Today I found myself erasing a used scantron sheet because I didn’t have 5 cents to buy a new one..  Is that the epitome of the broke college student or what?

You might first want to google “Old Hag Syndrome” to get some perspective on what I’ll be talking about - there’s a wealth of information on the net..

I decided to write about this because it happened to me recently. In fact, it’s something I’ve consistently experienced much of my life, perhaps 3 or 4 times a year (sometimes more, sometimes less, largely depending on where I’m living).

Old Hag Syndrome includes 2 distinct but related phenomena that have been lumped together by modern neuroscience to push a certain agenda. The first is Sleep Paralysis: some people, if they wake up at an odd time or are disturbed while falling asleep, will regain consciousness but will be momentarily unable to move. The brain disconnects itself from the body during sleep to keep the sleeper from acting out their dreams (when this doesn’t happen we end up sleepwalking). If someone wakes up at an odd time, the brain may not reconnect to the body right away, leaving the victim paralyzed for up to a minute.

The second phenomenon doesn’t have a scientific name, but I would call it demonic attack. People sometimes wake up and feel they are being pinned to the bed or choked by an evil entity, which they may or may not be able to see. They might feel like their body is being taken over, or that they are being somehow violated spiritually. This is where the name, “Old Hag Syndrome” comes from. In ancient times it was thought a hag (witch) was trying to kill the victim by sitting on their chest and suffocating them.

Modern science tells us these are both the same thing, and that the second is simply the brain making up a reason for why the body can’t move.

I’ve experienced both, and they are absolutely different and distinct. There is no mistaking the reality of the presence, which I have occasionly seen or felt hours before going to bed. This is not unusual - often the victim of the second sort of experience hasn’t fallen asleep yet, or they see or sense the evil entity before they are pinned down, which plainly gives lie to the current explanation. Sleep paralysis does sometimes occur as a prelude to an attack - I believe this is because the entity in question is taking advantage of the situation, i.e. the body is not under the brain’s control and is thus vulnerable.

This sort of thing is almost universally known in every culture across the world, both modern and ancient, and every culture but ours has attributed it to some kind of spiritual assault. I am all for modern science, but the foundation of science is empirical evidence, and in this case the facts point to a spiritual explanation. Non-believers often tell me there is no evidence for a spiritual reality, which is certainly not the case. This may in fact be some of the most convincing evidence. You must either attribute it to mass hallucinations, which have been consistently similar among different, isolated, cultures, or you must accept the reality of the experience.

Current mood: annoyed

I was in my bedroom drawing earlier today when I heard a TV commercial drifting in from the livingroom. The product being advertised was an “anti-aging” face cream fortified with caffeine, purported to take years off your face in just minutes!!! The line of copy that caught my attention was, “It’s got caffeine, it wakes your skin right up!”

There are three assumptions the copywriters are potentially making here that I find interesting.

1) Today’s successful woman (note this an expensive, high-end product) is completely ignorant of the biological sciences, particularly pharmacology. Caffeine acts only on the brain. Caffeine is not absorbed unless exposed to the digestive tract or mucous membranes.

2) Today’s successful woman is not just ignorant of the biological sciences, but also simply ignorant. Common sense tells us that topical caffeine will be doubly inneffective: We drink our coffee to get a buzz instead of dipping our hands in it, and even if we did dip our hands in our coffee, our skin does not look old because it is sleepy.

3) Today’s successful woman practices sympathetic magic. The caffeine in this product is functioning as a sort of tailsman. Caffeine wakes us up when we drink it, therefore it must contain the property of waking-upness, which can be transmitted through mere proximity. There is a confusion of ontological categories happening here. This is like eating the heart of your fallen enemy to absorb his bravery.

I find this commercial insulting and I’m not even a woman.

I got a bulletin today about seal clubbing. It’s been circulating for a while - I’ve seen it 3 or 4 times now - and it will no doubt be around until MySpace passes from us. It talks about hunters in Alaska and Canada clubbing baby seals for sport, from the perspective of the seal. The dialog is as follows:

wtf canada and norway
“we” animals are all gods creatures, have some fucking respect!
How would you like it to be whacked hard over the head as a “sport”!?
Norway and Canada have a new kind of tourism. Killing baby seals. They call it a “sport”..You want to call this a sport ?
You’re our only hope !!!
This barbarism shouldnt be possible in our society..
Dont turn your back on us, we are defenseless
I know these images seem painful for you, but we feel the pain. We are being slaughtered and its going on RIGHT NOW…
What gives him the right to kill us? Who is he to decide about life and death?
What kind of sport is this? I didnt harm anyone. I was just swimming around..
Please help me and my friends…
You cant just ignore these images.. Keeping silent and doing nothing makes you guilty…
Please help us
Please dont leave us alone…

A representative picture:

Before considering the issue, it is best to clear up some misconceptions. Baby seals are not hunted for sport but for their pelts, which are valuable because of the soft fur. They are clubbed instead of shot for several reasons. First, clubbing the seal doesn’t put a hole in the pelt. Second, seals that are shot often escape under the ice where they die slowly, and the hunter looses his quarry. Guns are employed when the ice is too weak to support the hunter, but otherwise clubs are more humane and more effective.

People read this bulletin and are outraged - they feel as if the hunters are committing murder. I will admit, I feel the same. Emotions can be unreliable however. Are we justified in feeling this way, or are we being misled? Does the bulletin even present an argument?

Examined objectively, it asks plenty of questions but otherwise doesn’t say much. It is effective because of certain foundational assumptions. To consider the bulletin’s contents we must first enter it’s frame of reference, a frame of reference in which the immorality of the hunter is a foregone conclusion. The writer doesn’t need to make an argument - by listening we have already agreed.

The narrator of the bulletin is a seal. It speaks as if it understands it’s situation, and even makes philosophical and ethical conjectures. Most people would deny that seals can reason, but the issue is never brought up. The seal’s intelligence must be presupposed for the dialog to even make sense (otherwise how could it talk to you?), so by reading we have tacitly agreed without considering the question. This is like being asked, “Have you stopped beating your wife yet?” The point of contention is concealed in the premise and sneaks in under the radar, as it were.

If the seal can reason, we must agree with it on all points. “Yes, Mr. Seal, of course it is terrible that your family is being murdered. This kind of thing should never be allowed in civilized society. I’m sure that with the help of the police we can have these people put away. Your testimony will be more than enough to convict..” WTF! I’m talking to a seal! Seals are not intelligent beings. No doubt they feel pain, but they most certainly do not suffer like us because they are not self-aware. Male seals eat their offspring on a regular basis - perhaps we should try them in court? The idea is absurd because a seal is not a person and cannot be morally culpable. In the same way, it can be killed, but it cannot be murdered. Only people can be murdered. It may be wrong to kill seals for their pelts, but it is not the same as killing a person.

Why is it so easy to view seals as people? I can think of two reasons. First, speaking from an animal or object’s perspective is a common literary technique, used to inspire sympathy. We are accustomed to stepping into the shoes of animals, and it is easy to forget the device is rhetorical, not logical. (or perhaps the distinction between rhetoric and logic has collapsed…)

Second, seals look like people. More specifically, baby seals look like human infants in certain respects, notably the size and position of the eyes. They trigger the same emotional response, and we want to nurture and protect them. This is why I don’t get bulletins about stopping the wholesale slaughter of iguanas in Ecuador - iguanas just aren’t cute. Identifying with a seal isn’t bad per se, as long as we remember our feelings don’t determine reality. The seal may be cuddly, but that doesn’t make it human.

This bulletin reflects a much bigger problem in our post-modern society: whatever we think or feel is real for us. If we feel the seal is suffering, it must really suffer like a person. This is most evident when religion is discussed: “That’s what you believe, and that may be true for you, but this is what’s true for me..” Also with art: “It doesn’t matter what other people think, the important thing is to express yourself and what you feel” Truth doesn’t work that way. It doesn’t come from inside you, it comes from outside. I have never heard an artist claim great art comes from inside, except as a sort of public relations ploy. Art must communicate truth, and truth is external. The artist must first internalize that truth, but it does not originate in him, and if no one gets his art it was probably based on a delusion and is worthless. Anyone capable of making great art must of necessity understand this, thus we have no great art. It is dying, along with poetry and music and philosophy, being replaced with meaningless abstraction. or sentimentalism.

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I’m sure you’re all groaning after reading this, “Ughh, Matt likes to kill baby seals..” If you think the seals should be spared, consider whether you are living consistently with your beliefs. Do you wear leather shoes? Leather belts? That cow spent it’s life in a stall only slightly bigger than itself, being pumped full of hormones, then was shot through the skull with a bolt-gun. Or perhaps these were used to electrocute the brain:This site is quite informative. Are cows somehow less significant than seals? Cows don’t eat their young like seals do, and while it’s true that we don’t need seal pelts, we don’t need leather either - there are plenty of substitutes. I respect people who think it is wrong to kill animals for human use if they are consistent in defending all animals and live according to their belief. Just getting whiny over the cute ones: a sign of a weak mind.

I just got home from the annual Ascension Day service, held this year at St. Johns Covina. The holiday is minor, and since the location rotates throughout the district attendance requires a map and varying amounts of driving. It is never popular. There is a mass choir, however, and I am a choir fanatic, so I go.

The performance was only average - just two songs: a hymn, and “The Lord Bless You and Keep You” by Peter. C. Lutkin, which is apparently such old hat that everyone ripped on the director for being lazy. I’d never heard it though, and played out material gets played out for a reason - it was quite pretty.

The preaching was far more interesting, though not for it’s content (Don’t remember the topic. Something about Jesus). As the pastor spoke, his sermon was translated into American Sign Language by a girl standing below the pulpit. I’ve seen people sign before, and even studied it closely, but I somehow missed the point - the central essence of the thing - until tonight.

This girl’s performance was mesmerizing. She was only average looking, with frizzy hair and the plain-faced look of a midwesterner (perhaps Utah), but I began to find her very attractive. I find people who sing attractive, and the experience was similar. I missed the sermon because I kept watching her and her hands - sometimes coming up under the sound and forming it the way a potter works at the wheel, sometimes floating on top like butterflies, or scarves on a line. Speech, with all it’s body and fullness, was shaped into an almost tangible thing under her hands. In the same way music creates a solid harmonic framework from nothing but air, upon which melodic ideas can rest and unfold, she was able to create substance through her movement. The kind of substance, provided by sound, that gives speech solidity and a felt presence - a substance that would otherwise be missing for the deaf, even if the sermon were available in print.

Both sign language and written English are inherently visual, so it is easy to think of signing as analogous to writing. Text is transparent: it is meant to translate from symbol to concept as quickly as possible. When formated properly, the medium almost disappears and it’s contents are directly available. I assumed ASL was the same - purely symbolic, with nothing in the form of the symbols apart from the ideas they signify.

This is not the case at all. ASL is much more like spoken English. It is not a transparent medium. The shapes of the signs are the sounds of speech, and they have substance inherent in their form, substance that can hinder or support the ideas being conveyed in the same way speech can be sonorous or ugly. I would have thought poetry impossible for the deaf (half of it would be missing - poetry must be read aloud, or at least read aloud in the mind), but it isn’t: the form of the sounds is in the shape of the signs.

I’ve just realized, thinking back, that it is most like dancing - like watching a ballet. Speaking with it must be like dancing yourself. Sign Language Girl, if you wanna go out some time, drop me a line…

 People moving really sucks.  I’m instituting a new rule - if you become my friend, I require you to stay put, or else.. (I will beat you about the ears will a rolled newspaper, or something similar..)

I’m taking a communications class, Mass Media & Society.  As a project, I cataloged my consumption of media over the course of a week and discussed the results.  The following is an excerpt that stems from reflection on the few, token hours I spent reading.  It is about the dangers of television and advertisements, and while it was written to be purposefully inflammatory (the prof. likes that), I do feel strongly about the dangers of TV.  If you’ve been reading for a while you’ve heard me talk about similar ideas, but I feel it’s something I should bring up periodically as a sort of public service.

    Books are, sadly, low on the survey but high on my list of priorities. I am currently writing more than I am reading, and the reading I do is on the net. Still, books provide an element of balance than cannot be found elsewhere. They are a few steps back from the fires of television and the weekly news: ideas have time to cool and solidify into something firm and stable within a book; TV just blinds and burns then fades away.

I don’t watch TV, except on rare occasions. I sold my television years ago and have never regretted the sale. TV isn’t inherently bad as a medium but I think much of what we watch is bad – bad for the mind and bad for the spirit.

Our bodies react pleasurably to stimulation. TV provides that stimulation, and as it increases, so does the pleasurable thrill. TV executives know this, hence the ever increasing levels of frenetic action in programming. Cut scenes of less than a second have become the norm - if the camera is still the audience is bored. Unfortunately, this continual over-excitement wears down and fractures the mind. There is no time for logical thought, for consideration or reflection, during that half-second cut: we are reacting on a gut level (great for the advertisers!), jumping from one topic to the next, and slowly becoming incapable of anything else. We are becoming a nation of idiots.

Without the ability to think we are vulnerable to manipulation and control, and TV advertisements prey on that vulnerability. The constant, underlying theme of modern advertising: without The Product you are worthless. Women are shown impossible ideals of physical beauty, images of wealth they will never possess, even visions of tranquility and inner peace, and they are promised everything if only they will buy The Beauty Product: “All this I will give you…if you will bow down and worship me.” We buy success with a Car, fun and companionship with Beer, and not even love is self-sufficient – it must be bought with a Diamond, nothing else will do.

I could go on about TV, about televised news creating a culture of fear and hate and political debate being reduced to an exercise in acting,..

Yet more music - either here or on my band profile.  I promise I’m not subjecting you to more of my painful vocals (for the time being).  Instead, you get samples of Spiro Agnew set against a good old TR-808 backbeat and some analogue synthesis.  Political music, if you will :)

1) I got in a fight last night. I was talking to this guy Mike, who happens to be black, and this other guy I don’t know (intoxicated I think) starts refering to him with racial slurs. So I tell Stranger Person to shut up (there was some profanity in there, sadly…). Stranger Person didn’t like this: he punched me in the stomach, threw me on the ground, and again into the bushes when I tried to get up. I collected myself at this point, chopped the guy on the neck, hip tossed him, and put a sleeper hold on him. I guess someone else went off and found a security gaurd, cause they showed up and handcuffed him while I had him pinned. I just explained what had happened and left, so I’m not sure how he ended up. I have some pretty nasty cuts from falling, but on the plus side I won, so now I’m 4-0 :)

2) Today, I was out walking, and I climbed up the hillside in Big Dalton Canyon. It’s quite steep and was difficult getting up - I came through a ravine then worked my way back around the face. This would have been fine, except I wasn’t paying attention to the time and it got dark. I turned around but couldn’t find the route I had come by and ended up sliding down the hill.

The hills in Big Dalton are covered with a network of valleys and canyons, most of them steep and full of trees. The tops of the trees grow up into the sun and protrude a little past the ground above. At night, this looks like flat land with bushes, not giant pits of death. I grabbed one of these ‘bushes’, and tried to lower myself into what I thought was maybe a 3 - 4 ft. ditch. Instead, I ended up falling God knows how far… it was too dark to see but I was in the air about 3 seconds. I bounced off the canyon wall twice, and the third time landed upside down in a patch of what looked like poison oak. It was really to dark to identify it, but I’m starting to get bumps on my arms so now I’m pretty sure. The rash shows up faster each time I get it.

So in short, I’m pretty beat up :-P

My mood has improved quite a bit since last posting - having strangers recognize and appreciate your creative efforts is always uplifting.  My band profile got a message from another L.A. band.  They said they really like my music, that they are planning a tour in august with another group from New Orleans, and they want me to tour with them :-)  Unfortunately, they were under the impression that I am a full band.  I can’t perform live because there is just one of me.  It’s still nice though..

This past Sunday Hope Lutheran’s evening service was held outdoors, around a campfire in Big Dalton Canyon. We had a similar outdoor service last year and it was very popular, so it will probably become a regular event.

Last time a few people went home after the service, but most stayed, roasted marshmallows, sang camp songs, and generally had fun. This year, everyone left. I tried to argue but was met with various excuses: “I have to finish these fliers that are due next Friday”, “The kids are going to get tired if we stay”, “I need to do the dishes”, “We don’t have any flashlights”, and “I have to go shopping”. I called a couple of these lame and got the response, “Well, sometimes it sucks being grown up.”

The general attitude after the service, and that response in particular, have been bothering me for some reason.. If being grown up means not enjoying campfires and fellowship I want to be a Toys-R-Us kid, but that’s not really the problem. I’ve spent enough time in the past buying my own groceries, doing the bills, etc., to know we must do these things whether we like them or not, and I think the person who responded was most likely out of everyone to have truthfully needed to shop that night instead of using it as an excuse. Their response just seemed to embody the group mindset, which was troubling.

The children wanted to stay. The grown-ups (except for me and Peter) didn’t. The grown-ups had responsibilities that interfered..? It looks that way, but no. Even children have responsibilities (schoolwork, chores). It was really a difference of values. The grown-ups valued their responsibilities more than staying, and rightly so..? Again it would seem so, but the reality is different. Fliers for work, shopping, and doing dishes beat out the campfire - they must be done. However! they didn’t need to be done right then. These people all have leisure activities they could have sacrificed later in the week. What happened was more like this:

*Child’s Priorities*
1) Campfire
2) Schoolwork
3) Playing Ball
4) Television
5) Internet Time
6) Resting

*Adult’s Priorities*
1) Work / Shopping / Chores
2) Reading
3) Television
4) Internet Time
5) Rest
6) Campfire

There are problems in both cases. The children should prioritize schoolwork over a campfire, and I’m pretty sure they wouldn’t. But at least they know better - I’m sure they would admit schoolwork was more important if asked. The adults, well,… I can’t say with certainty the campfire should be bumped up to #2 for every adult in every case. However, it is something that happens only once a year, and it involves genuine fellowship and communion with the Christian community.

Watching television at best does nothing, and at worst fills the mind with poisonous shit. There is a direct correlation between negative self-image and television/magazine viewing, and the average adult watches 28 hours a week. Some literature is edifying, but can be read any time (instead of the TV perhaps?). Surely it is better to give up the television or reading, do the errands or chores later in the week, and celebrate a festival!?

The adult attitude? No, it’s not better. Fellowship around the campfire is less important than routine. I think most adults really believe pushing back their schedule, spending an extra day with the dishes dirty for a campfire would be silly.

Our conception of adulthood is screwy. Growing up means growing, not just changing - we shouldn’t abandon things we loved as children, we should add to them and develop them. “We acquire a taste for coffee as adults, but we don’t give up liking buttered toast or hot chocolate” (Lewis).

The sad result - our children are stronger than we are, and can see more clearly. They love their friends freely: they are open with them, they want to spend time with them, they are intimate even to the point of sleeping in the same bed. They understand that sitting by the fire, talking, singing together is really important - that it is an expression of love and trust. It is communion without the wine (and grahm crackers for bread).

In contrast, us adults hardly seem to care. Something in our culture destroys that free, open love as we get older and convinces us the destruction is normal, a sign of maturity. Perhaps it’s because we constantly move - we leave home for college, move somewhere else after that, move again when we marry or change jobs. Each time we loose friends and connections we loose a little trust along with them. I’m not sure if it’s that or something else, but whatever it is, I hate it..