PAYNE! WHY SO SLEEPLESS?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

In which all is explained about basically everything.

So, you read the Nessie thread and now you can't sleep...What a shock, neither can I.  

Why?  Simple.  No matter how ghastly and blood-drenched and awful the world we as a group just made up is, it's still better than the one you and I live in right now.  We are primates, we are bipeds, we are fucking OVERMEN, but we have succeeded ourselves to death.  

We, as primates, were never designed for the life of luxury and worry that we dwell in.  It would be easier...cleaner to go out swinging at Nessies than to fret the fucking rent every month, to toil endlessly for the privilege of dying in whatever hideous manner old age has in store for us.  Monkeys are made for battle, sex, relaxation, and 'fropping our Goddamn heads off whenever we get a chance to score, not totaling up figures and collecting little paper tickets that say we get to eat.

Just look around you.  Does all this "civilization" bring you joy?  Hell, at least you Europeans have some seriously old grime to wallow around in.  WE can't even run a fucking republic for 200 years without shitting the bed.  And I suspect it's the same over there, but the reason we don't "pull a Libya" on our government is that we know - deep in our bones - that the problem isn't in our heads of state, but in the state of our heads.  Fuck, who elected these silly-ass retards in the first place?  And we KNOW that the moment we rose up and tossed them out, we'd find an even WORSE system to fuck up, because we as a people are DUMB AS A SACK OF HAMMERS.

It's a Goddamn river of SHIT, and at some level we know this, and we wish that there WERE Nessies in the sewers.  Tell me I'm fucking lying, Payne...Tell me you wouldn't elbow your way past the Templars like a Welshman with a dry pint, slam back the Payne Juice, and jump down the fucking hatch without bothering to strap armor on.  Tell me.  I dare ya.

Fuck, I would.  I wouldn't last a day, but what a fucking day it would be.  No variance reports, no "settlement rules", no Sarbanes/Oxley audits, no broken fucking refinery...Just swinging like a mad bastard at things that it's okay to kill.  I mean, isn't that the fucking DREAM of every primate?  An enemy that is not only morally OKAY to kill, but morally NECESSARY to kill?  

Hell, why the hell do you think the Greatest Generation all died of proper monkey causes like alcoholism and bad car accidents?  No fucking ulcers or living long enough to get cancer for THEM...Because they went and saw the fucking elephant, they fought like mad bastards against a truly evil enemy...And then they came home and - with the best of intentions - built the fucking monstrosity that you and I live in today.  They THOUGHT they were doing us a FAVOR by setting things up so that we wouldn't have to do what they did...But they built us a gigantic pile of smack to get addicted to.

We WANT adventure, but we THINK we want stuff.

So when you get to thinking that our lives are pathetic, pale reflections of what we are - or should be - on the inside, you're fucking A right.  When you can't sleep because you WANT a world full of horrible THINGS in the sewers, again, you're on the right track.

Now all you gotta do is think of a way to make the life you HAVE move closer to the life you SHOULD have.  We've talked about Curly, maybe we also ought to talk about T.E. Lawrence.

Or Kill Me.

[Jenne]

How in the hell are we going to top today? ...especially after the clusterfuck that was yesterday?

Maybe that's the ticket--we get a good cleansing of the colon, and the spring is released, then hey, presto! Magic.

[Don Coyote]

And that perfectly explains why I've been having trouble sleeping.

[Dysfunctional Cunt]

jesus Roger you leave me speechless...  



...no wait that is me screaming!



This is spectacular!

[Juana]

I can almost imagine the clean, hot thrill of chasing Nessies and fighting them (I'm not so wild about the dying part - I'd want to do it again, if only to know that I did what I could as a Nessie gets its claws under my armor and fucking rips, singing me a death song as each bolt gives out).

The Western World's gone Safe. I don't know what to do about it, except remove bits of my Safe sometimes, and invite others to do it with me.

[navkat]

We WANT adventure, but we THINK we want stuff.

Or Kill Me.

Summed up in 2 paragraphs.

I think this fact is basically what drives me to accumulate and then sabotage my life over and over again.

[P3nT4gR4m]

So fucking true! I watched those videos of the tsunami in Japan and the whole time everyone was going on about how tragic it all was, there was a little voice in my head screaming "FUCKING AWESOME". To have been there, trying to escape that river of broken metal would have been one of the coolest experiences of my life. Sure I might have been killed but there's worse fates than being killed by something incredible. I could sit in this office and survive, for example, there's a fate ten times worse than an agonising death.

[Richter]

RAH.

You put your finger on it Roger.  A foe to combat with moral imperitive, and in fact LACK of any moral repercussion.  When I talk about the wolves, running through the cities howling and circling the lone late night commuter, it's this kind of fundamental energy I'm getting at.

DO something.  Do anythign that might make you live another moment, or keep your fellows alive another moment.  This is the ugly red scrabbling truth under it, that anything that moves with a certain amount of brain tissue can appreciate, and it underscores values that cannot be refuted. 

We're divorced from it now.  "Safe" in sterile cities where we while away lives, waiting for cigarettes and booze, cars, errant genes or choked up arteries to kill us. 

It's a mixed blessing.  You see enough of that primal terror firsthand, you know WHY you don't want more.  Beyond what Cram describes as authentic experience, this is experience become REAL almost to the fatal point.  Until someone sees it, in it's different faces and different degrees, they won't be able to grasp it, and we've gotten VERY good at shielding ourselves from it.

Maybe that's what the greatest generation was looking for to happen.  That their chidlren wouldn't have to deal with the shit they did.  That shit shaped and tempered them though, and it's not somethign you can package or figure into someone's life any other way.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

THIS

IS FUCKING AWESOME.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

It ties into something I've been thinking about lately, which relates to the question of nuclear power. I hear "How else are we going to meet our power needs?"

And then I started wondering, what is it all for? Do we need it? Is it making us happy?

Do we even WANT it?

We live in big houses to make room for all of our stuff. We need room to keep machines that we can exercise on because we're afraid of going outside. Our strip malls and car lots are lit up like carnivals 24 hours a day. We used to go to stores, now we go to brightly lit and climate-controlled malls full of places that sell ABSOLUTE SHIT.

Seriously, most of us have SO MUCH SHIT we don't give a flying fuck about, it's just crap that clutters our lives and homes and makes it hard to move. What if life was simple? What if we lived in small spaces and only had stuff that we actually used? What if we put the bulk of our resources into medicine and science?

People talk about generating cheap, unlimited power, and people talk about food production to sustain a growing population. My question is, WHY? What makes more better? MORE MORE MORE. OMG MORE!

I don't want people to starve and die. But as a species, our priorities are FUCKED UP. We're like squirrels gone awry. We cannot move past the idea that we are competing for resources so we can WIN, and we're strangling ourselves with our hoarding and breeding, blindly unaware that there's no one racing against us.

[Luna]

I'm in the middle of a necessary downsizing.  (Going from a house to an apartment.)  It's been making me think about what stuff I've got I can live without.

Going through the books and deciding what I have space for, and which ones I'll need to get rid of is killing me.  I swear, I still have books I read in grade school kicking around my stuff.

[LMNO]

It ties into something I've been thinking about lately, which relates to the question of nuclear power. I hear "How else are we going to meet our power needs?"

And then I started wondering, what is it all for? Do we need it? Is it making us happy?

Do we even WANT it?

We live in big houses to make room for all of our stuff. We need room to keep machines that we can exercise on because we're afraid of going outside. Our strip malls and car lots are lit up like carnivals 24 hours a day. We used to go to stores, now we go to brightly lit and climate-controlled malls full of places that sell ABSOLUTE SHIT.

Seriously, most of us have SO MUCH SHIT we don't give a flying fuck about, it's just crap that clutters our lives and homes and makes it hard to move. What if life was simple? What if we lived in small spaces and only had stuff that we actually used? What if we put the bulk of our resources into medicine and science?

People talk about generating cheap, unlimited power, and people talk about food production to sustain a growing population. My question is, WHY? What makes more better? MORE MORE MORE. OMG MORE!

I don't want people to starve and die. But as a species, our priorities are FUCKED UP. We're like squirrels gone awry. We cannot move past the idea that we are competing for resources so we can WIN, and we're strangling ourselves with our hoarding and breeding, blindly unaware that there's no one racing against us.

But, those TV shows won't watch themselves....

[Luna]

But, those TV shows won't watch themselves....

You know what happens when people watch shows because somebody has to?  Dancing with the fucking Stars.   

[Richter]

Carried to the logical extreme, we will, in about 5 years, have shows where media personalities, Tv/Movie stars, and musicians are asked, prodded, then pressured to participate in making hardcore erotica.  The catch is their agents will have premptively signed them up for this and given teh go ahead to widely distribute any results. 

Half the fun will be weekly updates of the ongoing lawsuits, or stars loosing their shit in indagnation.  By comparisson, those who sincerely participate will be the lesser rated. 

[LMNO]

Carried to the logical extreme, we will, in about 5 years, have shows where media personalities, Tv/Movie stars, and musicians are asked, prodded, then pressured to participate in making hardcore erotica.  The catch is their agents will have premptively signed them up for this and given teh go ahead to widely distribute any results. 

Half the fun will be weekly updates of the ongoing lawsuits, or stars loosing their shit in indagnation.  By comparisson, those who sincerely participate will be the lesser rated. 

Just so you know, I'm ok with this plan.  Especially if I get to see an Olsen twin fuck John Goodman.