Came down to Fells Point to get out of the house on this rainy Friday. I forgot that this is the first weekend of October, so tomorrow is the Fells Point Fun Festival -- part of Broadway is closed off in preparation, screwing up traffic and the already insane parking situation, so I had to drive around for about a half an hour before finding parking and getting down here to Leadbetters.

(Digression -- Kurt is singing "Desperado", a song by the Eagles. There is a most amazing version of this song on the album "Langley Schools Music Project", it's sung by a girl maybe twelve years old tops, it will break your heart. The album is a wonderful find by "outsider music" expert Irwin Chusid, a recording made by an itinerant middle-school music teacher in the late 70s, of a kids chorus singing pop songs. It's the sound of kids falling in love with music. Top recommendation.)

As I was walking down Broadway I considered how this bar during that festival impacted my life thirteen years ago. It's one of those "fortunately/unfortunately" sort of stories.

On my net wanderings I found this image of a woman holding a "Teabagging 4 Jesus" sign.

This is the first firm example I've come across of the teabaggers actually using the term "teabagging". I've been using it and find it appropriate due to the presence of teabags and the pathetic nature of the participants in the act (when the best you can do to express your political views is throw teabags around, you deserve to be the butt of jokes), but up until now I've regarded it as a term that Rachel Maddow and other pundits stuck on them -- appropriately, but still not one of their own selection.

To see this confused, flag-waving woman claim to be "Teabagging 4 Jesus", though, well, res ipsa loquitur.

Last year at Fires of Venus, contemplating the deity in charge of my love life -- who is not, it seems, Aphrodite/Venus but rather Eris/Discordia, goddess of chaos and confusion but also of freedom and of silliness -- I had a revelation about the ur-myth of Eris, the story of the golden apple. The usual version of the story, as found in Bulfinch's Mythology, goes like this:

At the nuptials of Peleus and Thetis all the gods were invited with the exception of Eris, or Discord. Enraged at her exclusion, the goddess threw a golden apple among the guests, with the inscription, “For the fairest.” Thereupon Juno, Venus, and Minerva each claimed the apple. Jupiter, not willing to decide in so delicate a matter, sent the goddesses to Mount Ida, where the beautiful shepherd Paris was tending his flocks, and to him was committed the decision. The goddesses accordingly appeared before him. Juno promised him power and riches, Minerva glory and renown in war, and Venus the fairest of women for his wife, each attempting to bias his decision in her own favor. Paris decided in favor of Venus and gave her the golden apple...Now Helen, the wife of Menelaus, was the very woman whom Venus had destined for Paris, the fairest of her sex. She had been sought as a bride by numerous suitors...She chose Menelaus, and was living with him happily when Paris became their guest. Paris, aided by Venus, persuaded her to elope with him, and carried her to Troy, whence arose the famous Trojan war...

Last year's revelation was that this version of the story is an official history meant to make the opponents of the power structure -- i.e., anti-authoritarian types, such as Eris -- look bad. The apple was not a prank meant to stir up trouble, but rather a wedding gift. After all, who is the "fairest" at any wedding? The bride! Eris was simply giving a gift, and it was the jealousy of Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena that caused the trouble. And let's not neglect their bribery of the judge! The goddesses of business and household affairs, of wisdom and warcraft, and of love, all cheat! This explains much about how the world works, does it not?

I've just returned from this year's Fires of Venus, and as I danced around the bonfire I further contemplated this myth, as well as the chaotic state of my own love life at the moment, and was granted a further revelation to share with the festival attendees. So, yes, Eris had only good intentions and left a wonderful gift, but why did so much trouble come from it? How was it possible for the jealousy of Hera, Aphrodite, and Athena to turn a loving gift into such a disaster? Ambiguous communication. Had she clearly labeled her gift, "For Thetis, the prettiest one", the whole mess could have been avoided! And so I suggested to all present that they attempt to apply this lesson to their romantic endeavors, and indeed to all aspects of their lives. (Of course, it's easier to suggest this to others than to do it oneself.)

Video from my talk "Discordianism Through Its Literature" at Starwood 2009, featuring my new revelations about Eris and the so-called "Apple of Discord". "For the prettiest one"? It must have been a wedding present!

Zelda's Inferno writing exercise: write about flying dreams.

I have never had a dream where I sprouted wings and I have never had a dream where I tried to take off and wasn't able.

A few weeks ago I argued that one reason for intervention in the health care marketplace is that health is contagious. So I was fascinated to see this New York Times story about how data from the famous Framingham Heart Study backs up this idea:

...When they ran the animation, they could see that obesity broke out in clusters. People weren’t just getting fatter randomly. Groups of people would become obese together, while other groupings would remain slender or even lose weight.

And the social effect appeared to be quite powerful. When a Framingham resident became obese, his or her friends were 57 percent more likely to become obese, too. Even more astonishing to Christakis and Fowler was the fact that the effect didn’t stop there. In fact, it appeared to skip links. A Framingham resident was roughly 20 percent more likely to become obese if the friend of a friend became obese — even if the connecting friend didn’t put on a single pound. Indeed, a person’s risk of obesity went up about 10 percent even if a friend of a friend of a friend gained weight.

“People are connected, and so their health is connected,” Christakis and Fowler concluded when they summarized their findings in a July 2007 article in The New England Journal of Medicine, the first time the prestigious journal published a study of how social networks affect health. Or as Christakis and Fowler put it in “Connected,” their coming book on their findings: “You may not know him personally, but your friend’s husband’s co-worker can make you fat. And your sister’s friend’s boyfriend can make you thin.”

...Smoking, they discovered, also appeared to spread socially — in fact, a friend taking up smoking increased your chance of lighting up by 36 percent, and if you had a three-degrees-removed friend who started smoking, you were 11 percent more likely to do the same. Drinking spread socially, as did happiness and even loneliness. And in each case one’s individual influence stretched out three degrees before it faded out. They termed this the “three degrees of influence” rule about human behavior: We are tied not just to those around us, but to others in a web that stretches farther than we know.

“I should advise you to put it all down as beautifully as you can — in some beautifully bound book,” Jung instructed. “It will seem as if you were making the visions banal — but then you need to do that — then you are freed from the power of them. . . . Then when these things are in some precious book you can go to the book & turn over the pages & for you it will be your church — your cathedral — the silent places of your spirit where you will find renewal. If anyone tells you that it is morbid or neurotic and you listen to them — then you will lose your soul — for in that book is your soul.”

The New York Times Magazine covers the forthcoming publication of Carl Jung's "Red Book", a personal journal of visions and dreams that became the root of much of his work.

The quotation from Jung above called to mind Whitman:

Camerado! This is no book,
Who touches this, touches a man,
(Is it night? Are we here alone?)
It is I you hold, and who holds you,

I don't know if it will prove at all practical, but if it does, the Möbius strip-shaped library building proposed for Astana, Kazakhstan may be the coolest building ever.

For those with a low math-geek quotient, a Möbius strip is a surface, like a strip of paper, given a half-twist and formed into a ring. In this way one side becomes the other -- in effect, the strip only has one side!

In the case of this building, the exterior is continuous with the central courtyard, and the walls become the roof.

I've been re-reading Huxley's Brave New World. There's an exchange near the end, between Mustapha Mond, World Controller of the insane civilization that encompasses most of the world, and "the Savage", product of the lunatic barbarism outside, that rather sums it up:

"But I don't want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin."

"In fact," said Mustapha Mond, "you're claiming the right to be unhappy."

"All right then," said the Savage defiantly, "I'm claiming the right to be unhappy."

I think I shall have to spend some time rereading Huxley's Island next to balance things out. Written near the end of Huxley's life, Island is in many ways his alternative to Brave New World, his portrayal of a thoroughly sane society.

You've probably not heard of this book; its positive outlook on the use of psychedelics, and its positive portrayal of free sexuality, means that you're unlikely to see it added to any high school reading lists. The philosophy found on Pala is a blend of secular humanism and Mahayana Buddhism; its key text, quoted throughout the novel, is Notes on What's What, and What It Might be Reasonable to do about What's What.

Me as I think I am and me as I am in fact---sorrow, in other words, and the ending of sorrow. One third, more or less, of all the sorrow that the person I think I am must endure is unavoidable. it is the sorrow inherent in the human condition, the price we pay for being sentient and self-conscious organisms, aspirants to liberation, but subject to the laws of nature and under orders to keep on marching, through irreversible time, through a world entirely indifferent to our well-being, toward decrepitude and the certainty of death. The remaining two-thirds of sorrow is homemade and, so far as the universe is concerned, unnecessary.

...

Dualism. . . Without it there can hardly be good literature. With it, there most certainly can be no good life.

"I" affirms a separate and abiding me-substance; "am" denies the fact that all existence is relationship and change. "I am." Two tiny words, but what an enormity of untruth! The religiously-minded dualist calls homemade spirits from the vasty deep; the nondualist calls the vasty deep into his spirit or, to be more accurate, he finds that the vasty deep is already there.