HaVe a nIcE dAy!

“Happiness is a warm gun.”

-- John Lennon 1940-1980: title of song (1968)

I suppose I should write about something, anything: Perhaps the perils of singing, “My Way,” on the Pacific Rim; or progress in Helmand Province; or that Malaria killed King Tut; or that the Winter Olympics are on. I don’t want to say I feel depressed but I’m taking up the Luge. The Tutster also suffered from Clubfoot and Cleft Palate; even Bonobo monkeys know better than to inbreed.

It’s Fat Tuesday. I’m fat, ugly (at least today), unfit (yes, fat people can be fit), and old- age-infirmed (it crept up on me like a thief in the night). What is old-age-infirmed, you say. It’s when you see S.A.D. as a symptom rather than season.

Read about a new documentary on BIID, “Quid Pro Quo.” Noticed my old pal, Sean, commented that it’s fairly interesting. Why not want to cut your arms off in a world as inhumane as this. It’s not your fault - it’s psychic imprinting, or your mom, or rising sign, or smegmic legacy. It’s not that you’re a nut-job with to much time on your hands, if ya still got ‘em.

Reads the paper; learn new words. Nicholas Kristof writes, “One is “autocannibalism,” coined in French but equally appropriate in English. It describes what happens when a militia here in eastern Congo’s endless war cuts flesh from living victims and forces them to eat it. Another is ‘re-rape.’ The need for that term arose because doctors were seeing women and girls raped, re-raped and re-raped again, here in the world capital of murder, rape, and mutilation.”

Allow me to exit with a few cheery quotes for the day:

'My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.

'Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak

‘What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?

'I never know what you are thinking. Think.'

I think we are in rats' alley

Where the dead men lost their bones.

-- T. S. Eliot, from The Wasteland(1922)

The small god of the world will never change his ways

And is as whimsical--as on the first of days,

His life might be a bit more fun,

Had you not given him that spark of heaven's sun;

He calls it reason and employs it resolute

To be more brutish than is any brute.

-- Goethe, from Faust

"There is no happiness in comfort; happiness is brought by suffering. Man is not born to happiness."

-- Dostoevsky, from Notebooks: Idea of the Novel

Psychology knows that he who imagines disasters in some ways desires them. But why do they come so eagerly to meet him? Something in reality strikes a chord in paranoid fantasy and is warped by it. The sadism latent in everyone unerringly divines the weakness latent in everyone. And the fantasy of persecution is contagious; wherever it occurs spectators are driven irresistibly to imitate it. This succeeds most easily when one gives the fantasy a helping hand by doing what the other fears. 'One fool makes many'--the bottomless solitude of the deluded has a tendency to collectivization and so quotes the delusion into existence. This pathic mechanism harmonizes with the social one prevalent, whereby those socialized into desperate isolation hunger for community and flock together in cold mobs. So folly becomes an epidemic: insane sects grow with the same rhythm as big organizations. It is the rhythm of total destruction.

-- Theodor Adorno, from Minima Moralia(1951)

Peace - Randy