I keep returning

I keep returning to this same idea: nothing counts but selling. If you do not sell the self then the self will go nowhere. You must sell your children, you must sell your time. And people are unhappy because selling is depressing: those who manage to sell feel empty for doing so, and those who fail to sell (or who refuse to participate) remain stagnant.

The repetition of advertising. The inability to discern between high quality and low quality because one is too busy watching ads repeat.

Or I could say that luck is everything. Without luck it does not matter how much you sell. Or we could simply define luck as the ability to sell. Lacking buyers is the condition of bad luck. To be unwanted is bad luck.

If only one could communicate these truths to the atoms of the body. The atoms blame themselves for the failure: this results, for example, in a headache. But it is not the fault of the atoms: it is only bad luck. The healthier response is to shrug and begin again in a different direction.

Situations versus behavior. Avoid profitless situations while understanding that no behavior is profitless. Even an act that previously failed can be fit to the right situation and prove a success: in a new light, it can sell. But nobody knows where luck resides, so we all keep shooting in the dark.

In a violent and depressed age, one can be born into a role of power: a role of good luck. What if one finds oneself in a position that lacks power? Leave the luckless position and try again. Keep spinning the wheel of fortune until it lands on a lucky space.

It must have been very hard times that drove people to invent the concept of a rewarding afterlife. What we ourselves want but cannot get, our ghosts will get. We swallow embarrassing lies to avoid admitting defeat. Like slaves enslaving the world for the sake of freedom.

A gambler loses a fortune yet keeps gambling in desperation: the hope is that a win will occur, that luck will change from bad to good. Likewise, unlucky losers spend increasing amounts of time and effort on life, precisely because nobody cares for them.

The solution, some say, is to humble yourself: learn to live with less, grin and bear it. Some people are born likable. To those people, more attention will flow. To the others who are unlikable, only worse times are in the making. Even if you leave your luckless position and try again, there will be no success. Even if you keep spinning the wheel of fortune, it will never land on a good space: the game is fixed.

Some people try to diffuse the evil of life by raising children, but they end up only intensifying evil. Instead of one luckless fool who owes one death to the world, now two, three, seven luckless fools owe fourteen deaths. Both first and second death: fleshly and spiritual. The only winner is the god who owns all the pain.

St. Augustine was an idiot. I am in the mood to say that all of the saints were idiots.

Invest only in certainties. Refuse to participate in actions that do not appeal to you. Hold back, relax.

The whole church dies of natural causes. The next generation comes in, makes some minor modifications, and the system recuperates. Parents and children work hard to keep the ugliness alive.

Humankind spends time striving for basic needs. Machines are invented for the purpose of saving time: now, with only a fraction of the effort, all the needs of humankind are met. The result is that humans work much harder than they did before machines were invented.

Pigs are ideal because they can be slain by butchers. If a butcher slays a human, the meat is unsellable. Pig-thought differs from human-thought, thus pigs can be marketed. Humans purchase and consume the flesh of slain pigs, and this flesh becomes the brains of humans. Thought is something that humans wish to escape: they say thinking is agony. The ideal would be to think and live like a pig.

Property is a concept that I find funny. An angry father might think of his daughter as a possession. A father might have facial hair. Sunglasses and a stern mouth. Do not smile: you are a man. You are tall, your body parts are large. You have power over others.

Is the constitution of your country a piece of paper? Is it an agreement? Can you say no to it? Is the thing changeable? If it has been changed, is it correct now, or was it correct back then, or shall it become correct sometime in the future?

When I was very young, I would throw fits: screaming raging tantrums. My mother would say: It is not the end of the world. But she was wrong: the world is always ending, especially for an individual youngster. Nowadays I do not throw tantrums, at least not screaming raging fits: I just write down words. It does not help: I regret bowing under the yoke of self-control.

When the holy newspaper tells me about the murders that were committed last night, I recoil: I do not like to hear about murders. Occasionally there is even a report about children who have murdered their parents. What is the proper response to seeing such a headline?

Often I find that I am wrong in my thoughts and opinions. When I receive news of a suicide, even though the deceased probably cannot hear me, my initial reaction is always: Congrats, you did it! But that is because I do not know the details of the situation. Suicide is not always a good thing: it depends on who, what, when, where, and sometimes why.

And I do not like a god who kills others before he kills himself. That is like ordering for someone at a restaurant. Your waiter informs you that a customer nearby has decided what your table will be served this evening. And you still must pay for the meal. Therefore I think that it is OK for John Eleven to resurrect his Jesus, but it is indecent to force poor Lazarus to make a callback beforehand. Or for Matthew Twenty-Seven to compel a whole legion of retirees to rejoin the workforce:

Jesus, when he had cried again with a loud voice, yielded up the ghost. And, behold, the veil of the temple was rent in twain from the top to the bottom; and the earth did quake, and the rocks rent; and the graves were opened; and many bodies of the saints which slept arose, and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the holy city, and appeared unto many.