Real Hopes and Dreams

I feel I am floating along aimlessly. There has got to be more to life than this. We are taught from a young age to get through school, to go to uni, to get a job, and everything will be alright. Well I did. What now? What do I aspire to? Of what do I dream? I have never had to come up with my own dreams, my own aspirations. They have been somewhat forced on me. Or at least I have been told what they should be and I have been more than happy to acquiesce. Like an ancient redwood floating along in a flash flood, I have been borne by the current of other people’s ideals, but when the waters recede I am left where ever I end up, looking oddly out of place, wondering how the hell I got there.

I find it very difficult in this world and society to formulate a plan for the future. It has always just happened. It's the big lie. Your parents, your teachers, your grandparents, they all feed you this tripe to get you motivated, to do the best you can. But there is never any talk of what next? There is no preparation for ‘real life’. It's completely ignored, the elephant in the room, but you lack the perception to realise it. Do well at school Andrew. Finish Uni Andrew. Why? So I can slog my guts out at a meaningless 9 to 5 job I hate to earn a mediocre wage on which to live. What next? To what can I apply my vast knowledge and understanding that has been drummed into me for the last 19 years? Why doesn't anybody prepare you for the boredom, the massive disappointment when you finally realise this is it. This is what you have been working so hard for. So you can sit in a fucking cubicle, under harsh fluorescent lights that, try as they might, can't possibly replace the sun, and feed the corporate machine its daily meal of people's hopes and dreams. Slowly being crushed into oblivion, walking along with hunched shoulders, looking at the footpath, a weak pathetic shell of what you once were, happy just to be alive. What happened to your childish hope, what you wanted to become. What happened to your will to be someone, not happy until you were the best at something, anything? You have grown up.

You know you have grown up when you realise it was all pointless, that it was all a lie. That you have been feed romantic, sepia tinged versions of adulthood your entire life, so you can't wait to get there. And when you finally do, you wish you never had. You wish that you had stayed with your idealised notions of reality intact, always aspiring to an impossible future. I don't want to lose my inner child. I don't want to be crushed. I don’t want to be happy merely because I am alive. Yet I feel it more and more every day. I feel like I am less and less of me and more and more of the brainless, personality free clone that seems to populate our cities and our offices. I feel like I am slowly being overtaken by that insidious devil, the devil of the daily grind, till one day I won't miss the sunshine, I won't miss the frenzied horseplay of mates, and the just hanging out for the sake of it. I don't want to be that person. But I don't know how to stop it.

Abortion and a Woman's Right to Choose

Today I am going to continue my run of serious blogs and just for a change, add a bit of controversy. It will surprise none of you who know me at all that occasionally I like to play the devils advocate and bring new twists to situations, and I have no compunction in putting forward controversial points of view if I think it needs to be said, so strap yourselves in and get ready.

I am a strong believer in the right for women to have legal, safe, affordable and as far as possible painless abortions. The world is not like it once was, abortions can be done safely, and sometimes it is kinder to a potential child not to be brought into this world. If the parent/s feel that they are not ready to provide the kind of life that they feel the child deserves then it can be the right thing to have an abortion. I’m not saying that it is ever an easy decision and I am sure the emotional scars can last for years. But it is an option in most states in Australia.

It strikes me as ridiculous that abortion is still a criminal offence in Victoria, and is in South Australia as well, unless the well being of the mother is at stake. This exception is used widely in SA, with doctors saying the mental well being of the mother is at risk of harm. Of course there is limits as to at what point of pregnancy it is still right to have abortion for differing reasons, and there has to be. There is a lot of debate about these limits, but that is for another time and another blog.

This is where the controversial bit starts. Like I have said before, I am all for legal abortions and a woman’s right to choose. After all it’s her body, her life, her child. What I want to know about is where is the fathers right to choose? It seems to me that the vocal crowd that keeps baying for rights of mothers often forget about the fathers. How is it fair for a woman to insist on having a baby, against the father’s wishes, or even without the father’s knowledge, and then insist that that same father is then responsible for the child, must pay child support or risk being stigmatised as a ‘dead beat dad’. Surely that is being hypocritical.

I know that I can’t possibly hope to understand the complexities of the emotions a woman must go through when she is pregnant. And I am in no way suggesting that fathers should have as much as a say as mothers in whether an abortion occurs or not. But what I am saying is if a women decides to have a baby against the wishes of the father, then surely that has to be taken into account when deciding child support. Maybe a total absence of child support isn’t the way to go, but surely a reduced rate. And then that should also play a part in the mother’s decision. How is it that fathers are derided for avoiding their responsibility to the mother, but it is ok for mothers to abdicate their responsibility to the father?

I am sick of the debate centring on how women and mothers feel about abortion and pregnancy, as if all males are some sort of automated, non-feeling, impregnating bastards. You know what, men have feelings too, and some fathers are just as devastated by abortions as some mothers. I don’t see how it is congruous to suggest that fathers take responsibility for their actions, yet their right to have a say on what those actions are end with the sex. You know what, it takes two people to have sex, to become pregnant (normally) and two people are responsible for the well being of the child once it is born. Yet for some reason, one half of those responsible often get cut out of one of the crucial decisions in the whole business.

I am not for one minute suggesting that a unanimous decision must be come to in every case. This is clearly not possible or reasonable. And the ultimate decision of whether to have a baby has to rest with the mother; there can be no argument about that. I don’t want to see the ridiculous situation where a man can force a woman to have his baby. What I do want is for the women to take responsibility for what was ultimately two people’s choice.

It is often said in the child support debate that the man made that choice when he slept with the women, and now he must take responsibility. Well so did the woman. And I think it is grossly unfair for a woman to force her choice onto a man, and then expect that man to pay for it for the rest of his life. I agree there is a differing degree of emotional attachment and damage to be done in a lot of cases, but that does not warrant a free pass for women to decide the fate of men’s futures merely because they both chose to sleep together. Nor are most men emotionless beings running around impregnating women and the telling then to ‘just get an abortion’. The world is not as simple as that.

Unfortunately this view point is often ignored in favour of women’s rights, as though all pregnant women are somehow saints that ended up with a baby after a man promised them the world and left them with nothing. And I am sick of half of the population being treated as such pariahs. Yes some men are like that, as are some women evil, conniving, bitches, willing to do anything to make someone’s life a misery. Women and men are equally responsible for unwanted pregnancies, and should be equally involved in ALL stages of the decision making process. The law needs to reflect this and also make both parties responsible for the decisions they make.



PS I would love you to comment on this if you agree or disagree with me. And please take into account this is just one side of the story I think is often ignored, it is not necessarily the way to go, but I think it needs to be looked at more carefully.

The Audacity of Oxygen

When I consider my life I like to think I'm doing ok.

.

Sure I've had a string of shitty bar jobs, completed diplomas and degrees that funkmaster wouldn't use to wipe his arse with, but aside from that I've travelled pretty well and encountered a wide range of cultures and lifestyles.

.

Not once in this time, however, have i encountered somebody who is too busy to breathe. After spending a substantial amount of time pondering exactly what you would have to be doing to be, in fact, too busy to breathe i came up with nothing.

.

A diver would have an oxygen tank, a swimmer would come up for air, a sex fiend would loosen the leash...

.

But apparently there are people who are too busy to breathe. and finally they are being catered for. Nivea has released 'Nivea visage oxygen' catering for those who are 'too busy to breathe'.

.

Surely between dropping the kids off to school, making that 9am brunch with other well off young hottie mummies, dropping by the market to pick up some organic overpriced produce you would find at least a bit of time to breathe, and more importantly, even if you didnt find time, wouldn't your body just do it for you anyway? If it didnt, wouldn't you die?

.

Since when- and i concede i am the reminder king- did we have to actually think about making time to breathe.

.

outrageous.

The Next Step in Evolution and AI

Life, so goes the theory, has evolved over time (lots of time) to adapt to its surroundings. Slightly different surroundings bring slightly different adaptations and voila, we have the staggering variety of life here on Earth in mere millennia. Humans, of course, share this trait. Black People turned into white people over thousands of years while in colder climes, Asians stayed in the sun too long and got squinty eyes and all the rest of it.

The problem now is that we as a species are not allowing nature to catch up. We are constantly inventing new things, changing our environments to suit ourselves. Essentially we are adapting the environment to suit ourselves. The problem with this is it may freeze evolution where it is. We are essentially telling natural selection to go stuff itself, we are perfect as we are and we’ll change everything else to suit us, thank you very much. So we give nature no chance to move on to the next evolutionary step. We can’t read minds, we can’t fly and we can’t be a mind with no body, ever, because we can’t evolve.

Also with medical technology we are keeping those negative evolutions (or devolutions) that would normally kill off the lucky recipients of such changes. So humans as a species are in the midst of a simultaneous devolution and evolution. This can only spell trouble. Taking an extreme and definitely politically incorrect view point, do we really need millions more idiots running around this world just because of the ‘sanctity of life’ and we have prevented them from taking the natural course and killing themselves off.

Of course there is arguments against this and its all value judgements, and its impossible to draw the line. Do we let an otherwise healthy, intelligent person die of cancer just because they ‘evolved’ that way? Or do we have an IQ cutoff for babies and kill them because they are a ‘devolution’? It all gets too complicated so we just go on as we are, and suffer/enjoy the consequences.

The biggest problem I see though is not the evolution/devolution dichotomy, but the possibility that we create something that we can’t control, and ruin everything for everybody. Evolution previously took care of this. If it didn’t work, you died, if it did, you survived. Now with the pace of humans altering their environment to suit themselves, there is no such automatic control.

If genetic modification of crops somehow reduces or eradicates the nutrional value of those crops, there is no way to go back, we’re all screwed. One interesting project I just came across the other day is ‘Blue Brain’. It is essentially a project modelling an entire rat brain from the ground up. They have successfully modelled a single neocortical column, the basic building block of all mammalian brains including humans. The cool thing about this is that when the set it to run, the column created its own networks between its neurons. It essentially grew as a real brain did. Of course it is miles off being true AI, but it is a long way there already.

And this is one of the scariest things about altering our environment, altering it to suit us, instead of altering to suit our environments. What if we create AI and can’t control it. It could be the end of the human race. I have a feeling that all intelligent life reaches this point at some point in its life. We can go one of two ways here, wipe ourselves out, or move onto the next evolutionary stage in our development. And I think its going to be dumb luck, not good management as to which it turns out to be. Bring on The Terminator.

An off-the-cuff blog regarding the first thing that caught my eye

There is a very special item that adorns the wall to the left of my little laptop hub (aka dinner table). Many of you will be familiar with it. Some of you might even be lucky enough to appear in it.

Yes, it’s the infamous photo board that Fincher et al put together for that very special occasion that was my 21^st birthday. Seems like an eternity ago now. Well, I guess 5 years is a long time…

This board is far more than just a collection of photos. I view it as a living, breathing tapestry of memories. Anyone who has sat and gazed at it for even a minute would know just what I mean. It never ceases to amaze me – each time I casually glance at the board I hone in on a photo that I hadn’t noticed for a while, and this triggers a memory which sets off a chain reaction of other associated recollections. Allow me to provide an example.

The photo that just caught my eye is one of me with bleached blonde hair tucking into a sausage in bread. I recall that this was from Ricardo del Sanjay’s 21^st. I then remember the mood of that night….the first time I met The Michael (then known simply as “Michael”)….drinking copious of amounts of what would have been no doubt Coopers, yes, before I became a sellout…I remember thinking it would be a great idea to sleep outside…and then rueing the shit out of this decision as I woke up at the crack of dawn to the blistering January sun after what couldn’t have been more than a couple of hours sleep…I could go on and on.

Now I’d estimate that there would be about 100 photos on the board, probably more. Each one of these is essentially a portal to a myriad of memories of my teens and early 20’s. If my house caught fire, I’d get burnt in order to save the board. Its priceless.

In so many ways gazing at this board is better than watching videos. The story is by no means linear, and each photo triggers so many brilliant little nuances of reminiscence from days where everything seemed so simple, and everyone was never much further than a text message invite away…

Times have changed. The crew has more or less disbanded, geographically anyway. But this board is homage to tighter knit days – and I love it to death.

With great respect and humble appreciation for my co-authors,

- The Moff

Back to the Roots

Friends, Romans, Countrymen, lend me your ears.

It is time to take this thing back to where it all began.

I write this as the clock ticks past midnight on a truly pivotal day in the lives of your faithful blog veterans Funkmaster D and I.

For today, Grand Theft Auto IV is released.

The next installment in the franchise that has brought so much joy and escapism to our lives on and off for over 6 years.

It is fitting that on such a day, this bold decision regarding the blogs future be executed by its very founder.

Ladies and gentleman, today is year zero.

Benevolently yours,

- The Moff

Melon Collie and the Infinite Sadness

We have already established that the blog is dead. It’s tired and it needs a revival. As such, a change of tack is needed, so here goes, my foray into the world of ridiculously melon collie and thought provoking blogs, with not a scent of humour. If you don’t like it, HTFU.

Probably as a consequence of watching way too many teen soap dramas and enjoying them, I sometimes feel as though my life is a TV show. When I look back on my memories they condense themselves into neat little blocks of memories which resemble an episode, complete with appropriate theme music. The relationships between my friends will always work out in the end and nothing bad will ever really happen. And if it does it will all work out in the end, because we are in TV land and the protagonists always get out of it alright, good always triumphs over evil, and everyone lives happily ever after.

And then something happens that jolts me back to reality, and I suddenly realise whatever happens, happens forever. I can’t hit the rewind button and re-write the episode. Its done and dusted and I have to deal with the consequences. God knows why I am thinking of it today, but one such incident was when my Mum crashed her car quite badly on the freeway about a year ago.

I was at home when I heard about it and though nothing of it really, pretty much ‘Stupid Mum, learn to drive’, but then Dad called me and said the ambulance had taken her to hospital and she had crashed into the barrier at close to 100 k’s. And I suddenly realised if anything happened, it was for keeps. I might not have a Mum anymore, and it was one of the most sobering experiences of my life. I simply didn’t want to imagine what life would be like without my Mother.

As it turned out she was fine, with just a few bruises. But try as I might I couldn’t shake this reality feeling. I couldn’t stop thinking about situations or occurrences that could change my life. And the fact that it was my life, not a TV show that I could escape from if it became to embarrassing or hard, this was it, and its here to stay.

It usually lasts a couple of days and then I blissfully float back into my world, where I don’t have to think about things like that constantly. I think it’s a defence mechanism, I would be paralysed by fear and trepidation if I had to think about bad shit happening to the people I love all the time. But they come back to haunt me sometimes on days like today. Sometimes life would be easier as a TV show.