In heaven everything is fine - Eraserhead
Heaven is a place where nothing, nothing ever happens - Talking Heads
May you live in interesting times - Chinese Curse
I'll tell you more about life in heaven soon. It is possible, however unlikely, that some reader here doesn't already know everything about my history. Some interesting times. You can read the bio, it's around here somewhere, or the memoires, likewise, but I'm guessing due to correspondence and IMs that the blog is where the readers are. If anywhere. And as most of you must already know impolitesse is one of my great joys is life it's time to trample politics. Already enough religion. And sex on the Internet is blase. You can find a hundred things more shocking and titillating than I, go google. Politics may be defined as "social relations involving authority or power". If you have some social relations not involving authority or power let me know, will you? I might move to your planet. The monastary comes close but it's still on Earth. And my experience with terrestrial life forms has always involved them. Human interaction is almost invariably politics. So let's begin!
I'm fairly good at standardized tests. I suspect this is due to being fascinated by people. I pay what might be described as obsessive attention, even when I'm apparently staring off into space. Perhaps especially. The point, for our brief recap, is that I scored outside normalcy on the old IQ test. High side I guess, because the academes determined I should be in a GATE style school. Allow me to reiterate, my ocean of idiocy may float a teacup of savant. But go I did. And while that sort of schooling might be in some fashion academically more challenging or in some small way more conducive to the development of critical thinking than the average Merkin public school, let me point out one downside from which I can never truly recover; which I believe actually killed at least one friend. Being 'sent up' to such an environment has a very unhealthy effect on one's ego. Someday maybe I'll write on it, the segregation, the competitions between the real geniuses, the distrust or outright hatred from the 'normal' kids but the germaine point to my political understanding is this: I have first person experience with being 'chosen'. And I know how arbitrary and meaningless it is.
Near and dear friends continuously offed themselves, went bonkers, got themselves murdered all through and after that. Not particularly correlated to GATE, in fact nothing special there, most of you have your own 400 blows... just explainig how the aforementioned conviction may have been cemented. No one is 'special', no one is 'deserving', no one is 'superior'. Or everyone is and doesn't that rather obviate the very concepts?
At the end of High School, beginning of College I played bass for one of the most successful bands in Tucson at the time. The Host is pretty much lost in the sands of time and Sonora, we'll see what happens with that myspace page. We were nothing special, three to five competent guys and a songwriter who could say things people wanted to hear. But we did open for Guns and Roses, Jane's Addiction and other big names I can't particularly stand. And we did get on MTV, of course in those days that just meant we looked passable and had a pop enough sound. But the experience did not contravert my egalitarianism in the least. The universe is stochastic. Very talented, very nice people often never get anywhere. In my experience the majority of people who do so in the Music Industry (shudder) are neither nice nor talented. To say the least.
The world is not a meritocracy. Most of history is a horror. I am a libertarian verging on anarchist philosophically, but pragmatically? The horror continues my friends. I was in New York on Sptember 11, 2001. I had met Phil Rosenzweig years ago in Phoenix. I knew many people in Tower 2 because the headhunter who brought me to New York had offices there. Everyone inside got out. Phil didn't, of course. I don't need conspiracy theories. Never put up to ill-intent what can be explained by incompetence. I only want to know why jets weren't scrambled. Pragmatically I have to be socialist verging on communist. Because some people are inconceivably selfish. They got something different from the 'chosen' experience than I, I guess. Wall Street is one kind of a horror. Blackwater is something else. Listening to Neuwirth's 'Biggest Border Town' my eyes do get misty for NY. But I'm reluctant to return to hell, even for a visit.
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