lickhaven

1. Eternal human life would be disastrous: Either we’d continue to explode in unrestrained population, or the narcissists in control would live forever and eliminate everyone else.
   • Over-population is the essential threat to Earth. The planet can’t support 8 billion human beings under any circumstances.
   • The continued existence of humanity has proved its worthlessness.
2. The decisions of individuals are what determine human behavior, not the congealed mass outlooks that polls and social science try to uncover with simplistic questionnaires. We all make our decisions based on a complex of influences and inherent traits that cannot be fully uncovered.
3. There is no perfect solution to any social problem.
4. All social and historical patterns are less circular than helical; they repeat, but with variations determined by specific conditions.
   • The current “populist” revolt will lead to temporary social derangement, but ultimately create the basis for the reform of society: In other words, we haven’t yet fallen low enough to rebound to sanity.
5. Ours is the best of all probable worlds. This would hold true for all other worlds as well.
6. My beliefs are as worthless as anyone else’s. Only the facts matter.

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Effluvia and balderdashery:

New song by Neil Middleage:

I’m in love with a cinnamon bun,

But you can’t get none from a cinnamon bun.

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New band:

Al Paca and the Ungulates

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World’s smallest rodent superhero:

Deflator Mouse

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There was an absurd controversy recently about a woman Egyptian boxing champion possibly being ineligible to be a woman because of her high levels of  testosterone. By the same logic, male shotputters should all be considered to have an “unfair advantage” because they average 300 lbs. of pure testosterone.

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Dream #21

I’m talking to a small woman who is my friend or, possibly, someone I feel responsible for or am protecting. There is nothing sexual involved (which is unusual over the long run of my dreams). She is wearing a track suit, we are sitting in a back alcove of an old-fashioned soda shop. She is part of a group of four, the other three male. They were challenged to a race around the block against a “local” group (who are present only during the race). She is a very fast runner and expected to win.

I witness the race, paralleling it somehow, but can’t tell who is ahead. One of the males, from the other “team,” wears a woven, tannish fedora, possibly with a feather. I believe she won but get no clear answer from her back in the rear alcove. She becomes upset that I’m asking her questions about the race. I must also have asked at least one of her “teammates,” because they have the same reaction. Then I learn that the outcome of the race will be decided by a complicated formula that includes how each individual runner finished, so it will be a team, not individual, win.

Though I don’t know the formula used, I try to determine the winner by writing down the most likely position of each runner and assigning it a number. This only makes the woman and her teammates more upset. I stop doing that, and things calm down. That segment of the dream ends suddenly when somebody says that the woman who runs the soda shop had not assigned anyone as timekeeper for the race, so there are no results, so no winner.

In between, around, or possibly following this part (the segments interweave), I am visiting a factory or depot with several train tracks running through. They are mostly dug underground, and I have a strange concern about what the landscape had looked like before they transformed it. I feel a need to return it to its original state or outline, though probably retaining the train lines. I somehow have the ability to do the work but know it would never be what it had been.

Down at the riverbank, it is clear that the railroad and other industries had reshaped the bank, terracing it with river stones. It makes me sad but somewhat accepting. Earlier(?) I was fascinated watching the trains come in and out of the underground areas. There is brilliant sunshine. To the left, further down the line, two stone pillars arise, one on either side of the tracks. I keep trying to get a clearer view of them – they were initially clear – but people or objects continually get in the way. [On waking, I realize that the pillars were distinctly phallic.]

At some point, I visit or start to visit the town, with unnerving streets. It may be the drugstore-owner woman who agrees that they have the same effect on her.

There are more – but more indistinct – elements to the dream. It was most fascinating how they weaved in and out of one another.

I don’t usually find much meaning in my dreams, and they almost never include an overt symbol like the phallic pillars. I think the fact that the race had no winner – a result that was both unexpected and vivid – comes from lately reading writings of Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist.

The landscape restructuring was probably influenced by a talk with my nephew Tim about my growing up and wanting to bulldoze all the houses (including his father’s – my brother Vic’s) the constructed of which had destroyed the woods I loved when I was about 5.

The woman I needed to help may have been a combination of Linda, her mother, and my granddaughter Abi.

It felt good to have trains back again in a dream. I had missed them. But here they were not about urban transportation, as is so often the case. The setting was rural, and they were freight, not passenger, trains.