lyke omfg michael jackson is ded!!!!!111!!oneone!

Since about five p.m. tonight I’ve had to put up with the constant question from anyone I talk to of “Did you know Michael Jackson died?!” No. I didn’ tknow when the first person asked me. No. I still didn’t care when the last person asked me. Forgive me if I think there are more important things going on in the world right now, like y’know, the possibility of revolution in Iran, and the continuing destruction of the environment.

Yes, it’s unfortunate that he died. No, it’s really not important at all.

To sum up my feelings: Iran is falling apart, with innocent civvies being hacked apart with axes, and all people want to talk about is MJ. It’s disgusting.

Aint No Rest For The Wicked

I’ve been doing a lot of changing lately. In fact, I’m going through a rebirth process. Who I used to be was influenced by quite a bit of emotional baggage. I was never honest with people, to the point where even my closest friend doesn’t really know who I am. These are things I’ve fought with for a long time, and that I finally feel that I am beating.

I thought I was done with my period of rebirth, but I’m finding things that I still need to change. These things caused a great deal of damage to a relationship that I don’t want to lose. They caused a great deal of pain to myself, and they’re continuing to do so.

So I’m still fighting. I’ll try to log some of the things here.

Firstly, I have to deal with a touch of jealousy. I’ve also been learning to play chess, and I’ve been reading old sources on chivalry. No reason not to be the best person I can be.

The world needs soldiers

Our planet, our home, is in danger. It is being harmed by our actions, and we know this. We know this, and we continue to act as though nothing is wrong. We want to think that we can sit back and enjoy ourselves without any responsibilities. If there’s damage to the environment, we can always get the government to fix it! This sort of thinking has allowed the situation to last far longer than it should have. We, as humans, should have recognized the damage we were doing to our home. We should have reversed our actions, and adopted new policies. Instead we ignored the problem.

Yes, some of us took action,  but not nearly enough. The issue was confused, and the people who did not care about the world were able to spin the information into something unrecognizable. Until recently, the debate continued as to whether humans caused global climate change, or whether climate change even existed. I still see people claiming that it does not exist. That is how deeply rooted this problem is.

The world needs my brothers and sisters, who have dedicated themselves to healing the land. It needs them desperately, but their healing work cannot go forward while the enemy continues to pillage the world. You cannot heal a man who is being tortured to death while you work. We cannot heal the land while it is continually destroyed. We do not have the resources available to heal all the wounds being inflicted around the world.

What the world needs is soldiers. The world needs people who are not only willing to heal it, but who will go out and challenge those who are harming it. Their ability to do such great damage to the world needs to be removed. Their weapons must be broken, and their will to combat must be shattered. The world needs men and women willing to dedicate themselves to this fight; it needs men and women willing to use whatever skills they have to tear down the strongholds of those who think it their right to attack our home.

The world needs soldiers to defend it just as much as it needs healers to repair the damages done to it.

We need new pilots for the economy

Eh, so, for a while there I was pretty anti-capitalist. I’d say it was with good reason, too! People have done some pretty shitty things in the name of capitalism. Then again, people have done terrible things in the name of almost any cause out there. It’s not really fair for me to condemn capitalism while defending other systems that have their own share of nut cases. So, for the last few days, I’ve been thinking about how capitalism has effected the world, and whether or not it’s really the terrible thing I said it was.

Yep, it still really is. The capitalist system gave things a try, and it’s failed. It’s failed a few times. Just like mercantilism, and feudalism, capitalism has run its course and come up unsatisfactory. The capitalist philosophers, the founders of the movement, were brilliant I have to admit. But they were wrong. The world doesn’t work the way they envisioned it. The world doesn’t function the way it “should” according to an economist’s charts.

Capitalism is still with us, however, due to a simple thing; we have nothing to replace it with. The other systems have been tried and found wanting in various ways. It is because these systems have been found wanting that capitalism remains. If there was a viable alternative to the capitalist system, it would be easy enough to transition. But no, we’d be left with an economic vacuum, or a choice of other systems that we know don’t work the way they should.

What do we do, then? Our economy no longer flies true; its pilots can no longer reliably read the navigational tools they’ve been provided with. They’ve struck our precious economy against several metaphorical icebergs, and the most recent of these collisions has triggered the current crisis. It is vital that we find new pilots for the economy, and find them fast.

Finding new pilots is FAR easier said than done, sadly. We really aren’t left with many options. In all honesty, I don’t know where we should go from here. I do know that the system is broken, and it needs to change, but I don’t know how. Oh, I have some ideas, such as leveling the playing field between corporations and small businesses. My friend Corban and I were talking about doing just that only minutes ago. Hopefully I’ll have another post on that topic later.

For now, I’m left with the problem of finding a new system, a new set of pilots, for our economy. When the economy chooses to create new needs rather than meeting other, unmet, needs then we have a problem. The economy exists to divide resources and determine who gets how much. It’s a scarcity issue. The economy is a means to an ends. Unfortunately, I think we in America have mistaken it for an ends in itself

Ragnarok for America

As part of my Search for God class, I’ve been doing research into shamanism. It’s an interesting thing, and one that I think we Westerners should invest in. Unfortunately, I don’t see that happening. I’m a cynic. I don’t have hope that our culture can change in any sort of meaningful way. Not in any amount of time that we need, at least. Racial tensions, sexism, class warfare, and other such bullshit still plague us. It’s been how long, and we still haven’t dealt with these issues?

No. I don’t think we can change.

For fuck’s sake, it was still seen as acceptable to debate the reality of climate change until very recently. There’s no way we’ll stop dumping our toxic wastes into the atmosphere, into the oceans, into the world that is our home. They say you shouldn’t shit where you sleep; well, we’re ignoring that advice and have our fingers stuck in our ears while we pretend nothing is occurring.

Most of my own family does little to help the situation. It’s as though they can’t even make minor gestures, like using re-usable shopping bags. What. The. Fuck. If the majority of the population can’t even do things like that, how the fuck do we expect them to change in any meaningful way?!

We could learn something from Norse lore. Ragnarok, contrary to the twisted Christian concept of apocalypse, is not the end of the world. It is the end of a civilization. The Jotun, the Giants, represent the forces of nature. The Aesir, the Gods, represent the forces of civilization. In Ragnarok, the forces of nature rise up and burn civilization to the ground. Rather than leave only a field of ashes, a new generation of civilization begins to rebuild, having learned the lessons of the past.

If our civilization cannot change itself, perhaps it’s time for us to have our own Ragnarok. If my parents’ generation cannot accept that change needs to occur, perhaps it is time that we of my generation turn away from them. We’re the ones who are going to have to rebuild the world when they’re gone. Why should we continue to suffer through their mistakes?

Maybe our new President will be able to bring about the change we need… You’ll have to forgive me if I’m not all too hopeful.

tl;dr- How much longer are we going to allow the generations before us to ruin the world that we’ll inherit? When will we decide that it’s time to act?

I am a hedonist

A week or two ago, someone accused me of not enjoying life. I don’t remember the conversation before this accusation, but I do remember the person attempting to differentiate themselves from me by claiming that they “have a lust for life”. The claim that I don’t enjoy life was rebuffed pretty fast at the time, with several people (some of whom don’t even like me) correcting his mistake. It got me to thinking, though.

I am a hedonist. I toyed with the thought for quite some time, and kept discarding it because I don’t act to maximize short term pleasure. I play the long game, with an eye to the future, and for a while I didn’t think this counted. After thinking about it, I can most certainly see how I count as a hedonist. I embrace it this time around.

Hedonism, to me, is the pursuit of pleasure and happiness. I go with that happiness thing, though I take pleasure in much of life. Instead of being alcohol, sex, or drug obsessed, I take my pleasure in every experience. The taste of good food, the ache of muscles after a day of running around, a hot bath with a good book, these are things that I love. Beyond that, though, I embrace everything I feel. When I’m sad, I savor it as though it were some bitter delicacy. The pain from a cut or a bruise is exquisite; it sends shivers up and down my spine.

I take my pleasure in the experiences of life. Each sensation that I encounter is cherished, relished, and then allowed to fade as new experiences come. I can’t imagine life if I didn’t enjoy everything around me! I cannot imagine how people live in misery when there is so much to be enjoyed all around us.

When it comes to what I do, what I don’t do, and what’s expected of me, I tend to disappoint people. I don’t do things because I’m told to, or because it’s expected of me. I act when it will make me happy to do so. If I care about someone, then making them happy will often make me happy, and I act to please them. If they aren’t so important to me, eh… Well, yeah.

This way of thinking, and acting, has gotten me into trouble with family, with work, with school. Professors don’t like it when a student declines to do the assignments, it seems. What a shocker. To be honest, though, I don’t care. I don’t seek, or need, their approval. I don’t need something so arbitrary as a grade to make me happy, or tell me my self worth. Fuck that shit. I’m going to do what makes me happy, and society can go fuck itself if it wants to tell me I’m unsuccessful because of that.

I am a hedonist, and I’m going to do what I want. I’m going to do what makes me happy.

Domnu’s Back Again?!

j0. So, after a long break (I seem to take those a lot) I’m back. Well, hopefully I’m back. I’ve spent the last good while (really all semester) slacking off and doing my best to fail at every possible thing I could find. Managed to fail at a job, all five classes I took (I really gotta find out about that, I should have passed at least two (yeah, yeah, vast improvement there)), and a few other things along the way. I was a lazy ass, to say the least.

Well, my month long winter break is almost over, and I’ve come to the realization that I need to get myself back in the game. Sure, I might not care too much about money, or about grades, but right now those are the visible measures of my success and ability. I might as well focus on those until I get to the point where I can go off on my own, right?

Classes start on the 20th for me, and I do believe I’m only registered for two classes this semester. I’ll have to fix that. Four seems a good number for someone just getting back into productive society. I have a few plans for dealing with class, and with luck those plans will actually work. I’m sure I can pull it off with.

I’ll be augmenting my productivity in class with two blogs. This is one of ‘em, and the other will be at www.lewiskampf.com (that’s right bitches, I gots my own domain ). I figure I can use this one as a more personal blog, and the other as a more “professional” blog about my favorite pastime– politics!

Here’s to hoping I manage to stick around this time, ’cause if I don’t, I’ll have some serious ass kicking (my own ass) to do!

Shalom alecheim.

Loyalty, wut

So, hey, there’s this thing I’ve been hearing from people about how us poly folks aren’t loyal. I get shit for it on campus, and I get shit from my so-called friends. I wasn’t aware that being able to love more than one person meant you couldn’t be loyal to any of ‘em. This idea that poly people can’t be loyal has always pissed me off. It’s a zero sum game, and it doesn’t work.

I am loyal to my friends. It’s exceptionally rare that I consider someone a true friend, and I can count the ones I have on one hand. Once you are my friend, though, I’ll fight to the end to protect you. Anyone who claims to know me, or claims to be my friend, would know this. I make no effort to hide it; my loyalty to friends runs deep.

I’m even more loyal to the people I love, also very rare. There is a woman that I love, completely, with all my heart. She knows who she is. She also knows that nothing could make me betray her. She knows that no matter what happens, or who comes along, or who I have a crush on, she’s always the one closest to my heart. She knows that if anyone ever had the stupidity to make it them or her, she wins, hands down.

I’m big on loyalty. I like it in friends, and I require it in loved ones. Just because I’m poly doesn’t mean I’m not loyal. Just because you’re mono doesn’t mean you’re loyal. Plenty of mono people cheat. Plenty of mono people lie. Being mono or poly, being Jewish or Buddhist or Christian or Muslim, being a politician or a lawyer or a farmer or anything else, has absolutely no impact on your loyalty. Only you, as a person, can choose to be loyal or disloyal.

It’s time that people did that really un-cool thing, and took responsibility for themselves. They need to stop thinking they can declare others as inferior because of superficial differences, and they need to stop judging others as if they themselves were flawless.

Trust

Trust is something I have issues with. I’m paranoid. I hate trusting people. I expect betrayal at every turn. Sure, I don’t expect conscious betrayal all the time, but I know how people work. The subconscious can betray just as well as the conscious. I don’t trust people, and I don’t expect them to trust me. That said, I find myself in an interesting position, one where I’m forcing myself to trust someone. 

Domnu’s in Love

I’m writing this post for a very special someone, who will most certainly know who she is. I’ve never really shared my feelings in a public place before, so anyone who reads this, please be patient with me.