We keep recording and we keep writing, are we recording for posterity? I mean, what did Achilles get out of that arrow in his heel? did he get to fornicate with the woman he lusted after? no.
Did he get to go back home and chill in his original Greek island and knock back a fine toddy? no.
Did he get to do all the other things on his 'list' like skydive, bungee jump and saw off the head of a roaring lion? i think not.
Achilles sacrificed his life for an idea of glory so that some beat up poet could 'immortalize' his name on paper. He wanted to be immortal, so he embraced death. Kind of ironic.
He was a sentimental nincompoop beneath all the warrior like gruffness. That whole 'you're a lion, take it, its yours' thing. I think the only guys who made any use of the legend of Achilles were the people who portrayed him in art. Homer, Brad Pitt take a bow.
A good story, but ultimately bad lesson. What good will a good story do to Achilles now? What good will this blog do to me if it gets famous after i'm dead? Its not like i could use the Google ad money then.
Showing posts with label Contradiction. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Contradiction. Show all posts
Friday, February 11, 2011
Thursday, April 30, 2009
underground smoke and sheet
When you are a blunt guy living in a not so blunt world, you usually find it hard to see through the smoke. Or rather, you don't see the smoke at all. Social situations disintegrate under the unsubtle slash of the knife of direct statements that need to be buttered up, baked and served in a plate with blueberry pie instead.
Romantic options dwindle as you usually don't say what is 'expected' and skip the foreplay because you just know where your gonna end up anyway. Chicks are so shallow. Reminds me of russel crowe's little spat at the bar in 'a beautiful mind'. i can relate to the way he feels. does that make me a schizophrenic genius then? i dont know about the genius, but shizophrenia is not an unfamiliar sensation. lets hope the genius turns up soon. theres gotta be some upside to a chronic inability to get laid.
Casual conversations with new acquaintances turn into hurt and uncomfortable silences as you inadvertantly say something that was dancing around in your mind. So he stuttered, and so you just came out with it and made fun of him hey you was only jooking! no need for the uncomfortable silence and for people to walk away. Would've been much better for everyone to have a guffaw and put it behind, would even have made the stutterer more comfortable with the company in question. Like saying 'okay you chaps so i stutter, have a laugh and lets move on kids'. It builds relationships to have a quiet laugh about our differences now and then. hell if you were ever a schoolboy, you'd know this.
We know these things when we are kids, we are born with the knowledge. Adulthood just takes it all away. It instils this artificial smokescreen of properness that distorts everything honest and good and encourages all sorts of intricacies built up of 'white' lies and underground guerilla communication that is a downright pain in the rectum spectrum to behold.
Kids are honest, they are direct they are blunt. there is nothing wrong with that. Oh yeah you'll look at them with a sweet smile while your eyes bore into them and you grit your teeth and think 'geez wasn't this tiny pandithaya (know-it-all) ever properly slapped by his parents?' and imagine ways of teaching the bugger a lesson while all the while knowing that the only reason you got so worked up in the first place was cus the kid was right. Thats right, the five year old just told you how it was.
As we grow up, we learn a lot. Ooh now thats impressive isnt it? but we become dumbasses and complicate the single thing that we should never have forgotten, our first lesson in life, smoke free bluntness and openness. And you know whats worse? whats worse is we come to regard the very practice of it as crass and avoid it like the plague, or the swine flu.
Romantic options dwindle as you usually don't say what is 'expected' and skip the foreplay because you just know where your gonna end up anyway. Chicks are so shallow. Reminds me of russel crowe's little spat at the bar in 'a beautiful mind'. i can relate to the way he feels. does that make me a schizophrenic genius then? i dont know about the genius, but shizophrenia is not an unfamiliar sensation. lets hope the genius turns up soon. theres gotta be some upside to a chronic inability to get laid.
Casual conversations with new acquaintances turn into hurt and uncomfortable silences as you inadvertantly say something that was dancing around in your mind. So he stuttered, and so you just came out with it and made fun of him hey you was only jooking! no need for the uncomfortable silence and for people to walk away. Would've been much better for everyone to have a guffaw and put it behind, would even have made the stutterer more comfortable with the company in question. Like saying 'okay you chaps so i stutter, have a laugh and lets move on kids'. It builds relationships to have a quiet laugh about our differences now and then. hell if you were ever a schoolboy, you'd know this.
We know these things when we are kids, we are born with the knowledge. Adulthood just takes it all away. It instils this artificial smokescreen of properness that distorts everything honest and good and encourages all sorts of intricacies built up of 'white' lies and underground guerilla communication that is a downright pain in the rectum spectrum to behold.
Kids are honest, they are direct they are blunt. there is nothing wrong with that. Oh yeah you'll look at them with a sweet smile while your eyes bore into them and you grit your teeth and think 'geez wasn't this tiny pandithaya (know-it-all) ever properly slapped by his parents?' and imagine ways of teaching the bugger a lesson while all the while knowing that the only reason you got so worked up in the first place was cus the kid was right. Thats right, the five year old just told you how it was.
As we grow up, we learn a lot. Ooh now thats impressive isnt it? but we become dumbasses and complicate the single thing that we should never have forgotten, our first lesson in life, smoke free bluntness and openness. And you know whats worse? whats worse is we come to regard the very practice of it as crass and avoid it like the plague, or the swine flu.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Fear of fear itself
As bloggers in Sri Lanka, do we really have the right (or the honor) to be scared of repression yet? Are we such a troublesome blip on the political radar that we warrant white van teams deployed on our doorsteps and the trouble of equipment of torture sharpened in our faces to make us piss in our pants?
The blogosphere is not without its spats and even death threats. I've seen enough hate comments on various political posts around the place to deduce that much. But how much of these comments are really backed up with the capability and willpower to be followed through with hardcore action, and how many of them are just empty mouth-offs by people who disagree strongly enough or are suitably offended to leave abusive comments behind?
It looks like Dinidu has gone and deleted his blog again. That's a pity 'cos there was a post on it that i wanted to link to, with a very interesting comment by David Blacker.
No matter. The gist of it was that Dinidu had written a post on a disturbing incident that had occurred that he postulated was a result of his journalistic mischeivousness, and a very moving poem elaborating his defiance in the face of such threats accompanied it.
David Blacker followed up with a dose of cynical reality (?) and stated in no uncertain terms that SL bloggers should not really flatter themselves with the notion that they are really that important and should realize that they are too insignificant for the powers that be to bother with them.
Also, Indi tells me that Open Mic is getting affected by the same vibe as well because certain individuals have announced fears of repercussions due to the potentially politically volatile, against-the-status-quo nature of the material being read out.
But all this talk and no evidence of actual harm done to any blogger gets me thinking. It first gets me thinking of the nature of the society we live in, about law and order and the fear that people have of exercising their fundamental rights.
We live in a city and a country where the fear of being a victim of thuggery (political or otherwise) takes precedence over the feeling of assurance of back up from the law. In other words people are basically saying; the law? Screw the effing law, the law won't help me here..
But all this fear could just be founded on empty air.
This article i found links to this MSN survey on the Asian blogosphere in general and one striking fact to me was that politicians across the region fared poorly with only 14% shown to be actually reading blogs. This is with countries like China, Korea, India and Burma in the loop mind you so that is a telling statistic.
Assuming it was the same in SL and only 14% of politicians read blogs and presumably 100% read newspapers, the proportion of violence against newspaper journalists that could be directed towards bloggers would be marginally insignificant.
That is however, merely a play on numbers i admit and speaks nothing of the volatility of the country in question or the conniving brutality of its political class. But here's another interesting statistic;
Research has shown that most blogger arrests have occurred 'In countries where the media is restrained from reporting adversarial news' and where 'blogs continued to be the only source of information'.
In other words, what research has shown is that serious repression against bloggers has only occurred when they are bringing something into the media that is heavily blocked from the public by the respective government in question. It's usually only when they are bringing something new into the sphere of public knowledge in terms of cold hard facts that they are taken seriously enough to warrant action against them.
Like Woeser for instance, 'Tibet's most famous writer and blogger' who was put behind bars for the crime of taking pictures of Chinese military installations. This may seem like a trivial thing maybe. But how many of us actually go to the extent of performing some real investigative journalism and going through dangerous shit to get some pics or information to put up on our blogs?
Not many of us. Most of us (including me) merely harp about what we see and hear in the news, receive in e-mails etc . As a community of bloggers we are mainly reactive, and not very proactive.
The big fish are the guys who actually go out there and get the kind of information that gets people worried. And they are the ones that we usually talk about. So it makes sense to repress them first and cut off the sources of information we usually use to blog. Any old fool can voice dissent in terms of opinion, but it takes a real crazy sonofabitch to actually go out looking for the facts in order to bring them to light.
And i may not be all that political in my blogs (you can hardly call posts about tea ladies and peeping toms political) but i'v got eyes and ears. So what do you think? is there any real danger? or are we just flattering ourselves a wee little bit more than we should be?
The blogosphere is not without its spats and even death threats. I've seen enough hate comments on various political posts around the place to deduce that much. But how much of these comments are really backed up with the capability and willpower to be followed through with hardcore action, and how many of them are just empty mouth-offs by people who disagree strongly enough or are suitably offended to leave abusive comments behind?
It looks like Dinidu has gone and deleted his blog again. That's a pity 'cos there was a post on it that i wanted to link to, with a very interesting comment by David Blacker.
No matter. The gist of it was that Dinidu had written a post on a disturbing incident that had occurred that he postulated was a result of his journalistic mischeivousness, and a very moving poem elaborating his defiance in the face of such threats accompanied it.
David Blacker followed up with a dose of cynical reality (?) and stated in no uncertain terms that SL bloggers should not really flatter themselves with the notion that they are really that important and should realize that they are too insignificant for the powers that be to bother with them.
Also, Indi tells me that Open Mic is getting affected by the same vibe as well because certain individuals have announced fears of repercussions due to the potentially politically volatile, against-the-status-quo nature of the material being read out.
But all this talk and no evidence of actual harm done to any blogger gets me thinking. It first gets me thinking of the nature of the society we live in, about law and order and the fear that people have of exercising their fundamental rights.
We live in a city and a country where the fear of being a victim of thuggery (political or otherwise) takes precedence over the feeling of assurance of back up from the law. In other words people are basically saying; the law? Screw the effing law, the law won't help me here..
But all this fear could just be founded on empty air.
This article i found links to this MSN survey on the Asian blogosphere in general and one striking fact to me was that politicians across the region fared poorly with only 14% shown to be actually reading blogs. This is with countries like China, Korea, India and Burma in the loop mind you so that is a telling statistic.
Assuming it was the same in SL and only 14% of politicians read blogs and presumably 100% read newspapers, the proportion of violence against newspaper journalists that could be directed towards bloggers would be marginally insignificant.
That is however, merely a play on numbers i admit and speaks nothing of the volatility of the country in question or the conniving brutality of its political class. But here's another interesting statistic;
Research has shown that most blogger arrests have occurred 'In countries where the media is restrained from reporting adversarial news' and where 'blogs continued to be the only source of information'.
In other words, what research has shown is that serious repression against bloggers has only occurred when they are bringing something into the media that is heavily blocked from the public by the respective government in question. It's usually only when they are bringing something new into the sphere of public knowledge in terms of cold hard facts that they are taken seriously enough to warrant action against them.
Like Woeser for instance, 'Tibet's most famous writer and blogger' who was put behind bars for the crime of taking pictures of Chinese military installations. This may seem like a trivial thing maybe. But how many of us actually go to the extent of performing some real investigative journalism and going through dangerous shit to get some pics or information to put up on our blogs?
Not many of us. Most of us (including me) merely harp about what we see and hear in the news, receive in e-mails etc . As a community of bloggers we are mainly reactive, and not very proactive.
The big fish are the guys who actually go out there and get the kind of information that gets people worried. And they are the ones that we usually talk about. So it makes sense to repress them first and cut off the sources of information we usually use to blog. Any old fool can voice dissent in terms of opinion, but it takes a real crazy sonofabitch to actually go out looking for the facts in order to bring them to light.
And i may not be all that political in my blogs (you can hardly call posts about tea ladies and peeping toms political) but i'v got eyes and ears. So what do you think? is there any real danger? or are we just flattering ourselves a wee little bit more than we should be?
Tuesday, December 30, 2008
Hammer and Mirror
Hammer and Mirror
scream
for has the world ever seen
a being
so maliciously obscene
as which this mirror upholds
before my face?
dream
of a time when I was clean
for a time to come again
for a place where the greeting
would not be a constant grimace
The shadows upon my face
have long since become
the color of my skin.
the horns
have taken root,
yet they are as yet construed.
I still have hope
redemption is not far
and I have not reached that point yet
where my dispair is absolute
Hammer and Gun
scream
for the has been
and for the yet to be revealed.
dream
for tomorrows unseen
for the revelation to be learned
when the light hits you
and your face gets burned.
reel
for you will when you know
so you might as well go
off the deep end now.
why prolong it?
why let it wait?
it beckons
its grin and its slanted eyes
gleaming.
so stop screaming
and rush forward
you aren’t dreaming
just push onward
it’s yours
take it.
it's good for you.
scream
for has the world ever seen
a being
so maliciously obscene
as which this mirror upholds
before my face?
dream
of a time when I was clean
for a time to come again
for a place where the greeting
would not be a constant grimace
The shadows upon my face
have long since become
the color of my skin.
the horns
have taken root,
yet they are as yet construed.
I still have hope
redemption is not far
and I have not reached that point yet
where my dispair is absolute
Hammer and Gun
scream
for the has been
and for the yet to be revealed.
dream
for tomorrows unseen
for the revelation to be learned
when the light hits you
and your face gets burned.
reel
for you will when you know
so you might as well go
off the deep end now.
why prolong it?
why let it wait?
it beckons
its grin and its slanted eyes
gleaming.
so stop screaming
and rush forward
you aren’t dreaming
just push onward
it’s yours
take it.
it's good for you.
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