A Hopeful, Fun Coronavirus Post (With Lots of Fun Links!)
(With a Caveat: These Are Gonna Be Trying Times, Let’s Work Together and Imagine The Future We’ve All Wanted for a Long-Ass Time!)
(With a Caveat: These Are Gonna Be Trying Times, Let’s Work Together and Imagine The Future We’ve All Wanted for a Long-Ass Time!)
I’m sitting here in my non-heated, non-air-conditioned room in central Japan, probably in conditions that many would say are “too cold” or “uncomfortable” and I’m watching a YouTube video I found via this crazy interconnected world we have created, a video by two Millennials in the U.S. who are addressing, in a very realistic-yet-inspiring way, the craziness of the timeline we find ourselves in halfway into only the third month of this wacky 2020 and I hear:
“People who tell you that Utopia is just a dream are really only telling you how cynical they are.”
That was from the male host, this guy sitting on the left whose name I don’t know, but who I can look at and see myself if I can peer upstream a decade or so…
And this guy and his partner have been dishing out the goods throughout this video, so much so that I’ve not yet made it to the end and, to be totally honest, once I got about 15 minutes in, I was just about to jump out of my chair in celebration because, well, I’ve been waiting, oh how I’ve been waiting, for some sort of catalyst event to make the whole system, this whole fake system that we’ve all been told so long is “reality, deal with it” to be fully, 100 percent, fucking exposed.
Pardon the profanity, but understand, I’m an excitable guy and I held off for over 100 words so that was me showing some restraint.
Oh, here are these two lovely people and please, if my essay is annoying, boring or befuddling you, just go and watch their video and take in what they are saying:
Did you watch it? Or would you rather keep on reading and get back to it? Either way, I appreciate you taking the time to be here with me.
Because you know what? This whole shebang, this grand experiment that we are all involved in, this thing called Life as Prince once opened one of the great albums of the 1980s singing about like an old-time preacher from the year 3030?
Well, it’s about US. Not me, US. Bernie Sanders may be losing to Joe Biden for reasons that are hard to wrap one’s mind around, but he got some shit right and that slogan — not me, US — is one of the great slogans of my lifetime.
I’ve been thinking about it this way these past few months: Human culture has been playing the game of ‘me’ for several thousand years, now we are transitioning into the game of WE.
Now, before this starts to sound too pie-in-the-sky, or too damn Utopian, there are some serious icebergs we must maneuver the S.S. Civilization through here. Those icebergs may as well be called the 2020s, if we want to put a time stamp on it but maybe we don’t need to do that, because, well, the days of punching time cards to be on time for The Man?
Yeah, those days can kiss our collective asses, too.
Because, as they talk about in that video, so much of the System that we’ve been living under has had really no other purpose other than to keep us down, keep us living like sheep or pigs so the dogs can take what they want.
And now, I’m really dating myself with that obscure reference to one of the great, underrated rock albums of the 1970s. Fortunately, young people like this guy in this video below, are appreciating that, well, some of the older people amongst us have done some pretty cool shit in their lives and left it around for the rest of us to enjoy.
So if this essay has worn out its welcome, why not enjoy some music and do as I’ve been doing the past two days, which is enjoying someone else enjoying music and marveling at how marvelous this connected age we find ourselves in can be sometimes. Go ahead, I’ll be back…
I really do love that guy. Told him as much in one of the comments on his YouTube video. And that’s after only “knowing him” since, let’s see, 26 hours ago.
Now, if you expect any sort of destination for this essay, you’re sailing on a lot clearer, smoother seas than I am at the moment, because all I’m doing right now is surfing these waves and improvising, a la another of my favorite bands, who, well, screw it, let me give you one more opportunity to escape my grasp, can be seen here in one of my favorite songs of theirs:
That band there, well, they played the most famous album of the band from the previous video up there, back in fall of 1998, which kind of pissed off a lot of their fans because … never mind. It was cool.
You see, we live in an Age of Abundance. Yet its also an Age of Sorrow. And pain. And reality coming up to kick us in the ass for not paying better attention to those who don’t have as much as we do, or, for simply not waking each day and saying, “Thanks for another crack at this.”
No, I’m not gonna get all preachy, I’m not gonna tell you what you should do. Because I really don’t know. In fact, living with, accepting and even appreciating a mindset of I Don’t Know is one of the big lessons I’m having to come to grips with as a result of the Coronavirus.
In fact, that video I just posted above? Well, I was at that concert. And I’ve got tickets to go see that band again at the same venue in July. But … well, I don’t know.
I don’t know if these crazy historical seas we find ourselves in will allow me to navigate myself across the big blue Pacific from my perch in central Japan. I’ve actually got an airplane ticket for Monday, April 6 and was planning to spend five months in my native country, writing a book about what it’s become in the 15 years I’ve been away.
Because you see, last fall, I had this vision, a, ahem, 2020 vision, of this being a historic year in America, a turning point year, and so I made a plan to quit my job when the contract ran out at the end of March, travel to the U.S. and then use trains, planes and, no not too many automobiles, basically … any form of transportation where I could meet people so I could chat with them about what their life was like.
Everybody I’ve told the project to has been super excited about it. I was, too. Still am.
But now? Well, I don’t know. Because the timeline has gotten really murky. So I’m adjusting and flowing with time and accepting that perhaps I’ll have to stay here in Japan, tending to my family and the flock of seagulls that I sometimes hear in my dreams.
Now if that video didn’t steal you away from me, you really are mine.
Good. Glad we can enjoy each other’s company and share some time together. Honestly.
I may sound whimsical but this is actually all from the heart. If you click on my profile you’ll see I call myself a Serious Fool but there’s actual meaning to that. It means that I’m deadly serious about having a good time, but when I have a good time, I’m also being serious about it. You see the Fool Archetype is a pretty powerful one. In traditional societies, the court jester, or fool, was pretty much the only one who was allowed to speak Truth to Power because well, he’s just a fool, right? He can’t be serious!
So there you have it. But the thing is, a lot of people who are comedians are really speaking some serious truth and many of them recognize that the society we’ve been living has been full of foolishness, and it’s often the things we are told to be most serious about that are the silliest.
I mean, really, I’ve been waiting for this age where we can stop fooling around and buying into things like the GDP or the Nikkei Index or derivatives or … never mind, just typing those words makes me wanna cackle. No, I’m ready for an age where we take the real shit seriously, how about starting with Earth, Air, Fire and Water (sorry, to that 1970s band, but it is air, not wind).
I’m being deadly serious. Just as I am serious when I tell you that one of the best things I think we can all do is start taking those four elements seriously and, considering the Coronavirus is an airborne disease which impacts the respiratory system, you can’t really hurt yourself by looking into the Wim Hof Method and especially this breathing exercise (I really dig the cold showers, too).
But beyond that and getting back to the point, since we are moving into WE, well, how we treat each other is going to become the real commodity. The real reason we are here is not to build a bank account or to buy Caribbean islands or even to take vacations to Mars, it’s to love each other.
And that, my friends, is what’s going to get us all through this thing. Because one of the downsides of the Age of WE is, just as we can all rise up together, we can also sink together.
Folks who’ve been playing the Survivalist prepper game and building cabins in the woods, well, maybe they’ll make it through better than those who haven’t. Again, I don’t know.
But I have a pretty strong hunch that those of us who instead focus on doing whatever we can to be of Service to each other (while of course practicing Self Care in the sense of that airplane guideline of put on your oxygen mask before helping others), well, we are the Ones we’ve all been waiting for.
Now, I feel like there’s been a steady streaming theme of me posting some good videos for you to check out, but damn if my extroverted intuition superpower (MBTI type, ENFP) isn’t failing me as I draw this sucker to an end…let’s see, what would be a good video to wind this sucker down with.
An Intro to MBTI and How It Has Improved My Life
How Learning the Myers-Briggs Personality Type Indicator can make you more forgiving, accepting personmedium.com
What the heck, in the spirit of making strange connections that are also blatantly obvious, here’s an oldie but a goodie by a guy who used to be a newbie but now, like me, is becoming an oldie:
Thanks for reading!
P.S. I usually take way too much time to go back and edit shit and sometimes I get so caught up in that that I forget to post stuff altogether until it becomes outdated. But since this was stream of consciousness and since I talked about the need for Self Care, well, it’s past this old fogey’s bedtime, so I’m just gonna push publish and say, again, take care of yourself and the people around you and let’s take this opportunity to create a world of WE, the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible as one of my favorite writers put it.
Thanks for reading! You can support me simply by sharing my stuff, by linking to me on Twitter, by checking out my old blog, by listening to my new podcast, The B&P Realm Podcast, or by reading my 2015 novel, “The Teacher and the Tree Man.” You can also find that book in full here, or you can find it broken down into four shorter books (book 1, book 2, book 3 and book 4).