I Was Just Thinking...Here you can read the random and unusual thoughts and rants of D.S Wills, updated whenever written. - - - - - - - -
The Reversal Of Time, or Isaac Hayes and the insanity of religion
I heard today that Isaac Hayes has quit South Park. No longer will the legendary soul singer voice dish out school lunches with a side of advice, as the wise old Chef. If Hayes had quit due to health problems, or age, or some acceptable reason, I might be able to understand and fondly remember the hours I spent watching this delightful character in this delightful show. However, the reason Hayes gave for quitting South Park was “growing insensitivity toward personal spiritual beliefs”. How strange that this is the reason given by Isaac Hayes, given his recent conversion to that most logical and wonderful of ‘religions’, Scientology. Yep, that’s right, they got another one! It seems those wacky Scientologists can rope in celebrities as they please, influencing the world in a frightening and comical way. Who could possibly take these jokers seriously? For years Hayes has given his support to the genius satire of South Park, which has delicately torn to shreds the illogical idiocy of every major religion or belief system we know. Yet when it is his own religion in question, perhaps the least credible religion satirised, yet the most delicately dissected topic featured on the show, Hayes suddenly has no sense of humour. Let’s face it, with each passing year religions become less about fact and more about faith. With every new social, scientific or political advancement made, religions fall further and further into the realm of fairytales and make-believe, where you go along with the fiction only because you need to. It makes you feel safe and strong to believe in something. Religions have for a long time been a method of explaining the universe, but these methods have been proven wrong time and time again. Perhaps L. Ron Hubbard saw this and wrote a work of fiction to test the idiotic faith of the masses, and more specifically, the rich and famous. But Hayes is not alone in his protest against the evil bigotry of cartoons and satire. No, a frightening number of that oh-so-peaceful Muslim community (seriously, no disrespect intended to the genuinely peaceful Muslims of this world, where ever you are) have joined forces once again to wage war against another Western institution. Comedy, animation and satire appear to be an affront to god, an attack on the Muslim world, and just plain not nice. Protests have been for weeks breaking out across the world aimed at the harmless and healthy depiction of Muslim figures in the West. People have died and signs are paraded in the streets, with slogans encouraging murder and divine wrath against the West in general, and more specifically, those that don’t see anything wrong with a picture of a prophet. Hey, if I went to Iran and saw someone burning the Stars and Stripes or the Union Jack, would I have the right to go out in the street and march with banners proclaiming holy war? Fuck no! If I saw a cartoon picture of Jesus in an Iranian magazine, would I be entitled to call myself a victim of racist abuse? Fuck no. The beginning of this knew millennium appears to be heralding a return to the primitive days of yore. The past several hundred years have been ones of unrivalled human progress, seeing the rise and fall of conventional religion, and seeing science and ration thinking replace the moronic tendencies of superstition. But now, as we embark upon another century, another millennium, we are casting ourselves back into darkness. This is the century of revenge. The coloured people of the world seek revenge upon the whites that for so long have wronged them, the women of this world see to usurp the positions of men that have forever subordinated them. This is a reversal of the movements towards equality we have all fought in various methods to achieve. World, get your fucking act together!
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The Meaning Of Life
People say that your early years are the best years of your life. The worries of adulthood are non-existent and fun is your only object. Childhood is paradise compared to adulthood. But tell that to a child. Tell a child they are lucky not to have financial or sexual problems, health scares and mid-life crises. Child worry about school, friends and a great many other things that make their lives difficult. Sure, childhood is potentially the most joyful time of one's life, but it rarely ever is. Wishful thinking will always set childhood memories on an unwarranted pedestal, but childhood is yet another stage in the pointless and aimless thing we call life. They say a midlife crisis is when we face the fact we are half way through our lives and begin to contemplate all we have failed to achieve. This is a daunting prospect, but one that is entirely understandable. Say we live to eighty; at forty we are halfway through life with only the downward spiral left. We'll never get bigger, smarter, richer, happier or outgrow our woes from here on in. Mid-life is the realisation that the peak has come and gone and not been appreciated. Somewhere in that confusing rush between puberty and this inevitable slide towards death we passed a peak that means nothing other than loss. If forty is mid-life, then twenty is quarter life, and the realisation that life is short. Maybe we are not yet halfway through our short life, but are halfway to being halfway through. It dawns on me that twenty years is a quarter of my life and it passed in a blink of an eye. It was not the blissful paradise I was told it would be. And I now realise something no one will ever tell you: The first quarter of your life is spent in education, learning to work and struggle through the next two quarters, just so the last quarter isn't spent in poverty and loneliness. But in the end, it really just one struggle after another. But I offer hope: Perhaps small personal significances and gains make the whole process worthwhile. When you're a kid you can't know you are freer than you will ever be again. So when you are older and wiser, make the most of it. You have the power to enjoy life.
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Does The Pope Get High?
When I’m taking the last puff of a dying joint at the end of a night spent smoking, I take an upturned glass and exhale into it a lung-full of smoke. This I will place carefully over whatever weed or resin I have left, and watch the smoke envelop it. I believe that the trapped smoke nourishes the weed and makes it a little more potent, or maybe it will just last longer. I’ve performed this little ritual a million times without really considering why. It’s something I always do, and I don’t think I will ever stop. People pass judgement, but they don’t understand. I believe in what I do, no matter how random or pointless or insignificant it may be. When someone can prove to me that what I do is for no reason, through conclusive evidence, then I will perhaps stop. But everyone does this everyday. In religion and the basis principals of life there are things we do that are without reason, but that seem natural. Only when god has been finally disproved and when the pointlessness of custom is brought to light will these things be replaced by more pointless activity and belief. Perhaps this is a necessary part of life. I genuinely believe that we all need a little something unexplained to put faith in, even though we suspect or know that what we believe is wrong. Don’t ask me why. Ask the Pope why his religion has mutated through time. Ask why the various manifestations of Christianity today bare little resemblance to the original Christian views. Ask how a religion can claim to know the truth about life when it so frequently contradicts itself and changes to keep up with more believable truths. Ask why people have been burned and killed by religion for things that are now acceptable.
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Life Begins At Twenty
I often think that life begins at twenty. I know that this phrase has become somewhat of a cliché, though usually referring to thirty or forty, and intended to jokingly sooth the pain of a middle-aged birthday-boy-or-girl who has come to realise that life is now half way through. I believe that the first twenty years of life are practice years, an educational period that can be partially re-sat if one should fail. We practice relationships, first with a small family group, then with friends, and more people, and then with lovers. We go to school to learn the ins-and-outs of life before we are unleashed upon the world in a non-educational sense for the first time. We do stupid things and mess up a lot, but the slate is wiped clean, at least mentally, at twenty. Once the puberty of the teenager years has developed our bodies, and the schools have filled our minds, and when we have practiced communicating with other humans enough, then we must enter the twenties and put our skills to the test. Everything changes from twenty onwards. Sure, you might have already had a job, a girlfriend, a life. You might have a car and a million in the bank when you hit your twentieth year on earth, but things are different now. That girlfriend you’ve got: she’s no longer just your teenage sweetheart, she’s your adult partner. Your relationship is now that of an adult, and you’re both part of a bigger world. The clock is ticking for both of you, and you both have decisions to make. Neither of you will live forever, and you certainly won’t be ‘young’ for long. If you want kids, you’ve only got twenty or so years left; if you want to do anything at all, you’ve only maybe got forty or sixty years left at most. Relationships take this extra dimension when you both want something different, and most won’t survive. When you get a job: this might be the job you work until you retire. Sure, they say nobody stays in a job for life these days, but maybe they will. Maybe you will. Maybe if you want to be president someday, it’s already too late. Nothing can be put off too long. The teenage years were a preparation for the life you want, so now you’re in your twenties you better start following up, because you don’t want to turn thirty and still be chasing that goddamn dream. In the twenties life has begun to take shape and there are no more preparation classes. We can’t spend the next twenty years preparing for our life, we have to go out there and get it now. And that is why the mind develops as crazily in the twenties as the body developed in the teens. We’re gonna fuck up a lot, and we’re gonna suffer the same embarrassment and humiliation we went through in the teens. We’re gonna realise we should have worked harder earlier, and feel like we’re still working for something now, but maybe we’ll realise the all of life is a practice and a preparation for something that comes later. I think that all years before the twentieth should be referred to as minus one, minus two and so on. Twenty is the new zero, and twenty-one is the big kick off.
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Porn Fiend
I wouldn’t call myself an internet porn expert. This isn’t to say that I’m not an expert on the subject, more to protect my good name. I certainly know more about porn on the net than the average person, but I wouldn’t want to be known as an expert. I think people that take more than a cursory glance at internet porn are known as porn fiends, and fiend is not a term I would willingly label myself. I get the same pleasure from porn that, to the best of my knowledge, or in fact general knowledge, all men get. A naked woman is an arousing thing to see, assuming she comes to some level of attractiveness, and looking freely at one of these women is certainly something I enjoy. I am not ashamed to admit that I look at naked women on the internet, though I’d probably lie when questioned about the amount of time I spend doing so, and I wouldn’t judge another person for this habit. I know quite a lot about computers and the internet, and though this is innocent enough, when coupled with pornography, this moves my standing on the “accidental-viewing- to- expert- to- fiend” scale dangerously close to expert. Yes, I know how one would go about setting up a porn website; yes, I know how one might find the best source of porn; yes, I know how to download porn; and yes, I know how to hide the evidence left after viewing porn. I like to think that my daily glance at porn when casually surfing is enough to exclude me from the classification “fiend”, though some people are so uppity about the whole thing that in their eyes I deserve castration for my crime. But these people have a far greater problem than I have; they are twisted in the head. One day maybe porn will become a subject people want to be experts on. Maybe people will shed their moral ignorance and embrace this part of life. Maybe then I will call myself expert and people will respect it, but until then I piss enough people of anyway, and I don’t need to be labelled immoral anymore than I already am.
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