Wednesday 2 January 2013

Rum, Sodomy and the Lash

OK, not so good a title but at least it's thematic.  Maybe i can write this to make it fit.

Today's video:

This is all speckly because we live so close to the sodding pole that the Sun occasionally peeks over the horizon in winter and decides against bestowing its rays on us for another few months.  The light's on but the colour temperature is too low.  I should get one of those scandium jobs which my nephew broke with a plastic helicopter.

So that's "rum".  This is the doublydeu:

Though i wouldn't judge others for drinking it, the last time i drank alcohol deliberately "for fun" as it were was on 12th August, 1997, fifteen years ago.  I see drinking alcohol as a form of self-harm, rather like banging your head against the wall for fun.  Drinking alcohol has some value as a means of overcoming social inhibition and because i lack that, i have to push myself harder in social situations than i would otherwise.

If i drank to avoid my problems, i wouldn't deal with them then and there and get them out of the way.  Instead, they'd loom on the horizon and i would've given myself the additional problem of something like a hangover and impaired my ability to deal with them.  I don't understand why i'd put myself through that.

Having said that, in a way i'm addicted or obsessive about not drinking alcohol, which is probably not very moderate or healthy in itself.

I honestly don't judge others for drinking it and the fact that i think of wine, for example, as merely gone-off grape juice probably makes me a bit of a Philistine.  It's perfectly fine to drink wine and in fact i really miss whisky, which was my tipple of choice when i had enough money.


Come to think of it, it's also a vast waste of money unless you make it yourself.  However, it does make a good solvent, sanitiser and fuel.  Also, in a way we're all teetotal because there are certain alcohols we wouldn't imbibe in large amounts, such as geraniol and menthol.

Although i aim not to judge people for drinking ethanol for fun, to be honest i have a confession to make:  i do actually find it quite hard not to judge people negatively for drinking it when it seems to expose their aggressive tendencies and people get hurt psychologically or physically, including themselves.  However, I used to get drunk sometimes and have lost my memory at least twice.  On the second occasion, it took me nearly a week to get back to what appeared to be normal, and even then it could've simply been that my ability to judge what was normal had been blunted by that point.

On the other hand, it might just be that i've led such an easy life that i've never needed to resort to it.  If that's so, however, it still seems to be irrational because it makes it harder to deal with problems, so it presumably results from having problems so big you are overwhelmed with them.

Another aspect of all this is that I associate temperance with veganism, not because they're similar in aim but because they involve abstinence from a set of substances which the majority of people in this society consume.  I don't consider my vegetarianism to be a valid diet - it's a pointless sentimental gesture which is at best only transitional and a mere salve to my conscience which fails to address the root problem and is worse than some diets which include meat.  Like vegans, teetotalers no longer need to operate the denial and rationalisation which leads them to believe certain other things to justify their position.  My initial reason for approaching veganism was tropic levels, but once i'd started on that journey i no longer needed to pretend to myself that it was OK to kill animals unnecessarily for food or that it was healthy to eat the factory-farmed flesh of cadavers.  Had i pursued a different angle, such as eating roadkill, insects or only wild animals which i had hunted myself with a home made bow and arrow, i would probably have discovered other kinds of denial in which i'd previously engaged, but that's not the route i took.  Equally, there are psychological buttresses around my current position of not drinking large quantities of ethanol.

So what about sodomy and the lash?  Well, both of those are considered fun by some consenting adults, i suppose, so that's a link.  I realise it refers to the Royal Navy.

A few plans:  tomorrow is the start of the younger offspring's seventeenth trip round the Sun and i have asked him to do a guest blog to promote his channel.  This is only partly because, like certain other vloggers, he's a young pretty male person with a fringe, and i think this may be to his advantage there, although he hasn't produced much content recently, something he plans to change.  I also wrote some more dialogue for the animation and timed it, and started to plan a monochrome video called 'Fifty Shades Of Sophie Grey' (spelling intentional), for which i have fairly high hopes.  There's also 'I'm Old', a vid on the prehistory of the Nerdfighter gang sign and another on Aunt Marge in the same vein as this Violet Beauregarde video:


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