From "Letters to Malcolm" by C.S. Lewis

"If the imagination were obedient, the appetites would give us very little trouble."

Anthropology/History

Reading Amusing Ourselves to Death also makes me want to study anthropology very badly.

"We are in great haste to constuct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and Texas, it may be, have nothing to communicate."  -Henry David Thoreau 

"Prior to the age of telegraphy, the information-action ratio was sufficiently close so that most people had a sense of being able to control the contingencies in thier lives.  What people knew about had an action-value.  In the information world created by telegraphy, this sense of potency was lost..."

We have so much information and so little action that we are cursed with elephantine impotence.

Stuff like this makes me want to be a philosophy major.

"What ideas are conveinant to express inevitably become the important content of culture."

"With the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events."

(from Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman)

procrastination

I can't stop thinking that willpower is the solution to stopping my procrastination habits, but I have been saying this for a long time without much progress.  But that is because I have not given it much effort I believe. I hope it is not for lack of motivation, or just plain laziness.  I suppose I should make much more effort toward ending this procrastination, and if that fails can I move on to some more desperate measures. Which I kinda hope is what happens, I think? At least that is what I have been reading on growth says: that giving up is the way to go.  But I'm not needy enough to give up, so I guess I need something to break me. (what am i asking for?)  

"We're half awake in a fake empire."

Fake Empire by The National

The needle's worn the groove to deep.

"But there is a real choice after death? My Roman Catholic friends would be surprised, for to them souls in Purgatory are already saved.  And my Protestant friends would like it no better, for they say that the tree lies as it falls."

"They're both right, maybe. Do not fash yourself with such questions. Ye cannot fully understand the relations of choice and Time till you are beyond both.  And ye were not brought here to study such curiosities.  What concerns you is the nature of the choice itself: and that you can watch them making."

-C.S. Lewis The Great Divorce

It's Alright, Ma (I'm Only Bleeding)

Darkness at the break of noon
Shadows even the silver spoon
The handmade blade, the child's balloon
Eclipses both the sun and moon
To understand you know too soon
There is no sense in trying.

Pointed threats, they bluff with scorn
Suicide remarks are torn
From the fool's gold mouthpiece
The hollow horn plays wasted words
Proves to warn
That he not busy being born
Is busy dying.

Temptation's page flies out the door
You follow, find yourself at war
Watch waterfalls of pity roar
You feel to moan but unlike before
You discover
That you'd just be
One more person crying.

So don't fear if you hear
A foreign sound to your ear
It's alright, Ma, I'm only sighing.

As some warn victory, some downfall
Private reasons great or small
Can be seen in the eyes of those that call
To make all that should be killed to crawl
While others say don't hate nothing at all
Except hatred.

Disillusioned words like bullets bark
As human gods aim for their mark
Made everything from toy guns that spark
To flesh-colored Christs that glow in the dark
It's easy to see without looking too far
That not much
Is really sacred.

While preachers preach of evil fates
Teachers teach that knowledge waits
Can lead to hundred-dollar plates
Goodness hides behind its gates
But even the president of the United States
Sometimes must have
To stand naked.

An' though the rules of the road have been lodged
It's only people's games that you got to dodge
And it's alright, Ma, I can make it.

Advertising signs that con you
Into thinking you're the one
That can do what's never been done
That can win what's never been won
Meantime life outside goes on
All around you.

You lose yourself, you reappear
You suddenly find you got nothing to fear
Alone you stand with nobody near
When a trembling distant voice, unclear
Startles your sleeping ears to hear
That somebody thinks
They really found you.

A question in your nerves is lit
Yet you know there is no answer fit to satisfy
Insure you not to quit
To keep it in your mind and not fergit
That it is not he or she or them or it
That you belong to.

Although the masters make the rules
For the wise men and the fools
I got nothing, Ma, to live up to.

For them that must obey authority
That they do not respect in any degree
Who despise their jobs, their destinies
Speak jealously of them that are free
Cultivate their flowers to be
Nothing more than something
They invest in.

While some on principles baptized
To strict party platform ties
Social clubs in drag disguise
Outsiders they can freely criticize
Tell nothing except who to idolize
And then say God bless him.

While one who sings with his tongue on fire
Gargles in the rat race choir
Bent out of shape from society's pliers
Cares not to come up any higher
But rather get you down in the hole
That he's in.

But I mean no harm nor put fault
On anyone that lives in a vault
But it's alright, Ma, if I can't please him.

Old lady judges watch people in pairs
Limited in sex, they dare
To push fake morals, insult and stare
While money doesn't talk, it swears
Obscenity, who really cares
Propaganda, all is phony.

While them that defend what they cannot see
With a killer's pride, security
It blows the minds most bitterly
For them that think death's honesty
Won't fall upon them naturally
Life sometimes
Must get lonely.

My eyes collide head-on with stuffed graveyards
False gods, I scuff
At pettiness which plays so rough
Walk upside-down inside handcuffs
Kick my legs to crash it off
Say okay, I have had enough
What else can you show me?

And if my thought-dreams could be seen
They'd probably put my head in a guillotine
But it's alright, Ma, it's life, and life only.