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01/08/2022

Childhood’s End by Arthur C. Clarke*****This 240 page novel surprisingly took me longer to read than I imagined. It is a wondrous and imaginative sci-fi adventure that feels like a great futuristic bookend to the future George Orwell foresaw in 1984; somehow the two feel right in similar company for such profound, disruptive, troubling visions of the future. In many ways we are currently living in 1984 and could we wake up one day to the Overlords arrival in the sky and a similar purposeful agenda for the Golden Age they bring? This novel asks many intriguing questions and delivers quite an ahead of it’s time message for being written at the time it was. The novel feels quite different to my memory of the SyFy channel mini-series which I considered to be above average. A slow burn read that delivers mind-blowing scenarios, philosophies and takes concepts we have built to fear and craft them into guardian entities with a remaining drop of tainted tremble in the seemingly fine water.

I sat on this read a bit because we have a lot of crypto reads on here…. That said, this is interesting.

The final sentence is incredibly insightful and such a glaring paradox for how we Should feel when living a life of autonomous freedom; there should not be paranoia or anxiety around living such an independent life.

The costs of such freedom are considerable: the paranoia, the anxiety, the endless hours spent mining and trading. But for the Collins, it’s the only life they can imagine.

I experience major anxiety around the life I choose because I am making autonomous decisions that are right for myself and yet sometimes others project I should be taking any job or I should be this or that based on how they are living their life and it gets a little overwhelming staying true to one’s self path and keeping the peace during the harder times of emptier financials, housing crisis, etc. Like the Collins this is the only life I can imagine and yet I love doing so; even when it gets hard. I Imagine Great Things; Simply Living.

Really looking forward to Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Great Read! ReadUp version of word games and with similar philosophies of simple with no flashy ad distractions nor trying to addict the player for hours on end:

While other games send notifications to your phone hoping you’ll come back throughout the day, Wordle doesn’t want an intense relationship.

“It’s something that encourages you to spend three minutes a day,” he said. “And that’s it. Like, it doesn’t want any more of your time than that.”

I’m in. Will try today.

Love these guys. Somehow despite dancing to and listening to this album quite a bit last year the band member emergency at the core of this album bypassed me unto now. Their one off single last year “Don’t Wanna Talk, I Just Wanna Dance” is a favorite too and I love Dave’s dancing. Stiff competition at the Grammys where Rodrigo is likely to sweep it all ~ wish the lad Animals luck!

I stopped. Old Spencer wasn’t following. Maybe he was a little bit, but not enough to make me want to get into it deep. Anyway, I wasn’t saying much that I wanted to say. I never do. I’m crazy. No kidding.

Holden and schools is a lot like me and jobs. And his inability to communicate (or maybe he just doesn’t feel like exerting so much force speaking his truth because he is so authentically odd that even if he does He Will Still Be Misunderstood) while simply being present with others he is speaking with and listening to is so relatable.

This is bitingly honest. Funny and real. The author is self-aware of what works and what doesn’t… though this read doesn’t sell me on my current state of decidedly not likely to get married (which means I will probably end up married. Lol)

The final paragraph is 👌

Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes.

(And typing this I know from experience this works along with disciplined routines of yoga/meditation/healthy eating …all of which my life is massively deficient in lately and the nervous system, etc are paying for it).

I believe in barefoot walk benefits.

I clicked “here” and imported the full story. I just have to wait to read it later:

Collier’s described “I’m Crazy” as “the heart-warming story of a kid whose only fault lay in understanding people so well that most of them were baffled by him and only a very few would believe in him.”

OMG Butterscotch the Llama OMG I almost lost all the coffee in my mouth.

If you want more hysterical reading like Butterscotch I Highly Recommend A Star Is Bored by Byron Lane

Is our drive to live life and socialize in the face of such dangers foolhardy? Or is it inspiring?

My vote: Inspiring

He has been known to say the band will quit like this many times in the media after the band has released a new album. We’ll see.

Wow! Incredible. Since this poem has inspired the new project from Thom and Jonny I knew I needed to experience this. Read aloud. Powerful.

Really excited about hearing The Smile.

This topic is so gleefully Dr. Who~Ian I can’t take it (in an excitedly fascinating way).

This storm was Wild. The Wizard of Oz snowstorm of 2021 and everything that night was really really surreal and whackadoodle. I was subjected to a neighbor who was having some sort of voodoo like experience and another friend was like “I don’t know how you kept it together with such Peace and Calm that night. I would have flipped out on him for his chaotic behavior.”

This is the second wild surreal storm I have experienced in the last seven years or so. The other was an equally witchy Oz kinda night at Stag Run gay nudist campground. We had frolicked in the pool all day and that night a storm destroyed camping tents. Thankfully an attractive kind man and his two buds invited me over to their RV and we hunkered down whilst feeling like we were going to spin up into the ether. All four of us ended up in bed that night naked body to body in a chain just holding one another. A beautiful memory of calm intimacy after the storm.

Marvelous and Exceptional micro-read that packs so much Essential into the moments invested in reading this jewel. Belongs in Best Ever reads.

DB, Remember and Cherish this one inside the overflowing pulsing ripple of Emerald Green Heart energy for the next stretch ahead.

💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚💚

One night, Austin chatted about her life as a middle-aged wife in academia. “I completely missed out on the wildness of the ’60s,” she said.

I told her I had missed out, too.

“You weren’t born yet,” she said. “Or hardly.”

Often we cooked together, as we had that first night, after which she would show me whatever painting she was working on. At her request, I also started reading to her from my book-in-progress. We gave each other feedback; our work improved.

When my six-month lease was up, I renewed it. The novel wasn’t finished. Plus, I couldn’t imagine a better neighbor.

Before I knew it, three years had passed. I was writing seven days a week and spending most evenings with Austin. Sometimes she had spells of vertigo now, and when we walked together she held my arm. Often she couldn’t find the right word for something. When she wanted to keep away visitors so she could paint, she hung a sign on her studio door: “Do not destroy.”

Do Not Destroy reminds me of “Shhh…cookies are sleeping” in A Star Is Bored by Byron Lane when the Kathy Cannon character has baked cookies cooling.

Outstanding 10 interview with composer Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead. He is such a gift to cinematic soundtracks ever since A++++ of There Will Be Blood and The Master.

His work this year on Spencer is a home run. I still think about that masterpiece almost daily. I started The Power Of The Dog last night but had to stop because the internet went out. I actually might start it over to pay more attention to the sounds now that I have read this. I am only about a quarter in and I can tell it is a slow build to something powerful I haven’t reached yet…the portion I have seen is slooow yet quality made. Looking forward to the finish.

This made me laugh:

“The Power of the Dog” is just astounding. What were some of those early exchanges with Jane Campion about?

She’s someone who, if she takes you on, assumes you know what you’re doing. She’ll be supportive and enthusiastic, but not prescriptive. Which was good and bad. The bad side was that she’d agree to me trying ideas which were stupid. Like, I said, um, listen, there’s lots of banjo in this film, as you know. Why can’t banjo be part of contemporary classical music? What’s stopping it? I could only find some George Crumb stuff that had banjo scored for it. So I tried writing for string quartet and banjo—which you might not be surprised to learn was terrible.

Sort of atonal banjo?

Ugh! I mean, the worst comical sorts of sounds. That was a big dead end. But it led me to playing the cello like a banjo instead. Because I played cello a little bit, with the aid of lots of Sellotape to mark where the frets should be, if it was a guitar, and I just learned to play banjo rhythms on the cello.

In awe of the honesty, celebration of the author’s individual A-HA with this topic whilst making clear statements of respect/compassion for the multitude of NB & trans identities out there. My god, as the gay male body loving/straight feminine spirit vice-versa version to this author’s more masculine spirit in a gay woman’s body story - This Is Incredibly Refreshing to read. I was nodding along with so much shared here.

I respect any individuals choice of identity however, I have noticed a bit of a holier-than-thou air to some folks adopting alternative identities out in the real world and I have also questioned “Why adopt a separation They instead of, say, a more inclusive We/Us” pronoun?

We are living in a time where many are awakening to the pitfalls and brainwashing political two-sided-only focused media perspectives have done to attempt to herd us into a: “if you don’t adopt this leftist progressive agenda then you Must Be in that Right Wing agenda”… and this writing celebrates Our Uniqueness and Divine Spark of individuality. Community is important.

This section really rang my inner YES bells:

Once I fully divorced myself from left-wing identitarianism, my non-binary identity looked like a flimsy cope for the suffering of being human. Whatever poetry or magic I thought I’d found in it now looked nauseatingly empty and disconnected from reality.

I see my traipse through non-binary identity in retrospect as a sad, embarrassing fetishization of my own disarray in a last-ditch effort to find stability in an alienated world. The world is bleak. It always has been, but right now it has a particular strain of surreal, disjointed bleakness that has lent itself to obsessive self-fixation in a scrambled search for security in words that perfectly capture some essence of ourselves. One avenue for this is in gender, something so individual yet so compulsorily social; it’s private enough to suit an alienated world, but public enough to solicit connection and mirroring even from strangers.

In the last few stanzas of my coming out poem, it is clear what challenges I am trying to solve with my new identity:

it is gray space where I am. soul out of body looking in mirrors whose reflection is always just slightly beyond recognition.

soul hanging quietly above the scene of a now young adult dressed in coral and royal blue garb, the image of the 21st century secretary.

I am 12th house fire, and these words these clothes these bones this flesh cannot express the infinity of what I am. not this time around, not ever.

they/them thank you

With this identity, I am trying to find a linguistic way to affirm and embody a fundamental experience of disembodiment; I am trying to embrace and normalize a fundamentally pathological experience of dissociation. I am trying to find power and meaning in the alienation I feel from my bullshit job as an admin assistant, and the suffocating presentation and expectations I felt were foisted upon me by this position. I am, somewhat narcissistically, declaring special status for fighting the universal battle of human nature: we are all consciousness bound up by the constraints of an animal body, constantly in a battle between our impulses and our ideals. We are virtually all restrained in our self-expression by social expectations and barriers to resources or opportunity. This is what it is to be alive and human, tragic as it is. Pronouns could not reflect this nor alleviate the pain of it. It was a vacant, hubristic dead end.

//

I do not believe by any means that everyone who is non-binary is engaging in a flimsy cope. Being non-binary is legitimate and often materially significant, and discrimination on the basis of gender is abhorrent and must be eradicated. I do not see non-binary identity as something inherently pathological and therefore worthy of violence (I also don’t see pathology as worthy of violence anyway, rather of boundaries and support). I don’t think gender needs to be compulsorily restricted by or reflective of biological sex. I guess what I’m saying is ~non-binary people are valid~ and I mean it.

My story is my story and I’m not editing it for anyone.

Great job, Molly, sharing your truth - real and uncensored. So Essential for the times we live in to hold the banner of Liberty Democracy and Independent Autonomy intact.

True~True. Lots of folks carrying cash today.

I risk few readers by asserting that the commercial banking sector is not, as Waller avers, the solution, but is in fact the problem—a parasitic and utterly inefficient industry that has preyed upon its customers with an impunity backstopped by regular bail-outs from the Fed, thanks to the dubious fiction that it is “too big too fail.”

But even as the banking-industrial complex has become larger, its utility has withered—especially in comparison to crypto. Commercial banking once uniquely secured otherwise risky transactions, ensuring escrow and reversibility. Similarly, credit and investment were unavailable, and perhaps even unimaginable, without it. Today you can enjoy any of these in three clicks.

Still, banks have an older role. Since the inception of commercial banking, or at least since its capitalization by central banking, the industry’s most important function has been the moving of money, fulfilling the promise of those promissory notes of old by allowing their redemption in different cities, or in different countries, and by allowing bearers and redeemers of those notes to make payments on their and others’ behalf across similar distances.