Intro

'Sup Steemers

Its customary here it seems to begin with a personal introduction, so i'll curb my non-conformist instincts and start there shall i.

So who am i and what am i doing here?

I have spent many decades contemplating and re-assessing these questions, and as best i am able to discern i am just another filament of awareness experiencing itself subjectively - same as you.

Sure, you could hang the same kind of labels on me with which humans seem satisfied to define themselves these days - white, 40s, hetero, vegetarian, divorcee, father, south african, non-conformist, non-speciesist, non-nonist, human etc - but i'm long past hanging any such labels on myself, or you.

All labels are just words, feeble attempts at communicating meaning that are impossible for you to perceive in exactly the same way as i. None of them, in any number or combination, can come close to adequately describing the chaos in motion that is me, and you.

I've never actually met an incarnate being, myself included, who isn't most accurately described first and foremost as a fool, chasing meaning from a position of almost completely blind ignorance, with only his/her/its/other own intrinsically flawed perceptions as guide along the rollercoaster of cause and effect resulting from the application of his/her/its/other's own will (commonly referred to as 'life').

So if you must categorize me as anything, consider me that:
Just another fool making it up as he/she/it/other goes along.
Its how i see you.

In any event, during the course of a long and eventful series of moments on this chunk of blue green rock, as it hurtles through space so fast that the fools on its surface believe they are standing still, the more i learned about people the more fond i became of cats.

(Hoping Kaizer Wilhelm's ghost and Mr Putin can forgive that tasteless cannibalization of their wit)

When mankind willingly relinquished what remained of it's privacy and independence of thought to the likes of Facebook and Google, i retreated to a cottage in the forest just outside Cape Town, a place where i could smile and wave from as great a distance as possible at the unfathomable stupidity unfolding around me, which the locals call "normal human life".

Here i dumped the tv, detached from social media, just said no to all social gatherings, and armed with high grade psychedelics, higher grade information and a small tribe of inbred black cats, i retreated into reclusion to conquer man's most terrible self-inflicted handicap - belief.

It wasn't easy, isn't easy, but perception beyond belief certainly has its rewards.

I no longer believe anything.
None of your crap, whatever it is.
None of mine.

I don't need to believe anything. I know how little i know and i'm down with that, amused by it, wondrous even at the infinite vastness of experience and knowledge to explore that my ignorance makes possible.

I also know that 100% of the information i have received and ever will receive is at best second hand, that 99% of it originated from sources that know as little or less than i, and that with very rare exception most of it is fiction, however ardently the protagonists believe otherwise.

Like you, my mind has been crammed full of more or less complete cowshit from the moment they yanked me reluctantly from my mother's womb.

While there is little doubt that some of the cramming was done deliberately by individuals who knew full well they were pumping me full of cowshit, most of it appears to have been done innocently, fed to me earnestly by people who fervently believed the cowshit to be true. That's because their minds had also been pumped full of more or less complete cowshit from the moment they had been yanked reluctantly from their mothers wombs, by the same types of people, for the same types of reasons.

In fact, even the most cursory glance at human history over the last 6000 years reveals that this ritual passing down of cowshit as truth has been standard practice for a very long time. So long that the species has seemingly lost the collective memory of what it feels like to formulate thoughts that don't reek of seven-times-digested lucerne. Maybe even since the very first bipedal found itself banished from the group for questioning whether life might be more bearable if we didn't keep willingly filling our minds with the steaming product of bovine sphincter contractions.

Its still as good a question, isn't it?

So at the risk of suffering the same fate as Socrates, since we appear to have evolved such a paltry distance in the intervening 3500 years, my intention is to slaughter a few sacred cows on this here blockchain, that you might see for yourself the benefits of stepping without having to prise cowshit from your expensive designer footwear quite so often. Expect cognitive dissonance, that's the point. No pain no gain.

I'm also intending to muse on crypto, football, the music industry, cats, traffic lights, my off-planet experiences and much else.

I'm expecting blank stares, derision, possibly violence, then let's see if Ghandi's theory holds.

Much gratitude for reading this far.
You get a smile and a wave, and a wink ;)