Paul's book cover

Question on blog layouts

K, trying to figure something out about this blog layout stuff...

So I don't like the how, in Blogger, only (i think it's called dynamic, but not sure) the first page is set up to allow for individual posts and any other pages you add are basically just static (I guess for info that isn't meant to continually change and be updated.

This whole set up doesn't work very well with the way I think.  I know I tend to tangent more than most.  I'm OK with that, it's the ADHD...I don't try to fix that this happens, cause it's pointless.  However I've been working hard for a while now on ways to organize these tangents when they first fly through so they don't disrupt whatever they are interrupting and I can quick organize the thought that will allow me to later get back to it easily.

When I'm alone and trying to focus, I now keep a notebook next to me so I can jot down the tangents that interrupt and let them go for the moment.  I feel safe that I won't forget something important, even if most of them tend to be useless. I wish I were able to let the useless ones goes immediately, it'd probably save a lot of trees, but to do that I'd have to spend time in that moment deciding if the the incoming tangent is worth keeping or not, which means I'd first have to decide what the criteria are for 'worthy tangents' and all that ultimately would defeat the original goal.

With this one on one blogging thing, I can envision how that could be set up to work well with those tangents so they don't get in the way of carrying on a meaningful dialogue.  The whole 'getting side tracked' cause I feel I have to blurt something out is annoying, to me and probably to the other person.  It keeps me from really being able to listen well, which means I'm missing some important stuff that others are taking the time to try and share with me and that I sincerely care about hearing (despite how my interruptions and randomness may make it seem otherwise).

Like, you still haven't told me the particulars about the future changes are getting ready to happen in your life that you eluded to several weeks ago and said you would share with me, but didn't feel comfortable just texting, etc.  So we now have this more secure format...I'd like to figure out a way to set up only be able to access our blog (we have GOT to find a better word than blog.  As a word, it just sounds disgusting...like those analogue fart sounds from the Gin song...bllllooooooogggggggg....)

Plus my internal definition of 'blog' is basically a format for people who believe the rest of the world urgently needs to shut up and listen because they have developed some very important/insightful/life changing opinions on life that the world must hear. The ideas in their head are so unique  and enlightening they've decided it's worth creating their own site, with it's own URL specifically devoted to showcasing their own Personal Manifestos, in all it's minutia. So they make themselves a blog where they can talk and share and talk and share and never be interrupted by all those folks they've decided desperately need the enlightenment they're now sharing....You can't do this on Facebook, cause those FB folks are just too noisy and opinionated and and just won't listen!

So back to the point...2 questions...what do you think would be the easiest way to set up something so if I want to share a song with your or something, I can put it on it's own page and vice versa, and it's dynamic, cause I'd rather have these kinds of tangents of mine be something that I can drop link to for a different page, like a footnote, when I'm responding to your last letter, so you can look at it if you want or when you have time, and it's not distracting from what we're currently talking about

2)I think it would be cool to have a PGP access page set up as extra security.  I'm switching over to using Tor Browser, I've got a VPN.  My goal is to keep all of my personal correspondence on a protected flash drive so there is at least the same amount of expected privacy one used to have with letters hidden in the attic or phone calls before cell phones and the NSA. Do you know how to do this?

K, I've made a label for this (since that seems to be the extent of Bloggers functions)...I'm labeling this 'The Ironing'...since...you know the kinks and all...

Once it's finished downloading, I'm going to post the pilot to a TV show I just saw called "I Love Dick" that I think you might enjoy...I think it's pretty spot on about women and creativity...which I hate, but it doesn't make it less true...

Hangin' w/ Dean

Hey Mister,

I've got about 20 minutes to get my shit together for my therapy appt., so this will be short, but I really want to talk to you about us seriously working on this thing as a real project...some ideas I want to share and get your input on.  I've been a bit side tracked for the past 4 days because of a health situation that I'm trying to figure out how to deal with (don't worry, 1/2 the problem is logistical and finding a solution is something that I'll be discussing today with Debbie)

In the interim, I thought you might be interested in something I saw on a TEDTalk 2 days ago.  I know I am...https://www.coursera.org/

Here's the TedTalk:

K, more hopefully tonight...

Meyers-Briggs 1987

Two things of note here. First is that for at least 20 years I've been operating under the assumption that I was INFP. Second is that I fall right on the line between Thinking and Feeling, which is where most of my trouble lies and where I get into the most trouble.

Woman in Yellow on Red

I've had this up in every studio of every house I've lived in.

The News Room - Climate Change Interview

Ten Foot Cock & A Few Hundred Virgins - Tim Minchin

Keaton Henson - You

In The Bar Room Brawl Of Life, Crazy Always Wins

Yes, Crazy will always beat the living shit out of Smarts...and the smarter you are, the more unwilling you will be to accept this fact because your ego will insist that you hold onto the erroneous belief that you're smart enough to somehow out-think Crazy.  But you can't.  Why? Because Smarts has Logic for a trainer.  And Smarts believes that all you need to 'win' is  rapier-like wit, a sharp tongue and some cutting intellect.

Unfortunately, Smarts seems to always forget that you don't bring a knife to a gunfight...

See, Crazy will use whatever it can get it's grubby little claws on, to win...it doesn't matter if it's throwing your deepest, darkest secrets into your face, or shredding you to pieces with the things you fear most, or shooting you in the guts with every threat and manipulative lie Crazy can come up with...Crazy has no boundaries, no 'safety word', and no shame for lobbing verbal abuse like Molotov cocktails.  Crazy could turn your love of kittens into a Walter PPK and figure out a way to use it against you, given the chance.

And Smarts blindly walks into this minefield of WTF as though it were some kind of resolvable or winnable 'challenge'...

Mistake #1 - Thinking Crazy won't commit to a suicide bombing.

Crazy doesn't give a shit about resolutions. 'Resolving' with you would mean you 'win' in Crazy's mind. And Crazy just can't have that.  Crazy doesn't subscribe to the whole win/lose concept.  Crazy ONLY cares about one thing...that YOU don't win.  And if that means that, in the end, nobody wins and that you are both decimated, beyond all recognition, into piles of bloody pulp, well that's just fine with Crazy...cause Crazy doesn't play 'Chicken'...Crazy won't veer...Crazy will just hit the gas and the last thing you'll remember before your life explodes are those creepy eyes staring through that dirty windshield...gunning for ya'.

"And you think you're a guest, you're a tourist, at best..."  That's a line from a song by Elvis Costello called My Dark Life.  It's also plastered on the entrance sign to Crazyland.  It should have also read "Abandon Hope, All Ye Who Enter."  But hey, where's the fun in that? That would probably be way too direct for Crazy...

Mistake #2 - Thinking that you can ever truly navigate or comfortably hang out in Crazyland, much less change the politics.

Cause where Crazy lives, the streets are always shifting, and the stairways go nowhere, and there are invisible sinkholes and tarpits and quicksand and random flames shooting up from the ground and air filled with methane gas created by all of Crazy's bullshit chaos.  There's are very few street signs and the ones that ARE there are inaccurate as fuck, half the shops are boarded up, the other half keep unpredictable hours, like from 1:04pm - 3:17pm every other Wednesday and sometimes Sunday in the months that have 31 days.  And there's no one to complain to or reason with about all of this because the folks in charge of Crazy's Crazyland have names like Irrationally Irate and Delusionally Paranoid and Pathologically Neurotic and Lacking in Empathy and Pathetically Victimized and Morbidly Jealous and Narcissistically Fragile.  And they spend their time swapping out street signs and doing whatever else they can think of to ensure that you will remain perpetually lost in their domain.   You may falsely believe, at first, that you can somehow enrich, and even potentially, extricate Crazy...

Mistake #3 - Believing that Crazy has any interest, at all, in ever leaving Crazyland.

 Crazy is exactly where Crazy wants to be...and so what if that means that most days are spent sitting around on a throne made out of the shrunken heads of all of those well-meaning patsies that came before you, armed with THEIR good intentions and sparkling brilliance as Crazy screams out absurd directives, pointless quests and endless demands on how other's can accommodate them.  So what if they continuously shore up that  tired old song and dance with imperatives about how they weren't LOVED enough when they were a much younger and more innocent batshit Crazy.  Crazy don't care.  Cause in Crazyland, your time belongs to them. And they will suck up every iota your time with nonsensical requests for validation.  Requests that, at first,  may appeal to the brilliant and do-goodery, ego-driven 'teacher' inside of you.

Mistake #4 - Believing that you're the one who can finally show Crazy 'The Way'.

Stop it.  You can't.  It's like trying to punch a squid...Crazy just absorbs it all and then forms a deadly, gelatinous mound over your psyche, where it will suck and suck and suck until you are a shriveled, apple-core of a head rolling around on the floor, your spirit in ashes, your soul black because Crazy has ravenously drained every bit of life force from it that can be smashed out.

Run Motherfucker Run...

Daydream In Blue

The Little Man From Another Place

BLACK LODGE (1:07:16)

Observed While Falling

• “If anyone prays in space, they aren’t really there.” –p43
• “The purpose of writing is to make it happen.” [Burroughs] viewed writing in terms of effect and questioned the inherent purpose and nature of words with respect to their capacity for achieving it.... He viewed them as energy—organic, even—and subjected them to laboratory-like scrutiny, relentlessly prodding at them and dissecting them to try and elicit a response—to try and determine patterns of behavior. His modus operandi as a writer might be described as the process of using words to see what words can do. –p44
• Every culture has its aesthetic: its style of architecture, its clothes, its art, its music, even its military. It has its own aesthetic of violence. –p103
• GPS, CCTV surveillance 24 hours a day, more and more cops, more and more security, relentless word/image “programming” and “monitoring” through the media, results in an increasing behavioral conformity, political correctness, and identical cultural and religious mindset. “A uniformity of environment that precludes evolutionary mutation.” (WSB) But such a level of control in the long run produces a dull, homogeneous, non-resistant human product. –p117
• It’s only religious indoctrination that suggests that all [non-human] life on earth is somehow inferior. The human ideals of care, altruism, and sincerity are all clearly evidenced in the rest of nature. Boredom, duplicity, and the need to control, on the other hand, are not. –p121
• Both reincarnation and heaven enforce a sense of individual ownership of life by promoting a potentially painful system of personal accountability when that life is complete. It’s a process of continually obscuring the present with a fear for a hypothetical future. Given that there are no clear “rules” for ownership, it creates a state of psychological imbalance from which Control can operate. –p134

Malcolm McNeill, Observed While Falling: Bill Burroughs, Ah Pook, and Me

I SEEEE YOU!

POST TEXT A LITTLE BIGGER PLEASE. I BLIND.OTHER THAN THAT, GO TO TOWN!

The Last Dingdong Of Doom

Ladies and Gentlemen, 

I feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work - a life's work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before. So this award is only mine in trust. It will not be difficult to find a dedication for the money part of it commensurate with the purpose and significance of its origin. But I would like to do the same with the acclaim too, by using this moment as a pinnacle from which I might be listened to by the young men and women already dedicated to the same anguish and travail, among whom is already that one who will some day stand here where I am standing.

Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up? Because of this, the young man or woman writing today has forgotten the problems of the human heart in conflict with itself which alone can make good writing because only that is worth writing about, worth the agony and the sweat.

He must learn them again. He must teach himself that the basest of all things is to be afraid; and, teaching himself that, forget it forever, leaving no room in his workshop for anything but the old verities and truths of the heart, the old universal truths lacking which any story is ephemeral and doomed - love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice. Until he does so, he labors under a curse. He writes not of love but of lust, of defeats in which nobody loses anything of value, of victories without hope and, worst of all, without pity or compassion. His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars. He writes not of the heart but of the glands.

Until he relearns these things, he will write as though he stood among and watched the end of man. I decline to accept the end of man. It is easy enough to say that man is immortal simply because he will endure: that when the last dingdong of doom has clanged and faded from the last worthless rock hanging tideless in the last red and dying evening, that even then there will still be one more sound: that of his puny inexhaustible voice, still talking.

I refuse to accept this. I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance. The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past. The poet's voice need not merely be the record of man, it can be one of the props, the pillars to help him endure and prevail.

- William Faulkner - Speech at the Nobel Banquet at the City Hall in Stockholm, December 10, 1950