I have had this "broken record" song stuck in my head for a long time. It's called "Another and Again" (I have several matching main melodies to "dress up" the song). I only have two verses here, but the song actually extends to 10-15 verses (it ends up being like one of those 99-bottles of beer-on-the-wall type of songs, but most appropriately so), which one day I have a chance to work with. I started with "what's the point of getting a Ph.D" (most rebelliously and most accurately) as well as the "homeless man" verse. Ever since I met two really cool (and really intelligent) homeless "unincorporated" guys at Girsh park in Goleta (their names were Rick and Jason, more on this another time), this "homeless man" part of the song kept echoing in my brain... AGAIN. So I decided to dump it on paper. And voila!
Rick, the older, "more experienced" unincorporated human warned me (hold up! this IS the quote of the day! Thee "quotable quote.")
"Never confuse intelligence with education." Ahem! and Amen! to that. Shxt. I figured that out on MY leaves of absence. Again, it's nice for other people to state aloud all the things that have been stuck in my mind for so long! I'm starting to think the "homeless" people of Santa Barbara aren't exactly your typical, regular homeless people. Maybe they figured out that there are a bunch of non-profits around here to pamper them, in addition to the exceptional climate....
I told Dulce (one of the motivated students in the Blue Horisons course) that I would like to hook up with a local newspaper and one day a week interview a random homeless person in Santa Barbara or Goleta, and do a write up for the paper. The series can be called: "Lessons from a Homeless Man." (or woman)
Another quotable quote from Rick (which I wrote a few poems about, a poem called the Theory of Absence, and it's in my QR book):
"You never appreciate what you have until you have it taken away from you." It's cliche in my mind, but heck. It's a re-occurring theme in life that you can build several stories on top of, stories with very thick onion layers that just make you cry 'til your eye balls are about to pop out.
Rick told me that he would like to have a book written about his life story, and I told him that I was interested myself in such a task. I even gave him my ACCURATE cell phone (I have given people distorted versions of my cell phone number, depending on whether I even want to associate myself with such individuals... perhaps my degree of distortion of my cell phone number correlates with the degree of aversion from that individual, ha ha ha...). I was honest with Rick--I need to clear my plate, and it might take a little while to do so, but I think doing a co-authorship of a book will help me write my book Surviving the Systems. I would like to write my own life story through the comparisons of notes with a "homeless man." To compare and contrast--the parallels are numerous.
I identify myself strongly with unincorporated, "homeless" people primarily because (1). I thrive under difficult, arduous field circumstances (why I adore geologists, and the conditions of third-world countries...) (2). Homeless people are individualistic and maximally unincorporated, (3). They dress with the rags they got, and don't conform to the Hollywood fashion obsession of southern California, and (4). If I "believed" in re-incarnation, I strongly assume that I'm a born-again cave-girl (well, technically, I AM because cave-dudes and cave-dudettes WERE my ancestors, but in terms of a generalist (non-overspecialized-office-hermit-crab-dweller) know-how of the world, a live-off-the-land-day-to-day-survival, dealing-with-the-elements type of lifestyle, that is what I'm looking for). One thing I do not associate with homeless people is "drug consumption." Everyone consumes drugs--whether physically or mentally. I chose to be addicted to writing, and many homeless people became addicted to beer and cocaine and alcohol and the works. Can't people be a little bit more creative? Can't they find a more socially acceptable form of Alternative Addiction? (I want to create a song called
Alternative Addictions). Can't they find a more self-fulfilling, rather than self-destructive addiction? Pete Sadler, one of my geology profs at UC Riverside, blatantly, sarcastically remarked: "Scientists and heroine addicts are one and the same. They are both addicted to something. Scientists are addicted to research and learning new things about their pet pea system of study. Heroine addicts are obsessed with shooting needles up their arms. In the end, we both stimulate the same pleasure center in the brain. In the end, we both experience the same 'mental highs.'" This is not the exact quote of Pete Sadler, but I'll be dxmmed it's dead on true.
So, MY being addicted to things.... I became addicted to writing and learning new things about myself and the world around me. I didn't kill enough brain cells in the ritualistic college process of "endless Isla Vistan partying of purposelessness" to go through life just mindlessly
doing things. Doing what I am told to do. I decided to become a slave to my own ideas, otherwise I would be the slave to others. I decided to not accept Reality as it is. For me to survive, I am addicted to creating my own Reality. Every day, I have to do it. Because the existing Reality already nearly killed me. I am addicted to spacetime. I am addicted to applying my right brain to creating Reality (I guess that's why I think Blue Horizons is an optimal program for me, being addicted to creating film and like being addicted creating Reality, or at least a boxed version of it). I think it's a good addiction to have. At least society doesn't seem to find me as a menace or pest (not
yet, at least). Oh ya. I'm also addicted to air, water, food, exercise, sleep, a safe-territory and a roof over my head, bare-minimum mammalian eu-social interactions (a.k.a. "the social pill", you know... the basics (I wrote a poem on this too, "I think therefore, I am" type of poem). Stuff that homeless people are addicted to as well (in fact, all humans, and nearly
all organisms), but homeless folks struggle more to retrieve them.
How come there seems to be more homeless men than homeless women?
I remember Meg buying a book written by a physicist-gone-non-profit-philanthropist who told the story of a homeless guy by the name of Stuart. It was an interesting story (for what I read of it), but it wasn't structured well. The Present was the first chapter and the Deep Past was the last. I automatically skipped to the last chapter to investigates Stuart's childhood beginnings, because ultimately that is where all bad habits and Markov-chain reactions start (as in my song, Shifting Baselines, "Please be kind, do rewind, all the tangled layers of space and time, back to the point of origins, for where it begins is where it ends is where it begins all over again") (Heck. I'm citing myself, pathetic. Then again. Self-citation is like citing all the random elements of my environment that allowed me to organize and produce a self-constructed idea. I cite myself. I cite my environment. No big deal. I'm not egotistical. I'm just relativistical) Maybe I'd be copying this physicist if (more I hope to be "when") I write this
Surviving the Systems book, but it would have an interesting spin--it would be a doubled-up story of myself and Rick.
The last quotable quote Rick told me (Rick actually told me several quotable quotes) was:
"The ladies don't seem to understand this, nor seem to think that this phenomenon is feasible, but it IS possible for men to have their hearts broken... most notably by women." This I have yet to witness. I have only experienced extreme desperate circumstances for me to go about crawling on their hands and knees, before their tiny-little sympathetic emotional centers are actually FINALLY stimulated. Until their huge ego-centric alpha-male machismo melts away into some level of social and environmental awareness, to display some feminine sensitivity. I guess I'm going to have to follow up on this quote, perhaps with some systematic self-scientific data gathering. He he. (Do you know I also want to write a book on
N = 7, Dating as a Series of Scientific Experiments?) Well, I'm giving away my ideas like I'm donating my heart and my brain to society. Well, I'm doing that anyway. So, nevermind. They are MY ideas. They're self-published on Blogger anyway. They can't be stolen. I'm protected, and I'm going to pursue these ideas one way or another.
I can't seem to Quarantine Reality very well. Nor Quarantine my Creativity. Whenever I have attempted to Quarantine Reality, I seemed to be hit and slapped in the face and mentally bombarded with new elements of Reality, and then the system of my mind changes size and shapes as the new elements are rapidly being attempted to become organized and classified. *sigh*
