abominable /əˈbäm(ə)nəb(ə)l/

I fail to see what is supposedly so ghastly about an extra-tall snowman. Far more loathsome, I suggest, is the miniature snowman who looks up at him and says, “Oh! You must play basketball!”

Kudos, I say, to the former pro basketball player who confessed to losing his patience with a little old lady who asked this same question, based only on her observation of his loftiness. “No!” he lied, looking down on her. “Do you play mini-golf?”

image property of Pop Art Decoration

A-bomb /ā′bŏm′/

Here’s a fun little murder by numbers exercise. I think you’ll like it:

#10: Yang Xinhai of China was credited with 67 murders by axe, meat cleaver, shovel etc. before being executed in 2004.

#9: India’s Kampatimar Shankariya hammered at least seventy people to death in the course of two years until he was hanged in 1979.

And now we move to South America for the crème de la crème of non-state-sponsored killers:

#8: Since Brazil has a thirty-year cap on prison sentences, that’s all Pedro Rodrigues Filho got for taking 71 lives and claiming responsibility for at least thirty more. Included among his victims was his own delicious father who’s heart Filho did some nibbling on.

#7. Columbia, officially world’s worst place to be if you’re an unaccompanied child, was home to Daniel Camargo, strangler of at least 72 virgin girls; possibly as many as 150. He escaped Columbian prison, resumed his hobby in Ecuador and was there caught and murdered while in jail.

#6. Pedro Lopez confessed to killing 300-plus girls and was convicted for 110 of them. He was released from that same Columbian prison in 1998. Current whereabouts unknown.

#5. Columbia’s king of child-murderers, Luis Garavito, a.k.a. La Bestia confessed to the murder of 140 street children in the course of five years and was suspected of about 300 more.

Moving on to the real pros:

#4. U.S.A. president Harry S. Truman directed the efficient deaths of at least 129,000 Japanese civilians, largely women and children, by means of atomic bomb. There were plans for three bombings but he quit after two on account of being such a humanitarian. He passed away in a medical center at the age of 88 and has received many honors from adoring Americans.

#3. Cambodian dictator Pol Pot drove up to three million of his own citizens to death through executions and predatory policies.

#2. Joseph Stalin’s communist regime is open to debate in terms of its murderousness but its victims are widely agreed to be in the order of millions.

#1. And of course… Germany’s wacky and lovable Chancellor Adolf Hitler, through his spiffy S.S. organization, orchestrated the murders of approximately eleven million victims including two-thirds of all European Jews. He had specific plans for the dispatch of another thirty million lives if he had won his little war. Alas, he did not. But he did manage to add a last-minute tally to his score by taking his own life; undoubtedly his single greatest achievement.

abolish /əˈbäliSH/

He was running for election in the federal riding of Hamilton Mountain in 1993, representing the new Reform party; the brainchild of a couple of jolly old fellows by the name of Preston Manning and Stephen Harper. Standing outside his campaign office on Upper James Street, he told me that as a white male I was currently, in effect, the most persecuted “minority” in the country, but not to worry, for his party was destined to take power, not immediately, but by the following election in 1997, and that gradually, over the course of years, his party would roll back immigration levels until finally the borders would close entirely. I was amused by these multiple layers of deranged idiocy but was careful to exhibit no reaction to his claims, either positive or negative. I wanted to hear his spiel in its most honest form.

Where are these honourable men now, you ask?

Craig B. Chandler

Currently Craig Chandler is a member of the Legislative Assembly of Alberta where he is well known for publicly opposing gay-straight alliances in schools and, not surprisingly, same-sex marriage. Renowned homophobe and all-around brontosaurus Preston Manning officially retired from politics in 2002, while Stephen Harper, if you’re Canadian, is your very own Prime Minister. Sorry about your luck.

abode /əˈbōd/

It was many abodes ago when I last thought of a dwelling as home. My organic urges have become entirely nomadic. But the systems of our society hold me back from that way of life: health care, taxation, government ID, licensing, provincial jurisdiction, land ownership, arbitrary bylaws.

Stability breeds capitulation, dullness, wealth and poverty.

aboard /əˈbôrd/

A black hole falls through space, a galaxy of stars circling, pulled along with it, and towed by them: the planets and moons, and with one particular planet: you and me.

Universe, galaxy, star, planet, passenger. All the same thing: hierarchies of revolution; matter and energy in temporary forms. All propelled by a big bang, perhaps just one big bang of many.

Perhaps this space we call the universe is but one sector of a bigger multiverse, one sector just waiting to collide with another.

abnormal /abˈnôrməl/

Send me the loners, the misfits, the criminals. Send me the artists, musicians and writers. Send me the dreamers. Send me the abused. For the outsiders there is always hope and opportunity for change. For the soldiers of normalcy there are only the walls of normal, blocking great vistas of reality from perception.

abnegate /ˈabniˌɡāt/

I do not respect any law, imagining that it is right. I regard the law for the sake of the comfort of those who mistake it for right.

This is no kind of anarchy. I respect harmony instead, which the law often flirts with and rarely champions.

ablution /əˈblo͞oSHən/

I know now the illusion of continuity; the sense of self, when in fact the human being is a new person with every new moment.

But as some do, I underwent changes of a sweeping nature. Can I then forgive myself for my sins of the past?

I can accept the causal reality; be at peace with it; yes. But I cannot regain the freedom lost. That man is gone. There is only the future. The sins of relevance now, are those yet to come.

abloom /əˈblo͞om/

Small yard. Three full grown magnolia trees almost forming a canopy. Once a year, for just a day or two, the yard is transformed into a carpet of pink.

ablaze /əˈblāz/

From Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. The father lies on the ground, apparently dying:

You have to carry the fire.

I don’t know how to.

Yes you do.

Is it real? The fire?

Yes it is.

Where is it? I don’t know where it is.

Yes you do. It's inside you. It was always there. I can see it.

I don’t have the novel with me presently. I pulled this quote off the internet. And no one has neglected to copy quotations or dialogue attribution because there are none. The writing is so utterly precise that the usual aids are not required.

If I correctly recall, this is the father’s response when the boy hints that he wishes to go with his father into death. And perhaps that would have been a mercy, for both of them and for the reader too, to grant that wish, but the father is a true hero. Despite his magnificent love for his son he is delivering him (he hopes), just like the flame from the expired Olympiad to the new, to a new humanity; the improbable rebirth. The new garden of Eden perhaps.

The old humanity exists in the sparsest numbers, their last puny cannibalistic soulless inhuman hurrah in a world gray and crumbling, barren of resources. But the boy is a rare innocent; a singular beacon of empathy; a last spark of humanity if you will, and recently they spotted something in the water; some tiny living thing: the only hint that the planet has not quite entirely died; that such a garden might still be possible. If not for that sighting I think they would have chosen to die together.

Yeah, I’ve blogged about this book a few times already but it is so hugely important. It’s hard to find a novel so relevant as this. On a linear level, this scene tore me to pieces. He is sending the boy on alone, with no food, no destination and little hope. But it moves me tremendously on another level. The book addresses the question of species mortality linearly and also as a microcosm and then metaphorically too!

It is so clear to me that this scene is exactly where we are headed; that this critical juncture is coming and relatively soon. It doesn’t matter to me what form it takes. We are hopelessly, inexorably aiding and abetting all the forms. It doesn’t matter because it is in our DNA: a hopeless genetic formula; a formula with no contingency for a future.

We are, most of us, 99.9% instinct robots. It is so magnificently easy to not see that; to assume we are something better, and some few are better, and for some of us, there is hope to be better as we’ve grasped the functionality if only we would employ it. But human societies have only ever existed as slave systems and we are no exception. The corporate-political-religious-military-greed system has us in a stranglehold and all our innocents are delivered into that prison on the conveyor belt that is formal education. I don’t say these words with the carelessness or bravado that writers typically do in this society. I have studied this intently for a long time. I could write a set of encyclopaedias about it. Actually I have begun that very process and the project has swiftly grown into a monster and makes a fool of me. If only I could learn how to talk about it effectively in plain English.

For now I am working much harder than usual to get my shit together: to save this softening mind and softening body (last chance?) in order to join the fight more effectively. I know a thing or two about the miracle of empathy; that DNA antidote, which few do, and there is nothing left for me to do but join that fight. Nothing else interests me.

Perhaps we will somehow not arrive at that moment; that last-chance last spark of humanity, with the odds stacked against us. Perhaps all our little fights in their various forms, will somehow prevail and democracies will come real and humans will rediscover the difference between intelligence and sound-bites and choose intelligence. Perhaps we don’t have to come to the edge of the cliff. Yes, humanity only arrived here on planet Minerva thanks to miracles. Perhaps we have one left, as vain as that hope looks from here. Like Stephen Hawking said:

Where there is life there is hope.

McCarthy’s father character seemed to think so. “We’ve always been lucky,” he told his son, trying to convince the boy to go on without him. “You’ll be lucky again.”

abject /ˈabˌjekt/

What war does not see poor brothers murder and mutilate one another for imaginary reasons? Oh would they only turn their guns on their masters; the liars instead.

ability /əˈbilədē/

To detect the illusions in all normal things, the flaws in all normal testimony, the forces of ego when they assert their will and the tinkering of rationalization. To see the greater contexts, the crystallization of reality; to appreciate the miracles of life and Earth and the simple solutions to apparent problems: all emerge from poetic experience; from recognition of the constant bombardment of distraction and illusion that is society, and the escape from it. There is no peace like the peace of clarity.

abide /əˈbīd/

Neo pretty much ended the formal process wherein we had discussed at length, one at a time, the particular subjects of relevance to the poetic process and its resultant understandings; indeed all the subjects of relevance to the human experience. It is hardly surprising given the forces of natural selection which compel all adolescents to shift their learning toward peers and experimentation as the target adulthood of all mammals demands and which parents regard as teenage rebellion. And it is probably well that he did so, as ideally only the process itself should be taught, while understandings are his to discover through experience. Of course, in an ideal world of bountiful time and resources I would devise many ideal experiences for him.

Our companionship these days is casual and infrequent. Until he realizes that there is so much more of the world to learn than anyone, at eighteen, can possibly have absorbed; until he is ready for assistance again, or a valuable peer with which to consolidate with, I wait and remain loyal.

Yeah, you're not gonna like this...

I kind of hope I don't pull the trigger on whatever the hell I'm about to write because it is sure to be impatient and rantie. Rantish. Whatever.

We have this adorable little shenanigandrum going on in good old Ontario where the All Powerful Army of Stupid is sending out spastic little uninformed parents of children to protest the province's plans to actually teach something useful in school: a little clarity around that super big deal we call sex.

First off, anyone with the first shred of enlightenment has come to realize that SeX is in fact the most boring, ubiquitous, everywhere-you-look, non-big-deal since breathing air, with every mammal on the planet robotically absorbed in it one way or subconscious other, most of their waking moments. Not to say that you don't need to be informed and smart about it. Just like you need to be informed and smart about breathing air. You don't mess around with water safety and you don't go wearing shopping bags over your head if you want your life to go well. Similar concerns around sex. And you also don't need to invent a shit storm of superstitions about breathing air: invented by religion and smooshed all over innocent deranged humans already mired in hang-ups and delusion.

And if you don't realize this then I am sorry, but you are lacking the shred. I have no patience to be gentle this morning.

Oh but no, no, no, FWG! You got this one wrong! Sex is WAY WAY a big deal because it can be beautiful and magical and wonderful if you do it right and all nasty-nasty-spoiled if you do it wrong and then it will fuck up your mind!

Nice try.

Wrong.

I went down that road for years and I've learned enough to see how fucked up I was on that road. Lots and lots and lots of things including sex can be beautiful and magical when you do it beautifully and magically with your beautiful magical chosen one or whatever stand-in suffices for the 99% of you following a relationship model that does not actually work for you. The epic jeopardy you all imagine is all in your heads. Your heads are not fucked up because of sex. Your heads came that way because you are human and by the way, there is a process for unfucking them if anyone is interested.

Let me get to the point.

The Parents Of The World have had the burden of sex education for some ungodly horrific eon now and have done the shittiest job of it in the history of shit. If anyone deserves to be fired from anything it is you. Good riddance.

And gawd bless Kathleen Wynne and the good teachers of Ontario (those many I've met are tres awesome by the way) for taking on this job.

I am sick to all fuck of year after year hearing about young gays and transsexuals killing themselves because they don't feel any love and don't understand that they belong in this universe every iota as much as YOU. Every time they are destroyed, a world is destroyed and so is my heart.

For once the Army of Stupid is not going to get their way. At least not in this particular dip-shit province at this particular time.

Thank heavens.

New Day Rising: The Goals

Stemming from the mandate, in essence the manifestation of harmony, prioritized by leveragability, the top-line goals look like this and they all break down further into sub-goals and strategies:

1.    Investigate, assess and support noble organizations which may include businesses for profit, or not; charities, spiritual, environmental, social justice etc.

2.    Build/support communities, live or online, of evolutionary/harmonic natures.

3.    Nurture relationships and take on leadership roles where they are needed with the strategy to pass on said leadership roles.

4.    Set positive transparent examples in terms of harmonic behaviour.

5.    Spread harmonic ideas through blog, books, songs, social media and volunteer work.

6.    Continue to learn, evolve, re-learn and re-evolve through courageous exploration of ideas, experiences, dialogue and the arts.

I’ve started breaking this down into actual to-do lists which are maddeningly voluminous and begin at the top with defeating all the barriers to the above directives: health, sleep and financial issues, and the generation of inspiration, discipline and productivity. And all of that alone looks like a full-time job. Well, if that’s how it is, that’s how it is. There is time in a week for two full time jobs when both jobs are a joy and a security company is willing to pay you to do one of your jobs on their dime. The uniform may be all wrong but I can look past that.

Image gratefully borrowed from http://www.travisfavretto.com/

abhor /abˈhôr/

cell phones
car alarms
cigarette smoke
politicians

veal

cocktail onions

bread-and-butter pickles

Fishermans Friend cough drops

black licorice

vomit scenes in movies

self-surgery scenes in movies

nations

corporations

modern religion

ego

black holes

torture

television

the common house centipede

That's right. He die.

Yes, I still like taxes… in principle

Warning: the following blurberation is not well-researched at all but is useful to myself and hopefully others in terms of a thought process:

I’ve once again been pondering our pie-in-the-sky Kyoto dreams and how sadly they fly in the face of human nature. First, let me confess that I have absorbed zero media coverage of anything to do with the Kyoto Accord (or, if applicable, its absence, or whatever might have replaced it) for many years. I don’t know what kind of testimony I might be missing out on currently (though I’m very determined to do some research and soon) but I can’t imagine that the relevant popular systems of thought have changed a whole lot in the last ten years because it made perfect sense to me that they were popular at the time of my last reckoning and—for reasons relating to human nature which I’m confident could not have much changed since then (as much as such functionality indeed exists) —they still make perfect sense today.

So a bunch of world leaders sign an agreement to cut greenhouse gas emissions. Sounds delightful. But no dial exists for them to reach out and turn down. It is our very survival instinct, which could just as accurately be called domination instinct, which propels our collective greed and vanity and inability to curb our desires, and which gives corporations and other power structures all the leverage in the world to keep us duped. This I know from integral personal research, and I’m pretty sure no Kyoto-driven (or similar) plan incorporates evolution of consciousness drivers in order to overcome these main obstacles.

I also have no idea how to scale the kind of successful evolutionary processes I have reliably witnessed, in such a way that they might be effective not only for writer/musician/hippy types but also for the elite power-mongers who seem pretty clearly to be the only people who really matter when it comes to policy-making. Frankly I’m very confident that the elite power-mongers are incapable of meeting course pre-requisites for Evolution Of Consciousness 101. As for the endless armies of dull-minded ass holes who make up most of the realm between the two aforementioned groups, I’m currently unsure how I feel about their chances. I don’t mind tackling the math behind that but there’s an awful lot of it and now is not the time.

Have all of today’s three-and-a-half readers been scared away yet? Okay. No problem, I shall talk to myself from this point on:

It seems to me that if there is a workable global environmental plan that it would lie in taxation. We would have to understand the true costs of replacing Earth’s resources as they are depleted as well as the costs of repairing any kind of climate damage. A lot of work; yes. We then put a sustainability tax on everything that incurs either of these expenses. Thus when you buy a wooden table you must also pay for your share of adequate reforestation process. When you buy fossil fuels you must pay what it will cost to literally clean that portion of emissions from the atmosphere! Yes, this would incur a lot of research and development, and so it should!

So perhaps the gasoline for which I currently pay about $50 per week to keep my Lumina purring, would start costing me $500. I would be extremely happy about that. The price we pay for fuel is incredibly, ridiculously, vulgarly cheap no matter how boorishly indignant we all get each time it fluctuates a few pennies in the direction of realism.

Can I afford $500 a week for gas? Well, of course not and I damn well shouldn’t. But that is certainly a more proper price considering the true cost that we as a species are actually paying for such a privilege but without doing the damn accounting! We can hide these true costs because we are collectively mortgaging our species’ future health and financial prosperity and there is no way in hell we are projected to have any capacity to pay the bill! And by “we” I of course mean our children and grandchildren who by all accounting of our actions we love no more than domination instinct forces us to, no matter how sweet and gooey our paternal feelings might feel. The layers of illusions here are suffocating.

So what do I do about that $500 gasoline bill I can’t afford? Simple. Just like most people I would be forced to live and work in the same neighborhood, and the opportunities to do so would be created organically because we’d all be shuffling around accordingly. It is preposterous that we ever took the opportunity to embrace car culture and reap these extravagant, completely unnecessary logistical privileges in the first place, and no, I didn’t know any better, any more than you did. I’m fine with admitting to my own hypocrisy when called for, but this isn’t the occasion.

Our prospects for the future grow dimmer and dimmer every single day that we do not manifest sustainability. There is one lesson that everyone must learn if it isn’t already obvious: It is a mathematical certainty; a certainty of logic: Sustainability is inevitable. But the sooner we make it happen the better the deal we cut for ourselves. If we never embrace it then nature will serve the deal to us in the end, entirely on nature’s terms and it will be the worst possible dish for us to swallow; perhaps devastating; almost certainly a dish that will derail are most basic societal structures and expose our inherent beastliness. This is a principle of simple logic. Just how unsavory the dish—is debatable. The principle is not.

abeyance /əˈbāəns/

The longer I go without engagement in come creative writing or song writing, the more the allure is lost; the more I forget how vital and rewarding it is, the more I begin to regard it as work; the less inclined I am to restart. I cannot seem to defeat this strange amnesia. Perhaps the only strategy is to never allow the habits to lag.

abet /əˈbet/

The boy, at sixteen, is almost certainly more clever, wise and curious than his parents and struggles to find respect for them. He trusts in a mentor; approaches him with his deepest thoughts. The relationship is profoundly honest; transcends the normal modes of human interaction. There is no posturing; no calculation.

He is driven to sample hallucinogens and will do so no matter the mentor's support or protest. What is there to do then, but support the exploration by providing safe harbour?

aberrant [uh-ber-uh nt]

That this word exists is a testament to the whirl of delusion that is human society. It is defined as deviating from from what is normal, regular or right; as if aberration lies in one camp, with normal, regular and right in the other. But what things normal or regular are also right? To me, normalcy is the first clue that something is wrong and its wrongness is usually detectable within seconds of contemplation. Unless of course the phone or TV has distracted you from contemplation.