The worst haircut
And other great ideas we blame on God
Dear S,
Another slew of homeless thoughts.
Yours,
-J
Not so crazy after all.
The reason good parents are so tough on movies with sex and so careless about movies with violence is that almost nobody ends up in jail for murder. Every single one of us is likely to become a skank.
Finding yourself.
When you bump into a Hollywood celebrity you find out you're one of two people. The urge to shout the best movie they were in or the urge to shout the worst.
The ego on trial.
Our existence is comprised of us acting in a body and a world which we didn’t pick. When we’re winning and having a great time, we give greater credit to our acting. When we’re losing we blame the body and the universe.
The limits of science.
I read somewhere a while back, regarding scientists and their “discoveries” about humanity: If it's true, it’s trivial; and if it’s not trivial it’s probably not true.
The scientists can prove sleeping is good for you, and booze is poison, and that too much stress will kill you. When they try to prove that free sex is a good idea, or that eating pills to lose weight is healthy, or that atheists are smarter and kinder than religious folk, you can smell the fraud a mile away.
E.B. White, a non scientist and an armchair philosopher, has a better take on high blood-pressure than Healthline, or WebMd.
Medical men, it seems, are interested in turtle blood, because turtles don’t suffer from arteriosclerosis in old age. The doctors are wondering whether there is some special property of turtle blood that prevents the arteries from hardening. It could be, of course. But there is also the possibility that a turtle’s blood vessels stay in nice shape because of the way turtles conduct their lives. Turtles rarely pass up a chance to relax in the sun on a partly submerged log. No two turtles ever lunched together with the idea of promoting anything. No turtle ever went around complaining that there is no profit in book publishing except from the subsidiary rights. Turtles do not work day and night to perfect explosive devices that wipe out Pacific islands and eventually render turtles sterile. Turtles never use the word “implementation” or the phrases “hard core” and “in the last analysis.” No turtle ever rang another turtle back on the phone. In the last analysis, a turtle, although lacking know-how, knows how to live.
A case of self-esteem.
The reason easy women are such good friends with gay men is because they need someone with even lower standards to validate their lifestyle.
Church as an action.
Don't go to church looking to get your mind blown. In the age of the internet you should already be drowning in inspiration. Go to church to love and be loved. Go to encourage and be encouraged, to help and be helped, to make people smile. If the preaching is good but you don't have people, my best advice is to bail on the church sooner than later. A church that’s all preaching and no practice is just YouTube — a fight that YouTube won a decade ago.
Persuasion.
If you want to “get ahead” and have a fun life, don’t appeal to people’s morals. At least not all the time. Appeal to their stomachs, to their wallets, to their fears, their dreams, to their gonads — or, best and cheapest of all, appeal to their vanity.
Reason morally with a good man. Bargain with the average one.
Nothing vs Too Much.
The question of religion vs non-religion is about whether anything matters at all. But of course, once religion is in the picture everything matters too much. Every thought and word and deed you do gets noticed and scrutinized, and once this happens there’s a chance you'll end up paying for it. And the chances are high.
Christianity was supposed to be a go-between here, a cosmic wiping of scoreboards and giving you the best —assuming you accepted the plea deal. Then, when you knew you deserved the worst and got the best, at great expense, you were supposed to pay God back — not because He could break your legs, but because you could break His heart. It would be an act of joy, not fear.
Still, Paul shows too much anxiety for a man given a free gift. He says “if I win the prize,” “if I am found worthy,” “if I persevere until the end” — the sound of a man who still has something to lose. The question is, what?
Emerson in focus.
Emerson is the French impressionist of ideas. He gives you truths unfocused, poetic, slip-shod, half-baked. He could always argue more on the subject, delve into it, refine it; but he moves lazily, casually instead: he drops a half-finished piece and moves on to something else. Not anything to build your life on, but to contemplate, to add to, to fill in the blanks with your own mind.
When the act of reflection takes place in the mind, when we look at ourselves in the light of thought, we discover that our life is embosomed in beauty. Behind us, as we go, all things assume pleasing forms, as clouds do far off. Not only things familiar and stale, but even the tragic and terrible are comely as they take their place in the pictures of memory. The river-bank, the weed at the water-side, the old house, the foolish person, however neglected in the passing, have a grace in the past. Even the corpse that has lain in the chambers has added a solemn ornament to the house. The soul will not know either deformity or pain. If in the hours of clear reason we should speak the severest truth, we should say that we had never made a sacrifice. [...]
All loss, all pain, is particular; the universe remains to the heart unhurt. Neither vexations nor calamities abate our trust. No man ever stated his griefs as lightly as he might. Allow for exaggeration in the most patient and sorely ridden hack that ever was driven. For it is only the finite that has wrought and suffered; the infinite lies stretched in smiling repose.
Lots more could be said here, for and against, but Emerson isn’t an engineer with a blueprint or a general with a battle-plan or a camera telling us what is: he’s a painter with a broad-stroked brush. He was meant to be taken half-seriously — and I argue, it’s the only way you can enjoy him.
Another passage that leaves you not thought-out, but thinking:
Truth has not single victories; all things are its organs,—not only dust and stones, but errors and lies. The laws of disease, physicians say, are as beautiful as the laws of health. Our philosophy is affirmative and readily accepts the testimony of negative facts, as every shadow points to the sun. By a divine necessity every fact in nature is constrained to offer its testimony.
Human character evermore publishes itself. The most fugitive deed and word, the mere air of doing a thing, the intimated purpose, expresses character. If you act you show character; if you sit still, if you sleep, you show it. You think because you have spoken nothing when others spoke, and have given no opinion on the times, on the church, on slavery, on marriage, on socialism, on secret societies, on the college, on parties and persons, that your verdict is still expected with curiosity as a reserved wisdom. Far otherwise; your silence answers very loud.
Facade.
Without the privacy of our thoughts we would have no pretensions to goodness. We can be clean to everyone but God.
Whole men and forgotten philosophers.
What’s wrong with the great philosophers? They're always dreaming about people who don't exist. Thomas Hobbes forgot that people could be good. Karl Marx forgot that people in Utopia could be bad. Plato forgot that people like to be free. Adam Smith theorized about a businessman obsessed entirely with business. Ayn Rand forgot that all people do reason, and they tend to come up with varying conclusions.
The philosopher dreams up men and forgets about the man sitting right next to him. And when he views men as they are — a shifting, messy, ignorant, varying animal, saddled with cultures and histories and theories and genes — he loses a theory that makes him easily explainable to college students, and slips into obscurity: a Plutarch, a Chesterton, or a Montaigne. He is too rich to fit into boxes; and thus too big to fit into a textbook.
Going too far.
How far do you go until it’s not worth it? This year a lady ran a marathon, got well ahead of everyone else, and ended up with explosive diarrhea. She had a decision to make. She could pull aside to any number of porta-potties, do the deed, and come in fifth place. Or she could shit herself mid-run and come in first.
She chose the latter, and now she isn’t "the lady who won first place” to a few joggers. She’s "the lady who shat the road” to the whole planet.
Sex in church.
When Paul advised husbands and wives to give themselves to each other freely, or else they’ll “burn with passion,” I take him at face value. What he’s saying is that even amongst the saints, those indwelt and led by God Himself, the instinct to see a woman at work or school or church and want to make her yours, to smell her hair, to rub your nose against hers, to make her laugh and smile and moan — all these things, taking root in the imagination, are chemistry and clockwork: not a question of sin or devotion, but valves and pressure releases. And they show up whether you’re married or not, and whether for your wife or for somebody else’s. As Franklin says, a marriage without love will lead to love without marriage.
According to the Sermon on the Mount, this mindset of loving and wanting to be loved in itself constitutes adultery, and should make every Christian so humble that he’s incapable of judging anyone else. But this isn’t the way things turned out, and Christianity was summarily divided into two camps: those who believe Christians are scoundrels saved by grace, and those who believe Christians are indwelt by God and cleaner than the heathens.
One of these camps is fun, and free, and eternally thankful for the greatest gift ever given. The other one lies constantly, is hypocritical, paralyzed intellectually by cognitive dissonance, unhappy deep-down, worried about his salvation, and ready to lash out. His preaching isn’t a hand-up but a smack-down.
Judgment Day.
The day you meet your Creator is either the best day of your life or the worst. There is no in-between.
What I really want to do is this.
I want to go back in time.
I want to go back in time to meet somebody like Lord Byron.
I want to tell him that in two hundred years almost nobody will care about poetry but black people;
and that black people will use it to insult each other's moms in front of large crowds;
and whoever insults the other person's mom the best wins a prize.
I'll tell him that we harnessed the lightning and had the lightning make whatever we want appear in our houses,
and people use it to look at these insults and the rest of the time for naked women.
I'll tell him nobody can understand what he wrote
because everybody in the future is stupid;
but nobody quite as stupid as his mom.
The worst haircut.
Imagine thinking the God of the universe made every explosive sunset, every beautiful woman, and the sounds of frogs and crickets in a summer evening and then telling everybody the Jewish sidelocks are his favorite haircut.
A collision between Ghana and Walmart.
Imagine your people's traditional dress is the muu-muu and finding out that another race only wears it when they're 300 lbs and riding an electric scooter through the poor people store.
Man haters and those hated by men.
Women who don't like men aren't smart enough to understand us. It isn't that everything about men is lovable. It's that if women understood us they would know how to manipulate us — and when they know the right things to say, how to flatter us, how to charm us, they usually do. And the outcome of the manipulation is love: first from us to them, and then from them to us.
Empty and full.
If you focus on yourself, you become anxious, fickle, and needy. If you focus on God you’re abundant.
A holy lie.
Paul said to obey the government, for rulers hold no terror for those who do right, but for those who do wrong. Do you want to be free from fear of the one in authority? Then do what is right and you will be commended — the most generous statement about government by anybody outside the government, and a total about-face to Samuel’s warning about kings (1 Samuel 8:10-18).
There’s one major objection to this passage, and it's nothing less than the persecution and death of Jesus and the Apostles — Paul himself included, after a betrayal by a public official.
Thus if you believe in Paul, the Bible requires lying. You have to look at someone with a straight face and quote Paul without irony. But if you believe in God, you can see Paul as a man — that he knew Pontius Pilate was reasonable and the Jews still drove him to murder; that Romans believed in The Rule of Law and also in a fair appeal; and that Romans, further, both liberal and pagan, could swallow almost any religion. Most of all you can believe he'd know what evidence is — that his letter could be read in public, and eventually used for or against the church in a court of law. So he fudged a big fact.
But if you believe Paul is speaking for God in the letter, you have to say something crazy with a straight face, and worse: you have to shame anyone on your team who doesn't believe it.
Topsy-turvy.
“I'm a Christian because I love Christ."
"I'm a Christian because Christ loves me.”
A phrasing which puts the universe right-side-up or upside down.
The one-issue voter.
They say men have a one-track mind; but have you ever met a woman who doesn’t know the election is bigger than her vagina?
When your eyes are a nose.
Why do I hate Charles Bukowski’s books, and give up on them so quickly? Because I can smell them. They reek of piled-up dishes with old lasagna and hamburger helper stuck to them for days; the toilets that haven't been cleaned in months and have 30 layers of dried piss caked on; the cigarrette butts in full ash trays; the carpets glued to and stained by God-knows-what; the rotten couches; the empty bottles and reeking cans burying the tables; the total lack of color coordination or feng shui; the stupid posters and ugly cockeyed lamps; the mangled blinds; the complete disregard for sweeping, for mopping, for fresh air; the stale pizza in oil-spotted boxes; the shit left willy-nilly by a matted dog; the stench of dirty clothes and stained sheets and spilled beer.
I have a friend who says, with drugs, you get to go to hell before you die. Bukowski chose booze and whores and I don’t know if they were any kinder. His words smell like a crack-house.
Yours,
-J