REFLECTIONS

20-OCT-1999.

What We Are

When you see Shirley Temple, Claire Danes, James Dean, Marlon Brando, Peter O'Toole, or Sharon Stone, you can see they're not afraid to be themselves. Outside the movies, we don't have the luxury of a cutting room floor. We're on final take all the time, and to parts of our mind, it's a tangled bank in a deep jungle.

Somewhere in the jungle is a clearing, where dreams take place, which when left alone, becomes a glorious meadow. Occasionally little animals dart across the meadow, and looking down, you can see strange, exotic flowers. The beauty is breathtaking.

"You're so weird," says a complete stranger, interrupting us.

Almost all insults come as a surprise. It's tempting to wonder why a particular stranger has gone out of their way to insult us, and also a complete waste of time. Ignore the other person for a minute. Look at the myriad of feelings you have inside yourself. Do you understand them? If you did, nobody would ever insult you!

From a practical point of view, let's regard the other person as just a normal human being who at one time in the past was injured. Perhaps it was a painful injury. Unimaginably painful. So painful, they buried it. Maybe their insult came from an injury they can no longer feel, much less imagine, so even if you had the time and energy to help them to understand its origin, or to change themselves, they'd have to reexperience that pain to grow out of it. Is all that worth your while? Not really. There's an old expression: "Let sleeping dogs lie."

No. It's a complete waste of time to even talk about this. As a matter of fact, it's an insult. Whenever I address another person as anything less than a god, I am insulting them. I am saying, "Oh. You're the kind of person who needs help." Certainly it's useful to think of other people in disparaging terms from time to time (to stay honest on the inside) while in the outside physical world, to treat everybody like gods. How can a person do this? By being wrong.

	22-NOV-1999.
	taxi1010 Kung Fu
	Hanging the Insults from As Good As It Gets Out on the Web to Dry

With some trepidation I went out and rented As Good As It Gets, and asked my friend David Van Ness if I could come over to his house to "Webify the Insults." Somebody dismantled my VCR a few years ago, so I use that as a good excuse to wander around visiting friends.

Things get a lot easier when you get the exact words written down. Until then, you just have vague, unfocused fears. Okay. Here we go. I'm writing the insults down, while David operates the remote control. Rewind! Play!

20-OCT-1999.

Authoritarianism

Don't forget that most people are mean.

They hate other people
without knowing
they hate other people.

You can take it for granted
that you hate other people
without knowing
you hate other people.

You have to start all over again,
because everything's so entrenched.

17-MAR-1999. The fourth major class of insults has to do with CHALLENGES to your physical actions. When you find yourself in any particular situation, minding your own business, what else could you possibly be doing? A NITWIT, SPOILER, DEMOLISHER, SCHEMER, and STOOGE try to get you to believe you might have taken a different path, by means of challenges to your reasoning, challenges to your will power, challenges to your sense of humor, or simply challenges to the choices you have made (as a traveler in the outside physical world).

The key thing to remember is this: You have only one individual life, one past, and one future, and when you find someone challenging your situation, you have to stick up for yourself, because no one else will. There's nothing wrong with losing many battles, if in the end, by keeping your silence, you win the war.

07-NOV-2014.

As follows

CODE WORDS: aggression, becoming, bossy, communicating, constantly, [crotch], debatable, deception, difference, easily, exaggeration, finished, fit, genitals, [hootchy-kootchy], intellectual, interrupt, [lewdness], misrepresentation, office, perceptions, scum, [silent], smile, solved, speechless, steal, talks, tend, their, they're, unbecoming, understandable