Advice, Academics, and Mexican Beer.

It irritates me quite a lot when people ask how my health issue is progressing and then proceed to advise me on how I should think, and how I should feel, and how I must be positive not negative, and so on and so forth ad nauseum.

Don’t they get it? Don’t they realise that giving advice is effectively taking the superior position, and accepting it is effectively submitting to that superiority? I dislike both concepts, which is why I neither give advice nor take it. Besides, it seems to me that advice is ultimately only of any real value if given by someone who knows what life is really about, and nobody does.

This was going to be a long post about whether anything really matters in the face of inevitable mortality. It was going to ask questions like: ‘is there any such thing as positive and negative?’ But it grew too complicated to bother with now that my days of thinking like an academic are over and my tolerance of extended philosophical reasoning has flown away with them.

Tonight I’m drinking Mexican beer. I have the faintest germ of a suspicion that Mexican beer might be at least part of the reason why Trump wants to build that silly wall of his, and is prepared to shut down America or turn it into a Third World dictatorship in order to get his way. 2020 is going to be interesting. Hope I’m still alive to see what happens. Not that it will matter in the long term, of course. The world will keep on turning, birth will still be the first step on the road to death, and history books will continue to be written by academics.