• 1:45 AM
  or: please send me your hate mail

Today's achewood led me to read about "buck fever", which is when a hunter sees a buck and gets so excited that he or she has a heart attack, or an attack of stupidity. One article quotes a author saying how "hunting is much more strenuous than we imagined". I imagined it as being pretty darn strenuous, seeing as how it's one of the fundamental parts of the struggle to exist as an animal, here in an ecosystem. Of course, the hunting I'm thinking of is: here's your long pointy stick, there's an angry primordial elephant. The brain might still be wired to ratchet up into that level of intensity upon sighting prey, though, so when a modern, normally-sedentary, relies-on-gunpowder sport-hunter sees his prey, he gets so worked up he blows a gasket. OR maybe deer antlers are actually TRANSMISSION ARRAYS for their POWERFUL PSYCHIC WEAPONS, which can overstimulate a human's nervous system so much that they walk out of a tree or go into cardiac arrest!!!

Yay religion! President Bush mentioned something about Islam and Christianity both having one god whose prophet said a bunch of similar things, and the religious right got all over his back about it! I thought about this while cleaning up the kitchen. Do they still think they are fighting for worshippers? Does it matter where people get moral guidance, as long as they are guided to help their society? These days I think that Jesus was only trying to get people to live well with each other. I have gone through periods, like everyone, where I felt directionless and unsure how to be a good person. Religious dogma often has fairly reasonable approaches to living well. It frustrates me to see people caught up in the worthless aspects of their religion. What'd the Bible say? It made it pretty clear, I thought:

1. There is none righteous, no, not one (this means you too)
2. don't go stoning people to death until the righteous guy kicks it off (i.e. not you, or anyone you know)

Sound advice! Tough to follow, though. While scrubbing rice off the frying pan, I decided that Heaven was intended as a description of what our lives would like if we all were good to each other - as good as we can be. Conversely, Hell is what our society can become if we don't help each other out, act viciously against each other, covet, kill, all the shalt-nots. (ooh, running shoes with a necktie.. a serious Fashion Shalt-not) But why act altruistically? This is not an evolutionarily stable behavior - everyone but the altruist benefits. You have to have a serious commitment to delayed gratification. How to get everyone to understand what that is? The idea of eternal life AFTER death is a pretty good brain stretching exercise to teach this idea. It's a good idea! Delayed gratification is the key to overcoming the problem of local optimization (ex: the best limited-scope case can be significantly worse than the best global-scope case).

For me, personally, all I need spiritually is to accept that I do not have global scope. We can only search for the (potentially non-obvious) best path, trying to outwit the prisoner's dilemma.

And now, a brief chronology of clothes color justifications starting from intermediate school!

I wear black clothes because:

• Mom picks out pink clothes if I let her get colors.
• I think my heart is broken.
• Keeps the terrifying bees from being interested in me.
• Seems to keep terrifying people from being interested in me.
• I do not exist.
• Helping the world render faster.
• I'm a "winter", dark clothes indicated.
• Most practical choice: almost stain proof, wash cold.