A timely time

Hello to anyone who still has this on their mailing list, or who for some reason has been checking this webpage for 5 years without fail! What are you doing? What would possess you to check back here for so long? What has possessed me to check back here after so long? How was I able to remember my log in credentials? It probably does not speak well of my password security protocols, no indeed.

I've just spent a not inordinate amount of time reading some of the posts of my former self, marvelling at the use of metaphor, at the amount of feeling I was able to place in lieu of not doing much at all. It would have been a sobering experience, had I not been most of the way through a case of beer and a bottle of wine at the time. It's been interesting, relearning some of those old patterns of thought, being simultaneously comforted and disturbed by the fact that what I have done in the past remains, at least on the interwebs. If I go back far enough, I am very embarrassed by the man I once was.

But it's a good thing - I am glad that I have something hanging around to remind me of some of those times: and in fact, to date, this blog represents the longest standing enterprise that I have dedicated myself to outside of education and, you know, being alive. Off and on, it went on for 6 years. What the actual living fuck. Obviously, the main concern and most intriguing concern for myself over the years has been myself. I would like to say that that has changed - probably it is more accurate to say that I got too accustomed to myself to think that any of it was worth writing down, and probably rightly so.

But all of that being said, it is time for an update. You might have gotten away with a five year hiatus 20 years ago, but nowadays we have all these things that do things all the time in a timely manner - apart from cutting off your own hands, it is unlikely that you haven't typed anything today. So here we are, together, in an elevator, someone you have seen around and know has a name but are really hoping that wont have to strike up a conversation with because your wife left you and if not for the obligation of income you'd rather spend the rest of your life in a ditch. An update on the life of an insignificant being, pushing though life at the same speed as the rest of you, a tiny mote within an uncaring universe who still hasn't learnt how to spell check his work.

Since the last you heard from me:

 - I have lived alone for three years, at present I type this from a darkened room, listening to music. This is a net win.

- I have finally stopped studying. For the last two years, I have been gainfully employed in a business that offers possibility of advancement. I have found, unexpectedly, that I enjoy such an environment, and much like a video game I am spending inordinate amounts of time and effort to raise my level in a system that those outside of the system neither understand nor want to understand.

- I have gotten quicker at typing. I still eat too many toasted sandwiches.

- I now have a method of transport, a vehicle that is two wheels joined by a chamber that explodes. This was a thing that I never thought that I would ever do, and I find that I enjoy it almost beyond reason.

- Many of the socks that I owned 5 years ago I still own. Apparently I form attachments with foot coverings easier than I form relationships with humans, for, apart from a few long term companions, I have socks that I have known for longer than many people. Some would say that this is a serious defect in my character - I would argue that I am simply working my way up. If I can accept a sock full of holes now, much greater the chance that I will be able to accept you in the future.

- I've not yet travelled, around my country nor overseas, but I still harbour hopes to do so.

- Being an adult brings with it its own set of exhaustions - work, bills, measuring yourself against the success of your peers,  unexpected insights into the tribulations of your parents - but it also brings contentment. Contentment is not always a good thing, and come only at the sacrifice of idealism and often energy. But it beats not being out of bed because of he mind demons. Now I stay in bed because I want to.

- Mostly. No doubt I'll stumble on this post in some years time and wonder at the idealism and energy I exhibit now.

- I've thrown away a lot of cutlery, plates, and old acquaintances, mostly via the same channels. What I have left is either necessary or invaluable or, I don't know, that giant anatomically accurate heart soft toy I bought the other week when I was drunk and had access to the internet. A reflection of my soul.

- I am drunk and have access to the internet.

This is a modest list. I like that it is 100% accurate while only briefly touching anything that could be called truth. Such is everything you have ever heard everywhere. I won't promise that this will happen again tomorrow - shit, I'm not even going to promise that this is going to happen ever again. I shall put some words here whenever I god damn feel like it. You can't make me. Or rather, you can make me, but that would mean coercion, force, bribery or blackmail - and although I've done more than enough to be blackmailed over I'd probably rather just lick a porcupine even though they have diseases on their spikes, if I could have been bribed the guilt of absence would have gotten this updated sometime sooner, pushing my hands onto computer keys forcefully means that you are technically writing this yourself just using my body as a proxy which I might be ok with but we'd have to talk about that first and I'm not even certain coercion is actually a word.

So yes. You'll hear from me in five years. But probably not. Because fuck it.

 

Place holder

This is just a placeholder to keep Calvin Shine happy. But I shall be doing new updates every second day now, for I am unemployed and the government pays me t live.

That living is paid by your wages. But to be honest, you would have just spent that 15% on booze and pissed it against the wall. Now I can spend it on booze and piss it against the wall. It is like you are doing involuntary charity and making another human happy. And what is happiness? You 15% that I recieve. OH YEAH.

On the plus side, most of my friends are also unemployed. It is not nice to be a friendly parasoite.

OR IS IT?

Pragmatism.

I am alone, so very very alone.

But who cares? Enough of that self indulgent pity begging hilariousness, lets talk about PHILOSOPHY.

Begin Flan's Philosophy Extravaganza the First: Pragmatism! Or something.

Recently, my sister had a baby. It is small. It is wrinkly. Also lately, my friends Grandmother died. Also small, also wrinkly. If one were to be horribly cynical, as I intend to be, one could therefore deduce that the only things anyone manages in life is to learn how to speak and produce more wrinkly things. All other skills learnt go by the wayside, rendering them nill.

Add to this mix of misanthropy and existentialism the fact that I have been thinking. Thinking about things. I am to go and talk to some parlimentarilists early next month to give them reasons as to why a society for the promotion of the sciences should not absorb into its functions the promotion of the humanities. There are many reasons why this is a bad idea, the chief of which is that it won't work none good. But I'm having trouble thinking why it is a bad idea financially, which is, of course, the main way we measure health, happiness, and our place in the world. So I might be a little buggered.

Anyway. That was not what I was thinking about, well, not what I was thinking about to write here. Here I am going to complain about vegetarians.

Or at least about the arguments that vegetarians make for vegetarianism, and then I'll have a little bitch about ethics in general, ultimately showing that our societal constructs, where they aren't simply crap, are harmful crap. YES.

So. The most annoying argument for vegetarianism: Meat Is Murder.

Yes, it's snappy, yes, you can chant it though a loudspeaker, yes, it is the name of an album by the cold war kids. But when you are having new years steak in a restaurant and some smug bastard is explaining to the young lady he wishes to bed about the immorality of being carnivorous, using you in conjunction with dead kittens to illustrate his point, you apparently aren't allowed to go over and meat-slap the irritating goatee off his face.

I'm not against anyone not eating meat. There are damn good reasons not to: one of my friends will throw up if he so much as licks the stuff. I am not against individual choice, and for the purposes of this discussion let it stand that individualism is completely open within the scope of society and the law. But these arguments are used to try and convince others that this isn't an individual choice, that it is fundamentally wrong with the capital double-you. And perhaps it is. I haven't worked that out yet. And I think other people haven't either?

How is meat murder? Murder is a legal point of view, which requires, as much as my watching of Boston Legal has imparted to me, several things, two of which are intent and actually killing something. From our place at a restaurant table we can say that no, I didn't kill this piece of meat, nor did I form mental intent to do so. I was just like "Sweet! Meat!" Perhaps this is a deficiency on our part as we have severed the connection between dead flesh and once living creature, but still, murder as a legal charge is out. The goateed, bespectacled man who also, incidentally, votes for the more consevative parties and knows a lot about something boring, lets say the rate of fingernail growth at different stages of your life, would then retort that you are supporting murder. We are accessories to the crime.

Well, apart from having to change the original, oh-so-snappy saying, that's a rather large definition of accessory to a crime. Yes, paying for meat creates a market etc. but your paying taxes trains soldiers that are then put in kill or be killed situations sometimes? Your having a car creates need for crude oil which sometimes spills into a gulf as it is collected, causing untold harm to creatures you will save the indignity of eating? I suppose I wouldn't eat them either now that they are all oily and crap.

I can go on. Don't get me started on "natural law" arguments or questions of consciousness. We will be here all day. Suffice to say I find none of them airtight.

There are lots of reasons to abstain from certain foods, health risks and the lack of fish around the place for example, but the prescriptive you should not eat all meat has little if anything to do with these arguments. The problem with arguments for vegetarianism, and most other ethical and moral arguments for that matter, is that the person or people have already decided on what is either right or wrong and then created an argument to prove it. This is not as much of a problem if you are debating emotional matters where the only possible outcome can be for someone to respect your view (not to trivialise such debates, they are often more important than other types) but when someone promotes their emotional view as a logically reasoned one when it is really just the quickest rationalisation between two points then it makes me want to tear of someone's face and put it in a blender while shouting "WHERE IS YOUR REASON NOW CHEESE BURGER?" The face might well end up being mine.

Like I say, I don't know the 'right' or 'wrong' to the position on eating meat, ethically or morally. Perhaps at a latter date I will be convinced emotionally, or someone may come up with an airtight logical argument, and then either meat will be taken off the menu or I'll still have to be emotionally persuaded, for history shows us just what people are able to do or think in the face of 'hard' evidence. This course of creating an argument is called "pragmatisim" when the argument is to be judged against the practical consequences of that argument/ belief. Its a helpful tool, and is one way of moving from theory into action. However, it is often taken the opposite way, as in above, where the desired consequence is decided and the argument built around it. Not only does this often cause really bad arguments, but it can be used to give apparently reasonable consideration to really bad ideas. We can think of many ways and conflicts between races that bear this out.

The worst thing, I think, about this type of constructing an argument is that it already makes to many assumptions, which, as we all know, turn us all into a donkey. The biggest assumption in religion is that religion has all the answers. The assumption of science is that science can find the answers, and even that there are answers to be found. The assumption of pragmatism and the murder of meat arguments is that reason is that which gives truth, that logic is the way to dictate action, that empirical ways of knowing are the only ways of knowing.

Starting by asking questions about someone's reasoning is a good start, but sometimes I wonder whether we need to ask question of reason as a practice itself.

Years they come and years they go...

...but god I love that rock and roll. Those fast blunt puns hit you at the most unexpected times.

A more socially acceptable new years was had this year: people, I think, were somewhat concerned about my plans to sit in solitude and drink three bottles of wine while eating new years' steak. Instead, Although the quantity of wine did not change, it was instead a new years' roast and a night of talk, shouting, sitting on roofs, making the word 'poo' out of legos. Today, the day of rest after the festivities, I watched four movies. Pizza for breakfast.

It could be considered the sweet life. Except, we all know this isn't life at all. Excuse me for being a whiny bastard, but you can feel it start to come down. The painting isn't finished and you're out of paint. We all fall down. Etc. Other expressions of woe and doom. What. The. Fuck.

Anyway. Other news. Yes. I am now the proud owner of the title of Uncle. Saw the small child of my sister on boxing day. Less than two weeks old. When placed in my arms to have my photo taken, the young one promptly introduced himself to me by emptying his bowels with what could be described as the throbbing noise you sometimes get when you hold a dry rag up to a window and drag it with some force. I'm sure it will colour our relationship forevermore.

Language is an important thing. It has certainly been my life for 7 years now. I will enjoy talking to a tiny human when he can, I certainly don't have a huge amount else to offer. But I can teach words like "oxymoron" and"prandial". Some scientists and philosophers think that language might be the defining factor between "human" and "animal". Neat.

Christmas also happened. I got bubble mixture, quite possibly the best present you can receive. Bubbles make everything better.

Your brain on machines.

Well, this is that day where I was supposed to get my brain checked. I awoke this morning, full of the promise that a new day brings, especially a new day that has the distinct promise of having the insides of your head photographed, and even without coffee, skipped merrily off down the hill to the hospital at 8am.

I'll say this again: you can get the INSIDE of your HEAD...PHOTOGRAPHED.

We live in the future. You want a flying car? Go out and build one. I just want pictures of the inside of my head. Also, me in a car is a bad idea, me in a flying car is insanity.

Anyhoo. It seems today I was to be disappointed.

Apparently going to the neurology outpatients does not mean that they put you inside a rotating magnet tube like some hospital dramas would have you believe, I was just poked with a pin on various parts of my body to make sure I could still feel. The eventual diagnosis for my occasional stabby head pain is neurualga, which is when your nerves start decaying or something, which can be caused by herpes, but apparently not the kind I have. The leading competitor to this conclusion is a benign tumor, described to me as a "brain wart", that even if I do have they wouldn't remove because it is not actually doing anything. Apart from intermittent pain. But that pain be so intermittent I don't even need medication.

But at least they have referred me to get a CT scan. I will have a picture of my brain yet. And then I shall use it as my facebook photo, and put some glasses and a beard on it. Of this you can be certain.

In other news: Did you know you can make your own bread at home? Also your own beer, soups, and soap! Never leaving the house just got easier!

From on high.

Soon I am going to go to the war memorial above Brooklyn and look over wellington as I drink some wine. It is easily one of my favorite places to be in wellington, that and the waterfront: for me it is a place where you can be closest to the elements without actually being in them. Above in the air, closest to the water. Without being all emo and crap.

It might be this kind of time that one young man starts to think about what the hell its all about, why are you here, ectera. I'm not entirely sure that there are any answers, let along my ability to know them. I'm going back to go see a "councilor" on monday, and the following monday I'm having my brain looked at my MACHINES. Apart for the awesomeness of being, like, a cyborg, and crap, I really don't want to go back on those green and purple happy pills. Even though I feel the worst that I have felt in some time, I don't want that kind of chemical influence over my life again. I know that those of you on such medication will sympathize with my position.

"Am I here?" "What the hell am I all about?" sometimes seem like more pertinent questions, although just as difficult to answer. It is a continual source of disquiet for me that I am not yet grown up. When you are eight and want to be fourteen, you are told to just wait. When you have your first breakdown as a teenager, you are assured that everything will be fine later. When you are in you early twenties, and finding that it is just a little harder to more, a little harder to get out of bed, you are reminded that you are still young. But apparently, at 25, well past the time of legal adulthood, you still face quandaries about your identity, your direction, your purpose.

This month I came very close to giving up on my Master's study. I have now been in study 7 years, and probably, one of the biggest reasons I decided not to stop study is that, according to the rules of assistance put forth by the government, this is the last year I can be enrolled in a NZ institution of study and be allowed to put my course costs on my student loan. Effectively this means full time study is an impossibility if I wanted to continue immediately after this year. I cannot go out of this path on a failure.

Have I talked about the bias against academia. I think it strange that in our "knowledge economy" a student cannot get assistance for the entirety of their study from high-school to phd.

Fantastic.

Anyway.

Has anyone read "The Wasteland" by T.S. Elliot? I'm becoming slightly obsessed by it. It seems true, which I suppose is what poetry attempts. Also of great truth to me is "the Rock" by Wallace Stevens. I guess that is what poetry tries to do: to arrive at truth through emotion, not reason (which are probably opposites). Why not.

"Come in under the shadow of this red rock"

Well.

Apologies for this ramble. A more cohesive post sometime.

In other news: summer is actually quite nice sometimes.

What does it take to get a drink in this place, pt.2.

Time for something new.

Next year, unless someone creates the groundbreaking technology that in someway begets me a life partner, I shall be going off the map. To those of you who visitate this ramble, if you go to New Zealand on google earth (its those strange islands which look like an upside down japan next to australia) and zoom in enough until you can see the roads: where the roads are not is where I will be. In gods own, it is somewhat of a rite of passage for you to go over seas before you are considered grownup. And I shall do that: I've been informed that a Phd from my current univerisity means next to bat shit in a mountain cathedral if I want to pursue a career in academia, so I shall be going overseas for further study.

But there is so much of my own country that is not well trodden. In the southern Fjords people have believed they have sighted moose, which, unlike the sasquatch, was actually introduced to NZ at sometime in the history of European's coming over and fucking up the ecology. There are places on our islands where a blind carpenter can count the number of people who have stepped there on their remaining fingers. And since I was a child, my father has treasured a basket of rocks he scavenged from Mason Bay, one of the largest coves on our southern-most isle, Stewart Island. A number of those stones were greenstone, or what is sometimes called jade, still en-coated by the geode it was found in. Even as a child, I found it smooth, cold and entrancing.

It has been my dream of many years to travel to the south of our land.

In fact, I have always had a hankering to go south. If it weren't for my friends, and the fact that it would have been more difficult for my parents to send me food parcels during my first year of uni, I probably would have migrated further south. The south has an hypnotic pull on me: the cold, the solitude...its all that I wish for on those mornings when I wrap the duvets around me and keep hitting the snooze button late into the afternoon. Like I said in the post immediately previous, I'm getting sick of things. And hopefully this trip I am planning will be an acceptable compromise between being the sociable creature you all know and love and actively shutting myself off from the world, its inhabitants, its worry.

I called my parents today. I wanted to ask my father about the challenges of traversing Stewart Island. He said he wants to come on the hike with me. I'm not opposed to the idea, as long as I am left alone in the Fjords, but I know why he is offering. My parents are worried. I could hear it in my father's voice when he hopefully asked if all those people on facebook were wanting to hang out with me, if I was doing alright, said he was comforted by the fact that I was still making my usual status-update jokes.

Hah.

But I know they are thinking back to when I was 17 and, after a breakup, had a depressive episode and asked to retreat up into the mountains for a couple of nights. Those were bad times- these are bad times, but the difference is, I guess, that I am older. A difference that parents are often quite blind to. Sometimes I wonder why at that past time my parents let me go up that mountain alone. It must have stressed them like nothing else on the planet could.

Well, this really has no point. Someone once said that they could sum up life in three words: Life goes on. I'm not so fatalistic, I think. On my good days a least. And so I'll leave you with these encouraging words:

Herrings communicate underwater by farting.