I HATE the distraction / word count thing because that’s how my writing progreses, by steps and distractions. It’s my writing style, not necessarily what I choose but I have a life other than writing.
It’s a pretty rich life, I also have several programming projects on the boil, a few hardware projects, a garden to maintain, meals to shop for, garden for, prep for, wash dishes for. I have DIY projects. And I have friends.
So no. I will NOT put writing on a pedestal and worship it as the one and only creative act I’m capable of. That’s the reason I don’t do NaNoWriMo, turning writing into some wanky fetish isn’t where life’s at. I think we lost focus on what life is, at some stage. We’re the shadows left behind by real people in our pasts.
Take my father. He was what I call a real Rennaissance man. Spoke at least eight languages that I can remember, German, Russian, Polish, Hungarian, French, Italian, Englich, Arabic. Knew how to shoot almost minuteman scores. Played musical instruments, sang in a really good baritone, could yodel. Could charm the pants off people, was well-spoken and considerate.
Knew his way around domestic and wild animals, was a passable home vet, doctor, and surgeon that could treat almost any illness that came along and suture a wound, set a break. Reskilled from age 12 onwards, butcher and smallgoodsman, marine, commercial artist, agricultural engineer, powerhouse engine driver, linesman electrician. Raised four children when our mother suicided.
And knew how to be a part of his community.
Compare and contrast with today – whiney little shits who squabble over toilet paper because fuck you Jack as long as I’m all right. Who feel offended if you use any words that make them feel squeamish. Don’t know the meaning of the words sharing, cimmunity, civic pride, or even common sense.
Now when these sorts of things happen in a laboratory population of rats that are well fed but crowded, those rats develop particular behaviours. They break out of their social frameworks, fights and squabbles quickly turn deadly, usually devoted rat mothers abandon litters and go out mating and produce other litters that they then also abandon, they over-eat and eat foods they’d normally not even look at, and even start using proffered drugs that they’d normally have not bothered with. They become unclean and neglect hygiene. Can you see the parallels?
They become dumb and sullen, they no longer hold with community, they in short lose hope. As we as a species did when our population passed through half a billion or so. There may have been some truth to the Georgia Guidestones after all. Remember that those were commissioned and designed by another Rennaissance person, whose identity they unfortunately deliberately withheld and hid.
If we want to survive, we need to do things differently, otherwise our Earthling nature will do it for us. I say Earthling because it seems all species with some self-awareness have some idea of just how much they’re worth in relation to others of their species, and the more there are, the smaller a part each has to play, and the less responsibility towards others they feel.
I note that as a species, we made one thing a particular icon in our lives – the art of the story. We told tales of gods and spirits as soon as we could grunt some kind of coherent narratives, we made up stories about ourselves and about our families and our communities. We’d spread these tales as we moved, it’s like our brain children are as important to us as our genetic children, our culture behaves like a synergistic virus, it isn’t alive per se but it spreads with us and through our populations.
We got a second boost in this activity when we developed writing – now we could also propagate the culture virus through time.
Then printing presses and distribution.
And now – have ye heard of s t’ing dey call de Internet? …
Our survival depends on being able to expand – radically – our sense of community. We still need to manage at ultralocal, local, state, and country levels. But we’re still only just started learning how to manage such a large community, and yet we need to grow even more and realise that a white first world Christian MUST be the equal in ever way to a third world Zimbabwean Muslim refugee, and MUST be treated the same. And we have to do this while re-learning how to be a local community because the people controlling the large corporations, and so-called “ruling classes” (of which there are only reeally a very fewm hanging on by the thread of our ignorance of these facts) have found it advantageous to NOT share the welath of the planet, to NOT share the abundance, and to turn each of us into an uncertain, fear-ridden, dumbed-down shadow of what we should always have been.
If we don’t learn to do this, it won’t be long before we’re back to half a billion in number, and living on an inhospitable burning ball of dirt that will only be able to offer abundance to a few thousand Earthlings in total…
I just realised that 750w was right – The Future, Hearing, Us are listed as my moods. I want the future to hear this and start integrating it.