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Nation of One

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tid-bits
« on: September 28, 2018, 12:11:48 pm »
A man may have a high income or an abundance of time on his hands, but rarely both.

What is most frustrating for the "working poor" is that he/she has neither.

Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

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Silenus

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Re: tid-bits
« Reply #1 on: November 07, 2018, 03:35:09 pm »
Quote
“The acceleration of contemporary life also plays a role in this lack of being. The society of laboring and achievement is not a free society. It generates new constraints. Ultimately, the dialectic of master and slave does not yield a society where everyone is free and capable of leisure, too. Rather, it leads to a society of work in which the master himself has become a laboring slave. In this society of compulsion, everyone carries a work camp inside. This labor camp is defined by the fact that one is simultaneously prisoner and guard, victim and perpetrator. One exploits oneself. It means that exploitation is possible even without domination.”

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"...depression spreads when the commandments and prohibitions of disciplinary society yield to self-responsibility and initiative. In reality, it is not the excess of responsibility and initiative that makes one sick, but the imperative to achieve: the new commandment of late-modern labor society.”
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“What proves problematic is not individual competition per se, but rather its self-referentiality, which escalates into absolute competition. That is, the achievement-subject competes with itself; it succumbs to the destructive compulsion to outdo itself over and over, to jump over its own shadow. This self-constraint, which poses as freedom, has deadly results.”

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“In the course of general acceleration and hyperactivity we are also losing the capacity for rage.”
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“If sleep represents the high point of bodily relaxation, deep boredom is the peak of mental relaxation. A purely hectic rush produces nothing new. It reproduces and accelerates what is already available.”


― Byung-Chul Han, The Burnout Society

(My own use of Bold.)

"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

Nation of One

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Re: tid-bits
« Reply #2 on: November 07, 2018, 07:46:50 pm »
Quote
In the course of general acceleration and hyperactivity we are also losing the capacity for rage.

I feel something akin to rage, but it is below the surface, uttering words which frighten me, confusing emotions I do not want to acknowledge.

Case in point, everything I have cooked over the past few days, after spending a large portion of monthly funds at the grocery store, my mother does not want to eat.  I bought a lot of fish.  The only meat I got was a large butt-ham with the bone in, which I also made two large pots of pea soup with.

Even though she is known for eating domestic ham on a regular basis, she suddenly decides that ham has too much salt.  She won't eat the ham or the soup.   I think, "stubborn biitch."

She complains that the bananas are over-ripe.  I have no "baking mix" but mix up 5 bananas with the whole wheat flour, brown sugar, butter, eggs, vanilla extract, bking soda, honey, walnuts, and even some coconut flakes.  It comes out very well.   She says she likes the way I used to make it (with the baking mix).   I think, "stubborn biitch."

Like I said, I spent a lot at the grocery store stocking up on fish (cod, fresh salmon, 2 large bags of frozen salmon), several cans of tuna fish, Coconut water (Mom gets dehyfrated), prunes, raisins (huge bag), olive oil, crisco, several jars of peanut butter, tea bags, coffee, canned pink salmon plus 2 large bags of frozen shredded potatoes that I fry up with the canned salmon to make "salmon cakes," organic brown rice (she doesn't like it!), almond butter, apple butter, hot dogs, V8 Fusion Juice, Quinoa/Brown rice mix (she doesn't want to try it), Pomograte Plum Juice (a couple large bottles), a couple bundles of bananas for banana bread, cauliflower (she can't eat it), cabbage (she can't eat it), 4 dozen eggs, Italian-style Meatballs (she likes these),  some cookware, noodles, Romaine hearts (lettuce), fresh baby spinach, mushrooms, oranges (turned out to be hard and dry inside), lemons, cheese, cereal, milk, Steel Cut oats, Braunschweiger (liverwurst), garlic bread, green tea, red onions, onion soup mix, 5 pounds potatoes, carrots, croissants ...

The price?  $270

I give my mother another $600 each month to help pay just two of her bills, one being to a bank ($200 of which is finance charge, the other bill is the required maintenance fee).  Anyway, I am losing patience with my mom.  I'm not showing it, but, trust me, within me I am losing patience with all the complaints.  Now she says she can't swallow her food.  The oatmeal went down easy this morning.  Part of me thinks she is sick in the head, playing games.

Thankfully I have my math and coding projects.  I stay up late into the night and work in peace.

If I were Kafka, I might be able to make a story out of this, but all I can do is fester.

I think my mother is a hypochondriac.

She's surely neurotic.  She has equally neurotic friends who are advising her to "go to the emergency room."  Why?  Because she is spitting out her food, wanting to chew and swallow, but then just spitting it out.   Fresh spinach, fresh mushrooms, fresh par-boiled and baked carrots and potatoes.  She can get down the pea soup, but lets THAT go cold!  She's on the phone now with a friend who is advising her to go to the emergency room.  When she gets off the phone, she will suggest it, and I will roll my eyes.  Yes, I am a monster.  I think it is a ridiculous idea. 

I just finished cleaning all the pots and pans in the kitchen.  She made the brown rice, then refused to eat it.  She fried up chicken breast tenderloins, and spit it out.   I ate pea soup, cabbage, and cauliflower, then tinkered with some code, worked on some math problems.  Applying DeMoivre's theorem.  I could take the math work to the hospital, but, trust me, I will not be very sympathetic toward my mother.  This shiit is getting too ridiculous for me.  ALL-TOO-RIDICULOUS. 

Maybe she has a little head cold and has lost her appetite.  Is this really some kind of medical emergency, or is this about someone who has temporarily lost her appetite?  It happens to animals all the time, no?  Do we have to have ravenous appetites every day?   What, you didn't eat an entire cow today?   You better call an ambulance!  Please, someone tell me that I am some kind of insensitive monster, if this is how you see it.  r tell me my mother is a crazy woman.   Either way, it is what it is.   If she insists, I will have to take her there, but this life is going to drive me to drink.  Good mother-fuucking grief.   ::)

Ah, here comes the sense of humor.  I imagine how much funnier I would be with a few drinks in me.   :o

What does all this have to do with rage?

Well, I am trying to explain.  On the outside, I may appear to be a very patient man, but within me is some kind of tick-tock-tick-tock …  :-\
« Last Edit: October 25, 2020, 07:23:38 pm by Sticks and Stones »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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Re: tid-bits
« Reply #3 on: November 07, 2018, 09:01:21 pm »
So, my mom hands me the phone and it's one of my aunts.   She confides to me that a younger sister of theirs who died three years ago had started complaining about not being able to swallow any food without a gulp of water.


Uh-oh.   She did not tell this to my mom.  So, the one aunt has gotten through to me, and I suppose there may be reason for a little alarm.  We will go to the hospital first thing in the morning.  Tonight The Mother will have to just rest.   It's not the kind of emergency that you run to the hospital in the middle of the night for.   It's only the kind of thing one ought to be somewhat alarmed about.  A morning trip to the hospital to see if there isn't something threatening lurking about.


I'm not a monster.  Just a male.  My aunt said that men are less likely to be concerned about such things, whereas women, for some reason, tend to take such things as not being able to get down food without water as a sympton of the Grim Reaper being on the premises and circling around.




« Last Edit: November 08, 2018, 12:02:54 am by {{}} »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Silenus

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Re: tid-bits
« Reply #4 on: November 21, 2018, 02:04:14 pm »
A letter by Charles Bukowski:

Quote
8-12-86

Hello John:

Thanks for the good letter. I don't think it hurts, sometimes, to remember where you came from. You know the places where I came from. Even the people who try to write about that or make films about it, they don't get it right. They call it "9 to 5." It's never 9 to 5, there's no free lunch break at those places, in fact, at many of them in order to keep your job you don't take lunch. Then there's OVERTIME and the books never seem to get the overtime right and if you complain about that, there's another sucker to take your place.

You know my old saying, "Slavery was never abolished, it was only extended to include all the colors."

And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Early on, when I was quite young and going from job to job I was foolish enough to sometimes speak to my fellow workers: "Hey, the boss can come in here at any moment and lay all of us off, just like that, don't you realize that?"

They would just look at me. I was posing something that they didn't want to enter their minds.

Now in industry, there are vast layoffs (steel mills dead, technical changes in other factors of the work place). They are layed off by the hundreds of thousands and their faces are stunned:

"I put in 35 years..."

"It ain't right..."

"I don't know what to do..."

They never pay the slaves enough so they can get free, just enough so they can stay alive and come back to work. I could see all this. Why couldn't they? I figured the park bench was just as good or being a barfly was just as good. Why not get there first before they put me there? Why wait?

I just wrote in disgust against it all, it was a relief to get the **** out of my system. And now that I'm here, a so-called professional writer, after giving the first 50 years away, I've found out that there are other disgusts beyond the system.

I remember once, working as a packer in this lighting fixture company, one of the packers suddenly said: "I'll never be free!"

One of the bosses was walking by (his name was Morrie) and he let out this delicious cackle of a laugh, enjoying the fact that this fellow was trapped for life.

So, the luck I finally had in getting out of those places, no matter how long it took, has given me a kind of joy, the jolly joy of the miracle. I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I can no longer tell a bluebird from a paperclip, I still feel that something in me is going to remember (no matter how far I'm gone) how I've come through the murder and the mess and the moil, to at least a generous way to die.

To not to have entirely wasted one's life seems to be a worthy accomplishment, if only for myself.

yr boy,

Hank

« Last Edit: November 21, 2018, 02:55:19 pm by Silenus »

"And the strict master Death bids them dance."

Nation of One

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Re: tid-bits
« Reply #5 on: November 24, 2018, 12:10:43 am »
"Fortified, as well as might be expected, against all things, except sickness, death, inflation, revolution, and chance". (Holden)
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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Re: tid-bits
« Reply #6 on: October 25, 2020, 07:44:17 pm »
Quote from: Bukowski
And what hurts is the steadily diminishing humanity of those fighting to hold jobs they don't want but fear the alternative worse. People simply empty out. They are bodies with fearful and obedient minds. The color leaves the eye. The voice becomes ugly. And the body. The hair. The fingernails. The shoes. Everything does.

As a young man I could not believe that people could give their lives over to those conditions. As an old man, I still can't believe it. What do they do it for? Sex? TV? An automobile on monthly payments? Or children? Children who are just going to do the same things that they did?

Thanks Silenus.  Going through these tidbits, I notice that there was a certain resentment building up as far back as two years ago.  Part of me suddenly did not want to "play this game anymore."   Now I see that this living arrangement is what is best considering the situation.   There is a certain dynamic between parent and child, but these dynamics change over time.  Maybe I have a lifetime's fill of memories of being dominated by parents and authorities who got off on bull-headeded baboon family politics. 

Now that child is well over 50 years old.  By now, he's not pulling as many punches, so to speak.  That is, the look in my eyes gives me away, my intelligence has burdened me with a certain pride.   I was able to elude marriage simply because I would make such a poor prospect as a husband (not a good catch, a daydreamer).   And yet I have not been spared the minor aggravations of petty bickering that most couples must endure in their cohabitation.

If my life were a sitcom on the TV, well, then it might be funny to watch (as entertainment, as comedy), but the actual lived experience reveals we are each these porcupines Schopenhauer wrote about.   Our personalities are the needles, and we poke one another with these needles when we stand too close.

When we do not know how we can "go on like this," and yet continue to do so, this is what makes life so ridiculous, says Schopenhauer.

A married philosopher belongs in comedy (Schopenhauer).

What does this make the philosopher-as-caretaker for his aging mother?  Only humor can save me now.  We are getting along better ... as I "govern my reactions," that is, as I develop some gentleness in my gruff mannerisms.
« Last Edit: October 25, 2020, 08:38:14 pm by Sticks and Stones »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Nation of One

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Re: tid-bits
« Reply #7 on: March 31, 2021, 09:55:07 am »
Quote from: Senor Raul
Spanish is a difficult language and we forget the origins of “trabajar” (work) and familia (family). I learned that trabajar comes from the Latin word tripalliare. Tripalliare means torturing with the tripallium. Tripallium was a three-pointed trap that was used to tie horses or oxen and in that way shoeing them. It was also used as an instrument of torture against the slaves or prisoners.

Familia comes from the Latin word famulus. It means servant or slave. The word familia was equivalent to the patrimony and included not only the relatives but also the servants at the masters´ house in Ancient Rome.   

We are trapped by language.

From Senor Raul's post, "The semi-satisfied life
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~

Holden

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Wille und Vorstellung
« Reply #8 on: March 31, 2021, 09:56:24 pm »


I wonder if a movie about Schopenhauer would ever be made.Probably not.

A scene:

You are working in the Park, thinking about Schopenhauer in 1995.

The sequence transitions to Schopenhauer in 1815,still in the processing of writing Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung.

He think about the ideal reader who would read it someday.

The sequence transitions back to you.
« Last Edit: March 31, 2021, 10:10:52 pm by Holden »
La Tristesse Durera Toujours                                  (The Sadness Lasts Forever ...)
-van Gogh.

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Re: tid-bits [Jerky Boys of Dirty Jersey]
« Reply #9 on: April 23, 2021, 09:32:22 am »
Things They Will Never Tell YouArthur Schopenhauer has been the most radical and defiant of all troublemakers.

Gorticide @ Nothing that is so, is so DOT edu

~ Tabak und Kaffee Süchtigen ~