I recently came across an article about a strange parasite that infects ants. I’ve been fascinated by parasites for a long time, even though they terrify me.
It’s not the one you’re thinking about. I just started watching “The Last of Us” and I’m as freaked out by the Cordyceps zombie fungus as everyone else.
No, this is a tapeworm. Any ant that catches it gets to stay young and live a life of leisure. Bring it on, right? You’d think that until you find out where it leads.
The host lives longer, but the colony slowly dies from overwork. I wonder how that could be applied to society?
It seems obvious now, but I never thought about it till I read that article: wealth is a parasite.
Not the poor like I used to think as a younger ant – and not the wealthy either, but wealth itself.
Whoever thought I would volunteer to write and give a sermon? I swore off church decades ago. I just happened to join a Unitarian church to make some friends. We’re lay-led at the moment and here we are…
It turns out you don’t have to be a Unitarian to be a Unitarian. Deep down, searching for truth and meaning was always my mission, which is why I’m here on a Sunday instead of sleeping in like I did for 30-plus years.
When I read the 4th Principle of Unitarianism, I was shocked to realize it was describing me. Young me would never believe it. It turns out I was a Unitarian in my heart all along.
My search for truth and meaning eventually led me here. Finally, a team that doesn’t make you pick a team. You just have to be kind.
I’ve traveled many paths searching for the Truth. Looking back, I held some seriously wrong views along the way. I looked to the people around me for answers.
I believed what I was supposed to believe, because I wanted to be “good.” It was hard to be the man I wanted to be, so I tried hard to do it their way.
But beliefs would fall apart when I examined them. I was never satisfied with clever slogans or answers people refused to explain. They had the right answers already and they didn’t want to think about it.
If they wouldn’t answer my questions, I had to find my own way. When I realized a belief was wrong, I had to let it go even if it was painful, which it was. I had to demolish world views I had worked so hard building.
It was bewildering and scary, but it was also exciting. I loved discovering new things. Sometimes I felt like the rug was being yanked out from under me, but I accepted it.
I’ve always wanted to know what it all means, what us humans are supposed to be doing here.
I read a lot, which made me think big thoughts and ask bigger questions. The more books, the more questions. My parents got me into that habit. They read constantly we discussed what we read.
The first Unitarian I met in the wild was a college classmate. He gave me a ride once. People who weren’t Baptists or Catholics were a novelty for me. He explained Unitarianism when I asked, but it didn’t really click.
My second year of college I read a book called The Faiths that Men Live By, which gave me my first ever fair descriptions of other religions’ actual beliefs.
Before that I had only been taught all the ways they were wrong. They weren’t as foolish and ill-intentioned as I’d been taught. I still had a long way to go, but suddenly the truth wasn’t so obvious anymore.
Coincidentally, I found out later that it was written by Unitarian minister and theologian, Charles Francis Potter.
Eventually I quit looking for the only path and chose a path that said to keep looking. I look for signposts that will point the way if I pay attention. Seeing a Yin and Yang sign out front when I’d just been reading about Eastern religions seemed like too big a coincidence. I felt, “It was meant to be.”
I had a rough time during the lockdown even though I never got covid. The pandemic and the isolation were hard enough, but watching the madness happening in the country was way worse.
I began to lose faith in humanity. How could supposedly decent people do and say such terrible things? And yet they thought they were on the right side.
I did what a lot of people did during the lockdown, I tried to learn Yoga and consumed a lot of videos and books about Zen, mindfulness and Taoism, traditions I had never examined before. And they began to make sense.
One concept that really resonated with me was Non-dualism. Non-dualism was common to most of them, and it was hard to wrap my head around at first.
There are many definitions for Non-Duality and they can get pretty involved. The Wikipedia article alone is a challenge to get through. I’m still trying to wrap my head around “non-difference of subject and object.”
I stole this definition from a website called Non-Duality for Dummies: “Non-duality is an ancient Eastern philosophy that means ‘not two.’ It refers to the nature of existence consisting of one interconnected whole, rather than many separate things cobbled together.”
That’s the simplest explanation I’ve found so far.
I used to think opposites had nothing to do with one another, but it turns out they’re intimately connected. A magnet must have a negative and a positive pole. You can’t have tall without short, up without down.
Thinking about Non-Duality also shows how relative everything is. Is it a big rock or a small boulder? How many is “some”? Some arbitrary place between all and nothing.
I’m a giant eyeball to whatever looks at me through a microscope, but I’m a speck compared to the earth. And the earth is a speck compared to everything else.
Even for a lifelong science fiction fan, that was a lot, but I’ve started to grasp the basics. How everything is connected, and there isn’t really a “pure” version of anything.
I thought I knew what black looked like, but then they invented a pigment called Vanta black that will make a ball look like a spot. Everyone and everything are on a scale. That clicked.
The reason non-dualism resonated so hard is it gave me better way to look at good and evil. I needed that. Growing up, I was taught there were good people and bad people. You needed to stick with the good ones and avoid the bad. And the bad ones couldn’t be us.
The last few years were making me question: Is the human race worth saving? Is it inherently bad? Does that include me? Do the bad things I’ve done and thought in the past make me a bad person? Are bad people redeemable?
We all think we’re the good guy in the story, even if we aren’t. I’ve decided the way you really become the good guy is to just try to be better than the day before. Which made me feel better about myself and humanity.
Now I understand one shades into the other. Good and evil are on a scale. You can choose to move up or down on that scale. Redemption doesn’t just happen all at once. It’s a process.
I also discovered psychologist Carl Jung during the lockdown and his theories were also in line with those ideas. It’s hard to know where you stand on the good and bad scale.
Your unconscious knows the real story, but your ego will try to make you the hero every time. If somebody got hurt, they deserved it “because,” you “had to do it,” or whatever explanation makes you feel better.
English writer and lecturer Alan Watts explained it beautifully. “I think this is the most important thing in Jung, that he was able to point out: to the degree you condemn others and find evil in others, you are to that degree unconscious of the same thing in yourself.”
Everyone is at least a little bad, but that’s just part of being human. Understanding that helps you to be kind to yourself, which makes it easier to be kind to others.
I used to think being a good person meant fighting and repressing your dark side. Now I understand that side of you is something you have to accept and forgive.
It turns out the most important part of being good is kindness. Toward other people and toward yourself.
Hell of a cover of Tennesee Ernie Ford’s Sixteen Tons by Jeff Beck and ZZ Top.
I get credit card offers in the mail almost daily. I always toss them but it never stops.
I used to get tons of those when I was in the paper business. I was like, WTF? Don’t they know what I do for a living? How the hell do they think I’m ever gonna pay them back?
It has finally occurred to me that they don’t care if you can pay them back unless you’re one of the big fish. They just want a as many of us little fish as possible TRYING to pay them back. That’s something they can work into their budgets.
They’re not worried about you going bankrupt. They’re worried about the real estate developer.
Bankers are really trappers and we’re the fur! How’s that for a mixing metaphors?
Gotta share the OG version of Sixteen Tons. Dedicated to Granny, who I forced to listen to Creedence Clearwater Revival in the car when she mistakenly thought they were a gospel group.
“On the Computer” – by Treasure Mammal. A song from a more innocent age. I saw these guys during “Yeast by Sweet Beast” in Austin and they were so fun.
I fell in love with the Internet, even though it nearly put me in the street. I was in denial for years. Newspapers would adapt. Only the dailies had to worry. The weeklies and semi-weeklies would always be in demand.
It looked like my salvation at first. It was a wild and sometimes dangerous place, but it was exciting. So much knowledge, so many possibilities.
The Internet let me experience a world I couldn’t afford to travel to. I lived most of my life in small country towns, always broke. People weren’t interested in my favorite bands or sci fi books. They never seemed to get my jokes.
On the Internet I found my people. Or thought I had. I could talk to other music geeks and women who weren’t looking to marry a church-going cowboy.
I wasn’t a liberal, but I got along with liberals. They were usually good for a band rec. Even during the Iraq War you could agree to disagree.
Looking back, I feel so naïve. I thought it would always be about LOLcats and David After the Dentist and Charlie Bit My Finger. I might have been helping to put myself out of a job, but it kept me sane. For a time.
Now it feels like the hot stripper girlfriend who stalks my every move and keeps slashing my tires. I should probably hide someplace she will never find me, but I keep waiting for the magic to return.
What are we gonna do with this thing we’ve created together?
#Internet, #LOLcats, #Newspapers, #Yeast By Sweet Beast, #Treasure Mammal, #Traps
Interesting bit of graffiti I saw today. Way deeper than it seems at first. Ignore the spelling mistake. In fact, I think it’s a feature, not a bug.
“Before love I used to think words ment something.” True statement, maybe even truer than they thought. It’s also a paradox. Love is something words can’t express. But they said it with words.
That got me thinking. Language itself is a kind of paradox. A sentence never really “means” anything, because it’s made out of words, not the thing it refers to. Like an internet friend said on the subject, “It’s only a paradox because you’re using words.”
“The map is not the territory, the word is not the thing it describes. Whenever the map is confused with the territory, a ‘semantic disturbance’ is set up in the organism. The disturbance continues until the limitation of the map is recognized.”
I’m definitely not the first person to think of this. Wittgenstein explored the subject, as did Alfred Korzybski, quoted above. Surrealist Rene Magritte’s famous painting “This is not a pipe” is a good illustration. It definitely represents a pipe, but you can’t smoke it. It’s a symbol, just as words are symbols.
“Don’t think about elephants.” What did you just think of? Mom used to pull that on us when we were kids.
The sports editor at one of my newspapers used to do something similar. When I least expected it, he’d say, “You just lost the game.” Yup, I knew the rules. Sometimes I got him first. Our coworkers were playing the game too. They just didn’t know it.
It was simply called “The Game.” Apparently it’s something that’ started in’s been going around since the late ’90s or early ’00s. If you think about it, you lose. If you say “you just lost the game” you lose, but the listener loses also. The aim isn’t to win, but to make somebody else lose.
Everyone in the world is playing The Game. Everybody in the world who knows about The Game is playing The Game. You are always playing The Game, you cannot refuse to play The Game. It doesn’t require consent and you can never stop playing.
Whenever you think about The Game, you lose.
You have to announce when you lose the game. You may have to be reminded of The Game.
The Wikipedia article also refers to related games. Leo Tolstoy used to play a game with his brother where they would try not to think about a white bear and the image would appear every time. Similarly, when someone says “don’t think about elephants,” you cannot keep from thinking about elephants.
So I am so tripping right now. I just found out about muonium. It’s lighter than regular matter and has nothing to do with cows. Why do I care? I don’t know. I’m a little high. And a lot nerdy.
I barely learned about muons a few months ago. Another one of those atom smasher stories. That was hard enough for me to wrap my head around.
Usually, “they just discovered a particle” quantum physics news goes in one ear and out the other. I can’t keep up with all the subatomic particles they keep finding in labs. It’s voodoo to me at this point.
I pay attention to science news, but they keep finding things out. When I was in school, atoms looked like the solar system. People on the news were going nuts over something called a God particle a while back, but I didn’t bother to dig into it. I usually don’t care as long as it’s not gonna blow me up. I might get curious about it later.
Muons grabbed my attention, because they already have a commercial use. Like electrons only bigger? Still trippy, but particles you can shoot at stuff is something I get. They have lasers now.
Now I find out there’s a kind of matter called muonium, like a little bitty atom. With an anti-muon (anti-matter!) and an electron. So it’s an “atom” that’s lighter than hydrogen. It’s another one of those things in the atom smasher that lasts a fraction of a second, but it’s long enough to make compounds like muonium chloride and Sodium Muonide (!). It’s too much for my brain.
They discovered it in 1960. Never came up in school. That kinda pisses me off. Anyway, it’s all of my life late, but now I know another physics thing. Now when are they going to figure our how to make something out of it?
Late Boomer's Den 
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