On Mr Green and Me.

I just watched a YouTube video well worth watching. It was a documentary telling the full story of that most enigmatic of rock guitarists, Peter Green, the founder of Fleetwood Mac in its first incarnation. It's here if you want to watch it:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gMohqVHNCZ8

 

What left me somewhat enthralled by the whole sad story was the likeness between Mr Green and me in the matter of his nature and approach to life as a human being. I could say 'There but for the grace of God could have gone I' but I was fortunate in having guitar skills limited to strumming and ripple picking over a very short range of keys. My public performances were restricted to my post-school social group and a wild rabbit sitting in my garden one day, and they were limited to mostly Bob Dylan covers. I think I should be feeling grateful.

A Sort of Serendipity

 Somebody loves you deeply but they're staying away from you. Here's why...

So says the taster on the YouTube video. It's dominated, as is often the case, by a large picture of Carl Jung who you can rest assured is in no way relevant to what the uploader wants you to read. And of course, you scoff at the whole silly business. YouTube, and life in general, is overflowing with that sort of nonsense.

Ah, but is it nonsense you wonder? You can be quite certain that the video is pure click bait and watching it would be a really silly thing to do. But suppose the taster is a message sent by some spiritual agency because they feel you ought to know an intriguing and important secret? Who could the sender be, you ask yourself, and who the lover? And when you do that you come up with a surprising number of possibilities.

And then you repair to the kitchen to prepare your dinner, amused by the mind's little follies but pleased to have something about which to make a blog post and make the statistics flow nicely.

Mourning the Maize.

I stood out for about fifteen minutes in the growing gloom of a September twilight tonight, watching the harvester and trailers harvesting the maize crop in the field opposite my house. I find watching the process most interesting, but it's tinged with a hint of regret because the sight of a seven-foot-tall forest of maize  is a little spectacular. Mel found it fascinating because it reminded her of the early scenes of Lord of the Rings where it played host to much mischief by the young male characters. Maize is also typically garnered in the autumn, so the harvest is another marker telling us that the summer is definitely over.

For the first ten years of my living here, that field was pasture land on which the farmer's herd of heifers spent the spring, summer, and early autumn, occasionally calling to the young bulls in another field on the opposite side of the lane. But it had been ploughland before then, as evidenced by the clear ridge and furrow pattern on the ground dating at least to mediaeval times. No doubt they would have grown various beans and brassicas back then because the British climate wasn't warm enough for maize. In fact, maize didn't become a major agricultural crop in Britain until the 1970s. Not many people know that (at least I didn't, so I choose to believe that not many other people did either.)

My Captive Audience.

I was walking along Meadow Lane today when I spotted a herd of about twenty young bulls in in a field. I stopped to watch them for a few minutes, and when I did they all came dashing up the field and crowded around the gate to give me their full attention. They didn't want me to touch them, but they did jostle for position to get as close to me as possible. They seemed to want me to talk to them, and so that's what I did.

So why do they do that, because today wasn't the first time that's happened? Well, I've heard that pre-verbal creatures -- human babies and animals -- can sense the energies we give off, and on that basis decide whether to voluntarily associate with us. And in particular, non-predatory animals are more likely to gravitate towards humans in whom they sense non-predatory energies, which I presume would include me. That's rather heartening, isn't it? And maybe that's why the squirrels are coming closer.

But there's a sad side. Animals are my only friends these days, but that's not the sad bit. What's sad is that I don't want to get too close to a herd of young bulls because I know what's going to happen to them a couple of years down the line.

Idiot!

I was just reading through some old posts which visitors have accessed when I came across one entitled The Story of the Browser Playing Dead. A sense of dread came falling -- dark, damp, and desperate -- from the ceiling. It wasn't the browser I was talking about; it was the router. Browsers are software. They don't have hidden on/off switches, but routers do.

Now, Blogger isn't quite as sophisticated as Word; it doesn't have a search and replace facility which allows you to change every example of a misused word very easily and quickly. And so I had to set about editing the post manually, replacing every 'browser' with 'router.' There were twelve of them including the post title. I chose to blame the heatwave we were having at the time of posting.

Killing the Original American Dream.

The news from the USA is getting sillier and sillier. Trump's banning of CNN and like-minded channels from the White House is the latest example. He says it's because CNN and their ilk purvey fake news and spread lies. And Fox and Trump don't?

We all know by now that journalism in the US is more about taking sides and purveying propaganda than it is about impartially reporting facts, and that's not so bad as long as people understand the fact and both sides are represented. But now Trump wants the peddling of disinformation and misinformation to be restricted to the right of the political spectrum, while keeping the left quiet and setting himself up as King of the USA and Bretwalda of the western world.

Isn't that what the War of Independence was about? And isn't that central to why Americans are Americans?

A Recommendation.

I just finished reading Virginia Woolf’s short story A Society, and would recommend it to all women of an enquiring bent and all men of a disinterested one.

It tells of a group of idle-but-enterprising middle class women who meet in a tea shop and spend a few years before WW1 dedicating themselves to the nature of the gender divide. It’s full of irony, highly amusing in parts, and very clever in the whole. It makes you think of how society has changed in little over a century, and the narrative pays little heed to the dreaded stream of consciousness style for which Virginia is celebrated (and rightly so if you have the mental energy and staying power.)

As a male raised¹ to embrace the masculine mindset but who generally gets on better with women, I found it most enjoyable.

¹ Word insists that this word should be ‘rose.’ Why would I call myself a male rose?

The Purpose of Ads.

The adverts that frequently interrupt YouTube videos cause me a lot of annoyance. That's because the majority of them are little or no better than sub-juvenile in form and content. I wonder why this should be and would propose two possible answers:

The creators of adverts know, or think they know, that the majority of people are themselves sub-juvenile, and it makes sense to spend the vast sums of money available to the advertising industry on that section of the population most likely to be receptive to to them.

 

There is a plot afoot to use the ubiquity of advertising to create or advance a negative movement in the mental acuity of the population as a whole. This could be for several reasons, all of which are easy to guess.

I favour the latter, even though it's hard to imagine how it could be achieved. I'm well aware, you see, of a thought process becoming ever more prevalent from a variety of sources. It runs roughly: 'Why are the people who run our culture becoming so stupid? How and why have we created  this idiocracy?' 

 

Some people would say that it isn't true, that it's just me being cynical, but I was having thoughts along those lines long before I began to read of others saying the same thing. Or maybe I'm just sulking because no dogs came to say 'hello' to me today.

Endless Thinking.

It began when I got up this morning, and for some unknown reason a line from a Bob Dylan song ran through my head: '... while life goes on all around you.' It's an innocuous little phrase, isn't it? A simple, throwaway line, and yet it began the process of raising questions about life and the nature of reality that went on for about an hour. Every question led to another question and a discussion between one part of my brain and another. Eventually it came to the last question, one to which nobody knows the answer. At that point the slot machine ran out of money, the world went dark, and I moved on to something completely different. (This is quite normal for me. When people accuse me of overthinking I conclude that most of my fellow humans prefer paddling in the littoral surf because they've heard some mention of giant squid.)

 

*  *  *

So, the next pause for thought concerned the value of consensus. (I'd just passed the village notice board, you see, which showed mug shots of all the members of the parish council. I used to be a committee type myself, but not any more.) I'm aware of the fact that consensus is often useful, but I wanted a good, dramatic example of a situation which led to something pretty dreadful. I thought of the story of Moll Dyer, a story which I assume is well known to most Americans, but I'll offer the bare bones for those who've never heard it.

Moll Dyer was an elderly, unmarried woman living in one of the North America colonies towards the end of the 17th century (in Pennsylvania, I think.) One winter was particularly harsh and compounded by an outbreak of some serious health epidemic, so the townspeople got together and decided that Moll must be a witch causing the calamities and should be done away with. They went to her house, duly buoyed by the opinion gained through consensus, to do the deed. Moll escaped through the back door while the mob were setting her house alight, but she didn't escape death. She froze. And perhaps I might add to this the sight of strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees. My only conclusion to this was that consensus must be accompanied by fine judgement and not be allowed to run amok.

 

*  *  *

 

And then there was a third subject occasioning a great deal of deep thought, but I can't remember what it was. (This is quite normal for me, too, these days.) I might mention that squirrels have started coming closer to me than they've ever done before. One ran past me on the lane this morning, carrying something -- presumable edible -- in its mouth. And yesterday one came dashing towards me, also carrying something edible. I thought for one blessed moment that it was bringing an offering to swell my food stocks, but no. It changed its mind at the last minute and turned right instead.

The Real Reason for Christmas Presents.

I was thinking about Christmas today for some unholy reason (I prefer to call it Yuletide now, by the way) when I was struck by an unholy notion.

It seemed to me that in the modern western world the main reason for celebrating what people like to call Christmas is to condition children to the notion that consumption is the truest way to happiness. And further, to establish in the unconscious minds of said children the persistent and pernicious hum of discontent which is the bedrock of consumption mania.

At least that's one way of looking at it.

Interestingly, I'm given to understand that a lot of extremely rich people who have every material thing there is to have also suffer discontent, and even depression, because they experience feelings of emptiness when there is nothing left to want. Humans are a bit of a failure really, aren't they?

(And now I have something to look forward to. When someone next asks me 'what are you doing for Christmas?' I intend to reply: 'Christmas? What's that? How do you spell it?)