OMG!

Settle down and watch-

http://www.filmsforaction.org/Watch/The_Yes_Men_Fix_The_World_2009/

If it wasn’t obvious before let me reiterate ‘Psychotic Group Delusion’ or ‘Group Think’ as the CIA term it is rife in government, commerce and the media. It’s never been better exposed than here. What passes as corporate professionalism is a spurious delusion that otherwise sane and cogent men and women are weaned onto in the process of achieving their position. Once there their exclusive entry into their particular sphere of governance ensures the purveyance of their delusion as truth. Anyway just watch.

It’s So Unfair.

So I’m reading this ‘Conversations with God’ book and finding it full of omniscient authority that one might expect from an archangel. We’re all entities in clusters in the process of working our own way to omniscience through many lifetimes. I like it as a long view but am quite occupied with the one in hand. As almost an aside whilst talking about sex and how scrummy and beneficial it is and that it’s to be enjoyed wherever the fruit is hanging as it were God drops in that entities must serve many lifetimes as a male before progressing to one’s female lifetimes. That’s like, well in my terms, that’s like a promotion! Well that’s a slap in the face! I mean Christians refer to God as ‘he’ right so what’s going on. I feel stabbed in the back, a victim of son-icide. Chief hom casting his brothers aside as mere apprentice females. That can’t be right. After I calmed down I have to admit there’s a certain ring to it. I mean OK some females aren’t making a great job of it but as a whole, as it were, no smutty illusion intended, they appear connected to a strand of whimmery unavailable to us males. They can glimpse the bigger picture, which truth be told often confuses them, whereas males are content with 35mm slides of mere details that we blow up to immense proportions in order to prove our importance. Yet somehow we have to admit we are the seed drill and they are the field, we’re the moth and..etc. Oh and we’re the muscle and they’re the mouth. Perhaps that’s why while Mouthermouse is away I’ll be having a pint with Suzy on Friday, dancing with Sarah and an assortment of women on Monday, seeing Julie and Suzy for a candle light chat Wednesday, meeting up with Jenny when I can arrange it and hopefully seeing Pam some time and a catch up with Linda. Haven’t seen Linda in ages. I mean I do have male friends but it’s all ‘have you seen my slides?’ and anyway from my industrial experience it’s always a good idea to fraternise with the managers

It’s Kinda Obvious.

Big weekend in British Super Bikes, the showdown where the BSB championship is won or lost. It’s OK this isn’t about pistons.
Two monkeys in an experiment. Man gives both a slice of cucumber, both happy, man gives one cucumber and the other a grape, monkey throws cucumber back at man in disgust. Sound familiar? Oh and the other monkey happily eats the grape. It seems primates have a sense of fairness or to be more precise unfairness. We’re happy to get the grape and pissed off to get the cucumber. This leads to two effects. One, get the grape, and two, retaliate if you don’t. This explains the whole of human history. When all else changes these two themes are constant providing through the centuries the rich, the poor and conflict. From hunter/gatherers to industrial farming, tribes to states, wooden clubs to missiles we appear to have a Caligula complex. To us being either happy to get or pissed off to not get seem the obvious two sides of the same coin, but is that just a quirk of our primate brain? Other animals try to get because they need to survive, but once it’s been decided who’s got the morsel the other just turns to their own preoccupation of getting something else. Try the same experiment with squirrels and you’d get a different result. So we have these two constants throughout the whole of human history, i.e. they’re not about to change soon. But what has changed and continues to is our capacity to get more grapes and to retaliate. The rich have the potential to unbalance world economies and war has the potential to destroy it. It seems only a matter of time before our innate primate sense of unfairness destroys us. While we piddle about with our petty righteous considerations we overlook this deviant primate drive and its repercussions. Back to BSB. On the slow down lap the winner and loser stopped to give each other a hug of mutual affirmation. The winner when asked about riding with the pain of an earlier injury said, “I’m on a real high right now, you could kick me in the nuts and I wouldn’t feel it.” You don’t get that in Formula 1.

Toasters.

George Gideon Oliver Osborne hasn’t a clue. Let me explain in terms of toasters. The UK has say a billion toaster right, enough for all, but a small percentage of the population figure out a way of getting more and more. They stashed them in every available cupboard and cellar, in the attic and loads in the garage and next-doors as well because he’s got a driving ban and his wife went off with her therapist. Anyway over time these few cornered the market in toasters so much so that more and more people had to go without toast and toasted teacakes, which is my favourite. And scones as it happens. So to bridge the toaster deficit George Gideon Oliver Osborne took toasters from the poor arguing they can’t afford bread anyway. He took a few from the stashers but not too many because he didn’t want them leaving the country and take their toasters with them, then we’d really be in trouble. Well the stasher kept stashing and the toaster gap got ever wider. Then one day he hit on an idea. All he had to do was borrow the toasters from the few stashers. He wouldn’t take them like a toaster tax but let them keep ownership whilst distributing their excess toasters to the rest of us so we could all have toast again. They could hold say a thousand, which is enough for any man, and the rest would go into the government toaster bank. They wouldn’t be very happy but they still owned all their toasters, and it’s unlikely they’d leave the country without them. This allowed George Gideon Oliver Osborne to stop borrowing toasters on the open market and still have enough to cover the UK’s needs. And the stashers would only get paid for lending their toasters on the basis of how well the country as a whole was doing which focused their minds on all of us not just their own toaster fetish. 

Learn to Churn.

Tomorrow Mothermouse is going back in time to a land of wooden houses and picket fences, sheep and dairy farms, where even the Earth is still erupting like a youthful cheek: New Zeeland. I will be ever grateful to our NZ ski chalet rep for mercilessly taking the piss out of my pompous English cohort. Skiing is a recreational sport not a sign that one’s antecedents lived in Downton Abbey. Anyway being on my own for three weeks I will turn to music. I decide to internet shop for a new USB audio interface for use with my DAW. A DAW is a computer program that lets one record and manipulate a multitude of audio channels, add reverb, chorus, cut and paste, auto-tune, etc and add anything from a drum track to a full orchestra via a synth controlled by MIDI. So far so much the ultimate creative tool, at least so goes the blurb. Unfortunately this ultimately creative tool is so desirable it seduces even the moderately creative to use it, not to mention those that can’t even use a spoon imaginatively. As a result a pop record can be made in twenty minutes by cutting and pasting a 4:4 bar a hundred times, gargling over it and auto-tuning the result to resemble Three Blind Mice. Add a mildly pornographic video and rap section by a black person using a preschool rhyming dictionary and ca-ching. If only I were a digitised automaton I might enjoy it. But I’m not. Or said equipment used by a twenty something bemoaning the fact he’s still in nappies or is in, out, lost, found, over or under love, a word he has yet to define adequately. I’m not that either. So I sit with my guitar wondering what the hell I’m supposed to do with it now that music has been wormed to the core. It reminds we of meeting a newspaper writer who on asking said he was a ‘churnalist.’ That about sums it up.

The Answer is Now

Many roads have been leading me towards spontaneity recently, not me being good at it but trying to grasp what it is, what it looks and feels like. A little snippet from a book, Conversations with God, the big G saying, “The point I’m trying to make is that when you come to each moment cleanly, without previous thought about it, you can create who you are, rather than re-enact who you once were. Life is a process of creation, and you keep living it as if it were a process of re-enactment.” In Five Rhythms I’m reminded of riding a playful wave of creative choreography, shaping and reshaping in what feels like perfection, on X Factor when Nicole Shertsinger’s face flashed through three discrete expressions in less than a second, and Jessie J singing Domino. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FrLNwNg6n9k  Though well practiced and highly skilled she’s not performing through thought but being in the uncomplicated momentary joy of a three-year-old. To quote the book again, “Remember you pre-sent this moment (the ‘present’ moment) to your Self because it contains the seed of a tremendous truth”, and by thought I preclude myself from seeing that truth. I’m reminded of Csíkszentmihályi’s observations of ‘Flow’, of the super speed of eye cues in NLP, that so much happens before my clunky thoughts, abstractions, expectations and judgments kick in. So how to get there? Alcohol does it after a fashion but badly, and thinking and learning about it conceptually only gives rise to further conceptualisation or worse creating a cognitive equivalent. My few glimpses of it reveal it to be simply ‘perfect play’, or to make it personal, my perfect self at play. Our problem seems to be that when we achieve it it’s so perfect we tend to overlook it and only notice the ‘fault’ that kicks us back into the ordinary. It’s nice to know the next most popular thing on the internet after porn is cats. Now they do know a thing or two about spontaneity.

Bugger!

As my recent sojourn into hyper domesticity nears its end and Mothermouse is able to donk around the house like Marley’s ghost rather than the heavy thud of an approaching Tyrannosaurus Rex I can look back at multitasking with a balanced view. Men do multitask but under a different heading. We perceive it as multiple overlapping time sub-streams that, by running concurrently with precisely calculated start points, reduce the overall time required for a required set of tasks. For instance when cooking a meal I will note down at the bottom of a sheet of paper the required eating start point above which I write the times required in minutes for each constituent part, peas, chips, sausages etc. then in an adjacent column I calculate their start points relative to the eating start point. I thus place the sausages in the oven at 6.45pm and set a timer for four minutes and then begin the potatoes. I set the timer again for seven minutes to notify me when the peas need to go on and then five minutes, which through the wonder of mathematics equates to the required eating start time. Thusly in the intervening periods I am free to do other things, clean the cat flap, wash up and collect mealtime accoutrements. This isn’t multitasking because I’m only ever doing one thing at a time. Women on the other hand do multitask by considering everything that needs to be done all the time in a frenzy of conflicting necessities. Whilst cooking a similar meal Mothermouse will be considering if the bins need to go out, the cats need water, the two-pound man is getting better, Margaretmouse’s broken metatarsal was indeed less severe than hers and whether to get me a cow onesie for Christmas. (I can’t wait) In a mans world this isn’t true multiple overlapping time sub-streams, it’s frying one’s brain with nonsense that will be done when the time comes and better left to a written list and forgotten about. Yesterday for instance whilst considering nothing more than the job in hand I mended an old watch and set it to the correct time, day of the week, month and phase of the moon, stuck a base on a cup, maintained our electric tin opener and took some rubbish to the tip, which due to government cut is now closed Tuesdays, Wednesdays and Thursdays. Bugger!