Blue Saturday

Sprinkles is awesome, that's a great interview

was thinking just this morning, during a Today programme report on why people like getting drunk, which approached it from an angle of 'why bcos of chemicals in brane, people just think they enjoy it', what a pernicious influence materialism can be, especially when it is confused with or feeds into determinism. it's a grubby trump card played by people who are frightened of moral, spiritual or aesthetic arguments. Like 'taxpayer's money' in political discussion. I realise this isn't new, but i was reminded of it. last time i think i thought about it was on reading the introduction to 'guns germs and steel' by j diamnond, where he said 'one day all history will be scientific' i paraphrase, but not far off.

didn't hear the report but that doesn't necessarily sound like a reductively materialist viewpoint. like the parable about a supercomputer running all of society on utilitarian grounds deciding to keep us dosed up to the eyeballs with happy pills, surely recognising that all happinesses are not equal even if they're ultimately all brain chemicals is a distinctly anti-material view?

I'm sorry ledge, I'm not sure I understand, and that's absolutely not because your words aren't clear, but because i'm feeling a bit tired/hungover. the report felt reductively materialist, and I'm trying to turn your words back on it to consider whether that was the case or not, but my brain isn't up to it, it seems. I'll check myself into the knacker's yard.

maybe utilitarian or moral realist as much as materialist. i still believe in a materialism that allows for magic or soul - at least as metaphors. arguing that my subjective enjoyment isn't real is a lost cause in lots of ways, but there are political reasons why people want to demystify experience, and there are tired evolutionary biological arguments that always ignore the non-evolutionary modifications humans have made to their brains/lifestyles since we developed culture.

or in short the world is full of miserable ascetics and most of them are fascists of some stripe.

recognising that all happinesses are not equal even if they're ultimately all brain chemicals is a distinctly anti-material view?

possibly but not necessarily, i'm sure there are people out there who still think that they can build the perfect felicimeter and it's just a case of quantitative difference rather than qualitative.

Quantitative e-zing

can be a materialist & still believe in mind/soul if you accept the latter as "emergent" properties of highly complex material systems like the human nervous system

let's not turn this into another consciousness c/d thread though eh

c

I stay away from consciousness threads, prefer the existentialist ones like this

that's why i'm happy to use "soul" as a materialist term without worrying about what it's made of in this sense, in my reading i think this is how James Hillman uses it

but to return to Fizzles initial point i guess "pleasure centres cause pleasure" is more or less tautological and has nothing to do with "how much pleasure is too much and shd we tax it?"

well, that was the other part of the story, yes. recognise that alcohol can be a blight, certainly don't think it *is* automatically a blight (think this was why the 'pleasure centre' approach gave me the heebie-jeebies) and shy like a startled foal from what always looks like 'the poor can't be trusted with their horrible vulgar destructive enjoyments'.

of course it's about that. flat taxes punish the poor. sometimes for their own good. try engaging any MP or healthcare professional on the topic of "positive alternatives to intoxication" and then work out whether the blindness is voluntary or not

thinking this stuff thru the prism of the tri-weekly meetings i'm attending where we sit in a circle and remind each other why it's good to stay sober

yep. and nothing like the same thing, but i'm trying to be soberer as well, through a sort of animal sense of self-conservation kicking in. just find drinking is such a reset to 0 of things i'm trying to build against. in my head of course, but what isn't *dribbles into bib*

i take 6 pills a day which are supposed to damp down any cravings i might get and they are singularly failing to work today.

ill-advised walk down memory lane of nightclubs i have known, loved and fallen over in has stoked the gibbering boozewant that's been gnawing at me since last Friday.

typing this out partly to try and exorcise the fucker.

how much do you feel the cravings are chemical/how much patterns of behaviour emotional/memory triggers?

I mean fucked if I know how to deal with fine spring days - it's almost a childhood trigger for all sorts of things (love, drink, hope even, god help us).

if this isn't helpful tell me stfu obv.

Ive come around to the belief that wilted lettuce is a v important part of a toasted sandwich

And hey, if i can change

nah i think it's pure emotional/cognitive stuff. going into detox i met a bunch of people with full blown addiction, every day wake up til pass out drinkers, and it put my own patterns into perspective. not that i was "less bad" than them, but in the parlance i was a problem drinker and hadn't progressed to full-blown alcoholic. for a bunch of reasons i guess.

and what i'm craving isn't just alcohol and nicotine - god it is them tho too - but the pub, my blurry spinning Wonderland/escape route. and the sun's only just come out here, but yeah, it makes me want to drink. as does bad weather, hot weather, happiness, sadness, mediumness, emptiness, plenitude, you name it, i'll drink to it.

walking home Friday night a thought experiment came into my head - if I was presented with a stranger, and a gun, and if i shot that stranger right there and then i could drink with no consequences but the usual social/emotional ones for the rest of my life, wd i do it? and my nerves and brain was straining "yeah, this is horrible but yeah i feel like i could do that, feel like i'd have to do that". and then suddenly it occured to me that the victim - that was me too. i was unwittingly writing the allegory of my own life choices.

and still i feel like i am 2 children away from swan-diving back into my escape tunnel.

and i'm just rational enough to know that 4 weeks sober is nothing. not a dent, not a scratch on my soul. i know nothing will get better for months, years, ever, whatever. i have to keep rationalising the sense of this decision.

and i hate rationalising and i hate sense.

What other consequences apart from the social/emotional ones? Health?

4 weeks sober is a sea change stfu btw

financial mainly i guess. if i could "afford" to drink, whatever the other costs. finance being that hard, unnegotiable limit.

Hmm not sure yr unwitting allegorisin so much as considering a hitman career then tbf

Like crowds, drugs, and love, alcohol can befuddle the most lucid mind. Alcohol turns the concrete wall of isolation into a paper screen which the actors can tear according to their fancy, for it arranges everything on the stage of an intimate theatre. A generous illusion, and thus still more deadly.

i guess i've used this Vaneigem quote before but there it was, waiting to say hello while i browsed

Was RV a boozer? Was he talking there about Guy D's drinking, do you think?

i don't know. i've always thought of Vaneigem as the party guy of those two but that cd easily be an effect of writing styles. that quote cd be self-referential too, anybody who's loved booze too long and too well can recognise the seduction he describes.

(fending off my own little swim in denial with curry and scones, not necessarily in that order)

Hopefully not together tho

not sober, no

4 weeks sober is a sea change stfu btw

this, anyway, cos it's about... fucking gotta stop shriving my soul on ilx... but it's about the movement away from something wch is damaging you. it can be expected to be hard work, and you can expect not to succeed sometimes, or to backslide, but knowing that you are moving away from something and idk caring for yourself cos you deserve it etc, feels like an important thing to focus on.

<\psychobabble>

cosign on the whole pub thing tho.

i feel less irritable mostly but then i worry that denying irritation or anger or sarcasm is denying part of human experience

Ha

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0bS-YnLf4s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kq204wG8UfA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uIbXvaE39wM

wilson phillips otm tho

yeah i know :|

JESUS I WANT A DRINK

i think abt wilson philips more than anyone not living in 1991 should

it's fine to think about Wilson Philips imo, i don't think i want to go back to the early 90s tho unless i get to take foreknowledge with me

i'd probably just make the same mistakes all over

Q. is Abba's "Slipping Through My Fingers" the most heartbreaking song ever written?

heartbroken maybe. just completely flat out destroyed by what parenthood is.

it's amazing how fucking awful i can feel without doing a single thing all day

that's not amazing; it's natural imo

yeah, i don't know about natural but i know there are deep currents that do more to affect my mood than the mundane stuff on the surface. maybe doing nothing just makes that more powerful cos there's nothing to counter-balance them.

The Dogon say their astronomical knowledge was given to them by the Nommos, amphibious beings sent to Earth from Sirius for the benefit of mankind. The name comes from a Dogon word meaning 'to make one drink', and the Nommos are also called 'Masters of the Water', the 'Monitors', and the 'Teachers'. According to Dogon mythology, Nommo was the first living being created by Amma, the sky god and creator of the universe. He soon multiplied to become six pairs of twins. [This is a metaphor for our original 12-strand DNA. Our present physical DNA contains 2 strands which hold the genetic codes for our physical evolvement.]

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v165/noodle_vague/untitled_zps2401be8c.jpg

http://i298.photobucket.com/albums/mm258/mapung072/PocongGaulsss1.jpg