So, for the last six months or so, I’ve had pretty much nonstop bad dreams. They occasionally have good elements, but there aren’t any that you could call unilaterally good. I had hoped that changing the sleeping medication I used would fix it, but while the nightmares are less intense on the new drug, they’re certainly not gone.
My next experiment, which will not make me popular with anyone, is probably not going to be using any sleeping drugs at all.
I feel kind of like people assume that I’m lazy because I don’t get up at 8 AM with everyone else. My responses to this are varied.. from questioning why it would matter whether or not I was lazy – I mean, honestly, of all the things one can be, is lazy really that bad? .. to resentment, because I know lots of people who put less energy into life than I do, but think they’re better than me because their biology happens to happily coexist with following the sun in a ‘normal’ phase.
Anyway.. that’s not what I came here to talk to you about today.
A longtime dream of mine has been to get airplay for some of my music. A friend recently asked me why I wanted to make other people listen to my music.. to make them happy? Self-aggrandizement? Something else?
And I have to admit I have no idea. Until fairly recently, I didn’t even think any of it was that good. So why would I want to force my mediocre talents on the world? And I don’t really have a answer for that. ‘Because I just do’ doesn’t raelly seem like a rational argument even to me.
In other news, I’ve been carrying on a email conversation – which I plan to someday publish, because I think it’d make interesting reading to some people – with a card-carrying republican. One of e’s comments is that people don’t value things that they don’t earn – that we couldn’t have a unlimited-resource universe in which everybody has everything they want because they wouldn’t value it. He also insists that if people didn’t have to work for a living, no one would. [I don’t think that’s true – people *like* working. They just don’t like working in pointless and/or useless jobs, and they don’t like living in fear of being evicted/starving/whatnot the day they stop working].
I’ve been thinking.. do I think that I would value the things I have less if I had not worked for them? I can’t think of any good way to answer that question short of winning the lottery (either metaphorically or literally), although it occurs to me that there are some things I have that I didn’t work for, and it’s true that I don’t value them as much as some.. things like intelligence, and life.. 😉
(not that I’d want to be unintelligent.. I considered the possibility, and decided it probably wasn’t what I wanted. What I really want is to be happy without hurting anyone else. Thus far I haven’t found a workable path, but I remain cautiously optimistic.)
(One could probably make a case that the mental effort I’ve put into designing the perfect universe over the last few years isn’t likely to increase my happiness, since clearly the universe we live in is a long way from perfect. Ironically, I think that it may get that way by trying to average perfection for all users, when apparently users fall into a number of diametrically opposed categories)
Actually, as long as I’m ruminating on that topic, I’ve been thinking.. one of the great evils is thinking that you should be able to force others to live by what you consider to be right and wrong. I will grant that there are some exceptions.. i.e. no one should be allowed to kill, or steal something that doesn’t already belong to us all. (You will note that I don’t really believe that digital media can be owned, any more than the number 2 can be. Look elsewhere in this blog for more on that topic than you’d ever want to learn, and yes, I know that not everyone agrees with me, and a lot of those who don’t own guns. I point to this as one more inperfection in the current universe. ;P)
Hm. That whole paragraph kind of fell apart. Let me try this again. I don’t think that you should be able to tell me that X is wrong, where X is a action that doesn’t hinder your freedom in any way.
I was reading the wikipedia article on Radio Caroline – for those of you who aren’t familiar, you might want to take a gander. This is how far governments will go to try and squash people who are breaking rules that shouldn’t exist in the first place.
I think governments would be far, far better if they didn’t have unilateral ability to spend tax dollars however they wished. One can imagine a democracy in which individuals were required to put a certain amount of money towarads the common good, but were given a lot of flexibility in how the money would be spent. Combined with a somewhat expanded Bill of Rights and a design that deliberately left the federal portion of the government majorly underfunded, this could go a long way towards improving the current situation.
Anyway, before I went off on that tangent, I was going off on the tangent that in general, to become a police officer, fed, what have you, you have to start out with the basic mentality that you should be allowed to tell other people what to do. This seems like the basic root from which abuse of power would rapidly grow. Now, I know there are (at least reletively) good cops out there.. in fact, I’ve probably met more good cops than bad cops – so perhaps I’m oversimplifying the whole situation. I think the cop I hate is the hypothetical one who has not thus far materialized to bust me for any number of crimes that I’ve knowingly committed.
Interestingly, though, I haven’t believed that any of them were wrong when committing them, and I still don’t believe that any of them are wrong. I wonder, if I ever do something that I know is wrong, will a bad cop show up to bust me? Just how reactive is the universe to our thoughts about it, anyway?
(For those of you who wonder, no, I haven’t been indulging in recreational.. anything.. for quite some time. So this level of strange is just naturally me. I can see how you would worry, though.)
