On Pirates, Trolls something something and Really Bad Eggs

Have you ever wondered why we should be worried about pirates nowdays? People who breach copyright laws, steal movies and music, for some reason, are called pirates. If you think about it, it’s a strange term to give them. Why not video vampires; music moles or sega snitches?

Our collective subconsciousness is filled with images of scary types that would grant an evil personality to someone accessing a movie, song or game without paying for that right. But why a Pirate? Surely there are many other labels that would instil the impersonal fear of these fiscal outcasts in the general population more adequately and aptly than a pirate? How about a vampire; troll; goblin; leprechaun or werewolf? What is it about pirates that made intellectual property rights peeps change the arrrrrrrrgument?

Ba-da – cha... thanks, I’m here all week...

If we can learn anything from history, apart from the fact that we don’t learn anything from history, it is that pirates have been part of our collective subconscious for many centuries, and have been given greater credence and villainy than their acts deserve. The word goes back to at least the thirteenth century and can be linked to the Latin pirata (sea robber), the Greek peirates (one who attacks).  From about 1620, the Spanish word Picaroon was used to mean a sea-robber. However, in 1701, there was recorded the term from the Latin peritus to mean a person who takes another’s labour without permission, forward through to 1913 where it was coined to mean an unlicensed radio broadcaster probably similar to this one. Of course, this is to completely ignore the Vikings and many other groups that were essentially pirates.

Like most GenXers, I grew up with pirates being bad and Robin Hood being good. Then, somewhere along the way, pirates became good (thanks to Johnny Depp) and Robin Hood got really bad (thanks to Kevin Costner and Russell Crowe). Pirates were the bad guys in Treasure Island, the Swiss Family Robinson and Peter Pan. They were not only bad; they were ruthless, unreasoned and cold: they were not human. Then things changed a little.

The Goonies retold the pirate story from a different angle in searching for the treasure of One-Eyed Willie. Fighting through deadly booby traps and the Fratellis, in the Goonies, it is more dumb luck that saves the day, the concept of piracy is told to have been captured for so long, freed by a final booby trap, the film ends with the pirate ship Inferno, sailing away unmanned and free.     

The Princess Bride introduced the Dread Pirate Roberts as a more cultured and reasonable person. “Good night Wesley, get some sleep, I’ll most likely kill you in the morning” turned into a very reasonable want to retire and be replaced by our heroin, whom we already knew and liked.  All of a sudden, we are introduced to the back story of (one of the) Dread Pirate Roberts, and it makes perfect sense to us. 

But it’s not until the recent Pirates of the Caribbean and its sequels that the pirate story is told in the positive. Like all great action movies, these movies are in part a ‘Gospel according to Cool’ that made us buy the headbands and wristbands of Capt Jack and forgive Keira Knightly for the Phantom Menace and part a retelling analogy of freedom and justice. Piracy in these movies is regarded not as history records; ruthless and merciless monsters. Rather, the pirates of these movies are akin to nobility in many ways: from the bloodline that runs from to the son from an unknown father (Bootstrap Bill) to the concepts of freedom and justice, while in some ways a divine gifts, are given to the pirates, rather than the English, to be upheld.

So now pirates are the new black.

Walking along in any given marina nowdays, you would be unlucky to not see at least one ship with the Jolly Roger flying loud and proud. This is a very strange thing given that before July 2008, flying this flag would constitute an offence in Queensland liable to life imprisonment.

And there are other types of groovy pirates nowdays, a Facebook Pirate, we can learn, is an “...[i]ndividual that[sic]  proceeds to steal everything you post on your facebook wall and post it on their wall without giving any credit thus taking all the glory of your genius” used to complain about someone “stealing my Lady Gaga video again and he has 30 comments and I only have for [sic]”  There are Pit Pirates, who  “...focuses his entire life around his own ego. EVERYTHING is always about him. If you've cooked it, he's cooked 10 times as much and of course BETTER! If you've been there, he been there SEVERAL times! If one of your kids is cute.... well then he just doesn't care....because it's all about HIM!!!” There is also the Digital Buccaneer who “...obtains large amounts of video or music over the internet, usually by pirating or other questionable means”.

So it seems our pirates have gone from bad to misunderstood to good to just plain annoying.

Vampires have a similar stroll through history. From a weird poem by Lord Byron that inspired the sickness of Bram Stocker; to a Dracula whose story was unknown, he was just bad. Then he was, like others, misunderstood into a life against God due to bad fortune and trickery. Through the wonderful stories of Anne Rice, vampires became understandable and human, and through stories like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and the Lost Boys, they were even more human, if still bad. But then there’s Twilight, isn’t there?   Vampires became pooncey and annoying...just like pirates.

We’ve talked about Darth Vader in this light before have we not? Yet there is a lot more to his story that fits the same mould. The first movie that came out, he was barely human; he was a cold and ruthless killer. In the second movie (The Empire Strikes Back) this is even worse in his dealings with his henchmen, using the force to strangle them over the intercom; he couldn’t even be bothered to travel to their ship to weird force-strangle his 2IC in person. Yet in the third movie, he becomes human. He turns into a good guy and dies, but we don’t really understand that. But insert the new Star Wars trilogy, especially the third movie; Revenge of the Sith, where we not only learn how Vader becomes that person, we understand it. Anakin gets tricked into hooking his wagon onto the bad guys horse to save the love of his life....awwwww...isn’t that sweet?

No, seriously, it’s not only sweet, it’s understandable. It all makes perfect sense, down to the retelling of the story of Sir Galahad, stealing the metaphysical conundrum that free will and divine determinism can so easily confuse our heroin. Anakin is ‘fulfilling his destiny’ in the eyes of Emperor Palpatine, but at the same time chooses his actions, lest he not be responsible for them... he wants more, when he knows a Jedi  shouldn’t. A notion that is exaggerated at the end of the movie by Obe Wan not killing him because he is unarmed, juxtaposed against Anakin’s fight with Dooku at the beginning.

So what has all this got to say about bad, do we know what’s good for bad? Do we know what’s bad for bad? We got to grow up with a version of the devil, Vader, that was then warped by reasoned explanation. We get to understand what the devil did, more than that, we get to forgive him for it. What the previous generation had seen in communists, the one before that in Catholics and the one before that in Chinese and Germans, we got to understand ours. Maybe this next generation will be the first to finally transcend notions of good and evil in morality. 

And I know you’re now shaking you fists in frustration at me, screaming, ‘what about the Terrorists’? Are they just our generation’s communists or Catholics? Maybe, maybe not. But they are terrorists, rather than a particular identifying feature. It is their actions that condemn them rather than their beliefs or nationality.

I know, a pretty weak distinction. 

There is another thought troubling me about this: in all these types of stories, bad is not just beaten, it is eradicated; it is completely removed from the world. Vader destroyed the Sith completely. Dracula, who originally was just bad, was given a back story in our lifetime. His service to the lord was mocked by the trickery that destroyed his wife. This was never in the original stories, but the idea of killing him was. He was the one and only to be removed; once dead, bad was gone. But my concern is, can bad ever be removed from anything? As Uncle Fred said, "But what if pleasure and pain should be so closely connected that he who wants the greatest possible amount of the one must also have the greatest possible amount of the other, that he who wants to experience the "heavenly high jubilation," must also be ready to be "sorrowful unto death?"

You could use this point to argue that Jesus was wrong to refuse the Devil’s third logic in his forty days of wandering, but that’s another post in itself.

Back to pirates...

Interestingly, one of the anti-movie piracy ads here is Aus, which portrays a ‘pirate’, who seems to look more like a blacksmith than a pirate or a computer geek, states that one of the reasons we should turn away from video piracy is that it ‘funds terrorism’. This claim has been made by many, but interesting has been made by John G. Malcolm, a deputy assistant attorney general in the criminal division at the United States of America’s Department of Justice before a formal House Judiciary Committee proceedings, or in short, someone who ought to know better. The link is a clear one too. "Organised crime syndicates are frequently engaged in many types of criminal enterprises, including supporting terrorist activities", Mr Malcolm explained. Unsurprisingly, he could not, when pushed on the matter, name any case where this actually happened, but "it would surprise [him] greatly if the number were not large".

So if I drive a car, and some people use cars to go through drive-thrus, I think it follows that I am a hamburger.  But really...If a person breaks the law, they are part of a sub-class of people who can be labelled law breakers, some of whom fund terrorism. Therefore, breaking the law funds terrorism. Did someone say McCarthyism ?

SuPERB

There’s another ad that asks “would you steal a handbag?” ...then ... “Would you steal a car?” while presenting the types of situational crimes that Routine Activity Theory would explain all too well.

But are they actually stealing something? And if so, are they doing it for the types of reasons that the traditional pirate did? It may well be a too simplistic statement to say that the reasons for traditional piracy is simple scarcity caused by the greediness of the upper classes. Is that not the case still today?

As a part-time author, I have very little concern about people reading my stuff without paying for it, as long as this doesn’t happen too much and as long as they are not actually Stealing it (capital S for claiming ownership/authorship of it). But this may well be because I am, through most of my work, not being paid at six percent of the jacket price of my work by the people that are really pushing the anti-piracy bandwagon. I get to keep somewhere between forty percent and two thirds of the price, depending on where my work is sold. I also get to keep complete control over my work. But what is the opposite? Think about that for a minute; an author who has written an entire work of whatever, laboured through thick and thin, if s/he chooses a book-deal over self controlled publishing, s/he gets only six percent of the revenue from that work. Artists and musicians appear to be in similar situations; the are making more for the endless stream of accountants and marketing gurus out there than they are for themselves. But at least they are actually making something, creating something that this world may ponder and smile upon for a second or more. Kudos for that.

So I guess the term pirate is quite apt. Historically, it is not that pirates stole from the creators of products that made them bad, it was that they were better at it and had considerably less overheads to contend with than the government and the quazi-creative industries that leech off talent from the creators. This is still true of video pirates today I guess.

This post’s groovy, identity-seeking quote:

“Nobody can build the bridge for you to walk across the river of life, no one but you yourself alone. There are, to be sure, countless paths and bridges and demi-gods which would carry you across this river; but only at the cost of yourself; you would pawn yourself and lose. There is in the world only one way, on which nobody can go, except you: where does it lead? Do not ask, go along with it.”

This post’s lame jokes:

Q. Why don’t pirates sail to the moon?

A. Because it’s too faaaaaaaaarrrrrrr

Q. What kind of socks do pirates wear?

A. Aaaaaargiles.

Q. What do pirates do when they injure their knees?

A. Get Arrrrrrrthroscopic surgery

Q. Why do pirates read Playboy?

A1. For the Arrrrrrticles

A2. For the booty

An Apology and an Explanation

One of the funniest things, and at the same time, one of the saddest things that you come across in life is the concept that people always turn into that which they hate the most. Have you heard this claim? Jung was a fairly big believer in it, albeit he had a get-out-of-jail-free card which is another post in itself.  Socrates’ claim that an unexamined life is not worth living can be viewed as this same sort of exit; Nietzsche, Kierkegaard and Dostoyevsky have a better claim, but the central part of it is that you only notice bad things about others that you fear of yourself. While I have always been an enthusiastic follower of Jung, I really don’t understand this claim fully. While there are traits in other people that I discredit them for that I am fearful exist in my own personality at some level, the things that bug me the most about some people, I have no doubt do not exist in me, nor do they have any chance of coming forward...or do they? 

Some things that I am not overly fond of in others that I do fear in myself are things like disorganisation, wasting talent and potential and the like (and yeah, I hear you say ...ooo way to really criticise yourself there Chad). I know, to be honest, there are a few things that I never thought that would ever be an issue with me that have become so lately: weight; tolerance and substances... I was always a gauntly skinny kid, never learned to watch what I ate (which was mainly bananas and wheat bix) and could run on the smell of an oiley rag. I remember stupid behaviour as a teenager, daring each other to pull the quick-release from the brakes on our bikes and go down the Toowoomba Ranges just cause we were bored on a Sunday morning. What I wouldn’t give to be fit enough to not notice coming back up the ranges (especially after a Saturday night of John Player Specials and box wine.  Now as an adult, I am fascinated by the fact that I am not that pillar of psychotic fitness that advanced my youth. I never thought I’d see myself in that light, and cringe at the constant criticism of others for this trait. 

But the people that really bug me? The people that really make me go out of my way to ruin their day are the people that I have no fear of becoming: the people that a loud and obnoxious, think that they know everything and do not listen. They’re always happy to see you, but only when you see them first. They are always at the forefront of the latest fad, but never at the actual time... you know the type dear reader. They are the catch-cries of mediocrity, wasting their time and being on shiney things . 

Perhaps this is because I have the Birthday Blues at the moment...I once talked to a pshychology academic about this (he had never heard of the term) and he believed that it was nothing more than my subconscious preparing me for an inevitable disappointment that was to come. When I was a child, my birthdays always seemed so exciting just before they happened. The expectation of a day of my own. We were always allowed to choose the breakfast cereal the week of our birthday, meaning that it was the only week of the year we didn’t have either weetbix or god-awful muesli (complete with orange peel....yeeuwwwey). It was generally a toss up between Cocoa-Pops or Fruit Loops. But the presents...the presents always brought a massive wave of joy and smiles to my face...until the actual day. I remember one day getting what I thought was a groovy, hippie, brown-checker, cloth brief-case for my birthday.  That was the biggest joy for me... the cred I would get from school would be so above anything I had known. It was exactly the kind of bag that Hendrix or Joplin would have had. 

Then I opened it.

It was a rug...

 

A brown rug.

Folded in a strange way and given to an imaginative kid.

As a result of which, apparently I get the Birthday Blues. A feeling of being down and kinda grumpy usually about two weeks or so before that day.  According to a few psychology peeps that I have spoken to, most of these types of situations are other-thought by people: the simplest explanation is usually right.  But there is another element to it: another year gone, what have I to show for it? It’s this latter part that generally is the end of all the Blues, because, like most artistic souls, I can quite happily think that, while I haven’t done enough and have wasted some time doing some dumb stuff, by and large I am grooving to the tune along and about where I want to. I haven’t finished those two books that I promised myself I’d finish by my birthday (a few years ago), but I am still working in that sort of area. I am still living, still loving, still breathing, still being. 

In that I am happy.  

But am I moving towards that person that Jung feared I would be?

I always loved the last episode of Northern Exposure for the example of this.

Yes and no – I am further along that path, but not as far as I ought to be. Birthday blues are good to reaffirm one’s commitment to a life outside the explainable.

This post’s lame joke:

Q: How many lawyer jokes are there in the world?

A: Just the one, the rest are all true.

As a side note – a big shout out to those few who have joined our merry band for nasty reasons and may well have been mislead by the title of this rant – but if you’ve read this far, that’s pretty funny. Stay around, you may just learn how to mean something.

Vanitas vanitatum et omnia vanitas?

Vanity of vanities ...all is vanity...and the  vexation of the spirit. It appears that the only way to end this cycle is the self realisation. How are we supposed to deal with the complexities of modern day, day to day life, with the seemingly inconsistent need to leave a mark, a legacy of some kind that states that we were here, and we did ... well, something? How does this translate any kind of purpose to our lives? 

The reason I ponder this is that I find myself constantly fighting with people. I worry that I remember my father dedicating most of his life; most of my childhood, to what I believed were trivial disputes. I still do. Yet I look back at the progression of my children’s childhood and find it all too easy to measure time in terms of who I was arguing with at a particular point. 

We’ve talked about weird little teachers and their inability to live up to the standards that society asks of them while at the same time, holding a label which society greatly approves of. It the last little while, one of these annoying little people provides the current case in point. It seems that there is this endless progression of people wanting to be recognised by me, and to do this they will go out of their way to start a dispute.  This chick is going out of her way, putting her very employment and reputation at risk just to get some sort of standing with me. Just to get some sort of acknowledgement that I am listening to her and her petty claims and invalid understanding of behaviour. I couldn’t really care about it at all, I think her whole understanding, her very existence is pointless and I don’t really want anything to do with her. I paint her as the version of humanity that some of us have been lucky enough to transgress and surpass. They live in the bigger cities with their shiney, identity seeking materials that will prove to all and sundry how spiritual they are. They sit in a metal coffin on their way to work stuck in traffic, never realising that they aren’t stuck in traffic, they are the traffic. I should just point a silent and mocking yalp to the pointlessness of her life, however, I can’t seem to just stand by and let her dictate terms to me as to how I can act and what I can say. 

Do you know what I am talking about dear reader? Of course you do; you’re just as cool aren’t you? And I hear you say, “just walk away, vanity is vanity after all.” You’re right, I know that you’re right, but let me ask you this, “have you ever?”

Didn’t think so. 

I have no idea why this is the case. The LoML thinks that it’s because I am too cool and don’t grant people enough lee-way; that I should consciously compliment people more often when they don’t deserve it so as to avoid petty little disputes and an indifferent attitude to develop into an out of control hostility where everyone just gets fed up. 

Many years ago, in one of the first major legal cases that I was involved with, two families basically destroyed each other rather than walk away. This may be because they saw walking away as acquiescing to the request of their now rival. This may be true, the language that is used in disputes first and foremost seeks to own the path of resolution, to put a fence around it that says  “pay the fare or else”. 

These two older men, both from very wealthy families with many generations of wealth and prosperity formed a company that exaggerated their status and cunning to turn their many millions of dollars into serious money. Then the strangest thing happened; a sister of one of them broke a wine glass at a dinner party. It was not too much of a big deal at the time; easily solved with the promise of a replacement glass. It was an exceptionally expensive glass, but the price tag meant little to our heiress, who duly gave, as restitution, a set of six glasses of equal or perhaps better value than the one that she broke. The problem was:  the one that she broke was part of a set of twenty. She replaced one wine glass with six, but this was not regarded as due restitution by the other family. 

Then, by chance or design, who knows...the brothers met again as normal over tea and the brother whose family hosted the dinner party (and had their wine glass broken) ‘accidentally’ broke an antique tea pot belonging to the other. One family saw this as a deliberate response, the other pleaded that it was an accident. Then the lawyers got involved, their business partnership was dissolved and the many, many boxes of paperwork which detailed the dealings of this partnership, from innocent transactions right through to accounts which identify criminal activity from them (fraud, larceny, tax evasion and the like) were in the hands of the lawyers.  

Fast forward a few years and this dispute is still going. The two men were reduced to a laughing stock due to them destroying their position and privilege just to seek to get back at the other. Neither man recognised any point at which they ought to have just walked away, regardless of the loss of face. Yet everyone else looking onto the dispute could hardly see a time where this wouldn’t have been the appropriate thing to do. It’s the language of a dispute, it’s the point where one identifies themselves as the injured party and refuses to give up on some vague concept of justice or a fair outcome that the vanity blinds them from the realisation that this does not exist, or if it does, it is not available to them. One of the stories retold by Mark Twain in his travel writings: Life on the Mississippi  is of a dispute between the Darnells and the Watsons in the deep south; two families who started as kin/squattocracy and, over the generations had bitterly shot each other almost out of existence. Our arrogance and vanity blinds us from happiness. 

As I’ve always said, ‘if arrogance is misconstrued as shyness, well then I wouldn’t be arrogant.’ 

Yet, as Aristotle wonderfully said “there is no way to happiness, happiness is the way.” 

The problem is that I find myself way too much of a passionate and moral person to be able to let things go; and that this makes me different from other people. However, it appears most people are the same. I say moral in the sense of ‘how many times does a buttmuncher like Ms X here come across a person like myself? Not that I am arrogant about that (well, not too much, I am not overly arrogant, I have bad eyesight and get bored with dumb people very easily), but it appears to me to be the part I play in scheme of things is very greatly coloured by the fact that I have been given certain privileges and skills that enable me to respond quite strongly to these people whom society has granted a comfortable existence, well beyond their contribution to that society. But then this makes me greatly vain. 

Have you ever been unfriended by someone of facebook? Of course you have, haven’t you dear reader. But when you happen by chance to realise this, isn’t it the funniest feeling? You have this need to say, ‘hey, you’re not allowed to do that, you were my pity friend for like years and now you’re all snoochy about it?” We’ve talked about social media and trolling before, and the strange and unrealistic situations that it gives people. It gives a voice to people who, in real life, don’t have a voice (sorry to use the term real life as opposed to life online, but I’m not sure how else to draw a dichotomy). But the need to identify themselves in the most simple and non-dismissible way seems inversely proportionate to their abilities in real life. But can you simply walk away from that without getting upset, without thinking “is there a way I can have them know that there’s dogpoo on their windscreen wipers, and it’s because of their inabilities in life, their very vanity made me put the poo there?” Or is it my vanity? 

However, is the absence of vanity the answer to all this? I am not sure that recognising the vanity of my actions and removing it is the right course of action. To be selfless is not about being removed or ignorant of the world. It is in recognising that one is part of a greater all. An all that we realise our part in and thus truly transgress vanity. We play our part in the world, our experiences and skills enable us to do great things, but we must never forget that it is only a part we are playing. 

Without the play, we are nothing, but we would be wrong to assume we would be better off without the play. There is no us without the play, both metaphysically (how can we label something that we cannot know?) and morally (if we remove ourselves from the play, others will be left with missing lines). Ignorance is not bliss. The withdrawal of belief in something does not spur belief in nothing, it spurs belief in anything.  Then we are left with a nothing that is hard to comprehend and harder to listen to. As Uncle Fred said, being human, all too human is tough, we should give our darkness one big old hug and howl for the eternal yes. 

So what if we get so caught up in our own vanity. The current version of non-realism, which is generally referred to as science seems at best the latest version of vanity and arrogance spurned on by a failure to understand the wonder in meaninglessness. Meaninglessness is the most wonderful, yet also the most misunderstood and feared quality that our beautiful world has to offer us. 

Well, if you don’t count sex and guitars.

I found myself revisiting the Bible this last week. I have been a lapsed Catholic for almost as long as I was a Catholic. Short of some vision or calling from the big man, this year will mark a point in my life where I have spent longer as a non-Christian than as a Christian. I remember back to the days of my youth when I believed that there was someone at the wheel, keeping everyone to account (which we’ve talked about). Remember when you thought that so long as you stayed close to your parents, you were safe, nothing could harm you. I’m providing that for my children at the moment and it scares me. It scares me because I remember the day that it all ended for me. That day when you realised that you were never safe, you were always as vulnerable to the whims of the meaninglessness of the world. I hope I can keep up the pretence with my children long enough for them to find it easier to forgive me for holding up a conception of meaning in what we do and why. But remembering what it was like to honestly be part of the fold. You sing and put cardboard-tasting discs in your mouth and you had nothing to worry about. Even the time when you were falling out of that group, but faking it cause you wanted to get with the girl down the road who still went to church most Sundays. There’s beauty in that. Well, not in that dear reader, I meant the mindset of that. With regard to the other thing, sure there is beauty in that as much as there is beauty in the lesson learned of be careful what you wish for. Another thing social media has ruined: my memory of her. The memory of shock as I realised I completely misunderstood who she was, how pure she was by being dominated and used. That contradiction between loving being used as a toy for a time while being quite angry that she completely disregarded the rules of chess and threw the game just to get her own way. But now, thanks to the joys of social media, I learned that the years have not been kind. I didn’t want to know that just as much as I did want to know that. But there is nothing to be done about it.  Maybe this is why a passage from the Bible came and stuck for a minute. What wonderful passages there are to be found inside what can be regarded as a predominant history of the West and what joy there is to find, in this book, something that is akin to that wonderful Pink Floyd understanding of the metaphysics of morals.

The words of the Preacher, the son of David, king in Jerusalem. Vanity of vanities, saith the Preacher, vanity of vanities; all is vanity. What profit hath a man of all his labour which he taketh under the sun? One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever. The sun also ariseth, and the sun goeth down, and hasteth to his place where he arose. The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits. All the rivers run into the sea; yet the sea is not full; unto the place from whence the rivers come, thither they return again. All things are full of labour; man cannot utter it: the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and that which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun. Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us. There is no remembrance of former things; neither shall there be any remembrance of things that are to come with those that shall come after. I the Preacher was king over Israel in Jerusalem. And I gave my heart to seek and search out by wisdom concerning all things that are done under heaven: this sore travail hath God given to the sons of man to be exercised therewith. I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and, behold, all is vanity and vexation of spirit. That which is crooked cannot be made straight: and that which is wanting cannot be numbered. I communed with mine own heart, saying, Lo, I am come to great estate, and have gotten more wisdom than all they that have been before me in Jerusalem: yea, my heart had great experience of wisdom and knowledge. And I gave my heart to know wisdom, and to know madness and folly: I perceived that this also is vexation of spirit. For in much wisdom is much grief: and he that increaseth knowledge increaseth sorrow.

This post’s groovy, identity seeking quote

“But when from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, taste and smell alone, more fragile but more enduring, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, remain poised a long time, like souls, remembering, waiting, hoping, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unflinchingly, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection.”

This post’s lame joke:

This guy, Tom,  goes to his priest and says “Father, I think my marriage is in trouble”

“Well,” says the priest, “it’s good that you realise that and are seeking to do something about it before it’s too late. Especially in today’s world, the role of the mother is vexed and complicated and as a result, some men feel that their marriages come second.”

“Oh, no father,” replied Tom, “it’s nothing like that, she’s great with the arranging everything and keeping on top of things.”

“Well,” says the priest, “Sometimes being a mother will remove a woman from the complexities of the modern world and she will start to appear quite boring and plain during early child raising.”

“Oh, no father,” replied Tom, “It’s nothing like that, she keeps up to date with everything, is an avid reader and we talk into the wee hours about all types of topics...from current events to art, music, politics,... whatever.”

“Well,” says the priest, “Sometimes the role the modern, working man, with its stresses and fatigue can destroy the attention and patience needed of a father.”

“Oh, no father,” replied Tom, “It’s nothing like that, she keeps the kids out of my hair when I’ve had a bad day, but that doesn’t happen too much and they’re great kids anyway.”

“Well,” says the priest, “Sometimes the role of a mother can interfere with the want for physical love and as a result, the husband can feel unloved and unwanted.” 

“Oh, no father,” replied Tom, “It’s nothing like that. She’s an absolute firecracker in the sack...she’s always up for it and willing to try new things and is a wonderful lover.”

“Well,” says the priest, now quite at a loss as to what to say, “why don’t you tell me why you think that your marriage is in trouble.”

“Well father,” Tom started, “It seems a bit silly now, especially after talking with you. Don’t worry about it, it nothing... It’s silly.”

“No, no, tell me my son, no matter how silly.” the priest replied. 

“Well,” Tom hesitated, “It’s just every once in a while, not very often, maybe once a fortnight at the most...usually after I’ve had a tough day...come home to find the kids good and fed, bathed, then , even though I’m exhausted, she’ll want sex...then ... when she thinks I’m asleep...she’ll lean over and with such passion and force in her voice...well”

“Go on my son” the priest encourages.

“Well, she’ll say, full of infatuation and strength she’ll think I’m asleep and say ‘Die, when are you going to fucking die you son of a bitch.”