The Traveller: Personal Update & on Creative Writing

Quotes

George Orwell
"In a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act.”

Stephen Biko
"The oppressors' most powerful weapon is the mind of the oppressed."

Kevin A. Carson
"Ideological hegemony is the process by which the exploited come to view the world through a conceptual framework provided to them by their exploiters."

C. Spurgeon
“While I regarded God as a tyrant I thought my sin a trifle; But when I knew Him to be my Father, then I mourned that I could ever have kicked against Him. When I thought God was hard, I found it easy to sin; but when I found God so kind, so good, so overflowing with compassion, I smote upon my breast."

Madeleine L'Engle
"Truth is what is true, and it's not necessarily factual. Truth and fact are not the same thing. Truth does not contradict or deny facts, but it goes through and beyond facts. This is something that it is very difficult for some people to understand. Truth can be dangerous."

Troy Wisdom
"The truth needs no defense; it only needs witnesses."

Mark Horne
"There is no pleasure as exquisite as being told by someone with more income than you have ever had in your life that your politics are wrong because you don't have solidarity with the poor."

JRR Tolkien
"Deserves it! I daresay he does. Many that live deserve death. And some that die deserve life. Can you give it to them? Then do not be too eager to deal out death in judgement. For even the very wise cannot see all ends."

Augustine of Hippo
"What are kingdoms without justice? They're just gangs of bandits."

Mark Horne
"The Bush-Obama killing continuum shows that there are no reformers; each successor builds on the power grab of the predecessor."

Robert A. Heinlein
"There is no worse tyranny than to force a man to pay for what he does not want merely because you think it would be good for him."

BECAUSE IT STARTS WITH THE TRIVIAL LIKE THE ABOVE, BUT LEADS TO THE FOLLOWING:

Aleksandr I. Solzhenitsyn
"And how we burned in the camps later, thinking: What would things have been like if every Security operative, when he went out at night to make an arrest, had been uncertain whether he would return alive and had to say good-bye to his family? Or if, during periods of mass arrests, as for example in Leningrad, when they arrested a quarter of the entire city, people had not simply sat there in their lairs, paling with terror at every bang of the downstairs door and at every step on the staircase, but had understood they had nothing left to lose and had boldly set up in the downstairs hall an ambush of half a dozen people with axes, hammers, pokers, or whatever else was at hand?... The Organs would very quickly have suffered a shortage of officers and transport and, notwithstanding all of Stalin's thirst, the cursed machine would have ground to a halt! If...if...We didn't love freedom enough. And even more – we had no awareness of the real situation.... We purely and simply deserved everything that happened afterward."

Neal Stephenson
"The ancients who wished to demonstrate illustrious virtue throughout the kingdom, first ordered well their own states. Wishing to order well their states, they first regulated their families. Wishing to regulate their families, they first cultivated their persons. Wishing to cultivate their persons, they first rectified their hearts. Wishing to rectify their hearts, they first sought to be sincere in their thoughts. Wishing to be sincere in their thoughts, they first extended to the utmost their knowledge. Such extension of knowledge lay in the investigation of things....From the Son of Heaven down to the mass of the people, all must consider the cultivation of the person the root of everything besides. "

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Personal Update & on Creative Writing

Meditating on the quote from the other day and thinking how completely out-classed I am in the realm of creative writing, I have decided to move my few fiction works from this blog to another blog dedicated to creative writing (and not mentioned too much, at least until I am good enough to not be an embarrassment to myself). This will include most of my metaphorical entries also.

I haven't given up trying to write creatively, and I will still try to get published some day (if I live long enough). I will still continue to read, study, & comment on literature & writing tips.

Today we presented our counter-offer in the negotiation meeting to management, and together with some new revelations on management's latest attempts to take away our work, and undermine public safety, I find myself in a vicious political fight. So, the gloves are off, but there is no certain future for my job.

The old anxieties immediately emerged; I began to have thoughts like this:

I thought the Lord would take care of me, but it looks like He may want me to lose everything and have my family starve.

The thing is, God has laid it upon me to be the provider of my household. Since I am fully aware of His profound sovereignty, and completely at His mercy (dependent upon Him with no protection of my own), and with the wounds of the last 40 month struggle to survive financial uncertainty still fresh in my soul, I panic easily. I currently support myself and three others in my household as well as all the Monkey Collective parasites and my numerous creditors on my one wage. I don't think I can take another bare-bones survival fight.

And on top of being broke, my 16-year-old Honda finally just broke down. I hate getting caught with my pants down, so to speak. I still haven't finished my Bachelor's Degree and my creative writing skills are not yet good enough to make money from. So I am just effed.

All this is occurring just when I thought my relationship with the Lord was improving and I was starting to get out of my spiritual funk. --deleted unworthy thoughts--

I do pray for forgiveness for my sins and for my presumption in trying to better myself and perhaps trying to achieve my dreams. Gotta kill that hope, it just keeps rearing it's ugly head.

End Transmission.