What to do about a Professor, Cramulous?

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Seeing what it is tends to be the only way to deal with it, in my experience.

Yeah, I backslid.  Rather than take the bull by the tail and face the facts (I'm being hypersensitive and thus spoiling for a fight), it was more comfortable to let myself believe that a person (or persons) is deliberately out to get my goat.

I mean, if I'm hectoring other people to see things as they really are, I should probably work on that myself again.  I got complacent.

And if I WAS right, so what?  They can have the fucking goat.   

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

This is a thread full of interesting. Maybe the kernel of a new collection of juxtaposing positions...

[Payne]

Roger, Cram: "Speak Prophecy and Carry a Big Boffer Stick"

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

You guys make a great team, I gotta say.

I think so, too.  Problem is we go all critical mass and asplode too often.  

I think 90% of that is my paranoia, which I am trying to work on.  I've lost my Slack™, LMNO.  For a couple of years there, paranoia was irrelevant, because I wasn't concerned with the actions or words of others.  Over the last year, however, I've been reverting to 2005 type behavior.  Now that I recognize that, though, maybe I can do something about it.

<3

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

And if I WAS right, so what?  They can have the fucking goat.   

and great, great advice that everyone could stand to heed. Especially me.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

Bump.

I totally forgot about this one, and how much I enjoyed the thread.

[LMNO]

I still think you guys made a good team.

[The Good Reverend Roger]

I still think you guys made a good team.

I agree.

But we aren't exactly the first rock n roll act busted up over creative and personal differences.

[East Coast Hustle]

I have this curse, roger, and so do you, and we both got it from tampering with that fucking mummy's tomb. Sure sure, we read the warnings, but we ignored them anyway because shit - we are already so accursed, what could an additional mummy curse possibly do to us?

And the mummy tomb was Discordia. It was wrapped up in sheets and buried, back in 1959, and different groups of people keep digging it up and posing it and taking pictures with it before they send it back into the ground.

And you cats got that bug in 2006, when the first Black Iron Prison stuff was put together. I wasn't here yet, I was floating around in my own pineal headspace of self destructive hedonism and magical thinking and I needed a harsh slap in the face. And the money ran out and I got a new job and I was sitting there wondering how to pass the time in my new cubicle, and I logged into this forum for the first time in two years, and this time I actually stuck around and made myself an identity this time.

And I printed out the BIP pamphlet and I took it home and at first I hated it, and then I loved it, and then I hated it again but I hated it because it was RIGHT and then I poured myself into it like waffle batter. And that's where I got the curse.

And this curse is best summarized by - I think it's ECH - in his article Can You Feel It Coming:

You CAN NOT bring the MACHINE™ down. You can't even slow it down. What you can do is very slowly and unobtrusively begin to rearrange the basic components. We will refer to these as "widgets" and "sprockets". If widget A and sprocket B combine to exert societal influence C on the stinking morass known collectively as "humanity", then it stands to reason that the MACHINE™ can be reprogrammed at a very basic level and in very small increments. You waste your time dreaming of how to effect such a change on a global, national, or regional scale (the impossibility of which, I might add, keeps you in your perpetual state of blissful apathy), dreaming of assembling a group of like-minded fellows who will march with you to the very gates of the ivory tower whereupon those who have misled and exploited you will be cast down upon the parapets.

Well guess what?

YOU ARE the one who has misled and exploited you. You have overlooked the most obvious solution, the most effective solution, the only possible solution.

Kill yourself, fuck the body.

Just kidding.




Maybe.

But seriously, this is what I have come to believe is the true spirit of the oft-misused phrase "we must stick apart": we cannot effect a large scale change, and if we make a serious attempt we WILL be neutralized. Instead, each and every one of us should make a conscious effort to effect a small reprogramming of the MACHINE™ in a manner that affects us and our immediate surroundings. Keep the mutation small, and give it a chance to become effectively contagious.

If we all effect a change on our own paradigm (this DOES require some effort, being a bliss-ninny doesn't count), there WILL be an eventual overlap, at which point the large scale change which we have hoped to effect all along will be impossible to stop. (insert witty closing tagline here)

and that's what it is man, this curse we both have. We're both very slowly and incrimentally changing the world around us by sheer force of personality.

And while this is an extremely noble motivation, the drawback is that it means orienting oneself onto a world that does not yet exist.

I see it kind of like planning a party. A lot of my friends are very noncommittal - they'll never agree to do anything fun, you really have to hand feed it to them. And when you say something like "Hey we're going for a hike on Sunday, do you want to come?" they say something like, "We'll see. I've gotta check my plans," which is code for "If I can peel myself off the couch." And on Sunday I'm standing there alone. So I have taken to the "everybody's gonna be there" method of party planning. I just tell everybody that everybody's gonna be there. And if everybody shows up, that illusion becomes a reality, and you transformed the world. It's alchemy. But if people don't buy it, a half dozen people will be hanging out at a letdown, wondering why they came in the first place.

But we can't have the great party without the lie. And that means deluding oneself a bit.

In my case it's sometimes kind of maladaptive. Like for example my credit score is shot. Not because I can't afford to pay my bills, but mainly because they just don't appear on my radar until I'm getting calls from a collection service. I know it's irresponsible and I'm shooting my future self in the foot. This is my rationale: I can either live in a capitalist world where I am the butt of the joke, the lowest run on the ladder, and kind of hopeless, or I can live in a world where money means nothing as long as I have enough to pay for food, rent, and a little hedonism. So I choose the latter, even though I should have compromised.

You and I, Roger, we are building different worlds. And we're both succeeding, bit by bit. But we're at that part that ECH described as the overlap. So there's disagreement and drama and strain because at some fundamental level you and I are talking about very slightly different places. And we both hold our personal delusions, these phantasmal worlds we're building, very near and dear to our hearts. You and I can see each other's worlds pretty clearly. And I think we both see something great that is missing from our own. But it's still difficult to reconcile.

This place, and by that I mean the forum, often reminds me of the sea -- "...Chaos, the vast immeasurable abyss, Outrageous as a sea, dark, wasteful, wild..." -- and at first I thought we were on a great voyage across the sea, but usually these days it feels like we're just drifting around, pulled by whatever wind is blowing from the arctic circle this month. And I'm okay with that too, it's a bit of a letdown, but it is what it is. Our boats keep knocking into each other. Sometimes they turn broadside and fire a warning shot, or a real shot, and it's because we're all lost at sea. No stars to guide us, just the wind. Maybe if we had the same constellations it'd be easier to get to the far shore. Maybe if we were all on the same boat. But that is not the nature of things, and I blame the mummy, but I also thank him for all the treasures we looted.

I'm still mad at Cram, but I miss his writing.

[Luna]

Damn.  Good stuff, here.

[Faust]

I wish he'd come back.

[AFK]

Waters, Gilmour, and Mason recently got back together.  There's still hope. 

[East Coast Hustle]

Dear Cram:

Are you Discordia's David Gilmour? Or its Paul McCartney?