inquiry

> I have a certain energy inside me, and sometimes I describe > it as a fire. Often I have contained and focused this fire > into work, projects around the home, exercise, dieting, > etc. At the present I am exploring how to cultivate such > fire energy to grow instead of containing and focus it.

Pour some write.asoline on that puppy! ;–)

(FWIW, the mere mention of fire has me remembering this rather excellent version of The Ohio Players performing their “Fire” live...)

> How can you expand the reach of your fire, passion, and > energy in your life?

Hmmm. If anything, I'm looking the opposite direction, less being consumed after seemingly shaken in searing hot jaws.

> I always like the computer-y monospace font that > Write.as offers. The vast majority of my blog posts > on here are “Serif” because that is what this blog > basically defaults to and I (previously) couldn't get my > blog to default to Monospace every time I went to write > something. It almost always reset to Serif, but, that was > over a year ago, so maybe things have changed.

LOL... I almost always “scrape” read.write.as, so it's all 24x7 terminal font to me.

To me, the whole “how cool can we make things look in browsers?” thing has been mostly evidence of shallowness. I understand such things make some kinds of differences in some ways, but I'd much rather the same effort poured into the writing itself than the trappings/packaging.

It kind of reminds me about how people whine about “materialism” during holiday seasons, but then go buy their friends, family, and kids gobs of gifts, thereby making most if not all of the season about materialism.

I mean, please... spare me the goddamned dufuckingplicity....

So... do people want solid online content, or do they want a pretty bleeping picture show? Seems to me they say the former, but their actions keep belying far more cherishing the latter.

> I sort of wanted to be a journalist at one point. Now I > am totally and completely disgusted with the media, and > I hate reading / watching the media, but, I still wanted > to write FOR some publication that had some standards.

Tough quandary.

I think it's mostly getting over the myth of journalism, i.e. that it's some noble thing well above and beyond profiteering.

It may be important to remember no non-free-willed-entity thing “is” anything in particularly but what the wielder(s) thereof is(are). So if “journalism” is a disgusting thing, it's for being primarily created by disgusting people. There's just no way around that, for “journalism” isn't some independent being doing things – it's a sort of emergent chimera that we speak of as though it were a being of sorts.. like with sports teams, where we say “the <the name of any sports team> did so and so”. Well, no... there really is no such <the name of any sports team> being: just a bunch of people doing things under the guise of a corporate individual, and lots of deluded people believing in the mythical being.

> Making meaningful, community-based, small (and then larger) > changes OURSELVES

Add the word 'in' before the word 'OURSELVES', and I'm on board....

> you broke off a piece of my heart > and locked it up > inside a jewelry box > to be worn > when it was suitable for you > forcing me to steal > or accept as charity > fragments of those i love > so that i can be whole enough > to keep going

Mmmm!

> Just wanted to say that at this critical time in history, > it is more imparitive than ever that we all fight back > non-violently at those whom want to take away our right > to speak freely and openly.

Behaving like oppressors (“fight back non-violently”) merely perpetuates oppression – especially in subtle ways.

The only hope is that enough people being better people than the oppressors somehow convinces the oppressors to become better people such that the oppression fades like the people in Marty's photograph in “Back to the Future”.

> And so, we must never give up this fight!

In fact, giving up “fight” is on possible first step toward a world in which there is no fight....

> But I digress. I am sure the topic is what really matters, > and the fact that it (the topic, which was failures of > capitalism in this case) was being discussed at all in > any form (aside from a blog or op-ed) is a “win” > in the category of bringing awareness to the fact that > our (American) system is quite broken, and we have to > change it.

Whatever system is well nigh irrelevant: good people can make a shitty system work, and lousy people can wreck the best system.

I think it best to stop pretending “systems” are as though beings such that they can do anything.

Change occurs when enough individuals change such that their collective behavior(s) sum to a different – and hopefully more positive – value. The ongoing whine – at the social discourse level – about changing systems is really just so much procrastination from what each individual needs to get busy at hard work with.

> So now I'm going to try to just free-form write a little > more using write.as. It's a minimal interface, and I'm > banking that it will help me sit down for at least five > minutes and just write something ... regularly. Might be > crap. Might not get read by anybody.

Oh, but it will. I'm salivating even as I type!