Hunger

So yesterday I forgot to eat. That's kind of a lie. In all regards... I didn't forget to, I just didn't make time to. And I did eat something... at around 10:30 at night. But still, it's something. Hunger sucks. I can't imagine dying from this. Cool fact about hunger: it's its own category of the Senses. Which, there's something like twenty-one categories, as opposed to just the five that everyone knows (sight, smell, hearing, etc.) Every 3.6 seconds someone dies of hunger. I didn't make that statistic up. I found it online. So maybe somebody else made that statistic up, but the site that I pulled it from looks legit, mostly because it's called thinkquest.com. It's like a quest for thinking.

I'm not thinking properly. I can't hear my thoughts over the sound of my own stomach crying out to me in desperation. What is this post about, anyway?

Now where did I put that bathrobe...?

The Painting

You are an upside down painting

Not to be understood.

Yet the critics, the painters, the buyers,

The liars

Stroke chins and murmur contemplative

Sighs at you.

Write books of ever-growing size of you.

Make eyes at you.

Surmise of you.

I'm not surprised at you

If you are laughing.

Poem number two for my Creative Writing class series. The teacher will probably hate it.

Today I was wandering around outside of my work place with a confused look on my face. I wasn't confused. Just aware that every cell in my body wanted me to be back in bed, rather than wandering around outside. My hair was disheveled. I looked like an Alzheimer's patient who actually escaped the Facilities and was now looking for his bathrobe because... well, he couldn't remember why exactly. But he was there, wandering around with a confused look on his face and a strong conviction in his heart that he should be there.

"What are you looking for?" said a lady who I see probably every day, but I don't think she sees me, and I'm perfectly okay with that.
"My bathrobe!" I said. No, I didn't. But that would be hilarious.

"Nothing. I work here." said I. Really.

I'm not even going to mention the philosophical assertions that can be made with that brief interchange. Isaac's not looking for anything anymore, because he has a job. He's comfortable. He's lost his will power to search out life, to look for what matters, to explore the depths of this beautiful world. He has a comfortable job that pays him over minimum wage to write blogs and do homework. What are you looking for? Nothing, I work now. I'm not a crazy loony wandering around outside looking for his bathrobe. I'm a crazy loony inside who doesn't care where his bathrobe is, anymore, and would rather sit at a computer.

Oh, the sadness!

I'm late for class.

Unapologetic

 This morning I woke up at exactly 8:22, remembering suddenly that I had to be at work in eight minutes. The first twenty-something words of the day were a certain assortment of four letter exclamations, which I'm sure you'll thank me for not reproducing here. If only I were a sailor... my sailor friends would be proud.

Here at work, I've had some extra time to do some stumbling on the website Stumble Upon, which is pretty much the slightly more manly version of Pintrest. I came across this article by Francis Spufford in introducing his new book Unapologetic. At first read, I always begin to get uncomfortable at the first couple sentences of his thoughts. But as I kept reading, I found that he had some very interesting, valid, and refreshing points to make. Here's a bit of what he had to say:

My daughter has just turned six. Some time over the next year or so, she will discover that her parents are weird. We're weird because we go to church.

This means as she gets older there'll be voices telling her what it means, getting louder and louder until by the time she's a teenager they'll be shouting right in her ear. It means that we believe in a load of bronze-age absurdities. That we fetishise pain and suffering. That we advocate wishy-washy niceness. That we're too stupid to understand the irrationality of our creeds. That we build absurdly complex intellectual structures on the marshmallow foundations of a fantasy. That we're savagely judgmental. That we'd free murderers to kill again. That we're infantile and can't do without an illusory daddy in the sky. That we destroy the spontaneity and hopefulness of children by implanting a sick mythology in young minds. That we teach people to hate their own natural selves. That we want people to be afraid. That we want people to be ashamed. That we have an imaginary friend, that we believe in a sky pixie; that we prostrate ourseves before a god who has the reality-status of Santa Claus. That we prefer scripture to novels, preaching to storytelling, certainty to doubt, faith to reason, censorship to debate, silence to eloquence, death to life.

But hey, that's not the bad news. Those are the objections of people who care enough about religion to object to it. Or to rent a set of recreational objections from Richard Dawkins or Christopher Hitchens. As accusations, they may be a hodge-podge, but at least they assume there's a thing called religion which looms with enough definition and significance to be detested. In fact there's something truly devoted about the way that Dawkinsites manage to extract a stimulating hobby from the thought of other people's belief. Some of them even contrive to feel oppressed by the Church of England, which is not easy to do. It must take a deft delicacy at operating on a tiny scale, like fitting a whole model railway layout into an attaché case.

No: the really painful message our daughter will receive is that we're embarrassing. For most people who aren't New Atheists, or old atheists, and have no passion invested in the subject, either negative or positive, believers aren't weird because we're wicked. We're weird because we're inexplicable; because, when there's no necessity for it that anyone sensible can see, we've committed ourselves to a set of awkward and absurd attitudes that obtrude, that stick out against the background of modern life, and not in some important or respectworthy or principled way, either. Believers are people who try to insert Jee-zus into conversations at parties; who put themselves down, with writhings of unease, for perfectly normal human behaviour; who are constantly trying to create a solemn hush that invites a fart, a hiccup, a bit of subversion. Believers are people who, on the rare occasions when you have to listen to them, like at a funeral or a wedding, seize the opportunity to pour the liquidised content of a primary-school nativity play into your earhole, apparently not noticing that childhood is over. And as well as being childish, and abject, and solemn, and awkward, we voluntarily associate ourselves with an old-fashioned, mildewed orthodoxy, an Authority with all its authority gone. Nothing is so sad – sad from the style point of view – as the mainstream taste of the day before yesterday.

What goes on inside believers is mysterious. So far as it can be guessed at it appears to be a kind of anxious pretending, a kind of continual, nervous resistance to reality. We don't seem to get it that the magic in Harry Potter, the rings and swords and elves in fantasy novels, the power-ups in video games, the ghouls and ghosts of Halloween, are all, like, just for fun. We try to take them seriously; or rather, we take our own particular subsection of them seriously. We commit the bizarre category error of claiming that our goblins, ghouls, Flying Spaghetti Monsters are really there, off the page and away from the CGI rendering programs. Star Trek fans and vampire wanabes have nothing on us. We actually get down and worship. We get down on our actual knees, bowing and scraping in front of the empty space where we insist our Spaghetti Monster can be found. No wonder that we work so hard to fend off common sense. Our fingers must be in our ears all the time – la la la, I can't hear you – just to keep out the sound of the real world.

The funny thing is that, to me, it's belief that involves the most uncompromising attention to the nature of things of which you are capable. Belief demands that you dispense with illusion after illusion, while contemporary common sense requires continual, fluffy pretending – pretending that might as well be systematic, it's so thoroughly incentivised by our culture. Take the well-known slogan on the atheist bus in London. I know, I know, that's an utterance by the hardcore hobbyists of unbelief, but in this particular case they're pretty much stating the ordinary wisdom of everyday disbelief. The atheist bus says: "There's probably no God. So stop worrying and enjoy your life." All right: which word here is the questionable one, the aggressive one, the one that parts company with recognisable human experience so fast it doesn't even have time to wave goodbye? It isn't "probably". New Atheists aren't claiming anything outrageous when they say that there probably isn't a God. In fact they aren't claiming anything substantial at all, because, really, how would they know? It's as much of a guess for them as it is for me. No, the word that offends against realism here is "enjoy". I'm sorry – enjoy your life? I'm not making some kind of neo-puritan objection to enjoyment. Enjoyment is lovely. Enjoyment is great. The more enjoyment the better. But enjoyment is one emotion. To say that life is to be enjoyed (just enjoyed) is like saying that mountains should only have summits, or that all colours should be purple, or that all plays should be by Shakespeare. This really is a bizarre category error.

But not necessarily an innocent one. Not necessarily a piece of fluffy pretending that does no harm. The implication of the bus slogan is that enjoyment would be your natural state if you weren't being "worried" by us believers and our hellfire preaching. Take away the malignant threat of God-talk, and you would revert to continuous pleasure, under cloudless skies. What's so wrong with this, apart from it being total bollocks? Well, in the first place, that it buys a bill of goods, sight unseen, from modern marketing. Given that human life isn't and can't be made up of enjoyment, it is in effect accepting a picture of human life in which those pieces of living where easy enjoyment is more likely become the only pieces that are visible. If you based your knowledge of the human species exclusively on adverts, you'd think that the normal condition of humanity was to be a good-looking single person between 20 and 35, with excellent muscle-definition and/or an excellent figure, and a large disposable income. And you'd think the same thing if you got your information exclusively from the atheist bus, with the minor difference, in this case, that the man from the Gold Blend couple has a tiny wrinkle of concern on his handsome forehead, caused by the troublesome thought of God's possible existence: a wrinkle about to be removed by one magic application of Reason......

You can continue reading the rest of the article HERE.

Happy Saturday!