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New & Improved
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Rants
- Hits: 2504
Everything is new and improved. I'm not really a new and improved kinda guy, it's not my market, I buy what I have to, what inspires me, and that's it.
But there's a market for it. It's been created, the stage set with 50 years of laundry detergent and dish soap getting better and better, until finally you would think it would wash the sins from the world, yet somehow still it's only laundry detergent...
The laundry detergent was only the marketing research. Then came technology, with obvious and noticeable improvements. The kind that demanded you replace things every couple of years. They caught on to this, the technology people, exploited it by building their products to fail should you ignore the cultural imperative to upgrade. More Memory, more RAM, flat screen TV's, flatter screened TV's, richer streaming content, games and media. Most people have more technology on their desktop than NASA had when they sent people to the moon. It is used in over 90% of instances as a diversion, recreation, an escape. This is the world of New and Improved.
Jealousy
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Ideas & Questions
- Hits: 1752
Jealousy. I've wondered about this, wondered where it came from. I've had girlfriends who'd been jealous, some more than others. And I'd been jealous myself. And of what value was it?
And I had an Epiphany.
Jealousy is the imagining of what we would do were we in our partners position.
It's the projection of our worst selves upon others. And, if we've made a bad match, maybe we're right.
And then there is lack of jealousy. In which we project our best selves upon others, imagine that they would do what we would in similar circumstance, by "we" I mean the best of "we", the "we" possessed of those noblest of qualities: love, loyalty, fidelity and honor.
And if we've again made a bad match, maybe we're wrong.
But I understand it now.
To boil it down, make it quotable, try this: "jealousy is the presumption that others are doing as we would do in their position."
Birds on a wire
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2377
There's something zen about this. Not just the music (the Asian Influences are obvious), but in the recognition of the sublime in the ordinary...
Birds on the Wires from Jarbas Agnelli on Vimeo.
Autumn Melancholy
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- Written by: Rod Boyle
- Category: Miscellany
- Hits: 2262
"O Wild West Wind, thou breathe of Autumn's being...."
- Shelley
I have been seized with that restlessness, seasonal melancholy that brings in Autumn.
The leaves have not yet turned, but there is the shortening of days, the lengthening of shadows, the quick chill in the morning that never dispels itself....
It is Autumn.
And there is the wind, blowing from the west, earlier than the wind of Shelley, but the same. It always arrives here earlier, truly summer only lasts until the end of July, then the light changes, the shortening of days becomes more pronounced, there is that rush to finish those countless chores of summer....
TO explore, adventure, travel, live, each day growing shorter, quicker, more and more noticable.
Until it's September and Autumn is here, perhaps not on the calendar, but it's here. Dark still at 6:00 AM, chill outside, leaves and branches from the trees, still green, begin gathering on the lawns. There is the full harvest moon hanging bloated in the sky, low to the horizon, the next time it appears there will have been frost....
It is Autumn.
Strange, it fills me always with sadness, yet is my favorite season. It conjures, evokes within me memories of returning to University, of fresh acquaintance and old souls gathering in the halls, of finding new classrooms.
Of warm coffee in the morning, pretty girls whom you will know by the end of semester, the romance of libraries and of cozy winebars, live theatre, haunting music played late on the radio. It heralds winter, and you can see through the still green lawns to the frozen ground, to trees with barren fingers reaching up to the sky, to cold graves shoveled through the snow.
It is the colour of burnt sienna and raw umber and smells like freshly ground coffee, old leather and red wine, it's the bracing cold of early morning before the sun has arisen, early snowflakes melting upon your cheek, it's the smell of rare perfumes and burning leaves, it's the taste of pumpkin pies and crabapples, it's the hope, always, that this year it will be different, this year will be the one....
There is the sadness for the memories of loves that have failed, romances fallen by the wayside, people stolen away by death or circumstance, it begins the season of gathering and preparing for winter, the gestation of ideas and ambitions until more sunny and fortuitous times are upon us....
It is Autumn, and when you go outside the wind, the sun, remind you of how soon it will be here, how soon it will be winter, and somewhere in my soul there's an archtype, an understanding that with each season my own days are numbered....
It has been postulated that time is an illusion, that everything that has happened in the universe has happened all at once, for an instant and an eternity, and what we imagine to be time is a distortion of our senses that brings to us only what we can understand, a necessary evolution (if that can be applied here), and so we are forever in the womb, in the embrace of our lovers, in the cold earth beneath us...
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