YO everybody what up

I just realized something interesting. Oh, by the way, I'm a Buddhist again -- I think those rules are the best. No sex outside of marriage, no drugs -- you could call me a Buddhist by the way of Mormonism, because I'll take tips from the LDS on how to avoid masturbation (namely, never shut doors all the way, and never even close shower curtains all the way) and also, from the Word of Wisdom, on avoidance of tea, coffee, alcohol, and tobacco. I'm also going to start taking classes on the Book of Mormon at the Religious Institute here in Rocklin -- but no more prayer or fasting for me, I guess.

Eight Precepts on uposatha days:
January
4*
11*
19*
25
-
-
February
2
9Māgha Pūjā
17
24*
-
-
March
4*
11*
19*
25
-
-
April
2
9
17
24*
-
-
May
2*
8Visākha Pūjā
16
23
31
-
June
-
7
15
22
30
-
July
-
7Āsaḷha Pūjā
15
22
30
-
August
-
6
14
20
28
-
September
-
4
12
19
27
-
October
-
4Pavāraṇā Day
12
18
26
-
November
-
2Ānāpānasati Day
10
17
25
-
December
-
2
10
16
24
31
(no sex at all, no eating after noon, no dancing/singing/music/going to see entertainments/wearing garlands/using perfumes/beautifying body with cosmetics).

I am a Republican in California and a Democrat in Washington, DC (so to speak).

Please check this crap out.

http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Psychoactive_drug&oldid=15191998



This is by far the most useful thing I've ever found on Wikipedia, courtesy of "Thoric", in article "Psychoactive drugs": 20:11, 14 June 2005 Thoric (Talk contribs) (Replaced big list of drugs with this chart which I feel gives the average joe a better overview (let me know if anything is in the wrong place))

Let me be straight: Proletariat, lumpenproletariat, and proudly so.

I miss you, old bloggy-blogg. As this blog was created by and for myself, it will always be thus, I imagine -- unlike the Jana-inspired livejournal and rara avis are we. Not that anyone has ever read it, ever. Ever?

But I have been living about one inch away from death recently -- but that's boring to me, I don't want to write about it. So instead I'll talk about some things that I find interesting. Well, actually, let me lay my cards out there: yesterday I chanced on a book called "The Perennial Philadelphians," published 1965, that really got me interested in that city and well the "proper" or right way to go about things. Here's the gist of what I got out of the book (and I fell asleep before I could finish): there are two ways of doing things. Three, actually.

(1) -- "U"
(2) -- It's called upper middle class but as they would call it in England I think, just middle class is fine. But still since everyone claims to be middle class, there has to be some distinction between this and...
(3) -- The LMC or proletariat.

Basically, (1) has style, (2) has intentionally a lack of style (which is in its own way an anti-style, or reactionary style, like punk to hippie, for ex.), and (3) thinks they have style but do not and are therefore laughed at. Ha ha.

**

So, Philadelphia is kind of a center of this nation. Washington DC is actually in the South (below Mason-dixon0), Baltimore is too, and New York is actually a part of New England province. Philadelphia however is right dead-center. And the old Episcoapl church there, Christ Church, is the "motehr churhc" o f the entiere country. That means that many of the bishop lineages stem from there. It was built in 1720ish.

Anyway. Taking Philadelphia as a basic starting point here (and of course this is all based on the book I read last night) we have the U and the UMC.
Here's a handy chart.
U UMC
Place to live The Main Line. Chestnut Hill (or Germantown?)
Holiday at Northeast Harbor. The Poconos
Religion Episcopalian. Quaker (or Lutheran?)
Schools Private day schools, Public schools/charter schools
New England
Episcopalian
boarding schools
9-12
Colleges Princeton. Penn
Careers Church, Law, Banking, & family firms.
Military,
Politics.
(*WOW THAT's really hard to read when published. Church military professor go together, Law banking etc go tehgetr)


The LMC clutches for the top ("U") but stumbles and fails miserably. No one in America is L except illegal immigrants. Since you can't tell which Hispanics are illegal and which aren't, let's just lump them all in that bottom 25%, sorry Genevievers. (But you're only half-Hispanic.) That's pretty outrageous, so let me just take that back. I don't want to be like Lou Dobbs over here. But it is kinda weird how they all stick together, no? They are almost forcing us to see them that way. Even the college-educated, for that I need only point to Gustavo Arellano. Of course, there's also Villaigarosa who would seem as a major counter-example. But I have no idea about him, know nothing. Is he really cool as he seems or is he not? This deserves answers. Without futher ado, I want to point out that for my orig. hometown of P.S., all the schools I went to (G.A.T.E. Cielo Vista/Raymond Cree, Palm Springs High School AP/Honors track) do in fact count. The college I would elect (nod to Genevieve here) is Whittier, and also Whittier Law.

The "Inland Valley Friends meeting," which is part of the Independent scheme of things (I think of them as being kind of Calvinist-leaning) meets at Riverside's gorgeous Mission Inn at 10 am Sunday. Just a heads up.

I belong to the Evangelical Free Church, well not officially, but un-officially. It's the denomination my grandparents (dad's father was long away in NorCal, mom's parents in the Midwest -- so I'm talking about my dad's mother and stepfather here) did their best to raise me in -- incl weekly, obligatory trips to the Evangelical Free Church of Fullerton when staying at their house (for both worship and Sunday school), to Southwest Community Church in Indian Wells when they were visiting us, and summer Bible camp. It is an American style in the tradition of the Prussian Lutheran-Calvinist combos, uniting both groups for the sake of national unity. I like that, you know? I certainly didn't feel judged on the (very ripe) possibility that I was an Obama supporter. (Wow, "Obama" still comes up as a spelling eror.) I have a lot of other boring crap to write about, give me time. Oh, and I went to the young adult ministry after the service -- Christian rock is really good, by the way, and someone gave a talk on fasting -- which is very pietist and surprised me. It turns out my grandparents chose a very nice church, one that wasn't evangelical-in-the-sense-of-being-politically-correct-(on-the-Republican-side)-at-all. Believe me, there are churches like that. Megachurches. There's one here in Fort Collins, and they own everybody. They are Pentecostal-Holiness, so that should be the tip off right there. Those guys are the worst of the worst. Yecch.

It's really hard to place the Lutherans, because they can go either way -- in the Catholic direction or in the Reformed direction. Mostly, they're something else, something apart, pre-split. So are the Anglicans, of course. But unlike the Anglicans, the Lutherans were religiously motivated in their split -- or at least Martin Luther was. And Henry VIII wasn't. I don't know if that makes the Lutherans more or less Protestant. I guess they basically did the samre hting -- I just checked Wiki. and the dudes practically lived the same time-span, except Luther was a wee bit younger, but not by much. (7 years, and he died a few months earlier too.)

This is borne out by the fact that the main Lutheran and Anglican groups in the U.S. are now like the sameth ing, that is sharing Holy Communion, or in Holy Communion. So, whatever, it doesn't matter. Except that the Quakers are kind of like the Lutherans, really, well no they're Anabaptists like the Mennonites and the Baptists. But I still feel that overall places them closer to the Lutherans than it does to the Calvinists (however I may be wrong about taht one). The same would go for the Methodists and Pentecostals then, I suppose, since they are also Pietist movements. But why are the Pentecostals so, so gay? Srsly. I guess it's more socioeconomic than anything else. Dare I attempt to throw the Protestants into U, UMC, LMC, and L categories? Oh, why the hell not.

U: "Liberal" (whether Unitarian or simply non-religious, regardless of liturgy, for ex. Anglo-Catholic King's parish in Boston)
UMC: Calvinist (does this make sense? I should say Evangelical. Presbyterian. Southern Baptists even.
LMC: Holiness (unforunately have to incl Quakers Methodists Lutherans in this one. Mi familia.
L: points to the Bishop of Rome, sorry you bleeding fucking Irish mongers.

This gets easier with politics. We have the example of political magazines. I remember opening up a Whole Earth catalog form the PS Lib years ago -- it had all the different viewpoints laid out:
LIBERAL (The Nation)
NEO-LIBERAL (The New Republic)
CONSERVATIVE (The National Review)
NEOCONSERVATIVE (Commentary, The Weekly Standard)
PALEOCONSERVATIVE (Chronicles)

Other liberal periodicals being like Harper's and the New York Review of Books. These guys are pretty "U."

T.N.R. OK is perfectly Neoliberal or perhaps Libertarian, we could put it in the UM category. Along with Reason Wired and the Libertarian Party. Ron Paul is not a libertarian, he is a paleoconservative.

Neoconservatives -- goodbye Bushies! -- are LMC.

Paleoconservatives -- Pat Buchanan is the exemplar and the only one who doesn't look like a freak (sorry folks). I guess Ron Paul's OK looking too. Don't know about the others. But um this is definitely a Lower Lower stuff.

Northwest = Neoliberal. Capital: San Francisco. Upper middle class.
Southwest = Neoconservative. Capital: Los Angeles. Lower middle class.
"The South" = Paleoconservative. Capital: the Beltway, Alexandria, Georgetown. Lower class.
The Northeast = Liberal. Capital: New England, Cambridge, Manhattan. Upper class duh

I guess if I'm confusedat about anthing it's what church to go to. I am definitely a Lutheran, but I don't know, is that UMC? I guess it can be; it all depends on how you do it. Also, two new publications: The American Prospect, is pan-Northern. Capital: Chicago, Ill.
The American Conservative, is pan-Southern. Capital: New Orleans, La.

A cup of Chamomile from Utah w/ Colorado honey, a glass of OJ, and corn chips + Colorado salsa

...is what I have before me as I set down to type.

I'm supposedly fasting from everything but schoolwork for the moment...but that can get incredibly dry. So, to refresh myself, I simply willingly forget what it was I was supposed to be doing, and go along my merry way.

In reference to the foods above, I believe that the salt and vitamin C should help my in my weakness.

I'm finishing up Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, which I absolutely love.

I'm listening to Yawning Man (see Wikipedia), specifically their only released records, and Pot Head and Rock Formations, both downloaded as a torrent. This is desert music, incredibly popular in Europe. An article from the L.A. Weekly a while back had some revealing stuff on them. Basically, they were Kyuss before Kyuss, a stoner/desert/Palm Desert band even more epochal than that later one (and Kyuss were epochal, in the opinion of many they actually revived rock, and were the most vital thing -- perhaps the only vital thing -- going in that world until this whole nu-rave thing came about. An interesting connection, because the whole generator party '80s scene of mushrooms and pot that existed in the desert back then seems intimately connected with the later early '90s rave scene, which I do believe existed. Growing up as late as I did, I was on the shit end of all of that. By the time I was in high school (1999ish) ecstasy was well almost out of vogue (it didn't really hit the fan until 2000 or 2001), and pot and 'shrooms certainly were ... Yep. And then came crystal meth, which of course had been brewing in the L.A. rave scene since 1994 at least when trance first came in. And of course there's the whole moontribe connection. In fact I think that's the tail end (the hippy end ) of the L.A. rave scene that is actually just now coming into full flower and bloom. The whole psychedelic trance thing. It's definitely the only social scene still worth giving a fuck for -- maybe that's why it's popular with Prince William and other members of the English landed aristocracy, or so I hear... Btw, the moontribe album is highly recommended for a taste of what the hell I'm talking about. I believe it came out in 1998. So good.

So where was I? Psychedelic rock turned into ecstatic rave turned into crystal meth deadzone? Sounds about right. Anyway, Yawning Man were a real proto-rave scene in the desert, with links to the Grateful Dead of course naturally but being much more in a heavy metal/Euro-ish sort of thing, sort of like Goa. I suppose that's why the whole desert rock thing is so wildly popular in Europe, especially Yawning Man and Brant Bjork. They play in Italy and Spain, and their music is released only on Spanish labels. Only emo is as popular here. Of course I guess it is metal we're talking about here. Nothing revolutionary, then, just a heartfelt and unique attention to place. So I'm really back on the whole organic/back-to-the-land/neo-Nazi thing that everybody else is so keen to get it on. Well, I never really left. It's going to take a long time to extricate myself from some of these positions ideologically, and if I'm anything like Nietzsche, it will likely all be in vain (but perhaps not in the long run -- witness the almost subdued, renewed sympathy for the man existing in some European philosophe circles today, and even Heidegger -- not because they were right; they weren't -- but they understood what they were getting into and felt it had to be done all the same, an honorable position...) (Actually, I think they were right; that's why they felt they had to do what they had to do -- however, they were dangerous and worse they were not respectable. They were even a little bourgeois. When it comes right down to it, I mean. This is why I think the way of the future lies not with old fogies such as me, Heidegger, or Nietzsche but with radical Islam. Oh yes. Evangelical Christianity and Radical Islam have so much in common, they have to hook up. I can't believe they haven't already -- unless all this fighting is just the global religious equivalent of the boy pulling the girl's hair and throwing mud at her (and to be sure, Islam is the male in this relationship!) before they start dating later on. It shall be interesting to see. There's only one God, after all. Unless you're a heathen, like me. We'll continue to exploit the divisions between the two big religions, usually falling on the side of Islam, until we are forced to walk the plank. I kind of just see it all as a neverending story.)