on death; fear of

the first time someone pointed out to me that i wasn't alive before i was born and i don't suffer any trauma from that "experience", i stopped needing to wish upon an afterlife. oddly enough, that's how i realized that death is actually just an illusion. all the stuff that makes you you will still all be here and exist. it will just be different.  

instead of existing as a creation of your own neurobiology, your essence exists as a reflection in the neurobiology of others. instead of being a watery sack of meat and electrolytes, you'll be converted into metabolites and aether as your biome reduces your components for recycling 

or, if you're my mother, stuck in a wall in southeastern michigan with the rest of your weird, gigantic family until the earth crashes into the sun and we can be fused on the quantum level as the star implodes so we can be spat out together as the new god of whatever universe happens on the other side of the resulting singularity (which i'm just assuming is my mother's plan, considering how many books about theoretical physics she owns, you know, because).

there is nowhere that we "go" when we "die", and frankly, i don't want to leave. reality isn't just where i live. it's what i am, and i'm staying here. we're all staying here.

where else is there to be?

dear united kingdom,

hi.

disclosure: all my information about ukip comes from a comedian*

(*except for all the shit i've spent the last week researching)

you guys know what ukip is doing? they're slobbering on a copy of the karl rove playbook. the difference is that karl rove had five thousand square miles of exploitable religious bumpkins to bank votes with. ukip's been forced to default to racism because there's literally no other problem with which to divide the uk population that won't just result in a speedy legal solution, no ukips required.

the goal is to over-radicalize their base in order to compel as many of them to the polls as possible. the idea is to play the percents. it's probably not going to work as well as they'd like because another part of the karl rove election strategy is to count on seventy percent of the electorate voluntarily disenfranchising themselves, and while that's been historically true of the american electorate, uk voter turnout generally runs significantly higher.

and regret to inform, but you're already in for about twenty years of race relations issues because of this. if i were you, i would nip these guys in the bud because they will continue to mess up your country (and probably a couple of the countries near you). why do you think you keep seeing daily fail headlines like "americans refuse to breathe because they think the 'x' in the word 'oxygen' looks like devil horns"? the karl rove election strategy fucked our country all up socially, and we may not be able to keep all our pluribuses unum in the aftermath.

also, you realize that germany and a bunch of other countries are (probably) going to start pulling out of trade deals with you if ukip gains any real political traction. nobody in europe is going to do business with Potential Hitler. just sayin'.

if you don't want to go back into civil warfare, you need to keep the ukips away from your government.  seriously, just for pragmatism's sake, because your little flerp of islands right there is nowhere near big enough to keep you guys from having to fight over it.  like i said... the game is rigged for five thousand square miles of cornfields and ignorance that you no has.

these guys are "don't even wrap your fish in it" bad news.

if you can't see the video because of country restrictions, i apologize for not being able to transfer my right to watch american public broadcasting onto you.  this video deals with how karl rove got george bush elected governor of texas in the eighties using the "divide and conquer" strategy with tort reform ("judicial activism").  he used the same strategy to get w. elected president using religion as the dividing point, and the ukips are doing the exact same thing with race and immigration.

letting go

am i the only one burning out on the steady stream of news reports about some enclave of religious fundamentalists rotorootering their baby girls' reproductive organs out or giving their infant sons venereal diseases through oral copulation or murdering all their breeding age women just because some men are heterosexual?

it's not that i want to see these things happening, it's that there's nothing i can do about it.  in fact, there really isn't anything i should do about it.  these people are living their lives the way they choose.  it's no more my place or business to try and change them or tell them they're wrong than it is their place or business to tell me.

if we have reached a point in human history where that sort of adherence to fear and shame in the name of religion has become incompatible with the survival of whatever part of the species it afflicts... if religion is what causes a group of people to stop engaging in reproduction, whether through social pressure or physical violation, then that's just evolution.  the environment has changed.  if they are unable to adapt they're going to go extinct, and we're not going to have much choice but to let them.

i'm not forcing religious people to do these things to one another, and i'm having a very hard time not applying what i understand about the nature of reality to this just like i do to everything else.  i don't feel good about it, but there comes a point where my inability to do anything but feel bad begins to interfere with my ability to be a productive member of my own society.

if religious people could understand the kind of toxic despair they're causing in the world, we wouldn't have to have this conversation anymore.  until then, i just don't think i can afford to care about what they do to themselves and each other.  i have a life to live, too.

little things matter

i just realized that i've owned the same watch for three years. i've never owned any small personal item for that long ever before in my adult life.

i just wish i wasn't so sure that the only reason i still have my watch... and my coffee maker, and my violin, and my computer, and my books, and my coffee mug... is because i don't have someone in my life taking those things away from me constantly. there hasn't been someone in my life to "accidentally" break my watch or lose my watch or throw my watch away or give my watch to one of his other girlfriends... and so i still have my watch.

i'm going to guess it's just me, but men do this weird thing with me where they won't let me keep anything of my own. i don't know if it's on purpose or if it's just that men don't realize that i have personal belongings and just see everything in my environment as either theirs or garbage. for whatever reason it happens, i don't like it. i dated one guy who couldn't even let there be a flat surface near me. if i cleared things off a table where i was sitting, he would actually go out to the store and buy something to fill that space with. it would sit there until i cleared the space again, and he would do it again. he was only ever moved to interact with anything in our home whenever he saw that i was treating the apartment where i paid the rent like i actually lived there and wasn't just some unwanted guest he was patiently suffering.

when i pointed out to him what he was doing, he acted like i hadn't even said anything, and not like, "i'm ignoring this on purpose". more like, "i don't recognize the sounds you're making as you attempting to communicate with me." it was like i was suddenly talking to a goldfish. it reminded me of the fable you hear about the native americans not being able to see the first european boats on the horizon because they had no inkling of what they could possibly be.

but this is true for every small personal item i ever owned. i'm just plain afraid to buy things like hairdryers and curling irons ever again.  i haven't been able to own those types of things for more than a few weeks before something "happens". and don't even get me started about my glasses. what is so difficult about "leave my glasses alone. i need them to see"? is it just something about men that makes them not realize that waiting until i'm asleep and then moving my glasses without telling me is actually cruel? and these are people who told me they loved me... who expected me to allow them into my body.  

as long as i'm not getting any kind of sign that men even recognize me as a human being, i'm not really interested in having one around me on a regular basis. that would just be stupid on my part. hey, maybe men are nicer to other women, and maybe it is just me, but that doesn't mean i have to buy a new watch every other month.

i can do bad just fine by myself.