Here's a tonguetwister: Loveable cake of soap. Not so much twisting as quite a workout for the mouth. This is the last real day of my Christmas Vacation, afterall. I need to work out the last bits of nonsense and drivel.
Not along the same lines at all, if you've never read Orion, you ought to check it out. It's often a very insightful publication.
Friday, January 2, 2004
WalMart. Necessary evil by virtue of its economic footprint? Not fast breaking news, but here's a short interview with the CEO of SpraWlMart. Another of the side issues that plagues my mind at times like an angry yellowjacket.
Eh. My dear brother says "major announcement." Warning to visitors with no previous experience or expectations: lower those levels still more!
I always think about what I write for at least days afterward. Sometimes I have second thoughts, sometimes just second syntaxes. Do I ever wonder where THAT came from? Yes, quite often, and for wildly divergent reasons.
I speak sometimes in sweeping generalities for the sake of getting things off my chest. I am aware of these generalities most of the time, but for the sake of paring expression down to something less than fifty pages with footnotes and references, I sweep with one of those mondo high school gym dustmops at times.
I tend also toward verbosity, a dear friend once nicknamed me "maximum verbosity" for my sometimes unwieldy and youthful poetry, but I try to economize a bit nowadays. Nevertheless, expression fascinates me.
All else is well here in Central Utah for the Burninghams, the kids are well and the Momma Extraordinaire is recovering smashingly from the recent birth of our sixth.
If you enjoy heartfelt opinion and insight into unstable psychology, please come back often to see if my cup hath again run over! You could even check out the three years of interspersed rantings in the archives to see if there is any baseline at all. At any rate, welcome.
I always think about what I write for at least days afterward. Sometimes I have second thoughts, sometimes just second syntaxes. Do I ever wonder where THAT came from? Yes, quite often, and for wildly divergent reasons.
I speak sometimes in sweeping generalities for the sake of getting things off my chest. I am aware of these generalities most of the time, but for the sake of paring expression down to something less than fifty pages with footnotes and references, I sweep with one of those mondo high school gym dustmops at times.
I tend also toward verbosity, a dear friend once nicknamed me "maximum verbosity" for my sometimes unwieldy and youthful poetry, but I try to economize a bit nowadays. Nevertheless, expression fascinates me.
All else is well here in Central Utah for the Burninghams, the kids are well and the Momma Extraordinaire is recovering smashingly from the recent birth of our sixth.
If you enjoy heartfelt opinion and insight into unstable psychology, please come back often to see if my cup hath again run over! You could even check out the three years of interspersed rantings in the archives to see if there is any baseline at all. At any rate, welcome.
Thursday, January 1, 2004
Blogger is experiencing some difficulty right now, so I’ll throw a few down in WordPerfect. Darned Blogger.
I’ve been thinking much about the causations and factors behind relationships, both successful and un. There is so much one has to do in order to keep a relationship in working order, while at the same time it can be so easy to strike a new one up.
People have very little training in inter-personal communication and in giving and interpreting communication signals. While we are very similar in appetites and desires at a basal level, each one of us is unique in our ways of communicating those ideas to others. There are even similar personality types that many of us fit or at least communicate with more easily, but outside of those similar types, we often find ourselves at an impasse when communicating.
That’s when conflict can occur and build to points where a relationship is impossible or even undesirable to continue.
There are usually at least a few of these wrecked relationships floating like withered leaves in our experiential rivers. They usually are the kind that at some time in the past, we have spent a tremendous amount of time and effort on, but at some point the two paths diverged. Sometimes there is a cordial parting and in other instances, there are long and wrenching periods of struggle on the part of one or both to reconcile and continue.
Often those relationships are the ones that leave us feeling like there is more lost than won in these attempts, but only through these instances can we learn our own grasp of communication with others as well as with our own selves.
That is when growth comes and can show the way to future and more pleasantly fruitful interchanges.
I’ve been thinking much about the causations and factors behind relationships, both successful and un. There is so much one has to do in order to keep a relationship in working order, while at the same time it can be so easy to strike a new one up.
People have very little training in inter-personal communication and in giving and interpreting communication signals. While we are very similar in appetites and desires at a basal level, each one of us is unique in our ways of communicating those ideas to others. There are even similar personality types that many of us fit or at least communicate with more easily, but outside of those similar types, we often find ourselves at an impasse when communicating.
That’s when conflict can occur and build to points where a relationship is impossible or even undesirable to continue.
There are usually at least a few of these wrecked relationships floating like withered leaves in our experiential rivers. They usually are the kind that at some time in the past, we have spent a tremendous amount of time and effort on, but at some point the two paths diverged. Sometimes there is a cordial parting and in other instances, there are long and wrenching periods of struggle on the part of one or both to reconcile and continue.
Often those relationships are the ones that leave us feeling like there is more lost than won in these attempts, but only through these instances can we learn our own grasp of communication with others as well as with our own selves.
That is when growth comes and can show the way to future and more pleasantly fruitful interchanges.
We seem to have come to a unique place in our society, one where we have joined our brutal and primal roots with the ultimate expressions of our current culture and left little room for that which enables us to transcend to become better.
Our civil roots were planted deeply in power and the exercise thereof to further our own procreative exploits. Through the years, we created infrastructure to enable ourselves time to more thoughtfully pursue these ends if not transcend them as base modus operendi. Our families and extended families fulfilled the needs of the individual while enabling that same individual some time and physical wherewithal to expand the existential self. As tribes came together, they served the same purpose to both the individual and the extended family and tribe in a correspondingly expanded manner. And with time and experience, villages, towns, cities and city-states, and finally nations were came into being, often (but not always) enabling the individual more energy for self-discovery, education and relationships.
Not everyone afforded these luxuries took advantage of the opportunities for transcendence. Many chose to use this time and energy to expand their primal urge’s sway and power. Despots, raiders, brutes and general bad-guys pepper history like so much coal soot on newly fallen snow, but that is original to mankind’s nature. That is why we must work to develop other talents, and often it is difficult, even in the latest incarnation of society.
It seems though, our current culture is a hydra, swimming in its own offal and eating its own tail. We have invented a culture where those who have no real regard or investment in family, community or even culture have huge power and sway in creating public opinion and environment. We no longer need to keep up with the Joneses, the TV and movies have supplanted them as the paragons of material and social appearance and affluence, even creating the illusion that they have more ability to please and interact with us than our Jonesian neighbor.
Our culture is one that has gone from a neglect and oppression of sex to a overindulgence and obsession with it. It surrounds us in forums that were previously untouched by its direct influence. It is the main focus of forums only recently invented or revised, such as popular media.
Sex and power have become the main foci and raisons d’etre once again in our culture. From one side, brutal and primal, to the other, every bit as brutal and primal, but seemingly oppressed in its ability to tell the truth about its motivations.
That’s irony.
Our civil roots were planted deeply in power and the exercise thereof to further our own procreative exploits. Through the years, we created infrastructure to enable ourselves time to more thoughtfully pursue these ends if not transcend them as base modus operendi. Our families and extended families fulfilled the needs of the individual while enabling that same individual some time and physical wherewithal to expand the existential self. As tribes came together, they served the same purpose to both the individual and the extended family and tribe in a correspondingly expanded manner. And with time and experience, villages, towns, cities and city-states, and finally nations were came into being, often (but not always) enabling the individual more energy for self-discovery, education and relationships.
Not everyone afforded these luxuries took advantage of the opportunities for transcendence. Many chose to use this time and energy to expand their primal urge’s sway and power. Despots, raiders, brutes and general bad-guys pepper history like so much coal soot on newly fallen snow, but that is original to mankind’s nature. That is why we must work to develop other talents, and often it is difficult, even in the latest incarnation of society.
It seems though, our current culture is a hydra, swimming in its own offal and eating its own tail. We have invented a culture where those who have no real regard or investment in family, community or even culture have huge power and sway in creating public opinion and environment. We no longer need to keep up with the Joneses, the TV and movies have supplanted them as the paragons of material and social appearance and affluence, even creating the illusion that they have more ability to please and interact with us than our Jonesian neighbor.
Our culture is one that has gone from a neglect and oppression of sex to a overindulgence and obsession with it. It surrounds us in forums that were previously untouched by its direct influence. It is the main focus of forums only recently invented or revised, such as popular media.
Sex and power have become the main foci and raisons d’etre once again in our culture. From one side, brutal and primal, to the other, every bit as brutal and primal, but seemingly oppressed in its ability to tell the truth about its motivations.
That’s irony.
Wednesday, December 31, 2003
The country boy went to the big city up north today. I saw all sorts of people doing their business, buying stuff and eating more stuff, and I in a word I was impressed.
Impressed with the incredible simplicity of life even when surrounded by trappings and bobbles and tinsel, not the holiday stuff, but the kind that makes humans forget the fleeting and base aspects of life: eating, sleeping, shitting and eventually, dying. We are all the same, we all breathe all day long and sleep at some point of the day with some regularity, we all ingest at least mildly nutritive substances into our cake-holes and soon thereafter leave our regards to the sewer or septic system or lack thereof. All of us, no matter where, of what station or of what belief we are. We are the same. And we need the same things.
The list of dealer options is almost endless, we can do what we want and appear as we wish as long as we want to invest the time, effort and money into the process.
But the process of choosing which process to invest in can be withering. One can be a socialite with the right credentials and bloodlines, one can be an academic with the right papers and desire to conform to those guidelines, or one can even be a political leader with the right personality and contacts to run in that direction. You can be just about anything, on the outside.
Nevertheless, we are all the same on the gut level.
But it sure is fun to see the peacocks strut.
Happy New Year!
Impressed with the incredible simplicity of life even when surrounded by trappings and bobbles and tinsel, not the holiday stuff, but the kind that makes humans forget the fleeting and base aspects of life: eating, sleeping, shitting and eventually, dying. We are all the same, we all breathe all day long and sleep at some point of the day with some regularity, we all ingest at least mildly nutritive substances into our cake-holes and soon thereafter leave our regards to the sewer or septic system or lack thereof. All of us, no matter where, of what station or of what belief we are. We are the same. And we need the same things.
The list of dealer options is almost endless, we can do what we want and appear as we wish as long as we want to invest the time, effort and money into the process.
But the process of choosing which process to invest in can be withering. One can be a socialite with the right credentials and bloodlines, one can be an academic with the right papers and desire to conform to those guidelines, or one can even be a political leader with the right personality and contacts to run in that direction. You can be just about anything, on the outside.
Nevertheless, we are all the same on the gut level.
But it sure is fun to see the peacocks strut.
Happy New Year!
Tuesday, December 30, 2003
As if falling out of a passing coal truck or kicked out of a rickety old turkey wagon, anew, I begin!
New beginnings are a hallmark of our species, and I'm no stranger to this particular cycle. We have been participants and witnesses in our house of a new life, the babe named Asher Ewyn. Here at the crux of a new year, with another new being in our house, I renew this crazy attempt at written expression-
I am trying hard to figure out my relationship with the world at large again. Politics rage, events whirl, people prosper and others languish and here I remain, in Spring City, hearing some and seeing less.
More people write their ideas down in ways others can read than ever before. I have tried to join my voice to the din many times, using poetry, blogs, written letters, personal discussion and others.
For the sake of my everloving soul (and a few other precious beings,) I begin again.
New beginnings are a hallmark of our species, and I'm no stranger to this particular cycle. We have been participants and witnesses in our house of a new life, the babe named Asher Ewyn. Here at the crux of a new year, with another new being in our house, I renew this crazy attempt at written expression-
I am trying hard to figure out my relationship with the world at large again. Politics rage, events whirl, people prosper and others languish and here I remain, in Spring City, hearing some and seeing less.
More people write their ideas down in ways others can read than ever before. I have tried to join my voice to the din many times, using poetry, blogs, written letters, personal discussion and others.
For the sake of my everloving soul (and a few other precious beings,) I begin again.
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