Tactical shopping

Why is it that shopping seems to divide us along gender lines?  The stereotype seems to have a kernel of truth.  You know the one I mean, that all women treat shopping as a research project.  Where each and every item they come across has to be examined, cataloged and filed away for future reference.

On the other hand, for men every shopping trip is a search and destroy mission.  Get in, get out, and minimize collateral damage.

But where the hell does the truth lie and why would this be gender linked?

I've always been a bit of a researcher at heart, especially about us.  What makes us the way we are and what motivates us to improve or degrade ourselves.  When I was around twelve or thirteen years old my mother noticed that I was reading a book titled "Everything you ever wanted to know about Sex but were afraid to ask".   My folks weren't into television that much, and I was allowed to read what I wanted to.......

(Hold on to your seats folks! I feel a rambling digression coming on.)

So my blog has just missed the left turn at Albuquerque.  Let's talk about reading, children, and how the two should be brought together.  It's been a sore point for me for many, many years.  I believe it was George Carlin who said "Not only should you teach your children to read, you should teach them how to think about what they read."  What is the problem that we seem to have with reading?  There are people today that don't know that the Hobbit, and Lord of the Rings were BOOKS!!! (and that they were much better than any movie could be.)  Humanity has had a love/hate relationship with the written word since we discovered that an object could be represented by a mark on a clay tablet.  Why is that?  What makes books so damn dangerous?  Easily explained.  Books represent ideas, and ideas are POWER!! 

If you want to control people, be it one person or a hundred or a thousand, is to limit their access to information and ideas.  It's been done for centuries, if not millennia.  I would imagine that at the dawn of time the first person to take to pieces of hide, punch holes in them and lace the pieces together with sinew to make one piece was heralded as a magician.  "look! Og can make magic!"  Where upon Og said "Yes this is magic! Only I can do it and you must bring me many skins, and much food!!"

Silly example? Yes, but not, I think too far off the path.  The ability to communicate, to exchange ideas, had I believe, a great deal to do with our raising above the other mammals.  So if we use words to exchange ideas and concepts, then words are powerful.  Right?  Consider that the Egyptian "Book of the Dead" is not a book exactly.  It's a collection of spells designed to ease someones passage through the underworld to the afterlife.  These spells were not just spoken, (and they may not have been spoken at all) but were written on the walls of the tomb.  Makes sense, spoken word is transitory.  Written word is permanent.

That my friends is what makes the written word so dangerous.  It's permanent, well close enough anyway.  Books can be (and are) used to spread ideas far and wide.  If that idea scares you, or threatens your power, then your only recourse is to prevent people from reading that book.

I often wonder what Samuel Clemens would think about what has happened to his book Huckleberry Finn.  At one point in history the book was hated because it portrayed a black man in a positive light, as a thinking feeling, rational human being.  At a later point in time, people are screaming because the book contains a repugnant word that is offensive.  Granted that the word is offensive, now.  It wasn't then exactly.  Clemens wrote the way people talked at that time.  the word could be pejorative, or merely descriptive.  However, in both cases the book was burned!  Yep set fire to and destroyed.  Ripped from libraries,  banned from schools, and generally "sanctioned with extreme prejudice" by howling mobs.  Because it contained ideas.

I'm not saying that "all books are good" because not all ideas are good.  BUT all ideas deserve a certain amount of respect.  When I mentioned that my parents allowed me to read a book that at the time was considered "racy".  You have to understand that they didn't do it cavalierly.  When I read something that might have an impact on my way of thinking, or would raise questions.  It was expected that I would discuss what I had read, usually with my father.  My parents formed my way of thinking, for good or ill, and they did the best they knew how.  Strangely enough, given the time of the world we were in, they insisted I have an open mind.  That I thought about what I read, and considered whether or not to allow it to have an impact on what I believed.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  From the Bible to Mien Kampf. All in all, I think I turned out rather well.

We have a habit in this country, of letting children raise themselves, and instead of creating insightful, intelligent, powerful creatures.  We create miserable, hateful clones.  Because we don't want to give up our power, and we don't want them to be better than we are.  The best way to do that, of course, is to limit their access to information and ideas.  But you see, we screwed up.  Now most children have access to more information and ideas than we ever dreamed of.  If books opened the gates to the universe, then the net has put a rocket under our butts and we have hit the gates at warp speed.  And our children, these precious creatures, have all this information at literally their fingertips, and we never taught them how to think.

Growing up, I knew that what I read could be true, or false.  That it was up to me how to apply the knowledge that I gained from reading.  Now we have abdicated our roles as parents in favor of a "magic box".  Sound familiar?   The difference is that while our parents may have used TV as a babysitter, they also watched it with us, and were there to guide to an extent. However when your child fires up a computer, they're on their own.  It can be a confusing place for those of us who have some critical thinking skills, consider what it must be like for someone whose hormones do a majority of the thinking for them.

Just some thoughts make of them what you will.

By the way, why do women have to go down every aisle of the grocery store when we only went in for a loaf of bread?  :)

Take care of each other.
Larry

Breaking news......nah not really.

Hey folks!  This is going to be a quickie...... bad jokes over? Good.   Just wanted to let you all know I haven't forgot about you or the "Well".   I could tell you I've been incredibly busy (I have) I could complain that I swamped with work, (I am).  But those aren't the reasons I haven't written in a month.  The reason is.........Well I just haven't written.

I've been having fun!  That's it, living life and enjoying the hell out of it.  I've had bad news (Be well Michael Lynn)  good news, and a whole heaping pile of in-between news.  That's it.  Remember I told you about the ancient Chinese curse?  "May you live in interesting times."?  Well if I ever find that ancient gentleman from the Orient, I'm not sure whether I'll shake his hand or smack him up side the head.   Could go either way.

So I'm off to help a friend convince several people at a high-school basket ball game to learn CPR at half-time.  should be a hoot!

Take care of each other
Larry

Saving the World, or Not

So it's been awhile since my last post.  Frankly it will be like that, and in all honesty this is the longest I've kept up posting.  I have had to examine my motives for doing a blog in the first place. You see I like to tell myself stories.  Stories that have a happy ending, stories where I make everything better for everybody.  Where I have the Midas touch, where everything is golden.  Writing the blog was no different.  My first impulse with any new project is to jump to the end in my mind and determine just how wonderful my contribution to society will be.  Even with this blog I was going to "save the world" and maybe pick up a few sponsors to help pay the bills.

Of course like most good stories the ones I tell myself have a smidgen of reality but are mostly fiction.  Usually by the time I realize that, I'm too tired, lazy, or disillusioned to continue with whatever project my "stories" were about.

But this time, well this time things are a bit different.  Don't get me wrong, the stories are still there.  I still want to stop the killers, comfort the grieving, and yes pick up a few sponsors to help pay the bills.However that no longer is my motivation.  I'm not sure what my motivation is, and I don't really care.  I've finally gotten to a point in life that I can do what I want to do, just because I damn well want to do it.  And if that means that I don't contribute a single blessed thing to society, well yea for me.

I've done my bit for society.  I've been a good husband, a good friend, and in my opinion, an all around decent human being and  it's not like that is going to stop.  It's just that right now I have no agenda.  I don't have to leave my mark, been there done that.  My legacy is all around me and I'm content.  What legacy is that you ask?  None of your damn business.  See!! I can do that!  I've made enough of an impact on this globe that I'm fine with going "full speed ahead, phasers set on snark!"   It's liberating and I highly recommend it.

For the last half-century I've tried to make the world a better place, when all I really needed to do was make a better me.  I did pretty good job shaping myself, but all the time I was concerned with what effect I was having on the world in general, and beating myself up because I didn't do enough. It tore me up and I almost didn't survive.  Fortunately I did and now I have some very strange (albeit wonderful) friends.  One that argues with me just to see me blow up, one that seems to be amazed by my compassion and wisdom, and another that waits with a sharpened pin for my ego to get large enough, and ripe enough to burst with a satisfyingly loud POP!  Sometimes a bit painful, but very funny.

What I'm trying to say with this rambling fountain of goofiness is that I'm going to keep writing as long as I want to.  No idea what I'll have to say from one day to the next.  that may be the coolest part.  I hope you'll come along, I could use the company.  send me some ideas, start a conversation, crow about your latest triumph just don't whine about how unfair it all is, because my phasers are all warmed up....

Take care of each other
Larry