is mourning selfish?

if it's not selfish, what is it? well, the opposite of selfishness is altruism. can mourning be altruistic? i think it can be if there's a group aspect to it, if it's about helping others move on. there can be a shared catharsis. however, at the root of this is still selfishness. we need each other to help us get over our selfish responses of loss.

could it be neither selfish nor altruistic (i'm down with ternary logic for most real world applications)? in the sense that it's largely an uncontrollable reaction, perhaps. yet, i think this only applies to the initial reaction that happens upon learning of one's passing. the moment it gets dragged on past that initial reaction, it becomes selfish in the sense that it's a sort of self-pity.

now, let me throw in a twist: in the specific circumstance that a loved one goes through a lengthy period of great suffering before their death, can mourning be altruistic?

it seems to me like the clearly altruistic approach is not mourning but celebration. to really empathize with the loved one is to recognize that the suffering is over, that the cage of existence has been broken free from, that the hopelessness has ceased, that the horror has lifted....

what is altruistic about wishing a return to an existence of suffering? really, what could be more selfish?

so, is mourning ever *not* selfish?

sung with a bluesy swagger...

you meowed for an hour when i came in the door
(several bars of electronic chaos)
you meowed for an hour when i came in the door
(several bars of electronic chaos)
didn't know where i was, or if you'd see me no more
(several bars of electronic chaos)
you meowed for an hour when i came in the door
(several bars of electronic chaos)

just had a crash course at the school of hard knocks,
and all you wanted to do was smell my socks.
all you wanted to do was
SMELL MY SOCKS

i'm still in that same tim horton's. it's been about 30 hours, now, stuck here.

i'll dream about this place for the next twenty years as an archetype of purgatory. i'm going to avoid this line of thought. of course, i'm not actually avoiding it, i'm just avoiding typing about it.

really, the day has essentially been spent trying to find a means of escape from this place. i can't count how many bagels i've eaten, or how many times i've brushed the coffee off my teeth, or how many conversations i've overheard (oh, that's just a weird way of saying palisher), or how many plans i've created that twirl through obstacle courses with incomprehensibly frustrating and entirely unpredictable twists before they come out as dead ends. what i mean to take 3 hours took 30, but it's done.

midnight is too late to check in anywhere. it's raining. it's even kind of chilly out.

....but i'll be out of this place of absurdity the second i see the first ray of sunshine come up, and very much ready to start something entirely new.

so, i'm slowly sorting through apartment listings in a tim horton's in windsor by myself because i'm afraid that if i go home i'll get episodic.

the irony was never really lost on me. i first clued in on the ride here. i almost didn't leave at all; i didn't think i was in a stable enough mindset. i thought i felt him pass on sunday night and took it as evidence of needing to turtle for a few days. that was a freaky night (this is why i slept in and screwed up my plan). i felt alright enough in the morning, though. or did i just trigger myself? was not feeling episodic a part of the episode? i'm still not sure. at least i feel fairly calm. i've been calm all week, pretty much. well, i got a little snappy in a game of scrabble, but that's it. i'm not at all frantic in any way. i'm just slowly sorting through apartment listings in a tim horton's in windsor by myself.

very calmly.

if i can compare episodes and argue that one type of episode is better than the other, i think i picked the less harmful option. i trust my ability to improvise more than i trust my ability to cope.

all hope is lost, but he's still hanging on. he wasn't supposed to make it through wednesday night. he wasn't supposed to make it through 2012, either. he has a habit of making it through things nobody expects him to make it through. so, it's sort of typical.

fuck, he might hang on until i get home.

no. he won't.

and then it won't be home anymore...

i recognize that this seems like a strange thing to think about on the brink of one's father's death. a monty python skit? yeah. but, it was a frequently reproduced one. he strongly identified with the black knight, here. i'm not sure how he managed to interpret the skit as a parable for perseverance, but he somehow did. if there was a hint of irony, a touch of sarcasm, a commentary on the futility of struggle, then i never really picked up on it.

it's a dark analogy, but it's been running through my mind the whole week.

karaoke the other night.

can't get it out of my head.

music is the best medicine for depression. it's almost magic, really.

i'm ok. no, really. i am. i've had a long time to think about this. i was just overwhelmed for a moment, there.

it's mostly a coincidence that i'm skipping town almost exactly as my dad has given up. he fought as hard as he could. the truth is he never really had a chance. almost nobody survives brain cancer.

he stopped taking his meds last week, by conscious choice. the treatment was just overwhelming. over the last few hours, the paralysis has spread from his left side (the tumour is on the right side of his brain) to both sides of his body. he's likely to lose control of his face muscles while i'm gone this week, rendering him unable to speak, and possibly slip into a coma or die.

there's nothing of value that can be accomplished by me staying here this week and watching him die. all that can do is fuck me up. i could speak of many things right now regarding the nature of death, but the reality is that i do not believe any of them, nor do i believe they are of any consequence to a dead person. there is nothing at all of any consequence to a dead person, not even the fact that they are dead. i may wish it to come as painlessly as possible, but i know better. it's not even physical, but mental. yet, his mental state over the next few days is a temporary reality that only he has any real understanding of, and will not matter at all to any existing conscious being once he has passed.

such a state is devastating to contemplate. it's such an awful, gruesome way to die. seizures, treatment, surgery; slow paralysis, loss of speech, coma. i can only imagine the kind of fear that sets in as you slowly lose control of your ability to control your own muscles, as death slowly consumes your body. it must be like being eaten alive.

in truth, i don't want to imagine this kind of fear, especially in the mind of such a loved one. i want to move forwards.

we say goodbye to each other all of the time. it's reflexive. routine. meaningless, really.

sometimes the word actually means something. i couldn't handle saying it. i waited. that pause felt much longer than it was.

he said it first; a reflexive response. but it set me right off...

i'm ok. no, really, i am. the crying helped. but i think the music helped more.

hazy afternoon. lying in bed. daydreaming. digging some feedback.

let's get something clear, here. the supreme court has ruled that EI is not general revenue, meaning that cutting people off EI should actually not decrease government expenditures. the government is supposed to merely manage the fund. 

there was a big scandal about ten years ago when it was revealed that paul martin had dipped into EI to 'balance the budget' (whatever that is supposed to mean). the liberals made the argument that EI was just another tax and they had every right to manage the funds as they pleased. the supreme court said no - that money is a communal insurance fund constructed by workers and funds can only leave it under the circumstance that they're going out to workers.

so, this isn't an issue of general taxation. if you're dumb enough to think reducing the size of government will reduce taxation, it's not relevant in context - cutting EI premiums cannot reduce your income taxes or your sales taxes or any other kind of taxes. it's just not the same revenue stream.

so, what exactly are they doing here, then? why the quotas?

it's the same basic backwards liberal/conservative ideology that we see everywhere nowadays and few really seem to have a solid grasp on. people are on ei because the market isn't creating good jobs (in some areas this is seasonal, and that's just how the economy works there). short of dynamiting the concept of market organization (and you know i had to get that idea in there again), the most reasonable response from the government is to invest in job growth - because the market is failing on the point. if the market was being successful in creating jobs, there wouldn't be so many people on ei. yet, the backwards conservative/liberal approach is to throw people off ei so they can create their own jobs. the expectation is they'll become entrepreneurs of some sort. start businesses. and interest rates are low to encourage that.

it's like the industrial revolution never happened. small producers were never destroyed by large ones. competition is perfect and free. marx never existed.

the people they're turfing from ei don't even understand that this is expected of them. if they did, market fantasies are not going to all of a sudden allow of them to compete in an already saturated market.

five burger joints on the same street?

they just don't get it...

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/story/2013/07/20/bc-ei-whistleblower-suspended.html

this is an awful article, but i was thinking about something similar watching a chomsky lecture a few hours ago.

there's a strain of mathematics that is essentially platonic (with roots in pythagoras) that argues that numbers have an independent existence from the human mind. a modern proponent of this would be godel, which is an apparent paradox that i simply cannot grasp.

for the most part, though, modern mathematics completely rejects the idea - drawing largely on the mathematics of godel, which *proved* that arithmetic is incomplete, if not on the philosophy of hilbert. there have been a number of developments in axiomatic systems that make it clear that, by doing mathematics, we project our own perception of the reality around us. we can't even build a coherent theory of parallelism.

it's really a question of a classical v. a modern perspective, and it connects with other fields like physics and biology. quantum physics has rejected the idea that mathematics can be used to describe reality, whereas modern evolutionary concepts (notwithstanding the regression that game theory has thrust upon us) uphold the fundamentally stochastic nature of processes that happen around us.

it's not really an issue for debate anymore: math is a human construction, and kant was completely fucking wrong.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/07/130715070138.htm

there's a growing consensus, even, that, in order to really break through a number of the dead ends we're approaching in empirical science, we're going to have to develop a new language to describe reality.

how i learned to live with the tornado

ESA
should I be concerned about this tornade watch thing ?

Jessica Amber Murray
yes.

ESA
what do I do ? ? ?

Jessica Amber Murray

i'm not sure exactly, but it should involve working yourself into a paranoid rage somehow about something you have absolutely no control over.

ESA
...

thanks.

PARANOID RAGE CANNONS.

those rare moments of transcendent peace and clarity that occur when you've managed to reduce the number of tabs in your browser to a level where you don't need to scroll to see all of them...