4/7/99    I would rather have a bottle in front of me than a frontal lobotomy. I know, the first time you heard that you laughed so hard you broke your mom's water. It is still relevant to the current mental state of mankind. Some people can alleviate all their stress with an ice cold beer or a glass of wine, or for some people a workout or other exercise does the trick. For some sex is their drug for taking the edge off. Others have to resort to more extreme chill-out methods like tranquilizers or psychotherapy or even brain surgery. In those cases it is most likely there is some physiological dysfunction causing the brain to go koo-koo. For the most part people (especially Americans) are stressed out or clinically depressed because they are SPOILED ROTTEN. We want and expect so much for ourselves and our families that our careers become all consuming and the demands on our time so great we feel like rats on a treadmill and STILL are in debt up to our ears. Stress comes from that nagging over-anxious urge to break this vicious circle, and depression comes from surrendering to our inability to do so. Well I'm sorry, but if you want stress go to Kosovo or Baghdad, and if you want depression just visit a Hospice center or nursing home. As Americans we make up less than 10% of the world's population and use up at least 70% of it's resources to maintain our product-driven lifestyles. Nobody holds a gun to our head and makes us move to the big city suburbs where we spend half our waking hours at work and the other half in our cars, and if it gets to be too much to bear then either find a way to deal with it or change it. Bottom line, if you're not happy then life is pointless, and happiness can only be experienced in the MOMENT. Not to say we shouldn't look to the future, but the future does not exist because it hasn't happened yet, and the past does not exist because it's already happened and at best is partially imaginable using bio-chemical sensory storage, that which makes evolution possible, MEMORY. Whether any joy or despair comes to us from these memories or from what we anticipate will happen in the future, that joy or despair is experienced in the MOMENT, and as linear thinking life forms the MOMENT is all we ever have. And at any given 'moment' we could experience one or more of the following : hunger, thirst, fear, pain, suffering, or loss. If you don't feel ANY of these and are still stressed out or depressed it's because you want or expect too much . How many throughout history and even today can say they don't experience one or more of these things on a regular basis? We really are of the chosen few , unaware that humanity has waited all it's life for this very MOMENT, and not appreciating all who went before to make it possible (shades of Watership Down ?). So, in a nutshell, let's stop whining and get on with it. Now you may have noticed that in my list of "bad things", or as I like to call them, attributes of linear physical existence that hinder the individual natural evolutionary rate defined by the collective process (you know, "bad things"), I did not mention things like loneliness, despair, anger, jealousy or hate. These are things created by us and do not exist in real-time. However, the result of these things can often result in hunger, pain, fear etc. and these things are quite real. This suggests that, by some abstract manifestation, creating these "non-real" emotional attributes we do in fact create our own realities. Call it Karma or proactive reincarnation or simple cause & effect, or think of it as what goes around comes around. We are similar to radio "receivers", tuned to that very narrow bandwidth we call reality, and in a similar way act as radio "transmitters" causing undefinable ripples in the ether by our thoughts, emotions and actions that somehow manifest as real-time attributes that are again "received", like some Karmic feed-back loop. This seems to go along with the Einsteinian 'time-space curvature' concept, and where TIME is relative to VELOCITY (here we go again), thought/action at the speed of light could go full "circle" through a domino effect chain of events that might come back to bite us on the rear. Of course, as with any domino effect there is a 'random factor' to be considered, although as I mentioned before I don't see it as random at all, rather just a process we could at best know HOW but not WHY. Nevertheless, it kinda makes me want to think and act in such a way that is conducive to that individual natural evolutionary rate if not for the sake of the collective subconscience, to try and cut down on "bad Karma". In any event, you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, so it can't hurt us all to do a little less whining and be a little nicer to each other. The capacity for compassion is exclusive to the "more evolved" life forms on earth (primarily us mammals), and because of this exclusiveness it makes me think it's is a real important part of evolution. Selective extinction should of become obsolete eons ago when language and communication came into being. It is no longer necessary for "only the strong survive" when we have the ability to communicate these strengths and weaknesses and reach equitable solutions to cultural co-existential problems. Compassion combined with reasoning is a far more versatile and upgradeable tool than defensive pride, and with all our creature comforts and modern conveniences you'd think it would be second nature. Our desires still seem to dominate, though. And it's just never enough no matter what. It keeps going back to that inability to exist in the NOW, haunted by that which has already happened or worried that things that have not happened yet will not be the way we WANT it. All we can do is remember the past, plan for the future, but live in the MOMENT, because that is the only thing in linear time that exists for us. And if you're not happy at this MOMENT life sucks.