The world is biggish

I wish the world was smaller. Then gravity would be less strong, so not only would everything be closer, but we could jump there. Money makes the world a hell of a lot smaller. It's nice to have enough money that I can buy my ticket to Canada without making a dent in the budget. It's nice that my company has a good enough cashflow that I can traipse off to China and India and whatnot. And it's nice the Australian government has enough money that I'm allowed to write off all my plane tickets. But I do wish everything was closer. When we make babies, everything is gonna change, in terms of money, in terms of distance . . .

I still don't feel attached to Australia but fuck me do I feel attached to my garden. I'll miss it so much if we ever leave. And who knows how I'll feel about things in a few years.

Our neighbours are ladies in their nineties who have been in their homes for 50 plus years. I haven't been anything for 50 plus years. Though I guess half of me already potentially existed in my mum's ovaries, jockeying for position with all of her other eggs, including half of my three brothers. Once, we were legion; now, we are four. God, that's fucking weird. Her ovaries are gone now. Not just post-menopausal gone, but actually taken out and, I assume, incinerated. How the fuck did me and my awesome brothers manage to get born? Not only among the legions of eggs, but the legions and legions of short-lived little men fighting to get out of testicles and into the right place?

It's easier for me to have religious faith than to process how utterly random it is that I and the people I love exist. In fact I think I may have made a religion out of randomness since getting kicked out of church.

I'm not high. But it'd be nice.

Jesus of the driveway

So we got rid of our rats by boarding up the holes they were coming in through. Easy. The thing is, the agency had already put down poison for them so yesterday we got the spectacle of one slowly expiring on our driveway, and I couldn't scrape together the balls to kill it and put it out of its misery. I couldn't stop thinking about it - how it would feel when it heard the birds, or smelt a cat walking by; how its little animal brain was dealing with the pain. It gave me a bit of an existential crisis to be quite straight with you - that something as precious as life is so easily taken away because one disease vector (us) didn't want another disease vector (the rat) to be alive anymore.

Completely honestly, it gave me a total Jesus moment - it's a powerful religious story, when you get a reminder of how shitty, brutal and commonplace death is, to be told that someone who was God let himself be killed by people for no particularly good reason. Other religions are fearfully death-y of course, but I don't reckon there's ever been a deathcult quite like Christianity, in the sense of it being a religion where you are told that your God chose to share the worst fucking shit that could ever possibly happen to you, or to any animal, just to show how much he loved you.

In that vein: I question the relationship people have spent the last 100 years drawing between the advent of scientific explanations for things and the petering-out of religion in developed countries, which only seems to apply to Christianity while everyone in the world is getting more or less clever, and which assumes, I think unreasonably, that most people have a high degree of familiarity with the scientific explanations, or even an awareness of them.

I think it has more and more to do with a universal unwillingness to consider death as the end of you. Every religion makes its peace with the idea of its proponents rolling on and on into the grave, and most of them even deal with the idea of the extinguishing of you-as-a-person; even the Christian idea of heaven, depending on who you listen to, means an existence totally in harmony with God's will, rather than happily sitting around on the clouds playing harps and eating Philadelphia cream cheese, and certainly rather than continuing to be yourself up there.

I think, rather than ascribing our irreligousity to scientific explanations for things, it can be ascribed more to our utter unwillingness over the last century to admit that the Self is fragile, mortal, and will one day be utterly annihilated in both existence and memory. Christianity does offer some pretty mixed messages on that one, I'll admit, but at its core it's a deathcult ruled by an all-encompassing holy spirit and frankly doesn't leave a tonne of room for the cult of individuality, and it doesn't leave room for a society that will watch death played out balletically in its films and movies, but doesn't let its old people or sick people die at home.

Anyways, now there's a dead rat on my driveway and I'm trying to get the F-word to deal with it because it's gross.

A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses

So let's say you're the cardinals of the Catholic Church and you have a bunch of high-profile sex scandals in which several priests are revealed to be kiddie-fiddlers who you haven't adequately dissuaded or prevented from kiddie-fiddling. This makes a bunch of people hate you. Then your pope dies and you decide it's time to pick a new one. So then you pick the cardinal who oversaw - at best, at unrealistic best, at a best I'm only willing to admit might possibly exist because I understand there are no limits to human stupidity - the utter, jaw-dropping inadequacy of the reponse to hundreds of priests around the world being kiddie-fiddlers.

What does that make you? It makes that fucking stupid, that's what it makes you.

There are a lot of things that suggest that Catholicism is now, as it always has been, a sort of body corporate or a simple vehicle for the propogation and retention of wealth. You cannot have any familiarity with the history of the church without that being bleedingly obvious. Rather magically, the church has managed to create the illusion that is all a thing of the past, that people who rant and rave about church property and tax breaks and blah blah blah are a bunch of paranoiac nutters like that poor crazy fuck who flew his plane into the IRS building just recently.

But to me, counterintuitively but there you are, the bloody awful decision to put a charmless, cadaverous pitbull who oversaw decades of criminal, damnable institutional incompetence into the Popemobile is a superb demonstration of corporate behaviour, the sort of thing I see at work every day, the sort of thing that makes Carlo Cipolla's analysis of stupidity look less tongue-in-cheek and more simple observation.

Here's the thing. If you put a bunch of people together and employ them to promote the financial well-being of an institution which is not owned by any one person - and you would have to be as naive as a toddler to imagine that promoting the continued existence of a stagnating old leviathan like the Catholic church is in any way independent of promoting its financial well-being - you are grouping, and thus exponentially multiplying their stupidity.

In fact you are giving full rein to their stupidity, because their employment - ensuring the financial well-being of an institution - is an abstract concept involving principles that economists spend years trying and usually failing to learn in academic institutions. Hence they can be relied upon to do retarded things whose single obvious benefit, if they were intelligent, should not have outweighed multiple and equally obvious detriments - like outsourcing core business (which I don't object to in principle, but in reality usually means sacking competent, experienced people and hiring incompetent, inexperienced people whose contracts ensure they won't trouble themselves much to learn competence because it's not in their interest) or electing fucking Ratzinger to be pope because they think they need a tough guy to face down the competition (and maybe all the kids who had got fiddled by priests under his watch are either dead or had already come out about it, right?)

And surely the rest of your life will retain the full benefit of such intelligence as you possess - for the CEOs I deal with on a daily basis, ensuring the prosperity of themselves and their family; for a good priest, his and his parishioners relationship with the divine; for a bad priest, his access to kiddies to fiddle. And compounding the problem, benefits to the rest of your life from your employment supposedly ensuring the financial well-being of an institution (you personally accruing the maximum wealth possible, you personally having the time and the mental space to devote to your flock and the divine and trying not to get caught fucking children) are actually also demeritous to the goal of ensuring the financial well-being of the institution.

I still hate The Corporation for all those reasons I wrote about years ago, and another now. That film, from memory, presented corporations as scary, as a psychotic juggernaut that will destroy us all. One descriptor there is fatally wrong: they aren't psychotic, they are stupid. Massively stupid. They are juggernauts of pooled stupidity that will destroy us all if we fail to address the stupid. And the Catholic church is no exception.

My lovely horse, you're a pony no more

On Friday I felt like ass on a plate, or as the French say, 'une assiette'. Both physically and mentally. It's cold season, which explains the physicality, and mentally - well, of course it's my boss. I sort of swing between missing him and realizing for the first time what a shithole the world can be sometimes.

Nonetheless that night I dragged myself to a concert with the F-word and some of his friends: this one. And it was lovely, and I don't think anything else could have reached me properly that evening, since when I've been feeling substantially better. Julia Charkova of Khakassia - her instrument and her nasal tuneful singing - was very lovely and sent my brain off thinking about Mongols and what they've done to music as well as the map of Asia.

And then Albina Degtyareva of the Sakha republic was incredible. I read the programme, I knew she's been to university to put as all in a shamanistic state of mind, but it put me in mind of some militant First Nations guys who used to live around my hometown, who were anxious to recover their culture and willing to do so through the medium of dreams and meditation in the cases where us fishbellies had successfully expunged the record. But in Sakha I guess the degree of isolation was so huge that even the Russian Orthodox Church is calling them syncretic, and going to one of the republic's university's is a way of dreaming or meditating . . . I don't know. It gave me a powerful urge to go there, though.

And she was incredible, it was really incredible, what can I say? It took me outside of myself at a time I really needed to be taken outside of myself. Like a Jehovah's Witness knocked on my door right after my dog died. I'm grateful I just had some quick shamanistic exposure on Friday instead of bumping into any religions that would require me to stop boffing the F-word extramaritally, now that I think about it.

Here she is with her old band:



Here's another with more giumbarde - sorry, just can't bring myself to call it a jew's harp - except I guess I just did.