Tuesday, October 30, 2007

From The Youngest:
My Shoulder Hurts

Physical Pain has cut through my artistic output like a dull scalpel. It has hampered my poker playing, made defecating a rare and difficult task, and, worst of all, it has given me The Fear. The Fear that all of this may not actually cure my bimonthly (twice a month?) shoulder separations and that all this may just be a painfully annoying half year of "recovery".







"You sure did a good job on that shoulder."
"Yeah, it was pretty fucked up," I reply, reading his name tag.
"You had a tear going from the top of your shoulder all the way down to your armpit."
>giggling<
"What's so funny?"
"Nothing, sorry, go on…"






Then again, maybe it's not the pain and the doubt that is troubling me. Maybe it's the evil, Rush Limbaugh-crippling narcotic Oxycodone that has brought about this mean funk for the past 2.5 weeks. This is a narcotic so powerful that, after blowing $100 on $1-$2 poker tournaments in one night, caused me to purchase $70 worth of hard-to-find candy that I enjoyed as a youth. A narcotic so powerful that I briefly considered Hilton/Coulter a winning Republican Presidential ticket…and thought it might be hot. What the hell?








I guess it makes no difference if it's a little white pill causing my distress or the fact that I have six chunks of metal and a vast, interwoven web of sutures pinching my muscles and ligaments together within my shoulder. Maybe it’s because I can’t work with my sling on and I’m petrified that I’m going to destroy any benefits that my surgery may give me by sitting here typing all fucking day. Maybe it’s because I’m generally not as agile as I am used to being and am growing fatter with each passing day of minimal activity.
This weakness is making me bitter.
But really, how can I be bitter when my doctor’s name is…Dr. Cummins?
>giggling<
How can I be bitter when I beat Master P at Golden Tee left handed Sunday night.
How can I be bitter when I will be heading to sunny Aruba to play poker, drink, and recuperate in December…or that another trip to Vegas is in the works for February?







Well, until I get better, I can be as bitter as I want, assholes.
Nnnnnnaaaaaa what’s up Doc?










You are asking the wrong doctor, rabbit, and take that carrot out of your mouth.

Sunday, October 21, 2007

From Mezz0:
Lessons of Marriage

Lesson #1:

It is unacceptable to refer to one of the children on the hit reality TV show "Kid Nation" as "hot," not matter how serious you are, or hot the child may be.

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Monday, October 15, 2007

From Mezz0:
We Don’t Call it Pain, We Call it a “Deeper Understanding”


While home a few months ago*, I asked the Old Man about his financial situation. Things had been looking grim, but it sounded like the crises was averted, and he would be able to retire before becoming too senile to continue working. He told me that it was God’s plan, and the financial mini-crisis forced him to quit giving away as much money as he used to be able to, which was humbling, and now he was involved in other avenues for spiritual giving (volunteering).

At work, we recently signed a contract with a devout Muslim, who when receiving calls to prayer on his laptop, would interrupt meetings to bow to Mecca. Anything that happened to him in business, in his personal life, in other people’s lives, was all ascribed to “God’s will.” On the software contract, he wrote in Farsi next to each of his signatures, “Glory be to God.”

I’ve always found this knee-jerk “God’s will” explanation distasteful. Nobody ever says, for example, it was God’s will that a roving gang of genocidal maniacs raped, tortured, and killed hundreds of children in an African village. Nobody volunteers God up for natural and man-made disasters involving massive numbers of causalities, Pat Robertson notwithstanding. When people say “God’s will,” in mind’s eyes I picture the holocaust, and scores of dead Jews steam shoveled into mass graves, and I know what everyone knows – that can’t be God’s will.

About five years ago I had a conversation with a devout atheist. He explained to me over tequila shots that he was a “materialist,” and believed that everything in the universe, including those of the mind, were all accountable to material agencies, and there was no free will, only the fate brought to us through the material world. All of our choices were born from complex chemical and physical processes, and the effects of these choices percolated throughout the world subject to the same complex chemical and physical processes.



I’ve recently read a couple of Jack Kornfield books on Buddhism geared towards Western audiences. I’m not all that familiar with Buddhism outside of these books, but Jack focuses on the philosophy and practice of controlling one’s mind and emotions via “insight mediation,” and the crux of the teaching is to respond to everything as an opportunity for learning.

If you claim it is all God’s will, and rejoice when God provides you a bounty, and rejoice when God puts you through the grinder, or it’s all an opportunity for growth and insight because it’s an illusion anyway, or even if you are a materialist, and believe all of our choices, and all of our actions are merely a cosmic crystallization of chance, then we all pretty much believe the same damned thing. We are all saying “it’s ultimately outside of my hands.”

I was already to sign, seal and deliver this post as I was listening to the Joe Frank Show, and coincidentally, this subject came up, and a metaphysical answer.



Joe Frank: how do you reconcile the holocaust with a…with a God that um…that you would worship?

Man winging it on a phone call: Ummm…I do so in the following kind of way. There’s a magnificent scene in a novel written some years ago by a man named Meyer Levin, the novel is called the Fanatic, and in the scene is a Talmud scholar standing in a selection line with his son, who is a cynic. It’s dawn and as the sun begins to rise the old man begins to recite the morning prayer. His son spins him around and screams at him “in a place like this where people are being chosen to live and die how can you pray? Doesn’t this place prove to you that there is no God?” The father with tears in his eyes turns to his son and he says “it is precisely in this place that I must pray because what this place proves to me is that man really has free will.”

The thing that’s most tragic about humanity is that we are unwilling both to accept the power given to us as the gift of our freedom, the responsibility that goes along with that power, and the understand that the freedom operates because we have the will to do so.

The tragedy of humanity is that it will make itself God in an attempt to eclipse that which is divine and meaningful. It’s not a matter of reconciling the holocaust with God, it’s a matter of reconciling ourselves to the reality we were created with. We seek to escape it either by trying to make ourselves more powerful than the universe in order to flee from our own sense of frailty and loss. Or else we attempt to make ourselves appear in our eyes to be like God - Omniscient and all-powerful in order to say we are wise and good.

The minute humanity takes that position it puts itself in a position in which it has to lose. And ultimately like holocaust, man tests whether or not he really is or isn’t God. One of the things we need to understand is that the responsibility of God and the holocaust is that God gave us the gift to choose and to act with power and with authority. To be angry at God and that gift means that we would also have to deny our humanness. And we can’t do that, because when we do that we end up slaughtering millions of people.


* I noticed he removed my favorite Christian haiku from his office:

Be still, and know that I am the Lord
Be still, and know that I am
Be still, and know
Be still
Be

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