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Last night I went on an mtsar thing, selecting a really long lecture for getting in bed. I mean, I prefer silence, of course, for bedtime, but there's none to be had here. Even in the middle of the night I rarely get more than a moment's break from the sound of traffic on Highway One Oh One. And there's the problem with whether I will fall asleep or not to consider. So this listening to a lecture for bed is a good way to deal with it. My attention is off the white noise and I'm doing something with all that time I'm supposed to be asleep.
I was trying to explain to someone the other day that I can fall asleep pretty well by lying down and blanking out my brain chatter, but I won't do that... no matter what. This would seem to most people to be most unreasonable. Why gripe to people about your insomnia if you can make yourself sleep?
One is not supposed to fall asleep while meditating. That is a baaaad sign! And I'm supposed to be never not meditating... which... obviously... isn't exactly the case. It is more the case than not when all my cylinders are firing, but they're not. I'm fallen into a glue pit of hassling over my state of decrepitude, fussing about the wreckage, feeling sooorry for myself... fucking up.
This does not mean that I give up. It means I'm making a Shakespearean deal out of stupid stuff to avoid being any further removed from regular than I already am. I can almost not believe this is the case at all because the absolute worst thing you can ever accuse me of is being normal. That concept has always come wrapped in ugly connotations here and it has not improved with the unspeakably many things I've learned since first recognizing what an awful idea that was.
Still, I have no wish to even unconsciously be abnormal in a negative way. If others find it negative, and they do shit like that with the most appalling regularity, I need to learn to live with that, but if I find it negative, it goes away... mostly....
Anyway, I digress. Turning meditation into a sleep aid is fucking cause for a firing squad, okay? That is about the most ungrateful thing I can think of at the moment. Maybe after more coffee I can come up with something worse.
So I'm noticing that there are TOO DAMN MANY EMPTY SEATS at the Tsarion lecture. I can see that there are things he has not thought out well enough, not mastered, is blind to, but, in general, people want to hear what he has to say. In that vicinity lies liberation, and even if he errs in spots, the general thrust of his work is all about another golden age on this planet.
At some point into it I fell asleep. So now it's today and I'm noodling around, clicking on links in the comments threads of out there, generally feeling around for what it is engaging the interest of Bliss Ninnies. I ended up in some auditorium in Tennessee, PACKED HOUSE, come to listen to some guy hold forth about the Humane Society's persecution of Walking Horse enthusiasts.
The place is at least comparable to the venue where Michael was speaking last night, maybe even bigger, and it's packed. I'm thinking this is a really, really, really depressing sign. I'm telling myself that walking horses are a much bigger deal in Tennessee than anywhere else and so this is a skewed sampling. It's not helping. It's still upsetting me. More people are willing to get out of their own way about defending their right to keep agonizing their horses with at least questionable practices... which gradate up to outright inhumane practices... than will muster themselves to wake up.
Okay, okay, try to look at the good in it.... It's nice to see homo sapiens amassing against regulatory intrusion... even though there's a good excuse for the intrusion. They get collectively het up over some things, mostly relating to property, and, and this could be telling, interference with livelihood. That could be in the form of taxing and regulating them out of jobs or businesses, or it could be about resources.
All over libertarian cyberspace we see the headline about the guy in Oregon going to jail for collecting rainwater. We do not look into it to find that this is not what you think of when you think rainwater collection. He's dug a bunch of ponds on his property. If there's any slope whatever to his land, he's taking that much water out of a river that farms and fishermen and environmental groups have all got parsed to the last drop. He's stealing.
I'm not happy about it either, even if he's dug ponds, but the fact is that we are putting way too much pressure on our watercourses, and appear to be insensible to any means of regulating our own behavior. You either tromp on people killing the ecosystem or you make people who are unwilling to kill the ecosystem. One or the other.
And, as the disparity in audiences at the Tsarion lecture and the walking horse lecture will attest, you are fucking dreaming if you think you can do the other.
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Crikey, for over a day this read "Highway One" instead of "Highway One Oh One". Most of my life has been near Highway One and even seven years on, I still default to it. I, of course, think I should just get back to it instead of continuing to fail to adjust to this one. I'll be needing that solvent gentleman for it, though....
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