Category Archives: autobiography

May 2005

Posted on by
Reply

Nostalgic – this was the last stretch of the road to the bus stop back when I lived in the original Chaos Node. I would also walk there frequently in the afternoon, as one of the several round trips I could take.

I have  lately been reading up on some of my entries from May 2005, a time which was in some ways similar to now. For years up to Easter 2005, I was moderately overweight. Well, my Body Mass Index was at least above the magic line of 25, although the only visible sign of overweight was a modest paunch or gut bulge, which I could probably have hidden with stronger stomach muscles.

Around the time of Easter, I became acutely ill. For a week or so, I could not digest food at all, it seemed, and I felt terrible. The doctor later said it was probably a virus. That is probably true but does not really tell anything more than it not being magic. For some days, I evidently produced no bile at all, but it did not last so long that I got yellow eyes like with the more famous liver infections. I gradually recovered, but discovered that from then on, I could only eat small amounts of fat at any one time, or I would get violently ill. The amount has increased slightly since 2005, but is still fairly small.

These events caused me to take an interest in physiology and health. In May, I wrote about these things extensively. I also bought a pulse watch and a pair of good jogging shoes, and started walking all over the place. Just like now, I would burn approximately 600-700 calories per day walking outdoors. (One and a half hour today, 900 calories, but that is above average.)  I expected this to be one of my usual fads, to fade away after a couple weeks. But it continued throughout the summer and fall. With the onset of winter, I was already busy moving, and got my exercise from that. There was a lot to carry over to my new apartment, which was within (a long) walking distance from the old. In the end, I did not actually move in there, but hurriedly moved to the house at Nodeland.

During my last 9 months or so in the original Chaos Node, I lost almost 15% of my body mass, all of it fat. I was hungry constantly, and in the end I would wake up in the night with hunger pangs and had to eat before going back to bed. (On the plus side, my acid reflux was gone.)

After I moved, I gradually put most of the weight back on, although not enough to be overweight again. I stabilized at a BMI of 25 or just below. I doubt I will be able to exceed that unless I become able to digest fat normally again.

And now, it seems I have resumed my practice of walking around for an hour each day.  I had almost forgotten that I used to do this in 2005 too. But then I looked for something else in my archives and found this, and remembered it clearly again. I wonder if it will be one of those 2-week fads again this time, or whether it will become part of my lifestyle again. I am not sure quite why it faded away last time. Perhaps I just did not enjoy starving all the time, even when my stomach was full. (Yes, I really felt hungry even then. It was like the brain was detached from the stomach in that regard.) Hopefully I can find a better balance this time.

In spring 2005, my digestion had not yet adapted to life without fat. In the years before, I ate small meals, but rich in fat. These days, my meals are larger but contain mostly carbohydrates. So it was in the meantime, while I could not eat fat but also could only eat small meals, that I lost all that weight. I don’t think it will happen again, for better or for worse. But then, I am not overweight either. I guess that is also beginning to be a rare thing these days.

One thing I noticed back then that I am noticing again, is that I am sleepier. And on that note, good night!

Growing up

Posted on by
Reply

I disagree a bit – kids do need to be looked after. But it is true that you have limited influence on who they become in the end: That will increasingly depend on their own decisions. Each child is an individual, whether you want it to or not.

I guess it had to happen sooner or later. Over the last years, I have noticed that I am beginning to grow up. It has kind of accelerated after I hit 50, it seems…

“Growing up” is really a very vague concept. When are you a grown-up? For much of history, childhood was very short, in so far as it existed at all. There were infants, and then there were small, stupid workers. But you generally were not considered grown-up until you were able to reproduce. That did not stop girls in particular from being married off as young as 5, although more commonly around 9 years old. The notion that pedophilia was wrong, rather than just impractical, is fairly new. The word itself was unknown a hundred years ago, but we have had some idea about this for longer than that. The ancient Greeks and Romans, however, did not. Judaism stood out in this area by not actually shipping the girls off for marriage until their first menstruation (which was generally later than today, due to less nourishing foods and vitamins).

Today, we have almost certainly gone too far in the opposite direction. People are now “kids” until they graduate from college, and are not expected to take responsibility for their own lives until then. (Kind of hard to do in a capitalist society without money, really.) Needless to say, most people won’t be celibate that long, but are discouraged from forming a family. By the time they take their place in adult society, they have a decade’s practice of fooling around. To everyone’s great surprise, some of them continue to do this after they marry and/or have kids, and acrimony ensues.

***

But there is another meaning of growing up, and that is internally. Some people don’t really much care about what happens inside their own mind, much less others, but in that case you would probably not be hanging out here. So…

Ryuho Okawa (of Happy Science fame) says that you are fully responsible for your own life from around the age of 30.  He bases this on both his own experience and Jesus Christ, neither of which started their religious work until the age of 30. Even then, one may notice, Jesus’ mother managed to get him to perform his first miracle by putting him in a situation where she would be regarded as a weirdo if he didn’t. Or that is one way of seeing it at least. He warned her at the time that she could not expect to have any say in his life anymore, and from what it seems, she didn’t after that one time.

It is a gradual thing though. We start shaping our own lives much earlier. Jesus asserted himself when he was 12 and stayed behind in the temple, although we don’t hear of any further such episodes. But for the rest of us too, it is common that some sense of identity awakens late in childhood or at the onset of puberty. In my case, I discovered my free will the summer when I was 15, I believe, shortly before leaving home for high school. So that was convenient. I read a small tract by Elias Aslaksen, a Norwegian preacher of Truth, where he convinced me that nobody can lift our hand to strike or open our mouth to speak. We are not responsible for what others do to us, but we are responsible for how we react. What we do depends on what we think, how we see that which happens to us. The way we see things can be completely opposite, depending on ourselves.

In a matter of minutes, my life turned around. Of course, in the heat of emotion this insight was often forgotten, but not permanently. Gradually, my power over my own body increased. It still does – it is still not complete, even at this age. I’d like to be able to say with Confusius (Analects chapter 2):
The Master said, “At fifteen, I had my mind bent on learning.
“At thirty, I stood firm.
“At forty, I had no doubts.
“At fifty, I knew the decrees of Heaven.
“At sixty, my ear was an obedient organ for the reception of truth.
“At seventy, I could follow what my heart desired, without transgressing what was right.”

Intriguingly, reception of Truth is what I am “specializing in” now, I guess. There is still so much Truth to absorb. But I really wish to arrive at having no desires that transgress what is right. At that point, I suppose I may call myself a grown-up, even spiritually.


Me, a nightmare

Posted on by
3

Faceless, nameless nightmare. Once, this was me. In a manner of speaking.

There are many human nightmares. Robbers, burglars, rapists, stalkers… I’ve not been any of those. But I’ve been a faceless bureaucrat ruining your life through sheer incompetence and cowardice.

Before I branched into computer and software support, I spent years as an actual bureaucrat, working for the state as a tool of public suspicion. I shuffled papers, I read various explanations of why people wanted money the state would have for itself, and rejected them. I was probably a source of fear, hate and despair even when I did my job. When I did not, it could be even worse. This also came to pass.

Looking back on my life, I remember one time in the 1980es, when I was still fairly young and had only worked for a fairly short time as a case worker. There was a thick dossier on one of the famous people in our city, and he had sent in a form that I for some reason did not know what to do with. The details are pretty hazy, but I remember reading it and trying to figure out what to do with it. I was not sure, and the boss in charge of this particular thing was an elderly man of somewhat unpredictable temperament, when he was present at all. And of course we had a quota of sorts – we had to report how many cases we had handled each week, and I was already lagging badly. (I know this because I was ALWAYS lagging badly with the cases.) I held on to the document for some while, then misplaced it. Eventually it was destroyed before its time.

Much later, I found out that there had been a fairly high-profile case involving this person, where he had referred to the document, but it was nowhere to be found, and the corresponding arm of government naturally did not believe there had ever been such a document at all. At that time, I was doing something else and only learned about it afterwards. This was exactly the kind of nightmarish encounter that people have with the bureaucracy, where they lose money and get humiliated because some incompetent faceless bureaucrat has failed to follow their incomprehensible rituals.

This is one reason why I am skeptical of a big public sector (and other monopolies). I was intelligent, idealistic and basically a good person, and I still became a nightmarish villain through a brief combination of ignorance and cowardice. And I did not even lose sleep over it. It was just a job, after all, and not a well paid one at that. It was not my money that was lost or my reputation that was tarnished.

Now that I am old and look through my life, I see it suddenly from the other side. Whereas I have been thinking of myself as a Servant of the Light, this guy has rightly seen me as a faceless, nameless, shadowy figure of evil and probably cursed me a hundred times, wishing that I would burn in Hell and be violated by a thousand hairy demons.  After all, Hell has no fury like a conservative scorned by bureaucrats.

I have toyed with the idea of telling the guy the whole story, if he is still alive. But I am not sure whether this would make things better or worse. It happened a generation ago, after all: I cannot prove anything, and even if I could, there is no way the decision would be overturned now, these things expire after 10 years around here.  Nor do I really have the kind of income to compensate him for the money he lost, or at least it would probably take many years.

Or I could just say to myself: “Well, Jesus died for my sins so it does not matter that I caused Hell on Earth while I was alive, I’m still going to Heaven and there’s nothing you can do about it, nya nya!”

OK, got a little carried away there. But you know what I mean.

Changing tastes

Posted on by
6

The other day I had an errand in town that took me past the McDonalds “family restaurant”. There was a sign outside depicting a special hamburger they had this week, California something.  It looked very tasty.  But I remember last time I bought a hamburger. I opened the box and the stench of dead animals hit me square in the face. No, it was properly cooked, and the hygiene at Norwegian McDonalds is almost like a clinic. It is just that this is how meat smells and tastes to me now in my older years. At that time, I remembered that it had been like that, only not quite as intense, when last I tried, a few months before. It is probably more than a year now. I have no doubt that it is stronger now.

In fact, almost every ready-made food I buy seems so intense these days. Are people just amping up the taste for each passing year?  Probably not.  It has affected cola too – some days I find it hard to drink without mixing it with water, as I routinely do at home. It is just so intense.  I can eat a small amount of chocolate if I don’t eat anything else that contains fat within a few hours. But even those taste so strong, I wish I had some milk to swallow them with.

Somehow, I doubt the whole food and snacks industry has sneakily worked together to suddenly make everything taste more intensely. I mean, I can see them doing that over time. I don’t think it is a secret that they are working constantly at “improving” the taste of snacks to make them more addictive. But I doubt it happens that fast. And I don’t hear anyone else complain.

My tastes are changing. That is the most likely explanation.

I suppose it could be some sneaking illness of the brain. Or I suppose it could be a result of my spiritual practices the last couple years.  In fact, there are probably people who think these two may be one and the same.  I don’t think so, but it is an interesting observation.  Perhaps I will look back at this and understand it, later in life. Or if there is no such later, perhaps historians of the future, or relatives or some other curious person.

Hearts and dreams

Posted on by
Reply

Want to know where your heart is? Watch where your mind goes when you daydream.

I approve of this meme, which goes around among friends and friends of friends on the Internet. After all, it is reasonably close to Jesus’ observation that “Where your treasure is, there also will your heart be.” But it also is practical, so you have a harder time deceiving yourself.

This time, when I say “you”, I don’t mean “I”. I may still be able to deceive myself, because I don’t daydream, at least not in the usual sense.

I have come to understand that for neurotypicals, daydreams are involuntary and spontaneous. For me, creating and maintaining a daydream requires concentration, and lots of it.

If a daydream is something I initiate of my own free will, consciously,then it is probably not telling me much that I didn’t know already.

A better measure might be what I repeatedly think about throughout the day. Or even what I dream about in the night. Curiously, these two are not even remotely similar most of the time.

When my mind reboots after having concluded a train of thought (or resigned from it), it will typically soon go back to one of a few things:

-Strategies for the computer game I am playing that week.

-A novel in progress (the progress stops when I stop thinking about it).

-A topic to write about in one of my journals.

Actually that is pretty much it, since I write about almost anything.

Neither of these take up all that much time, however, since I am usually either at work, or sleeping, or in front of my computer. The notable irregular here is that I don’t think about work when I am not there, while I may think about the other two while I am out walking or sitting on the bus. Thus, my heart is at least not at work, for better or for worse.

My dreams, in contrast, are usually utterly alien.  I am in a different place, with different people, often a different name and a different family and work and friends, and sometimes different laws of nature.  It is exceedingly rare, if it has happened at all, that I wake up from a dream about doing my job, or playing a computer game, or writing.

The only thing I can remember that I both dream about and think about is sex, and that is not something I am unaware of.  There is usually a reason why I am reminded of it, and I notice immediately.  I don’t think it is important to get into details about this, since it does not noticeably impact my relationship to actual humans. But I do think about it from time to time, and I do dream about it from time to time.

I doubt my heart is in it though, anymore than it is in food when you starve. Those dreams will likely disappear with my body. Or so I fervently hope.

Still, I probably do have a heart. I just don’t know where I’ve hidden it.

Paladins, celibates and other abominations

Posted on by
Reply

Moderately abominable paladin: Not so gay, but very very celibate.

One shall read much before the eyes pop out. I recently read an article by Dennis Prager.

This Prager fellow is spoken of with the greatest respect by my conservative friends, one would almost expect him to be some kind of hero of our time. Well, I suppose this may be the case under some circumstances.

In any case, it is strange how pieces of puzzles fall together as one lives one’s life, an effect often called “synchronicity” these days.

***

Does anything ever begin? But we can make a beginning on the day when I was quietly reading Dante’s most famous work, the Divine Comedy.  Now in the (so far slowly) declining years of my body, I am reading up on some timeless classics which every civilized person ought to know, but which I don’t. I mean, I am so busy now that we have all this spare time, so there just hasn’t been time for the pillars of western civilization. This includes Dante who pretty much defined the folk theology of the late Middle Ages. Some of his concepts, like the circles of Hell, have become part of common speech.

While reading my Dante, I found a drive-by reference to “Orlando” and his horn. This sounded vaguely familiar, but something was off. Could Orlando be, apart from a place with an airport, also the Italian name for Roland? Wikipedia sure thinks so. And Roland was someone I vaguely knew from my childhood. Well, not in person, but from the Norwegian folk song “Roland og Magnus Kongjen” (Roland and Magnus the King), also known simply as Rolandskvadet (song of Roland, see also the much longer French “Chanson de Roland”.)

No points for guessing why that particular song lodged in my memory.

Over the next days, I spent some hours reading up on medieval literature. I realized that the peers of Charlemagne’s court were the original paladins, which spawned not only a deluge of romance stories but also some legends that are more comparable to modern superhero stories or the Greek and Norse mythology. These men were seen as larger than life. Though at least some of them were real men from history, they were transformed into archetypes as the centuries passed. Legend became myth.

What does this have to do with Dennis Prager?  Less than he thinks, I would say. He referenced my beloved paladins in his article “Judaism’s Sexual Revolution: Why Judaism (and then Christianity) Rejected Homosexuality”. In this, he argues not only that the paladins in Chanson de Roland were gay, but that celibate men (and women) are less than human.

I can defend myself, but I would encourage Mr Prager to keep his hands off my paladins. It’s bad enough with the yaoi fangirls writing gay paladin fiction without a renowned Conservative adding fuel to the fire.

***

Now, I don’t think people and their works are generally pure good or pure evil. I like to think I am more nuanced than toddlers, people with borderline personality disorder, and American political bloggers. (I will assume, despite frequent anonymity, that these are three distinct groups.)

And Mr Prager’s article certainly has its good points, and is a welcome – maybe even necessary – contribution to the debate. In particular, someone had to point out that the ancient world was not like USA in the 1950es. Young people today may not know, but the world where Judaism first appeared was horrifyingly alien. Civilization was still young and somewhat experimental. Notably, women were literally treated as slaves: Not in the sense that hubby went from the dinner table straight to the couch without doing the dishes, but in the sense of being shipped off to some unknown house around the age of 9, there to be brutally raped and put to hard work, and harshly beaten if the work did not please their husband / owner and his family. Boys were somewhat better off, but were still subject to sexual abuse by older men on a regular basis. You may remember from history class that in ancient Greece, there was an elaborate system in which men of the upper classes would induce barely pubescent boys to love in the physical sense as well as the more romantic adoration or idealization. This was less regulated in other cultures, but the man-boy love association was a staple of coming of age in early civilizations.

From the dawn of civilization, religion has sought to exert a civilizing influence on human sexuality, among other things.  (Food being probably even more prominent.) In Bronze Age religions, this sanctification of sexuality took the form of temple prostitution and also public religious rituals of a sexual nature. In other words, rather than have the men roam freely and rape anything that couldn’t fight back, the Bronze Age religions encouraged them to instead visit the temple and have sex with one of the temple priestesses or cute boys (or sometimes sacred eunuchs) residing there.

Dennis Prager is, understandably, horrified by this practice. So was Yahweh’s prophets, and there are several references to these things in the Bible, some oblique and some pretty explicit. But if you  travel with your mind back through time, you will realize that the Bronze Age religions (usually centered on fertility goddesses) did what little they could to tame the male beast. In the stone age, people had lived in tribes where everyone knew everyone and most people were related. With the break-up of the small tribe, people were cast into a world of strangers, and the male libido, no longer under mom’s wakeful eyes, went wild. We have been working on getting this creature integrated in civilization ever since.

Be that as it may, a new age dawned in the Middle East with Judaism. Marriage already existed, but it was mainly a matter of ensured paternity, not a mutual union. Men were still visiting prostitutes as a matter of course. You will find this mentioned casually in the early books of the Bible. Judah impregnated his son’s wife thinking that she was a prostitute, and thus begat the lineage that would lead to King David and ultimately to Joseph of Nazareth. Samson, the Biblical hero who redeemed himself by killing himself along with a couple thousand infidels and a public building, had a well documented habit of sleeping around, which was fine as long as he stuck with prostitutes and did not get attached to them. When he fell in love with Dalilah, things turned nasty. But sleeping around was OK. Sometimes a man got to do what a man got to do.

The prostitutes are still among us, but they are not employed by the churches.  And the boys are definitely not accepted. (Contrary to some liberal media, the altar boys are generally not there for that purpose.)

Judaism, then, moved the “sacredness” of sex out of the temples and into the home. The sacred union of man and woman was now not a temple ritual, but marriage itself, which had before had a function more akin to slavery.

This is pretty much as far as we have come even today. It has taken its sweet time. Kings and the upper class used to have courtesans and concubines well into the middle ages, if not modernity. (It was usually more discreet in recent years.) The teachings of Jesus Christ about not even ogling other women have few adherents even 2000 years later, but I feel sure its time will come as well. We are talking about changes to basic human behavior, so millennia may be needed to complete the transformation.

***

It is an irony that the focus on homosexuality in the past century has sounded the death knell for the kind of deep affection between men which was idealized not just in the medieval paladin literature, but well into the cowboy age. A bond of love that is not sexual, but intimate in the ways of the soul. When modern liberals read about love between men in ages past, they naturally suppose that they are seeing gay characters, but this is not necessarily the case. Certainly I would have wished that at least conservatives would still be able to recognize this, but even that time may be over.

It is, incidentally, the same with children. Today, a father cannot even bathe his own children for fear that he may be imprisoned as a child molester, should he ever have a fall-out with his wife.  Women can still be affectionate toward each other and children, long may it last.

***

The sanctification of marriage necessarily means that any other lifestyle becomes suspect. Prager is not the first to bring up this. I was still young when I first read the Rabbinical saying that “a man who is unwed after the age of thirty is under God’s curse”. Certainly this was also the prevailing attitude of the Christian Church, and one of the reasons why I slipped out of there. (I still think of myself as a Christian, but not a Churchian, unfortunately.) Even if a man was celibate in word and thought (this was supposed to be possible, albeit only with divine intervention), he was still depriving a woman of a husband. This was a sin, unless one had a really good excuse.

Prager brings up the point that single men commit almost all coarse crime, like violence and drug crime. He seems utterly unaware of the possibility that the causation could be the other way: That most women would hesitate to marry a notorious criminal. (Many of them have girlfriends, though. I guess these are not the marrying type.) Even so, I think he may be onto something. Having a wife waiting for you at home may really make you less likely to do something that could get you imprisoned or dead. Conversely, the need to constantly impress new girls may be a powerful force to push young men into crimes.

That’s still a bit from assuming that being single means you have given your heart and soul to the powers of Death. It may be the Rabbis who think so and not Prager, but this is hard to say for sure from the text of the article.

Is a bachelor actually only half a human until he finds the woman who will make him complete?  I think that is the case for some. One of my friends, a good and admirable young man (though less young than when I first met him) certainly seems very troubled by it. Another is more quiet on the topic, but still hatches plans to get hitched. A third… actually, I cannot remember if there is a third. I think the rest may be either married (or nearly so), or still young, or… non-mainstream in various ways as regards their intimate behavior. And even among those, there are some who feel incomplete.

Not I. Well, perhaps a little. Like 98% complete or some such. I enjoyed hanging out with my female best friend a couple times a year, as I did ten years ago.  But being half a human? Dear complete humans, no offense, but don’t you already have your work cut out for you to keep up with the happiness I have been given, no matter how much sacred sex you have in your marriage? You better amp it up already.

And may Light have mercy on us all if I actually were to level up to my supposed human potential. ^_^

Roland set horn to bloodied mouth, and blew it in his wrath;
rent was wall and marble stones for a distance of nine days’ march.
-Roland & Magnus the King.

So, King Magnus, did the earth move for you too? ^_^

Immunity to sadness 2

Posted on by
Reply

…a person who is like a doorway into a realm of light?

At least the graphics are much improved, compared to my original “Immunity to sadness” entry, on October 14, 1999. Yes, it really is that long ago, less than a year from the start of my archives.

Back then I observed that I mostly had only two moods: Happiness, and fear of death. Happiness most of the time, and then when I was sick it turned to the other. But there were no other emotions, at least worth talking about.

Things are really not much different after all this time, as I mentioned in my previous entry. I am not absolutely sure the overwhelming feelings of joy inside are more intense now. I would think so, but it is hard to remember clearly how one felt more than a decade ago.

Actually, when I looked at the picture above, I remembered that entry, but not in detail. I did remember my strange comment that I was more afraid of the brightness inside than the darkness inside.  And as you may guess from comparing the pictures, this seems even more relevant today. As if inside me, still locked in the basement, there is this person who is like a doorway into a realm of overwhelming light. And I am not sure whether it is me or not.

Obviously I mean this figuratively. I think there is very small chance that I will spontaneously combust. Less chance than my computers doing so, certainly. In a physical sense, at least. But there is, I think, a definitive risk of what is described in another of my favorite Japanese songs:

My thoughts will some day reach my destiny,
and I will discover my overwhelming strength,
in the infinitely distant sky.

Radio from Hell

Posted on by
1

“Your soul has been defiled!”  By radio? Well, that’s not quite what I mean…

I turned on the radio this morning. I have a portable stereo in the bedroom, I use it to play brainwave entrainment tracks almost every night. I had forgotten that it also has a radio tuner… In fact, when Gallup called the other day to invite me to a detailed study of broadcasting usage, I told them my household had neither TV nor radio. In practice it certainly seems that way, so hopefully I will be forgiven that lie.

This morning, however, I actually turned the radio on. I even tried 3 different stations. My impression was that ordinary people are in a kind of hell. Either that, or I am in a kind of paradise. Wait, does this paragraph even make sense?

What is the connection between radio and hell? There wasn’t one when I grew up, or at least I did not notice any. I think the people who have continued to listen to radio since then, probably still don’t notice.  But as I switched from one station to another, they all were so… jarring, I guess. Or like food made for elderly smokers – too sharp, painfully so. The music is disharmonious for the most part, and even when not, the lyrics are. We’ll be back to that in a moment. But even the news seem to be collected to make people upset, not to actually help them live their lives better or more safely.

The third and final radio station played Dolly Parton, who at least can sing well. But the song she was singing – “Jolene” – was an all too vivid reminder of the hell people today live in, where you not only have to fight for mating rights until you marry, but for the duration of your life.  (I don’t think she actually said anything about marriage, but this is how it is here in Scandinavia at least these days.  It is like civilization has slipped and fallen in this particular regard. I don’t mean you should treat your spouse like you take them for granted, but you should be able to take them for granted without treating them that way.)

This jagged, disharmonious, disturbing world is what people live in, is it not? A world where beauty is either absent or tainted, distorted, broken. A world where harmony is not just rare, but unwanted. God, how did we end up this way? What can we do about it?

I take a certain comfort in being disturbed by this sudden glimpse into the ordinary world. Perhaps they are not so much living in a half-hell as I am living in a half-heaven? Or perhaps that is always the case, the world below us is always hell and the world above us is always heaven, no matter which world we live in? So if you go to Heaven, you will find that even Heaven has a heaven.

On a more prosaic note, I think the reason why I dislike radio and television is that they try to think for you. With the Web, you click what you want to see or hear (or think you want), but with broadcasting there is someone else clicking for you. As if you were a patient unable to use your body from your neck down, and all you can do is open your mouth and they will put things in it. I would be hard pressed to spend much time using broadcasting even if it was of the same quality and had the same focus as myself.  But it doesn’t. It is different, at the very least. And in my ears, unpleasant.

Not literally Hell, I suppose. More like “Heck”. The realm of the Prince of Insufficient Light, if I remember my Dilbert correctly. That’s the world in which even Norwegians live these days – a world of insufficient Light. And the problem, the REAL problem, is that people like it that way.

… like King Solomon and I

Posted on by
Reply

When we are children, it is natural that even ordinary events, things that happen to pretty much anyone at some time, make us lose our peace and clarity of mind (if any).

I hope it amuses you as much as it amuses me, when I compare myself to King Solomon, the legendary archetype of the wise ruler. I assure you, this is not something that occupies my mind every day…

But just recently some small thing made me remember a movie about King Solomon. What struck me again, as it did when I first saw it, was how the movie separated the excited, sensual and generally upbeat Song of Songs from the chilling, cynical Ecclesiastes. Both of these are attributed to Solomon, although they may be inspired by him rather than dictated, historians now believe. In the movie, the Song was made during the visit by the Queen of Sheba, whereas the more depressing philosophy came after their parting. This is something common people can relate to, I am sure: When they are lifted up in the air by the whirlwinds of love, their feelings overflow into their thoughts, and likewise when they crash to rock bottom afterwards.

But it is different for people like King Solomon and I. You can compare the average person with a large stream, such as those that ran through the farm where I grew up in western Norway. During sunny summer days these streams were quite small – you could literally step over them – but after a day of rain, they were raging torrents that could sweep with them man and horse if you were careless. Now think of a similar stream, except that somewhere along its course it passes through a lake. When the stream grows to excess, the dam absorbs the shock, so to speak. It takes a lot more to make it go over its banks. Conversely, it takes much more dry weather to make it shrink. This would be people like King Solomon and I.

This was how I thought, that there were only a few people like that, and I happened to be one of them for some reason. Having reflected on myself, I think that is not quite it.  This should be the natural state of mind in my age, past the middle of an ordinary lifespan. There are unfortunately people, even many people, who remain easily moved by small things:  A thoughtless insult, being passed over for a promotion, days of rainy weather, even a bad loss for their favorite soccer team. So yeah, there are a lot of people who are not very similar to King Solomon.

And the truth is that I am not quite King Solomon myself. When I suddenly fall ill, it influences my thoughts quite strongly, at least while I am getting worse. And the time I suddenly was without a place to live, I did not exactly have Sabbath in my heart either. So perhaps the river of my feelings just run through a big pond, not the Great Lakes.  Still, I am glad for what there is. And I am glad I have not been tried beyond my breaking point. It is better if I can find the truth about my self through reflection than having to go through disasters to the brink of death to see myself. Or, perhaps just as bad, having hundreds of wives, like King Solomon.

***

But I hope you understand that when I write about different topics, they all pass through this big pond. It is not like one day I am only thinking about the weather, then about City of Heroes, then about books of timeless wisdom, then about writing fiction, and so on. Much like Solomon could have worked on the Song of Songs and Ecclesiastes simultaneously, I also simply present different facets of my slowly changing life. Only by the balance and tone of the writing may historians of the future possibly be able to get a realistic picture. But they probably won’t. They may be better off studying King Solomon, even though he did not write an online journal…

What the Hell am I doing?

Posted on by
Reply

“What do you think about this amount?” -I think it is eerily similar to my amount of superhero comics before I left the original Chaos Node.

I stopped by my comic book dealer (who also happens to be the used book store in Kristiansand). I fetched the two issues of Savage Dragon that were lying for me, and asked him to discontinue my subscription. I have quit the other comic book series as they closed down (and usually came back with a different name and different artists, but without me buying them). But this Larsen fellow just keeps ticking like the energizer bunny, it seems. So I gave up and told the shop to just cut it.

“I no longer see the point in reading about people bashing their heads with cars” I explained. “You should have realized that long ago” said the shopkeeper. “Why didn’t you read something more edifying?”

Why the Hell not? thought I, and as always when I use that phrase, I mean it in its religious sense. The shopkeeper continued talking about a local soccer hero who recently died at a fairly old age, and was praised by the local newspaper for soccer being his life until the very last. “Running after a ball is natural when you are a small kid, as long as it is just one of several games you play. But even then, something is wrong if soccer is all you play. And to keep being hung up on this for the rest of your life??”

Indeed. If some other person had been forced to spend his whole life doing nothing but soccer, seeing nothing but soccer, talking about nothing but soccer, wouldn’t he be in Hell? Not because soccer is omg so wrong, but because of the confinement and the stagnation – being essentially trapped in a small corner of a normal childhood for the rest of the life.

Ever since I read Ryuho Okawa’s view of Hell as something humans create rather than something God creates for them, it has seemed obvious to me that people are not actually thrown screaming and protesting into Hell by  hard-faced angels on the command of an angry God. Rather, Hell is something we gravitate toward. There is, so to speak, a mutual attraction between the sinner and his Hell.  Just recently I saw Rabbi Adin Steinsaltz imply something similar in his book The Thirteen Petalled Rose, and a quote from Jennifer Upton’s Dark Way to Paradise about Dante’s Divine Comedy also implying the same thing. Perhaps I am just selectively reading people who tell me what I want to hear, although this is a bit strange when I have not heard about them before. In any case, back to my comic books.

The difference between me and the soccer hero, apart from me not being a hero at all, is that I have only been partially imprisoned in a corner of my childhood.  I have tried to think about this. I have spent thousands on superhero comic books during my adult life, until my late 40es. Why the Hell did it not fall away before? It is after all not a biological urge… one can understand single men who buy porn (although I would think a couple porn mags should be enough for a lifetime, I mean, how many fetishes does one person have? – but what do I know.) Or even women who buy cook books. The body has its urges. But the urge to have cars thrown on you by angry supervillains is probably not one of them.

Looking back, I wonder if this did not start fading away around the time I wrote the series of gray entries about The Next Big Thing. At this point, I saw superhero comics as a symbol, an upwelling from the collective subconscious of the expectation that a new type of human was about to replace ordinary humanity. While the real “human version 3” will probably not be able to fly by willpower or shoot energy beams for their eyes, their thinking will be as far removed from that of current humans as superpowers would be from our physical abilities.

So as long as I remained ignorant, I remained enslaved. Reading superhero comics was in a certain sense a meaningful impulse, diverted into a symbolic form that is not exactly counterproductive, but unproductive.

In a similar way, I believe, the attraction of computer games is that they allow us to quickly do what we feel we want to be doing but cannot. In my case, guiding people to prosperity, peace of mind and lasting happiness (The Sims 2 and 3), or protecting the innocent from evil (City of Heroes). Unless I learn how to actually do these things in real life, I will probably remain attracted to these games until I die… and quite possibly beyond.

That is a chilling thought, right? But now you have to excuse me, the Double XP Weekend has begun in City of Heroes. It is time for Bright Hand of the Sun to protect his fellow heroes from the forces of Darkness!