Anonymole – apocryphal agitators

Hello, Old Friend.

The mountain air is invigorating, the wildlife gives Jesse plenty of critters to chase, and I took my first trip to Burger Boy last week when my niece and her boyfriend came through town. A top notch burger, as expected, but the fries left something to be desired.

There was an episode of the original Star Trek series wherein Spock took charge as commanding officer after Kirk disappeared on some unknown planet inhabited by an aggressive and bloodthirsty man in a silly monster suit creature. As CO, it now falls upon Spock to decide which crew members to beam down to the planet in search of The Cap’n. Of course, he approaches the problem with what he deems to be “pure logic”, yet time and again, those unnamed crewmen lose their lives due to Spock’s inability to factor emotion into his decisions. You see, since the creature itself was potentially guided by emotion and his human shipmates unquestionably so, failure to factor in the possible emotion-driven reactions of all involved wound up killing quite a few very temporary Enterprise denizens whose names you won’t even find on IMDB.

I talk a really good game with the logical, Stoical nonsense, but like anyone and everyone who ever has paid lip-service to this dubious ideal, I’m full of shit. In fact, what is the common impetus for the intellectual “endeavors” of history’s Stoics, logicians, Zen masters, and stone-faced semi-statues? That’s right: an emotional distaste for uncomfortable emotions. By claiming that I don’t experience such emotions or even that they affect me to a lesser degree than they do most people, I am ironically admitting that at some point in the past, I found my own human emotions to be so intense, not to mention anathema to my implausible worldview, that they had to be eradicated (impossible). In this sense, all those years sitting on my ass in front of a shrine of pewter Buddha statues actually represented an emotional outburst, not a pragmatic training of my mind. What’s the difference between the calmness of the “enlightened” mind of the Dalai Lama, for instance, and the defeated stillness of Al Bundy? Very little. One of them actually believes he’s doing something important while the other believes quite the opposite, but the end result is more similar than any of us would like to admit.

On a completely different note, I got a remote job transcribing recorded interviews for insurance companies, which is the same exact occupation I held 30 years ago, but without the commute. And as you can imagine, it turns out that “wasting” a year and a half of my life composing the utterly ridiculous shit show that is Notes From The Avalon served as indispensable preparation for this particular occupation.

It’s also a Stoic’s dream job.

And now, for no logical reason whatsoever, here’s Kage and Jaybels utterly slaying the Beatles:

Goo-goo-ga-joob,

‘Mudge