On January 11th, 2016, I started a daily practice of writing a joke meditation of the day called Cracked Pot Meditations. I was still recovering from the treatment of cancer, and I was having very challenging cognitive issues, so I chose just to put something simple and easy to write every day. Posting it to the blog allowed me to have some accountability. Some of those meditations were poorly written and unedited. I have gone back and begun editing these and adding an illustration, starting with the April 27th meditation. I hope you enjoy.
Meditation for June 2nd
Rules to Boredom
Laws, rules, and guidelines are how we create order as a society. We learn and follow these rules in school, which carry on to our work lives. Almost every company has an employee handbook that states the company’s regulations and expectations for its employees. Then we drive home, where speed limits and other laws need to be followed.
Society and politics are contingent on making or trying to erase those laws. Some states are at odds with the federal government because the laws they want to enforce are the opposite of federal law. There becomes a tug of war with money, and usually, the feds win.
Rules and laws prevent people from being creative or thinking outside the box. Things need to be a certain way, or a person will not be able to solve an issue. When the guidelines are unclear, people become frightened that they will upset someone if they guess wrong about how to handle any given situation.
We have accidentally made robots, and since the CIA stopped funding the arts to combat communism and the continued decline in arts education funding, it has gotten worse.
This is also a problem because if someone tries to live outside the norm, they are judged and treated as a pariah. The only options are get rid of the subculture (the old way like when they continually kill rock and roll) or make that subculture mainstream and market the shit out of it (the brand new way, suckers!). We want people to be socially recognizable in their values and morals, so if we aren’t recognizing the lifestyle, we become uneasy and seek the law to manage it. Just look at the war against rap with the censoring at the end of the 80s and the beginning of the 90s.
Everyone wants to make a sign, to have something written down so that it is permanent, to take away privileges, and to put up defenses against the possible spread of unsavory actions into everyday life. People need to know that something is going to be done about it.
People are so into rules that they will talk about how there used to be rules that were better than the new rules. People will talk about how things are done where they’re from. Some people even try to bring the cultural commandments to their new homes. People want a social basis on which they can understand and be comfortable. People have difficulty going from one set of rules to a new set of rules. With so many rules, people don’t even study the history of where that rule comes from. You do need to know the rules to break the rules. It blows people’s minds to go from a set of rules and guidelines to being told that they can come up with solutions independently and are trusted to do so. They literally can’t.
Too bad it’s destroying art. Things have to be a certain way. Old timey music can’t have mandolins, metal can’t have any interesting parts, punk has to be identical to all the other punk songs ever written – no exceptions, rap and hip-hop has to sound more like other genres but not as good, indie rock has to have a glockenspiel part in every song, painting needs to look like an illustration – usually with an early twentieth century scientific illustration feel, comic books should be about zombies or the apocalyptic end of the classic superhero as we know it, books should be a series of short stories and never be a novel because noally reads anymore, tv shows shouparticularecific genres and every episode must end with a cliff hanger and a death of a characteeally liked for 17 seasons, or if the tv shoutstandingy good, it’ll be cancelled because people love Kardashians and drag queens more than smartly written shows, comedians should joke about how they can’t joke about racial, sexist and other under privilagism and joke about the insanity of how entitled millennials are – ugh, millennials are ruining everything! (laugh track)
Who dictates what is good and what is bad? Would that be interesting? Can we not blanket hate a whole genre? Who has the right to impose restrictions on anything? Who actually gave anyone the right to create a constitution and force other people to follow it?
Fear of breaking the rules is the reason our next president of these United States will be a money & power-hungry narcissist.
Or Donald Trump. (This was written in 2016, so call me Nostradamus.)
Prayer
Eunomia, Goddess of legislation,
There’s nothing written about this particular situation.
What do I do?
I don’t know what to do.
There is nothing in the handbook about this.
The boss is busy over there, so I can’t ask her.
At my old job, I had to do this, this, and that,
But here I have no guidelines for any of this.
Whatdoidowhatdoidowhatdoidowhatdoidowhatdoido.
I asked the grumpy barista guy,
But all he says is make it up as you go.
I don’t feel that’s a good philosophy.
Maybe if I close my eyes, this situation will go away.
Or someone else will fix it.
Amen.
Craft
Play Risk with someone. Instead of moving your armies, tell your opponent to stop it, or you’ll tell the UN.
Fun!
Goal
How do you respect others’ laws and boundaries while not becoming a trend-following, uncreative welp? How can we solve problems without guidelines or fear of authority? How do you erase everything you thought you knew about anything before trying to create something?
Learn the rules and laws, and then break them.