Idle hands are the devils playground and all that.

I live in a place where our government (like all governments before it and all governments after it) know what is best for it’s people. Therefore we can no longer smoke where we want – no public indoor space, no public outdoor space and not within 6 meters of any door way.

It has been tabled that smoking should be banned in our vehicles next. As if the driver / owner of the vehicle may have someone else in his car who is too small or polite to let the driver know that they do not crave death as much as he does. Smoking can’t be banned in our vehicles, they are our only private spaces left. We use our vehicles as closets, we hide things, we keep junk in them, we sing bad pop tunes because no one else can hear us in them. No one drives with other people in the vehicle any way so what’s the point of banning something we do alone, that doesn’t “hurt” anyone else?

I have gotten off track.

Humans need to do something to fill idle time. We used to smoke and we were all cooler for it.

Pass a cafe patio or bar and you see someone waiting for someone. Just waiting. Talking or texting, updating their status… They should be smoking, cooling their nerves, brooding because the person that they are meeting is late.

Instead they just look and sound obnoxious, and when their date arrives they just keep texting and calling. If they were smoking they would be ready. Cool.

Facebook was created as the new nicotine.

Before your next call,text,update. Smokemifyougotem.

Let that sink in for a moment.

Makes you think about why we don’t let our kids walk to school by themselves anymore. Don’t want to let our kids out of our site for one minute. Don’t want to give someone else the pleasure of killing them, we want to do that ourselves.

We over protect our kids. Is it because we feel guilty about our feelings to destroy them?

We might want to ask ourselves why we over protect our kids. Where does the fear come from? The fear comes from our parents. That’s right those baby boomers who call us when we plan on taking a trip and telling us all the things wrong with where we are going “I just saw a news special and I don’t think it’s safe…”

There are many ways to kill your children and some are worse than physical death. We need to remember this unlike the generations before us who are so full of themselves they only worry about death and achieving immortality while they slowly kill thier children by smothering them.

Let them go, let them run and play.

Just remember when you see them run who it is they are running from.

Terry Pratchett one of my – sometimes – favorite authors is stepping up and setting up a public tribunal on assisted suicide. He wants the public in the UK to decide whether assisted suicide should be legal or not. Terry suffers with alzhiemers disease (maybe that’s why he writes so many books) but his disease isn’t far enough along right now to make him want to die just yet. I guess he is getting his ducks in a row in case he wants to end his life later on down the road. It is an iteresting way to use your celebrity to say the least.

Reading the article I just had one thought: what do life insurance companies think of assisted suicide?

Seriously the fact that life insurance does not get paid out if someone commmits suicide has kept me on the planet when things get bad for me – there is no way I am leaving my kids high and dry.

The article was of course all about making sure people are making the desicion themselves and not being pressured into an assisted death by family or friends who stand to gain either by not having to take care of thier “loved” one or stand to gain an inheritance.

So what about life insurance and assisted suicide? Seems to me that this would be a huge conflict that no insurer would be willing to touch. Then again you can buy insurance for almost anything so who knows.

If insurance does get paid out would it ever be possible to legalize assisted suicide? I would expect that people would be far more likely to want to die if they knew that a wind fall awaited their families once the funeral was over. Either by their own guilt or persuasion by the survivors it would be tough to tell the true motive of why someone chose this cause of death. If someone did persuade someone to die by assisted suicide would they be able to be prosecuted? Would the charge be murder one?

Insurance and murder. Probably not the can of worms Pratchett is looking to open.

Listening to the environmentalists talk we need to go away. We have ruined the world and nature and nature, nature needs to take the power back. We need to be erased.

Listening to the evolutionists talk we have stopped the evolution cycle. We developed technology in order to kill that strongest, and fattest. We have broken the cycle where the weak were killed and the strongest survived and spread the good genes along. We have ruined the world and evolution with it. they tell us that we need to be replaced. We are too destructive.

While I don’t disagree with the fact that the world is a miserable place full of misery what the hell are we supposed to do give up?

What was evolution about? Strongest survive right? Well that’s us… Love us or hate us we are here and rather than have highly educated and highly paid public radio personalities agree with all these people who just want to give up on mankind while not offering a solution – what are we supposed to do just committ mass suicide? We need to find a better solution.

I believe this way of thinking will bring about mass killings. In the same way we have radical religious people trying to cause terror in the name of god we will have people killing mass groups of people in the name of nature.

If you belive in evolution then this is what you get. Random mutations for good or bad determinining who the dominant species is/are. It should be no surprise that evil can be part of that.

Don’t give up. Evolve and find a solution. If we give up the. What kind of world will we leave our children?

I swear she was a Kamikaze pilot in her last life. I guess as long as I am the aircraft carrier she aims for and crashes into I have everything I need. I just wish she would get some sleep so she can fly straight.

Music.

Music can’t get loud enough. Music awakens, the emotions, energy, passion. Music makes me feel great, it makes me feel terrible, it makes me feel something. Music is just math really with rhythm, timing, ticking metronomes, perfect pitch. Math sucks but music is alright. Music is the NEW math.

Turn it UP!

I am unsure of a way to get music across better than by turning it up. Crank it loud, as loud as it goes and then just add a little more. Take it to eleven. At eleven is when the true meaning of the song, the lyrics become apparent. Choruses, bridges, codas, and verses all become what they were meant to be. Perfect.

A hot wired Marshall stack can make anyone sound like they are the angel of death roaring through the clouds to take us away to a different place. It’s terrifying.

If you want to listen to music as loud as it gets pick up a good set of in-ear headphones. The gods must have created these little wonders. They shut out everything else. Let the music hit your brain unfiltered, perfect. Take it to eleven.

I live in a time and place where I can also eat out of enjoyment not because I have to eat but because I want to. Eating makes us feel good and we can choose what we eat making the experience even better. Groups of “foodie” type people are popping up everywhere to take eating to new heights of adventure, of pleasure and expense.

No one is concentrating on making us look good while we eat. Mothers maybe. Mothers maybe the only people on the planet who try and get us to keep our mouths closed, to not spill, to sit up straight, to not have or arms on the table.

Have you drank six bourbons and then watched someone eat?

The experience, like most things after six bourbons, is totally different than without the bourbons. I get it. You get to see the animal within. You observe a connection between the fed and the food. Eating is an all sensory moment. Can you ever remember anything that is going on while your eating? Sure we sit down with other people to eat, conversation happens between bites, eating is probably the most social thing we humans do but it is also one of the most solitary experiences we have as well.

I am talking about when you are tasting, chewing, and swallowing. It’s like the world stops, you can’t talk, your breathing changes, you go into a little of bubble to eat a bite, then you come out. I never noticed it until I was watching people eat (after I drank quite a bit). The person is completely alone in consumption.

Eating might be the most intimate thing we do, but who are we intimate with? We escape into ourselves to eat and we are alone, surviving another day by eating another meal. I think thats why most people don’t like to eat alone. When they come back from the bubble, they want to see a familiar face, an outstretched arm. Hear the roar of dull dinner time conversation.

Seattle seems like a city steeped in a history that embraces the fringe. The gold rush, farmers who wanted to sell direct to their customers, music that made people want to kill themselves…

The city just seems to come out of the sound and creep up the hills to embrace the natural landscape. I was in Seattle a few weeks back and one of my favourite spots to just wander through is Pike Place Market. As you walk deeper and deeper through the market place the smell gets weirder and weirder a mix of fish, and old books. That smell takes me to a strange time and place, a place all its own, a place I know but can’t describe.

My favourite thing to do in the rain is to drive. 5:30 on a November afternoon when the rain is coming down, the lights are brighter and everything looks like it it is melting.

I think the rain has a big thing to do with why west coast music is so great. The rain brings us down, it either demands from us a slower tempo something organic, acoustic. West coast music sometimes tries to scream or rock the rain away but it just keeps coming wave after melting wave.

Let it rain.

I was blessed and am still blessed by what some of the activities offered to me, the skills they taught me, the friendships (even if they are gone) that were able to form during the time spent in the activity. When I was in the middle of all the activity all I wanted to do was slow down, hang out. I wonder what it is about me that longs to do nothing. Is it the fact that I have never really spent much time doing nothing? The grass is always greener I guess. My wife can attest to the fact that I am miserable when I am doing nothing, I am not used to it, I go crazy, my heart starts to hurt from the lack of adrenaline… So why do I crave it? I am addicted to what I don’t get to experience.

I guess when I think back at how busy I was as a child I long for my children to have TIME, to just kick back and bore themselves to death, to create their own adventures, to explore and have unlimited options as to what they do and don’t do with whatever little time they have on this planet. The question is will they? Will they use the unstructured time we give to them wisely or will they just rot their brains on television? Am I that powerful to “give” my children time? Who do I think I am?

Why am I concerned with my children rotting their brains? Rotting my brain with music and TV is exactly what I longed for. What is it about being a parent that makes us want to program our children’s time? Maybe we program their time with adventures or opportunities we wish we had growing up, only to later realize that something that is programmed is not an adventure, it becomes something we must do, which in turn becomes something we avoid because everything we must do obviously isn’t something we chose to do or want to do.

Art and Adventure need to be self created, if it is scheduled or programmed it becomes someone else’s (mine the parent) idea of what adventure is, but for the person who is told they must experience it becomes something less than tolerable. It becomes dull, work. Can we all agree that we have too much time for work and not enough time for adventure.

I think I will explore this a bit more, but maybe later.