In My Humble Opinion
In My Humble Opinion. A journal to vent about why people are like that and why all the stupid things they do are so obvious to me.
My Dysfunctions. A journal for chronicling my immeasurable fascinating dysfunctions.
“Almost any difficulty will move in the face of honesty. When I am honest I never feel stupid. And when I am honest I am automatically humble.” Hugh Prather
“We must always think about things, and we must think about things as they are, not as they are said to be.” George Bernard Shaw (Irish literary Critic, Playwright and Essayist. 1925 Nobel Prize for Literature, 1856-1950)
Loading ...Story In Subtext IMHO
Since I no longer expect anything from mankind except madness, meanness, and mendacity; egotism, cowardice, and self-delusion, I have stopped being a misanthrope. Irving Layton
Why People Are Like That Today: Perhaps context is everything.
We decry every human failing and very often in words much less clear and well organized than those that expressed the idea we just had to attack.
People tend to behave in the same fashion as they speak. People of few words engage in simple activity that shows itself to be either very appropriate or conversely inappropriate with very little middle ground. Verbose people tend to dissipate their energies but also exert a subtle moderating influence that can possibly have a meaningful impact. There are of course all the shades in between these extremes and everyone has a reason for anything they do, no matter how poorly stated.
What matters more is the story told in subtext by all this human action and interaction. Right now, it may be a crass sounding mish-mash of grunts and growls akin to the cries of barnyard animals, but when our collective experience grows and our shared capacity for reason evolves, might not some gold emerge from the dross? Might some medicine be derived from the bacterial filth of the cesspool? It’s happened before.
In My Humble Opinion. What’s yours?
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
Absorption Dysfunction
The advantage of the emotions is that they lead us astray.
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Why I Am Dysfunctional Today: I sometimes become intensely absorbed in some random train of thought.
This isn’t daydreaming. While I’m immersed in whatever mental tangent I am on, I lose touch with whatever my current reality is to the point that I don’t properly react to what’s going on around me. If it were daydreaming, I might potentially stumble along some train of novel ideation, but no… It’s just the same old beaten down obsessions. This can go on until I’m really sick of my own company.
People do tend to go on about self-esteem, but it’s only been in these moments of self revulsion that I have had the opportunity to reconnect with something more real and genuine than the noise in my head.
I tend to run off at the mouth in social situations, but when I get bored of my nonsense, it’s then that I really listen to other people. If nothing ever disturbed me or moved me to emotion, I fear my life would degenerate into an empty narcissistic mess. Even if this describes everyone’s life, isn’t it nice to have variety?
That‘s my dysfunctional self. What’s yours?
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
Distortion Dysfunction
I know I’m paranoid; I’ve made a career out of it. Thom Yorke
Why I Am Dysfunctional Today: I would like to say that I perceive reality clearly. I would like to say that I have learned something useful from every one of my mistakes. I can not honestly say these things.
I am intimately familiar with error. Being as detail oriented as I am, there isn’t a single activity that is without bugs… not in my experience. Many people are afraid of those naturally occurring creepy crawlies that form a vital component of our ecological health, but they pay no mind to the little absences of thought that infest their perception of the so called real world and accumulate until your consciousness is filled with distortion like a roaches nest is saturated in waste. I’m a bit of a meme-aphobe. Those little elements of culture and communication that others seem to thrive on, often just seem like offerings of various foods, each in different states of decay.
These are a couple of my hang-ups and they each create what are sometimes serious distortions in my perception and behaviour. I guess it’s like they say, remove the timber from your own eye before trying to remove the cinder from your neighbours.
That‘s my dysfunctional self. What’s yours?
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
Painful Dysfunction
I believe that everybody comes from pain and a certain amount of dysfunction. Mariel Hemingway
Why I Am Dysfunctional Today: Life is stress. Learning is the acquisition of methods to cope with stress.
I myself gain these skills slowly. Like everybody else, I take in a situation and then feel like I know what this all means to me. When this first impression is wrong, that leads to distress. For myself, this can go on repeating ad nauseum because those little cobwebs of nerves in my brain won’t really update until something has gotten on my last nerve, as they say. This makes me a detailed oriented person, perhaps obsessively so.
By focusing on the little details of a situation, I can get through it more steadily and reliably. This also means I become really intimate with poor thought habits. On the other hand, it also means I can get to know quality thought patterns as well. They both linger long in my head and interact with each other like the waves crashing on the shore.
I sometimes envy peoples changeable nature, but I guess we all get there in time. Inevitably, I will catch up…
That‘s my dysfunctional self. What’s yours?
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
Sanity Dysfunction
Sanity is a cozy lie. Susan Sontag
Why I Am Dysfunctional Today: We all look for clarity in our lives. Each of us is motivated to varying degrees of intensity.
To me, life seems both amazingly intense and to an equal degree abstract, at the same time. I find myself chronically at a loss to see the point of all the sound and fury, and when I think maybe I just might understand something, I have an experience that reveals it to be almost completely irrelevant.
I have tried to give up my search for truth as my experience has shown time and time again that the only things that work are rational lies. I have taken these apart and put them back together in so many ways that I’ve forgotten the original ideas I started from, and the principle still holds true.
They say that one should “Keep it real” and until now that advice has confused me. What I think they mean to say is, “Know your story and stick to it.” So in that spirit I have continued to break it down and share it as much as I can.
Extra illusion for all! Why don’t you have some more?
That‘s my dysfunctional self. What’s yours?
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
Human Effort IMHO
The more humanity advances, the more it is degraded. Gustave Flaubert
Why People Are Like That Today: People seem eager to hoist themselves up by their own bootstraps, but they aren‘t clear on which way up actually is. People are often not entirely honest about their motives, either. They want to have their cake and eat it too. This is not only illogical, but naturally leads to even further delusions, not just related to goals, but about the ways to achieve those goals.
It is true that the universe is abundant in potential, but it is also very well balanced, and to attain anything there is always a commensurate cost. All that we create takes it’s energy from, and takes the place of, something that was already there. Likewise, no change occurs in a void. The disturbance caused by the process of change touches all the things that were connected with what it was you changed, and are changed by it, either directly or indirectly.
To be honest, the majority of human effort is not made for the purpose of advancement. But instead, most of our energy is expended to let us remain the same in the face of a progressive world. It isn’t a mystery why we seem so backward.
In My Humble Opinion. What’s yours?
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
Presence Of Life IMHO
We must, however, acknowledge, as it seems to me, that man with all his noble qualities … still bears in his bodily frame the indelible stamp of his lowly origin. Charles Darwin
Why People Are Like That Today: People are entranced by their “issues”. The events of what they call real life seem to be of greater supposed importance than health and even sanity at times.
People are easily confused and the reason is simple. In trying to rise above nature, they corrupt their natural drives to the point of making the input from their senses almost unintelligible. The meaning of life is embedded in the presence of life, or else non-existent. The presence of life is to be understood through the evidence of the senses, including the intuitive sense.
The process of activity and habits that gets called thought is more often only an energy draining process of self delusion. Nature reveals to us one world while we are busily convincing ourselves of the supposed reality of another. Better to embrace our inner awareness with all its disturbing little quirks, and acknowledge our genuine feelings and desires, than to continue to worship the false idol of the so called real life and wind up living a half-life punctuated only by moments of insanity.
In My Humble Opinion. What’s yours?
Travis Saunders
Dragon Intuitive
