People in a Crowd

When I read writings on Socrates I was surprised when he talked about how the many are dim witted. This seems rather conceited and arrogant to assume you are smarter than most people. I mean, even if you are, I wouldn't suggest dwelling on that fact. It would be a better use of that smart brain to do smart things instead of marvel at how smart you are.

I realize now that I was foolish. The term is not used to say that only a few people are smart and most others are dumb. It is used to describe how people act when they are in a mob. People in a crowd start thinking less and worry more about how they appear to the crowd.

I came to this realization suddenly a day after I went to a soccer match. I did not stand up during the national anthem. I did not stand to protest of anything. I did not stand because the act of standing means nothing to me. If the national anthem came on the television I would not get off the couch and stand. I would wager that this is true for many of the people at this sporting event. So why do they stand? The answer is so that other people see their standing. Once in a crowd, one must convert a lot of thinking and actions to acting like the crowd. It is very possible to be saying things you are not actually saying if you are not aware of how you are acting in a crowd and lost in yourself.

The day after the match my parents confronted me as they were upset. They conjured many reasons that I stayed seated. Of course all of this was in their head. People normally do not fantasize about why people are sitting down, but they do if everyone else is standing up. In a crowd you must do and say things that you do not mean just to keep other people from assuming you are saying something you don't mean. It seems like a silly situation and I can see why many philosophers look down at people acting in a crowd. When you behave in a crowd you are thinking about what other people are thinking about you and not about other things. It is like having a conversation with people but a conversation where you are saying something with hopes to say nothing.

Lately my paintings are things that are cultivated. They begin as faint images. I layer little by little with no concern for time. They begin to cake with layers. Each layer speaks with the space surrounding it and what lies beneath it. How each layer interacts is usually discovered much later then when it is first applied. At the surface this process seems to say that each layer is random, and I take credit in place for the randomness that creates it. I do not see this as such.

The randomness that I am possible to create is separate from the randomness anyone else is able to produce. So even if one reduces my paintings to randomness, it is at least my personal randomness and not anyone else's.

Part of the process is the passing of time. I tend to set a painting away with enough time to forget it to the point that it becomes fresh. At this point the painting process is more like me interacting with the painting. It is not so much a painting I have created. It is more like running into a stranger. Yet it does bear the mark of myself that I cannot erase clean with time. But with time, I as a person have changed. I have had more experiences and I am not the same thing. It is like talking to my past self in a way that is possible.

Then I, as do many painters, come to an impasse about when to stop painting. If I view the paintings I make to conversations to my past selves, how do I end the conversation? This conversation is also nothing of the content of a normal conversation between two people. People rarely carry a pad of paper with a pencil and give to a friend that scribbles with you back and forth. This is the conversation I am having with my past. It is a conversation that is easy to start but hard to end. I guess I would have to figure it to be a collaboration of past selves to an image. Each one has a say in what it should look like. The end comes not as a handshake good bye but as a democratic electorate ending a vote. The end comes when there runs out of people.

A democracy does not elect perfection but a majority what the electorate thinks is right. Each time I paint I do not creating know that what I do is perfect. I do what I do because I think it is what is right for the painting.

But the voters currently cannot articulate what the other voters think. I am not saying that the voters do not react to the each other, but I would say they do this with out awareness. Voters do not go out of their way to influence the thoughts of other voters. They simply put down what they think and that is that. I am uncertain whether this will be a permanent feature.

* art hijacked by intellectuals
* want to make art as symbols
* art is part symbol part aesthetic
* art can not be purely intellectual but must contain aesthetic qualities of the senses. Otherwise it would just be pure thought in a head.

*like to share but don't speak my language
* is it because I don't want to put the effort into learning another language?
* do others put in the effort to learn other people's language?
* What is the relationship between intelligence and language?

It is interesting to examine Christianity at the time it started to form, that time is roughly from anywhere from 3 a.d. to 200 a.d. and it is particularly interesting to examine Christianity of today to that of the past. In the present culture which I live in we see very strange behavior from Christians. There is still a male dominated congregation which has no foundation besides tradition. Largely this can be seen in how people first governed themselves. When a political unit consisted only of a family, it seems that the father was the leader and decision maker. There is more to this. The father's role was more than a governing role but also a religious role. He was the mediator of the dead ancestors and the living relatives.

This father figure is still seen in Christianity and I will use the Catholic sect for examples since it is the one I was brought up on and the one I know the best. Obviously what is left over from the years of change is the priest, but a priest isn't what he used to be. In religions predating Christianity the priest was, like it was said before, a father of a family. His job was to perform sacraments like feeding the ancestors, marriage, and proper burial of the dead. All of these were not taken lightly. If the body of a family member was buried improperly, the ghost of the individual would haunt the family until it was buried properly. The priest was also involved with rituals to honor the dead relatives. This involved chants that must be recited exactly every time. Even when the language of the chants changed so that the people reciting them did not understand the language they spoke, they still had to be said in the way they have been before. The

Hey there man. It's me me. Do not worry about it. I'm here because I got a call from you. I'm pretty sure you go the wrong number but you said your address in it. I get bored easily. The interesting thing is that I used to live here as well. It's been nearly four years. I moved because my dog died in that corner over there where there's that spot over there. After that I found some place cheaper and never got another pet.

I used to cook dinner. The fire alarm would always go off. My dog pissed in the kitchen every morning. I do not know what it is like to be a dog. I've never felt the need to pee anywhere else besides a toilet. The dog belonged to the person who lived here before I did. It hadn't been feed in days. I've never had a dog before so at first I didn't know how to take it. I really didn't want a dog either. But I needed to at least feed it. After I fed him that once I thought that it wasn't so bad, you know. So I kept her around. I got mail from lots of people who lived there before me. One guy kept getting a magazine about knives.

I finished a monster semester that this spring has brought. It was a combination of heavy things and a mess of smells. It was a thing that I want to forget. Yet it is too large to fit through a door, and I can not push it out towards the garbage bin. It was a turn back into a time that was much worse. It was a floor above that time, but it began to sag too much. Most importantly it is nearly over. I, a friend, and a uhaul will be the end for it.

I am preparing for finals late in the game, but I can't help myself from thinking about things other than school. I was trying to figure out the amount of money I would need to save from my summer job. This journey led me to think of a discussion on the radio. The issue of the discussion was societies that have an aging population with fewer young people. To have a good economy based off of socialism, a country would need two things. One thing to be able to support the aging population would be to raise taxes while the other possibility would be to make more babies to support the older generation. Taxes can only go so high, so no matter how determined the citizens are to give certain benefits to their elders there is a limit this is possible.

With the limit in mind I began to think of conversations with people who oppose gay marriage. The main argument I deduced against gay marriage is that gay marriage does not contain the ability to reproduce. An older population would benefit from a younger generation that out numbers the older generation. To the old person, procreation is a tool that keeps himself secure.

In America, the baby boomers have underdone their parents. Baby Boomers have a threat that lurks behind them. These threats are very real and make sense to worry about. But what does that say of marriage and of the virtue of raising a child? In this light, birth is not a moral ideology but a pragmatic investment. I think that it is absurd to see gay marraige as something that will lower the birthrate anyways. I doubt that many people who would consider getting a gay marriage would procreate if they didn't get married. The problem is obviously more complex. Gay people shouldn't get blamed for this problem.

Baby boomers will enter old age with a possibility of financial uncertainty. But lets concider some factors. Baby boomers have not reproduced as much as their predesestors and their children have followed this trend as well. That is part of the problem. Also, the behavor of baby boomers as a whole is recless. We have problems with diet, drugs, and financially unsound spending. These will all be costly. The children of these boomers will mostly like inherit a lot of this behavior as well. Infact, children now are needing health care that was once pertained to an aging person. All of this from a bad diet and lack of excersize.

And so promoting birth without considering the burden of raising a child will not solve the problem either. Children should not be treated as little knick nacks. One has to seriously invest in a child and one must also take responsibility for their own actions as they will model behavior for their children. We as a collection of people are entering into a time that will be lean and mean, yet our behavior is not reflecting this which worsens the problem.

Hold on! This is not my best time to explain but I have to time to make a sandwich. Usually, not that it matters, but I've lost some of my radio stations. They weren't important to me but I loved them. Oh yes! But who is in love with radio stations? What makes me think that I am in love with a radio station? This is all together a sample of what it is like to live what I have lived. I was once young in a cow pasture. I made hats out of grass and I cared little about it. Not one of my hats have survived and I have forgotten how to make them.

Years ago, when I first found I loved that cow pasture. I found when I came back a similar sky of tubes! The sky was segmented into good tubes and better tubes. The tubes would not reasonably be called tubes but people who cannot see tubes. It is true! There are some that cannot see tubes. I was not born with the ability to see tubes but inherited it through training I got from a cow.

Cows are lovely. I felt like a warm sweater and my spit became bouncy in minutes. Why does this go on? Why do tubes feel like I have chocolate in terrible places! I can only guess. Cows are wise but do not understand what it is to be human much like I do not understand what is like to be a cow. We both understand though that we are not each other.

Tubes are in theory more than I'm able to explain. One thing that makes it difficult to explain is that most people find see them but get hungry. They eat spaghetti instead of looking at the tubes. I congratulate myself for I to lust for spaghetti at the sight of tubes. I am hungry now. I haven't eaten in 53 days and I don't know what I will eat next.

Cows eat all the time. They know about the tubes but do not see how they would be better off looking at the tubes instead of eating. The eat instead. Cows push cow ideas. I find them crazy and they must tip well at resteraunts. I met more people in my life than I have eaten croutons. But this is not to say I am better for it than that. I sleep with my face in a pillow. I pretend it is lava from a volcano that remembers how old I am. I forget sometimes that volcanoes are older than I am.

"Pop pop, I'm a volcano!" Says Volcanoes.
"Hello how old am I, " I say in my dream.
"How many times are there to have?" the volcanoes replies.
"Volcano you are so wise to know this." I admit.

If I were to be in a wagon, I'd have to be in a state where wheels make more money than anything else I could hope to send in the mail. Mailing things can be expensive and it is hard to make money by sending things to other people. If I met someone, I'd like to send them a letter right afterwards. I should carry letters already stamped.

Salad

The little girls did not permit insubordination.
"We only allow nine yellow tickets!" one cried.
But one never knows the next ten years. The cool night air gave a dim suspicion. The boy stammered.
"What do you do with them?" he asked
If it were dark there would be no great consequence! He wouldn't look. They have guns.