I'm done here. I moved to myspace.

I am just at a different place in my life now. I need to start over again, and that's a decent place to do it.

Thanks for the love. btw my myspace is the same as here (myspace.com/Janus762)

I'll see you on the other side.

James

Currently Listening Vegas By The Crystal Method 01 - Trip Like I Do see related

Trip one more time,

“I don’t want you to trip like me, I want you to have fun…I want you to trip like I do.” Crystal Method – Trip Like I do

Awesome lyrics to an awesome song, but this is really only the background sample of the female vocals. In order to get the full effect you need to listen to the song. You need to feel the insistence in her voice, and you need to hear the edge in her words. Listen to the desperation in her plea, “I don’t want you to trip like me,” Then it gets followed up by the encouraging almost laughing “I want you to have fun,” She says it as though it was the most obvious thing in the world. She speaks like she feels, and she feels desperate. She is at once wanton and frustrated, simultaneously beseeching and denying. You have to be there for final lyric as the song doesn’t really get started till its about 3min.19sec. in. It all turns on when she says

“I want you trip like I do.” The song pounds in with insistence the bass racing to keep up with the flying treble. Speeds and slowness contrasting over a maddening beat, the rhythm denying the traditional notions of meter and space that music require. It flings itself headlong into the void of silence, speeding ahead of our perceptions till we catch up to it breathless at the end of the track, and that same female voice tells us why we just did that.

“I want you trip like I do.”

It’s more than just a phrase wrenched out of the hopped-up mind of a sexually frustrated, strung out young hippie. It’s the only plea this mind can make. Don’t do what I do, don’t act just like me, and whatever you want, do not emulate me. I am not someone to act like, I don’t actually enjoy this, I just do it. When I let go, and leave it all behind you need to be there in order to know what it looks like. You look at me as if you know me, and you judge me like you know better. So be that way.

I don’t want you to feel what I feel, it’s mine and you can’t have it. In other words, don’t trip like me. Don’t just stand there and say that you want to see this thing that I’m inside of. Don’t tell me that you want to erase the soul that I stole in the first place. Don’t ask me to give up the burden I’m trying to shove off on some unsuspecting fool. Instead try something different.

When I step left, step left. When I throw my head back, toss yours as well. Don’t stand in my spot, don’t put yourself in my shoes, wear your own damn shoes. If I hold out, give in, and If I give in, take it all back. Can’t you just stand there and see what I’m seeing? Won’t you stay you, and feel me too? “I want you to have fun,” Don’t stretch yourself on my account, and don’t burn up the goodness in your soul for the weakness in mine.

You see super heroes, can turn it off. Whatever it is they can turn their powers off and at least pretend to be human like we are. They always maintain that they aren’t any better than us and they try their best to be just like us. They play by society’s rules and operate under the laws of the mortals they serve. X-men claim that mutants are humans, and Superman dresses up like Clark Kent everyday. All the time they do their best to maintain that super-strength, speed, invisibility, telepathy, and razor claws don’t make us that much different. So they suppress who and what they are in order to be one of us. Their passage into human society is dependent on their ability to blend in, or did you ever wonder why Colossus isn’t always the tin-man?

Supervillains can’t turn it off. They don’t actually know how to not use their powers all the time. Most often they are the tragic characters who simply can’t control it, and are thus dangerous rather than safe. They are evil instead of good, but of course their character is also vital. They know they aren’t human, and they don’t pretend to be like us, they claim to be better. Humanity is a class they passed with flying colors, it’s a school they graduated from, a job they got promoted out of, and an old habit that they finally kicked. Magneto says that mutants are the new step of evolution, and of course Xavier knows he’s right. Luthor wants to own the world, and rather than destroy it he does his best to save it because it is up to him to run it. He’s not like the lesser men beneath him, and even though he lacks powers he knows that he is no mere human. Or did you ever wonder why The Joker’s makeup is permanent?

Heroes claim to be less than men, Villains claim to be more than gods. No one is simply the average man on the street, he doesn’t get his story told.

You see the thing of it is this, Don’t feel my pain, feel your own, and know that there is a difference. Don’t step on my feet, dance with me and follow your own steps. Leave your ability to understand me at home and accept me instead of knowing what I am. I don’t want you to go through what I’ve gone through, and I won’t go through your valleys either. Instead can we do something else? Instead of trying to be me, why not feel what I feel? Instead of saying that you know what it means to walk in my shoes, walk in your shoes right beside mine. Don’t subvert and play the hero claiming you can’t be like me at all. Don’t leave me far behind and reach for villainous power on your own.

I want you to trip like I do,

A post in reply to a question

God is?

One, God is. He is an existing being, an entity that has been posited as real. Reality being what it is, that is to say mentally construed or accessed; God exists, insofar as He has been posited.

Two, God…it’s a word. God is a word that denotes the Supreme Being, the creator, the uttermost intelligence and power that we are capable of grasping. It would be better to say that God is an idea we have in our minds that we believe corresponds to either the “realms” of fiction, theology, philosophy, spiritualism, the politicizing of an extinct ruling class.

Three, God is mine. My word and conception of God is uniquely my own. My meaning and the importance I ascribe to that word or idea stems from my own life, experience, and beliefs. Even borrowed beliefs are still mine, and though I share them they remain ideas and realities that I have.

I think because He is, a paraphrase of Descartes. He is merely the ruling classes concept of justification for their rule, Marx paraphrased. He is simply the slaves attempt to de-justify the rightful power of the ruling class, Nietzsche paraphrased. He is yet another stage in the history of human knowledge, just before the final stage of truth in philosophy, Hegel paraphrased. He is the initiator, that natural cause from which all the world stems the first and unmoved mover, Aristotle paraphrased.

Yet these are mostly not my ideas, and I owe them to the minds from which they were borrowed. A question might be this, is God your idea, or is it just one you borrowed?

Yet is God real? Only experience can tell you that, but experience is a teacher without respect to your desires or needs. You will not learn His identity as imagined, real, necessary, outdated, or otherwise if you wait for experience to justify ideas that you borrowed from someone else. Even though almost all of our ideas are borrowed, what should be more interesting is to discover which ones aren’t.

Which idea in your mind do you not remember inventing, reading, discovering, turning or trading? What do you encounter as outside of your realm of knowledge and experience? Have you ever encountered the unexplainable, or the truly anomalous? Did you need a word for it that made it less horrifying? Science has a few, philosophy has many, and religion has more than enough. Yet perhaps you can find a word that suits it and ties it to all those borrowed ideas in your mind.

Maybe that word is, God.

A word on meaning

This insight lacks depth, and for the most part I have just been really torn over what to post lately.

I have this great idea about the problem of asynchronous simultaneity. You know, that nothing ever happens at the same time. Yet I usually don’t know what I’m going to write till I write it. You see I had this conclusion to the Cain and Abel postings, but its kind of more of the same and it just gets mean so I’m thinking better of it. Let me think, there is this idea, somewhere in my mind, an idea about things.

I started watching that new show Heroes, and I kind of like it. I mean it’s great that a Geek show goes mainstream, and everyone is like superheroes rock! Of course the creator is all hung up on the idea of ordinary people with extraordinary abilities. Now this has been one of the staples of the comic industry for years, and it is a common super hero thing. Yet since I don’t want to argue the point I should let it go for now.

I had this great idea about a story involving a werewolf and some Gypsies. Of course the Romani have been romanticized enough and since I know I’ve got my facts wrong I might just set it in an alternate universe. This seems like the easy way out, so I am doing my best to be satisfied with this move.

Stories are on hold till I get a good thought anyways, I just don’t know which ones to tell. I mean I don’t want to be redundant, and I don’t want to be cliché, so I wait for a good thought.

I met an artist on Sunday, she’s a photographer and she mostly photographs, abandoned spaces. Places around the city of Pittsburgh usually serve as her palette, and her camera is the brush with which she paints the world. She says she can see herself as those spaces, she can relate to the abandonment. I take a look at her site though and she has friends and fellow artists who support her. So it makes me wonder who abandoned her. She says she felt abandoned by the church, and she has this great photo of a church.

I don’t know why it’s such a common tale that people leave churches or have fallings out over religion and so it turns them off to Christianity. Of course this artist is going back to church now, so I guess it’s not all bad.

Ahh, passion that was it. You see passion is meaningful. When we feel, expand our emotions and get entangled in the world, clutch up our tired souls and immerse them in the fires, we feel real. We feel alive, and we do our best to fulfill that passion. Behind the great things that drive us to be and to be more than what we are is a belief, however simplistic, that our passions matter. When we feel so strongly about a person that we can’t get them out of our head we tend to think that this must be for a reason. When we are driven to protest some vicious political decision, we do so because we think this burning in our hearts must mean something.

It is passion that is the single overriding teacher for when we seek to live life. Passion tells us what really matters, and what truly counts. Do you want to know why evolution went out of vogue, and why spiritualism is high? It’s because if all we are is random, or at least very well intentioned without any intender, then we lose something. We posit the mechanistic universe and we become its masters, yet we are only ever the lords of the slums. Our kingdom is the pile of earth in our hands.

On the other hand if you posit God to save you from this meaninglessness, then you fall under another problem. God is meaning, but He is all-meaning. Where once we were lords of nothing, now we are slaves of a being who has all things within himself. If you posit God you must fall into pantheism, or else God is merely your tool.

Spiritualism allows for these things to shift in light of experience. To believe is to be freed from the dogmatism of science or religion and to open yourself to the mystery of life. Then you may see that your passions return with a renewed meaning, and that they may hold the key to locking those mysteries away for good.