humanity
Posts

• Sea Glass Insomnia and Obliterating Borders

  

  There is nothing quite like crawling into bed, closing your tired eyes, allowing your breath to deepen, and then just as you’re about to drift off into a sweet slumber snuggled inside the encompassing embrace of Morpheus… you instead start thinking about everything you’ve ever regretted about your life coupled with enervating anxiety about your future. I love when that happens!!! As a life-long insomniac this is often my process in going to sleep, and it’s EXACTLY as fun as it sounds. Something about trying to lose consciousness makes me instead consciously obsess about all that’s wrong with me which then transmutes to all that’s wrong with the world. So relaxing!

  I just got back from vacation, and during that time I was sharing a room with The Munch. Her method for settling down into slumber was to toss and turn in bed as if she were training for a breakdancing marathon. Go figure, but it’s really hard to sleep when someone next to you is engaged in a head-spin. The sounds of sheets rustling against her flailing body eroded my psyche and disturbed any chance I had in settling my soul. With every grand gesture she made, I fell further into the abyss of my own self-loathing. I began stressing about my career and overall lack of financial success. I then started feeling inadequate for all my political impotency. This lead to my being consumed by a deep sensation of dread for everything that was to come in not only my life, but in the future of humanity as well. Stories of the horrific news swirled through my synapses. It was a Kafkaesque nightmare of my own making, and my daughter’s thrashing punctuated my every concern as if she were mocking my anguish with rustling fabric.

  Toni: Munch, I’m having a really hard time trying to fall asleep and it doesn’t help with all that wiggling you’re doing! It’s actually really loud. Can you stop moving around so much?
  Munch: I just can’t stop thinking about sea glass?
  Toni: What?
  Munch: I just keep imagining giant pieces of sea glass. In my imagination, I go to pick up a piece of sea glass and just the small corner is poking out, but when I pull it, I realize it’s actually a GIANT piece of sea glass. I just can’t stop imagining that. That’s why I’m wiggling.

  AHHHH TO BE A CHILD!!!!

  The beauty of her thoughts compared to mine.

  Sigh.

  As an adult it’s impossible for me not to envy the purity of a child’s imagination. A brain that hasn’t been burdened by social programming and conditioning… YET. This still malleable mind of the innocent that thinks beyond the confines of civilization. I was inspired by The Munch’s mental meandering about sea glass and equally lost in self-pity. To live in my mind feels like being trapped in Dostoevsky novel while also inside a Russian prison. Yet to live in The Munch’s mind is like experiencing a perpetual episode of Pee Wee’s Playhouse on acid. Her perception of existence feels unattainable for me to achieve because the corruption of culture has infiltrated my sense of reality. I can’t fathom the relief of a mind that focuses so deeply on the joy of finding GIANT pieces of sea glass that it kept me up at night.

  Yet this lack of imagination, of creativity, of seeing how the world could be different, is exactly why we are watching the demise of this country. As annoying as it is to have my kid keep me up at night, at least my kid is fucking with me and not being ripped from my arms by the US government!

  If you have my mental sensibility, chances are the world depresses the fuck out of you. The news overwhelms you. You fear for the future of not only your own life, but what is going to happen to mankind and the animals we are forcing into extinction. Sure, the planet will continue, yet I can’t help but want life to as well. Call me a romantic, but I like life. I think it’s nifty. It would be a real bummer if human beings annihilated it with their selfish greed. I don’t think this is the way things have to be. I think we are stuck in our programming and need a major reboot of how we configure everything. We need a lot more imagination when it comes to solving our political troubles. For example, the solution to this so-called immigration “problem” is not baby prisons. Let’s actually re-imagine how we structure society and get rid of borders.

  I don’t understand why this is such an outlandish proposition. We already live in a global society. Our media is global. Our communication is global. Our trade is global. Why are we holding onto borders? What do they accomplish? Having borders means we have war. Having borders means we have EVIL anti-immigration tactics. Having borders means we have nationalism that promotes racist ideologies. What do borders accomplish that are good for humanity as a whole? Borders don’t even reflect the truth of how we interact. Borders are a colonialist structure that benefits those in power. Borders are a way to perpetuate capitalist corruption. Borders serve zero purpose to the suffering, and clearly only have value for those in power. Why can’t we instead develop a system that supports and admits our interconnectedness? What are we holding onto by maintaining this antiquated arrangement?

  I want to see a political platform that is thinking on these levels. That wants to truly eradicate the infrastructure that’s designed for the rich to oppress the poor. Only then will I have a night where I can maybe think about sea glass instead of traumatized children.

  To be fair munch is right, sea glass is pretty epic.

  

  July 12, 2018 • 8 years old, Children, Current Events, Emotions, Environmental Impact, Extinction, Family Drama, Musings, Political Banter, Talking and Not Talking • Views: 3327

  Read More

• It’s Too Stressful To Care

  

  For those of you that don’t live in the North East, New England has been having a glorious global warming fall. It’s been so unseasonably warm that I swam across the lake last week. That’s an hour-long swim that I took in late September – sponsored by Big Oil!

  Because I live in the soon to be Tundra of New Hampshire, I’ve been trying to appreciate all these uncharacteristic warm fall days. I push it out of my mind that this is all a consequence of greenhouse emissions being trapped in the atmosphere, because greenhouse gases sound kind of environmental no? How can they be bad if the word GREEN is used to describe them?

  On Sunday The Munch went to a birthday party, and I figured she would be so pumped full of sugar/GMO candy/cake that spending the afternoon at the playground wouldn’t be a bad idea. Munch climbed into the car with her bag full of candy, and I was emotionally prepared for her to eat the majority of it.

  Munch: Mom, we got all this chemical candy from the Piñata at the birthday party!
  Toni: I see that love.
  Munch: I tried one piece and I didn’t like it. It was too chemically. I’m not going to eat this chemical candy. It’s gross.

  Okay, first of all, I can’t believe my indoctrination has worked this well. My kid is so conditioned to believe that chemicals in your food are bad, that she wouldn’t even eat her Gummy Bears. I felt a deep pride that The Munch respects me enough to not only listen to my opinions, but also adopt my values as her own. Yet another part of me wanted her to eat all that chemical candy because fuck authority Munch!!!

  Once at the park, I saw some friends collected together at picnic blanket. I went and joined them, happy to experiencing this lovely day in this quaint community. The whole scene was really sweet. Children playing in the sun, mom’s watching their kids frolic while talking about G-spot orgasms. You know, the usual.

  We were having a good time is the point. Then somehow we started talking about the news and what was going on in Puerto Rico.

  Friend 1: I think that I need to be more informed about stuff.
  Friend 2: Ugh. I can’t. It’s too stressful. I only have so much empathy. It’s hard to have empathy. Things are always happening somewhere. It’s too much. That’s why I live here – in this bubble. I live in this bubble so I don’t have to care.

  Okay so here is where shit starts to get allllllll fucked up.

  Now I had a LOT of opinions about the above statement. A LOT! But I also didn’t know this person very well. It felt super awkward to disagree with someone so violently that I wasn’t even sure I’d met before – especially because we weren’t alone. It’s one thing to have a debate one on one, it’s another thing to school someone in public. And because I am such a people pleaser, it’s hard for me to knowingly make others uncomfortable. Yet at the same time, isn’t my being a people pleaser also about me pleasing myself because I don’t want to make myself uncomfortable because someone else is uncomfortable?

  The second more humiliating problem was just like this person felt it was too stressful to know about the world, I felt it was too stressful to provoke an argument about the 2,000,000,000 ways I disagreed with her. Just like she wanted to live in the bubble of not caring about the rest of the world’s suffering, I wanted to live in the bubble of not having to care about a middle class white woman that thinks it’s okay to not care about the world because you live in a fucking bubble.

  DO YOU SEE THE IRONY!!!!!

  As much as she didn’t want to have to care about the world, was as much as I didn’t want to have to care about her not caring about the world. Just like she wanted to enjoy her day not giving a shit about Puerto Rico, I wanted to enjoy my day not giving a shit about her not giving a shit!

  AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!

  There was also this feeling I had of total impotence. I had no idea how to tell her that she should care about people. I felt the same impotence for that situation that I feel about the trauma that is going on in the world. The same impotence she probably feels about the trauma of the world. There is so much violence, destruction, and gratuitous misery. It’s not like I don’t understand that feeling of not wanting to feel. Yet even though I don’t want to feel, I still feel I have to put myself in the face of feeling.

  Another one of my friends who shares my political beliefs was sitting next to me during this fateful moment. We both just got really quiet and looked down at the grass. My high functioning autism kicked in, and I refused to make eye contact. My social anxiety and fear of confrontation took over my physical form. As much as I wanted to scream, I also wanted to cry. The silence permeated the group. It was obvious that we didn’t agree, and my friend made the suggestion that you really don’t have to do that much to be a quasi-active person or be helpful to others. There were some vague agreements on that, and then the conversation shifted to food politics. If there is anything that white middle class people that live in a bubble can get behind, it’s organic farming.

  I left the park feeling both traumatized caught off guard by this chick’s ignorance. I didn’t have the energy to say anything. I didn’t know how to change her mind, or express my thoughts in a way that wasn’t aggressive. So I helplessly said nothing.

  This is the problem with humanity. We are sheep. Sheep that passively mill around, waiting to be devoured by the corporate and political systems we willingly allow to control us. Flocking about, unconcerned that the wolves lurking in the shadows are ones we’ve actively surrendered to. Yet expecting us to not be sheep may be unrealistic. Adaptation and sheepness have been a major part of our evolution. The fact that we are easily led around by the sheep dog we elect is why we were able to become the successful parasites on the earth that we see today. If humans weren’t sheep, there would be such constant dissent, bickering, questioning, and pontificating that we wouldn’t get much done. Because most of us are sheep, we can be easily organized and controlled. Being sheep is how we’ve been able have the so-called progress of the industrial revolution. There were plenty of sheep to work mindless jobs in factories. Our sheep ways have made it possible to for the few to control the many for thousands of years. We sheep have built pyramids, gone to war, and paved the way for John D. Rockefeller and Mark Zucerberg to have taken over our bodies and minds. It is our sheep ways that have been crucial for the invention of all modern technology and artificial intelligence so the robots will soon rule the planet.

  Yet if we accept our sheep ways, that doesn’t mean we have to be ignorant sheep. We can be knowing sheep- sheep that are interested in evolving. The ability to adapt to our environment was a crucial part of our evolution at one point. The ability to adapt our environment to us was the next crucial aspect of our evolution. Now we have the need to re-imagine our environment because at this is exact moment the earth is trying to shake us off the planet like a wet dog with fleas.

  All animals evolve. We are evolved animals. Now we have to become evolved humans.

  If you are an American, you are one of the privileged people on the planet. If you are white and middle class, you are even more privileged. You can’t have the rational that you were born into a bubble and therefor entitled to stay in that bubble. That bubble was built off the blood of others. That bubble is not clean. No one deserve’s to live in a bubble.

  I benefit off the imperialist and colonialist actions of the United States. Whether I want the government to be secretly destroying Yemen in a covert war or not, I still benefit off of those actions. Even if I don’t want poor black Americans to be incarcerated for absurd drug laws designed to imprison them and force generations into slave labor for the prison industrial complex, I still benefit from those actions. Even if I don’t want Puerto Rico to be drowning, I still benefit from our President refusing adequate financial aid.

  No matter what I want to be happening, all the despicable acts of our government still benefit me, and therefor it’s my goddamn responsibility to give a shit. Poverty, starvation, lack of access to clean water – this is not how life has to be. These atrocities are in direct correlation to political corruption and greed, not because it’s inevitable. The world has the resources for every human to live a descent life with access to the basic amenities. The fact that billions are denied this right is a choice. It is because of misdistribution and a deliberate withholding.

  In America, a large percentage of us can afford to learn and care about the well being of others. Most of us are not in survival mode, wondering if we will ever eat again. For those people, the 20% of American’s that live below the poverty line – I get it, you’re busy. You have yourself to worry about. That’s cool. You have the right to not tear your hair out because of global injustice. But for the rest of us, if you have time to be on Facebook, you have time to care and do shit for others.

  Here’s the lake and sunset that day I swam across… it’s a pretty bubble

  

  October 4, 2017 • Change, Current Events, Environmental Impact, Political Banter, Responsibilities • Views: 4498

  Read More

• What The Left Wing Needs and The Solution To the World’s Problems

  

  Like most of you, I watched the debates with an expression akin to what I would look like if a snake crawled out of my asshole, and then licked me on the nose – horrified, but also intrigued. In both cases the main question is, “how did you get here?”

  Sometimes I wonder if Trump is just a brilliant performance artist using this platform of presidency as his canvas for expression. Maybe he’s being mentored by Marina Abramovik to reveal the truth of our country through his despicable behavior and bigotry? Doesn’t it seem more reasonable that he’s the physical manifestation of an interactive live art installation intended to pull back the veil of American imperialism than him being an actual candidate?!

  Where are all the left wing political assassins?? How come assassins are always right wing? Every public figure that has been murdered by some gunman is always a progressive trying to fight against injustice. Abe Lincoln, JFK, RFK, Martin Luther King, John Lennon, Indira Gandhi, Mahatma Gandhi, Malcolm X… the list goes on. Where are the crazy lefties that go around executing people, and why isn’t Trump first on their list? I am not saying I want him dead, but no one has even tried to shoot him in the leg? If that isn’t proof enough that every left wing assassination is a government conspiracy conducted by the New World Order lizard elite then I don’t know what is!

  Trump isn’t the real problem because ultimately he’s just a figurehead. The real issue is that millions of people support him, and they aren’t’ going away no matter who’s elected. This country is beyond divided. It’s fragmented. The corruption of the justice system is an obvious symptom of our collective disease. Police getting away with murder, and rapists getting away with rape is an everyday occurrence. Everything is boiling to the surface and no one can find a lid to stop it.

  The world is fucked, everybody knows it, and nobody knows what to do. The environment is going to serious shit, there are endless wars destroying humanity and the planet, corporations rule politics, and we are facing potential extinction. The reason why we don’t know what to do is because we are all so isolated in our tiny boxes, staring at our tiny boxes with screens – separated from each other and nature and thinking connection is best achieved through “likes.”

  If I “like” enough articles about global warming and Syrian refuges will it all go away??????

  Humans are by nature followers, and we need a leader. I know you don’t think you’re a follower, but you are. That doesn’t mean you aren’t lovely, but 99.9999999% of us would rather be told what to do then figure it out on your own. But if you are on the outside of the political fence looking in, we don’t have a leader – so we sit around finger-blasting ourselves and our phones, waiting for the diarrhea to hit the windmill.

  That was one of the problems with Occupy Wall Street – it was a leaderless movement. I get the philosophy behind it. I respect the impact that it made. A lot was born from that initiative. But in order for people to really make change in their every day lives, they crave someone giving them specific direction.

  Bernie Sanders was the most powerful potential leader for progressive left wing in my lifetime. There was a moment when his light was so bright, and millions of psychologically and politically disenfranchised people wanted him to lead us out of the darkness. We were begging for someone who shared our vision of the world to be our take over. Please Bernie… be my dad, tell me how to take down corporate America, and then hold me.

  But Bernie couldn’t survive within the current political landscape. It’s too corrupt. I’m not saying that because I’m sexist and hate Hillary, but because the status quo is compromised and anyone who can rise to the upper ranks of power is also –including Obama.

  We want politics to be our parents because figuring out how to self-organize is too daunting. There are too many people, and we didn’t evolve to live in such big groups. We are overwhelmed with population, infrastructure, and corporate monopolies. Revolution takes sacrifice, but we aren’t willing to actually fight for a cause because the present paradigm isn’t that bad. Forget the fact that we may not have a future… right now is okay because “Stranger Things” is an amazing show and I just watched the entire first season!

  A vote for Hillary isn’t just a vote against Trump, it’s a vote for the establishment that already exists. Bernie Sanders is urgently supporting the democratic party’s nomination and doesn’t feel like now is the time for 3rd party protests, but when is that time? The first vote I ever cast was for the 3rd party, and everyone blamed us for the rise of the Bush era.

  People who want more than two choices are thought of as irrational and naïve. There is NEVER going to be an election where it is safe to pursue that goal. But a democracy isn’t just a two party system, and there are many countries that successfully prove that.

  The right at least has the Tea Party for their extremists, but the left doesn’t have the New Age party that only speaks in sacred geometry and whispers in fractals. Maybe the kind of politics that I want to see in the world can’t exist within this current framework, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t need leaders outside the scaffolding to shake shit up. The Black Lives Matter movement is proof enough that so many of us are CRAVING a movement to ignite change. We need to take these social movements to the next level and use this momentum to force the hand of those that are destroying the planet with their greed and corruption.

  If you think about our access to connection, we have more opportunity now than ever before for mass protesting. I feel like we need to enter into an era of love induced social terrorism against the corporate elite. We need to spread our message like a venereal disease across all social medial platforms. The 1% does not own the world, and we need to take it back from them.

  We need someone to tell us, “hey, nobody pay back their student loans until we have more reasonable college tuition and a better support system for our youth so they don’t enter the work force with $200,000 in debt.” Or “No African American person should pay taxes until the prison industrial complex has been completely reformed and the police state addressed.” Or no one pay their medical bills until we’ve had a true overhaul of our health system so people aren’t dying because of insurance complications.

  If EVERYONE participated in these kinds of economic protests you bet your sweet ass we would get shit done!!! We just need someone to lead and organize us… and not get shot by the lizard elite! So maybe this leader has to either be able to regenerate, have many clones, or be like the Dali Llama and if one get’s killed another is born.

  So who ever is trying to lead these kinds of initiatives we have to vehemently support and defend! If you know people that are on this level… LET US ALL KNOW so we can get organized.

  October 1, 2016 • Current Events, Education, Environmental Impact, Political Banter • Views: 4593

  Read More

• Learning To Live With your Inner Demons

  

  If you see a bug in your house, how do you react? Do you kill it? Do you trap it and release it outside? Do you call it a monster and shame it so severely that it’s self- esteem crumbles and it commits suicide?

  I have done all of the above. There was a point where the fear of an exoskeleton was so great that I would murder it viciously with a shoe, book, or in one case a used condom – drowning it in my misery. Then I started doing yoga and became all newagey and one with the universe or whatever the fuck, and I started capturing all of god’s creatures and freeing them outside to live their destiny while gifting them with my positive intentions. Looking back on that time, I realize that it was actually the same spider that just kept coming back in over and over again.

  Now when I see a bug in my house now you know what I do? Nothing. I just acknowledge its presence and hope it doesn’t crawl into my mouth while I’m sleeping and lay eggs.

  I feel like this is all a metaphor for my personal demons. There are many ways of which I deal with, or try to cope with the darkness inside me. Yet no matter what my strategy, there are going to be insects of my self-destruction crawling around inside my consciousness. The common solution to an infestation is to have an exterminator come and bomb your house with chemicals, and maybe that is often what we do to ourselves? We often rely on substances to free us from the contamination of our thoughts. I guess all that acid I did in high school was an attempt Raid my mind? And the coke I did later… and ecstasy… and the one or two times I tried meth. YOU GET THE GIST!

  There are desperate times when I feel plague ridden with vermin, yet in my attempts to create a manageable ecosystem where my psyche is not overrun by parasites, the solution is not to kill everything in sight. The more reasonable idea is to get the numbers down.

  Bugs are part of nature’s plan no matter how gross and yucky their gnarly crunchy little bodies are, much like the shadow side of our humanity is part of our experience on planet earth. We can’t poison all the bugs without killing all of life, much like we can’t ever truly get rid of the negative thoughts and still be alive. Unless you are enlightened, chances are if you are breathing air, every one in a while your mind will come up with some shitty shit.

  I live in the country so I have to co-habitat with many bugs. Yet when I see their creepy little physiques I think how we are not that different. I force myself to accept that I can live with them because they are the physical manifestation of my journey to become an evolved person and how I will come across plenty of creepy-crawlies inside myself as well.

  Well, well, well… so we meet again.

  

  June 1, 2016 • Musings • Views: 4154

  Read More

• Maybe It WAS Aliens?

  

  Toni: Hey, do you think you can hang out at my house tomorrow night after I put Munch to bed so I can go see my friend sing?

  My Brother Laszlo: Hey, what about that video I sent you about aliens?

  Toni: What about it?

  My Brother Laszlo: Well, have you watched it yet?

  Toni: No, but why don’t we watch it tomorrow night when I get back from my thing.

  My Brother Laszlo: Or why don’t we watch it tonight?

  Toni: Ummmmm…..

  My Brother Laszlo: If I am going to do something for you, we are going to watch that thing about aliens right now!

  And that is how I watched an hour long documentary about aliens and their role in the evolution of humanity with my brother.

  I am probably giving you the impression that I don’t believe this shit.  That my brother is just crazy-pants, and I was placating him.  But I am kind of lying to you.  I am totally into aliens.  When I was 25 I saw this lecture on Youtube by a guy named Michael Tsarion who talked for 2 ½ hours about the mythology of aliens, Atlantis, ancient civilizations, and the evolution of human consciousness.  It was just him at a podium, with bad audio, bad lighting, and a ponytail.  But I watched the whole damn thing- and I wasn’t even high.

  This is my thinking on these theories.  Why the fuck not?  It seems just as possible as the scientific explanation that we exclusively evolved from monkeys.  The reality of our evolutionary story is there is a huge fucking jump from semi-monkeyman to human being, which is called the “missing link.”  Meaning there is an absent step in our understanding that doesn’t explain the vast leap in advancement.  Terrance Mckenna believed the catalyst for this major progression was hallucinogens.  He calls it the “stoned ape theory” which is the notion that some of these monkeymen got high on mushrooms, and that explains this massive shift in consciousness.  Maybe?  I have done mushrooms and it is transformative – but I also don’t remember a thing about my trips. So maybe it was taking mushrooms that catapulted our evolution, or maybe it was aliens?

  I am just saying it’s a possibility.  Our understanding the cosmos is so minimal it is comical. 96% of the universe is dark matter, and we don’t even know what dark matter is.  So even though a lot of what my brother and I watched was relatively absurd, like the story of how inter-dimensional immortal beings flew around on a Merkabah to shield our planet from the take over of negative energy, I could also get down with the idea that the 13 families who own 90% of the worlds wealth of decedents of aliens from mars who have are controlled exclusively by left brain consciousness and have no emotional bandwith.  Seems pretty reasonable to me.

  * While I was out and my brother was staying in the house with Munch, I asked him to write an addendum to this blog so as to make sure I didn’t miss any pertinent details!

  Laszlo Nagy : Martians and Atlantians collided. The Martians had time traveled to Earth as it existed in some past where the Atlantians existed as higher dimensional beings. The Martians had destroyed their old world. They were unable to completely subjugate the Atlantians, but the Atlantians were irrevocably changed. A Polar shift erased the memory of this hybrid culture. Nakals told people about stuff so that they had a step in evolution. Some unclear urgency existed that required the reaching of “Christ Consciousness” in 13,000 years as opposed to 100,000, so various sacred geometries were erected across the planet in order to shield it from bad energy.  Somewhere there were indestructible emerald tablets that says all this.

  

   

   

  August 7, 2013 • Adventures, Family Drama, Musings, Talking and Not Talking • Views: 11284

  Read More