Who can forget the Captain of the Orca?

Here is a short video of Captain Quint’s best lines…

text link: Quint

Power and Intimacy – achieving a balance

Stock still, breathing lightly I face the shadows and reflections mirrored in the smooth wood. I choose a path, and body and mind combine changing stasis to action as I hurl the marble ball gracefully to the floor. A waiting perid is shortly followed by chaos and cacophony. Likewise the perfect balance of opposite elements offers a basis for a rewarding life.

The two great organizing principles in human life are Power and Intimacy. They are opposites: destructive vs. creative, agency vs. communion, “death aggressiveness” vs. erotic “life instincts.” Your life-story can focus on power, be highly intimate, or contain a balance of both.

The Powerful Ones are motivatied by the obvious rewards- success and money. They like to hang in clubs, throw lavish parties in their penthouses and applaud each others’ accomplishments. Their major fear is embarrassment and thus powermongers manipulate each other and avoid conflict at all costs. The advantages are obvious as well. they don’t have to beg for their space, are free to structure their lives independently and manage to have exciting affairs. The can always find a long-legged babe or handsome partner in crime to enjoy the glamorous life.

The Intimate Ones are concerned with just being. Ultimately they seek one-on-one encounters. Betrayal of trust is their biggest fear in relationships, but when it occurs they accept that they themselves are part of the problem. The Tibetans have a principle that emotions should be given free rein, “Ride out the wild horse.” the ride will take you out of the known realm and yet the horse will eventually tire and stop running. It’s fighting our feelings that wastes so much energy.

All this talk about riding is urging me to make a point. Sex is not intimacy. Touching, kissing, caressing, cuddling, undressing, sucking, humping, rocking and rolling; savoring each stage involved in intercourse for a reason. you transcend the bounds of your physical body and become one with another.
The electrostatic energy generated during lovemaking causes a magnetism between the lovers. You have created joy. Surrender to another is simultaneously an escape and a connection to the outside world. A sense of breaking the limitations of time and space gives it a cosmic sense of harmony, It is easy to see the positive effects a mate has on your whole existence. Trusting someone, sharing an ongoing daily dialog is important to your emotional and psychological growth.

Individuals who are motivated by BOTH power and intimacy want it all; they are generally miserable as youngsters, they refuse to conform to archetypical models, exhibit dual sexuality, struggle with immature emotional stages. These are the late bloomers, productive contributions are finally reached at 30-40 years of age. These best and brightest achieve a better life adjustment (as rated by income, happy marriages, promotions, vacations, job satisfaction, no shrinks, no drug or alcohol abuse and minimal sick leave). Their mortality rate is 50% lower. They attain a higher income and social standing, but also possess political outlook, intellectual tastes and superior lifestyle. They become counselors, teachers and peacemakers. Good luck to those of you struggling for the balance.

A Dead Ant is 2D

The Class Arthropoda is made up of 800,000 kinds of insects.

By far the largest group is ants. Six-legged creatures crawl all over our planet. As they scale the side of your house the gravity pulling against the sticky feet on this new surface is the only indication of up. The ants go marching in through the window and across the cupboard to the sugar bowl. The appliances grow larger, mutate each moment, twist and contort with foreshortening. Edges flare and recede nonsensical as they pass.

To ants the Earth is flat. A two-dimensional world; forward and to the side. Our third dimension is incomprehensible in minds devoid of concepts. According to P.D. Ouspensky in “Tertium Organum, A key to the Enigmas of the World”, time replaces our third dimension for these creatures of the 2d world.

Flocking behind the leader, who is the ant in front of you, struggling beneath enormous loads, they return to the nest. They have remarkable memories. Labyrinths of tunnels covering up to an acre are negotiated only by remembered sequences of turns and of smells.

“No sex, no drugs, no wine, no women, no fun, no sin, no wonder it’s dark.” This song, “Turning Japanese” by the Vapors, sums up the worker ants’ life. They build the new colony from nothing. They are the whole defense of the colony and nurturers of the young. Besides gathering food, they plant gardens of mushrooms in the depths, and herd and stroke the cow-like aphids for sweet milk. Mother Earth is God. Through floods, and winter they perservere. Death comes from attacks by giants and aardvarks.

For citizens of a society that provides survival for six or seven years, if not freedom and concepts, there are benefits and obligations: Ice cream socials, community action committees and service projects, PTAs, bowling leagues, giant square dances and an underground system to shame that of London.

Individualism cannot be tolerated in a society that only tries to survive, thrive and share equally. Are we wrong to proclaim INDIVIDUALISM as the ultimate social manifestation? Or are the complexity of language, nuance of manners and solid social customs just survival schemes in a land where people live on top of each other? Small differences within the same limitations?

If ants represent the 2D and our world is 3D, what is next? Is any man/woman able to take the next step, beyond concepts and become the future fourth dimensional being?

Alternative Lifestyle in Prison

After the drama and arrest and trial, my life has settled into an unbearably mundane level. My arrest was a complete fluke. Our passion for sex on balconies erupted into a media conspiracy. My boyfriend was released on his on recognizance shortly after the incident at the Women’s Club.

Ah, politics! I especially balk at the term “indecent exposure” being used in my case, and “repeat offender” offers the same tainted vision of this state’s moral myopic misogyny. My lawyer said, “It’s a nasty twist in the new crack-down on sex offenders”. The blue-haired, be-necklaced ladies of that Loring Park establishment weren’t the only victims.

It’s my second time in the slam for indecent exposure. The culture of troublemakers, a twisted group support system, cracking my new strongarm and buying ketchup, Zu-Zu’s and Wham-wham’s again are precious and quaint for a little while. A short bit indeed.

Deprived. The top three problems of incarceration are caused by deprivation. Being institutionalized separates me from:

–Freedom.
I dream of swimming and flying often.

–Family and loved ones.
I miss my boy, my dancing partners, roomies, colleagues and lovers. I’m so out of touch that I worry That some emergency will not be reported to me until it reaches a horribly late point of no-return.

–My favorite special activity.
Pleasure. I’m sexually frustrated, it’s a difficult thing for me to abandon. At a specified hour I lie on my bunk and concentrate on him. If I know that he is doing the same simultaneously, I can imagine I feel him inside me and transcend to oneness again. Thank god there’s a bowling alley here. Substitute kegeling.

I feel sorry for myself, angry at the system. The next moment I’m overwhelmed with apathy, boredom, hopelessness. I’m increasingly insecure about my safety and development. Most of the dangerous power trips of alcoholism, drugs and guns are precluded. But incidents of shanking are common enough to scare me.

After just a few weeks I began to take many of the restrictions for granted and settled into the ROUTINE. The rhythm of life is locked into institutional routines, narrowing my attention to the present moment. The count is steadily chipping away at my peace of mine. I avoid thoughts of the future, except as a source of fantasies; and thoughts of the past are limited to some of its happier moments. Many of the rules have changed since I was here last time. I feel like such a fool sometimes, not knowing where I stand. Stripped of my usual mates, I try to cultivate new ones here, but they are twisted souls for the most part. The good ones are suddenly transferred and moved, it’s out of my control.

How can I avoid the entanglements, obligations and conflicts, adopting a solitary lifestyle, after being such a social animal on the outside? The old inmates are socially self-contained, hardened for psychological survival, they manage to cope, but the cost is considerable.

I rebel with a sinking sensation in my stomach when I’m told what to do, so staying out of trouble is a constant struggle with these motherfuckers. The screws are mean and uncaring, my grievances are genuine, but ignored by my Team. The self-improvement programs are ineffective given the negative environment, negative emotions, negative vibrations trapped and swirling inside this drainpipe. Chronic problems remain chronic. If anything, there is a decrease in pressure to change, a reinforcements of bad habits and attitudes. The peer pressure resembles that of a suburban junior high.

If anything, coping and adaptation is more difficult the second time. Jumpstreet. Is jail my alternative lifestyle? I hate conforming with these lowlifes. Most importantly, confidentially I believe that I am going mad. My altered state come without the use of drugs. My imagination is running wild, it’s the only thing that can. Paradoxically, one does not thing of prison as a place where problems can be escaped. I wake up in a good mood in the morning and imagine that I am in a cheap hotel while on a foreign holiday. But when I see the missing toilet seat and realize it’s not a bidet, I come down for the rest of the day.

Remember driving through a twisting winding road at high speed and how fast your synapses popped and made your muscles react so you didn’t even have to think of how to drive? There is a cosmic number- 30,000. Your mechanical being is that much faster than your mind. But furthermore your emotions are 30,000 times faster than that fast driving thing. The shiver up your spine is a clue. The emotions drive our imaginations like rocket fuel and it can be truly ugly when it careens out of control.

Most of the inmates are using reactive solutions to cope with problems. Or with a teensy bit of forethought, they can anticipate trouble using avoidance techniques. Or in the put-a-patch-on-it worldview, palliative schemes, like excuses or apologies that offer no cure to the real problem. These are low-level coping, common inside and out.

Inner dialogue is only a start toward self-knowledge. Re-evaluation of myself has filled the endless winters. I am gaining the skill to control my thoughts. It’s having just a small beneficial effect on my emotional life. But the mind can play tricks on you.

A new scheme involves persistent, though largely ineffectual runs at consciousness. Still I have been sleepwalking for 99% of my waking hours. It takes considerable energy to phase in. Daydreaming and self-analysis does nothing to help my future. It’s time to wake up, wake up, wake up. Say it over and over, pay attention to Square business.

So, I go downstairs and bowl until I’m so tired my mind turns off. That is when I feel closest to the something that is glorious and infinite.