PLAYING THE GAME

Sitting here turning tiles and cards in games on the computer as my mind wanders where it will. It seems to be the place I sit to meditate on the effect of laws in the micro of the game and the macro of civilization. The garden is for meditating on nature.

I have become familiar with the results of enough various choices in both Mah Jong and 3-up Solitaire to enjoy the facility with which I navigate to the conclusion, avoiding traps and noticing every quirky option. I am not even sure I am playing the games as they were designed to be. I just know that I am doing everything the computer lets me do to get as far as I can go. What’s so great, what’s so worth posting about, is it no longer matters whether the conclusion is a cleared board or being stopped by an unbreakable lock.

This may not seem like a big deal unless you can relate this to the macro part of this metaphor and my inability to cool out and do less than rant against the monumental debilitation of individual human thought wreaked by following the edicts of external authority by abdication of personal accountability to oneself and the security of anonymity amongst the mainliners. Yeah, unless you can relate to that …

The way my mind works, or malfunctions for those of you who indisputably know how it’s supposed to work and/or think, I am able to transfer through apt metaphors lessons learned in one variation of the Tao into another manifested variation, in much the same way that the functions of friction and resistance in mechanics and electronics share the same effect with a myriad other fields across the universe both manifested and energetic.

So now I’m cool with the brainwashed portion that remains of everyone who has ever sold themselves out for shiny beads and fifteen minutes of fame. Until I was thirty-three my fence was damned near as brainwashed as Tom Sawyer’s was white. Then the cook took the children back home to the Chef for her old fashioned recipe and I had to learn how to feed myself for the first time. It’s been a long, strange weaning and there are still some insidious apron strings yet to be discovered, but I’m losing karmic weight. Going organic in every phase of my life, or learning to, has shed a lot of pounding headaches.

With this new attitude about the sheeple, I can grant that, except for the republicans and fundamentalists, no one is 100% offering themselves up willingly to the Matrix and most only serve it in plausibly deniable positions like the clerk typing requisitions for depleted uranium ammunition with no inkling of or responsibility for its eventual use.

About a year ago my angst about the ills of civilization began to take over my most lyrical moods of praising the benefits of natural symbiosis and universal connection so I began a separate blog, Canary in a Cage, to handle the venomous vitriol that the political, environmental and energy crises brought to a head. It didn’t help keep the gut wrenching concern from poisoning my best moods.

So now, when I get those OMG and WTF moments about events within the zoo of civilization I’m gonna treat ‘em that way; as if they were entertainment by another species living in a world they created through the proxy of an imaginary god and are fair game for satire, snark and scripts for the Daily Show. I won’t separate the civil from the natural subjects this time, I will just take on an extremity of this new way of looking at playing the game with the aliens in the zoo and having fun stretching the possibilities within the cages in my new persona. Like an aboriginal Australian who announces to the tribe he has reached a new outlook, I am taking on a new name; gregraetgar shall henceforth be known as Yodood.

For folks who think they cannot exist without a belief system, Yodood’s philosophy is very simple really; life is an ever changing, growing story about existence in a universe whose nature permits everything. Yodood, that’s me, believes that if the story is of a universe as malicious as the atrocities committed within the mythical world of civilization, I wouldn’t want to exist in it. A couple of posts back I discussed having or getting to live one’s life. Knowing that being glad to be alive is the only state of mind from which ones actions can be of benefit makes it a piece of cake to edit the story by keeping the “have to” parts in the western civilization pigeon hole along with any good it may have manifested. In this way the natural world remains a place I get to live because civilization, while permitted by nature, is a perpetuated mistake I don't have to live in.


So now I can play the game of “civilization” with a detached facility I had ‘til now not developed and shall relish all the days of my life. Yet another graduation in a career whose only evidence is my wake. Prosit!