The best ways to win against a witch Monday, Oct 6 2008 

I don’t know about you kids but personally I have lived a strange life. So saying I have known a few witches of all sorts (figurative, literal, speculative, self-professed, self-denied etc. etc.) and the best way to deal with a witch is to either not have anything to do with them at all or to be on their side. The chances of a witch being on the side you actually want to be on are even, but the chances that the witch will make your life a living hell if you go against her are 100%. Now some people are willing to live with that. They want to win or they want to stand up for something they believe in and they’re willing to put up with or try to neutralize that other side. I say good for them, enjoy your shitty life. For the rest of us who really don’t care that much about any given thing like the background color of the senior center events calendar, we’ll just go ahead and be on the side with the witch so that she is off our ass and on yours about wanting to go with yellow instead of sticking with white.

I just might be advocating selling out here but I assure you it’s entirely circumstantial. Possible exceptions are when you’re dealing with such big groups that there are probably an equal number of witches on both sides so that you can’t win no matter what, or just when your group is so big you won’t get singled out. But definitely on an individual basis, just go ahead and try to be on good terms with the witches in your life. Like the one that lives down the hall/street, the one at work, the one you’re related to, the one your son is engaged to (there’s still hope!), the one at the market that’s not even a block from where you live, the one who works in your doctor’s office, the receptionist at the dentist… I could go on.

But do you see my point? If you choose to fight against every single witch that’s in your life then all that awaits you are days filled with petty bickering, peeking around corners, long waits at the doctor’s office, inflated prices for kiwi, and yellow events calendars. So the next time somebody goes in ahead of you for an appointment even though they arrived after you, just stay in your seat and read another page. I know that every day could be the last, but that’s all the more reason to not waste your time complaining to someone that doesn’t even make 1/10 of the wage per hour of the person you are there to see. And after all, that article on pirate in the south-east asian sea was kind of interesting, wasn’t it?

I remember when 10,000 hits was a big deal Sunday, Sep 14 2008 

Do you remember when it was a big deal to get even 1,000 hits on your site? Frankly I don’t feel like it’s a big deal that this invalid(‘s) blog has gotten 10,000 hits but I was lacking a title. To make good on things, this blog apparently passed 10,000 hits on the 11th day of September in 2008 AD.

I doubt that anyone has been anxiously awaiting a new entry from me but as it happens I got injured in a cyclilng accident recently so the opportunity to write did not immediately present itself. The world is not a great place. I wasn’t devastatingly injured, in fact I don’t think I was bleeding at all externally (internally is another matter), but nonetheless nobody at all stopped. So I just lay on the concrete for about 10 minutes looking at the sky. Why not? That was kind of interesting. Eventually I got back on the bike and went home on my own in spite of my injuries.

Unfortunately the problem with this down time recuperating it gave me a lot of time to think. Looking back on all the tragedies in my life, all the injuries suffered, all the hurt, I suppose that I did make choices that directly lead to my suffering. On the other hand most of my choices were innocent enough, for example I got into this accident because I chose to go down one street instead of another. I don’t know for sure that I wouldn’t have gotten in an accident had I chosen the other street, or even had I chosen a different turn on the same street, but my choice to take that street and that turn lead directly to the accident. Yes, analyzing ones choices in life is just about the surest route to despair that there is.

Since I’m already despairing though let me break things down for you. Typically people get hurt either because they trust themselves and fail or because they trust others who then don’t live up to expectations. In this case I trusted my cycling ability and bike maintenance and found myself lacking (actually the bike is OK so I was right about that). Many times in my life I was hurt by others though, even times when I thought people were going to hurt me some part of me thought they might not hurt me as bad as they did. The real problem is that if you want to live then you have no choice but to put faith in your own abilities and the honesty of others at times. Maybe when we all die it won’t be like that, but for now that’s the world and all you can do is try to be cautious and learn how to protect yourself.

Of course in my case the times I was hurt the worst were almost entirely out of my control, or at least I had almost no ability in those situations to do anything valid to protect myself. In fact a lot of the times when I was a child and so many horrible things were happening I didn’t even understand anything. All I could do was cry and hurt. It was later that I would understand just how I had really been hurt.

Most of the time I’m able to shove the past into dark recesses of my mind. Perhaps psychologically it still affects me, but without fail I always feel worse when I think about it. It’s even less reliving the moments than it is realizing just how they fucked up the rest of my life. I would not refer to myself as an especially smart person, but my hindsight is as good as anyone’s. And applying it to my own life is not a joy. I suppose that I can even make sense of why other people did, or sometimes did not do, the things to me that they did. But I really can’t make sense of the world that those things occur in. My only conclusions are that either existence is absurd (athiest approach) or that the earth is some kind of proving ground or even punishment (religious approach). I suppose that there is no reason it can’t be both, the idea of heaven seems pretty absurd at this moment.

Let me take this opportunity to dissuade you my dear readers from sexually abusing people. There is really no good reason for it, there is nothing that you can accomplish through those means that you are unable to accomplish through others. If you can only get off by doing so, then go jump off a high building. I will even go so far as to say that I’d rather you killed somebody than raped them, especially children. Now there are probably some people who don’t feel that way, that they’d rather be dead than raped, or moreso a lot of parents might wish to hold on to their children no matter what happens to them, and a lot of women in particular have had to make and live with the choice to go along in exchange for their lives. But I don’t fucking care. I’d rather have just been killed and never been forced to come to this point, to be sitting injured in a bed reflecting upon past indignities suffered long ago and not even being able to cry about them.

The moral of today’s story is that the world would be a lot better place if bad people killed themselves instead of harming others. But everybody knew that one already right? It’s precisely because bad people don’t give a shit that they inflict harm upon others. I thnk that almost everyone thinks about harming others, maybe even fantasizes about it, and frankly there are a lot of assholes out there who wouldn’t hesitate to hurt your feelings, but there’s a clear difference in quality between the person who thinks about sodomizing a child and the person who did it at their leisure, repeatedly. Why don’t you think about it, person?

By the way between getting injured and having these thoughts come back to haunt me things haven’t been going that well with the person I was reunited with that I thought I mentioned recently. Fortunately that person is one of the good ones and has been patient with me, but it’s hard to imagine things going the way I want them to at this point. It’s hard to imagine that I’ll be able to do anything but push them away. And that is what really makes me curse the past.