I love having the last word. Perhaps it's pathological, but I think it's just pedantic and stubborn.

Presumptuous or not, it is possible to determine alot about how a person thinks and their state of mind by analyzing the content of their writing. Any human behavior is chalk-full of personal beliefs and personal values that simply can not be considered separately from the person who engages in them. Relating what I see with what I think I see and what it means is a matter of personal experience. The longer I live, the better I get at it.

It's a certainty that some day you'll be better at this whole judgement/life thing than you now are. So will I. So will everyone. What I am seeing that I resist is the fact that those who walk the spiritual path and bask in divine light don't waste their time giving their opinions or sharing their heartfelt anger with people they know aren't where they are at. Father Keating is like that. Always smiling. Always warm and engaging. He lives in a monastery. Perhaps he knows just how frustrating dealing with all levels of development co-occuring in the same space can be. I don't know. Maybe I'll ask him that question the next time I see him.

Ultimately, there aren't any private thoughts. You may comfort yourself that there are, if that's what allows you to sleep at night. But the roads we travel leave trace amounts of themselves all over our behind's, our face's and our feet's.

My wolf used to know where I'd been for the past two weeks, who I'd been with, how I felt about it, what I had been eating and how I was feeling in the moment. That information all comes from having a sense of smell that is 1500 times more powerful and focused than human eyesight. That's why dogs are so scatological...whole conversations take place between animals who aren't there and it's all done with urine and feces. "oh, geez, my master is being a real pain in the ass this week. I can't get him to understand anything important." "Don't worry, Fred. I'm always here. I understand. It's not forever."

And we think we see dog feces and smell dog urine. But dogs see conversation! The END of loneliness!

How profound the mundane can become from the proper perspective.

When I was getting lost in the weeds of some thought I thought was relevant, my wolf knew I needed a wet, warm nose on my hand. She knew I needed to know that I wasn't alone in the world, in spite of how I felt and how things seemed to appear.

Could she speak English? Nope. Why should she bother communicating in a language that includes so much unctious, superfluous self doubt about one's own personal feelings and beliefs? She simply KNEW stuff and then responded directly to her experience of them in ways she deemed appropriate.

She avoided contact with MOST humans for this very reason.

But humans are more evolved than other species, right? You know that because we keep telling you.

...turn the gun, loaded with those same projectiles, at yourself.

Where and when have you been narcissistic, self absorbed -- pathetic, even?

Why does how a particular artist behaves concern you in any way?

When I am DONE with an issue, it means I have released it to the greater good of whatever. I am no longer in control of it. I have ceased giving it any power to fek up my day, my life, my moment. I OWN my own stuff, take responsibility for it, and then I release it.

Generally it just evaporates into thin air. The people who used to urk me either tickle me with their eccentricities or they just quit showing up. It's like they leave the room before I even show up.

When I am NOT done with an issue, people keep showing up and pissing me off in ways I just can't seem to take ownership of. I mean, I didn't gas all those Kurds in Iraq, Hussein did, right?

Right?

Whatever, Mr. ethically principled taxpayer-sir.

This whole threadbare thread, for me, has been about my utter and complete incapacity to accept that, like me, some people just want the freedom to be completely ignorant. By choice. It doesn't matter what the consequences are. We just put our heads down and CHARRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrrrrrGE!

And, of course, nobody really listens and I don't really care. I get so irritated by the mean spiritedness of it all that I want to tell people more truth than they can handle in the moment so that, one day, in a moment of quiet existential angst, their head spins off their shoulders when they finally GET what I was trying to communicate through the words. Not WITH the words...THROUGH them. In spite of them.

Eric Schaeffer rocks and you suck. That's the color of the sky on my planet. I like it. We force people like you to watch obnoxious people do really unnerving things to themselves with small implements just because it makes you crazy.

Spiritual? Not in any conventional sense. Enlightened? I kinda doubt it.

Entertaining? Lovely. A guilty pleasure of the first degree.