“We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Thank God for that. Maybe a little styrofoam. Maybe. A little styrofoam. The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas. A surface nuisance.”
— George Carlin rant on why the planet is fine
A Hollywood director with a reputation for making violent, bizarre films is headlining what’s billed as a world peace conference in southeast Iowa this weekend. Known for movies like “Mulholland Drive,” “Blue Velvet” and the T-V series “Twin Peaks,” David Lynch is also on the board of directors at Maharishi University in Fairfield. He says perpetual world peace will result by assembling eight-thousand people to continuously practice transcendental meditation. Lynch says “It brings peace, real peace, and peace is not just the absence of war. This real peace, being enlivened, drives negativity away like light drives darkness away.”
What –if anything– does it say about you if you can instantly recall the worst day of your life but have to think a while to come up with a few contenders for the best day? One would hope this is because you’ve had a lot more really good days than bad. Or, maybe it’s because it’s easier to peg the misery-meter than to get a good reading on the happyometer. Or, does joy fade quickly while pain lingers like the smell of burned popcorn? What we need is a way to record every day, sort of like the security camera at the convenience store. Just recycle the tapes every few days unless you get one so good (we’re only interested in the good ones) it’s a keeper. I’m still wrestling with whether or not I’d take that little pill that would erase the past 12 or 24 hours. For those that might be wondering, I do have enough empathy and imagination to understand that my Worst Day would be a walk in the park for someone else. Or for some future me. Just a little navel-gazing on a beautiful summer day.
“The greatest country in history. We can do so much. We will do so much. This country was, after all, founded to move into the future, not to hold onto the habits and ideas of the past. For most countries, if you ask them what they are, what’s unique and defining about them, they’ll point to their past. Not us. Americans have always pointed to the future. If you want to understand us, look at what we’re going to do. Americans face forward.”
A speech that David Weinberger wrote but never gave.
“…about how we all spend so much time having a life that seems to be the kind of life other people have — get up, get breakfast, get dressed, go to work, get there at 9:00, leave there at 5:00 or 6:00 or whatever, come home, eat dinner, watch TV — and I suddenly found this really sad. That we come to this earth and that’s all we can come up with for a life. I don’t want to be the fire-eating woman in the circus or something, but I think I want more of a life than a person who lives in a box, leaves their box in the morning, gets in their box-with-wheels, drives to another office box, sits in that box for 8 hours, their butt spreading a little wider every day from just sitting there, goes home to their box, sits in front of the box, eats a frozen dinner out of a box, goes to sleep on their mattress and box spring.”