Human 👩🏻🦰👨🍳👮👷🏿♂️
"Let there be a voice to assure them. By day, and even while they are asleep, in spite of all the terror, all the bewilderment and confusion, the ultimate reality remains unshakably itself and is one of the same substance as the inner light of even the most cruelly tormented mind."
—Aldous Huxley, "The Doors of Perception"
> outro | the warmth of sameness
You've now completed God Don't Make No Trash's 13 official chapters.
They were braided together using over 100 cute-sized stories that are 300 words each or less.
But we're not done until I run out of coffee.
Still to come in your inbox:
- How I built GDMNT
- Bibliography of sources
- Mind reads
- Mind studies
- Mind listen and look
- GDMNT playlist
Today, I'm still hopelessly human. 👨🏻👧🏽👱🏻♀️👨✈️
- I zealously cling to my routines and unchallenged beliefs.
I avoid opportunities to experience new things and people. 𖨆𖨆
- I embrace the reassuring warmth of sameness and conformity.
I remain a man consumed at times by pride and a fear of being viewed as less than a man.
I still worry that people will think I'm dumb.
I forget that dumb – like smart, and lazy, and handsome, and uncaring, and trustworthiness – is perceived by people individually. They're constructs manufactured by humans, not the universe.
There is no universal dumb or universal weird or universal uncaring. We call each other these things as if the universe reaches objective conclusions about us, rather than our own subjective, personal judgments.
Sometimes I'd rather be weird than boring.
Like the war on terror after Sept. 11, 2001, these are constructs made of air that are powered more by our feelings and emotions than by reason and reflection.
So, I don't want to be a good person anymore. Who decides who's good?
I don't want to be good by your interpretation at my own expense and at the expense of my sovereignty.
I have only this moment and another and another before I return to the dust, as the Bible says.
I continue to work at coffeehouses. I like that they're a place where people can go when they want to be alone but need people around to do it.
Coffeehouses are for coffee and revolutions.
I felt that way about bars, too.
At either, I usually didn't want to talk to anyone.
But I still wanted to hear and almost feel the clink and clank and clang and screech of a busy bar room or coffee shop. I needed the hum of low voices that are punctured periodically by a sharp belly laugh that hangs suspended in the air.
Our internal discourse on lateness at the Tulsa coffee shop where I worked perfectly captured the intellectual legacy of coffeehouses worldwide.
Wrote the owner on Slack:
>> "I'm actually enjoying the debate more than I am needing a tardiness policy. Great points on all sides."
- next time Series end
- listening David Frizzell, Shelly West "You're the Reason God Made Oklahoma"
– thirty –
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