You're just a mammal. Let yourself act like it. Your brain needs enrichment. Your body needs rest. You feel hunger and grow hair. You need to pack bond with other sentient things so you don't become unsocialized and neurotic. You are biologically inclined to seek dopamine and become sick when chronically stressed. "Hedonism" is made up to place moral value on taking pleasure in sensory experiences. I am telling you that if you don't let yourself be a fucking mammal, as you were made, you will suffer and go insane. No grindset no diets no trying to be above your drive for connection. Pursue what makes you feel good and practice radial rejection of the constructs meant to turn you into a machine. You're a mammal.
Imagining Garak and Bashir in a fucked up survival situation. Garak getting injured somewhere intimate like the thigh or lower abdomen. It severs an artery and he's bleeding out. Forcing Bashir to reach inside and apply manual pressure to the artery while he repairs it. Garak, conscious and whimpering, as Bashir puts his whole hand inside him :) Bashir whispering softly, gently how well he's doing, just a little more :) :) :)
I like when gods look like spirals and snakes and shit I like to think about the different types of gods like ones that are directly connected to humans are more human and the more creator, forces of nature, types are just fucked up little guys
Star Trek III: The Search for Spock (1984) dir. Leonard Nimoy
Driving my girl to work on our tandem bicycle. Takes me 15 minutes to drop her off and 45 minutes to get back home
The way Trek cast members react to their characters being shipped with other characters is fascinating to me. Shatner ping-pongs back and forth between being homophobic and being Spirk’s #1 supporter so fast it gives you whiplash. Mulgrew has her hands over her ears going “LA LA LA LA LA I CAN’T HEAR YOUUUUUU JANEWAY IS A STRONG INDEPENDENT WOMAN WHO DON’T NEED NO MAN but like I guess if we absolutely must then she should be with Chakotay” meanwhile, Alex Siddig and Andrew Robinson are begging the writers to let them kiss, with tongue
the bachelors
@roach-works // Melissa Broder, "Problem Area" // Mary Oliver, "The Return" // @annavonsyfert // Koyoharu Gotouge, Demon Slayer // Haruki Murakami, Dance Dance Dance // David Levithan, How They Met and Other Stories // Tennessee Williams, Notebooks
"The transition from [the barter system to currency] is hard to understand; how can human cravings be fetishized into pieces of metal? The answer is elegant because it reveals not only the origin of money, but its character even today. Money was and still is literally sacred: 'It has long been known that the first markets were sacred markets, the first banks were temples, the first to issue money were priests or priest-kings.' The first coins were minted and distributed by temples because they were medallions inscribed with the image of their god and embodying his protective power. Containing such manna, they were naturally in demand, not because you could buy things with them but vice-versa: since they were popular, you could exchange them for other things.
The consequence of this was that 'now the cosmic powers could be the property of everyman, without even the need to visit temples: you could now traffic in immortality in the marketplace.' This eventually led to the emergence of a new kind of person, 'who based the value of his life — and so of his immortality — on a new cosmology centered on coins.' A new meaning system arose, which our present economic system makes increasingly the meaning-system. 'Money becomes the distilled value of all existence ... a single immortality symbol, a ready way of relating the increase of oneself to all the important objects and events of one's world.'
If we replace 'immortality' with 'becoming real,' the point becomes Buddhist: beyond its usefulness as a medium of exchange, money has become modern humanity's most popular way of accumulating Being, of coping with our gnawing intuition that [the ego does] not really exist. Suspecting that the sense of self is a groundless construction, we went to temples and churches to ground ourselves in God; now we ground ourselves financially.
The problem is that the true meaning of this meaning-system is unconscious, which means, as usual, that we end up paying a heavy price for it. The value we place on money karmically rebounds back against us: the more we value it, the more we use it to evaluate ourselves."
- David Loy, from "Buddhism and Money: The Repression of Emptiness Today." Buddhist Ethics and Modern Society: An International Symposium, edited by Charles Wei-hsun Fu and Sandra A. Wawrytko, 1991.