Lies, Truths, Metaphors, the Baldies and Brucie

Gretel asked me today if she's the best soccer player ever. I said that we hadn't played for while but she was pretty good when we did. She asked if she could beat me. I scoffed and said no. Some kid beat me? Give me a break. I asked her why she was asking me this stuff. The answer surprised me!

She found an article on the internet, 10 Lies Parents Tell Their Children. One of the lies is that they tell them that they're the best at soccer. To paraphrase Jack Torrance, "See, it's okay. She saw it all on the internet."

I then realized that before she asked me about soccer, she asked me why the sky is blue. I told her that I wasn't exactly sure, but I knew that it had something to do with the sun hitting the atmosphere at an angle and spreading the light a bit like a prism where we can only see the blue. I told her that we could look it up if she wanted. She didn't really seem to care.

She was testing me then too! One of the lies parents tell their kids is that they say they don't know something that they do know. Well I told the truth, because I kind of knew a little bit. I was being put to the test and passing. 

And this was no regular test. This might have been the most important test of my life! Passing meant my children should trust me, whereas failing meant that they should not. This was the process for her to discover whether my words should be listened to, or whether they were meaningless. I was doing great and I hadn't even studied.

Actually, that's a lie. I kind of have studied. Years ago I read Sam Harris's book, Lies, in which he makes the case that we should never lie in our daily lives, and that the only acceptable case for lying is if you are saving somebody from harm. (If the Nazis knock at your door, you lie to them about hiding Anne Frank upstairs.)

I was listening to his podcast the other day and he talked about it again, saying he still never ever tells his kids lies. He said that he accidentally told a lie once. He was flipping through some book and there was a picture of a guillotine. His daughter asked what it was and he kept flipping, saying it used to be an impractical way of performing surgery. That's his one lie, wow.

The truth is that I do have a lie that I've told my kids. I told them that I've told them a lie, but I haven't told them what the lie is. It's not Santa, not the Tooth Fairy, not the Easter Bunny or any of that nonsense. Want to know what it is? 

They were obsessed for a little while about creepy dolls from movies - Chucky, Annabelle, one they saw in a Twilight Zone episode, and others. I told them that there's another one even scarier than all of those- Brucie. And he's so scary that they completely erased him from the internet. I told them that I'm not going to tell them anything else about Brucie, not even one detail, until they can prove to me that they are brave enough to know the truth.

My kids are six and eight and they've only just recently been able to go into other rooms by themselves. They are getting braver, so they're getting closer to me telling them that Brucie is not real. He is like many scary things- they don't exist in the real world, they just exist in our minds.  

It's like Tony said, "Remember what Mr. Halloran said. It's just like pictures in a book, Danny. It isn't real."

So Brucie is a metaphor, which is not a real thing, but an honest reflection of the way our brains operate in the real world.

Still a lie, but a well-intentioned lie, hopefully rectified by my rousing test score. Hopefully Anne Frank would have approved.

April 16, 2022

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I think I know how to make everybody happy on the abortion and gun debates. Just perform all the abortions with small guns. Abortion doctors gun rates shall not be infringed. Seems perfect, but there's probably a snag.

April 16, 2023

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2 Kings 2:23-24

New International Version

Elisha Is Jeered

23 From there Elisha went up to Bethel. As he was walking along the road, some boys came out of the town and jeered at him. “Get out of here, baldy!” they said. “Get out of here, baldy!” 

24 He turned around, looked at them and called down a curse on them in the name of the Lord. Then two bears came out of the woods and mauled forty-two of the boys.

Haha, the author (spoiler alert, not God) was so obviously bald and ashamed!

Don't fuck with the Baldies!

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I've had my share of terrible interviewees over the years, and today's was certainly among the worst. He said that he just moved to the area recently and he finally got used to the smell of manure on the farmer's fields. He went on to add, "It's like you could crap your pants and nobody would even know." 

I said something like, "OK, if you say so." Weak.

Obviously I should have said, "I'll assume that you're speaking from personal experience," but instead I just wrote down, "craps pants," then went right on to the next question.

I guess he was better than today's other two interviewees though. They didn't even show up!

April 16, 2021

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York Peppermint Patty, Zagnut, Zero... the alphabet saved the best candy bars for the end.

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On this day in 1963, Martin Luther King Jr. pens his Letter from Birmingham Jail for protesting against segregation. It should be required reading in every social studies course across the country. And I don't say that lightly. 

"I must make two honest confessions to you, my Christian and Jewish brothers. First, I must confess that over the past few years I have been gravely disappointed with the white moderate. I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the White Citizen's Counciler or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to "order" than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: "I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I cannot agree with your methods of direct action"; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man's freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the Negro to wait for a "more convenient season." Shallow understanding from people of good will is more frustrating than absolute misunderstanding from people of ill will. Lukewarm acceptance is much more bewildering than outright rejection."

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Apollo 16 launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida on this day in 1972. This is when the public started growing bored with the Apollo program. They discovered that the moon's highlands are not volcanic in origin, and did the first spacewalk on the way back. I think landing on the moon is among the greatest achievements of humankind, but my jury is out over whether it was worth the money (let alone the risk) for these later missions. I don't know enough about what they learned. Astronaut Charles Duke left this family photo on the surface.

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"Doctor Death", Jack Kevorkian, participated in his first assisted suicide on this day in 1990. He was something of a joke at the time, but there are few others who have put as much on the line to decrease human suffering.

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Charlie Chaplin was born on this day in 1889.

"Failure is unimportant. It takes courage to make a fool of yourself." 

Sure, he could be an awful person in real life... but those freaking monkeys crawling all over him while he's on the tightrope in The Circus! Come on! We have to appreciate that for what it is right? That's the highest echelon of comedy as far as I'm concerned. I don't know, maybe that will annoy some people.

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English novelist Kingsley Amis was born on this day in 1922, so today is 100th birthday.

"If you can't annoy somebody, there is little point in writing."

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Pope Benedict XVI was born on this day in 1927. Is that what they still call him, poop Benedict XVI? (I don't have the heart to correct that voice to text mistake.) If that's still his name, then we have two popes? What if one says one thing and the other says something else? Are they both still infallible? Hitchens lamented knowing he would not be around to be able to write his obituary. In a rare mistake, he should have done it before he died. Why not?

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Ian MacKaye was born on this day in 1962. I don't know how I came to care about the world, but I know that Ian MacKaye was an early influence.

"My feeling was that punk was a gift, and if you received the gift and take care of the gift, and you give it to somebody, it replicates and they can give it to somebody else. Some people received that gift and they polish it, and they think, "oh, I can sell it," and when you sell it, it's fucking gone."

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Russia's war of choice in Ukraine rages on. Hannah Arendt will be forever invaluable in breaking down corrupt power and its consequences. This is from The Origins of Totalitarianism.

"Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty."

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Jacques Cassini was the French astronomer who first published tables on the satellites of Saturn. He was the son and father of astronomers. He died on this day in 1756.

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French historian and philosopher, Alexis de Tocqueville, died on this day in 1859. 

"The greatness of America lies not in being more enlightened than any other nation, but rather in her ability to repair her faults."

That is an apt observation from the early 1800s. It's reflected in Abraham Lincoln's quote about us striving to become a "more perfect union." I always loved the ambiguity of that phrase, "more perfect."

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Author of Giant, Edna Ferber, quit loving life on this day in 1968.

"Life cannot defeat a writer who is in love with writing - for life itself is a writer's love until de

ath."

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Powerhouse director David Lean, left us on this day in 1991. 

"Film is a dramatised reality and it is the director's job to make it appear real, an audience should not be conscious of technique."

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Amy Carlson left us on this day in 2021, known to her cult as Mother God... Love Has Won, one of the stupidest cults in history of cults.

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Teenagers in the 50s

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Jana Heidersdorf
http://checanty.tumblr.com/

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Easily the best short film in which the earth suffers a fatal heart attack.

Guy Maddin- The Heart of the World

http://shortsbay.com/film/the-heart-of-the-world

Apr 16, 2011 11:10:22am

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Where Am I? By Daniel Dennett

Imagine an operation in which your brain was detached, and as each neural pathway was severed it was capped with tiny transmitters that continued relaying info to and from your brain. Your brain was put in a vat, and your body was led into a room to look at it. Were "you" a brain being looked at by eyes, or were "you" the one looking at the brain?

http://www.sechumscm.org/WhereAmI.html

April 16, 2011

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I'm going to use this song as my inspiration to have a great night.

The Pogues- Waxie's Dargle

https://youtu.be/jAufzEH0ZMY

April 16, 2011

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Cracked- 4 superpowers everyone thinks they secretly have

4. Controlling the Outcome of Professional Sports

3. Communicating With Inanimate Objects

2. Reading Omens

1. Causing Disasters By Joking About Them

http://www.cracked.com/blog/4-superpowers-everyone-thinks-they-secretly-have/

April 16, 2013

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Boston Globe- The decline of war and violence

Seems counterintuitive, but I believe it. If you would prefer not to die as a victim of violence...now is the best time to be alive. (But of course that could change pretty quickly.)

http://www.bostonglobe.com/opinion/2016/04/15/the-decline-war-and-violence/lxhtEplvppt0Bz9kPphzkL/story.html

April 16, 2016

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New York Magazine- Why do Democrats feel sorry for Hillary Clinton?

Conservative writer Andrew Sullivan:

"What on earth is the point of trying to understand him when there is nothing to understand? Calling him a liar is true enough, but liars have some cognitive grip on reality, and he doesn’t. Liars remember what they have said before. His brain is a neural Etch A Sketch. He doesn’t speak, we realize; he emits random noises. He refuses to take responsibility for anything. He can accuse his predecessor and Obama’s national security adviser of crimes, and provide no evidence for either. He has no strategy beyond the next 24 hours, no guiding philosophy, no politics, no consistency at all — just whatever makes him feel good about himself this second. He therefore believes whatever bizarre nonfact he can instantly cook up in his addled head, or whatever the last person who spoke to him said. He makes Chauncey Gardiner look like Abraham Lincoln. Occam’s razor points us to the obvious: He has absolutely no idea what he’s doing. Which is reassuring and still terrifying all at once."

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2017/04/why-do-democrats-feel-sorry-for-hillary-clinton.html

April 16, 2017

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"Purity, of the most extreme degree, to the point that it is prophecy, is what Dylan manifested, particularly in his peak 1962–1966 period, which I think is unparalleled in the history of music for its sheer genius, its fecundity and its deep tapping of the mystical poetic roots, all of which defy comprehension as to how it could have come about in such a short period of time.

Is Dylan a poet? To me, the question is, is Dylan the 20th century’s Arthur Rimbaud? Or Keats or Shelley? Or Yeats? Those are the valid comparisons for me, not whether he is a poet."

http://www.alternet.org/culture/bob-dylans-prophecy-kryptonite-we-need-against-trumpism

April 16, 2017

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After 10 minutes of heckling Louis CK at a table full of his friends, Don Rickles grabbing by the shirt pulled him down and earnestly said, "Don't let them forget who I was." This was several months before Rickles died.

https://youtu.be/V0u6PDZGhrg

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Stanley Kubrick's NY Street Pictures

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Rick, Rick and Morty- “I wouldn't lie to you. Well... that's a lie.” 

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Groucho Marx- "I find television very educating. Every time somebody turns on the set, I go into the other room and read a book."

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Pythagoras- "Physical matter is music solidified"

Diagram of the harmonic series, compared with a shell.

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Abraham Lincoln- "You must remember that some things legally right are not morally right."

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Steinbeck, Journal of a Novel: The East of Eden Letters- "And the greatest foolishness of all lies in the fact that to do it at all, the writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true. If he does not, the work is not worth even what it otherwise might have been."

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Charlie Chaplin on his 70th birthday, April 16, 1959- "I feel I am privileged to express a hope. The hope is this: that we shall have peace throughout the world: that we shall abolish wars, and settle all international differences at the conference table: that we shall abolish all atom and hydrogen bombs, before they abolish us first."

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Joan Didion, The Year of Magical Thinking- “Read, learn, work it up, go to the literature. Information is control.”

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Thomas Ligotti- "How much nonsense can we take in our lives? And is there any way we can escape it? No, there is not. We are doomed to all kinds of nonsense: the pain nonsense, the nightmare nonsense, the sweat and slave nonsense, and many other shapes and sizes of insufferable nonsense. It is brought to us on a plate, and we must eat it up or face the death nonsense."

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Carl Sagan:

We are a way for the cosmos to know itself. We are creatures of the cosmos and always hunger to know our origins, to understand our connection with the universe. How did everything come to be? Every culture on the planet has devised its own response to the riddle posed by the universe. Every culture celebrates the cycles of life and nature. There are many different ways of being human.

But, an extraterrestrial visitor examining the differences among human societies would find those differences trivial compared to the similarities. We are one species. We are star stuff harvesting star light. Our lives, our past and our future are tied to the sun, the moon and the stars. Our ancestors knew that their survival depended on understanding the heavens. They built observatories and computers to predict the changing of the seasons by the motions in the skies. We are all of us descended from astronomers.

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Thomas Szasz- "Clear thinking requires courage rather than intelligence."

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Richard Dawkins- "Peter Sutcliffe, the Yorkshire Ripper, distinctly heard the voice of Jesus telling him to kill women, and he was locked up for life. George W. Bush says that God told him to invade Iraq (a pity God didn't vouchsafe him a revelation that there were no weapons of mass destruction)."

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Kinison- "The Ten Commandments: proof that if you want things done right you have to do it yourself!"

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Sartre- "Do you think that I count the days? There is only one day left, always starting over: it is given to us at dawn and taken away from us at dusk."

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Sam Harris- "We have a choice. We have two options as human beings. We have a choice between conversation and war. That's it. Conversation and violence. And faith is a conversation stopper."

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Life sometimes seems like a dramatized reality. I think we need a Brucie every once in a while to add a little spice.

Addendum

I asked ChatGPT to write a hypothetical Bukowski poem on the subject of sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows.

.

Sure, here's a hypothetical Bukowski-inspired poem on the subject of sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows:

Sugarcoated Lies and Fleeting Joy

Sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows,

that's what they say life's all about.

But I've been around this town too long,

and I know what that's really about.

Sunshine's just a way to blind you,

to make you forget about the rain.

Lollipops are just sugar-coated lies,

and rainbows? They're just pain.

You see, every rainbow's got a storm,

and every lollipop's got a stick.

And as for sunshine, well, it's fleeting,

just a momentary trick.

So don't tell me about sunshine, lollipops, and rainbows,

I've seen enough to know the truth.

Life's a hard and bitter pill to swallow,

and that's the real deal, no sleight of hand, no sleuth.

But still, I guess I can't deny,

sometimes I crave a little light.

Sometimes I yearn for something sweet,

even though I know it's not quite right.

So maybe, just maybe, I'll indulge,

in a little sunshine, lollipop, or rainbow.

But I won't forget the truth,

that life's a bitter pill, and that's just how it goes.