Say it with me now... "Trissle, Trassle, Trossle, Trom... Time for this one to come home."[Side note: A lot of references to Tooter Turtle on the web use the letter D instead of T for the above incantation, but I think they're wrong. The alliteration is much better with T, hooking into the second phrase accents on Time... This... and To... not to mention Tooter Turtle]
Okay... by invoking Tooter Turtle's manic cry for rescue (let alone my little literary analysis) I have clearly cemented the geek nature of my being, but then that is in fact the point.
I have had a week (really two weeks) from hell... buried in a cybernetic miasma of other people's design realities and desires for bad art that pretends like they have quality product. I feel like my soul has been sucked out of me through my fingers and the proclamation I made a dozen years ago that "I do not want to be doing websites in 5 years" has finally brought me to the absolute burnout point.
In "Confessions of a Guilty Bystander" (41 years ago) Thomas Merton wrote, "It is precisely the illusion that mechanical progress means human improvement that alienates us from our own being and our own reality. It is precisely because we are convinced that our life, as such, is better if we have a better car, a better TV set, better toothpaste, etc., that we condemn and destroy our own reality and the reality of our natural resources. Technology was made for (hu)man(s) not (hu)man(s) for technology. In losing touch with being and thus with God, we have fallen into a senseless idolatry of production and consumption for their own sakes, We have renounced the act of being and plunged ourselves into process for its own sake We no longer know how to live, and because we cannot accept life in its reality, life ceases to be a joy and becomes an affliction. And we even go so far as to blame God for it! The evil in the world is all of our own making, and it proceeds entirely from our ruthless, senseless, wasteful, destructive, and SUICIDAL neglect of our own being."
That's it... I'm done. I once did an interview with Sam Keen in which he invoked a quote from one of his teachers (and one of my heros) Howard Thurman. Keen said that Thurman told him, "There are two questions one must ask in life, 'Where am I going?' and 'Who will go with me?' and if you get them in the wrong order you will be in for a world of trouble."
I have asked these questions - almost always in the wrong order - my whole life.
Time to ask again... Time to turn the page.
