Saturday, January 13, 2018

The Road to Health

I've heard some responses to the Carl post and I appreciate how some readers are worried that I have perhaps gone off my nut, and that youtube is responsible.  One readers suggested that my issues are probably because I have so few readers, and Matt Mercer has so many views, that perhaps it is just time for me to admit that I've lost the fight and that it is time for me to accept the sweet, sweet goodness that is New D&D.  The WOTC has clearly "won."

Rest assured, I'm fine.  The post incorporated portions of Allen Ginsberg's Howl, which is a 25-minute performance piece (though it varies) written in 1955-56.  The poem encapsulates virtually all the vices that underlie the western experience of life, and when embraced or spoken aloud is tremendously cathartic ... at least for those who are not afraid of concepts such as anger, drugs, heterosexual and homosexual themes, hatred of government, hatred of conformity, hatred of money and despondency in the face of impossible odds.  When I feel despair, it is the poem I turn to, just as I turn to Shakespeare's 57th Sonnet when I am washed with love, Coleridge's Ancient Mariner when I am in over my head, Kipling's 'Heathen when I'm kicking myself to get better and anything by Ogden Nash when I need a laugh.

Catharsis is healthy.  For a time we soak ourselves in the misery or helplessness of a film, we scrub ourselves with a true novel of human suffering, we steep ourselves with a charity's personal experience of seeing what it is to be poor and misbegotten and wanting, we coast along the corridors of a hospital and remind ourselves of our mortality, in the face of an experience that can't be denied ... and so we come to grips with unhappiness and in that, find an approval for the life we're leading, for the things we're trying, for the wars we're waging and the hills we're ready to die upon.

So I engaged in a little catharsis.  I'm all right.

5 comments:

  1. I'm hear often, reading, enjoying and learning.

    I don't think you're off your nut.

    Keep on with the great posts.

    Cheers,
    Johnn

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm a new reader (found your blog a few weeks ago) but an old gamer.

    "How to Run" arrived the other day and I started reading it last night.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Dirk,

    I trust you're happy with the look and the feel of the book. I hope it gives you what you're searching for.

    ReplyDelete
  4. You post with such wanton pace that I skipped this entry entirely.

    Everytime I get someone pulling the "victorious by dint of popularity" card on me I rationally infer that that person must be coprophagous.

    After all, the whole of Earth's fly population cannot, clearly, be standing in the wrong.

    ReplyDelete
  5. I am not your typical blogger. I have much to say. It is, after all, a blog with too many words.

    ReplyDelete

If you wish to leave a comment on this blog, contact alexiss1@telus.net with a direct message. Comments, agreed upon by reader and author, are published every Saturday.

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.