LuckyR wrote: ↑Sun Sep 24, 2023 4:53 pm
Thanks for the more detailed description. I'm hearing several, semi-conflicting ideas. I hear some pride with where you currently are. I hear some disappointment with certain goals not met. I hear some description (could be justification) of how you got here. And maybe a hint of resignation.
I guess if viewed from a practical perspective, it boils down to: are you interested in being in a different space with a different outlook and a different persona?
My message is twofold, as I said earlier, there are absolutely huge numbers of folks in various parts of your boat and second it's definitely possible to move to a different spece, if (and only if) you're interested in getting there.
I'd like to stick around with the stragglers. I'm in no shape to go anywhere. I can't even tie my own shoes anymore. But Mom likes to do things for me. It makes her happy and keeps her active. I try to help where I can break away from the Keyboard and if it's something I can do. The house is still in her name, though. It's hers. I don't make the decisions too much, though I give advice and clarify things for her quite a bit.
I'm learning a new way to get along with Mom now that Dad is gone. It takes some practice and getting used to but I want her to be happy. She and Dad stayed together for 62/63 years. I'm 56 as of 9/25/2023. I'd like to remain here for her too.
Sounds like the right answer for the moment. But nice to know when you're ready to exercise options, that you have them.
The future's coming, no need to panic but it bears saying: not making a decision is itself a decision.
Gary Childress wrote: ↑Sun Sep 24, 2023 4:32 am
Sometimes I feel like others avoid me for good reason. I'm the prototypical "ugly American". I have no formal manners. No "restraint". I say things that others don't want me to say because it's not considered polite to respond in the ways I do. I'm a social ogre, an "unclean" brute. I'll mannered and defy conventions.
I remember attending a wedding with a female friend who invited me to it one time. It was at a Catholic church. We sat down to eat after the ceremony and I reached right for the plate of food in front of me. But not everyone at the table had received their plate yet. I just instinctively reached for it as soon as it hit the table in front of me. My friend had to correct me and tell me to hold off before eating until everyone received a plate.
When I was young and lived in the suburbs outside of Washington D.C. where I grew up, my dad would go deer hunting in the next county over. If he bagged a deer, he'd hang it from a tree in the front yard while he made steaks out of it. I was too young to notice but I imagine that probably played a role in shaping the way the other kids viewed me in school--through the actions of my dad. He wasn't well socialized either. He grew up in Idaho and when he passed he had almost no friends, certainly not a single close one. He always kept to himself even at home with mom and I.
What an oddball I grew up to be. Even my best friend from college and I get into spats often after only a few minutes of texting each other. I turn people away. No one wants me around their kids. No one wants to associate with me in public. I'm too free. I'm not "restrained". I fit in with no one around me anymore. Most people my age are married, have relatives, etc. Younger people I have an even more difficult time relating to. I'll say things to them and then feel like I shouldn't have been so candid.
Can't take me anywhere. Can't avoid me completely.
Hello. Or maybe "howdy" would be more in tune. I'm a son of a hick, two of them, both Mom and Dad. I grew up in the middle-class side of an upper-middle-class suburban town.
I tell people my story and the first thing they think is that I'm looking for pity. I hate people's pity. But if it weren't for pity no one would have anything to do with me. People would avoid me. I'm like one of Jerry Lewis' telethon kids. People think that if they lower themselves to associate with me, it will make them look charitable and win them social brownie points. I'm a poster child for uprootedness, or a fish out of water. Like "poster" children people just want to take pictures of me. But no more than that. "Look at the funny American hick."
Did my parents go wrong? Or did I fail my parents? It doesn't really matter. Dad is gone. Mom won't be here forever. When she is gone, there's nothing in this world for me to do other than add to the human-created pollution on the planet. Life for me is a waste. My existence is nothing more than an atrocity to the rest of the world. If there's a "right" thing for me to do in this world, I don't know what it is.
Don't ask me anything. Virtue is the currency in society and I'm flat broke now.
Gary, you are a step closer to becomming a better human than everyone who's living in denial of their shortcommings. You know you are a misfit, most people keep on pretending that's a virtue, not a vice.
Not everyone deserves your story, it's all yours. You appreciating it for it being true is good enough to make better choices in the future.
Still, I recpect you for sharing this with a bunch of weirdos on a philosophy forum, because if you did that in public with some strangers, well - that's not tactful.
Find a group of people who care to listen without judging you. The people who don't want to listen; or rush to judgment - they aren't your people. Accept that and part ways.
Recognize your suffering as an ennobling thing, Gary, and be proud of yourself. Assuming of course that your suffering is not of your own making, not your fault. If it is, u can't get points for it. You'd be just another idiot who made his own mess, suffers from it, and then wants everyone to feel sorry for him.
Next, identify the cause of your suffering beginning with god (logically, of course). This will immediately present u with the problem of Job and you will either break and lose your dignity and your soul to this sadistic god... or you'll defy him, becoming stronger and more evil through your suffering.
The most difficult thing for anyone to do tho is knowing whether or not they are suffering becuz they are stupid and weak themselves or becuz they are strong but overwhelmed by the machinations of the weak and ignoble who are superior in numbers and in cahoots with God.
Let me use my own personal Job story as an example of what to do with your suffering.
At this very moment i lay on the floor with lower back pain so intense it literally takes me a good minute and a half merely to lift my self up so that i can crawl to the toilet and take a shit. Yeah i said crawl... like a dog cursed to be on all fours. U will never see in your entire life anything more pathetic than me trying to merely put my shorts on. And i have never in my life felt more humilated, more pitiful, than when i witness myself struggling like this. I can't stand or walk for more than a minute without collapsing. Later this morning i have to call a customer and tell her I can't finish the job. I'll lose about six hundred dollars.
The back story (pun there). I'm gonna do it in the style of a dialogue between god and one of his advisors, whom we shall call Patsy.
Patsy: good morning, my lord! What a gorgeous day. U really do do some fine work, sir.
God: yeah thanks. hey btw I'm bored and unsure of myself so i wanna have some fun torturing something.
Patsy: a brilliant idea, sir!
God: here's what i wanna do. Marry a couple of morons and make the mother a chain smoking piece of shit with an IQ of seventy four who poisons her child while she's pregnant with him. Make it a bone deformity or something. Oh i know! Give him a leg length discrepancy that won't be recognized by either the parents or the incompetent family doctor so that it isn't corrected while he's growing up.
Patsy: that sounds like a splendid idea, sir. But why a leg length discrepancy in particular rather than, say, a form of cancer or a terrible disease?
God: becuz I've got a novel idea, Patsy. Something especially cruel. You'll love this. This person will eventually become a construction worker, which is why i chose the length discrepancy. As he ages, his condition will become worse and worse. But first, i want to develop the story a bit to make it abnormally heinous.
Patsy: A bit of intrigue, as it were? Do tell, sir!
God: in his 35th year we're going have him charged and incarcerated for sex offenses he didn't commit. During his incarceration we'll make his condition suddenly worse, which will be totally ignored by the prison medical staff. At times he will be writhing around in unbearable pain on the floor of his solitary confinement cell for days at a time, unable even to sleep, begging for more NSAIDs which he will not be given.
Patsy: my god that's horrible. U are indeed a master of the arts, sir.
God: thank u, Patsy. Now for the grand finale. When he gets out of prison and tries to salvage what's left of the life we destroyed and commits himself to honest work, we'll set him back every time he starts to make anything resembling real progress.
Patsy: yes I've seen what you've done! U might also make medical care so expensive that he can't possibly receive any help without trapping himself in enormous debt and bad credit when he refuses to pay. $25,000 for an hour long surgery, sir?
God: a decent figure Patsy. Yes let's make it $25,000.
Patsy: done. Also I think making it unbelievably difficult to get employment as a wrongfully convicted sex offender would force him into an even more difficult situation, my lord.
God: Patsy! That's a wonderful idea!
Patsy: thank u, sir. I do try. Tell me, my lord, what is the greatest pleasure of being omnipotent?
God: ah, i never thought you'd aks, Patsy. That they'll know what they suffer is not their fault and be able to do nothing about it. A totally powerless plaything for my sadistic pleasure. Now u see Patsy what will drive them mad. The strong ones will be afraid to become evil and fight back, poisoned by my religion, in fear of eternal damnation, and yet unable to endure the humility and pointless suffering i put them through. I will fill the world with morons, deceivers, liars and clowns and then pit them against only a select few who are intelligent enough to know what I've done. My own private stock of Sisyphuses who I'll fuck w...
..
Patsy: my lord i have news! Prom75 just dropped to his knees in pain. Did u zap him again?
Now listen Gary none of that bullshit is true but that's not the point. I mean the god stuff, not the pain. This pain is rizzle. Rizzle af.
The point is that if it were true - if that kind of god existed... the christian design - those conclusions would logically follow and couldn't be avoided.
Even as u 'sang praises to god for eternity' (as RL put it) in the company of all the angels and fellow christians in heaven, in the back of your mind you'd still have that persistent lurking thought while u absentmindedly sang along the horrible hymn that all that suffering down on erf wasn't at all necessary just for this. That most of it was utterly gratuitous (*nods to the Astro Cat*) and that you'd have thought when u got to heaven it would all finally make sense.
But it doesn't. You're not like 'ohhhhhh i see now' but still like 'wait why did u have to do x and y like that'.
But there u sway back and forth, for eternity, in a white standard heaven issue choir robe so unexcited u can barely contain yourself, thinking this is not what i did all that suffering for. No way. This is bullshit and that dude four guys down on the second row has been singing out of key for like five eons now.
promethean75 wrote: ↑Tue Sep 26, 2023 10:36 am
Now listen Gary none of that bullshit is true but that's not the point. I mean the god stuff, not the pain. This pain is rizzle. Rizzle af.
The point is that if it were true - if that kind of god existed... the christian design - those conclusions would logically follow and couldn't be avoided.
Even as u 'sang praises to god for eternity' (as RL put it) in the company of all the angels and fellow christians in heaven, in the back of your mind you'd still have that persistent lurking thought while u absentmindedly sang along the horrible hymn that all that suffering down on erf wasn't at all necessary just for this. That most of it was utterly gratuitous (*nods to the Astro Cat*) and that you'd have thought when u got to heaven it would all finally make sense.
But it doesn't. You're not like 'ohhhhhh i see now' but still like 'wait why did u have to do x and y like that'.
But there u sway back and forth, for eternity, in a white standard heaven issue choir robe so unexcited u can barely contain yourself, thinking this is not what i did all that suffering for. No way. This is bullshit and that dude four guys down on the second row has been singing out of key for like five eons now.
The Great Sufferers, Gary. I think i understand the masochists now. If life is a cornucopia of suffering then one must eventually want to master suffering, need to master suffering, in order to endure this world and assert oneself over it, no? And would not the greatest act of will be it's destruction of itself? No that can't be right that last part. The dual forces of the will to health and the will to suffering must be brought under the same yoke then. Like in the samurai bro. A life devoted to one's own inhuman self improvement, one's own extravagant health, the continued renewal of vitality and force to face new, dangerous challenges. The annealing of the soul into a tempered steel. The will to not only expect the most terrible things but to want them, too.
Is this possible, and are there ears to hear it?
Verily, Garily, we stand before a precedent... our great moment in philosophy. It is here that we shall have a voice among our predecessors and contemporaries.
Should i give myself 100 lashes in some dark and damp chamber where torch light flickers on the wall and the groaning of miserable prisoners can be heard echoing through the darkened corridors over what sounds like a group of evil monks going 'ohhhhhhmmmmmmmm' in a ridiculously low dropped D key, then? Or is that going overboard?
promethean75 wrote: ↑Tue Sep 26, 2023 11:57 am
The Great Sufferers, Gary. I think i understand the masochists now. If life is a cornucopia of suffering then one must eventually want to master suffering, need to master suffering, in order to endure this world and assert oneself over it, no? And would not the greatest act of will be it's destruction of itself? No that can't be right that last part. The dual forces of the will to health and the will to suffering must be brought under the same yoke then. Like in the samurai bro. A life devoted to one's own inhuman self improvement, one's own extravagant health, the continued renewal of vitality and force to face new, dangerous challenges. The annealing of the soul into a tempered steel. The will to not only expect the most terrible things but to want them, too.
Is this possible, and are there ears to hear it?
Verily, Garily, we stand before a precedent... our great moment in philosophy. It is here that we shall have a voice among our predecessors and contemporaries.
Self-destruction is only warranted under the most severe circumstances. I remember an incident I read once of an American B-29 crewman who bailed out over Japan landing in a field full of Japanese peasants. The peasants rushed toward him and the B-29 crewman put a gun to his mouth and killed himself before they had a chance to get to him. He never found out what his fate would have been had they gotten to him, however, the account is told by a Japanese man who said that he was going to go to the pilot to make sure he was OK but the pilot did himself in before he could get to him.
