Cabal

These little essays are virtually always just stream of consciousness. So I don't generally take them seriously. I come out with some good stuff sometimes, so much so that I surprise myself, but it's just me, shooting the breeze as you kids say. I haven't been keeping up with the news, which used to provide a fair bit of fodder for my musings. Sometimes I just have a single idea, or a yen to explore some topic. Don't know what I'm going to say. Just get started.

Right now I'd like to write something about God. You've seen the two things I just bumped up. I like them. I like their clarity. Is there anything left unsaid? Sure. Lots. Probably not very important. I don't have anything to say about God, though, or the way the universe works.

Yesterday I was speaking with someone I've know for a few years, and it turns out that he is a Truther. 9-11 was a US gov conspiracy. Cuz the second plane didn't have windows, and commercial planes have windows. I have very little interest in the topic. The 19 Arabs were CIA trained? Evidence? Just talk and supposition and a need to be in the know. I'm like that too, with all my vegetarianism and exercise to exhaustion. But the axes that I grind don't require anyone else to be scum. The Truthers need an evil in the world greater than that which Satan alone could account for. There is such evil, of course, but it's not so organized. Fu Manchu died a long time ago.

Well, I don't want to write about that nonsense. Here, look for yourself.

Yesterday I saw a teenager sitting with his pants down around his mid thighs. For reals. Big silver belt. Goth or emo or whatever rebellious nonconformist stereotype he included himself in. Somehow that image associated itself to an idea I have, about this generation. We always think the next generation is going to hell. It's never true. These things are cyclical. But there is a difference, now.

This is the first generation in the history of the universe that has had unlimited and unrestricted access to pornography of the very most degenerate character. Individual kids have always been exposed to such things, as the case may be. But now they all are. It's unique. And the pornography of generations past has been of a different character. A man and a women. Hardly worth commenting on nowadays. Nowadays, when there are things I can't even begin to understand, and would never recognize as anything like actual sex. Sexual, only because it involves naked bodies. That, alas, includes autopsies.

This is what the entire next generation can see, at will. I haven't given it any thought, to decide the sort of damage it will do, to them of course, but to the world and to humanity. There's never been anything like it. Societies built on child sacrifice, but once they got past infancy children were protected as much as the society could.

I was talking tonight with someone, touching on this idea, and the conversation moved to tattoos and piercings and so on. He knows someone with pierced nipples. A normal, accomplished and professional man. My understanding, expressed in these pages several years ago, is that gay men sensualize their whole bodies, whereas "straight" men concentrate their interest primarily on their genitals. As I said, I don't want anyone touching my nipples. Yick. I think that's how it is for most men who are older than me. Something has changed, apparently. The way I see it, inhibition is a good thing. Maybe it's just a matter of innocuous taste, though, like haircut styles. On the other hand, maybe it's part of the pornographizing of American youth. Who were meant to be, as has been the case, the salvation of the world.

AIDS and sars and avian flu and swine flu were and are not conspiracies, not dry runs, not planned. Pandemics happen ever few generations, and we haven't had one since 1919. That, if you'll allow me to do the tough math for you, is 90 years ago. We're due. Same with economic upheavals: we wish they didn't happen, but they do. Planning helps only so much, then it doesn't help.

We did not plan for a generation that never had a meaningful period of innocence. This, more than anything else, is an indicator of an impending apocalypse, escatological or not. We don't need Truthers or any other conspiracists to point out our doom. It is at my fingertips at this very moment.

They've always said this sort of thing. The world has always been ending. But don't you suppose this is different? It is a sin taken into the body, which means a sin taken into the soul. Has this happened before? Europe never recovered from the loss of the generation of WWI. That was just physical. This is spiritual.

But I'm not a conspiracy hound. I look for patterns, is all. Do I really believe it? No. But I don't really believe that I'll die someday. Neither do you. We find a sort of hope in this, personally. But it doesn't have much effect on reality.

Ah well, the stream of my consciousness has become a trickle. I guess I can't save the universe tonight. In fact, I'm so devoid of good ideas that I'm going to have to knock my IQ down to, oh, say, a mere 185. No worries. Tomorrow is another day.

Tonight I tweaked a muscle in my lower back in the middle of a pretty tough workout -- one that wasn't going well. It's been a hard week, and a hard month. Stopping was a hard thing to do, but I stopped. Feels like failure. But a motto we strive to live by is: be sensible. It's just a muscle. But that can put me out for a week, if I don't catch it. I expect three or four days, as it is. Should be good by Monday. But I couldn't just do nothing, and walk away with a failure, however subjective. So I whipped together a little something, five minutes or so. Learned a bit more about p-factor, doing it. So, uh, that's good? For short workouts, it's balls out. Balls out, incidentally, is not a reference in any way to anatomy, human or otherwise, let alone male. Frankly I'm a little disappointed in the way your mind works.

It's spring, and I'm restless. I've decided that envy and ambition are practically the same thing, and the absence of one in my life has harmed the presence of the other. Hm. That's good. 186. I have to remind myself that just because I see no cause for hope doesn't mean there is none. I have superb health, for any age, and some small but measurable amount of stability, and I have what certainly gives every evidence of being the best friend I've ever had. I wish I could, well, not repay, but express myself in a meaningful way in this regard.

This is the one year anniversary week of the unpleasantness at the place I used to roll. Here, when I first got the news. I've returned to it now and again, but it's nothing like the traumas that scar the soul. This in itself is cause for hope. I lost friends, but I've gained friends. What's good is that I didn't even notice it, this anniversary. Progress. One of the people I have cared about, who has lived here since he was nine, now apparently finds himself with an expired and nonrenewable visa. Back to his country of origin, it seems, where he speaks the language like a nine year old. I'm wondering if he has explored his options with a lawyer. I'm not a very practical guy, but I've known it to happen that people can get together and collect some money and maybe help a friend in a time of need. That's a conspiracy I could believe in. Wouldn't it be nice if something like that happened and did some good?

There is something very ill in my soul, deeper than you can know, and I don't quite know how to deal with that. But that's what the future is for. And no matter how horrid the world seems, it's better when we help people. Yep.

Ah well. The stream peters out.


J