Current Events > I'm bored. ITT: Post walls of text that probably nobody will read.

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Let me share some thoughts I had after reading the works of masters Weekes, Jung, and Miller. More precisely, on the concept of emotional pain. And even more precisely, on how we all seek to avoid it. While avoidance may seem like a desirable solution at first, taking a closer look reveals an important truth : that which you resist, persists. In other words, you can only suffer from that which you don't embrace or accept. Anxiety can be thought of as two dots in the mind, one for "what is", and the other for "what one wishes was". Pain, in this picture, is as strong as the gap between those two dots is wide. So in order to feel better, that gap has to be closed, or at least reduced significantly. And that's where I believe these annoying "Mindfullness Meditation" apologists may have a point. "You have to learn to let go", they keep repeating. Easy to say, don't you think? Especially since we only seem to hear that advice from people who already feel inner peace, and being told it's supposed to be easy only makes a suffering soul feel even less adequate. I think it may speak to closing that anxiety gap between the two dots in a healthy way. If you think about it, most of the pain in this world is caused by people who can't deal with their inner anxiety, who then try to close their gap by attempting to transform "what is" into "what they wish was". Or in other words, use control. Imposing your will on others, the very definition of abuse. Now control may sort of work as a short term strategy to reduce the controlling person's anxiety, but all it really does is transpose it onto others. The challenging but ultimately liberating truth is, there is another way to close the gap, and that is, to instead transform "what you want" into "what is". Or in other words, use acceptance. By embracing negative emotions, we can integrate and eventually accept them, both for what they have to teach, and as proof that we are very much alive. This acceptance leads to an emotional grief of some sort, where we eventually become free of particular memories or sates [sic] of mind, ultimately disarming their ability to overtake our mood. If that sounds hard to believe, consider this it also works for positive emotions. Let's take nostalgia for example. The one song you kept listening to during that one special summer a few years ago, it takes you back, doesn't it? But more to the point, what happens when it does? Surely you don't resist the warm and happy memories that wash over you. You take them all in, and even try your best to feel them even more, to their full extent, conjuring images, and almost even smells if you could just concentrate enough. After a few moments, the warmth starts to wear off, and sort of like when you wake from a good dream, you fail to maintain your mental grasp on those feelings as they inevitably dissipate. And just like that, you went through the grieving process of a positive memory, because you embraced it instead of trying to resist it, and thus its grip on you has been weakened. What you will sadly find the next day, is that while that old song will always come with a dash of emotion for you, it will never again hit you as hard as the first time you reopened that corner of your mind in full acceptance. That is certainly a sad reality when it comes to positive emotions, but on the bright side, it also applies to the negative ones. If you are struck by sadness, experience treason, or are revisited by a sad memory, by using acceptance, fully embracing it and letting it wash over you, you can also weaken its ability to affect you. And eventually, in contrast with the twinge of sadness you feel at the realization that a given happy memory cannot be visited with any effect anymore, you will feel that hit of joy when it becomes clear that a negative emotion has packed its bags for good. In this way, I believe it is fair to say that there is beauty in sadness. That was a lot to cover, I hope it all made sense.

We can't bust heads like we used to. But we have our ways. One trick is to tell stories that don't go anywhere. Like the time I caught the ferry to Shelbyville. I needed a new heel for m'shoe. So I decided to go to Morganville, which is what they called Shelbyville in those days. So I tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time. Now, to take the ferry cost a nickel, and in those days, nickels had pictures of bumblebees on 'em. 'Gimme five bees for a quarter,' you'd say. Now where were we...oh yeah. The important thing was that I had an onion on my belt, which was the style at the time. They didn't have white onions, because of the war. The only thing you could get was those big yellow ones and they were awful hard to slice. So, if you had an onion on your belt, you were in style. And that was the important thing to a kid, to be in style. The second thing was that I had a free ferry ride across the river. 'Cause if you walked onto the ferry with an onion on your belt, they thought you were a foreigner. And foreigners didn't have to pay because they weren't Americans yet and hadn't gone through naturalization or whatever it is. So I got on the boat with my grandfather and we crossed over into Shelbyville together. And we got off and went to the theater. And I remember that there were like five or six thousand people in that theater and everybody was having a great time. Everybody was drinking Coca-Cola and smoking cigarettes, which is what you did then; if you didn't smoke or drink Coca-Cola, people thought there was something wrong with you. And, you know, it was a great time. And I remember that we sat down and there were these two guys sitting next to us. And one of them had a cowboy hat on and the other one had a straw hat on. And they had these big, thick cigars in their mouths and everybody else around them was smoking cigarettes or drinking Coca-Cola and having fun. And the guy with the cowboy hat leaned over and said, "I tell you what." He said, "This is a great show. But it ain't nothing like my wife." I don't know what he was talking about but everybody laughed and I thought that was kind of funny. But I remember the second act, when this man came out on stage. He had a cape on and a mask over his face. And he was carrying a cane. He walked up to one of the audience members, who happened to be sitting in the front row, and he tapped him on the shoulder with his cane. And he said, "Hey buddy," he said, "I'm going to need some help from you tonight." And the guy looked up at him and said, "What do you mean?" He said, "I need some help from all of you tonight." And that's when I figured out what was going on. This man, who was dressed like a superhero and had a mask over his face, was actually a villain. He wanted to kidnap all of us and take us away with him. And that's when I started wondering why he needed our help to do it. I wondered if he couldn't do it himself. I mean, why did he need us? Maybe he didn't have any powers at all. Maybe his cane wasn't made of steel and titanium like I had thought; maybe it was just a regular old wooden cane like the kind that old people use to get around. And then it hit me. This man wasn't a superhero at all. He was just an old man who needed help getting around, but he thought that if he dressed up in a cape and mask, then people would be more likely to give him a hand. I was wrong about him being a superhero. But I was right about one thing: he wasn't going to be able to save us all by himself. I looked around at my friends, who were all still staring at the man in disbelief. I knew that if we didn't do something soon, then we would all be dead. As I was thinking about what to do next, the man turned around and started walking away from us. He didn't even try to help us or save us or anything like that; he just walked away like it was no big deal. Which was when I noticed the onion on his belt, which was the style at the time, and I realized that the man was just some guy who had been walking by and decided to stop for a second and look at us. He wasn't a superhero, after all; he was just some dude with an onion on his belt, like me, as it was the style at the time. Anywho, this villain needed to be stopped, but we couldn't bust heads like we used to...

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To be fair, you have to have a very high IQ to understand Rick and Morty. The humour is extremely subtle, and without a solid grasp of theoretical physics most of the jokes will go over a typical viewer's head. There's also Rick's nihilistic outlook, which is deftly woven into his characterisation- his personal philosophy draws heavily from Narodnaya Volya literature, for instance. The fans understand this stuff; they have the intellectual capacity to truly appreciate the depths of these jokes, to realise that they're not just funny- they say something deep about LIFE. As a consequence people who dislike Rick & Morty truly ARE idiots- of course they wouldn't appreciate, for instance, the humour in Rick's existential catchphrase "Wubba Lubba Dub Dub," which itself is a cryptic reference to Turgenev's Russian epic Fathers and Sons. I'm smirking right now just imagining one of those addlepated simpletons scratching their heads in confusion as Dan Harmon's genius wit unfolds itself on their television screens. What fools.. how I pity them.

And yes, by the way, i DO have a Rick & Morty tattoo. And no, you cannot see it. It's for the ladies' eyes only- and even then they have to demonstrate that they're within 5 IQ points of my own (preferably lower) beforehand. Nothin personnel kid