Thoughts on Shrapnel

Once upon a time, a little baby was born. There is nothing remarkable about this- I'm told it happens every day- and there was nothing remarkable about this baby, except that it was you, or me, or them.

This baby was pristine, a sponge for information and experience. Little though it was, it was growing rapidly, learning every thing it could as fast as it could. It had to, you see, because it's a big bad old world out there.

Everything it learned chipped a little bit of its personality away, or added a bit to it, every packet of information, every experience. Much like that saying about sculptors "freeing the statue" from the crude stone its encased in. Except that the sculptor is blind, like that woman in the Lionel Richie video (hah! "Hello, is it me you're looking for?!" except she's blind...), but I digress.

The tools that are used to "sculpt" this baby into the badass human that will stride the earth on two hind legs, using it's opposable thumbs like it just doesn't care, is what I call shrapnel.

It's when you are told about God, it's when you fall in love for the first time, it's when you realise, as a baby, that bawling your head off will have your mother come running.

It's the "ripples" of things that happened long ago, still affecting us today. The shrapnel thrown out by history, causing us to throw out our own shrapnel into the future. It blows your mind, it really does.

Shrapnel is necessary, and vital, to who we are, to what we do. And for Discordians, it can be a tool. It's another medium for spreading a little bit of chaos. It's not "good" or "bad", though you may want to assess which bits of it you have sticking in you that aren't really needed. Unwatched, that shit can fuck you up.

In conclusion, Shrapnel is an idea that has yet to find its time. In the right hands, it can be a kick ass suit of armour AND a big-fuck-off flamethrower. For me, being aware of it is enough until some wiser heads can show us how it works.

Okay, I'm done preaching at you for now, I'm back off to my ivory tower, where I'll probably look for that Lionel Richie video and laugh about it all night.

~Payne