March 18, 2003                                                                      © 2003: JAN COX
 
 

Feeling ragged --  head full of anger --  this is when most people feel most alive;
stomach sour  --   emotionally ticked off about this-or-that something --
splenetic scenes and dialogue racing uncontrollably through your mind  --
in such conditions do civilized men feel most vital,
when thought tells the person they have been mistreated,
and have a legitimate complaint;
if starvation is not a threat  --  this is the situation in which men can best feel that
their life has purpose: getting even for the mistreatment,
and rectifying the collateral circumstances.

‘Tis difficult to be fed, civilized, and feeling good AND be satisfied;
if struggling to survive is no longer a reason to get out of bed  --  what is?
The way men most commonly seek purpose to their life is either by
working to acquire wealth, or to improve their social position.
These mortally created challenges pacify to varying degrees the majority of
urbanized humanity; those whom they generally do not, make up the prison population, the priesthood, and keep warm the beds in psychiatric hospitals --
but beyond these obvious outcasts there are a secret few others who also are not adequately challenged or pacified by man’s commonly available,
non essential activities –
these people, rather than trying to change/improve their physical circumstances,
turn to attempting such regarding their inner, intangible ones  --  specifically struggling to explode, and expand their understanding of life, man and their self.

These scattered nervous-system rebels, do they achieve anything,
quickly realize that being angry over non physical matters shuts down all possibility of any meaningful internal movement, or fresh neural experiences;
whilst primed to flee or fight, all animals are at the height of their alertness
and physical vitality, and what such conditions do to a human’s consciousness,
and its thoughts gives ordinary men a sensation of increased psychological alive-ness, but for the mentioned few, this common mortal state bars them from
the exceptional mental one they desire.

Being mad can certainly get people off their asses, waving their arms and tongues,
and speechifying up a storm,
but in the throes of non survival related anger or fear,
a mind cannot get off of itself –
it cannot get free of the overwhelming power of the uncontrollable thoughts that go along with such non physically based aggression.
The few have a choice: you can be angry at the injustices your ordinary thoughts constantly perceive and parade through your mind,
or you can come to realize that such does not constitute thinking,
and then discover what thinking really is  --  or can be  --  for some individuals.

Be pissed, or be investigating pissedness;
be angry for all the right reasons, or be chasing down the truth about reasons,
and about the mind’s preemptive assumption it is the arbitrator of right;
put in rational terms: there is no middle ground;
you feel ragged and soured on you/life/man
(as everyone's nervous-system naturally does from time to time),
or when you feel so, you say: “Fuck it!”   --
the magic code phrase that loosens up a rebel’s muscles and neurons,
and puts you in secret contact with that super special, super hero –
                 More Conscious & Less Common Man  --
who (as you know) will then start mentally communicating to you
the directions necessary to dis-anger and de-confuse yourself.
 

Suffer, suffer, little children --
big old bodies operated by little bitsy children
(in a better reality, such would be against the law, but alas! –
                                      in this one, you gotta police yourself).
 
 

Everybody has a problem --
at any given moment it may be physical, or it may be otherwise;
if it is the former  --  you see a doctor or a mechanic,
if it is the latter --  there is no one to turn to  --
O!  men have created rabbis and psychiatrists for that ostensible purpose, but they simply play a role --  they do not actually DO anything --  they do not solve problems, not in the way dentists  and plumbers do to those of teeth and pipes
through their hands-on work;
there is but one kind of attempted treatment possible for problems which have no tangible reality  --  talk –
which (upon examination) proves appropriate;
incorporeal medicine for incorporeal maladies;
                subtle comfort for subtle dis comfort.
 

Everybody has a problem, and if your immediate one is physical in nature,
something can be done to change the situation;
even if the problem does not, from the sufferer's view, get cured,
there is the possibility of the conditions surrounding it being altered to a degree that will at least render it tolerable and soon forgettable.
Not so with problems on which no human can lay hands;
the problem cannot be cured, nor can circumstances supporting it be
salubriously shifted since they can no more be literally moved than can be
the intangible problem itself    --    but you can talk about it  --
and talking can seem, no, prove...no, seem to...no, prove to...okay, can seem to work --  to at least make the problem seem (to the talker) less important than it was
prior to the talking.

“So!” say the ordinary: “Talking does work!”   --
and in the minds and feeling of ordinary people it certainly does something;
their talking abut a problem can (as per their own assertion)
accomplish something beneficial;
the problem seems lessened in significance and severity by their talking about it.

Indeed, even though the reality remains that  --    talking does nothing,
talk may be the absolute best therapy and treatment in the whole world!  --

Talking may well be the primo treatment for all the singular problems that
come from being  human  --  but only if it leads to a well-grounded,
self-generated and acceptable rationalization for the problem situation;
it requires you achieve the status of: a self-rationalized fatalist:
a conscious practitioner of: fatalism based on eradicating, ad hoc explanations
which you extracted (invented) from the problem's conditions.
 
 

Life one day told this to an acquaintance: "On Earth I have a man who is an automobile mechanic and when customers have trouble describing specifically the problem with their car,
he will ask them to imitate the kind of noise it makes at the troubling moments,
which almost always turns into a quite ridiculously sounding display,
and which he will request that they repeat several times as he appears to be sincerely pondering their slobbery rendition of the illicit racket,
and when another mechanic asked him what it was he learned from these silly episodes he replied: 'Nothing --  I just enjoy watching people make fools of themselves.'" --
the friend seemed puzzled as to life's purpose in relating the tale, so life added:
"Okay, there is no such mechanic  --  that's what I do with all humans and their speech."