Intolerable Alienation of Being

We've had a flash flood here. The paddock is like the Lake District, the creeks are overflowing, the roof is leaking and the roads are fords. I'm fully expecting a great wall of water out of a Hollywood disaster movie to come rushing down the valley while I escape it, running at uber-human speed.

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They've demythologized Troy and King Artrhur. What's next? Lord of the Rings, I reckon. Froddo has a psychological problem - he's paranoid that everyone wants his Ring and he's paranoid that everyone ignores him. It might have something to do with his body dimorphism. I think I'd like to watch that.

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My brain has been a bit fuzzy over the last few days. (I'm also a bit tense awaiting my possible transition from "academic" adjective to noun.) It's a pity because I would love to have a crisp brain to solve some meta-ethical issues howling away in my head. I'm too tired to effectively communicate all the nuances so what I'm about to say will probably sound either obvious or absurd. Which is probably how my verbal communication sounds most of the time.

I used to think that the topic of ethics was boring and contentless. How wrong was I. I took for granted the existence of good and evil as undefined and only saw Ethics in terms of applied ethics. I have been doing some deconstruction so I now am (as frequently happens to me) at crisis point. A summary of my conclusions: perhaps we inhabit an amoral universe. And there also seems to be an a fundamental good/evil asymmetry. And intuition is either to be totally disbanded, or our only guide, at the end of it all. And, as Christians, our ethical system is from the Bible. But if this is true, how do we go about defining "what we would have done to us"?

You can help me answer those questions in the comments section, if you like. However, I'd rather have the discussion with you in person, since what I have set out above isn't supposed to be formalized or accessible for ready discussion.

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Okay, so Waiter Rant is funny and interesting to read, but the whole blog really is just self-expression and self-promotion without any sense of irony or guilt or self-awareness. It also annoys me that he smuggles in a happy ending for himself in the literary convention of justice-for-the-hero-of-the-folklore-tale. Take therapeutic Jujitsu, the entry of the 26th. After his battle against a therapy-junkie customer he assures his audience that he won, even though things might appear otherwise. Couldn't he forgo his ego for a dismal, yet more realistic ending? He would probably swear authenticity (and I hope I don't have delusions of clairvoyance) his admissions of despair at other times don't need to be resolved with contrived closure. Unless he really does have prozac optimism at the end of everyday. In which case, he needs to go cold.

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And remember kids. Meth is baad. Angus will show you some ugly pictures if you ask nicely.