried out by CIA assassination teams. And the first Wikileaks leaks proved there ARE CIA assassination teams working all over the world (remember, those leaks also showed that Israel had assassination teams roaming the world at will, too). In actuality, in keeping with the Saint Paul analogy, Julian Assange is a true saint in all of this and you know how saints usually end up-- as martyrs.

One realization that hit me right between the eyes is that I am of the up-and-coming ultraminority: a Cynical, A(theistic), Highly Pessimistic, Bottom Class, Rather Elitist, antiAuthoritarian, Rugged Individualist, Advanced White Ape whose only device left to him in terms of growling is this blog that is a blog among millions of blogs--a minority blog; a minor blog; a blog that will soon be sent back off into the garbage space left behind by advancing technology and the corporate takeover of the Internet--the idea that Facebook will replace Google amazes as well as amuses me--also Goldman-Sachs proposing buying Facebook for billions of dollars (where'd Goldman-Sachs get billions of dollars?, I wonder with cocked eye). Yesterday, February 7th, it was announced that AOL is buying the Huffing-and-Puffing Post for 300 million bucks. What is the fascination media has with this Arianna Huffington?--I mean, to me and my wolf nose, she smells so much like a superphony who talks out several sides of her English-second-language Greek-accented mouth--check out the name Huffington and where dear sweet liberal Arianna got her nest-egg swag. We fall for information-collecting sites that offer us individual glory--at the cost of having all our personal information loaded into their "private" files--all the while these early bloggers are now selling their posts to rest easy as lecturers and teevee-talk-show guests and book writers--and don't you know any book Arianna Huffingblowhard writes is gonna get published and hawked like the words from this phony-boloney are divine, to the point, and deductively inducing to further investigation and perhaps from it come up with workable conclusions. I've never heard or read anything Arianna said that led to anywhere but back to her and her particular life experiences.
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The Ever-Changing (Flip-Flopping) Mistress-Concubine's Marriage to Michael Huffington: From good ole reliable Wikipedia:

She met oil millionaire Michael Huffington, a family friend of the Bushes, at a 1985 party hosted by Anne Getty in San Francisco^{[citation needed]}. The couple were married in 1986 at a wedding paid for by Getty, who had declared that she needed to find Arianna a husband. They moved to Washington, D.C., when he was appointed to serve as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Negotiations Policy.^{[citation needed]} They later established residency in Santa Barbara, California, in order for him to run in 1992 as a Republican for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives, which he won by a significant margin. He was a political conservative on most issues.^{[citation needed]} Arianna campaigned for her husband, courting religious conservatives, arguing for smaller government and a reduction in welfare. In 1994, he narrowly lost the race for the U.S. Senate seat from California to incumbent Dianne Feinstein.^[7] The couple divorced in 1997, and in 1998 Michael Huffington revealed that he was bisexual.^[8] The financial terms of their divorce agreement remain undisclosed.
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My Realizations Teased by a Nerdy Future
"We're going small," the hi-tech every-six-month-rebranders are telling us. "People are demanding smaller devices on which they can take their whole lives along with them everywhere they go--to be able to text those cornball friends 24/7 and also talk on the telephone to some dunderhead friend for an unlimited number of minutes or hours or the ability to make flight plans while riding in a cab toward some business destination. I am still in the big clumsy PowerMac tower and flat-screen display and ergonomic keyboard era. From bigger to small now means I'm really left behind like a beer can having been tossed out the window of a car going 100 mph spins madly for awhile in the middle of the highway only to eventually spin off to end as thrown-away garbage in a roadside ditch.

We are becoming slaves to this constantly evolving computer-iPod-MP3-iPad-notebook revolution (it's been around for 10 years). This is a revolution that is eventually going to start making cyborgs out of us. To show you how clod-like backwards I am, I still use a touch-tone phone to dial up my ISP. I mean such obsolete functioning still works perfectly fine with me. Yes, downloading is frustratingly slow, but with patience you finally complete such a task. But, oh how uncivilized dial-up phones and using dialup to connect to your ISP is becoming. [ Mr. Ed: Please note: the The Daily Growler technical department is currently in the process of purchasing a Mac G5 with a Leopard operating system. Huzzahs! In fact, it's being delivered by FedEx to our downtown Manhattan offices TODAY!]

Also on teevee I saw this guy who spoke with a very broken accent--it sounded like a Russian accent--with a new company through which you can now trade in your old CDs for iPods and iPads and iPhones--I think I heard him say 699 CDs (amazing!!!) would get you an iPad. The guy says that since CDs are now officially an obsolete way to record music in the USA, he takes your old CDs--699 = 1 iPad--and sends them to places like New Zealand and Taiwan (where he said they especially like "jazz and classical" CDs) or to the Caribbean (where they want pop CDs ) where he resells them to record stores and radio stations, etc., and comes out smelling like a profitable rose. I have probably 400 CDs in my collection...and of course as a musician I'm falling way back into the dust bin of obsolescence by still making my own CD recordings, though with my new digital studio I am able to convert my recordings to MP3 status via my computers.

It's ironic how We the People are being forced to go small and lean and constantly mean while the corporations are merging and getting BIGGER and BIGGER and double-meaner--bigger is better to the old plantation boys. Ironically, too, bigger is better in the HD teevee world now--where if you are still watching teevee on a 15-inch screen, you're out in the alley with the old analog sets. On the other hand, the nano-chipped iPods, et al., can now be used as television sets or movie theaters, though I can't imagine watching a movie on an iPod.

And Kindles are going to replace books. However, We the People can't trade our book collections for Kindles because where are the used book dealers going to peddle books published in English?

I once attended a lecture by Buckminster Fuller, to me one of the 20th-Century's great inventive minds. The lecture was long-winded as only Bucky Fuller could be long-winded and in a bubbling along rather low scratchy voice that was rather hard to understand. Though one point he made in this lecture perked up my ears to where they caught his meaning full blast. Bucky Fuller in talking about understanding ourselves and why we act the way we do said we all are connected to the time we were born. Whatever is going on in the world at the time of our coming into the world is OUR time and the fountainhead from which we spring. I was born at the tail end of the Great Depression; at the dawning of World War II. My intelligence was basic. My parents were from nomadic people, people who slashed and burned their ways from the original 13 colonies on out the covered wagon trails through the Cumberland Gap in my mother's family's case as they trekked toward the West ("Go West, young man!") and in my father's family's case trekking toward the West over the heavily used wagon trails from Georgia to Alabama to East Texas to West Texas where they dropped anchor on their oxen-drawn prairie schooners to eventually meet as kids of pioneer White settlers and to marry there and to have two sons there--two sons a generation and a half apart in terms of years with a dead brother (he lived long enough to be named) in between.

I do come from dust. I am old enough to remember dust storms. Where you could be sitting and wiling away your time on a clear-skied sunny afternoon when suddenly you first could smell the approaching storm--smelling like rain, but also with that stale burnt-sand smell in it, too. And then on the far horizon, you could see a horizon-spanning line of a single giant-wide behemoth bluish-red cloud advancing toward you. Then it began to rise upward off that horizon and billow up into the high sky, advancing, rising higher and higher. Soon the air chilled slightly. Soon that cloud was fuming up to soon start forming a black-red velvet hood like a smothering blanket being pulled over your earth-bound being (birds can fly up over storms). And soon that cloud had erased the sun and soon that once-clear-skied-peaceful afternoon became as dark as a moonless midnight--midnight in the afternoon. The black-red cloud roiling up, covering the sky, tenting over and finally descending with a vengeance-packed sand-pebble-thick rain on my space. First the rain came followed by the boiling up red clay dust that had been pulled into the sky from the sandy, clay-bound flat treeless desert plains a hundred or so miles away. The earth actually taken up off the earth and made a mudpie in the sky--and soon that rain mixed with that dust became evident as you suddenly couldn't breathe the air was so full of dust. After these storms had passed, we'd go out and see red dust on everything. The last house I grew up in in West Texas was a white asbestos-siding Cape Cod. After those dust storms, my dad and I would take a couple of hoses with high-spray nozzles on them and wash our house down--the white asbestos shingles turned mud red by the sticking dust.

This environmental fact led to a way of thinking in terms of out-of-nowhere changes. From fair to midland. From bright high to low cold black. From cool breezed to anvil-iron hot. From gentle rains to hailstorms. From clear-blue skies to red-dirt roiling thunderheads. From still-as-a-mouse afternoons to howling wind-pounded evenings.

And change was happening as I was born. The world was changing. Everywhere powers were beginning to show their muscles. Male-god-led societies amassing huge military organizations. Weapons building becoming every country's national industry. China was in a period of rapid everyday change. Japan was roaring up trying to demand its imperial self be bowed to. Germany was two-faced and meanly revengeful as the good Germans gave their lives over to the little bitter ex-paper-hanger bad artist brash soldier pomposity from Austria, Adolph Shickelgruber --hush, tone down to a whisper, they said perhaps his grandfather was a JEW! And Russia had had the only revolution of the century, not really a Marxist revolution, but a communist one, a revolt of peasants and not the workingclass as Marx had hoped, which led to the dictatorship first of Lenin and then of ruthless Joe Stalin, the peasant from Georgia--a tough old paranoid psychotic who didn't trust anyone, not even himself. The world was changing so rapidly--wars, wars, and rumors of wars; most of the world just beginning to recover from the Great Depression; amidst the advent of television, jet planes, rubber, aspirin, nylon, rayon, penicillin, faster and slicker designed automobiles, electricity for everyone, paved streets and 6-lane highways, international communications--telephones, telegraphs, radio, color film.... What a century. Time sped up in the 20th Century. From wind-blown speeds to propeller speeds to jet speeds. Everything jetted up to superfast. We the People of the US love the superfast. Check out the theme of every Olympics according to US sports commentators. The Olympics are always Them versus the USA! "USA, USA, USA!" (Which actually comes from steroid-meister Vince McMahon's World Wrestling Federation (now World Wrestling Entertainment)--Vince force-fed his idiot audiences that shout when his true-blue US rasslers faced say the Iron Sheik, a known Arab militant and terrorist, or Russkie-looking rasslers who bad-mouthed the US in order to surge up the BOOS and catcalls that led to them shouting, "USA, USA, USA.") We are the fastest human beings on earth--BUT, that's not true anymore, is it? I mean Usain St. Leo Bolt, a Jamaican, is now the world's fastest man. No longer does the US dominate track and field events. We no longer own high jump records, long jump records, pole vault records, javelin-throw records. We no longer own mile (1500-meter) records. Nor do our marathoners any longer dominate the many big city marathons or the Olympic marathons.

And time is changing. It is getting faster and speeding along faster and faster...moving from common old ordinary seconds to nanoseconds.

The most painful realization to hit me in this road-to-Damascus experience I had was that what I think, how I act, how I live, how I react is not the ideal American way. The ideal American way now is to just go along with whatever the Power Elite orders. There are no contrarians. There are no rebels left. There are no rugged individualists to follow, no lefty revolutionaries, no muckraking journalists, no voices in the wilderness, only the honking of idiot geese as they gladly follow the aggressive paths set down by the goosemeisters! I am on the wrong side of the American coin. I wrote a song a few years back called "I'm On the Wrong Side of the Right Life."

I am a lover of peace and quiet. Yet, Americans love disruptions and loud noises. I am for one man one vote. Americans are for rigged elections and political intrigue. I do not believe our myths and instincts lead us to a living godhead. Yet, Americans by the millions follow the teachings of religio-political fools--like Pat Robertson; like the Texas hillbillies--James Robinson and Kenneth Copeland; or dumbass Blacks following the Uncle Tom likes of Creflo Dollar (well named since the Dollar is really who is standing in those Christian pulpits preaching tithing and the giving of your money to them--like old reprobate Oral Roberts came up with his big spiel based on seed faith--and seed to Oral meant dollar bills and not the mustard seed Jesus supposedly was talking about in one of his parables where he compared faith in his being the son of the living god to the might of the tiny-small mustard seed (I assume Jesus ate mustard greens)--and these SEED DOLLARS are tax-free dollar bills, too, by the way--these birds teaching that Jesus doesn't like paying taxes, even though he (supposedly) said "Give unto Caesar what is Caesar's," etc.--and Saint Matthew was a tax collector who continued being a tax collector all the while he was trudging along on those dusty trails with Brother Jesus and his gaggle of hale-and-hearty MEN followers--was Jesus gay?

I am a member of a hated minority. I am a member of several hated minorities.

First of all I'm obsolete. Americans hate the obsolete. Second, I am an A in terms of religions--an A being an Atheist without the Theism. I'm A-religious. But I'm not A-sexual. Third, I am an anti-Authoritarian. I find it very hard for me to honestly bow my knee to someone who says they are my superior. I hate masters. I find kings atrociously silly, as silly as Arianna Huffington's prostituted way to success. I find Godheads as ridiculous as the dress-wearing foppish freakish child-molesting priests who claim direct descendency from those Godheads. "Give me some head, God, and I'll believe in you, as long as I get a happy ending." Fourth, I am pessimistic, though not really since I've looked forward for a long time to a face-to-face meeting with Lord Chaos, in which I find great optimism. Chaos to me offering a chance at true rebirth in the since Chaos signs us to the fact our current way of existence has led us to a dead end and that now while in Chaos, we have a chance to reconfigure, to reprogram, to recompass...to get back on the right path, the right Tao, the right Nirvana. Fifth, I like being a rugged individualist. I have confessed to having dabbled in Austrian Economics--the American brand, the US Libertarian Party back when I was in college that was headquartered in Holland, Michigan. Michigan is a big home to a host of Calvinists and it is Austrian Economics (the Economics of Freddie Von Hayak and Ludwig Von Mises) that champions Calvinist work ethics and fiduciary systems. Sixth, OK, yes, I am cynical, but in a humorous way. As thedailygrowlerhousepianist has warned me many a time, back in the days of Plato a cynic was someone who masturbated in the middle of streets and on corners--you know, wanking themselves in public. Perhaps I am that kind of cynic and these blog posts are masturbational--but then aren't most books masturbational--isn't Arianna Huffington nothing but a masturbater? Seventh, I probably am an elitist. Maybe in an American transcendental sense--in terms of Emerson, Thoreau, Hawthorne, and Melville--not an elitist in the Eric Hoffer sense. Yes, maybe in the sense of Jose Ortega y Gasset. Eighth: I am Bottom Class. There is no class beneath me. I live off the fat of the land, and trust me, folks, except for trans-fat, the land ain't that fat anymore--I'm living off the dole--and whatever trinkets I can sell the collectors of this world. As a Bottom Class eccentric, I will work until I die. And ninth: I am a Advanced White Ape. I admit I am an animal. I do not have a soul. I have a solar plexus, which is where I think all of our emotions come from--and how we try and define all these emotions through our computer-like solutional brains. My brain is like a computer. My body speaks through the solar plexus. Just like a great singer sings from the solar plexus. D.H. Lawrence believed the solar plexus is our true soul--the place where the Self God that was in us at the beginning of our lives became a legendary part of our egos--the ego being that place Bucky Fuller said we were all evolved from in terms of our points in time and what was going on in terms of those points.

Aren't sudden realizations fun? What do they prove in my life? That I am an outcast--not an outlaw--if I were an outlaw, I'd be a well-paid hero.

thegrowlingwolfonaramble
for The Daily Growler