Titanic Post

Fear is an insidious destroyer of a good time, also fear is bad for your health. To deal with fear, people are always looking over their shoulder to see how close they are to something bad happening. Fearful people are forever devising strategies to be safe, secure, and protected from all the worlds evils. To escape bad happenings, people hoard things—things and money, and they organize their world in such a way so as to preclude bad things happening . They become Republicans.

And yet, bad things happen anyway. Life is not fair. For example: In Otero County and Southern New Mexico, as in most of the country, the wolf had been hunted to extinction, Apaches and Mexicans were marginalized and killed to make life safe for the Anglos who had migrated here from Texas, via Appalachia, and originally, Northern Ireland. (more…)

Answers to those tough metaphysical questions

Where did the world come from? Why did God make the world? Where was I before I was born? Where do people go when they die?…

There was never a time when the world began, because it goes round and round like a circle, and there is no place on a circle where it begins. Look at [your] watch, which tells the time; it goes round, and so the world repeats itself again and again. But just as the hour-hand of the watch goes up to twelve and down to six, so, too, there is day and night, waking and sleeping, living and dying, summer and winter. You can’t have any one of these without the other, because you wouldn’t be able to know what black is unless you had seen it side-by-side with white, or white unless side-by-side with black.

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DEALING WITH MYTHS
Sam Smith
Progressive Review

Having been an anthropology major, I don’t get as riled up about mythology in public life as many in the media and politics. Myths can be helpful, benign, sad, or deadly but mostly they’re there to fill the empty places in reality.

Sometimes myths are carried on the backs of famous people because the reality isn’t powerful enough to do the job. A classic case involves the death of Dr Charles Drew, the famous black surgeon.

It is widely told that Drew, then 46, died in North Carolina in 1950 following a car accident for which he was unable to get treatment at a white hospital and had to be transported to a much more distant black hospital, wasting critical treatment time.

But the Annals of American Survey notes:

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Lately, I’ve been working on my much neglected KLR650 and am now neglecting the V-Strom. Although having two motorcycles in the garage sounds enticing, polygamy is not as easy as you may think. The V-Strom, the newest addition to my family, has been the focus of most of my attention as far as material things go.

I have never thought much about polygamy, at least in the sense of how problematic it could be in practice. In theory, according to the scientific viewpoint, when you are with one, you are not with the other. Metaphysically, I suppose you could be with both at the same time. I do know that you can’t ride two motorcycles at once. Hmmm, I wonder where this metaphor is taking me? (more…)

I named my motorcycle Jelal (sometimes spelled Jalal), because it is the name of Jalal ad-Din Muhammad Rumi, the famous and much honored Persian poet. In earlier posts on this site, I mumbled something about my motorcycle having this big hump of a fuel tank that was really quite ugly and reminded me of a camel. While this harsh judgment was true then, it is not true now, because the experience of riding this motorcycle over the past months has given me new insights and has brought much joy into my life. Riding this motorcycle through the mountains brings up honest to goodness belly laughs and childlike giggles that just burble up from somewhere deep inside. What indescribable joy! The name “Jalal” does not convey this motorcycle experience as well as it honors a truly great man. (more…)