Jun 3

 Exhausted. Sprinting for an end point that always moves ahead of you.

I worked til 4am today. I think I started late at something like 10.30am. But then worked all the way round the clock with slow periods and breaks littered throughout. Still. A chonky hard day. I can't really be doing days like that anymore. Or though, demonstrably, I still kinda can. Apparently. But it's super not good for me.

Eh well.

Progress made. Stuff done.

I was trying to clear decks a bit to be able to go visit my family. I intended to go yesterday. But work was too busy. And I ended up just ploughing on through as I watched the time slip away.

I debated working on through today, giving up on going and seeing the family. Waking up this morning I felt like the living dead. I can't go anywhere like this. I need to rest. I need to cancel the visit. Rest. Then noodle with work in the evening.

I turned over, slept some more, and very slowly shifted from the undead, to the half undead and decided I should indeed make the effort to go see my family, and, cut out work for the day. As soon as I sat up, looked at my laptop and notifications, the code called. Look at me. Another problem to solve. It's interesting how the habit can stick when you're burning. Your brain just gets used to stomping through coding. And it gets hungry for it when you stop. I am familiar with this in all sorts of ways. The whole. Spinning wheel that cannot instantly come to a halt. I used to get this a lot. Work hard. Then hit a break. You stop work for a while. But that madly spinning wheel hasn't stopped. Can't stop that quickly. And you hit a bit of a manic I have nothing to do I need something to do I need to code I need to work malarkey. At it's worst it is indeed pretty manic. Easy there. Come down. Slowly. Like a spooked horse.

Funny old chemical lump of mush the brain.

So. Today. I am trying to gather a little strength. To get my shit together. Stuff it in a car. And make the drive. It's like trying to move through treacle. This is either. a) my body and mind telling me that I need to rest right now. or b) my fucked up condition telling me that I need to rest right now because we've burned out of energy. or c) my body doing its thing and just giving me bullshit signals or d) all of the above.

That being said. I think we are firmly in the area of it Not Being Rocket Science. I am knackered. Tired. Big black eyes. And. Of course. A twinging chest.

The chest pains have subsided somewhat the last couple of days. It has backed off. And I've felt better all round a bit. I think my eating has been a bit more tolerable. Also less stress. But it's just the nature of the beast I think. I rise and fall continually. My moms peaks and troughs are never far from my mind. I saw in her the way someone can rise and seem pretty good, and then a week later be on the death list. Literally. Rinse and repeat. Until one of those troughs nails you. Which it inevitably did with my mom. Nailed at the bottom of yet another nasty clogged up chest trough, unable to breathe.

The parallels are not lost on me.

More reflections on humanity.

I realised there is a history repeating itself angle going on in relation to people always showing their worst side over time.

Let's take a lot of the words of Jesus. Tricky. Because a hundred hairy hands have badly repeated what he said. All of which have an angle. Or prejudice. And in some cases really fucked up exploitative angles. Such as misogyny. But. If we can sift through the garbage to get the gist of it. The meaning of the law. If not the letter of the law. I think you get something that basically says, don't be mean to others. Don't kill. Don't murder. Help don't hurt. And remember that you are flawed too - so don't be a judgemental prick.

I think that's pretty much the gist. The rest of it is coloured mumbo jumbo nonsense. Which of course. Because. People. The sun is actually an orb pulled through the sky by a chariot and all that. We do love a bit of nonsense.

So. For a set of instructions that are pretty unambiguously telling you to be not a dick.

You eventually get various religious flavours that mostly go out of their way to Be A Dick. In fact. In the US. Christians are some of the most closed minded, prejudiced, judgemental horrible fucks you can encounter.

Why ?

Well. See my previous blog about our nature being more inclined to be hostile than understanding.

The summary of that then is perhaps. Tenets of the teachings of Jesus are then warped into something it's really not. The corruption of a set of Good Intentions. Which starts to sound very human.

Here's my modern parallel.

The set of Good Intentions to give everyone a fair shake, rights, no one should be prejudiced against, there should be understanding and acceptance and no judgement and an understanding we all struggle and pulling together is a good thing.

Starts to be corrupted into yet another religious war. The believers v the unbelievers. Just another excuse to behave shittily to people.

I think this stuff repeats itself over and over.

It's early days yet. But. I think there's a possibility there that as time goes on, things polarise even more, and the message gets lost, that the good intentions of fairness of the modern age will just end up corrupted into yet more awful behaviour. Violence. Intimidation. Psychological abuse.

It's the witch burning DNA. Deep in our souls.

We love a good burning. Who we burning today ?

For the record. My head canon for Jesus is not some divinely inspired dude. It is just a dude who was emotionally intelligent, smart, and saw how shit people treated each other and came up with a bunch of ideas on how to behave better, and basically have a better civilisation. Of course. People of the age aren't going to listen to a dry lecture from a late arriving Plato type. But the mob will listen if you also spice it up with some illusion and rather than have to argue the point to death, just fob it off as well, God said so. The big cheese. The imaginary arbiter of the rules. It's just. A whole lot easier to tell the uneducated there is a God and They Have Decreed the charge of an electron should be This than actually explain it with a board full of mathematics. Know your audience. They like a firework show and a hero. They do not like a math lesson.

I'm pretty sure this is the case. Also given that at the time of Jesus there were a lot of those types of dudes running around. This is something that doesn't get talked a lot about. But there were a huge number of popup messiahs and sages and all sorts. All professing new ideologies and blessings and yada. It was the trendy thing those days. I think. It's a symptom of the populace at the time striving for more. Realising that things were shit and there was a better way to do all this. Jesus is just the one that got most famous. I actually think this is the growing pains of modernity itself. The attempt to regulate some order onto the warlording petty king barbarism, ascribing to something beyond your liegelord, a higher moral compass. Right and Wrong. Not just what your King says is good.

After that time of many dudes standing on corners telling you about their thoughts. You then have several hundred years of fanboys ( of Jesus ) writing up events after the fact and inserting whatever bullshit into the story that they think seems good. Or sells well. Or gives them leverage in the current age. Which is akin to me writing a school report up of Henry the VIII - same kind of time gap, and deciding that he rode into battle on a magic powered motorcycle, and lo, everyone did fear his hog. Nice.

Scroll on 2000 years you end up with an archaic accreted bunch of nonsense whos core ideas in there are actually a sound start for not murdering people on sight. But also contain so much guff. Like a proto bill of rights. A proto set of laws for civilisation. Are they all good ? Is it all wise ? Hell no. People are flawed. And they make mistakes. And no one gets shit right first time. I think most religions fall into this category ( we're not including obviously heinous modern corruptions like Mormonism or Scientology ). There is much wisdom to be found there in the old stuff. They are at their heart a condensing of thousands of years of experience and wisdom and contain nuggets of gold about the human condition and what works and what doesn't. They're also full of absolute garbage and the equivalent of ad breaks, scams, and outright lies. Sifting one from the other is an art. Also, not taking any of them super seriously. It's  just hairless apes writing hairless ape stuff. Insightful. Also prone to bullshit. And getting it wrong. Learn. But don't take as the Absolute Truth. There is no such thing.

Another way to think about this is if 10 people get to joint author a book of wisdom.

1 of the 10 is wise and experienced and their writings are solid. The other 9 are idiots, some of who love writing fanfic. The end result is a merged book where 10% of it is solid, 90% of it is dubious at best, and at times outright utter no good bullshit. 

And also that one wise person is still just a person. And their wisdom is subject to the context they experienced at the time. So. Possibly incorrect. But well intentioned.

You could just argue, fuck it. Throw it all out. Garbage. What relevance does it have, and most of it is bullshit. Too hard to sort it out.

But then. You wouldn't be learning from the past. From experience. You'd be open and new and almost certainly making the same mistakes everyone else has for the last 100,000 years. People like Plato and Marcus Aurelius and even Jesus all of them have stuff to say which has an impact. Learning from them gives you a cheat sheet. A leg up. And all of human advancement and civilisation is based on standing on the shoulders of giants. We all stand on the shoulders of the person that invented the wheel. Managed fire. Figured out irrigation. The plough. Mathematics. Engineering. Physics. Medicine. And so on.

If each of us had to discover that afresh everytime, we'd still all be banging rocks together.

One of the strengths of humanity is the capability for racial knowledge. Passing of learning on down through generations. A continuing progress.

So. Long story short. Don't dismiss. Learn. Filter.