There are times in my life when I need to get out of the way.  I mean that in multiple senses.  There are times when I need to get my hopes and fears to shove over, to be blocked or to be breathed through.  There are times when I don’t have any power at all over a situation, and I need to recognize when that is the case and stop struggling to change the thing I can’t change.

As a weird person, I have had a thing in my head since childhood, telling me the probability of things.  It is not like counting cards in Vegas, though.  It is more like, this person is likely to cheat me and lie to me, or there will probably be an Earthquake in this region within the next 10 years.  Sometimes, I feel the “disturbances in the force” preceding and during mass events.  It is a slippery feeling, and it usually results in my becoming very aware of the things surrounding me, in the fight or flight sense.  I’ve spent a very long time working on my ability to shut the awareness down, because it really doesn’t help my social skills.

There are times when I do have at least a little power over a situation, but I don’t have enough information to make the eventual choice.  I’ve come to recognize the feeling I get when that is the case.  These situations tend to be false dichotomy choices.  A simple example would be: are you going to vote democrat or republican?  The answer is neither.  Sometimes I vote democrat, sometimes I vote republican, sometimes I vote third party or non-partisan, and sometimes I don’t vote at all because all the options are bad, or because the act of voting gives my power or privacy away in ways I don’t want at the time.  The amount of energy I spend deciding a thing needs to be commensurate with the amount of power I have over the thing and its consummate impact on my life or my friends’ and family’s lives.

Sometimes, it is necessary just to wait.  The solution will present itself in time, at least according to the probabilities.  I don’t particularly like the cognitive dissonance of waiting.  Yet, that is where I make a bunch of decisions from, a place of patience and deep thought.  While I wait, I must get out of my own way.  Ruminating and obsessing over a decision I can’t make yet is not very helpful.  There are times I need to distract myself, to move on in my thoughts to another place, to be able to discover the joy again.

Joy.  Joy is a powerful thing, and I can have it anytime.  I don’t have to wait to be joyful.  I don’t have to be perfect to be joyful.  I don’t have to make the right decision to be joyful, even in the midst of despair and loneliness, or shame and guilt.  It is always there, if only I’d just get out of my own way.  Oh, but I have things to do, children to raise.  And climate change/an EMP/nuclear war/hackers overloading and permanently disabling the electrical grid will kill us all and make us go extinct!  Yes, I see you, anxiety and fear.  I wouldn’t live without my anxiety and fear for the world.  They have a very necessary evolutionary purpose, and are valuable in spurring me to get things done.  Yet at the same time, they don’t have to overwhelm me into paralysis.  They don’t ever have to overwhelm me into accepting authority when that authority is misguided and toxic.

When you are lied to by the fake news, the fake school propaganda textbooks, or when you are surrounded by ignorant people who can’t see things the way they actually work, you develop coping methods over time to deal with the necessarily resulting uncertainty.  This scales up nicely to the species level, and down to the individual decision level as well.  Humans just don’t know enough of the future to be able to make exact plans in advance.

All civilizations that I know of have come up with games to deal with uncertain decision making.  They are typically games of chance: geomancy, tarot, throwing the rune staves, dice, goat knucklebones and many others.  Believe it or not, mathematically, these work for the benefit of the species as a whole.  Not everybody should do the same thing, because not every circumstance is the same.  Thus, a question such as “should I move?” is answered differently for each family, and the families get spread out over the landscape.  Yes, some stay in the path of Vesuvius, but a bunch don’t.  Yes, some move into the path of the plague or the collapsing river dam, but a bunch don’t.

We learned early on as a species not to put all of our eggs in one basket.  Thus, some prepare for the global warming, and some prepare for the next ice age, and some prepare for the climate to be very slow at shifting, while muttering “not in my lifetime suckers” under their breath.  This is good.  Regardless of who is correct, somebody has prepared for the correct option, so somebody survives.  “Where should I move to prepare for the diminishment of the availability of oil resources and the next famine due to the lack of fertilizers and pesticides and working combines?”  The answer, obviously, is for some to stay, and some to move around, for some to garden, and some to keep researching the biodiversity of fungi in big university ivory towers, and some to manufacture and internationally trade plant-based medicine on massive scales.  There is no one right place to move to prepare for an uncertain future.  Perhaps the answer is, where the jobs are, or perhaps the answer is where I will have access to clean air, clean water, clean food, and medical care when I need it and to hell with jobs.

Humans are very good at lying to their conscious mind.  They can handle vast amounts of cognitive dissonance for decades.  Yet, if they tapped into their unconscious minds, a wealth of information would come forward.  They would know who is a creepy person, and would stay away from those people with the slimy eyes, simply by engaging with the patterns of body language which betray unspoken intentions.  This intuition is very useful in decision making when there is just a little bit of uncertainty.  If you are asking “Is my boss planning to fire me or lay me off?” usually, you have a gut feeling, even if you would not necessarily know why or when.  Tapping into that gut feeling using a game of chance can give you more information.

When there is quite a bit of uncertainty, using a game of chance is just about the only way to make the decision without succumbing to paralysis by analysis by the analytical paranoid types.  Sometimes, you just can not know in advance what the risks of ruin are for each option.  There comes a time when ranting and raving against the bought and paid for mainstream media doesn’t work, and you have to make a move, or perhaps wait motionless, based on only the very limited information and patterns of behavior which are available to you.

It helps a lot to be able to formulate the right question.  There are times when even the act of attempting to formulate the right question can give you insights into something you are missing or hiding from yourself.  “Should I lose weight?”  Is that really the right question?  Is it instead “should I lose body fat?”  Or is it “should I become the healthiest I can be, so that I am prepared and able to live life with joy?”  And what does healthy mean, anyway?  I mean, maybe you should really gain weight by adding more muscle than fat lost, or maybe you should have sufficient amounts of body fat to be healthy in the possible famine filled future?  And maybe your weight should fluctuate over time.  Maybe the inverted Moon tarot card is the best outcome possible, and that is a good thing.

I’m starting to notice problems with data acquisition via the internet.  A number of blogs I regularly read are starting to go behind a paywall.  It isn’t a big paywall, usually something on the order of a dollar a month or so, but troublesome for me.  I have this policy against paying money for stuff over the internet.  It has to do with a long-standing disagreement with paypal I’ve got going on.  See, I can not use paypal.  Not even for one-time credit card processing.  I guess I’m on a list of people they have banned, and I haven’t been able to figure out why.  Most of the time, I don’t care.  About once a year or so, I’ve want something that only takes paypal, and I’ve had to find a work around, or not buy it.  Preschool went to paypal for tuition payments, but I could still mail a check.  A local race required paypal to enter, but I searched around and discovered how to mail a check to them.

I’ve considered altering my identity information, pretending I’m my husband, and the like, just to be able to buy some books.  It turns out that Scarlet Imprint requires paypal.  So does a philosophy professor, and a sigil magic course I’m interested in.  What is in a name?  After all, I can use different names in different places on the internet, so why not with paypal and facebook as well?  Yet, I haven’t.

I understand why the token dollar paywall exists.  Those bots are brutal out there.  The DDOS attacks are increasing.  When Martin Armstrong talks about the shift of public confidence to private confidence, do you think he might be discussing such things as the public to private internet usage as well?  It could be.  The private internet, the darkweb, is already bigger than the public part of it.  The public part of it increasingly is vulnerable.  You can see that every time a bank website goes down.  How many times this year has Bank of America gone down?  How many times this year have you gone to the grocery store, and the new chip card doesn’t work because the connection to the server is down?

Kevin at Cryptogon is down this morning, and by that I mean the skin is there but the content is not.  Forums run slow, and the host servers lose data.  Facebook is down for people from time to time.  Things just are not as reliable as they used to be.  Is it just down for me?

How much reliance on the internet are you exposed to?  If the banking network broke, what would your cryptocurrencies be worth?  How much government theft of trillions of dollars could you cover up with a banking network failure?  More than you could cover up by three skyscrapers falling onto their own footprint, or by a bank’s records room being flooded out in Hurricane Sandy, I’d think.

These problems are not solved by one bank to rule them all and in the darkness bind them.  You can solve “show the note” mortgage problems (MERS) by merging all of the mortgage holding banks into one central bank, but the three factions won’t have it.  If the Vatican moved its records, don’t you think the banking system would do the same?  It is basic risk management.  There are various black swan scenarios which result in the death of the public internet as an effective means of communication.  As it is, all we get is increasing noise to signal ratio.  The truth is still out there, but you have to look at the fiction to find it.

This morning, I read yet another article on “I saved $23,000 by not buying stuff I didn’t need like movie tickets and new clothing and going out to eat.”  Okay.  I’m happy for you, oh childless one.  Generally speaking, the clickbait stories on people getting out of debt by not spending money are about people without children.  Go a bit deeper into the austerity movement, say, into Dave Ramsey territory, and you’ll find stories of people with children.

Some of my friends don’t like Dave Ramsey, because they aren’t religious, and he is.  Some of them just don’t believe the stories they read, though.  When they read about somebody paying off $200,000 of debt in three years, they just can’t believe that that would apply to them.  For the most part, they are right.  To pay off $200,000 in debt over three years, generally speaking, they sold something big like a house or a condo which was gifted to them, or they have a really high income, like they are receiving rent from that house or condo which was gifted to them.

For the most part, getting out of debt is a good thing.  Dmitry Orlov describes the iron triangle of house-car-job as the chains which keep people enslaved to soul-sucking cubicle slavery.  What is it that we need?  Dmitry rightfully points out, 80% of people on Earth don’t own a vehicle.  In 2014, there were 1.2 billion vehicles on the planet, and 7.1 billion people.  Think about those numbers for a bit.  I need a vehicle, because I have kids in upper-middle-class suburbia, which is deliberately designed, at least according to James Howard Kunstler, to require a vehicle to get to the grocery store, to a job, to the doctor’s office, because nothing is within walking distance.  I can’t grow my own food because I don’t have enough land to do so, plus city livestock ordinances.  I can’t grow my own fuel because I don’t have enough land to do so, plus no harvesting firewood from the city-owned greenbelts and parks.

There are plenty of people in the survival/prepper communities who implore people like me to grow my own something.  I do grow things.  I grow apples, quince, cherries, plums, pears, Asian pears, aronia berries, tayberries, blackberries, blueberries, kiwi, and other things.  However, this particular location can NEVER be self-sustainable, not even if the population reduced by 90% and I was in the favor of the local warlord.  I can make it better than the typical mortgage debt slave with a perfectly manicured lawn, it is true.  I have paid off my mortgage, my car loans, and my student debts.  I no longer have over $250,000 in debt.  Yes, I did do it by sitting on my butt at home and buying as little as reasonably possible.  There was self-sacrifice involved.  Meanwhile, friends move, and rent, and get another mortgage.  I don’t tell them I’m mortgage free.  They wouldn’t understand.

My kids get teased for their clothes at school.  They play hard in them, and rip the knees over time.  I don’t get around to replacing them, or sewing patches on the knees.  My kids get called poor.  How much greater does the adult level of teasing occur?  In order to do the austerity measures required to get out of debt, you can’t go out to coffee with your friends.  You can’t go do expensive events with your friends.  When you don’t spend money, you lose your previous friends who do.  When everybody in the neighborhood it seems has enrolled their children in Chinese, swim team, basketball, girl scouts, piano, play practice, dance, and horseback riding (and I’m talking ONE family with two children here), and I haven’t because those things cost more money in fees and gas and time than I’m willing to pay, is it any surprise when my kids just don’t play with their kids after school?  How could they possibly?

What is it that we need?  Maslow’s Hierarchy doesn’t include cars.  You need food, a warm bed to sleep in (you don’t need to own it), functional clothing, clean water, and a community to provide the other incidentals like medical care and friendship and insurance when bad things happen, and bad things always happen eventually.  When you start with a family culture of self-imposed austerity, there is sufficient cushion when bad things happen.  When you don’t have a $2000 monthly mortgage payment, a $600 monthly car payment, and a $250 monthly student loan payment, you have more cushion when you lose your job or get long-term disabled by a broken leg or cancer and can’t work for a time.  Yet, the financial cushion comes with a cost to your social cushion.  Not spending money includes charity.  Is that worth it?  Well, if your friends are leeches, who drop off when they don’t receive monetary gifts from you, then yes, it is worth it.  Be alone for a bit until you can find friends who aren’t financial leeches.

All of this makes me ponder whether there are spiritual leeches.  Spirits who require more maintenance costs than you are willing to give.  Heh.  I can think of a few deities which fall into this category so easily, demanding way more of me than they would give in return, with unfair terms which I just need to walk away from.  Go find the ones who aren’t spiritual leeches, whose negotiated terms are fair.

Sometimes, I get depressed.  Once a month or so, I feel trapped, pointless, worthless, and so on and so forth.  One way to move on from that place, is through meditation on ghosts.  It goes a bit like this.  Ghosts exist.  Go take your Ouija board into an abandoned jail where they tortured people to death and prove it to yourself if you have not yet had sufficient experience.  Or, if not ghosts, then spirits without physical bodies exist.  Which is why you can say that lizards have taken over certain powerful people in the world, or that creepy feeling you get when you’re in the presence of a mass murderer.  Or, even if you’ve never experienced that, then there are atheists out there with precognitive or telepathic abilities which they should not have, and can document.

All of which points to this one concept: I can’t die.  Oh, sure, my body can die.  But I can’t.  The me that is my will, that is the thing that watches myself think and fall in love and feel all sorts of powerful instincts and emotions, will still be here in the beginning and at the end of all things.  It is bigger than this body.  I am bigger than this body.  Which means I’m capable of dying and being reborn in another body.  Perhaps in a previous life I was an alien on another planet, with wings, watching the end of my species, urgent to protect my clutch of eggs, but helpless to prevent the solar outburst with dancing plasma figures across the sky.  Or possibly that’s the future, I always get the past and the future mixed up.

When I come to the realization that my soul is immortal, then I can take risks.  If my body is all that there is, then I must guard it as a precious thing.  If I live after death, even as a ghost able to travel through all of space and time because of the interdimensional nature of spirit, then it really is okay if the human species goes extinct.  If consciousness really can affect physical matter, then the ghosts will create bodies to inhabit again, or already have.  When it is okay to die, you can reach a point in your head, where you imagine yourself already dead.

Imagining yourself already dead is actually a technique that certain military commanders have successfully used during campaigns.  When the soldiers imagine themselves as already dead, they are capable of throwing themselves upon the enemy at severe risk of death, without fear, and complete their assigned missions.  I’ve found it in several fiction books.  Throw your life away, and catch it back in your hands.  Ah, but what are you throwing it away for?  Love.  Love is the strongest thing in the Universe, and has proven to be much stronger than hatred or fear.  Sure, you can go for non-attachment, but where’s the fun in that?  I have a physical body for now, and I may as well have an adventure with it.

Oh, and the other thing.  If there are ghosts hanging around, that means they didn’t ALL go immediately to heaven, hell, Valhalla, hades, the summerlands, or other afterlife that does not include them hanging around Earth and making sure we don’t nuke ourselves to death.  It means all of the religious rules of behavior go out the window.  Especially when you start catching those ghosts lying to you or trying to trick you.  That alone busts hierarchical obedient tendencies right off the bat.  Ghosts lie as much as politicians, so one might imagine that gods lie bigger than ghosts.  As with all animate beings, watch what they do, not what they say.

I struggle a lot with “pure” concepts.  Not only do I not really know what pure fascism and pure communism and pure democracy look like, but I don’t know what their economic equivalents do either.  What the heck is a “free market” anyway?  Is there even such a thing as an “arms-length transaction” in the real world, really?  Does a “meeting of the minds” ever really occur?  In my mind, these are all just fantasies.

Most of the time, the market is not free.  You must pay informational and reputational costs to enter, no matter where and when this market is.  Most of the time, there are significant power disparities between the parties, especially these days.  Economies of scale have produced great big corporations, and you as an individual are just so small, how could it be otherwise?  When you need a couple thousand dollar prescription drug, that your medical insurance only covers 50% of, how could you possibly think that that market was free?  You had informational and monetary and power disparities so huge, it seems they could only be overcome by single-payer healthcare.

Derrick Jensen talks about blind hope.  Would you rather resist and be killed, or go along with the hierarchy, every step of the way into the gas chambers?  Then he points out that the people in the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising had a greater survival rate than the people who did not resist.  This goes along well with Nassim Taleb’s concept of risk of ruin.  What is the risk, at any one decision point, that you will die if you do this action versus this action?  You also have to take into account the risk that you will die at the end of the primrose path, not just at a single decision point.  However, things at the end of the primrose path are not always clear.  You can see the close up probabilities more clearly than the ones in the future, in general.

Thus, I can make a decision like this one: If I suspect that I have stress-fractured a bone doing something like too much running for too much time, I don’t actually have to go see a doctor about it.  If I do, I know that I will be out of pocket roughly $1000 due to the high-deductible health insurance plan plus multiple visits and tests.  The chances of me dying are really quite low, and it is a low-risk of nonunion location.  If I so desired, I could order a fracture boot on amazon or other online medical supply provider for far less than a doctor’s office would sell it to me.  Crutches are $20 at the local drugstore, should I decide that I need them to get around.

I then have to ask the question: does the internet change the information disparity in healthcare?  Or only certain types of healthcare?  There are certain things that cost more to do without a doctor’s order than with the high deductible full-price office visit associated with obtaining that order, like specialist blood testing.  These things also have a higher risk of dying if you get the interpretation of the thing wrong.  This means one does not always avoid the medical system as a matter of policy, but wisely chooses cafeteria style when it is useful and when it can be avoided.

Translating this decision heuristic over to politics works as well.  One does not always choose the anarchy option as a matter of policy.  Sometimes, it is useful to choose the hierarchy, when the risk of ruin is lower.  Sometimes it is useful to choose democracy, or fascism, or even vulture capitalism.  Keep in mind that these decisions are not forever, and should the circumstances change, going back to mere anarchy is always on the table.  If you choose to seek all of the government services possible in order to bankrupt it, that’s fine, and so is avoiding government services for the sake of privacy, stillness, and solitude.  We are all still deeply connected, even if it doesn’t feel like it at all.  I am connected to the psychopath just as much as I am connected to the all-loving and nurturing mother.  Giving up hope in any one self-identity as being the salvation of my sense of righteousness has borne fruit.  There is no salvation, there never was.  I will never be righteous or good.  Therefore, I am free to decide, even badly.

In contract law, they teach us, that withholding vital information needed to judge the terms of a contract makes the contract voidable.  You all know, from having watched way too many court dramas, that withholding a material fact can completely change the story, and thus the judgment of the jury or the judge.  Too many secrets can make people commit atrocities, simply because they didn’t know.  It seems that while not knowing the law is not an excuse, not knowing the facts because they have been deliberately concealed, is very much an excuse.

Thus, we come to morality.  People who know more about the story of the planet tend to have different morality structures than those who don’t know as much.  Let’s face it, though, trudging through life as a smart person feels like a hangover.  It honestly feels as though I “should” know more to the story than I do.  Piecing together the puzzle pieces, and looking at all of the myths and the science, knowing that parts were deliberately kept from me, is demoralizing.  I use the word demoralizing in a different sense there; it means that it breaks down the morality I was indoctrinated as a child.  Oh sure, we all were.  Don’t steal, don’t kill, don’t cheat, obey the law, don’t lie, don’t run stop lights.  This basic morality is taught because it must be, because it works, and because it has stood the test of time through aeons of trial and error.

As you grow in power and influence, your morality changes.  Cthulhu’s all-powerful morality is so very different from the one children are taught.  Odin kills the frost giants, and yet he lets the fairies and the dwarves live.  Voltaire knocks a hole in a fishing boat which was ferrying them across the lake, because boats with holes are not taxed and boats without holes are.  Voltaire goes and kills an innocent child, explaining that the child was going to grow up and become a genocidal monster.  How much different from Voltaire’s morality is Haephestus’s?  How much different from Haephestus’s morality is Hera’s or Zeus’s?  They would let the genocidal monster child live, and wipe out all of the non-believers in the next nation over.  They would create ebola, the flu, childhood bone cancer, and all of the sexually transmitted diseases to afflict innocent newborn babies with.  When they said that “God’s ways are not our ways”, they were absolutely right.

Absolute power corrupts absolutely.  Actually, if I remember the story correctly, absolute knowledge of good and evil corrupts absolutely.  Do you really think that I know right from wrong?  Do babies know it?  Of course they don’t.  That’s why we have to teach them right from wrong, and what we teach them is very crude.  As an adult, you know very well that there are times to kill, and times to lie, and times to steal.  The Jewish morality allows all of those to be broken to save a life.  Prosperity Gospel Christianity allows all of those to be broken to make a profit, pumping oil from the ground and destroying ecosystems worldwide to do it, stealing clean water and dumping fracking chemicals and cancer-causing chemicals into it.  It seems the entire pantheon of gods throughout the world allow this.  They allow rape to go on, allowing the entire police force to look the other way when several of their own engage in violence of various types within their homes or on the streets.  Surely you can forgive the atheists for thinking that there are no gods when they never witness gods interfering for the benefit of mankind as a whole.

Humans are pretty bad at foretelling the future.  Oh, granted, far better than chance at the general outlines and probabilities, but the specific details?  Not so much.  We can’t even tell the past, because so very much of it has been kept from us.  We can’t tell even the future, because there is way too much privacy at all levels.  How are we supposed to be held morally accountable for our actions when we don’t know 90% of the story?  Unless we know every material fact, we can’t be held morally responsible for what we do.  We know not what we do.  I would go further, and say, from a gnostic point of view, even if we did know, there is nothing we could do to change the story of the planet.  We are powerless over humanity’s oil addiction.  Even the .01% are powerless over humanity’s oil addiction.  According to leadership boundary theory, if I am powerless over a thing, it is not my problem, and I instead focus my energies upon the problems which I do have power to create and/or destroy with.

Too Many Secrets.  Here we are with access to much more knowledge and information than ever before, than even the kings of old had at their fingertips in their vast libraries of records and messengers and spies.  We still can’t make good moral decisions about where we want the planet to go.  We CAN, however, affect the local scene quite a bit.  Anything within walking distance, you have much more local knowledge than any national level bureaucrat ever will, or could.  That is always the way of things, even in the forest between the vast fungi networks interlinking the trees and shuttling nutrients to and fro.  If you were to decide to kill all the psychopaths and rapists in your local area, or to throw them out, I simply don’t have the information available to judge your decision with.  And why should I bother to judge you anyway?  If you want to bottle feed or breast feed, it really isn’t any of my business.  If you abort babies, it is not my business.  I honestly have enough moral decisions without sufficient information as it is.

What does a snake eating its own tail have to do with freedom?  Freedom is an interesting concept.  Recall that it is one of those things that doesn’t actually exist, or if you had a spectrum between real bricks on one side and bricks made out of skittles that you imagined because you read them on a piece of paper covered with squiggles and your mind created the image on the other, it would be much nearer the brick made out of skittles than the heavy thing that people tend to build walls with.  As more of an unreal than real kind of thing, it is therefore a bit slippery to define or grasp.

When you declare yourself to be something, an identity politics kind of thing, then you are no longer as free as you were to begin with.  So, for example, let’s say that you have declared yourself to be an anarchist, and therefore are not going to be following the rules of hierarchy for as much as you can get away with as a matter of principle.  That means you are not free to support hierarchy.  You can’t become Emperor, and you can’t become CEO of a trans-national corporation which provides Tasers for the human trafficking system.  By declaring yourself to be free from rules, you are less free.

It works all the way on the other side of the spectrum as well.  Let’s say that you have declared yourself to be a Unitarian, and a member of the local Unitarian church.  That means you have decided to be bound by their rules, be bound by their democratic decisions, their bylaws and consensus processes.  That is a tradeoff, you can’t do these dignity-lowering things here, and yet because they are many, you do have more options than you would as a lone individual.

If, on the other hand, you declare that you will never join a group, because you want to remain free?  Then you are not free to join groups.  Or to leave them.  Freedom of association isn’t quite the contradictory statement that one sees at first glance.  If you are free, then you are able to join the most hateful nationalist group out there, and to vote or not vote as your conscience dictates.  If you are free, then you are able to create massive wars, and to change the climate through the efforts of multi-national joint military and drug-running gang efforts, and to lie to the public about what you are doing in complete privacy.  If you are truly free, you can change the way the money works, or you can lead people down the path of their own destruction as The Satanic Bible says you can.  Or can you?

Then we get into the old philosophical argument of free will, wherein POSIWID (The Purpose of a System is What It Does) is used to disprove its existence.  If people truly had free will, then 100% of them would not have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.  The argument is, if everybody makes a particular choice in one direction and not the other, then that is proof that everybody was coerced to make that decision.  Res Ipsa Loquitur.  Are people truly free?  You couldn’t disprove it, because no two people really make all of the same decisions.  Then again, using the same logic, you could disprove that sin exists, by simply proving that not-sin doesn’t exist, and therefore everything is sin, and therefore the definition of sin versus not-sin can’t exist.

Originally, I had told a friend that a group MUST be able to exclude others, or it would not remain a coherent group.  That’s one of those negative axioms: freedom to associate necessarily implies a freedom to disassociate.  Freedom of speech necessarily implies a freedom to remain silent and private.  Freedom to exist as a church necessarily implies the ability to exclude people who don’t obey the membership rules.  Freedom to exist as a tribe necessarily implies the ability to exclude the bastard who beats his neighbor’s wife who he’s been raping.  Freedom to exist as a nation necessarily implies the ability to exclude criminals who don’t obey the membership rules.  Shunning is different than imprisonment.

I thought that these truths were self-evident, but I should have looked around and realized that they definitely are not self-evident.  I can’t bind groups like that.  Groups are free to make stupid decisions, stupid membership rules, and to fail.  There are no “musts” in the world, nor even any “shoulds”.  There is only probability of adverse consequences, and the grinding wheel of time which dissolves all groups and destroys all statues of Ozymandias over time.  It was a form of yelling at the tide to stop advancing, and I’m sorry.  I make lots of philosophical mistakes, and I probably will continue to do so.

It is partly my fault.  I do have to acknowledge my own responsibility for the history that led to this, but it isn’t all my fault.  You see, I have no current real life friends, other than my husband.  Nobody outside of family ever invites me over for dinner, or to go camping.  Nobody ever invites any of my children over for a sleepover.  The birthday party invites for my children are few and far between.  If a bunch of soccer parents are taking their kids skiing?  I won’t be invited.  We don’t go out to restaurants with people, because we’re not invited.  We’ve stopped being invited to Fourth of July BBQs, New Years Eve parties, Super Bowl watching parties, baptisms, weddings, and funerals.  Nobody ever invites me out to coffee.  Nobody ever asks me to come over and help them move, pack, clean up, watch their children while they do something important.  Nobody ever asks me to go to a movie with them.

I have acquaintances, sure.  I have digital friends who used to do the above things.  When they post pictures of the great time they had with their friends doing any of the above, I feel excluded.  It’s just like high school and college all over again, being the last one picked for dodgeball, being the only one in church youth group not invited to the party, being the one not picked for the lighting crew, not picked to sing, having stories told about me behind my back.  I’m sad and hurt.  But not too sad, and not too hurt.

Desperation doesn’t work.  It never did.  The people who practice magic would call it “the lust for result.”  The people who don’t practice magic call it something different.  They blame the victim.  I mean, obviously, I need to do the inviting first, or something.  If you’ve even seen social shunning in action in high school, you know that doesn’t work, and the outcast quickly learns that every invitation leads to a quick “no”.  I already admitted that I am partly responsible.  I have no voice.  I have no friends.  I have no visible presence.

I have ancestors I talk to and listen to.  Oh, don’t look so shocked, a belief in ancestor worship is very common across the globe.  It is only in the western U.S. where it is not practiced much.  You don’t have to believe in the existence of ancestor life after death in order to understand that having conversations with them works.  If the vast majority of people have an imaginary friend called God or Allah whom they talk to and that actually works for them, why would you poo-poo my talking to my ancestors, even if you believe they are imaginary?  Besides, they’re more responsive than high and lofty Gods who have high and lofty plans that involve what He did to Job’s children, what He did to Daniel, and what He did to the daughter of Jephthah.  Ghosts can hug when nobody else ever does.  Ghosts can teach social skills, when the rest of the world is intent on hiding the unwritten rules from me.  It was the ghosts which first taught me to look and listen and feel, to see beyond the surface, and it was the ghosts which taught me to block out others’ pain.  Or are they spirits?  Are they alien spirits?

Does not matter.  Need not be.  It doesn’t matter if they are real or all in my head, like governments and titles of lordship.  It doesn’t matter if I never have any real life dependable friends ever again.  Do you know why?  I’ll tell you why.  Without the bonds of mutual obligation, I am free.  I am free from their judgment of me.  If they think I am arrogant or socially awkward, they can do so, because they are petty and shallow and can’t hear the Earth cry out in pain over the roads and deforestation and monocultured grass.  I have no need to conform to their standards.  I have no need to chase popularity, or that kind of social power.  I can be a bad mom.  That’s right, I can be considered by anybody else to be a bad person, and it doesn’t matter.  My worth is not determined by them.  They lost that right, and they lost that trust when they neglected to show love or even basic decency and respect.

My youngest child has food allergies.  That is still plural, as in more than one food allergy, although it used to be a much greater plural.  I had food allergies as well up until sometime early-mid last year.  Because my child has severe food allergies AND asthma, he gets to go see the allergist, in order to get epi-pens prescribed, and in order to have the 504 plan signed off on for school.  See, if you are disabled, then you need a doctor’s note to get accommodations in public school.  Food allergies and asthma are both disabilities which impact the necessary life activity of breathing if life-saving medication is not immediately available and somebody able to administer it is not present.

Public schools are “supposed” to be free.  They’re not, of course.  Not even for the able-bodied.  You must bring your own growing list of school supplies.  There are music and athletics fees.  There are lunches and snacks to be packed.  Furthermore, if you happen to be a double income with two and a half children attending schools, you have to have childcare for the days in which the teachers decide to train themselves how to better warehouse their future felons.  That’s a teacher joke.  One of my friends used to call the “Future Farmers of America” program the Future Felons of America.  This was before somebody had coined the phrase school-to-prison pipeline.

For a kid with food allergies, school is anything but free, unless you decided not to tell the school about your child’s food allergies in the first place.  There are only two settings: 1) You don’t tell the school, and your child goes to school without any epi-pens available or teacher notification, which could honestly save you hundreds of dollars, or 2) You fill out the appropriate form, get an allergist appointment in addition to the regular pediatrician appointment, pay the $350 office visit co-pay, plus $150 testing fees, and then pay a couple hundred for TWO sets of epi-pens.  One to be locked up in the nurse’s office, unreachable in case the nurse is only there 2 days a week or the school is in lockdown, or doesn’t follow the actual allergy plan, and one to have at home, and if you are extremely lucky, you can bring it with you on the bus for when somebody decides to eat PB&J for breakfast and poke your kid’s eyes out.  It is that expensive WITH insurance, because, hello, those high-deductible insurance plans were the only reasonable ones left on the list of available options from the employed person in the family.

Now, IF you didn’t go to public school, it would cost less.  Let’s say that you decided to homeschool.  Plenty of reasons for that, I don’t need to go into for the purpose here.  As a homeschooler, you don’t need an extra set of epi-pens and inhalers and spacer locked up in the nurse’s office.  You also don’t necessarily need to go to the allergist every single year.  You could, instead, get your epi-pen prescription through your pediatrician at the annual checkup, which IF it is coded correctly should not cost you a visit co-pay.

There are other things which need doctor’s notes at public school.  Let’s say, for example, that your child gets migraines.  Runs in the family.  Well, your child can NOT just take Ibuprofen to school with them and pop some pills when they need them.  At least not until late middle school when all the other post-puberty females are doing it one to three days per month, with their teachers looking the other way because it is still illegal.  Oh no.  They need a school form, filled out by a doctor, stating that they are allowed to take ibuprofen in school for a headache.  Plus an entire bottle kept under lock and key in the nurse’s office.  Without that form, and that doctor’s office co-pay, your child will just have to suffer, and may vomit, in which case they’ll have to be sent home and stay home an extra day.

Because you took advantage of this “free” thing, you now have to pay for it in other ways.  Because you have a driver’s license, you are required to show up for jury duty.  Because you have a social security number, you must pay income and property taxes.  Because you own a car, you must have the emissions inspected in order to keep the license tabs up to date.  Because you receive mail, you must have a mailbox which complies with the specifications laid out by the post office.  Because you live in the city, you must remove the noxious weeds from your property or it will be done for you at your expense.  Is there anything which is truly free?  Is the air I breathe free?  Well, no, I pay property taxes in order for somebody to organize and keep the chemical factory from expelling hazardous chemicals into the air I breathe.  It is all interconnected.  In for a penny, in for a pound.