Some End of the Year Debris

Thoughts:

Stories. Most people need stories; they need to fabricate fictions to give some order to their lives, or they need stories to fill the holes of their misapprehensions. Creating stories allows one to be the hero of his own myth and god of his own reality.
For me, stories are no way of living; stories are only good for books.

Love can inspire us to be more compassionate and enlightened; but it is also amazing how memories of a failed romance can drag us down into such petty shit. Cf. From an Occult Diary, A. Strindberg

What is the color of "beaver"?

Wandering around the web and grabbing snippets to feed my imagination.

What is “psychogeography”? The jacket flap defines it as a “meditation on the vexed relationship between psyche and place,” and any number of well-spectacled young Ph.D.’s in sociology or urban studies will talk to you of Situationists and leave you with the bar tab. At its writerly best, though, psychogeography seems simpler to me: it is clear and vivid nonfiction writing with a sense of the past and an eye for the present that takes us close to the street. I mean “street” both literally, as in the color of the paving stones and the font of the signage and the shape of the sidewalk, and figuratively, as in the multitudes that pass by, the movers and shakers, the loiterers and bystanders, the beggars and mimes. (A bartender might mix one part local historian, one part flâneur, one part novelist, one part raconteur. Call the resulting cocktail a Peter Ackroyd or a John Berger, a Rebecca Solnit or an Iain Sinclair.)

.....

Hunter Thompson once said that satire became impossible when reality itself was too twisted and I fear that’s become the case.

Here lies an atheist, All dressed up, And no place to go

In the war on religion: Religions = ∞ atheism =4

I'm still on the side of atheism anyway.

from the article:


Blaise Pascal wrote that "men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from religious conviction." Napoleon thought religion "keeps the poor from murdering the rich." Freud regarded religions as "mass delusions."

Konner's choices also remind us that Bible-bashing is next to godliness among atheists. Issac Asimov viewed the Bible as "the most potent force for atheism ever conceived." Paine described it as "a book of lies and contradictions," "the work of a demon" more than "the word of God," and denounced its "obscene stories, the voluptuous debaucheries . . . the unrelenting vindictiveness."

Voltaire shared Paine's disapproval, defining the Bible as "what fools have written, what imbeciles command, what rogues teach." Leading 19th-century American atheist Robert Ingersoll castigated it for presenting a God who upholds slavery, commands soldiers to kill women and babies, supports polygamy, persecutes people for their opinions, and punishes unbelievers forever.

I know one thing, no matter how dressed up I am, I do not ever want to go to a wedding, or have one!

article:

About a dozen years ago, an old friend of mine was told by his daughter that she was going to get married. This suited him fine, but he balked at pouring untold thousands of dollars down the drain of a full-dress wedding. "I'll tell you what," he said to her. "I'll give you a choice: You can have a wedding, or you can have $30,000 to help you get started on your new life." Without a moment's hesitation, she astonished him -- and me, too, when he told me the story -- by replying, "I'll take the wedding."