Is it moral for a slave to be happy in his slavery?
Is it moral for a nonslave living in the vicinity who isn't directly connected to slavery to be happy?
Is it moral to be happy in this world?

I have thought that it isn't for many years.

This morning the thought was completely foreign to me. Lately I've been feeling a fear, a stress that is really making me unhappy, to the extent that I just want it overcome so that I can be happy. The idea of the immorality of happiness was forgotten and seemed just bizarre to me.

Does one need to be unhappy in order to want to make a situation change?
Does being unhappy help make a situation change?

Made quickly. Could easily be made a lot better. Can you imagine a world where it would matter? My imagination is failing me on such matters. Still I like it quite a bit.

I built a bunch of bookshelves that are attached to the wall. Something like 140 feet of shelf space. Maybe barely enough for my books. But then I didn't quite finish putting all my books on them. Why? Not quite sure entirely but it may have something to do with feeling like I won't be living here long. Then also night shift has me not spending much time in the room (would bother sleeping wife). This all ties into feeling though like the space I live in, that it just doesn't matter much to make it nice. In this world it just doesn't matter. Work is way too much chop chop savagery. Not to mention even without the chop chop something essential is missing... Such that nice spaces don't matter.

Writing a beautiful piece of music doesn't matter.

Recently I was thinking that 'good music should not be written in this world'; instead music that sounds like it can hardly bother. Music with blatant mistakes. Music that doesn't have any polish in it's production or original composition. For that matter, if you can overhear someone flushing the commode in the background, etc, that's a good idea too.

Where would it matter?

Where having beautiful spaces mattered.

Where for that matter, living or dying actually mattered.

What would such a world look like?

There is a lady at work who seems pretty wonderful. My wife met her at a party with 10 or so people. Upon leaving (I had never mentioned her at all) she immediately mentioned what a wonderful person she seemed to be. So we both independently came to this conclusion.

She sort of looks like me. Large head. Reddish hair. Angular face. Large nose. She's the one who suggested the book club at work. The book club it's looking like may actually have an inagural meeting. From at least 50 people at work a grand total of me, her and two other people just might show up. There's nothing to understanding why I like her. Not like my weird attraction to S. With K it's perfectly obvious and nothing to go on about.

A world of such people as those by the way. Where one simply gave up on the rest. Where one made sure to spend absolute minimal time associating with those other kind of people.

Well, in such a world as that, I suspect it might matter a bit. Simply by gathering together people who existed more. (I think therefore I am. The more I think, the more I am.)

It's not such a horribly complex idea. I'm around such people and I immediately feel so much better. As if someone put my shoulder back in it's socket. As if sensory deprivation has suddenly ended. The world is just so much more when around such people. K in particular, at least it seems.

It's startling. No amount of philosophy seems to me anything at all for human happiness compared to simply being around the right sort of people. But there are so incredibly few.

...Fredrik Douglas barely survived slavery. Rather than take another whipping he attacked a white man. I think most such people were killed. His circumstances were just exceptional. I strongly feel that being an intelligent man didn't make it easier for Douglas to survive his brutal existence. I think it made it much harder. I strongly think that most such men as him, were removed from the gene pool. I know it's highly verbotten to mention but the evidence of the result is there.

That evidence would not be worth mentioning except that the same thing is still going on around us. There is something very awful to learn from slavery which no one is allowed to admit.

"Darkness has descended upon mankind."

A many headed blob of all that's dark, all that's wrong, all the fear and hate and isolation. All massed together into one creature. This creature looms, this creature sits there in your memory. Sometimes you forget it. But it returns again and again.

Imagine a second creature, it's opposite.

Which of the two will win out?

The very end of Ran, where the blind boy is playing the flute while standing on a precipice is my favorite bit of movie ever.

Saw Kurosawa's The Lower Depths a couple nights ago. It's maybe nothing original but it's the most blunt, fundamental presentation I can recall. So starkly laid out. The Predicament. How to cope with this life. Sad to know after all those good films he tried to kill himself, slashing his wrists more than 30 times just because he couldn't get funding for movies after already making so many masterpieces. The miracle was that he ever got to make movies in the first place that were so cerebral and dark. Wonder if WWII had something to do with it...

Also watched Gilliam's 12 Monkeys again. Rewatching a lot of old movies on netflix that are free and instantly available online. Sort of a memory test. Who was I back then? Howard the Duck was interesting in trying to remember who I once was. Awful, absurd movie that I still liked. And I remembered why as I watched it.

Gilliam's 12 Monkeys is a lot more like Brazil than I remembered. The time travel thing, watching his own death, is just too gimmicky though.

I've tendency to misremember my intelligence when younger in the sense of thinking myself dumber back then then I actually was. My main 'lack' back then was actually just having too much hope in me. Being too optimistic. Thinking there might be a way forward. A point in trying.

..on a subconscious level I was wishing for death the other night. Was thinking about how people slowly kill themselves, not just with alcohol or illegal drugs, but even with junk food. Or for that matter by destroying relationships, perhaps. All not necessarily with even realizing just what they're doing. In a sense in the face of the typical obese flat affected hospital patient I'm seeing a nihilist who's been slowly killing themselves for years.

(Not that it's entirely all that bad. There's two levels. There is the one where indeed it's that bad. Where, indeed, there is no hope at all. That humans are awful, disgusting creatures. Where the number that break through, the true revolutionaries, the ons who manage to show compassion, concern, friendliness to people outside their family or prospective family are so rare and so setting themselves up for pain that one anymore wishes them to just not even be that way....etc.

But then there's the mere survival, moment to moment life. Where there's some security, some jokes, decent health. And hardly any hurry anyway. It's all a short blink anyway.)

I've been looking forward to death for at least a few years now. The feeling though has definitely increased, recalling back to a poem someone read a few years ago. Since then still more negative information has been uncovered.

It all worries me. I'm afraid I'll have a moment one of these days, where I suddenly feel too 'artistic' and I slash my wrists 30 times. Try to remind myself there's hardly any hurry. And my health's good. I can go jogging for a bit yet before my joints give out. My wife is very very nice. My parents are too. And I have some slight association with a couple beautiful people, to the slight extent they're not locked into barbaric social norms. Anyway there's no hurry and nowhere to go anyway.

Try to withhold honesty on the topic of suicide because I know of quite a few on the political left who have been 'suicided'. Steve Kangas comes to mind. Getting Jack Daniels forced down his throat in a bathroom while he bled to death from the hole in his head. Or perhaps Gary Webb. I surely don't matter at all though and have nothing to worry about there.

No. It's just interesting that my subconscious is thinking about such things. While my conscious has almost completely ignored such questions. Or I should say my conscious has only thought of such things theoretically and generally, but not personally. At least in the last 18 years. Consciously I don't go around thinking about killing myself. If it were to happen it would very sudden. Which is what worries me.... Sometimes I'm driving and it just pops into my head how wonderful it would be if I just suddenly jerk the steering wheel...

What to do?

Remember there's no hurry I guess. And not bother stressing too much during chop chop times.

Cutting off all that is pretend. Cutting off all that is meaningless. Left staring at a wall....

Close to deleting my facebook account. Close to destroying email account. Soon I'll not exist at all.

Soon free to be nothing.

And... running 5 days a week. Really trying to get up to a minimum of 6mph. Feels like a return to youth. A pretend youth that never actually was. Now I can go back and remember it all insanely different from the hell it was. Back then my achilles tendon, my grievous injury... I remember imagining the euphoria if this grievous wound ever healed. But of course there was not really much euphoria. Did that which didn't kill me make me stronger? If at all, only for absurdly useless activities. But the euphoria didn't happen in part because I've forgotten. Through (faster) running it's like I'm going back... ?? (This is a paragraph safely misunderstood, for all of time.)

The problem with music is that it's not supposed to be such a spectator sport. The massive concert of people just watching is the height of the sickness. If at least they were watching some freak, some Vladimir Horowitz at least, that, although also wrong, would be a magnitude better than Brittany et al.

Playing a musical instrument well shouldn't take years of practice. Practicing by yourself 8 hours a day is sick. Music should be a participatory endeavor. It should not consist primarily of bystanders.

Musical instruments should exist that the average person can pick up and immediately play a half decent tune on, immediately improv with others. There shouldn't be pain involved. There shouldn't be the need to toughen up the finger tips, etc.

Plucking/strumming strings is no good. Brass instruments no good (hard on the mouth, takes too long to learn to play, too much spit.) Keyboards too unweildly. Plus 12TET set-up too difficult for novice. Reed instruments too difficult.

And the embochure of the flute is too difficult for the novice. The one I built from PVC, I have to change the shape of my mouth for each note. Then instead the fipple of the recorder and the irish penny whistle, etc... still the issue of overblowing. Will construct a micro-orifice upstream to limit the max flowrate. But still, such a small max volume. How else to reduce overblowing? How to get a louder sound?

Will learn the physics of the whistle next.

Will tinker around. Watched Scanners and The Deadzone last night. Put 5 60's and 70's Godzilla movies on my netflix. Watched short thing on how Monty Python got together (I never had a chance in this life). Will tinker. Will run. At the same time that I cut off everything meaningless, everything pretend, such that I don't exist. And life is such a quick blink of the eye. There's hardly any hurry for what comes immediately after...

I'm of miner stock. A bit of genetic inertia of something else. It's painful to watch. My epigenetics are miner stock at best. Maybe a lot worse. Me not having children is no loss whatsoever.

The woman sweating her ass off beneath her burqa in Saudi Arabia convinces herself this is the best of all possible worlds just as the slave did, just as the man struggling to survive from paycheck to paycheck in capitalism just as the aging hippy who used to have a nagging sense of loneliness about the lack of community but now but manages to drive hours away in his car 6 to 9 times a year for festivities like going rafting or to the Burning Man festival and just focuses on that.

It's so easy. You fall asleep, you forget. The goal is to be happy. Utilize your stupidity. If someone points out how wrong it is, demonize them.

Everyone's a pangloss. Everyone ensures that this world will never change. That it will always be insane. Everyone has learned how to be happy by being insane.

It's simply evolution. He best adapts who believes this is the best of all possible worlds.

And so you have children and then, simply evolution, the person who exists for their children, for their family, for their welfare and no others, best passes on their genes. A morality that doesn't go beyond one's own children. No sense of community beyond one's own relatives. Even if, by some chance, you don't think this is the best of all possible worlds, you just turn away from everything but your family, you turn away from all else. And your children flourish and reproduce in turn.

And these people are the only people alive at all now.

For better or worse, this is it! (He says as he flashes a big dumbass smile at his 'masser' whom whips him for his own good.)