Never been one to let the carrier drop

I still remember leaving Phoebe’s, bound for Epoch West.. as I hit the rockies, the sun was coming up and I put the Forrest Gump Suite in the deck.

It was a perfect moment. The sunrise, the trees, the music, the sense of freedom and adventure.

I miss you, Phoebe. I will never know if what happened was in my head or in the real world. Maybe no one ever knows.

I miss you even more, Vicky. One of my deepest hopes is that you will someday know what you gave me. I also really, really hope it didn’t hurt you too much. But having been someone else’s other side in that set of conversations, I now have the idea that it didn’t hurt you as much as it helped me. The old Callahan’s thing.. shared pain is pain lessoned, shared joy is joy increased.. Spider was writing about real truth.

I will always wonder about another of my adventures. I had a friend who was in love with someone across the pond, and I couldn’t get them to take the leap and see each other.. I don’t know why, but they just couldn’t get it together to just go there. Finally, in desperation, I sexed her and used every bit of my not very charged sheerish faith to send the entire sensory texture map of my body to him..

Did it make it? I’ll never know.. but it was the most intense orgasm of my life. It was almost a hour before I was capable of coherent speech. Which makes me think.. um.. yah.. that really happened. Technically, I can easily show you how with the help of the sysadmins of Earth’s reality engine it could have been made real. Maybe it was. I like to think so. How about you?

One of the most important experiences I had on my way to becoming polysexual as well as polyamorous was the shocking discovery that laying next to someone you are in love with while they have sex with someone else doesn’t feel bad.

I wonder how many of you dared to do the experiment. I was shocked as anything.. I felt rejected.. and then I took her hand, and then I was a part of it, and then it was just beautiful.

I have a feeling my existence and my willingness to tell the truth is sometimes a bit of a unhappy thing for my parents. I don’t know how to feel about that. I wish I could get over feeling like they were idiots to not take a few more chances. They probably think I’m a idiot for taking so many. Whatever.. I love them even in my anger and frustration at the scars I bear for living with them for 18 years. I wouldn’t live with them again, I wouldn’t select them as parents again, and I wish I’d been smart enough to realize as a teen that a kid can ask for new parents, but I love them.

One of my strongest guiding lights is the idea to never add more pain and fear to a system that already clearly has far too much. I don’t know that I always succeed at this, but I’d like to think intention counts for something.

So, a long time ago I broke a friendship. I’m not sure how I broke it, although I see numerous things I did that in retrospect I would not have done. I know I had no context for dealing with what I was feeling or what I was thinking.

It did result in me learning a important lesson about love. You don’t forget the people you fall in love with. No amount of wishful thinking or pain or indeed anything will make them stop mattering to you. I miss someone so much it hurts, and all my friends know it, and I think they all knew it and knew why long before I did.

It’s one of the great ironies of being a neural net that you sometimes really can’t see the forest for the trees. I’m sure you all know I love Vicky, and I would give anything to have our real life friendship back, and I’m totally incapable of being normal or even sane in text to her most of the time but as far as I can tell I have always been and would always be just fine in person. But there’s no way to get back to in person that I can think of.

None the less, I believe teams solve problems that individuals can’t. So I’m discussing this with most of my friends, one at a time. I’ve learned to reprogram parts of my neural net, and I have no problem with the idea of changing anything that’s in the way of this friendship. At the same time I will freely acknowledge that I have no idea what I’m doing.

On the other paw, I am still impressed with how little Clint knows about love. Yes, he actually did tell me, and I think he meant it, that I would kill her so other people couldn’t have her. I don’t know what you’re smoking, Clint, but I’d suggest stopping, whatever it is. This is so far from love that it doesn’t even fit on the same map.

So, Rebel, my furry four footed friend, left us on thanksgiving. I’ve lost a lot of people over the years, but I’ve never experienced missing someone as much as I miss him. Part of it is that, working at home, I was always around him.. and he was one of the most loving friends I’ve ever had. I talked to him often, and almost everywhere we went we went with him.

Everything reminds me of him.. every meal I would share “puppy taxes” with him.. every day we would walk.. even going to the mailbox reminds me that I’m not doing it as part of longwalk.

Part of me wants to go out and get another four footed friend right away to fill the furry hole in my heart, and part of me wants to wait. I know Gayle would probably rather wait a while.

So, I am again avoiding facebook. I’ve set www.facebook.com to 127.0.0.1 in /etc/hosts on my mac and C:\Windows\System32\Drivers\etc\hosts on my PC to help remind me that I’m avoiding it. This time, it was a post of my mother’s that drove me over the edge.. I considered just unfriending her, but I decided that it would be far more productive to just unfriend the whole system.

See, the thing is, Facebook doesn’t make me happy. I think part of it is that people repeatedly post religious and political messages on it, and I have enough friends who are right wing for that to get incredibly depressing – but part of it is just that it’s kind of like reading a list of all the people who are having lives while I am working 9.7 hours a day (my average last pay period)

One bit of good news is that $LARGE_TIME_HOGGING_CLIENT has given me a week off in November and another in December. I’ve given a few days of that to other clients, but I’m currently hogging the majority of it for me.

Anyway, so, if you don’t see me on facebook, it’s because I’m avoiding it

So, at least according to some sites, Nick Mason has stated that U2 releasing their most recent album for free ‘devalues music’. I think Mr. Mason is confused about value.

(Yes, this is part of a recurring series on the topic of value, which I think is a important topic for us all to understand if we want to have a amazing future instead of a dystopian one)

There are some things that become more valuable the more of them are wandering around in the world. A single fax machine, a single computer, not particularly valuable. Two fax machines, two computers, and now you have a network. Add more fax machines or computers, and you’re making them more valuable because more people can use them to get things done.

Music and movies and books are very similar. They form a cultural rosetta stone that can assist us in communicating with each other. They often transcend the notes and words they are made of to capture emotion and spirit and story in ways that aid communication. So, the more copies of a song are out there, the more people have been exposed to it, the *more* valuable it is.

Thinking that scarcity and price define value is a cognitive distortion that can lead to a number of unhappy things. While the free market economy makes it *appear* that scarcity means value, it is a illusion. It might raise the price, but it doesn’t make the whatever the scarce object is able to do any more or be any more, except for the few sick people who get pleasure from knowing they can have something no one else can have.

So, earlier I suggested that we should have live streaming video cameras on all cops. That appears to be being implemented. Now I suggest we take it further.

Cop guns should be extremely smart, armed with video recognition and a fair host of complex software, and should refuse to shoot to kill without authorization from a operator who is not at the scene of the crime, but rather is sitting watching from dispatch.

Think about it. At the scene, often emotions are running rather high. Most of the time that cops shoot a innocent, I suspect that it’s a case of the emotions of the cops are making them incapable of making good decisions. Someone sitting and watching the show from elsewhere would likely have a much better evaluation of whether the cops were actually in any danger.

I am actually suggesting that the guns be smart enough to refuse to fire if the cop is aiming for a kill shot rather than a disabling shot unless either the onboard computer (via video recog realizing the target has a weapon drawn) or the dispatcher (away from the scene and not as involved emotionally) has enabled that functionality. I would also suggest we consider similar limitations for tasers to avoid cops abusing them – while tasers are not generally lethal they still can be abused in a number of ways.

I think we as a society need to be thinking about ways to end “the thin blue line”. It’s not moral, correct, or something we want in our worlds for our guardians to abuse their power whenever they want, secure in the impunity that nothing bad will happen to them because they are the cops and therefore are above the law.

So, I think I’ve talked on here.. certainly I’ve discussed with various of my friends.. how the best defense against a resentment is gratitude. And certainly I have a lot of resentment towards certain aspects of my childhood exposure to religion.

However, there is undoubtedly a appropriate grattitude here. Several, in fact. First, I’m not required to be any religion. The country I live in enforces no state religion, and the majority of the people in my life will be friends with me, and treat me well, regardless of what religion I am or am not.

Second, I don’t have to believe the bible. My mind is not so damaged that I can’t see the parts of it that are clearly sick and disturbing (things like the story of Job) as anything other than some very afraid people making up some very disturbing stories.

Third, I have a number of reasons to think that my final resting place does not in any way hinge on whether or not I believe the bible. My experiences with the spiritual universe have repeatedly suggested to me that I am not going to hell unless I choose to go to hell, and that the bible is out to lunch, and I get repeated reinforcement of this idea.

Fourth, the effect of some of the most poisonous beliefs of the bible is fading with time. I don’t have ‘brain bleach’ exactly, but I do have rational thought trained with over half a million lines of code written in languages that are strictly rational. Against that type of rational thought, the more broken and poisonous ideas in the religion can not stand, while the good and worthwhile ideas (and there are some, especially in the words of Jesus) stand even stronger. Rational thought turns out to be quite a powerful tool for combatting irrational fear.

So, I’m grateful both for the freedom to not believe that there’s anything wrong with the many things the Bible suggests you should kill people over, the freedom to live in a world where even fundamentalists are not allowed to stone gay people and witches, and the freedom to live in a world which contains the tools to fight the more disturbing aspects of the religion I had (at least somewhat) crammed down my throat. I also think I live in a world where increasingly we would not strongly pressure children to get confirmed even if they didn’t completely agree with or understand the religion they were supposed to be getting confirmed in. I think increasingly we don’t see children as property, but rather as fellow travellers. I even see signs that increasingly we don’t see pets as property, but as fellow travellers. And that’s all to the good.

I’m grateful for the growth and positive change I see. While I’m at it, I’m grateful that I am not required to own or even know how to use any weapons, that I’m not required to serve in our military, that I’m not required to be in favor of the state’s beliefs about money, or power – that I in fact can apparently openly criticize the state (I’ve done so many times in many forums) and no punishment results. I’m grateful for my freedom to disagree with our government, and with our societal constructs, which I do indeed seem to have. Repeated tests have suggested that at l east within the context of my web site, I do have freedom of speech.