King Louie
07-15-2005, 06:36 AM
I've been thinking about lots of things today -- about a lot of different kinds of things, and I think I might have come to a few consculsions along the way.
I do believe that I've come to some basic truths concerning things, although I doubt that there are many people among you who would truly want to hear it; and maybe, it's because of the fact that some truths in this life are probably a bit difficult to hear.
I think that in life, there are people in this world who don't want to hear things because those things make them feel totally out of control, as if they don't have a bit of control over their lives -- not nearly as much as they'd like to imagine. And because it's truly a scary feeling, I'm sure, and I know, these certain truths; but the truth is, is that the truth is scary, sometimes, and oftentimes, no matter where it is that you might find yourself standing -- no matter how you might find yourself assessing your own philosophical foundation, or theological foundation, or economical foundation. Because really, as far as we know it, there is no such thing as a rock-hard foundation, in this world. We're all groping, the lot of us, and lots of us weary our spirits because we clamor for overall control, that we are endlessly unable to grasp.
So here's the first Universal Truth, all you peeps, coming to all of you by way of the Jungles of South Alabama.
Your life is not a train, but it is very similar to one.
A train: as if your life started out in one place -- and perhaps, at the Boarding Station -- and from there, it ever-chugs towards its set and defined course all the way to the very ends of its limited tracks -- wherever, and over the hills, that destination may ultimately be.
And so, your life is much like a train; but it is not a train, because it's a car on the Old Fashioned Car Ride.
For if your life is to be a ride, then it must be the Old Fashioned Car Ride, that ride at Disneyland or Six Flags; where it, much like the train, follows a set path from the Boarding Station, all the way to the end of its tracks.
And yet, unlike the train, the car can be steered by you -- if only just a little bit. Short sine waves the tires make as you turn the wheel left and right, as they oscillate back and forth, but kept in ultimate check by the sturdiness of the Guide Rail, as the gas is ever pressed, and as the brake has been removed, so that the ride will ever chug on.
Your life is like an Old Fashioned Car Ride, forever chugging forth towards its end.
And that is your life. And here is my reasoning:
As you ride across your parks in this life, and strapped irremovably into the bodies of your Old Fashioned Cars, you are ultimately unable to defy the general direction of the Guard Rail; you may not circumvent the ultimate destination of your ride. Not yet, anyway.
And no matter who you are: whether you're a rich man or a poor man, or young or old, or man or woman or person or hey: even you beasts -- we all chug forward towards the same destination over the hill whether we like it or not, or accept it, or not.
And such is the purpose of the guard rail, like it or not.
You are not in control, all you people -- nobody is in control of their lives, which is really just the thing that most people don't truly want to hear. That's what I bet, anyway. But it's true, even still. I think about this thing a lot -- I hear the voices of all these people who describe how they put the world beneath their feet, and how they did it all themselves, with their heightened wits, and their power, and their influence -- how they have annhilated all the odds and all the challenges, and how they are to, because of this accomplishment, be praised in all their glory, for everything they've done in harnessing control of all their surroundings.
"My flow, my show brought me the dough
That bought me all my fancy things
My crib, my cars, my clothes, my jewels
Look homey I done came up and I ain't changin'." -- 50 Cent
I wonder how many of us forget how we're all so out of control, whenever it applies to the presence of the Guard Rail. It seems we even began things that way, whenever we had no control whenever we first arrived at the Boarding Station; for, we didn't have control over whether to ask -- or not -- if we could even ride the ride in the first place; and, whenever we were first placed on the slick monorail, we were even then unable to drive the cars we were strapped inside. We were helpless from the start, our back bumpers pushed slowly forward along the first quarter mile, by those in the Old Fashioned Cars chugging behind us, who placed us there, and who -- as we are alive in the moment, and speak to each other on these matters, and are alive and well today and capable of communicating -- they must have cared enough to give our back bumpers an adequate push. But we, ourselves, we had no control. We simply screamed in the cold air in our wetness, completely powerless, incapable of anything, as they snipped away the bloody cord.
We didn't earn this ride we're now riding on -- we didn't earn, or have control over, even getting boarded, whenever we were first plopped onto the decks of the Boarding Station -- those days when our feet were far too short to hit the gas.
We were simply put there, without any regard to what our wills might have been on the matter; and so, we were ushered in and pushed along in all our cars with no control, and from there, we grew into our seats; and then, somewhere along the line, we grew high enough to hit the gas, and we began to steer and we watched the sights, and went forward and ever forward because hey: you know, that's what you do when you're riding on the ride.
And we end it that way, too. We end it with no control.
People talk about where they're going in this life, and about all the things they're going to do. And they drive to the treatment centers to get radiation for their cancers, and they proclaim, "I will defeat it. I will determine myself to overcome this dreadful disease."
But they are not in control of the Guard Rail, though perhaps they may shake their fists at it, in defiance of the Guard Rail, though they may forget how much the very ground they're standing on is truly a time bomb -- a crust of rock that bounces around out in oblivion, dodging hurling bursts of flame ten times its diameter, unable to muster any sort of defense; or, how the body is also a time bomb, of its very own -- a delicate complexity so fragile with wear, and so ever-impending towards the Guard Rail's end that at any moment, and for millions of reasons, it might suddenly and abruptly cease -- a Rail so sinister and cold that perhaps, even, before the man could ever get the words from his mouth, as he describes just how fiercely he will take his cancer by the tail: an electron makes a flicker in the constructs of his brain, and he is brought to his knees with a sudden and vicious stroke.
That's the Guard Rail, and its future is set -- where your future, and my future, is a grand and unavoidable unkown. All we can do is only shift from side to side -- from Rail bounce to Rail bounce -- and in it, perhaps, every once in a while, we might find great pleasure in accomplishing a change in the view.
Here's something else I was thinking about today, and it seems to lead to the same sort of truth concerning "control," and people's desire for it: the moderation of insults on forum boards, and anywhere else.
And in it, I'm going to use the Internet Infidels as a reference point here, because I've done a lot of writing over there concerning moderation, on that particular board, and because I've spent my most recent time over there; but the way they've got it set up, as it stands today, there's just no way to edit out insults. The insults remain.
They still exist, no matter the moderation, and they linger on, pulsating on the page, flaring there for the naked eye to see; and even more: they are impossible to govern from the start, for that, my out-of-control friends, is life.
People insult other people, and quite honestly, I'd bet that most people would agree it's better than people murdering each other, or something, which also seems to happen in this life. But don't damn me: damn the Guard Rail.
When I first posted a post on the Internet Indidels, I put my heart and soul into it. I was hoping that it might bridge some sort of gap -- that I might find a way to turn my wheels hard to the right, and to find a way to break through the irony metal of the Rail.
I waited with baited breath for the audience to respond, to see what they might have thought about it, and almost immediately, a post arrived from a reader. But then, the contents of the post disappeared; and at the bottom of the post, a short explanation: "Edited: Insult Deleted."
Now granted, I really do not know what sort of insult this particular poster presented; but I do know that an insult was once there, y'seewhatimsayin? So I took a look at the name of the poster who had been edited, and I took a look back at the "Edit: Insult Deleted," and in my mind, a devilish little voice spoke up: "You know what, Kang? That bastard insulted us. He must not like us very much, because he obviously hated the things that we have to say -- so much, even, that he even got so raucus as to be restrained. I feel so....insulted -- don't you?"
The only way that people can remove all the insults from other people's conversations is to edit them fully, and most importantly, to give no explanation for anything. They simply edit them out, and then, they say nothing about it, as if the newly edited text was actually the original.
Then, to cover all their tracks -- and, to ensure that no one will ever know how the edited person was not actually edited (for, if they ever knew it, then they might suspect that the edited person was edited because he said something deserving of an edit); the only way to ensure that no one would know about the edits is to make absolutely private the complaints section, and the conference room, and also, every inch of the forums for any signs of people who might be screaming out about how they were edited, and then, to edit them out too -- to edit all of those people who might speak up about how, to their dismay, the words that they initially wrote were no longer the words that stand now -- and they must be silenced, if the insults are to be fully averted.
This way, the insults would be removed, and the readers would be unaware of all the edits and the reasons for edits, and no one would ever have the platform to spread the word about how they were moderated without reason.
However. A community who would aspire to accomplish this sort of thing would also need to do something else: they would also need to disengage all Private Messaging, because there, any of those people who might want to talk about it, they might begin to talk to each other in private conversations, about how they had been edited, and how nobody knows how their words had been changed around -- how their perspectives had been tinkered with by someone possessing passcodes.
But then, once Private Messaging is disengaged, the community would also need to find a way to disengage all other forum boards, and email communications, and telephone communication; they would need to prevent personal, human communication, snail mail, telegraph capabilites, sign language, faxes, and hose-and-funnel treehouse phones -- silence them all to prevent the people who post there from spreading the word.
They're not editing insults over there, or anywhere -- the Guard Rail defies it. It allows people to steer their wheels a bit, one way or another, so these things are unavoidable -- these insults. And it's unnatural to even try, I think, though I do like the intent (when it seems the intent is good.)
Let reason rise to the top, like frothy cream, as it eventually and inevitably will. If you take one insult out, and add in an explanation for why it's gone, then what you get is just an insult for an insult -- the same insult, in the place of the original insult. It doesn't go away, because it's there, to stay, in the momentary firefly flashes of the dark parks we chug through, along the Rail.
[Edited]
Not sure what got edited out, but that was my attempt at humour, just for the record.
See what I mean? It's there in black and white. One person thought that another person had gotten insulted; and so, regardless of what was edited, the removal of the alleged "insult" was still an insult remaining.
It can't be gotten rid of, but merely steered about from side-to-side, about the rusty monorail leading all of our Old Fashioned Cars to their junkyard's end.
Last thing -- and the last Basic Truth of the Universe, for tonight: there's always something to fight, it seems. And as of today, I kind of got tired of fighting. I got kind of tired of this fight.
And it's always coming at me from a T.V. or a radio commercial, or a newspaper ad or from a person's mouth standing in front of me -- some sort of untruth that I, in my recent and critical thinking years, have come to immediately object to with great force: "That's just a crock of bullshit."
Like today, for instance, when this guy was talking about the Emmy nominations. He was saying, as he had adressed "me," personally, the listener: "You have voted 'Deperate Housewives' as your favorite television program this year," -- and I, like I normally will do, began to speak right back at the radio: "No, dude, I didn't, because I've never even seen the show. So quit telling me a bunch of crap that I know is not true."
But I knew what he meant. You see, that's the thing -- and it's why I'm getting tired and deeply weary: it's getting hard for me to stand firm on a point-to-point, house-to-house, overly-militant search on things that ring universally true or not true, because so much of it seems to be just a bunch of desperate chatter rising from a desperate populace, screaming bloody murder careening along on a desperate Earth, and wholly unable to subvert the unbreakable pull of the defiant Guard Rail.
But I knew what he meant: I knew he was talking to a majorty of people. And that was the first time I hit the brakes, today, whenever I normally would have felt good about being a critical thinker -- about putting my heart's foot down about the things that people say for lack of thought; but I knew what he meant. I gave him a hall pass today. You know, perhaps I'm getting tired of hoarding all my hall passes. Am I missing out on enjoying life? Should I toss up all my books and binders and say, "To Hell With It All!" -- and take my hands off the wheel and close my eyes, and enjoy the ride?
But if I should give a hall pass to everybody, then in the silence of my own mind, where will it be that I am slipping to? What thing about my soul will define me then, if I am not unstoppable in my quest to decipher all the wrongs and rights of things, and all the universally correct statements that lie like pearls in an ocean full of shells, as opposed to all those general statements launched towards a general populace or general idea, but only applicable to a portion of the people -- if even that portion would include every soul on the planet, save for one?
Oh man, it's so hard to be human: ever heading over this hill -- all of us the same, impending hill, of which no one knows what hues its flowers might eventually be, or its dirt, or its absolute drop into oblivion. Nobody knows.
And you know, I suppose, it's the answer to the question of the thread.
From the Jungles of The Guard Rail,
Kang Louie
I do believe that I've come to some basic truths concerning things, although I doubt that there are many people among you who would truly want to hear it; and maybe, it's because of the fact that some truths in this life are probably a bit difficult to hear.
I think that in life, there are people in this world who don't want to hear things because those things make them feel totally out of control, as if they don't have a bit of control over their lives -- not nearly as much as they'd like to imagine. And because it's truly a scary feeling, I'm sure, and I know, these certain truths; but the truth is, is that the truth is scary, sometimes, and oftentimes, no matter where it is that you might find yourself standing -- no matter how you might find yourself assessing your own philosophical foundation, or theological foundation, or economical foundation. Because really, as far as we know it, there is no such thing as a rock-hard foundation, in this world. We're all groping, the lot of us, and lots of us weary our spirits because we clamor for overall control, that we are endlessly unable to grasp.
So here's the first Universal Truth, all you peeps, coming to all of you by way of the Jungles of South Alabama.
Your life is not a train, but it is very similar to one.
A train: as if your life started out in one place -- and perhaps, at the Boarding Station -- and from there, it ever-chugs towards its set and defined course all the way to the very ends of its limited tracks -- wherever, and over the hills, that destination may ultimately be.
And so, your life is much like a train; but it is not a train, because it's a car on the Old Fashioned Car Ride.
For if your life is to be a ride, then it must be the Old Fashioned Car Ride, that ride at Disneyland or Six Flags; where it, much like the train, follows a set path from the Boarding Station, all the way to the end of its tracks.
And yet, unlike the train, the car can be steered by you -- if only just a little bit. Short sine waves the tires make as you turn the wheel left and right, as they oscillate back and forth, but kept in ultimate check by the sturdiness of the Guide Rail, as the gas is ever pressed, and as the brake has been removed, so that the ride will ever chug on.
Your life is like an Old Fashioned Car Ride, forever chugging forth towards its end.
And that is your life. And here is my reasoning:
As you ride across your parks in this life, and strapped irremovably into the bodies of your Old Fashioned Cars, you are ultimately unable to defy the general direction of the Guard Rail; you may not circumvent the ultimate destination of your ride. Not yet, anyway.
And no matter who you are: whether you're a rich man or a poor man, or young or old, or man or woman or person or hey: even you beasts -- we all chug forward towards the same destination over the hill whether we like it or not, or accept it, or not.
And such is the purpose of the guard rail, like it or not.
You are not in control, all you people -- nobody is in control of their lives, which is really just the thing that most people don't truly want to hear. That's what I bet, anyway. But it's true, even still. I think about this thing a lot -- I hear the voices of all these people who describe how they put the world beneath their feet, and how they did it all themselves, with their heightened wits, and their power, and their influence -- how they have annhilated all the odds and all the challenges, and how they are to, because of this accomplishment, be praised in all their glory, for everything they've done in harnessing control of all their surroundings.
"My flow, my show brought me the dough
That bought me all my fancy things
My crib, my cars, my clothes, my jewels
Look homey I done came up and I ain't changin'." -- 50 Cent
I wonder how many of us forget how we're all so out of control, whenever it applies to the presence of the Guard Rail. It seems we even began things that way, whenever we had no control whenever we first arrived at the Boarding Station; for, we didn't have control over whether to ask -- or not -- if we could even ride the ride in the first place; and, whenever we were first placed on the slick monorail, we were even then unable to drive the cars we were strapped inside. We were helpless from the start, our back bumpers pushed slowly forward along the first quarter mile, by those in the Old Fashioned Cars chugging behind us, who placed us there, and who -- as we are alive in the moment, and speak to each other on these matters, and are alive and well today and capable of communicating -- they must have cared enough to give our back bumpers an adequate push. But we, ourselves, we had no control. We simply screamed in the cold air in our wetness, completely powerless, incapable of anything, as they snipped away the bloody cord.
We didn't earn this ride we're now riding on -- we didn't earn, or have control over, even getting boarded, whenever we were first plopped onto the decks of the Boarding Station -- those days when our feet were far too short to hit the gas.
We were simply put there, without any regard to what our wills might have been on the matter; and so, we were ushered in and pushed along in all our cars with no control, and from there, we grew into our seats; and then, somewhere along the line, we grew high enough to hit the gas, and we began to steer and we watched the sights, and went forward and ever forward because hey: you know, that's what you do when you're riding on the ride.
And we end it that way, too. We end it with no control.
People talk about where they're going in this life, and about all the things they're going to do. And they drive to the treatment centers to get radiation for their cancers, and they proclaim, "I will defeat it. I will determine myself to overcome this dreadful disease."
But they are not in control of the Guard Rail, though perhaps they may shake their fists at it, in defiance of the Guard Rail, though they may forget how much the very ground they're standing on is truly a time bomb -- a crust of rock that bounces around out in oblivion, dodging hurling bursts of flame ten times its diameter, unable to muster any sort of defense; or, how the body is also a time bomb, of its very own -- a delicate complexity so fragile with wear, and so ever-impending towards the Guard Rail's end that at any moment, and for millions of reasons, it might suddenly and abruptly cease -- a Rail so sinister and cold that perhaps, even, before the man could ever get the words from his mouth, as he describes just how fiercely he will take his cancer by the tail: an electron makes a flicker in the constructs of his brain, and he is brought to his knees with a sudden and vicious stroke.
That's the Guard Rail, and its future is set -- where your future, and my future, is a grand and unavoidable unkown. All we can do is only shift from side to side -- from Rail bounce to Rail bounce -- and in it, perhaps, every once in a while, we might find great pleasure in accomplishing a change in the view.
Here's something else I was thinking about today, and it seems to lead to the same sort of truth concerning "control," and people's desire for it: the moderation of insults on forum boards, and anywhere else.
And in it, I'm going to use the Internet Infidels as a reference point here, because I've done a lot of writing over there concerning moderation, on that particular board, and because I've spent my most recent time over there; but the way they've got it set up, as it stands today, there's just no way to edit out insults. The insults remain.
They still exist, no matter the moderation, and they linger on, pulsating on the page, flaring there for the naked eye to see; and even more: they are impossible to govern from the start, for that, my out-of-control friends, is life.
People insult other people, and quite honestly, I'd bet that most people would agree it's better than people murdering each other, or something, which also seems to happen in this life. But don't damn me: damn the Guard Rail.
When I first posted a post on the Internet Indidels, I put my heart and soul into it. I was hoping that it might bridge some sort of gap -- that I might find a way to turn my wheels hard to the right, and to find a way to break through the irony metal of the Rail.
I waited with baited breath for the audience to respond, to see what they might have thought about it, and almost immediately, a post arrived from a reader. But then, the contents of the post disappeared; and at the bottom of the post, a short explanation: "Edited: Insult Deleted."
Now granted, I really do not know what sort of insult this particular poster presented; but I do know that an insult was once there, y'seewhatimsayin? So I took a look at the name of the poster who had been edited, and I took a look back at the "Edit: Insult Deleted," and in my mind, a devilish little voice spoke up: "You know what, Kang? That bastard insulted us. He must not like us very much, because he obviously hated the things that we have to say -- so much, even, that he even got so raucus as to be restrained. I feel so....insulted -- don't you?"
The only way that people can remove all the insults from other people's conversations is to edit them fully, and most importantly, to give no explanation for anything. They simply edit them out, and then, they say nothing about it, as if the newly edited text was actually the original.
Then, to cover all their tracks -- and, to ensure that no one will ever know how the edited person was not actually edited (for, if they ever knew it, then they might suspect that the edited person was edited because he said something deserving of an edit); the only way to ensure that no one would know about the edits is to make absolutely private the complaints section, and the conference room, and also, every inch of the forums for any signs of people who might be screaming out about how they were edited, and then, to edit them out too -- to edit all of those people who might speak up about how, to their dismay, the words that they initially wrote were no longer the words that stand now -- and they must be silenced, if the insults are to be fully averted.
This way, the insults would be removed, and the readers would be unaware of all the edits and the reasons for edits, and no one would ever have the platform to spread the word about how they were moderated without reason.
However. A community who would aspire to accomplish this sort of thing would also need to do something else: they would also need to disengage all Private Messaging, because there, any of those people who might want to talk about it, they might begin to talk to each other in private conversations, about how they had been edited, and how nobody knows how their words had been changed around -- how their perspectives had been tinkered with by someone possessing passcodes.
But then, once Private Messaging is disengaged, the community would also need to find a way to disengage all other forum boards, and email communications, and telephone communication; they would need to prevent personal, human communication, snail mail, telegraph capabilites, sign language, faxes, and hose-and-funnel treehouse phones -- silence them all to prevent the people who post there from spreading the word.
They're not editing insults over there, or anywhere -- the Guard Rail defies it. It allows people to steer their wheels a bit, one way or another, so these things are unavoidable -- these insults. And it's unnatural to even try, I think, though I do like the intent (when it seems the intent is good.)
Let reason rise to the top, like frothy cream, as it eventually and inevitably will. If you take one insult out, and add in an explanation for why it's gone, then what you get is just an insult for an insult -- the same insult, in the place of the original insult. It doesn't go away, because it's there, to stay, in the momentary firefly flashes of the dark parks we chug through, along the Rail.
[Edited]
Not sure what got edited out, but that was my attempt at humour, just for the record.
See what I mean? It's there in black and white. One person thought that another person had gotten insulted; and so, regardless of what was edited, the removal of the alleged "insult" was still an insult remaining.
It can't be gotten rid of, but merely steered about from side-to-side, about the rusty monorail leading all of our Old Fashioned Cars to their junkyard's end.
Last thing -- and the last Basic Truth of the Universe, for tonight: there's always something to fight, it seems. And as of today, I kind of got tired of fighting. I got kind of tired of this fight.
And it's always coming at me from a T.V. or a radio commercial, or a newspaper ad or from a person's mouth standing in front of me -- some sort of untruth that I, in my recent and critical thinking years, have come to immediately object to with great force: "That's just a crock of bullshit."
Like today, for instance, when this guy was talking about the Emmy nominations. He was saying, as he had adressed "me," personally, the listener: "You have voted 'Deperate Housewives' as your favorite television program this year," -- and I, like I normally will do, began to speak right back at the radio: "No, dude, I didn't, because I've never even seen the show. So quit telling me a bunch of crap that I know is not true."
But I knew what he meant. You see, that's the thing -- and it's why I'm getting tired and deeply weary: it's getting hard for me to stand firm on a point-to-point, house-to-house, overly-militant search on things that ring universally true or not true, because so much of it seems to be just a bunch of desperate chatter rising from a desperate populace, screaming bloody murder careening along on a desperate Earth, and wholly unable to subvert the unbreakable pull of the defiant Guard Rail.
But I knew what he meant: I knew he was talking to a majorty of people. And that was the first time I hit the brakes, today, whenever I normally would have felt good about being a critical thinker -- about putting my heart's foot down about the things that people say for lack of thought; but I knew what he meant. I gave him a hall pass today. You know, perhaps I'm getting tired of hoarding all my hall passes. Am I missing out on enjoying life? Should I toss up all my books and binders and say, "To Hell With It All!" -- and take my hands off the wheel and close my eyes, and enjoy the ride?
But if I should give a hall pass to everybody, then in the silence of my own mind, where will it be that I am slipping to? What thing about my soul will define me then, if I am not unstoppable in my quest to decipher all the wrongs and rights of things, and all the universally correct statements that lie like pearls in an ocean full of shells, as opposed to all those general statements launched towards a general populace or general idea, but only applicable to a portion of the people -- if even that portion would include every soul on the planet, save for one?
Oh man, it's so hard to be human: ever heading over this hill -- all of us the same, impending hill, of which no one knows what hues its flowers might eventually be, or its dirt, or its absolute drop into oblivion. Nobody knows.
And you know, I suppose, it's the answer to the question of the thread.
From the Jungles of The Guard Rail,
Kang Louie