clear rants

The biggest lesson I learned today about surfing: wear a wet suit or similar-materialed t-shirt.

Why?

Becuase if you don’t, your nipples will chafe and you will feel pain like you have never felt before.

by Alan Watts

In music, one doesn’t make the end of a composition the point of the composition. If that were so, the best conductors would be those that played fastest. And there would be composers who wrote only finales. People would go to concerts just to hear one crashing chord, because that’s the end! But we don’t see that as something brought by our education into our everyday conduct.

We’ve got a system of schooling which gives a completely different impression. It’s all grading. And what we do is we put the child into the corridor of this grade system. With a kind of “Come on, kitty kitty kitty,” and yeah, you go to kindergarten, you know, and that’s a great thing because when you finish that you get into first grade. And then come on, first grade leads to second grade, and so on.

And then you get out of grade school, you go to high school. And it’s revving up, the thing is coming. Then you gotta go to college, and by jove, then you get into graduate school. And when you’re through with graduate school, you go out and join the world.

And then you get into some racket, where you’re selling insurance. And they’ve got that quota to make, and you’ve gotta make that. And all the time this thing is coming, it’s coming, that great thing–the success you’re working for. And then you wake up one day about forty years old, you say, “My god! I’ve arrived! I’m there!” And you don’t feel very different from what you always felt. And there’s a slight letdown because you feel there’s a hoax. And there was a hoax, a dreadful hoax! They made you miss everything!

We thought of life by analogy with a journey–with a pilgrimage, which had a serious purpose at the end. And the thing was to get to that end: success or whatever it is, or maybe heaven after you’re dead. But we miss the point the whole way along. It was a musical thing, and you were supposed to sing, or to dance, while the music was being played.

Awesome.