Do You Feel Lucky?

(and feel free to comment! My older posts are certainly no less relevant to the burning concerns of the day.)

Wednesday, April 24, 2013

Way to Start an Argument

"Of course I believe in Government! We see the roads. We see the uniformed officers. Some force, some organizing power must be responsible for these things! They could not have arisen by pure chance."

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

Occasionally, a man loses track of his belt, and has to email people about it.

Is there a MAN'S BELT kicking around your house? Perhaps draped over a chair? Perhaps fallen behind something? Could it be a MAN'S BELT with a dark color strap; a squarish, gunmetal-gray buckle? Have you ever seen a MAN'S BELT in the greater living room or kitchen area since say, last Tuesday?

Have you ever threaded a MAN'S BELT through the loops of your waistband? Tighten it up, slide the buckle-peg into its snug notch, let the excess strap flap free! Did you ever take a MAN'S BELT in your hands and double it back, loop it so that your left hand held both ends with your right gripping the folded middle - then CRACK! you jerk your hands outward, snapping the belt taught?

Ah, a MAN'S BELT can be a great thing to hold your pants up, or suitable for home defense. A MAN'S BELT.

Is there one in YOUR home?

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Afterlife? I don't need to talk about the afterlife.

We seriously don't need to argue where or how heaven, or paradise or the eternal kingdom or whatever you wish for, whatever you wish to call it - is going to be set up.

Trust God's judgment. Trust God's competence to manage the details and aspects of the afterlife. Afterlife? I don't even need to guess about the afterlife. I am one life, eternal - not because I was worth it, or deserved it on my own merit! Heck, I didn't even deserve to be born.

God looked, and saw, and said that it was good. God sees all. God saw that you were good. Good, and worth saving. That was God's judgment on the matter, anyhow. God's judgment on humanity was Christ. Was and is - and in him, will ever be.

Christ accepted, then rebuked human judgment - accepted the sentence of death we pronounced, then swept it aside once and for all! For all who heed Christ's call to accept God's judgment - no longer stubbornly preferring our own.

It is not our choice that saves us. By God's choice, we are already saved: Christ came to save us all. But God will not force us against our will. We can always choose to prefer our own human judgment, the fruits of our knowledge of good and evil. We're allowed to reject God's judgment. We're allowed to reject Christ. Or we can accept the salvation, the good news that salvation is ours. At Christ's call, we reverse Adam's fall.

That's all pretty normal and straightforward. I don't see how arguing about shining clouds, or pearly gates, or halo frisbee golf, or alleluia choirs, or the details of wherever and however our heavenly Father shall run his house, the house he has prepared for us - who cares? Do we believe in God, but worry he might bungle these minor matters? Come on. Or the way hell is, or is run. Whatever hell is, it is founded and set in place how God saw fit. God's competent for this junk. Some of the ways I hear people talk about heaven or hell, I find upsetting. But not because I worry God might have actually set it up some crazy or unjust way. It's upsetting to me, to hear people upsetting themselves and others over stupid things. And to make a major case over aspects we can't dictate, but that God surely has covered is stupid. Arguing about the afterlife - is stupid.

I was born twice, I can die once and still come out ahead! - and alive. I was born once to nature, natural inheritor of the natural universe, inheritor of free will and the right to prefer my judgment to God's. "Cursed with original sin," they call it. Ah, children. Grow up, and accept this great gift you see all around you!

I was born a second time in Christ, even as Christ himself - already and eternally one in being with God! - was born, incarnate in human form. Taking on flesh, to wed it to the eternal. Through him, with him, and in him, by God's will, God's judgment and God's grace, I was born to eternity. What astounding news. Undeserved. I accept it gratefully.

I don't need to talk about the afterlife. There's nothing after life. I was born twice. I can die once. I don't mind the minor passages of life, which is eternal. I was born to it.

Sunday, April 14, 2013

I believe in the Separation of Church and Hate.

And no, I didn't come up with that myself. But yeah, it's pretty catchy! And I believe in it. Sure.

But let's define terms, please. By "hate," I only mean the choice to have utter contempt for the ultimate worth of a living human being. I call that hate. Sure. To make the claim for Christ, "even Jesus would throw this person away." What contempt for human worth! What contempt for Christ's call. What contempt for Christ himself, who we are called to love and serve in the person of even the worst of our enemies, in the person of even the least of our fellows. Is there a worse hate than to look at a living human who you have no call to judge, and condemn that human being as worthless, as something to be utterly, permanently thrown away? Well, sure, arguably - doing that to a human being you haven't even met is worse. But either way is bad.

Yet I have Good News! For believer and nonbeliever alike!

If a Christian storms the high seat of Christ's judgment, and presumes to sit in it, to sit in judgment: to reject the possibility of Christ's mercy, and pronounce to damn a human being - any human being! No matter what they done! - good news! They do it wrongly. They pronounce judgment wrongly. A Christian has no call to do that. Doing that, they reject Christ's judgment to substitute their own. They reject the judgment of Christ.

"Reject Christ's judgment"? So are they damned? Are they therefore damned?

Well, pay attention, dipstick. I don't answer that. You don't answer that. It's Christ's call. Am I fully God and fully human as well? Christ alone is competent to answer the question of whether a person is saved or damned. Christ alone makes that call. And I tell you what: even though to reject God's judgment and prefer your own is the original sin, and still one of the worst - I won't hate that person who does. I won't have utter contempt for their ultimate worth. I won't presume to judge them damned.

Instead, I will trust in the mercy and justice of Christ's judgment, as I am called to do. Every time, in every case. Even my own.

On the new Top 9.

On the new Top 9. (sidebar, to the right)

"The Associate Editors of Merriam-Webster's 'Ask the Editor' Segment: Hot or Not?" was added in after, just now. That one was an editorial decision, I stumbled across it and could neither leave it out nor wait for the next Top 9 - ALL the others were from the Random button.

This also marks the first time the official Top 9 has had anything other than eleven (11) posts.

I hope that doesn't become a trend.

Friday, April 12, 2013

DUMBASS!!!

DUMBASS!!!

Don't you know that when you get an email with a vague subject line ("Check this out" or "Have you seen this yet?") and a link in the message body, from someone you trust - don't you know that 90% of the time, that's a hijack? A virus, a spam, a scam, a pirated send from your friend's INFECTED INBOX?? EWW. And you CLICKED on that link?!

Come on. Get aware, get responsible! You want to just spread that problem yourself, to everyone in YOUR contacts list? Do you click every link you're sent, when the email itself has nothing in it from your friend that sounds like them? "Clicky-clicky, Ooo...an infected page. Who knew? Paging Malcom Ware! Paging Mr. Mal Ware?"

How do you not know better than that? Please, seriously.

Luckily for you, though - good news. This page is not infected. Your mailbox, right at this moment, is not sending out copies of a link to this page, to everyone you know. The person who sent you the link didn't send it to you due to a virusy piratey hijack attack. I don't know why they sent it to you. They want to promote anti-malware awareness? Maybe they just wanted to call you "dumbass."

Instructions for use: copy the URL to this page, and paste it into the body of an email. Give the email a vague subject line, such as "Check this out" or "Have you seen this yet?" Send it to as many of your friends as you wish!

A public service announcement, from we here at Consider Your Ass Kicked!

Thursday, April 11, 2013

Rule #1

Beating everybody at their own damn game is my own damn game.

God, the rules are so complex. Rule #1 though, is I'm not playin'.

Science: Balls-Deep In The Universe And Loving It #1: the Formation of Stars

I know all about stars!

Basically, it starts with physics. Then they put the matter in, but it's really jammed in there, right? So because there's so much of it, the gravity pulls it all in all pushy-crushy and then, the pressure builds and builds until the force and pressure overwhelms and breaks down the strong nuclear forces holding atoms together as separate from each other. RESULT? FUSION. It gets so hot in there you don't even want to think about it! And all that energy puts out in the form of visible light, cosmic rays and what not, solar flares, hard radiation particles - you name it.

A star is basically an ongoing everyday ho-hum nuclear explosion that only keeps its nice, round shape due to the uniform action of gravity coming in around roundly from all sides, acting towards the stellar core where the heavier elements begin accumulating as hydrogen is fused to helium, helium to the next one, the next one into something even heavier.

GOLD forms in stars, before they lose all their best un-fused fuel and finally explode! Supernova, and fly apart.

How's that?!

Better than wikipedia at least! Go look it up, and prepare to fail to be inspired I bet. I fervently hope. Because that's me trying my best up there! Wikipedia explains it very dry and convoluted I am sure, albeit probably they use more "right terms." They explain everything that way. They say the right song, but they've forgotten the music.

The music of the stars.

Stream of Consciousness Semi-fictional semi-Autobiographical Materials

The dog came on. Yapping. I was terrified. I must have been four years old. Could this be the source of my fear of dogs? If so, what happened to my fear of dogs? I feel as though I had one, once. A fear of dogs. Click.

new memory: I stand at the beach, squelching and re-squelching my toes in the wet sand. The dying rush of another flat wave foams in, muddy colored with brilliant surface bubbles, the reflected sun pushes streaming warm water around my ankles and then - slow, stop, reverse - the tide drags itself back, its suction pulling the foundation from under my heels. I thrill to the sensation of the wet sand and mud disappearing out from under me. My feet are unsettling, making weird pits as the waves wash in and out. Click.

new memory: I stood there, in front of the candy store with my colored fluorescent chalks. Or were they crayons? Pastels? Some sort of colored tacky things they'd given me to draw on their window glass. It was the summer before eighth grade, and they were paying me to draw on their window. I was drawing a clown. I don't recall now if I had been asked to draw a clown, or simply to draw something. I was drawing a clown. Click.

My first sexual experience. I am simultaneously penetrating and being penetrated by myself. But something is wrong. I have only half the necessary genetic material for a human being! Wait, okay, the other half is in wiggly me. That complements and completes the half in round me. The nuclear boundaries are dissolving, releasing two halved double helixes into a shared cell chamber. Drawn to each other, pulling and whirling as if in a dance, the two incomplete sequences combine into one - complete! A new organism! Unique in the history of the world. Straight, white and male. Click.

End memory retrieval sequence.

Tuesday, April 09, 2013

Most of the time, perfection's only pretty neat.

...And the reason you can never remember perfection is, perfection is not what happened. Perfection isn't what you actually did - it's the blaze of a moment where something was created, and it's the glow your memory gives that moment. But the thing itself - the idea, the act, the perfect turn of phrase - wasn't perfection, never was. Even if you reconstruct that turn of phrase precisely later, word for word, your mind will say, "aw man that is not it. It was better than that. Why can't I remember!? Why didn't I write it down?"

Perfection must always be written down, or your mind will never be satisfied you got it right. What you reconstruct perfectly later is not good enough. But if write it down, your mind will be forced to succumb. "Wait, was that it? I guess it was. I thought it was better than that! But yeah, I guess this was it. OK!

Pretty neat!"

Sunday, April 07, 2013

Retiring The Old Top 9!

This was the all 'hell' label edition:

a horrible thought
Satan Hates Puppies
I Think World War I is On The Cusp of a Big Public Appreciation Renaissance
Some Claim Hell
On Any Given Sunday In The Afterlife
I Love Beets!
Who Did You Say You Thought You Were, Again?
So Okay, I'll Bite: What The Hell?
Reincarnation? Oh God, Please No
I Have This Theory About The Afterlife...
A Compassionate Outreach: to Atheists

For the next Top 9 of All-Time: It's back to the Random Post button! Hoo hoo!

Zero Google results for "don't card my recovery process"

Does that mean I made it up?

"Don't card my recovery process!" It means basically, don't ID me on shit that's supposed to be anonymous (or private); don't ask me to produce credentials on my personal state or document my stage of struggle; don't investigate my program and rate how I'm doing, when I didn't ask you.

Could also have overtones of "don't make this a competition between us of who's been the biggest victim, of whose agony wins the pain pageant."

Stuff like that. You mean it's not even a saying?

Huh.

Well then what do people say for that?

Saturday, April 06, 2013

thought process

If humanity's got any chance of getting through the thickness of each other's skulls it will...

...something to do with the thinness of each other's skins. Make it clever, wrap it with a bow, dunzo.


hm.

Maybe a poem!

the thickness of each other's skulls
the thinness of each other's skins
so sensitive to undertone
so flushed with insult, loss and win
so pricked with shame, the thickness of
each other's skulls

protects the tender brain
inside,
so delicate
let nothing in
that could upset
one's delicately-balanced pride

let nothing in
that could cause me
to reevaluate my life
let nothing in
that could cause me to question
why I'm on my side, let nothing in

to cause a switch
crack like a whip
red stripe of shame
across my hide


...

Yeah. Hm. Could be!

Call it "hide," I guess!
Second off, it would be insane for me to mean anything but what I say.

Tuesday, April 02, 2013

A dunce is only a few stars and moons away from being a wizard.

Edison Vs. Tesla? COME ON.

I go for EDISON 'cause he was just a straight-up thug. He was like, a borderline-criminal kingpin of science! The world's first real-life supervillain mastermind mad scientist.

You know Edison stole a print of George MĆ©liĆØs A Trip To The Moon and then made a shitload of copies of it to show in the U.S.? Never paid MĆ©liĆØs a franc! Meanwhile, he was a vigilant protector of film rights - on his own films. The efforts of his Motion Picture Patents Company to suppress and control rival film pioneers all but created the film industry in Hollywood - by chasing every wannabe filmmaker out of the tri-state area! The dude was basically a one-man enterprise of brute force intimidation and villainy, turning every gear and lever of the system to his advantage while chewing up and grinding under heel every competitor he possibly could.

Tesla? Hell. Come on. The guy was bright, sure, but he just didn't have the eye of the tiger.