*Our Stately Pleasure Domes

The perfection of our various lifestyles varies.  More or less perfect.  Mood and season play their part, and happenstance.  

My recent and unique health issue has been useful in resetting my complacencies.  It just goes to show that there are no guarantees.  Buses and meteorites do hit people, even if we never go outside. And for those cavern dwellers among is, there are cave-ins and earthquakes, and lava-venting fissures.  Nowhere is safe, and no behavior.

That TMJ (technically TMD but that's being technical) turned into a half-handball-sized swelling, and I could hardly open my mouth.  Moderate to meaningful pain.  Ibuprofen was the most effective -- I've never had to use a painkiller in quite that way.  Finally went to the ER.  IV steroid and antibiotic, and a 10-day course of two antibiotics.   Steady improvement after that.  ENT doc stuck a tube up or down my nose, etc, found no cause.  I'd have to suppose it was just some opportunistic bug.  I bite my cheek and tongue more than seems reasonable.  

Something like this is an attack on one's worldview.  Of course I know there are no promises.  Of course.  But good practice should be its own guarantee.  Yes it should. The way people should be kind and honest, and children should be cherished and guided, and the lion should lie down with the lamb.  We tend to neglect to remember which version of the universe we're living in.  This one is all about perfect justice.  Everyone suffers and dies, because they deserve it.  

The sooner we mature out of childish expectations of security, where following rules carries the promise of safety, the happier we should be.  The more content our delusions make us, the less human we are -- lotus eaters, or suspended in the Matrix, or partially sentient cattle in the feedlot.  Not really living.  Fantasy is the opposite of boldness, courage -- of anything at all that is real, like love or joy.  

I am fully disgusted with the fantasy of our culture -- the takeover of comicbook visual entertainments, where magic and mutations overcome every obstacle, and actual training and work are just cgi scenes to excite our eternal adolescence -- it's just a slightly expanded sort of porn.  

The actual stupidity of the fantasy cult of the super-empowered usually ethnic warrior female, it's grating.  

Africa

Hollywood

The pervading dramatic theme is of a woman tormented by her insecurities, and talking about overcoming them, for this episode.  Women are great, as are men.  I mean real women, and real men.  But force feeding female interests into the adolescent male conventions of science fiction is not genre-bending, it's tone-deaf.  Hacks deserve to fail.  Invent your own antonym for meritocracy.

"Porn" is Greek for "whore", and whore means someone who applies her or his energy toward a completely inappropriate and ultimately damaging outcome, for reward.  Sex porn, fantasy porn, Marvel/DC porn, political porn.  In our current millennium, the human impulse is of course the same as always, but the tech is infinitely worse.  

I think it started with immediately available music, gramophones; prior to Edison, the only music you heard was what you, or someone near you, made.  Now our brains can be constantly fed, overfed with something that was meant to be not rare, but special; music, as excitotoxin.  Like theatre, music was invented not as entertainment but as ritual.  Into what cult have we been initiated, enchanted, entranced, fascinating glamour.

Same with cgi.  Very boring, now.  Nothing but 8 minute flying-car chases around burning skyscrapers.  Zoom!  Look out!  Damn!  Boom!  Nothing but fantastical hells and megalopolic cityscapes spanning moons-lit alien horizons.  Abandon all Hope.  Look on my Works, and despair.

I have a craving for the similitude of reality.  Being propelled into a dreamland by Star Wars -- and of course I mean the first movie, its real name -- was a unique experience, and should have remained that way.  I don't know the percentage of people who first try heroin and are immediately addicts, or truly psychically damaged.  That's what happened to our culture.  Addicted to near-virtual impossible reality.  When senso-suits become commercial, the terrorists will have been right -- we will be completely immersed, depraved and satanic.

And the writing and storytelling is really bad.  Formula for teenagers. Suck it down, suck it up.  As Jack Nicholson said about playing the Joker, "Sometimes you just have to let the costume do the acting."  Now, cgi does the writing.

I'd intended to say something else.  But like the Holy Spirit, I go where I listeth.  

J