Trust the Ferret, the Ferret is Wise

"Wankers, the lot of them."

"Who?" the buddha asked.

"Y'know, you seem awfully attached to my scooty chair, for all that it's an illusion. I thought you'd buggered off to somewhere else."

"We're British tonight?"

"The British have better profanity. All we've got is damn, and then your bog standard anglo-saxon terms referring to sex or poop, and yes, I KNOW what the British words mean. But they sound better, and aren't offensive to Americans, because they're not part of our culture. Sorta like how the British were weirded out when Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me opened over there."

"So we are British then."

"No, we are just fanboy. I blame Monty Python and Terry Pratchett. And probably Neil Gaiman, but I don't want to mess with him, he's got a satanic tomato."

"It's only a model. So which wankers roused your ire?"

I flopped down on my bed, on top of the pile of shorts. It's already starting to get chilly, and I just unpacked them. That's planning, that is. "Oh, 'literary' authors. Seriously, they write books that are about wannabe writers, and OMG TEH DRAMA, and then the character in the book meets some amazing chick and things go either good or bad, and Great Lessons Are Learned. Or similar dibble. It's like Real Life Self-Insertion Fanfic."

The buddha didn't say anything, but I'd gotten rolling, so I went. "I mean, seriously, you want to whine about your life and bitch about drama? Get an LJ, that's what they're for. Many of the novels would fit right in as LJ posts. And hey, they'd save a few trees that way. But I can't really blame them. Well, yet, anyway. The real culprits are the teachers who repeat crap like 'Write what you know!' over and over again, without mentioning things like 'Go and do something interesting.' And the ones who bash anything 'genre' as addlepated fluff. When they're told to write what they know, and all they know is being an underemployed wannabe writer, what else are they supposed to write about? All that creativity wasted. Oh, but hey, it's Real Life! It's Serious! It's got Great Human Emotions and Deep Meaning. Whoop-dee-doo. You can have Great Emotion and Deep Meaning and still have spaceships or dragons or guys in tights punching each other. But that's not 'Serious' literature. PAH! And of course, the kids they've trained grow up to become the next generation of gatekeepers of Literature with a capital L. And the cycle repeats itself."

The buddha spun quietly in my chair for a second. "Are you finished?"

"I could go on, but I think you get the point. Trust me, I could go on."

"So how much of that isn't sour grapes?"

"Bah," I said, "As you Californians would say, 'Whatever.'"

"Well, if people are buying it, what's your problem with it? If they're enjoying it, and the readers enjoy it, how's it hurt you?"

"Because they keep up this facade of what makes something 'Real Literature', and sneer at anything that doesn't meet their standards."

"Ah. Completely unlike what you're doing, then."

Unconcerned by my glare, he started trimming his toenails. "Do you show up just to annoy me?" I asked.

"If you just want comfort food, ask a fairy godmother. You wanted an imaginary spirit guide debate."

I sat up. "Yeah, but shouldn't you be trying to help? Infinite compassion and all that."

He leaned back in the chair. The chair's not set up to DO that, damnit. I wish it could. "Hey, I've got compassion. I totally feel your pain. Infinitely."

"That's because you live in my head."

"Bingo. But the other part of the whole Buddha thing you're forgetting. Infinite patience. I've got nowhere important to be. Nirvana's not going anywhere. Besides, time's just another illusion. So yeah, I feel your pain, but I'm not gonna kick your ass into gear. Even if I could. That's your job."

"That is almost entirely unhelpful."

"Ah, but only almost! I can only show you the door, you're the one that has to walk through it."

"That worked out so well for Neo."

"He got a cookie out of it. And phenomenal cosmic powers."

"And he got killed, then brought back for a pair of bad sequels."

"He got the chick."

I held up a hand to stop him. "And then SHE died. Twice. And what's with stories always rewarding the hero with nookie, anyway? Even stories for kids. Go out, kill something, get laid. There's a very caveman vibe about the whole thing..."

"We're wandering from the subject again."

"Not really, I think we've said all there is to say about it right now."

"So you're going to get to work?"

"No, I'm going to bed. Have you looked at the clock?"

"Time's an illusion, remember?"

"Fine, but I still have the illusion of Arabic class tomorrow afternoon, and I'd like to be up BEFORE five minutes before class."

"Sleep is for the weak and unenlightened."

That's me to a T. At least at this hour of the morning.


Things Wot Come Before:
Stories from the Rabbit Hole
Stories from the Rabbit Hole, Part 2
There's a Buddha on My Bed
A Discussion of Procrastination and Buddhism
Buddhablog
Haven't Seen Him in a While
The Illusion of Pain
Stuff that Binds
The Joy of Scrubdom
More About Failure


Tags: Rabbit Hole, Mindscribbles, Religion, Movies

Okay, seriously. What. The. Fuck. Pat Robertson said we should assassinate Hugo Chavez, the elected president of Venezuela.

I am far less shocked by that than I should be. Must be from reading too much about the 80s, when we were knocking over elected South American governments like they were dominoes.

But, seriously. Folks. We are the UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. You know that big list of Things Not To Do? The one with Torture on it? Yeah, assassinating elected officials in other countries is on it too. Seriously, the Republican leadership no longer has any connection to what America actually means. (And let's not even bother with the "thou shalt not kill" thing, that's long since gone.)

And as always, Jon Stewart has the goods.

Technorati Tags: WTF?, Evil, Crazies, Politics, Religion, Daily Show

"WASHINGTON -- President Bush said Monday he believes schools should discuss "intelligent design" alongside evolution when teaching students about the creation of life."

Okay, look. Intelligent Design isn't a scientific theory. It doesn't offer anything that can be proved or disproved, doesn't make any predictions. And it doesn't help us understand anything better. It's watered-down Creationism, with all the references to God removed so they can pretend it's not religious. Basically, ID says "Life is too complicated to have evolved on its own, at least portions must have been designed." (There's also, I suppose, a splinter group that doesn't actually disagree with evolution, and says that God designed the universe, including its rules, and created life by those rules). But there's a problem with Intelligent Design. A very simple, and fundamental one. If something's designed, it implies a designer. Now, Creationists could just say "God did it", but by pretending to not be about religion, ID proponents can't do that, they just leave the Designer unspecified. It could be God, or aliens, or interdimensional mice. But with the exception of claiming God Did It, the next obvious question is where did these Designers come from? If life couldn't appear on its own, and had to be designed, then who designed the aliens? And who designed the designers of the aliens, and then it's turtles all the way down.

So don't let their protests fool you, Intelligent Design is just Creationism all over again, and dishonest Creationism at that. Or it's such a weak version that it doesn't disagree with evolution anyway. But either way, it's not science and doesn't add anything to science classes, aside from giving the teacher a chance to go "And here's why this isn't science." Science depends on things that can be tested and reproduced, and make predictions that can be tested. "Intelligent Design" does none of these.

And it really shouldn't surprise anybody at this point that Bush would push it to fire up his base.

(via Obsidian Wings, see also this New Yorker article and many many other places on the Internets.)

Technorati Tags: SCIENCE!, Religion, Rants, WTF?, Politics

Another thing that struck me, when reading through some more Buddhist stuff, along with a couple other things, that I just don't get. The whole idea of "Don't do X while you're alive, then when you die, you'll go to a paradise where you can do X even better!" It's usually about sex, or drinking, and just confuses me. You get rewarded by resisting sex/drink/whatever by... being given sex/drink/whatever. Seems kinda counterintuitive, I guess.

Technorati Tags: Religion, Mindscribbles

"Are you sure that's what you want to call it? You must know some of your friends will take it entirely wrong."

I stood in the center of my room and shrugged. "That's half the fun," I said, "Besides, they all know I'm boring and any title like that is going to be just innuendo. Until one day I decide to link to a sex toy store or something, just to see them react."

The buddha spun lazily in my computer chair. "Huh," he said.

"I have way too much crap."

"Coming around to the idea that possessions cause desire which causes suffering?" he asked.

"No, not really. I just mean that I can't see half the floor in my room. And there's hundreds of books on my shelves I haven't read. Not really a spiritual angle at all. If anything, it's the opposite, because all the stuff is keeping me from making more connections with people, the kind that matter. Because there's a lot of it, and it can't be easily moved. And then there's the opportunity costs of it, too. Even with my old discount, and buying things at used bookstores, how much did those couple shelves of RPG books cost me? Games I've never run, never played in, hell, a bunch of the books I haven't even read. At all. Or the shelf of graphic novels, and the boxes of comics. I haven't pulled anything out of the comic boxes in months. And the random computer games. What else could I have spent that money on? School? Moving? Pornography?"

"You have the internet, free pornography abounds there."

"Okay, bad example. Travel. Maybe I've just done too much RPGs and fantasy stuff, but I keep thinking about traveling. Just wandering."

He stood up. "It's not nearly so romantic as it's made out to be. Especially when all you've got is a robe and a bowl. Spiritual, maybe, but not romantic."

"Meh," I said, "I'd rather have a bike, and GPS, and some kind of portable computer thing. The monk thing never has appealed to me. Much more ninja, be prepared, that's their motto. And the Boy Scouts. Anyway, things just take up too much space, and I haven't watched many of these movies or read any of these books in a while. Or ever, in some cases. And a lot, I read or watched once, then that was it. Movies don't hold much interest for me lately, at least as a solo thing."
"Wait, are we still talking about pornography here? I wasn't paying attention."

"One thing I'll give the Catholics, sloth is pretty bad. Not always, but overdone, oh yeah. Keeps things from getting done. What you need is applied laziness. Well, what I need. So what I need is something else that I need to feel I need to do, so I can put that off by cleaning and getting rid of crap. People usually only clean to avoid doing something else."

"So when will that happen? And are you going to get rid of Voltron?"

"Hell no. Voltron's the defender of the universe. He stays. But I can probably cull at least a third of the books. Just gotta sit down and look through things and ask myself 'Do I want this badly enough to keep it if I only had X space?' and then the stuff that's not, I give to friends, family, or the library or something. Maybe sell to a used bookstore."

The buddha turned and looked at me. "Why am I even here? This is your monologue, there's no questions or anything. And who do you think will be interested in any of this?"

I shrugged. "Probably nobody, though they might all leap t me and try and get me to give them the stuff I'm getting rid of. Few people would turn down loot."


Previously, on X-Men:
Stories from the Rabbit Hole
Stories from the Rabbit Hole, Part 2
There's a Buddha on My Bed
A Discussion of Procrastination and Buddhism
Buddhablog
Haven't Seen Him in a While
The Illusion of Pain