Forgiveness. And the lack of needing a deity.

Again in a bar. In southern Missouri. Visiting my ma may turn me into more of a drunk.

Religion permeates this place. It’s astonishing how faith works. Such a blind concept. So easy to not research and accept that some deity can make things function.

Life has a certainty. Death. The party has to end eventually. What happens after is completely unknown to us. It’s the childlike curiosity, combined with a megalomaniac style desire of importance, that creates this vacuum of acceptance of ignorance. I recognize that research takes time, and there’s a game on, but at least use those commercial breaks to look into something more than the bottom of your Busch Light can.

If the rest of the individuals I was surrounded by took time to stop blindly accepting their preferred monologue, and questioned themselves, we may begin to grow a bit as a species.

Nationalism…

Sitting in a bar in southern Missouri. A country song comes on glorifying the red, white, and blue. All that comes to mind is that any other country doing that with a song would be considered borderline fascist. We have been inundated with them since before Lee Greenwood.

Is it that we’ve been trained to believe in nationalism, or is it the teenage years of our country, just believing we ate invincible?

How frightening are either?

Running late in Vegas.

I’ve never wanted to be the life of the party… those gregarious individuals never made much sense to me. Style over substance.

I’m enjoying breakfast and considering that I’m going to miss the one class I intended on making today. Over the past day, I’ve entertained staff at The Neon Museum, in which the people are great. Informative staff that are full of information on the history of Vegas. After hanging out with Thaddeus and Damien and Householder and D and Ryan, and enjoying conversation with Scott Sterling, ended up staying up late with Jay Brown Rosini and his daughter. Great buddies at first into a developing a friendship with the owner of an awesome tattoo museum, and a character from history that harkens back to when tattooers were showmen and were characters…. this morning ran into Fip before he took off and had a brief breakfast.

With all of this, I’ve realized that if it wasn’t for the privacy of most of this being small groups, I would not have made the impact, or been impacted, by this contact. I desire a level of quiet conversation to really come out of my own shy nature. The stoic behaviours I show off stem from not wanting to be heard… because then I could be judged. That fear of rejection is something that I have known about, but now realize is over arching.

And now that I understand that, I can combat it.