the church as the nexus of the material and false spirituality

church (chûrch)► n. A building for public, especially Christian worship. n. The company of all Christians regarded as a spiritual body. n. A specified Christian denomination: the Presbyterian Church.____________________________________________________ we will be concerned here with the first definition...why a building? and why specifically christian? because it's not about spirituality...it's about the material...about behavioral control...it's about money...you don't need a building to be spiritual...you can go out and look at the stars at night or watch plants grow to know you are living in cycles within cycles and realize that you are not the final end the universe had in mind...just a part of it...that's not what a building is for...it is actually an impediment...no...you need a building to bring people together in a group and establish a group mentality...one less open to independent, critical thought and more subject to group assessment and approval/disapproval..."are you one of us...or are you 'the other' "...the other is damned...institutional architecture is purposefully designed to diminish the individual...public buildings are large to instill what geert mak calls "antness"...a diminusion of self...some cathedrals would fill the same purpose...however small churches and even chapels are designed to negate the self by invoking the eternal in the face of simple human transience and ultimate oblivion...and that fear of self oblivion is the key to religion's behavioral control...alone, individuals might begin to question the veracity of the clergy...stray into heterodox thought, the bane of true faith..so the "individual" needs to be controlled...watched for signs of inattention or heresy "...and the seating is so arranged that the males are in front of the house father, and the house mother acts as a rear guard for the females. this ensures that everyone's conduct in public is watched by those who are responsible for his discipline at home. here too they take great care to see that a young person always sits next to an older one; for if children are left to themselves they're apt to waste their time in church playing childish games, when they, above all, ought to be developing a sense of religious awe, the strongest, if not the only, incentive to good behavior"...that is the ur-maoist sir thomas more ( a saint no less ) embraced by teleological authoritarians, religious or secular ( hitler was an austrian choir boy who "drank in the awesome solemnity of the catholic ritual" and sought to emulate them in the rites of the nazi party...stalin was a seminarian...there is a critical thread that links theology and authority ), to this day...so, in these terms, the material becomes a necessary part of the "spiritual" because there has to be containment, group think, peer judgement, and a loss of self for those commandments ( authority again ) to take hold and for us poor miserable sinners to toe the line and support the church...whether that be a poor parish priest or a jet owning televangelist...the church is a way to earn a living..and like all ways there can be big money in it if you have an entrepreneurial bent and the will to diminish individual thought...hurry...someone will snap this property right up.

apocalyptic failure

david meade...bible scholar...ranting evangelical...failed numerologist...

there are quite a few cars at urgent care on central...but not because of nibiru...

there is considerable damage at the strip mall...but it was a fire a few weeks ago...not nibiru ( and in an inversion of the "end of the world" scenario as well as a sort of a lake station miracle, the bar at the end survived unscathed )

and there's a lot of traffic on willowcreek...but not because of a nibiru based evacuation...it's just another busy evening with everyone headed home...the world will end at some point..it is true..but not the way these doomsday twerps think...or the way you or i think either probably...the variables are unknowable...accept your limited human cognition and denounce bogus manipulators...we have enough to worry about without some attention whore tugging on our coat sleeves...fuck these people.

calling planet nibiru...

the dense yellow # 2 is still ripening in the quasi rural fields here in the nexus...

and my nascent winter rye is still standing as tall as it can...

the parking lot at the local supermarket is full...at least half way...

the macdonald's out on route six seems to be doing a robust business...nothing extraordinary on a saturday moring...

admittedly it is a bit on the warm side for the second day of autumn...

and there is an azure sky redolent of deepest summer..and there is part of the problem...the anti-life nihilist fundamentalist evangelical in me is crying out at the failure of planet nibiru to materialize and obliterate the fucking godawful terrible sinful hedonistic human race ( that this would have obliterated every trump supporter is the only real shortcoming i can see in its non-materialization )

oddly the only empty parking lots i saw were at churches...have the faithful already been raptured up and i missed it? or have the faithful seen through the lame numerological con game that is an evangelical side line? remember harold camping and his confused babbling from 2011? david meade can join him in the pantheon of failed prognosticators who fade into oblivion muttering to themselves about what could have gone wrong and god's treachery...personally i am going to have some lunch.

"well...that passed the time"

made a call at the "behavioral health" segment of a local hospital today to make a visit...i found it all to be rather formal and constrained even though the staff was "glad" i was there...as long as i succumbed tot he list of rules...one of the first of which was "no cell phone use " which i promptly violated by taking the attached photographs ( grainy though they may be )...each inmate..er, patient...was allowed only one visitor at a time so i was left to cool my heels in the hallway for about half an hour and wait...so i began to live through waiting for godot line at a time as i paced around...until i noticed the surveillance camera...so surveyed it and its 180 degree field of vision and saw that it overlapped another that was about fifty feet down the hall...behavior was being watched...i was suspecting a shrill whistle followed by a stern voice calling me to task for rule violations...i looked around for refuge and saw a nook where the wall extended by some disused elevator doors ( nothing in good repair...oceania...airstrip one ) unfortunately it was not nearly a deep enough recess to avoid the camera...winston smith had it made compared to this...so i spent an hour on camera ( there was one in the "visitor's lounge" as well...as we left i noticed the cameras vanished...or were better hidden...wondering how much more of my life is surveiled.

mired in an ego viewpoint

"western mankind, without exception, is under the influence of an immense optical illusion. everyone demands something of the rest. we say "thou shalt" in the conviction that so-and-so in fact will, can and must be changed or fashioned or arranged conformably to that order, and our belief both in the efficacy of, and in our title to give, such orders is unshakable...in the ethics of the west everything is direction, claim to power, will to affect the distant. here luther is completely at one with nietzsche, popes with darwininas, socialists with jesuits..." oswald spengler. decline of the west___________every now and then you can open a book....journey to the end of the night, cosmos, confessions of an english opium eater...and find a passage that rings so true at that particular moment that it laves you gasping...old ozzie damn near knocked me out of my chair this morning...we are all stuck behind our own eyes...it is difficult, if no impossible, to view others without making their existence relative to ours...we have difficulty empathizing...it can be done...it takes some effort...and there are those times when you come across an individual so utterly self-absorbed and buried so deeply behind their own eyes that they don't seem capable of any sort of understanding....who can only positively sanction the existence of others in terms of what those others can do for them...it is about them...period...we call that sociopathy...or indifference...or cruelty...or megalomania...and find it abhorrent and react with revulsion and avoidance...just wondering how much of ourselves we see there before we react.

the blanching hour

i spent an hour working on the first step in making what my carpatho-rusyn granny would call holubci...you can call it stuffed cabbage or whatever non-authentic name you want to apply...i will stick with what i grew up with..one head of cabbage in the pot blanching...another on the counter waiting...peeled off with tongs and into a bath of cold water to stop the cooking...then into a colander to drain..forty leaves in the first head...forty-seven in the second...the last two photos are the largest and the smallest leaf from the second head...my work is done here...the rest of the project is in other hands...i am free to ponder whether this qualifies as a post-modern "death of the real" since the generation that brought this to my family is long gone...or if my inclusion of this post in the blog carries on my tradition of satirizing the whole bogus theme of post-modern claptrap...i lean towards the latter...we need g.e. moore now like never before.

just another grifter whore

my garbage can isn't real anymore...it has become a simulacrum...a mere shadow of a real garbage can...you can tell because it says old keith soderquist is mayor and he isn't anymore...statutes enacted in, i believe, 2008, stripped him of his office as soon as his conviction on all counts ( including taking money from the food bank account to spend gambling..up in michigan so he wouldn't be recognized as easily i suppose ) and rendered my garbage can fallacious...the times of northwest indiana says his conviction "casts a pall" over the city...how? a whore is a whore...some political grifters are bigger than others...too big to fail...others not so big...still...cut from the same cloth...let the light in...recognize where we find ourselves for what it is...a free-for-all at the public trough...fuck these people.