Apologies

First of all, I would like to publicly apologize for having called the lovely salps that are saving us from carbon dioxide mere crap-eaters. What I meant by that is that they eat our crap, our waste, our carbon dioxide, and therefore they are our-crap-eaters, but obviously they deserve to be called better names.

Secondly, I would like to thank Indigo for being so proactive in the blog world, always commenting our silly posts not matter what weather, motivating us to be better bloggers, filling us with the joy of being heard. Hey Indigo, the salps make my heart sing as well!

Thirdly, I would like to apologize to all moneymakers for being so rude to them. Sometimes I generalize, I'm sorry, not taking into consideration the psychological needs of most human beings. We crave attention, yes. We want to be accepted and loved by others. We want people to recognize our value in society and the easiest way to do it is by getting rich!

Some of us have different ways of having fun, different ways of interacting with the world, different ways of showing our genius. Some ways are easy to recognize, like having loads of money, for example. If you are rich, people look at you and think "well done!", if they are not the jealous, envious type of person. Girls jump on them rich, mates workship them rich friends, and society welcome them with tender tones of voice, the automatic door type of "come in!".

But what if you derive your sense of self (Buddha forgive me) from silly things like getting your foreign ass inside hermetic societies, saying no to parties to stay home on a Saturday night reading Erowid, representing nasty brands in order to slag them off while wearing their T-shirts, sitting around with drunk Irish men listening to war time stories and things like that? You're fucked, mate! Nobody is going to stop and say: "Oh, nice! I see you are talking to this filthy drunk Irish man in order to learn more about war without the media in between! How great! Would you like a cup of coffee? Can I get you anything?" No, most people won't praise your subversive self. Forget it.

So, once again, I apologize to you money-driven people, cos I feel a bit of sympathy for you need to be loved, since I need it too, but my mind took me elsewhere. You are very brave to give yourself fully to the system. I don't have the balls to do it!! Like the old banana business man: "I'm a business man! I sell bananas! I think about bananas all day long! Hahaha. Today I'm going to think about a better way to sell bananas, and tomorrow, for a change, I'll just eat them, cos it's my day off."

What is left for me? What is left for us, dreamers? What is going to confirm we are of some importance for the whole? Apart from ourselves and our bloggers friends, Ralph Waldo Emerson keeps me going in the silence of my room. From self reliance:

[...]

Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string. Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events. Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being. And we are now men, and must accept in the highest mind the same transcendent destiny; and not minors and invalids in a protected corner, not cowards fleeing before a revolution, but guides, redeemers, and benefactors, obeying the Almighty effort, and advancing on Chaos and the Dark.

[...]

These are the voices which we hear in solitude, but they grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world. Society everywhere is in conspiracy against the manhood of every one of its members. Society is a joint-stock company, in which the members agree, for the better securing of his bread to each shareholder, to surrender the liberty and culture of the eater. The virtue in most request is conformity. Self-reliance is its aversion. It loves not realities and creators, but names and customs.

[...]

What I must do is all that concerns me, not what the people think. This rule, equally arduous in actual and in intellectual life, may serve for the whole distinction between greatness and meanness. It is the harder, because you will always find those who think they know what is your duty better than you know it. It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

[...]

Insist on yourself; never imitate. Your own gift you can present every moment with the cumulative force of a whole life's cultivation; but of the adopted talent of another, you have only an extemporaneous, half possession. That which each can do best, none but his Maker can teach him. No man yet knows what it is, nor can, till that person has exhibited it. Where is the master who could have taught Shakspeare? Where is the master who could have instructed Franklin, or Washington, or Bacon, or Newton? Every great man is a unique. The Scipionism of Scipio is precisely that part he could not borrow. Shakspeare will never be made by the study of Shakspeare. Do that which is assigned you, and you cannot hope too much or dare too much. There is at this moment for you an utterance brave and grand as that of the colossal chisel of Phidias, or trowel of the Egyptians, or the pen of Moses, or Dante, but different from all these. Not possibly will the soul all rich, all eloquent, with thousand-cloven tongue, deign to repeat itself; but if you can hear what these patriarchs say, surely you can reply to them in the same pitch of voice; for the ear and the tongue are two organs of one nature. Abide in the simple and noble regions of thy life, obey thy heart, and thou shalt reproduce the Foreworld again.

So old, so new. Read the rest of this text and more at http://www.emersoncentral.com/selfreliance.htm