wheels within wheels au naturel

 i'm thinking there's a difference in everything between any 2 ppl - including their sensitivity to (= ability to withstand the experience of) violence (within parameters acceptable to the wellbeing of the individual) - including simply viewing it. i guess individuals within the media have been able to find and probably unconsciously "push" the outer threshold of that sensitivity in a large enough "market", or simply percentage of population. for no apparent reason than profit, or some other unfortunate concept. i guess a percentage of the pop. gets some sort of guaranteed repeat gratification out of "thrill", and what more bankable sources of thrill are there than fear, revulsion, something adrenaline charged - and if we can connect some vague feeling of curiosity, as for example why would anyone do that, then u got a 2 pronged approach. how many more prongs are there? out of control memes and evolutionary processes... if a process is good enough - it will survive another day. it will be refined, join the ranks of those already there, and later be joined, and likely extinguished at a later date, by others. maybe not processes run amok, just temporary tangles and twists in energies, processes, whatever else you may have.

depending how much you zoom in or out, and/or really where in the scheme of things you fit, and how much you feel where you fit, is how much matters to you. things change all the time everywhere - some may matter to you, some to others, but i dont see how, or maybe just why, the objective - the whole picture, would matter to any ONE. maybe feeling is just a function, and maybe its only purpose is something like preservation of the group, the hive, the "school". now that it has a purpose, at any rate. it was probably another one of the immensity of possible expressions of the DNA "package". under these particular circumstances, at any rate. dormant and insignificant until enough individuals having this "pesky" set, when in a tight spot, found it to be a strength by turning out to be a way to increase the number of survivors when faced with adversity. might not help the individual, might even be a hindrance  but to the group, it meant survival in bigger numbers. and the next twist is the evolution of individuals who can "work the system", use this "feature" to better their own chances. u'd think they'd flourish after a while. but that would mean, and likely has meant - their doom. the only way these politicians and other possible "system workers" would be able to survive is as part of the organism, in the correct proportion. too many politicians, and there would be nobody left to do the actual work. adversity to a population is practically in a "politician"'s best interest, especially if he can make the populace believe that he knows the way out, and support him. i know i'm using the masculine. also, if the groups of ppl werent afraid of a situation, they wouldn't need to have someone know the way out as badly. i'm kinda stuck in a world view that at this point ppl are not that able, not that manipulative, as to actually cause these adversities, from the "danger" of the rise of a certain drug, to 9/11. i really hope i'm not just naive. how to verify that?

also, even if you have a plan, that may already be part of somebody else's plan.

just started wondering if ppl would live happier lives if they didnt fight against their own natures. but would that work? if each of us was trying to do whatever we wanted, some of those wants would surely conflict with others' wants. out of conflict, the losing, or potentially losing party would probably come out with some kinda compromise with themselves = this is not important enough to me to get hurt over. enter the conflicting parties' friends and families. finally now the deciding factor might be how well liked each of the 2 original individuals was by whom they knew - enough to get their support in a risky situation? did one of the "originals" actually not even know nearly as many people as the other? the socio-political factor.

so back to an individual's freedom to do one's own will - i guess depending on the degree to which one's will conflicts with the wills of others in the environment, one whose natural desires dont encroach on others' should be able to expect to live a fairly happy life. or at least relatively conflict-free. would the absence of conflict actually lead to a happier life?

but how many of us have desires that would never seriously be in conflict with the desires of others? also, do we curb our desires more than strictly necessary to avoid undue danger?

i feel like we should all do what we like a little more. we just got to figure out how to free ourselves of some of these mental restraints. our self-restraint mechanisms are probably governed more by fears of social unacceptance rather than fear of physical harm. but how much acceptance do we really need? maybe if we find ourselves surrounded by ppl with values very different than our own, we should not persist in such an oppressive setup but rather leave and find others like ourselves? guess thats where the fear of the unknown might come in - leaving the relative safety of a known situation for an unknown, possibly worse reality. an individual would have to cross a threshold past which the risk is worth it. its a tangled web. still - i think one should try. even if just a little. at first. even realizing the possibility of doing something different is a start. then knowing that others have gone down that path is reassuring. having a support system, group, or even just a person to lean on during a transition would definitely help. and with the advent of the intrawebs, "finding the others" just got easier.

what to do?

85 year old lady, single (widowed, i think), seems in pretty good health for her age, has lived in this house for a long time, has been doing gardening there all that time, apparently at some point won 1st prize for that town's gardening contest. not too long ago had to have her german shepherd put down. got another one, 8 or 10 year old, from the shelter, because she doesnt think she has that much more to go...
has probably 14 cameras around the house, hooked up to 3 DVRs, figures somebody wants her house, and is trying to get her out of there, messing with her garden, trimming her hedge 6 inches lower than it used to be, taking chunks out of her trees, taking her garden stones - which she got for a fair bit of change (apparently stones are good in garden b/c they help retain moisture). she's had 2 security companies install the cameras and DVRs for her, but at least one of them seems to have been gouging her, and she doesnt wanna be involved with them anymore. she wants to get good footage of her neighbours coming into her backyard to steal her stones and damage her trees. she pretty sure the neighbours whose backyard is kitty-corner to hers have 3 cameras pointed at her house. either they are the police or they got some kinda deal with someone who's in the police, so she doesnt feel she can go to the police with this anymore. she's suspecting someone's been inside her house because she's heard ppl speaking upstairs where her DVRs are, and she suspects they took one of her harddrives out of one of her DVRs, and so now she's lost some valuable footage that would prove... i forget what.
she really wants me to help her out.
on the one hand, she's a customer, she wants a better view of a certain area, i suggested a different camera, she's all for it. with the missing footage, i told her likely one of the harddrives failed and thats why the footage is missing. i saw her receipt for the purchase of this DVR, it says 1 terabyte, the dvr says its got 500 gigs, it should still be under warranty from the company she bought it from, they should fix it for free - which i told her. there's probably some more work she'd have me do there.
on the other hand, as much as i am willing to entertain the idea that someone could be messing with her, damaging her garden, taking garden stones - more likely unrelated things than a concerted effort, i have a strong feeling that this lady is suffering from some senile dementia or something, suspecting that people are out to get her, to get her out of this house, because they want it, and they want it cheap, and she doesnt want to be pressured out of there just because she's an old, lone lady.
i dont want to feed her probable dementia, though i dont know whether anything i'd do would change things either way. i feel like doing this work she wants done is taking advantage of her, because its probably all in her head, and so she doesnt need to spend this money, and all the money she'd already spent getting ripped off by one of the previous security companies she dealt with. she seems aware that these things she says may sound crazy, but she doesnt think she is. she asked me something like "you dont think i'm crazy, do you?" to which i answered "no, not really". i've never really had to deal with this kind of thing. now i think i should have said how it all sounds, somehow try to tell her gently. hope that big friggin dog wouldnt freak out on me for upsetting his owner. but she's not crazy enough to be dangerous, so nobody can really step in and lock her up. nor should they - she's not doing any harm. just to herself. spending all this money and worrying that ppl are trying to screw her out of the house.
i dont want her to spend more money and persist in her paranoia. but if i walk away someone else will come in and gauge her again. and she really wants my help with the security setup. what to do?

its been bugging me. i keep trying to think it out, and what i got in my mind at the moment is to try to find some kind of volunteer senile/demented service to keep an eye on her, possibly take care of her somehow, if she's not far enough gone yet then when she does. this was phx' idea, which i like. but does such a service even exist? i also want to call her and tell her what i think of her situation, but ultimately say that if she wants, i can do some work for her, but i'm hoping she takes what i say into consideration, talks to her doctor about it, i dont know. is there even meds for this kind of thing? it seems obvious that her judgement is impaired, so how can i trust her judgement when i tell her what i think? but i dont think she's messed up enough for "the government" to step in. what to do?

what if humanity evolved enough over time, to the point that each of us would be as a lord unto himself - owning whole galaxies populated by beings who would "farm" other, "lesser" beings themselves, which in turn would have parasites, which would in turn have smaller parasites living on them - all an absurdly gigantic pyramid scheme to produce or distill some sort of energy or even diversity or novelty, whether useful, or as a form of art or even a collectible. or a battery. what if we were not just the beings at the tops of our pyramids, but only small parts of some other ultimate being's mega pyramid or polyhedron or what have you. how many individual "gods" would tell their farm animals what they're actually a part of, were the animals able to comprehend the situation to any meaningful degree? how many might concoct a story to tell their livestock, if they found such a story gave better yield, like a mental steroid, or vaccine or just a supplement? a story or even an idea that would polarize a species, or at least a sub-section of it, in just the desired manner, like the concept of good and evil, a struggle between them, god and satan, good cop vs. bad cop, the carrot and the stick?

or love.

my parents' friends' 24 y.o. son died. i thought i remembered hearing he was into coke, but it didnt sound like he OD'd, plus i dont think he had that kind of money. when i asked what he died of, my parents said something like "he did drugs!"
is naivete = harmless stupidity?
there was talk his organs got beat to shit by all these drugs he did. it seems unjust and even hard to believe that a 24 y.o. guy would wreck his body enough to die when all these bums downtown seem to live on and on forever. i've met people who have apparently done a lot of drugs and you couldnt tell just looking at them. i havent met any meth heads, that i know, but i hear it really ages you fast. i just saw some pics of this guy that just died and he looked healthy. my parents have met him and apparently he looked fine. his parents are obviously devastated. but they put on a prayer evening for his soul, and a mass at church on sunday... i said i wouldnt have done anything - just bury him and try to forget, because he did it himself, and he did it to his family, and since it was basically an extended suicide, i'm kinda surprised they had a mass for him at church. but someone said, they are his parents after all, so it shouldnt be surprising that they would do this for their son. makes me feel really sorry for them. so they cant help their nature and do what they feel they must for their son. and he apparently couldnt help his nature either, saw it coming, landed in the hospital a few times, there was some rehab effort, but in the end he died. ridiculous. fucked up. the flesh is weak. in some more than others. it's just sad. what a waste. seems like he just couldnt be helped. natural selection seems cruel, but i guess thats how it is. his nature just worked against him in his environment, which had apparently an abundance of things lethal to him. is this selection process leading to a humanity that is "smarter", with stronger will power, and a more robust physiology? i'm sure the race will survive, but the cost of this evolution to all the individuals around the "failing" subsets...

some people scoff at being immersed in stories and say ppl should go out more and experience life for themselves.
some people say reading is where it's at, and surely watching the tube does not lead to anything good. does anybody complain saying others should sit in front of the TV and not go on the computer/intraweb so much? will they complain in the future against more immersive media?
its just a medium. but i suppose each medium is its own message too. marshall mcluhan was cool. cool like fonzi. man i'm brainwashed.
maybe not everything you see on a screen should be measured on the same scale? educational programs versus commercials? but even the edu programs - whose points of view are they representing? who prepped content for you to perceive it in just that specific way? what was their idea of what's right and wrong? did they care if they misrepresented something to some degree if they made some money off it? are they just proliferating some false ideas that they bought at an age when they didnt have the logic faculties to process these ideas as they would now? are they reinforcing ideas that were handed down to them from authoritative sources, without actually experiencing or investigating these themselves? i figure the best lies are the ones closest to the truth.
truth - an ideal. maybe truth should be viewed more relatively - an IF-THEN relationship. under some circumstances, something may be so. under other circumstances, things might be otherwise.
we need better tools to understand the world around us. and inside us. we need to be taught these in school. we need tool-making tools - for new situations. i suppose this might be taking place somewhere already. just want to show support and help spread the meme, if it's out there. it probably is.
drugs - substances that affect our bodies to effect "abnormal" functioning. heroin, pot, alcohol, coffee, tylenol... spicy food? most people probably mean illegal drugs. legality is fickle. throughout times and cultures, things have been both legal and illegal like pot, alcohol in general, gin, opium, coffee... i suppose everything used to be legal when there was no one imposing their will on others as to what they can and cant ingest. gasoline is legal and obviously necessary in our world, but there's some communities where it's also the main intoxicant. what about fasting? Sun Dancing?
people need to be truthfully informed about the risks and benefits of things. people need to be informed about social pressures. people could use help learning about their own psychology - what makes them tick. people need to re-learn to experience and judge for themselves. but also people need to be allowed to make their own decisions, learn through their own mistakes. sometimes people need to be helped, not directed and punished. well, i'm sure some people love being directed and punished, too.

my little girl's very first compound curse :)

i forget what i was doing, but i was at the dining table, phx was at the laptop, and LB was in the hallway - from where we heard her say "I can't get off my fucking shit sock!"
we're like "whaat?" to which LB repeated the aforementioned obscenity. it was shocking, and we wanted to laugh, kinda, but i dont think we did. phx helped LB get her sock off, and we figured we really gotta curb my, er, our cursing again.
which brings me to asking again - what's wrong with cursing? what happened, somewhere along the line, that has made some words "Bad"? this seems to have occurred in most human cultures - but why? like - what the fuck?

sitting outside a starbucks

an obviously homeless and very fucked up looking guy is making his way up the sidewalk with a slow, shuffling walk. he's holding a can of turpentine. he stops to pour some more into a small rag he's holding in his other hand. takes a few more steps, the turpentine dripping from his hand. he then stops to inhale deeply from his rag a few times. turns around and walks into the starbucks. maybe for some paper napkins? stumbles out in a minute and slowly continues on up the hill.

this 60-something persian concierge was getting flack from a 30-ish resident who'd just gotten in the front door for not going outside and telling people waiting for the bus to not stand in front of the entrance. but the people were standing in front of the entrance because thats where there was some cover from the rain. the concierge got more and more agitated. started speaking louder and louder, with increasingly bad english, culminating in saying "Fuck You!" to the resident a couple times.

it got to the concierge's supervisor that i witnessed that incident, so i kinda confirmed it for him, somehow trying to save the old guy, but he still got the axe. he told me he used to be a fighter plane mechanic back home. i thought he sounded a bit bitter about his "career change".

i saw the old guy back at the concierge desk at that building the other day :)

2 guys put on balaclavas in the garage of a 2-tower apartment building. they make their way up the stairs to the ground floor. they enter the management office, get out their mace and demand all the money the ladies in the office have. the ladies answer they put all the money they get from residents into the safe through a slot, but they dont have the key. the manager has the key, but he's not at the building. so the boys try to pull out the safe, but cant. the lady in the leasing office right next door saw what was happening through the partly glass wall, dialed 911, and as she yelled into the phone "help! we're being robbed!" the would be robbers bolted out of there. i bet she dialed 911 and the operator went "police, fire, or ambulance?" and the lady just lost her nerve...

***

saw a video of a bike thief being tackled by 3 plain clothes security guys the other day. it felt so good. i wanted them to hurt him. bad. i hope they did. couldnt see - the camera looked too high up...

homie-cide

yet another brothel suite in another expensive downtown highrise. 2 asian guys enter just after midnight. about 15 minutes later the guys are back out with some laptops, this time hoodies up. a few minutes after they leave the building, police arrive. apparently the killing of the guy that was looking after the girls was quite noisy...

was it planned? simply a rip-off of an already illegal operation? thought no one would go to the police with it? was it to get the laptops, possibly containing the name of someone who really didnt wanna leave a trail? was it to get names of ppl for blackmail purposes? or was it just heat of the moment, hence hoodies on way out only? ... and laptops because they were repeat customers? or just thought theft wasnt gonna be as big a problem if they were caught?

things you hear at these expensive appartment buildings...

concierge: see that guy? he works for (local phone company). he keeps going to the brothel suite here all the time...
me: there's a brothel suite here???????
concierge: yeah, you didnt know? yeah, its a different girl every week. poor girls, they get a new customer like every half hour.

*note: i saw this guy show up at a different appartment building the other day. he's not a technician, in case anyone's wondering. i wonder if he spends most of his money on this.

***

maintenance guy: yeah, so we were doing fire alarm testing in all the suites at (1st brothel suite building), and we go in this one suite, and there's machine guns and ammo on the table in the living room. turns out there's some east indian guys passed out in the bedroom. we left right away and called the cops.
me: yeah i was working there once, and these 2 cops show up gesturing to the concierge to open the door, then asking to be let up to whatever floor. 30 seconds later 2 more cops show up. 30 seconds later 2 more - with shotguns! and then a paddy wagon parks just at the corner. found out later that it was just some domestic dispute between someone's girlfriend and mom, but now i know the reason for the overkill.

***

bike patrolman to concierge: there was this bum that kept hanging out in this parkade, and i kept telling him to leave, and he kept coming back, so i finally called the cops. so this big cop shows up, i take him to where the bum is. the cop said he's seen the bum before, and then just tells me to beat it. so i rode away just around the first corner, but stopped just to see what was going on, and the cop started to beat the shit out of the bum, and the bum was just squealing like a little girl...

***

maintenance guy: this lady came down to the front desk asking if we'd seen her husband. apparently he'd go for a bike ride every morning, then come back and go to work, but he never came back from his bike ride that morning. so we checked to make sure he'd gotten his bike out of the storage, and he just never came back. not long after we heard someone was hanging from a tree not far away. i went to see and yeah, that was the guy - he just hung himself. i told the concierge to help his wife with anything she might need...

i remember when they arrived from the east coast, from new brunswick. they had a little, shy, delicate son. i always thought the wife was a bit tall for the husband. i remember when we were camping one time, and my brother and i started building competing towers out of blocks of wood available at the campground for firewood, and the man made me sit on his shoulders and my brother sat on someone else's, so we could build higher. some years later the man's wife left him, and stayed with another man with the same first name (the man in the shades). he never gave her a divorce. he drank himself to death maybe two weeks ago.

totally getting a boner off this page

met a jewish dude named Ray the other day. asked him why he decided to come over here. he said he finally realized israel is going to collapse sooner or later, especially in light of apparently vast numbers of young ppl leaving there these days. this came as a shock to me. one way that it shocked me was the statement that so many young ppl are leaving there. the big shocker though, was a jewish guy saying he thinks israel is about to fall apart. i guess despite disagreeing with the way they occupied the land, and kept it under occupation, i'd sorta hoped they'd finally find a way to all get along, and things would start moving forward. together. i figure a nation needs a piece of real estate to belong to. and where better for jews than the israel area.
an interesting thing Ray said, was that hitler was a huge fan of the zionist movement. i guess that was before he became a fan of concentration camps.
another gem from Ray was something he was told by a non-jewish friend of his:
"Jews are like salt for the soup: a little gives it flavour, but too much spoils the soup."
i told him that i think thats how societies have felt about any visible minorities. and what really seems to sour the mix is when this visible minority is seen as having a degree of power over the rest of the society. maybe a melting pot society will safeguard against that.

the things you remember...

the greek civil war ended in 1949, resulting in the flight of thousands of greek communists to eastern bloc countries. poland accepted around 13,000 of them. my dad's dad worked with some of them. one once said: "once, when i cut off this one priest's head, the blood poured so much!"
my grampa said: "that's not something to brag about."

that same grampa went to a juvenile political prisoners' jail when he was maybe 14, for participating in acts of vandalism against rural communist agitators - they flipped their cars onto their roofs, and generally tried to make life harder for them. in this jail, he was subjected to unusual punishment such as having his foreskin nailed to the questioner's table, then being slapped in the ass with a large ruler; and being pressed on at the sternum with a huge, old key, with his back against the wall, while being questioned about something trivial, until he'd pass out.

that same grampa turned into an abusive father, who'd come home drunk and look for trouble. when my dad was small, he learned to recognise when his dad went into this mad frenzy, and learned to run and hide under the bed. this tactic didnt work for him when he was maybe 15, when his father learned from a neighbour that my dad skipped school that day with some girl. my dad had to walk using a cane for several weeks afterwards.

that very same grampa was born in france, where his father was able to find work as a miner. however, his father decided to go back to poland, apparently largely because his mother was over-indulging in what sounds like absynthe.

my mom's dad somehow ended up in siberia during ww2 in a forced labour camp, working on the construction of a rilroad. he saw people getting shot for trying to stuff their mouth with some grass while working. i wonder how it got to this, but apparently him and a cousin of his were able to escape naked through the snow while being fired upon. my grampa remained loyal to his abusive cousin more than to his own wife and children, until his cousin died a few years ago. my gramma took him back. her eldest son-in-law got so mad at her for it that he's severed all contact with her.

that same gramma got caught at the wrong place at the wrong time during ww2, and got rounded up with a whole bunch of other random ppl to be taken to a nazi labour camp. lucky for her, these germans were "civilised" enough to hold them in a corral for the rest of the day to give their families a chance to realise that their family members were being taken away, and to bring them some clothes and food and say goodbye. during this clothes drop-off and goodbye, she casually crossed to the "free" people side, and just kept walking, and started running as soon as she neared a corner. she's sure some of the guards knew what she was up to, but let her get away anyways.

my friend romek's grampa was captured and tortured by nazis, and when they thought they'd killed him, they dumped him out back on a pile of bodies. he didnt dare twitch until it got dark, when he crawled to safety.

what a site

Quote of the Day

"now THAT just made the whole day infinitely better..."

not only is the word "NO!" boogie's fave word, but yelling seems to be her favourite form of expression. this morning, i think i said to her something like "we're gonna changer ur diapie (diaper)" and she said "no diapie!" to which i asked "are you a little nazi?" to which she of course replied "no nazi!" ha! now that i think of it, when we were just visiting the inlaws during the weekend, we went to the beach, and boogie's nose was running, and she tried to wipe it with her sand-laden hand, ending up with a little sand moustachio, so i told her she's got a little hitler-moustache, but that it doesnt suit a little girl.
other things that sound funny at the time, but sound absolutely horrible, sick, insane and all that good stuff outside said time? something a friend of mine and i touched upon during a short conversation today - a parent yelling at their kid "when i smack you, your head will fall off with the lungs!" roughly translated, but you might get the picture.
or something like "if you dont stop that, mommy will kill herself." to which the dad adds "if mommy kills herself, then dad will commit suicide too. but first will kill you kids. it'll be a gory murder-suicide. then i'll choke myself with my own guts."
sounded funny at the time :)
ok, its super late, gats ta go

as if all this death wasnt enough...

... Albert Hofmann - the creator/discoverer of LSD died, almost a month ago. but at least I find consolation in that he's had a very full life - he was 102 years old. he was reportedly a great chemist, made big pharma lotsa money in "straight" drugs. in addition to discovering the psycho-active effects of LSD, he was also the first person to synthesize psilocybin - the psychoactive substance naturally found in "magic" psilocybe mushrooms.

an icon of a man. i'd like to try to honour him next "Bicycle Day" and go for a ride with the local heads. weird, this year's "Bicycle Day" was 10 days before his death. i wonder - had his death been slow, if he knew he was dying, would he have opted to go out accompanied by his "Problem Child", like Aldous Huxley ..?