Bury your taboo, before it finds you

I’ve got a morbid fascination for all of the darker human behaviors in life. I call it morbid, because most of the time your dinner conversation can’t be about the most brutal murder you’ve ever heard about. You see we’re taught (in Western culture) to be polite as much as possible even if it goes towards the point of being a little fake. Rather be more polite and honest, and this is what leads up to the road of most treacherous religions. Bury the social taboo, and then maybe people will find you more believable. Seal those dead bodies in a heavy layer of rituals, prayers, social events (and if you’re especially lucky) a book that tells you what’s the right way to do things, just in case you have your OWN ideas.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back to the bodies, before I’m ranting on about religion again. I was watching a program on women killers. Again…here’s something we all tend to ignore. Ever since Women’s Rights have seemed to mean something, most of the time we only think of men as strong and sophisticated killers. Some of us are even hesitant to mention that women might have a dark side, because then we’ve become chauvinist (or gender-specific, depending on how politically correct you’re feeling at the time). I came to learn that many killers (male and female, although I was watching a show on so we’ll keep them in the hot seat for the time being) are victims of childhood abuse.

You have to have a sense of brokenness inside of yourself to be able to burn up other children and family members with little remorse. So if you ever decide to study serial killers you’ll pick up that down the line they suffered a period of physical (and often sexual) abuse. Whether it was some uncle who liked to do some molesting on the side; or a husband who liked to get drunk and pummel his wife to pieces. Both stir up a gut reaction in me…because I’m always voting for the underdog. What I’ve also come to learn about many killers is that the key motives are often power, jealousy, revenge, and greed. I said ‘power’ first because I think that it’s the primary influence to torture someone else’s way of life. You do this normally because you feel jealous about something, and you get a release doing it (which could be seen as greed or revenge.) Relying on more specific results of the case would give us an idea of which is more relevant.

There’s a very strange need in people to crush the tormentors that brought them so much psychological harm. I was a victim of bullying as a child and I even though there have been a few years of therapy between all of it, I still have a very human fantasy of standing over someone who gave me a very raw deal, and watching them squirm. If you do decide to partake this as a hobby, you simple have to consider how much squirming you want the people to do. Let’s not forget to have to weigh up how much the squirming will effects you, and if you want to see more people squirm under your hands. I admit that I’m being a bit vague, but I don’t want to delve into unnecessary psycho babble about death when I don’t need to…

Going back to the power issue, I find it incredible the lengths people go to watch others squirm. I forget the name now, but I remember that there was a woman in Ohio in the early 1920’s that went about poisoning her whole family with arsenic. The criminal profiler that was interviewed mentioned that the killer today might have been diagnosed with bipolar disorder today, but then psychology was hardly available to the general public, since the quacks of the time were still learning new things in psychology and psychiatry.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

So we have this housewife who was abused as a child, and then went straight into a abusive relationship with a husband. He obviously took advantage of her mental illness and beat her up, time and time again. After his death, she goes to the pharmacy, and buys arsenic to plant in everyone’s food during a family get together. She manages to kill off one of her relatives, and then make the rest violently sick. After that she takes up a very clever strategy of nursing some of her family back to health, while at the same time, slipping them poison in their food.

Apparently arsenic can either be administered immediately in a large quantity, or be done over time, so that eventually it accumulates in the system and makes the body shutdown. I can’t think how much more fucked in the head you have to be, to sit next to your dying relatives and ensure their death. To my knowledge…she ended up killing off around a dozen of her family members. Eventually she ended up being sent off to a reformatory for women, where apparently she was a great deal happier. I think real life got too complicated for her, and especially with the condition she was in…it made her feel trapped. Being in a prison-type place I think showed her a certain amount of respect that she was looking for. After she was released at the age of 79, she went back to the prison the next day, because she was terrified of the outside world, and what it’d do to her.

It’s a harrowing story, and I’ll be sure to look up the name of this woman, when I get the chance. The point I wanted to make is that most of the time we react in a violent way because we’ve buried ourselves in a taboo (or our own system of lies). It’s often very difficult to wriggle free from it, because you’re sowing your own behavior into yourself. People react when they are challenged by something they haven’t talked about in a while (for a very good reason). So if you want to avoid the urge of killing people make sure you a) have a shrink b) are prepared to think for yourself and to forgive and c) you don’t take yourself seriously as a result.

Otherwise there much just be a bigger body count on CNN sometime soon

PhilosopherPoet

Renting identity, just for tonight…

Tonight was one of those nights. My book became too boring, and my conjuring of dreams turned to smoke. Drinking anything made me end up in the bathroom, pissing it all out again, and then ending up (back on the bowl) with more racing thoughts. So I decided to crawl towards the all familiar nodules of my keyboard, and begin to type out and idea that had been troubling me for a while. You see the thing was…a while ago at college, there was a competition to write a poem on the theme ‘identity’. I’m (by nature) reasonably prolific, and so just handed in one of my older poems that needed little oil and elbow grease to be presentable. This theme of identity still raced around my head and I thought that I had to do it enough justice, and make the topic pinned down and conquered (in my own head).

So I took the word identity. It was eight characters long, and had four syllables. You may ask why this is at all important, and the reason is that for a change I wanted to try building more of a puzzle than a poem. I took the word further and broke it up into i/dent/ity. Still not satisfied, I decided to turn the ‘ity’ into a word and then end up denting whatever the ity-word happened to be.

Sometimes I think writers need to feel more relaxed and loose with words. If you are restricted by too many rules, then your creativity is blocked, because you’re scared of making a mistake. This is part of the reason e.e. cummings is such a massive success, he is today. In his era everything was strict and formal, like having a whole crowd of parents around you telling you how to eat (except they were critics). He threw his hands in the air (metaphorically, of course) and decided to write without using any grammar. He was young and wild at heart and decided to run with the creativity rather than the fear of messing up.

That’s what we’re told in school, isn’t it? We first learn to write, and then to write in cursive and keep it neat and tidy. Even when we color in, we’re taught to stick to the borders and be good little boys and girls. Well by the time the freedom of varsity grabs you and your big ideas, everything that HAS rules seems rather infantile now, and you decide to squash it. So the piece you are about to see it partly about experimenting, but then also about being honest. This is another trap that artist’s fall into, IMO. They’re scared of showing what they really feel and want to say… because if they do, they’ll have society cursing them.

 

That’s another WHOLE topic all on its own, so it’ll just give you the poem instead

 

 

PhilosopherPoet

 

 

identity

 

i dent (p)ity

and the morosembrace

crawling over

our bones

 

i dent (gratu)ity

the feel that

comes once

you’ve given your

beggar his coin

and a bin to lie in

 

i dent (the sh)itty

cigarettes that crawl

out of her mouth like

burnt worms.

i told her

once to stop

this habit of

collecting smoke.

 

i dent (tranquil)ity

with my morning

fart, my wife leaps

out the bed like

burnt toast.

 

i dent (deform)ity

when i shave

the morning after

the stag. i carve

up the face

i use to have

 

i dent (moral)ity

because god is dead

last time i looked,

and remembered

to check my

religious opinion.

 

i dent (char)ity

with a furtive shout

i gave an old man

who should have quit

trying to help

 

i dent (formal)ity

because i’m an ass.

i can’t chat at

supper, or mutter

at weddings,

button my shirt, or

clean out

my psychopath.

 

i dent (proxim)ity

i draw borders

you won’t always

find.

i listen to voices

tucked behind

 

our pseudonyms.

Book Dilemma

This morning was one of those mornings (for me), where you find yourself lying in bed for an extra five minutes meaninglessly listening to the radio. You wait for the guilt of wasting time in bed instead of doing the morning chores, to override your current impulse of listening to more news. Eventually half of me decided it was time to get out of bed, this time it was the heavier half. So I managed without oversleeping. I did my morning ritual of staring dumbly into the depths of my bookshelf, for not particularly reason at all, other than that I seemed to be doing the same thing every other morning.

The First Copy of the book I bought

 

Still half asleep, and feeling lazier than most days, something on my bookshelf jolted me to a sudden and frightening freshness. I have two copies of the same book! I’m a Don DeLillo fan at the moment, and I realized that I’d bought two copies of the book Falling Man. This was on two different occasions, and the two books I had had different covers. The first time it was when I was at a book sale on a leisurely weekend stroll through the mall. The second was when I was in a rush buying groceries. All my brain registered at the time was the Author’s name, and the fact that I hadn’t seen this cover before. Both are still in good condition, so I came up with a cunning plan. The book with the most attractive cover (the second one in this case) will be my personal copy. I’ll read this in due course and then rave about the book to my friends and lend out the other copy, to further promote literacy. This way I can not worry about my favorite books being lost to the terrible clutches on friends.

This is the Second Copy I bought. The image above is of an audio tape, by the background image is the same as what I landed up with.

 

This experience has haunted me previously. It’s ironic that your most favorite books you end up recommending always get lost in the clutches of some long-lost friend you can’t find on facebook anymore. Sigh…anyway I’ve decided now that I’m going to draw up an inventory of all of my media. This would be books, films, music…and so on. I think I need to start keeping up to date with discs that go missing. The handy thing about music, is if I recommend an album, I’ll download it…and then make a copy for a friend or two. Alternatively if I do happen to buy the original, I’ll still make a copy of the disc for a friend. It’s logical and sensible. Unfortunately I don’t have a pocket printing press I can slap on the counter, and run off a few extra copies.

 

PhilosopherPoet

Where is my sword?

Over the weekend, I came to this realization by watching a BBC documentary on Ancient Rome, and then the classic movie 300 (for the umpteenth time). I’ve always been fascinated with the Roman Era. The reason is it’s a period of history that seems so close to our own. Okay, nowadays we’re not exactly watching people get thrown to the lions…and to me it was the birth of thinking. They tried to be as civilized as possible, and in doing so brought forward many ideas, theories and religions that would later be boosted a couple hundred years later in the Renaissance.

Call me the historian now…but think about it, if the Roman Empire didn’t exist (this includes all the thinkers, philosophers, scientists, scholars, and activists of that period) would there still be a Renaissance? Many say that the 1600-1700s was a time of rebirth in knowledge, although it was more an uncovering of past ideas and thinking. This is not to say that there weren’t new discoveries, but I see the Renaissance as a whole lot of people stopping themselves and saying, “Holy crap, there’s so much to build on in the past! We better get started and make the most out of our generation…”

Moving on, I think that we a lot to thank the Roman’s for. They were ahead of their time. Okay, they didn’t exactly have the internet, automobiles, and a Starbucks around every corner, but they did begin what the rest of mankind would continue to build on. The only regret (I have) of the Roman rule, was the institutionalization of Christianity with Emperor Constantinople, deciding that slaying a few pagans in the name of God…isn’t such a bad idea.

(Anyway, I won’t get started on that train of thought just yet.) For those who are interested the documentary I mentioned, it’s called BBC: The Rise and Fall on the Roman Empire.

If you’re into history…I highly recommend it!

 

PhilosopherPoet

Thoughts on Blogs

I was reading a really interesting book today. It was on Blogs…although not written by a blogger. If I remember correctly, it was called Ultimate Blogging. It was an analysis of blogs, written by a woman who is a fan of them. It went on to say that according to Technorati.com there are about 80 million blogs out there, 16.6 million of which are active. I was stumped by this statistic…that’s a huge…to think that there are that many people ranting, discussing, researching, advertising, and publishing on such a wide scale!

When I’ve certainly got the blogging gene, at the same time it’s not for everyone. Some journalists still admit that they haven’t got the hang of the blog format. Anyway I find it a wonderful escape, and opportunity to voice what I think and feel to whoever may be listening. Also, it’s a form of publishing, that can sometimes give opinionated people the chance to blow off steam.

 

Why would I recommend it?

It’s a form of online sharing, and expression. I know that if you are a writer (of any kind), blogging will help you become braver and also grow your writing. I’ve always been lazy to keep a journal…I did it out of diligence for a while in school…but nowadays I just can’t. If I need to talk through my problems, I’ll go to a therapist, and sort it out there. Blogging gives me motivation to go and explore more blogs (and ideas) that distribute it to the masses. I also have the habit of posting links that readers may find interesting. Technically this isn’t adding anything back into the blogosphere, but my opinion is that if I’ve found something interesting…there’ll be someone else who also does.

Again, I’m blogging about blogging…just in case someone out there may find it. So long Writers and Blog-o-maniacs!

PhilosopherPoet

The cell phone is your sword

A few days ago I was catching up on World News, and noticed that The Pirate Bay (a torrent, file-sharing site) were taken to court. It’s not the first time. At the moment I’m hazy with dates because I don’t have the facts in front of me. I do remember that about a year or so back they were taken to court and the charges were dropped.

Alongside this headline I read another which intrigued me further. This one spoke of court verdicts being released via technology (with the help of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.) Even TPB (The Pirate Bay) owners, were voicing their thoughts over the ‘invisible’ wires. So where does this leave our Justice System, and Government system? It is being overwhelmed by technology, not only that…people are bursting with information.

Back in the day someone who was really opinionated would become a witty Columnist in the local paper. Now (due to the evolution of technology as well as the Internet) everyone is entitled to speak their minds. In fact it’s more extreme than that…we’re all encouraged and goaded into sharing our daily/hourly thoughts with whomever trawls across the Cyber River at that certain moment.

With that said, it’s clear that we need to rethink our ways of handling public opinion. We are a growing-cyber-interactive-innovative-zesty culture. It’s the era of Post Modernism, not only that…but also a terrifying feeling that we can never hold everything in our hands. The main thing is that we learn how to swim in the stream of society, and with time, learn the river.

For some I may be sounding incredibly cryptic, and overly-philosophical. Let me put it this way in a question…Should we be reading more status updates than news headlines? Doesn’t this hamper our decision-making? Why should we let collaborative, interactive, blogging or Twitter-ing affect us? If you are deeply involved in social networking, it means you are actually living in a part of your head…not the internet. Although I’m not denying that it isn’t useful for people to network, start up businesses, form relationships, etc. It’s keeping your head in the sand (internet) and not on the outside world.

Not to mention if you are an artist of some kind, staying online means you could be missing eye-catching, every day experiences. I can also be accused of this because of the amount of time I spend typing and using a computer. I try to remind myself, that there’s no harm in stretching your legs once in a while.

 

PhilosopherPoet

Killing several cats at once

There are many reasons why I listen to heavy metal, one of them is because I love extremes and contradictions. If you think about it you probably don’t get a music genre out there that best supports these two claims. Is there another genre that talks about murder, mutilations, killings, Satanism, beheadings, rape, torture and plenty of blood? The point is it’s done by perfectly human and friendly guys, who’ll go home to their families, their children, and become civilized. (Some even go to church – i.e. the Christian metalheads in this case).

I still battle (with myself) trying to understand why I listen to a bunch of long-haired, tattoo-engraved, piercing-enhanced men that try to act as evil as possible. In a weird kind of way…it all makes perfect sense when I listen to it. Most people (than are more sane) can’t bare the thought of listening to guitars brutalized through a distortion system, or listening to deep growls, and blood-curdling screams.

Musically it has as much significance as kicking a cat (tied to a chimpanzee and a cow) down a flight of stairs. You might as well be listening to a donkey having an orgasm, with some background Aborigine beating a drum to give a sense of rhythm.

It’s musical chaos that combines misfits, drug addicts, computer nerds, business-people, accountants, barmen, waiters, and let’s not forget other angry people in general. Despite the confusion some see in this genre, longtime metalheads will tell you there’s little confusion with liking this type of music. It’s just preference. Why do some people enjoy music other people don’t? Well…simply because we’ve all got different ideas and opinions running around our heads.

Nothing is certain, and none of us are the same. We are all bound by our own experiences and feelings, and therefore we’ll choose the subculture that allows us to feel recognized for our inner foibles.

So what I’m really saying as I reach the end of my ramble about the universe is…rrraawwwwrrrr!

Mettttaaaallll!

 

PhilosopherPoet

The confession of a chaos addict

It is overcast today. The clouds are looking too depressed for their own good. The smell of rain is in the air. When this happens my Englishness seems to give an excited whoop, on the inside. It’s hard to explain to some people that bad weather is actually a delight. Maybe is because bad weather is more of an event. Think about it went the clouds gather up together like some depressed emos, it tells you one thing…shit is going to happen. There will be rain, or thunder/lightning, road accidents, and soaked pedestrians.

We’re chaos-based people. Call me a pessimist, but are the good things really meaningful to us, or are we actually taking a breather until we have to face more chaos again? Chaos is a limited word, and in this case slightly crude. I’ll stick with it though. I’ll give an example to support my claim.

Jim and Sarah are going through a rough patch. This is because Sarah suspects her husband is cheating on someone else. She is pregnant, and at this stage is limited to staying at home and doing all the house work. It’s not an ideal situation. Jim tries to spend more time at work than usual, because Sarah is emotional unstable, and easily angered.

So now (as usual) everyone is in one big melting pot of chaos. This couple may end up with a divorce and finding their own direction, or they may pull themselves together and talk things through. There are never two sides to the coin, especially when you’ve got a relationship to deal with. This may be all and well, but what is my point? Are we inherently bad people because of this? Not at all…

Allow me to euphemize the word ‘chaos’ and instead we are system-based people. We are controlled by systems most of the time. We have responsibilities, jobs, relationships, because they make our lives more meaningful. At the same time we can’t escape the systems we’re in. It’s a default that life throws at us. I’ll elaborate…

Just like Plato’s analogy of the cave, the Systems are what we start off with. Just like everyone begins in the cave, everyone is born into systems. It’s inescapable. This doesn’t mean though that we are out of our control. I believe that the only way we can make enjoy our existence, is to learn the Systems. Eventually once we’ve spent many years of thinking, we’ll get the systems to work for us. The greatest achievement in life is to have the Systems compliment and enrich our lives, rather than control and dominate us.

Comments Welcome

PhilosopherPoet

The World is Dead (Horror is Born)

Haven’t you noticed? I suppose this is what happens when you spend your evenings watching horror movies, rather than be a normal person and get out to a date, or the pub. Anyway, I sometimes find they are the best entertainment we still have around. I was watching the classic, Dawn of the Dead. Wow, what a film! I don’t care how unrealistic and absurd it really is…the whole point of undead people ripping up a handful of living ones…somehow excites me.

I mostly avoid explaining my fascination with death to people. The reason why is a) it doesn’t make for such a good dinner conversation and b) people will think I’m cuckoo and will probably give me some pills rather than some freedom to talk. Putting my personal issues aside I started thinking about why we create these creatures…

Why was horror born? Well like anything there are a number of reasons behind it. One of them is that it is a reaction to the norms of society. Horror started way back in the Victorian Era with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. This was a significant leap into the genre as we know it. The Victorian’s took Christianity very seriously. Woman had to be covered up, and children were best seen and not heard. Think of your grandparents going Amish, and then you’ve got the right idea. Moving on into the Early 1900s books are still highly regarded…but a new medium in film is developing…cinema.

When the Roaring Twenties hit America, it was a sort of Media Renaissance. Society was starting to open its eyes. Women got far braver by wearing shorter skirts, smoking in public, drinking in public, and attending events without a chaperone. It all sounds pretty innocent to us. Although tell any Victorian to wear a knee-high dress and whip out a cigarette, and she’d probably tell you to sod off.

Everyone was trying to forget all the business of WWI, and so the Western world was living it up. Cinema happened to be an indication of the evolution of entertainment when the silent film appeared in the late 1920s (if my memory serves me). So now people are getting bored with books, and want a new medium to give the audience. Movies were born on pretty primitive technology, but that didn’t stop anyone. All of a sudden theaters were for the old folks, and cinema became a rage.

Ticket after ticket were sold all around Europe and America. After WWI Europe was still limping after the war, so America had the resources to hone this newly found craft. By the time WWII struck in the forties, black and white films were going strong. Media was now reaching the masses. Any person could pay for a movie ticket, and go and sit in a cinema, not to mention it was a helluva experience seeing character’s expressions 100x closer than in reality.

I’m skimming over the topic of Cinema pretty briefly simply because there is so much in it. Anyway, to make a long story short, after the sixties Horror really came to the Media’s attention. Special effects were developing at a massive rate. By the time the eighties came along this was not only the rise of Horror, but also the darker side of Heavy Metal. I would be lying if I said that this is when this music genre really started, but it’s certainly where things began to kick off. Also all media is interlinked, and compliments each other, so we can’t deny music not playing a role.

So I obviously am aware that the world isn’t dead. Although I think when I lay my head down at night…my mind may take some convincing. All I need to do is pray they don’t eat me, and move on to someone else.

 

Later Bloggers

PhilosopherPoet

BoSD…One error you don’t want to see!

The Blue Screen of Death, or known as a STOP error is the last thing any user wants to see. For the unenlightened I simply talking about when your computer stops working and sooner or later you see a big blue screen pop up with an error script. It usually starts with about five to six zeros and turns into gibberish as it progresses. Below I’ve shown what this all looks like:

Anyway, most people will simply sigh and go and take it into the nearest computer repair shop. Then there are those of us who are just not satisfied to leave it at that, and want to fix the damn thing our self! So here is how you’d go about it. The following information was taken from this link: http://pcsupport.about.com/od/fixtheproblem/ht/stoperrors Hopefully you’ll also find it useful if you are technologically inclined.

1. The most important STOP error troubleshooting step you can take is to ask yourself what you just did.

Did you just install a new program or a piece of hardware, update a driver, install an update, etc.? If so, there’s a very good chance that the change you made caused the STOP error.

Undo the change you made and test for the blue screen. Depending on what change you made, some solutions might include:

1. • Startup with Last Known Good Configuration to undo recent registry and driver changes.
   • Use System Restore to undo recent system changes.
   • Rollback device driver to version prior to your driver update.
2. Verify that a minimum amount of free space is available on your Windows partition. STOP messages and other serious issues, like data corruption, can occur if there’s not enough free space on your primary partition used for the Windows operating system.

I recommend that you maintain at least 200MB of free space.

Scan your computer for viruses. Some viruses can cause STOP errors, especially ones that infect the master boot record (MBR) or boot sector.

Important: Make sure your virus scanning software is completely up to date and that it’s configured to scan the MBR and boot sector.

1. Apply all available Windows service packs and other updates. Microsoft regularly releases patches and service packs for their operating systems that may contain fixes for the cause of your STOP error.
2. Update drivers for your hardware. Most STOP messages are hardware and driver related so updated drivers could fix the cause of the STOP error.
3. Check the System and Application logs in Event Viewer for errors or warnings that might provide more clues on the cause of the STOP error.
4. Return hardware settings to default in Device Manager. Unless you have a specific reason to do so, the system resources that an individual piece of hardware is configured to use in Device Manager should be set to default. Non-default hardware settings have been known to cause STOP errors.
5. Return BIOS settings to their default levels. An overclocked or misconfigured BIOS can cause all sorts of random issues, including STOP errors.

Note: If you’ve made several customizations to your BIOS settings and don’t wish to load the default ones then at least try returning clock speed, voltage settings, and BIOS memory options to their default settings and see if that fixes the STOP error.

1. Update your BIOS. In some situations, and outdated BIOS could cause a STOP error due to certain incompatibilities.
2. Make sure all internal cables, cards, and other components are installed and seated properly. Hardware that’s not firmly in place can cause a STOP error so try reseating the following and then test for the STOP message again:
   • Reseat the internal cables
   • Reseat the memory modules
   • Reseat the video card
   • Reseat other expansion cards
3. Perform diagnostic tests on all hardware you’re able to test. It’s highly likely that the root cause of any given STOP error is a failing piece of hardware:
   • Test your system memory
   • Test your hard disk drive
   • Test your CPU
4. Start your PC with essential hardware only. A useful troubleshooting step in many situations, including STOP errors, is to start your computer with the minimum hardware necessary to run the operating system. If your computer starts successfully it proves that one of the removed hardware devices was the cause of the STOP message.

Hope this comes in handy to some frustrated users! If there are those of you who are even more geeky and are interested in the error codes themselves, here’s a list of STOP codes you can download: bsod error code list

PhilosopherPoet