Don't you hate it when you go to Goodwill to find some used shorts that don't make you look like your father and you go into the dressing room and take off your sweatshirt and hang it up and then try the shorts on and decide they are as bad as anything you already own so you put them back on the rack and get on your vintage and sweet 1974 vespa ciao moped and drive off and are nearly sideswiped by a blind old lady and then you try to get to a Jack In The Box to take advantage of their buy one chicken sandwich and get another free deal but then you decide that their food is garbage and you already got scammed by a con artist this week so you need to conserve your money...so you ride your vintage and sweet 1974 vespa ciao moped back to the van you live in and cook up a meal of Ramen noodles and when it gets chilly in the evening you go to put your sweatshirt on and can't find it. You look everywhere. Where the hell is it? You had it at Goodwill and then...Oh Fuck! You left it at Goodwill in the dressing room and now Goodwill is closed.
So, you think that you will never get it back because there is no lost and found box at Goodwill since the whole store is basically a lost and found box that is for sale. The whole point of Goodwill is that you can leave stuff you don't want anymore and they will take it and sell it. But don't you hate it when Goodwill gets something that you didn't mean to give away. You've had that sweatshirt for 6 years and yes the zipper has broken and it has paint and bleach stains on it but it was cool when you first got it and it serves a function so...
So...the next day you have to ride your vintage and sweet 1974 vespa ciao moped all the way across the city again to go to the Goodwill to retrieve your sweatshirt. Of course it isn't in the dressing room. But where will it be? And what will happen if you find it? You search and search everywhere. It's a blue sweatshirt with a green hood. Hard to miss. You check in the Men's department but when was the last Goodwill you went to that had organized all their clothes perfectly? Underwear is with the jeans. Shirts are with coats. All the sizes are a mess. You hunt and hunt and move on to the women's section, perversely leafing through old lady sweaters looking for your own sweater. Then you find it with the women's sports bras. It's hanging on the rack and no one has bought it. You wonder if that's a good thing or a bad thing. No one wanted your sweater at Goodwill but here you are hunting for it.
Oh well. You grab it and wonder if you should steal it, basically walk out with it and pretend it was yours all along but the way things are going these days you wouldn't be surprised if they had security monitoring you. Jesus, that would suck to be arrested stealing your own sweatshirt from a crappy Goodwill in Missouri. People kill themselves over less than that. So, you get in line. The worst thing that will happen is you will have to buy it back. But there is no price tag because the employee who put it back on the rack didn't really care that there was no price tag. He probably figured someone tore it off and then left it in the dressing room. Or maybe someone took it off and traded it for something. You get to the cashier.
"I'll ring you up." He reaches for your sweatshirt.
"Well, it's funny. I've got a funny story. This is my sweatshirt. I went into the dressing room and left it there yesterday."
The cashier's look tells you that he doesn't believe you. Why would he? This has to be the first time since he's worked there that someone is telling him that they left something in the dressing room and they want it back.
"See," you continue, "This paint spot is from when I just painted my friend's house. And look at the zipper! It broke and I tied this ribbon on there so I could pull it. And this bleach spot was a splash from this kitchen cleanup job I had around Christmas at a Lobster pound."
Your desperate tone wins the day. The cashier nods.
"You're all good."
You are relieved that you didn't have to shell out money for a sweatshirt you already own. And when that is a highlight of your day then you really have big problems.
Saturday, March 31, 2012
Lottery Results
Ready For Winter
Friday, March 30, 2012
Religion Isn't All That Bad
The problem with religion is that Americans basically only see the candy cane/mardi gras/easter egg side of it. We see American Flag book covers on bibles and Christianity invoked in our battle with Middle Eastern Children. No wonder you get some head shaking.
"Religion causes war. It's evil."
And I've been guilty of that reaction too. It's very easy to look at religion in America objectively and see it as purely a contrivance and a fraud basically trying to get money from old people and justify a decade [millenium] of senseless slaughter. Ok. But I've pondered this perplexing mess and have decided that religion in America is not religious. It's like saying McDonalds serves food. In other words, judging religion based on what you see today (mass exploitation of Jesus for profit) is no different than saying the sport Football is evil because there have been coaches who sexually molest their players. I'll even go so far as to say that since the institution of church in America and the bible is almost completely exploited to the point that I don't know of an example in my travels of all 49 states on the Continent that would contradict your belief that religion is evil. So if every sports team had an incidence of sex abuse (not far from the truth) you still couldn't say football is evil because it is used to exploit kids. You might as well say that sodomy causes first downs . That analogy would look like this:
Religion Football
-------- = ---------
War Sex Abuse
This question came to me because Bill Maher made a movie called "Religulous" and his whole premise is wrong. He's searching the world for an example of pure religion, a rational justification of it, but that doesn't exist in any recognizable form anymore. He's 250 years too late as the Puritains and Quakers have been replaced by porn kings and big macs. But that doesn't mean religion is essentially ridiculous. No. And football is not to blame for sex abuse. See, I feel that your average Jehovah pedaling truth of death and resurrection has as much to do with religion as sodomy has to do with punt coverage. Were Puritains and Quakers "real" religion? God, I hope so. They would all be unquestionably horrified by the state of the country they started. They would think most of us, including the Unitarians and Methodists, were involved with witchcraft and should be burned at the stake. I have no doubt of this because when I read the CNN comments every third remark has something to do with killing someone for being evil. If the average CNN reader feels that way then I'm sure the Puritains would simply declare America a lost cause, spawns of the devil, hopelessly corrupt. And it might be a lost cause. This is the central debate I have not found a conclusion to: If America stands for progress and progress leads to an environmental catastrophe, and progress means finding a way to survive in the man-made environmental catastrophe THEN WHAT THE FUCK IS THE DEFINITION OF PROGRESS? If you go with the flow then I'm pretty sure that's like the Germans ignoring the ash floating from the strange chimneys for 5 years. But if you don't go with the flow then you end up in the police blotter. You've got a powerful church that manipulates the masses for profit but it's so widespread that it can't be stopped. And if it can't be stopped and you can't ignore it then you are living by the whim of an insane and megalomaniacal monster in a funny hat. But I digress...
This is an ongoing debate that robs Oggy of many hours of peaceful sleep. Some people study ant habits, some study distant galaxies, some engineer better artificial valves for pig hearts. Oggy ponders these complicated questions because he wants to understand the world he lives in. Let me stop talking about myself in third person and say that I was hooking the last strands on my rug when I felt that it could not be done; my attempt to fully understand the human condition is an impossible task. Then I think that all researchers will eventually doubt their abilities. The good ones continue in the face of failure. The bad ones become politicians. Astronauts explore outer space; Oggy explores inner space...and he is lost without oxygen and no map. If I could start all over and accept the headlines as irrelevant facts then I would do that, but that's also impossible. So, as a weaver by name and trade I am cutting the tether. You either go forward or you stop. We don't live forever and I was racing around on my moped today and several times was nearly killed. A worker on a bridge was sucked into the Mississippi in an elevator. Dead. We get a limited amount of time to raid the refrigerator of humanity and then it is gone, passed on to another greedy generation. I do not think I will find a conclusion to the madness of life but I might have some artistic expression that will be a piece in the puzzle. I feel that is worthwhile. We live and die. Science has allowed us to live longer but Religion, I think, started as a way to finish the puzzle of the human condition before it turned into a crazy obsession and that crazy obsession led to the hotly debated details that separate the religions. The details are irrelevant but they've been bastardized and used to kill...and so the details have morphed religion into something unrecognizable. It does not comfort. It is invoked by sellers of snake oil and is the ponzi scheme's ultimate rationale. But that isn't the nature of religion any more than sex scandals are in the nature of college sports. It would be like trying to convince someone to stop liking Culture Club songs. How can you rationalize Karma Chameleon?
I got off track because the tornadoes are blowing my van across the yellow brick road, but I want to close with a memory of Gislane LaChance in Quebec, the only Religious man I've met in North America. There was no rhetoric, no invoking God for his favors. God was another name for fate, fate that controlled the winds and the rainfall. God didn't control the direction a tree fell when it was cut by Gislane for his lumber mill, but God did control the direction the tree fell when the wind blew it down. But once the tree lay on the ground then it was in Gislane's domain. God made the chicken and Gislane killed and ate it. Simple. That's the difference. Simple but true. So, I know there are people who are religious in North America but Bill Maher* will not casually walk down the street or knock on a church door to meet one of them here or in Jerusalem or the Vatican or Mecca. Those are all masquerade balls with open invitations. No, religion is rare in this Christian country. It never had anything to do with the birth of Jesus or white doves. Easter is coming up and that has nothing to do with religion either. Easter is about exalting our details of creation so they overshadow your details of creation. That has more to do with the insecurity of the devout than anything else.
Now I'm going to get back to pondering the universe in my insecure shame palace.
*Maher really plays slow pitch softball with his agenda driven movie. It's weird because he's clearly trying to champion reason in place of faith. But the easiest argument against that is, why bother? Who cares if we know dinosaurs didn't live with humans 25,000 years ago? Who cares if we can cure cancer? Who cares that the constellations are distant suns and not actual celestial beings? Without spirituality the realities of life are too much to deal with. He attacks Mormon beliefs in front of a palatial building that pretty much proves that the Mormons are not full of shit. The proof that religions work is in the fact they have lasted and the infrastructure they have produced. Yes, they are snake oil salesmen, but their snake oil lasts. People say religion is a crutch and I agree. It's a crutch for an animal alone on a rock hurtling toward death. Maher has no consoling words for our condition. God does. That's the difference he never admits.
Maher says, "If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest."
But he's wrong. He's projecting his beliefs onto others. In fact, he's pinpointed the exact reason people accept religion: because it's a club and it gives them strength to be on the same page as others. Loyalty means accepting beliefs and defending them. They wouldn't resign in protest because they would probably try to affiliate the club with the religion and reduce the number of Christmas cards they have to send out. Maher says a devout person can't know his fate after death, "Because I don't know what's going to happen...and you don't posses mental powers I do not."
That's his basic contradiction. I don't believe in God so you shouldn't either. (add a haughty laugh)
He preached to the choir in this film and he knows it and I'm almost glad he doesn't have a good enough argument to convert a single person's belief. Heck, he made me MORE religious! Amen.
"Religion causes war. It's evil."
And I've been guilty of that reaction too. It's very easy to look at religion in America objectively and see it as purely a contrivance and a fraud basically trying to get money from old people and justify a decade [millenium] of senseless slaughter. Ok. But I've pondered this perplexing mess and have decided that religion in America is not religious. It's like saying McDonalds serves food. In other words, judging religion based on what you see today (mass exploitation of Jesus for profit) is no different than saying the sport Football is evil because there have been coaches who sexually molest their players. I'll even go so far as to say that since the institution of church in America and the bible is almost completely exploited to the point that I don't know of an example in my travels of all 49 states on the Continent that would contradict your belief that religion is evil. So if every sports team had an incidence of sex abuse (not far from the truth) you still couldn't say football is evil because it is used to exploit kids. You might as well say that sodomy causes first downs . That analogy would look like this:
Religion Football
-------- = ---------
War Sex Abuse
This question came to me because Bill Maher made a movie called "Religulous" and his whole premise is wrong. He's searching the world for an example of pure religion, a rational justification of it, but that doesn't exist in any recognizable form anymore. He's 250 years too late as the Puritains and Quakers have been replaced by porn kings and big macs. But that doesn't mean religion is essentially ridiculous. No. And football is not to blame for sex abuse. See, I feel that your average Jehovah pedaling truth of death and resurrection has as much to do with religion as sodomy has to do with punt coverage. Were Puritains and Quakers "real" religion? God, I hope so. They would all be unquestionably horrified by the state of the country they started. They would think most of us, including the Unitarians and Methodists, were involved with witchcraft and should be burned at the stake. I have no doubt of this because when I read the CNN comments every third remark has something to do with killing someone for being evil. If the average CNN reader feels that way then I'm sure the Puritains would simply declare America a lost cause, spawns of the devil, hopelessly corrupt. And it might be a lost cause. This is the central debate I have not found a conclusion to: If America stands for progress and progress leads to an environmental catastrophe, and progress means finding a way to survive in the man-made environmental catastrophe THEN WHAT THE FUCK IS THE DEFINITION OF PROGRESS? If you go with the flow then I'm pretty sure that's like the Germans ignoring the ash floating from the strange chimneys for 5 years. But if you don't go with the flow then you end up in the police blotter. You've got a powerful church that manipulates the masses for profit but it's so widespread that it can't be stopped. And if it can't be stopped and you can't ignore it then you are living by the whim of an insane and megalomaniacal monster in a funny hat. But I digress...
This is an ongoing debate that robs Oggy of many hours of peaceful sleep. Some people study ant habits, some study distant galaxies, some engineer better artificial valves for pig hearts. Oggy ponders these complicated questions because he wants to understand the world he lives in. Let me stop talking about myself in third person and say that I was hooking the last strands on my rug when I felt that it could not be done; my attempt to fully understand the human condition is an impossible task. Then I think that all researchers will eventually doubt their abilities. The good ones continue in the face of failure. The bad ones become politicians. Astronauts explore outer space; Oggy explores inner space...and he is lost without oxygen and no map. If I could start all over and accept the headlines as irrelevant facts then I would do that, but that's also impossible. So, as a weaver by name and trade I am cutting the tether. You either go forward or you stop. We don't live forever and I was racing around on my moped today and several times was nearly killed. A worker on a bridge was sucked into the Mississippi in an elevator. Dead. We get a limited amount of time to raid the refrigerator of humanity and then it is gone, passed on to another greedy generation. I do not think I will find a conclusion to the madness of life but I might have some artistic expression that will be a piece in the puzzle. I feel that is worthwhile. We live and die. Science has allowed us to live longer but Religion, I think, started as a way to finish the puzzle of the human condition before it turned into a crazy obsession and that crazy obsession led to the hotly debated details that separate the religions. The details are irrelevant but they've been bastardized and used to kill...and so the details have morphed religion into something unrecognizable. It does not comfort. It is invoked by sellers of snake oil and is the ponzi scheme's ultimate rationale. But that isn't the nature of religion any more than sex scandals are in the nature of college sports. It would be like trying to convince someone to stop liking Culture Club songs. How can you rationalize Karma Chameleon?
I got off track because the tornadoes are blowing my van across the yellow brick road, but I want to close with a memory of Gislane LaChance in Quebec, the only Religious man I've met in North America. There was no rhetoric, no invoking God for his favors. God was another name for fate, fate that controlled the winds and the rainfall. God didn't control the direction a tree fell when it was cut by Gislane for his lumber mill, but God did control the direction the tree fell when the wind blew it down. But once the tree lay on the ground then it was in Gislane's domain. God made the chicken and Gislane killed and ate it. Simple. That's the difference. Simple but true. So, I know there are people who are religious in North America but Bill Maher* will not casually walk down the street or knock on a church door to meet one of them here or in Jerusalem or the Vatican or Mecca. Those are all masquerade balls with open invitations. No, religion is rare in this Christian country. It never had anything to do with the birth of Jesus or white doves. Easter is coming up and that has nothing to do with religion either. Easter is about exalting our details of creation so they overshadow your details of creation. That has more to do with the insecurity of the devout than anything else.
Now I'm going to get back to pondering the universe in my insecure shame palace.
*Maher really plays slow pitch softball with his agenda driven movie. It's weird because he's clearly trying to champion reason in place of faith. But the easiest argument against that is, why bother? Who cares if we know dinosaurs didn't live with humans 25,000 years ago? Who cares if we can cure cancer? Who cares that the constellations are distant suns and not actual celestial beings? Without spirituality the realities of life are too much to deal with. He attacks Mormon beliefs in front of a palatial building that pretty much proves that the Mormons are not full of shit. The proof that religions work is in the fact they have lasted and the infrastructure they have produced. Yes, they are snake oil salesmen, but their snake oil lasts. People say religion is a crutch and I agree. It's a crutch for an animal alone on a rock hurtling toward death. Maher has no consoling words for our condition. God does. That's the difference he never admits.
Maher says, "If you belonged to a political party or a social club that was tied to as much bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, violence, and sheer ignorance as religion is, you'd resign in protest."
But he's wrong. He's projecting his beliefs onto others. In fact, he's pinpointed the exact reason people accept religion: because it's a club and it gives them strength to be on the same page as others. Loyalty means accepting beliefs and defending them. They wouldn't resign in protest because they would probably try to affiliate the club with the religion and reduce the number of Christmas cards they have to send out. Maher says a devout person can't know his fate after death, "Because I don't know what's going to happen...and you don't posses mental powers I do not."
That's his basic contradiction. I don't believe in God so you shouldn't either. (add a haughty laugh)
He preached to the choir in this film and he knows it and I'm almost glad he doesn't have a good enough argument to convert a single person's belief. Heck, he made me MORE religious! Amen.
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