Lawrence R. Spencer's Blog, page 386
September 13, 2017
September 12, 2017
September 11, 2017
MY GIRLFRIEND FOUND MY NERD PORN STASH
It was like a perfect nightmare scenario. I came into my bedroom to find her standing there, the evidence strewn about her, undeniable proof of my dirty secret. I’d kept them hidden for so long, the things I shamefully stashed away and pleasured myself to when no one was around… but now here I was, busted red handed with it.
I tried to reason with her, suggesting we all have strange little turn-ons that are too weird to tell anyone about in the harsh light of day. But the sheer size and volume of my stash tipped the scales. So she just stood there, looking hurt and confused, two storage containers vomiting all their profane material all over the floor: the complete Lord of the Rings DVD trilogy, a stack of Wolverine comics a foot high, a detailed bust of Iron Man with light-up eyes. And staring up at her from the carpet, a pristine statuette of Han Solo, mid-blaster shot (and looking pretty magnificent, if I do say).
I love that statuette. Oh, the pleasure it has brought me over the years. But how could she understand, this woman with the Catholic upbringing and stodgy taste in fiction? She who had found the new Star Trek, “unrealistic,” and “pandering.” Unrealistic? She would never understand… but that didn’t make the look on her face any less humiliating – a mix of disgust and pity, mingled with disappointment.
And that wasn’t all. With fresh horror it dawned on me that I didn’t remember to clear my browser cache, and once she had found the Batman novelties and Battlestar souvenirs, she went straight for the hard drive. And, of course, all my fetish sites were listed there: TheOneRing.net, Dark Horizons, the Stargate fan page…
I tried to turn it around. I put on my seductive smile, cooed a little bit. ‘Come on baby,’ I said. ‘Just give it a try – a lot of couples are into it. Let’s just give it a shot, we’ll go slow, and if you don’t like it, we’ll stop. I’ll play the first 15 minutes of ‘Aliens vs. Predator,’ and if you aren’t comfortable, we’ll just do it regular, and watch Letterman.’
She called me, “a little twisted with all of this,” and mumbled something about her mother being right, but I wasn’t willing to give up, and within three days I was warming her back up. I started out easy, with ‘The Princess Bride,’ and left an extra copy of a magazine with Viggo Mortensen on the cover lying around the place. Lastly, I resorted to that gateway drug for all female fantasy haters – a rented copy of ‘Twilight.’ The hook was set. I bought her the book, and not two weeks later I was able to talk openly about the Hulk (both comics and movie) without reprimand, followed closely by an animated conversation about the upcoming Hobbit films.
When she actually said the words ‘Peter Jackson,’ my penis stood up a little, and the goal, I suddenly knew, was to complete the ultimate conquest: to get her into a replica of the Princess Leia bikini from ‘Jedi,’ and screw the bejesus out of her.
The course wouldn’t be easy. First I’d actually have to get her to watch the film, and then introduce the notion of role-play into our sex routine. Simple was best, I knew, and I offered to do my Christopher Walken impression while feeling her up just to get things off the ground. I asked her to do Marilyn’s ‘Happy Birthday’ seduction from the Kennedy years, and I think it was my spot-on JFK accent that sealed the deal. Last would be the costume…
Ebay is a wonderful thing. You can get a stuffed, mounted moose head from Alaska, and you can get finely-crafted faux-metal bras and panties from a fanboy in Scandinavia. And, more to the point, with the exposure of your nerd-porn, a few months work and a little persistence, you can get your girlfriend to pretend to be your love slave on a replica Tattooine slave barge and screw her ‘til the Jawas come home.
(by Haphestus Foster – Artist: Liva Rutmane)
Originally posted 2010-12-14 09:50:06. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
September 10, 2017
SUICIDE
“Have you ever thought of committing suicide? It’s okay if you have. In fact, I’d venture to say that it’s a fairly normal thing for most people to have considered at some point in their life – at least in the theoretical sense of it. To consider what it may actually take to go through with it, or what it may actually mean that you would want to. If you’re like me, you may even have occupied that place where it seemed to be a real option; and, like me, actually taken that option a number of times, in a manner of speaking.
When a famous person, someone we know, or someone we’ve just been acquainted with commits suicide, naturally there’s the sadness that accompanies such a profound personal tragedy, followed by that sense of futility. But there may also be a deep, underlying identification with a troubled fellow voyager; the understanding of suicide as a viable solution to what seems to be an utterly hopeless situation.
“When you commit suicide, you’re killing the wrong person.” ~ Anonymous
Obviously, I didn’t really commit suicide when I thought of it, but having passed through that “dark night of the soul,” I do understand the impulse – and not as an overwhelming urge to for the absolute, but instead as an overwhelming urge for absolution.
The Urge for Absolution
After all, the desire to ‘end it all’ often isn’t a wish to actually die, just a wish to end things the way they are.
In this sense, the suicide urge is a completely natural impulse that arises simultaneously from both deep despair and a kind of optimism in the eternal, the idea that a spiritual solution awaits our return. We’re searching for the source of relief, renewal, and regeneration.
It can actually indicate a profound kind of spiritual sanity and practical wisdom – the desire to return our battered soul into the care of a loving power, and rediscover our spiritual freedom, away from a world where our human shortcomings and ineffectiveness are constantly imposed on our simple search for happiness.
But please – don’t get me wrong on this point!
I’m not urging anyone to commit suicide. At least not in the way you may usually think of it.
Our misunderstanding of the suicide ‘process’ has a lot to do with our unwillingness to properly define death itself. As a person who’s unintentionally experienced a kind of reincarnation myself, I can tell you that we do live and die many times over–and not just in the physical sense of it.
For example, the child you once were – that innocent, playful, awakening soul – died outwardly in a sense, when the need to create an egoic interface to “the grown-up world” (and biological chemistry) raised its ugly head, all too soon. Likewise, your teenager was sacrificed to the demands of a life of responsibility. And as you get older, the young adult you once were has given way to a being of lesser physical ability (that’s one I really miss). The body I’m in now is heading down a stretch of road dotted with signposts for another turn-off up ahead. There’s always some form of death approaching. That’s just the way it is.
“Without dying to the world of the old order, there is no place for renewal, because…it is illusory to hope that growth is but an additive process requiring neither sacrifice nor death. The soul favors the death experience to usher in change. Viewed this way, the suicide impulse is a transformational drive.” ~ James Hillman
Suicide and the Soul
The author of that quote, James Hillman, (my late uncle, by marriage), was a brilliant (and very funny) guy – a teacher, author, Jungian analyst, former director of the Jung Institute in Zurich, and the creator of Archetypal Psychology. That quote is from his elegant, utterly amazing little book, Suicide and the Soul (Harper Colophon, 1964), in which he describes a lot of what I’m talking about here far more eloquently than I ever could, based on years of working with patients in states of personal crisis. Elsewhere in the book, he says,
“To put an ‘end to one’s life’ means to come to one’s end, to find the end or limit of what one is, in order to arrive at what one is not – yet.” ~ James Hillman
Personally, this required a number of very uncomfortable moments in my own life, where who and what “I thought I was,” lay in broken pieces on the ground before me. When my life, as it was, no longer made any sense – where it no longer worked. The person I was had stopped being a viably effective participant, and living that way doomed me to repetitive collisions with my own self-created obstacles to happiness and fulfillment. That’s a dark place, where the suicidal impulse arises. Naturally, I required a deliverance – a death – to make room for my own personal renewal.
So, I committed a kind of suicide – and I’ve done it a few times – the sort that I propose you embrace if you ever reach that impasse yourself. Not to actually physically kill yourself, but to set about killing the part of you that no longer works.
That false egoic interface – often the same one we constructed first as kids – has to be destroyed to allow a more authentic self to emerge and arise from the ashes like the mythical phoenix. That’s an archetype Uncle James may have liked.
While my late uncle speaks metaphorically, as an analyst, I speak as a ‘near death experiencer,’ so in what I know as a real, spiritual sense, we do live and die and live and die – on and on. Our deaths are necessary for our soul’s growth; every death is a suicide, of sorts, fashioned over time by our own designs. Life can be quite ruthless in pointing out the biggest flaws in those designs, but the awareness we gain is the gift that pain gives us. It becomes our job to change. This is the case at every level.
Fractal Motivation
We are all the creators of our own deaths, individually and collectively, and the suicide urge itself is a kind of fractal motivation – an urge that lives within every expression of consciousness taking part in our mysterious spiritual evolution. From plants, to animals, to us, to our earth, there is that sacrifice to growth, to our return, imprinted in our very core.
Meanwhile, our soul – the same playful soul of a child – continues to live on in wonder, willingness, and absolute surrender, even as we must slough off sheaths of outer lives. With that willingness, that faith, we can sacrifice our overly serious superficial selves; with our soul’s knowledge that our true self is never abandoned, we can bury “who we were supposed to be”– even if we don’t know who we are meant to become yet. It’s an uncomfortable state of grace, like the chaotic mess inside a chrysalis just before a butterfly emerges.
Kill the Right Person
So, please, don’t ever actually kill yourself – it’s a “permanent solution to a temporary problem.” But if you insist on it, make sure you kill the right person. Kill only the part of yourself that causes pain; the part that prevents you from being the creature of light and love you are truly meant to be. Bury your superficial self, christen a more authentic you, rise up, and spread your new wings.”
Re-post of an article by Robert Kopecky from http://www.gaiamtv.com/article/suicide-and-superficial-self
Originally posted 2015-06-03 00:21:20. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
September 9, 2017
THE SOURCE
(image: Eric Kuns)
“Of the Western philosophers, I have been influenced most by Plato, Spinoza, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche as well as the historian Jacob Burckhardt. But they did not influence me as much as Indian and, later, Chinese philosophy. I have always been on familiar and friendly terms with the fine arts, but my relationship to music has been more intimate and fruitful. It is found in most of my writings.”
~Hermann Hesse, an autobiographical statement from http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1946/hesse-bio.html
Originally posted 2015-11-16 02:52:23. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
VERMEER: PORTRAITS OF A LIFETIME
Vermeer: Portraits of A Lifetime explores the life of the world famous Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer.
This book reveals observations that have never before been made about his paintings, his life, his friends and his family.
Originally posted 2009-09-11 21:31:29. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
September 8, 2017
WHERE YOU COME FROM
Originally posted 2016-01-03 23:00:46. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
September 7, 2017
ANIMATED SATURDAYS
ENJOY ANOTHER ANIMATED SATURDAY!
(GO OUTSIDE AND DO SOMETHING FUN, INSTEAD OF LOOKING AT YOUR STUPID COMPUTER / PHONE / iPAD, etc…)
Originally posted 2012-04-14 12:41:53. Republished by Blog Post Promoter
