I recently found myself at a church attending a formal event. I was truly shocked when later that day all the nastiness and backstabbing gossip emerged. You have to wonder how people can call themselves Christians when they are so eager to hurt others through plainly malicious and untrue gossip. It makes me feel that the wrong Christians may have been thrown to the lions.
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Apology to a Mugger
This Ad Was Placed in the Personal column of a newspaper in Georgia.
To the Guy Who Tried to Mug Me in Downtown Savannah night before last. Date: 05-27-09, 1:43 AM EST.
I was the guy wearing the black Burberry jacket that you demanded that I hand over, shortly after you pulled the knife on my girlfriend, threatening our lives and me.
You also asked for my girlfriend's purse and earrings.
I can only hope that you somehow come across this rather important message.
First, I'd like to apologize for your embarrassment when I drew my pistol after you took my jacket. The evening was not that cold, and I was wearing the jacket for a reason.
My girlfriend had just bought me that Kimber Model 1911 .45 A CP pistol for my birthday, and we had picked up a shoulder holster for it that very evening.
Obviously you agree that it is a very intimidating weapon when pointed at your head wasn't it?
I know it probably wasn't fun walking back to wherever you'd come from bare footed since I made you leave your shoes, cell phone, and wallet with me. That prevented you from calling or running to your buddies to come help mug us again.
After I called your mother, or "Momma" as you had her listed in your cell, I explained the entire episode of what you'd done. Then I went and filled up my gas tank as well as four other people's in the gas station on your credit card. The guy with the big motor home took 150 gallons and was extremely grateful!
I gave your shoes to a homeless guy outside Long's Drugstore, along with all the cash in your wallet. That made his day!
I then threw your wallet into the big pink "pimp mobile" that was parked at the curb ... after I broke the windshield and side window and keyed the entire driver's side of the car.
Later, I called a bunch of phone sex numbers from your cell phone. AT&T just now shut down the line, although I only used the phone for a little over a day now, so what's going on with that?
Earlier, I managed to get in two threatening phone calls to the DA's office and one to the FBI, while mentioning President Obama as my possible target. The FBI guy seemed really intense and we had a nice long chat - I guess while he traced your number etc.
In a way, perhaps I should apologize for not killing you ... but I feel this type of retribution is a far more appropriate punishment for your threatened crime. I wish you well as you try to sort through some of these rather immediate pressing issues, and can only hope that you have the opportunity to reflect upon, and perhaps reconsider the career path you've chosen to pursue in life.
Remember, next time you might not be so lucky.
Have a good day!
Thoughtfully yours,
Alex
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Jean Claude Van Damme is still searching for a talent beyond being able to kick the shit out people. I found this interpretation of Van Damme's heavy metal debut.
One too many perfect smiles. The smiling, laughing, wistful and youthfully vigorous perfection of the advertising images slowly worked their way into his unconscious like a sociopathic ferret into warm and inviting undergarments. His mundane daily grind of cartons and boxes, bottles and advertising copy was an overwhelming repetition of perfection, utopian lifestyle and the promise of a blissful and unending personal consumer satisfaction. It began to gnaw away at his sense of perspective and whatever notional life-raft of reality he found himself clinging to in this world of consumable knick-knacks and low-fat, environmentally-friendly close-weave woollen knickers. It was all too much.
He began to feel as though he were becoming a character in a bad student film about the psychological pressures of working in a large corporate wonderland of bullshit and chewing gum. All of the perfect teeth in the smiling faces of those glamorous-looking girls on the front of those boxes of hair dye (and just why do they need perfect teeth to sell hair-colouring products anyway ?), all of the bright and happy families oozing vitality from the cereal packets, all of the loyal pets cheerfully (some might say - wistfully) gazing back from the pet food product labels - it was all too much.
He was beginning to become a character in a drama revolving around the endless (almost Sisyphean) task of stocking the crap that people need (and think they want) into supermarket shelves and fridges, freezers and display cabinets. Somewhere between a carton of low-carb beer and cheap-as-shit fizzy booze the images of beautiful and improbably symmetrical women began to flash from his unconscious into his conscious awareness. The desire for items and goods began to show itself in it's naked form as a pure lusting, thrusting and gyrating animal urge to feed, copulate and breed. He began to feel that people were only really furthering their lusts through their purchasing power in these supermarket shelves and that even the displays of housewives and mothers playing happy families were all about people lusting after the things that they knew were never really real or fact in the first place. They were all (him included) looking for some panacea or soulful salve to soothe the emptiness they all knew lay below their desires and baser urges to consume, to engage with the only reality they knew - this packeted, polished and perfected image of perfection to which they were all lured like compass needles towards magnetic North and just like these needles they were always just slightly and ever off the mark of the true North of their needs. The desire was always and in some way by it's very nature skewed away from what would truly fill the void within. Deep down they all knew it. Deep down he knew it too but he played the game like everyone else. Chasing a perfection he knew he never could attain. Images of beautiful women played upon the mirror of his unconscious mind and the thousand ripples and affectations were the "oh that would be handy" or " I never knew they even made those" of the poor supermarket worker enthralled as much as any punter by the cornucopian plethora of products on display.
Underneath it all lay a desire. An unspoken (perhaps unspeakable) desire that could never be fulfilled. Everyone has it. We all play the game. We know we can't fill the void within but we choose to spend a greater portion of our lives chasing it anyway and, somewhat intentionally, place our aim just slightly off the mark in this way. When we chase the perfection of the advertiser's artificially enhanced life we know we can never attain these images. We know that falling for their allure will always leave us even emptier than when we first began desiring. We all know, deep down, that the perfect beauty and pseudo-copulatory sense of completeness we seek in the product and the media-projected consumer life is like an impossibly perfect digital beauty which in it's all-too-perfect symmetry and customisable lustfulness detracts us from the true North of the real and perfect beauty which is precisely already that less than perfect self and other that we already all are. The blemishes, scars and asymmetries of our bodies, of our lives, are what make us perfect. He felt like a character in a bad student film because he knew all this and he couldn't tell anyone, no one would listen. So he would imagine his virtual beauties as he stacked the shelves and disposed of the cardboard to the recycling units. He would impose his own desires upon the tedious oblivion of his workplace until he could finally imagine that there was something even remotely sensuous or desirable in his peasant-like role. He would by sheer power of will project a beauty upon the emptiness of his working life because he knew that was what people did to convince themselves there was any reason to be living such a life in the first place, that their (hire-purchase) fictions were taking them to the fulfilment of their desires and their dreams. Desires and dreams which were, of course, never really their own (any more than his digitally pre-fabricated dream-girls were really his own). He superimposed the emptiness of the impossibility of his fulfilment embodied as a nubile woman upon the sheer crappery of his job. His unconscious bled into his conscious life.
The desire to belong. The desire to be loved. The desire to leave something worthwhile in his wake when the small pebble of his life had finally sunk below the water's surface and he no longer was. He knew that in the end there really were no such things as people or desires. Only the ripples they make as they skip across the water's delicate surface and the interacting, intersecting patterns these ripples make in time.
Depicts ten thousand dog and cat collars, equal to the average number of unwanted dogs and cats euthanized in the United States every day.
Chris Jordan, photographer. (Website).
Every now and then when I am tweaking and fiddling, polishing and perfecting my virtual 3D women - it all comes together in something special. This is one of those images. Click it for a larger version.
Although it has been some time, I have yet again resorted to my own creation of virtual beauty. It seems to be that to which I turn when life is weighing heavily upon me. Things have become so complex and utterly problematic that I turn to my virtual creations to light a small fire of aesthetic pleasure to ease me through these times. She is too perfect, unreal, and yet in this I find my temporary creative refuge from the storms of my troubles. (Click the image to see a larger version.)
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Reflecting later (i.e. the day after) on this post and it occurs to me that the word "beauty" may here be a little unrefined and possibly misdirected. A pretty face and well-formed breasts do not define beauty. They probably do define a visual "toy" or something designed to arouse the male desire and sexual sensibility. Perhaps this is what I was seeking to salve my current multiplying worries. Devoid of intimate human warmth in real life, I create virtual (and ultimately false) warmth in my computer. Perhaps it is a reflection on the proliferation of sexual imagery online (of which the above is hardly an example, to my mind) that people are creating and seeking the artificially intimate to compensate for their lack of a real experience of intimacy in their lives.
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Again, and a little later, in reflection upon the next day's virtual creation, this one looks positively shallow and tarty.
Rupert Murdoch has all but declared war on internet search engines for using the content that his (and others') websites are generating. It seems more than just a little bit duplicitous for this billionaire tycoon to claim that search engines which may in some ways use the content that his websites/agencies generate are harming his business. When search engines index websites they tend to bring traffic to those sites, they don't diminish the potential profits or hits of the webpages and their advertisers.
The internet is a massively decentralised information network in which assertions of ownership over generated information seem to be anathema to the very nature of the ubiquity of that information in the digital age. The free flow of information is exactly what makes the internet the stunning success it has been. Attempting to isolate content and news articles is actually almost humorous considering the relationship Murdoch's media has always had with it's own creative fabrications, conservative interpretations and sensationalism of the media.
In simple terms - Murdoch is making a mad grab for more power and cash and see his own personal influence as the most effective way of kick starting this greed train. Before he gets his legions of lawyers out of the dungeon to attempt to cripple the search engines he really should think carefully about the roles that those search engines play in generating profits for his insular and conservative media networks.
The internet is successful precisely because of it's open information architecture. Any attempt to wind this back is small-minded, greedy and very likely (along with most corporate or governmental internet censorship and regulation) to fail miserably. Will we live in an age of omnipresent, freely available information and digital democracy or will we be deeply enmeshed in a vast prison-like architecture of purely profit-driven information technology ? I like to think that people are smart enough to reject media imperialism in favour of something far more egalitarian. Large websites can actually block search engines from accessing their content which would seem to imply that this is all about Murdoch trying to find a way to claw some of the big search engine's profits into his own vast piggy bank.
Murdoch has accused the search engines of being "content kleptomaniacs". He could as easily be accused of asserting his own brand of "digital dictatorship".
In the above painting by Francisco De Zurbarán we find Saint Francis of Assisi in deep religious contemplation. I chose this image of Saint Francis because it is one of the most powerful Christian devotional icons I have encountered. It is quite stark and yet also deeply emotional, representing the total devotion of a Saint sworn to a life of poverty and austerity.
Much has been written on Saint Francis’ love of animals and of the natural world. He is considered as the patron saint of animals and the environment. I find the notion of St. Francis preaching to animals to be a fascinating one. It is an idea that encapsulates a world view in which all living beings have intrinsic worth and value. Many interpretations of Christianity see humanity as the pinnacle of creation, alone in the cosmos and separated from the world in which they live and upon which they depend to thrive and survive.
The notion that the sanctity and spiritual or temporal (i.e. worldly) value of creatures is limited only to human beings and that the rest of the cosmos is populated by soulless automatons appears to me to be the general direction in which many Christian doctrines tend. Unfortunately, it seems also that the world is steeped in so many interpretations of Christianity (and, let’s face it - many other religions as well) which consider that their way is the one and only truth and salvation. There have even been variations upon a theme in Christianity that have at various times and in different places stated that women do not have a soul, non-Europeans do not have a soul, and so on. It would appear to the intelligent observer that we can witness the application of religion as a means of justifying varying degrees of small-mindedness and bigotry.
If one’s own worth and spiritual value is defined in distinction to the alleged worthlessness and emptiness of spiritual merit of another - is one’s own worthiness based in this upon something rather false and empty ? When considering such grand Universals as God or Life or Spirituality, it would seem that either all life is holy, or none is. Personally I tend towards the belief that all life is holy. Of course, our ethical considerations tend to proliferate when we consider all living things to have the Divine spark within them.
When I look into an animal’s eyes I do not doubt that although there may be varying degrees of awareness, consciousness and intelligence between us - this animal has intrinsic value and worth as does any human being. For religion and spirituality to be in any sense inclusive and complete it must surely have to be all-inclusive. Again - either everything is holy or nothing is.
Poster issued in Van Diemen's Land in 1816 prior to the height of the Black War depicting Lieutenant-Governor Arthur's policy of friendship and equal justice for settlers and Aborigines.
