The Hum of the Monolith

The following was excerpted from a sermon on 3/30/14 at the Church of the Divine Suffering at the Terrapin Hills Farm, Turtle Town, Kentucky:


....I'm very concerned about the youth of today.  I know our brethern once cast aspersion at the hippee's in the 1960s, but the hippee's had a community of sorts.  They were marching to a beat of a drummer who pounded out a rhythm leading the hippee away from the comfortable existence enjoyed by their parents to something more soulful and primal.

And when the hippee squatting on an city sidewalk would see a lawyer or a stock broker in a suit going to work in a life of banal bourgeous employment, the hippee would say unto them:   "Man, why are you doing that to yourself Mr. Square?  Come with us, enjoy nature.   Capture your life-- enjoy your inner prompting while you still can."  Consumerism meant little to them.   They wanted more; to suck the marrow out of the bone that life had given them.

But today the Haight Asbury street has turned into the hate street.  And there is a new social divide between the Mr. Squares, who are currently the techno startup geek nerd elites and the technologically inept.   True, the young have a community of sorts, but it is based not on common aspirations, but common alienation and disappointments.  And when the young of today watch the employees of Google and Apple walk by wearing Google glasses the young rail against the inequality of income disparity that permeates the bay area and drives up the property values.

I say to you my friends that the Occupy movement, to the extent that it continues to draw breath, did not inspire a collective to a common life fulfilling goal.   It was filled at its core with jealousy and envy, which can only bind even the weakest of electons only in the most transitory of fields.

What have the young to look forward to?

I say onto thee that I may have found the answer:  here on my farm, just the other day, baby, as I was performing random excavations with my backhoe, I discovered the most remarkable of objects lying approximately 10 feet underground over on the nape of the neck of yonder hill.  It was a black monolith of sorts with uniform rectangular dimensions.   I immediately discovered the curious properties of the object, to wit, it defied any attempt on my part (or the backhoe's part) to scratch or mar its surface as if  it were constructed of entirely of impenetrable obsidian.   Moreover, the color of the object was darker than black, as if all color of the universe had been drained from it and it was a reflection of some absolute void.  Soon a weird humming noise began to emanate from the object and I felt an unbearable desire to dance and hop around in the most satisfying of manners.

I felt as if my mind were being reprogrammed by the humming from the monolith.  I had the overwhelming feeling of the lack of humanities' limited senses to comprehend the underlying nature of existence.  The monolith was a perfect lack of color, form, space and time and I was plunged into that nothingness--never to return.

END TRANSMISSION




Springfield annexes the Ukrainians.   The whirles get Divergent.

Boring into the Unconscious

I think it was around 2023 when they first discovered the B wave in the human brain.   You know, that brain state which became associated with boredom?   Soon everyone was complaining about elevated B Wave levels.   B Wave intolerance became the greatest undiagnosed malady of the 21st Century since fibromyalgia, gluten intolerance, and depression.   Sorry I can't go out with you tonight, I'm so B'd out.  This restaurant is so "B". 

The pharmaceutical companies were quick to capitalize.  Hence the birth of the drug psychothiordone B-187, commonly known by its trade name:  "Simple Mind."  Simple mind, when taken daily with meals modulated the B wave, and with it, boredom.  Well, sort of anyway.

Under the influence of "Simple Mind," the brain re-engaged with the most mundane aspects of life.  Early tests subjects of  Simple Mind would stare at the hairs on the back of their hands for hours, as if exploring a virgin forest.  The developer of Simple Mind, a practitioner of Zen Buddhism took large quantities of the substance during sesshin and was profoundly moved until the effect predictably wore off.   He quickly sold his rights to the drug when his companies sales floundered to marketing giant Ecstasy LLP.   The management team at Ecstasy quickly developed a new line of products based on slight variations of the psychothiordone B-187 molecule.   The first of these was predictably marketed as "Simple Ecstasy" designed to make orgasms more orgasmic.   Soon came a whole host of mind altering substances from the "Simple SAT" designed to increase your analytic ability which soon became the most popular drug on college campuses to the "Simple Jordan" which became immediately popular with professional and amateur athletes. 

By 2028, there were over 10000 boutique drugs manufactured under the "Simple" trademark by Ecstasy LLP.  That all came to a crash when its founder Harold Wilander disregarded warning labels and mixed "Simple Masochist 11" with "Simple Power via Persuasion."   It left him in a coma.   The pending investigation, spurred on my rival Pharmaceuticals, put an end to all "Simple" drugs.   After that, they could only be found in black market suppliers in Turkey, India, and Canada.

By 2030, the alien invasion was well under way and all of this nonsense was forgotten.

It Can be a Drag Brewing

Well I was looking on Spacebook last weekend and noticed that one of my friends who I haven't seen in ages was celebrating the birth of his new homebrew (with pics) which supposedly was loosely based on one of the microbreweries in St. Louis.  It had no interest to me at the time.

See I'm flirting with this new paleo diet and wheat and gluten are not on it.  Except for the pizzas last night.   And most of the things I've eaten this year.  Maybe "flirting" is not quite the right word.   But I do listen to the Bulletproof Executive podcast.   And maybe someday all this "body hacking" stuff will have the imprimatur of science.

I don't have anything against femented foods and beverages in general.  Wine in particular.   And Pow Wow Rye is especially interesting.   Saurkraut and kimchi and those roast eggplant things with balasmic vinegar and garlic sustain me though the many cold winter nights in the blue room with the stars and planets on the ceiling.

Eventually, while staring at the stars on the ceiling, I go to sleep.  Then I start thinking that I too, should start homebrewing.   In fact, I should get a home brewing kit for Chistmas.   The fact that its March did not seem to matter.  So I contact my friend on Facebook and even before I send the email, I receive a lengthy PDF file from a woman who supposedly has the best homebrewing kit on the market.  It costs $500 which seems a lot.  But it might be something I could do with the kids.  I would have to brew Stout beer (the "chew spit" beer), or even better, Russian Imperial Stout, or Expresso Stout which has more alcohol than wine. 

Suddenly I was talking to the woman who sent me the email and she was in the room.  But it wasn't the blue room with stars, it was in the basement.  A basement I have never been in before.  She assures me that I can make Imperial Stout, but you have to do some sort of double fermentation thing so it takes longer.  Then this woman isn't a woman anymore, but a dude in drag.   Like Phillp Seymor Hoffman (god rest his soul) in that bad movie called Flawless.

Then I'm not in the basement, but somewhere else.  Like a restraunt maybe.   And the dude in drag is still there, but so is my friend B.  Only B. is behind a veneer screen acting like the dude in drag.  But he's not doing a very good job at it.  The dude in drag seems to recognize this and we look at each other with the mutual recognition that  B. should be engaged in other pursuits.

Then I'm back in the room with blue stars.  Or was that the blue room with stars.   Wondering where my beer went.  Hey Mable, have you seen my Black Label?  And then eventually I woke up.   Or did I?

Show me the way, to the next whiskey bar.  Oh, don't ask why, oh don't ask why.

Mudwrestling with Kabayeva and Lewinsky

That's the problem with your generation, dude.   A total bunch of slackers; now they are running the country and look what happens.  They are all talk and no action.   Slouching along without any purpose until 9/11 and then all hell brakes loose.  They resort to the most obscure form of tribalism.   All this rallying around the totem pole while taking viagra.

Now we have slacker leadership which consists of throwing ideas against the wall and waiting to see what sticks.  The opening bout of tonight's card:   Kerry v. Lavrov.    As the two square off over Syria, we see Kerry drawing various lines in the sand and daring the cagey Russian to cross them.   Without hesitation, the Russian crosses them.   And somewhere in the realm of the not yet dead, Mr. Kissinger rolls over in his crypt.

"Burn Me!" I exclaim, as I revel in the complexity of my organism.   Its all about the outliers.   The cells that don't follow the pack and allow the organism to evolve.   Without them, there would be no innovation.   We would all be automatons.   Or worse, we would all be lawyers. 

Keep in mind, however, that any attempt to impose order on the complex system can only be accomplished with irrational means.  And for the first time in my life, I begin to hear the faint stirring of totalitarian voices in the discourse.   They proclaim that the Chinese and Russians don't have all the deadlock we do because of the failure of capitalism in the Post-Modern Age. 

The Investors were not even particularly intelligent.   They made up for that with a cast-iron gall and a magpie's lust for shiny loot.  They were simply too greedy to become confused.  They knew what they wanted, and that was their critical advantage.

But this was all politics.   Like my own mortality, it meant so much to me once.   It was all I had left of my old life, my old convictions.   Now my mechanical arm covers up a deeper reptilian musculature.