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Sometime I forget or ignore that other people don't have the time I take to write in order to contemplate my life. Apparently, they don't contemplate anybody else's life either. It's more likely, it seems to me, that if they contemplate life at all it's more likely to be somebody else's life rather than their own.
I've wondered since I was a boy why people decorate their bodies with tattoos. When I joined the Navy I knew people before they got tattooed and immediately afterward. Naively, I occasionally asked them why they did it. Many times they didn't seem to know. A lotta times they passed it off as something they did because they were drunk and somebody dared them to do it.
I didn't really believe them. I chose to think they were just a certain type of person who didn't know ahead of time they were going to do it. I do have a small tattoo myself in the web of my left hand between my thumb and index finger. I got it put there so that if I closed my thumb tight toward my hand that it got hidden in the crease of the skin fold. I deliberately got drunk to be able to say that's why I did it.
My reason for not getting tattoos in the Navy was that I figured it would identify me in case I got in trouble, and the tattoo would get me put in jail. Later on, I realized that was the very reason many people do get tattoos. Not to get away with a careless act or some crime, but for the purposes of individual identity.
The tattoos seemed to give them an identity they wouldn't have otherwise. Tribal tattoos or gang tattoos that stated who they were or what they were like. For some, getting tattooed demonstrated some sort of commitment to some mutual cause. Doing things that way just didn't seem to work for me. It might show other people what they thought I was like, but it didn't do anything for showing me what I was like. To each their own I guess.
My quest has always been about achieving some sort of personal identity. Each time some significant event happened that I thought would give it to me has ultimately failed. Mainly, I believe, because of the final statement in the header at the top of my blog: Great moments in our lives never return.
I have had lots of incredible experiences of a spiritual nature that should have done the trick. I have received "enlightenment" many times. In the long run these experiences lost their favor with me as a form of individuation because they only happened once, and never the twain shall meet.
Not only did these experiences only happen they way they did just once, but there were never any witnesses to the occasion but for me. Getting a tattoo to commemorate such events never appealed to me. Nobody could possibly know what I referenced if I told my tale. Having these experiences never made me into something or somebody unique, they only proved I was human.
Sometime I think being human is a fate worse than death. The only thing that makes humans human is their ability to do abstract thinking. All abstract thinking is sheer delusion. Abstract thinking merely makes me into a great pretender. Like the song The Great Pretender. It was made popular by a group called The Platters, and written in 1955 by Buck Ram when I was a very sad teenager. I never get the lyrics right.
Drinking kefir and eating probiotic pills gets me very thirsty, but without knowing it's so. Last night a friend who has a lot of medical training told me that the chapped lips I've been complaining of was one of the first signs of dehydration. I immediately began drinking lots of water, and had to get up to urinate during last night at least ten times. There's gotta be a better way.
I need to stop writing about how hot it gets now. It's hot everywhere, and for all intents and purposes is gonna stay that way for months and months. Global warming is gonna kill us all. Probably soon. I briefly communicated with a lady from Texas who owns a plant nursery. Her entire way of life is being threatened by the enduring drought there.
Now, Arizona is on fire. I hate to hear of all those Ponderosa pine forests going up in flames. Northern Arizona and southern Utah is/was a beautiful area, and one of the few places in America I'd like to see again. Too bad.
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