Always Love Lifelong Learning.

Always love lifelong learning.

Harvard University offers a completely free online course on the Fundamentals of Neuroscience that you can get a certificate for successfully completing and which requires nothing other than basic knowledge in Biology and Chemistry. This excites me! Here’s the website

It was only Yesterday that the village collapsed.

The oxygen in my blood has become an act of rebellion Invisible Devalued Unless I inhale monoxide the hegemony scoffs They don’t know how my mind has reorganized Neural pathways undone and re-bridged by latent trauma Like a swarm my cells adapt and restructure and assimilate Screaming past each other in silent chaos.

I am not permitted to posses my history. Canned and processed in capitalist factories And boycotted by radical enclaves Exploited and forgotten Seldom do they recognize my soul.

But my humanity is resistance. My identity is power. My breathing is hope. My orgasm is liberation. My name is wisdom.

And no one sees.

Because I’ve come just far enough for those you hate to look like me.

Episode

Gazing coolly back Flattened eyes to flattened mirror Six steps, fifteen feet To the mattress Ninety degrees, reverse Thin quilted cover over Thin skin over Thin blood in a Thin heart beating One Two Three

H2O means water and O means oxygen And chemical bonds keep Numbers and figures In order and propriety While reactive compounds Scrimmage in cranial nooks Thinner than 37,000 feet

Cannons of yesterday are memory’s wares To reinforce serotonin’s last stand Amygdala Armada is taking heavy losses Five in seven out Thirteen minutes till 3 Means time to prepare the funeral pyre

Tailor Kleenex’s surrender flag in tow Aching eye sockets open shut raise it high And in one last rebellion Fill the stark white dusty face With lacrimal floods, Crumple up And let gravity arrest it into forgetful cellophane

Noticing I’m short on flint The pyre is postponed and Reverse, ninety degrees Deep breath in breath out Apathy allows the sitting silence To shutter the restless eyes And drag themselves to slumber’s lair

The sequel will be better.

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Am I more than you bargained for yet?

Mystic-lite and substance-strained

Foolish, listless, garbled, pained

Seeking silence, craving peace

Murdering dreams in waves of sleep

Medicated though I be

Restless fervor powers me

And of this silence none can tell

What ought to be and ought to hell

So page by page here writ my mind

Hollowed out I now confide

In you my readers, friends, and foes

To look beyond the stilted prose

And find the dreams I all but lost.

My rhyme declines.

But finding you is worth the cost.

Someone asked a good question yesterday that got me thinking: why are some mythologies more “mainstream” than others? Where I’m from, everyone knows at least a couple things about the Egyptian, Norse, and Greek (and sometimes Roman) pantheons, but no one’s ever discussed those of East Asia, or South America, for example. 

My theory: Eurocentrism and colonialism.

Egypt, Greece, and Rome all have some relevant proximity to the history of Christianity. Egypt features prominently in the Exodus, and Greece and Rome were important cultural shapers in the time of Jesus and Paul. When Christianity spread and gained the force of empire through Constantine and others and spread up through Europe, it dominated nearly all the local traditions in its wake. This domination continued through the European colonization of the Americas, Africa, India, and others -- history is written by the colonizers, so it makes sense that the prominent revival pantheons among European-descended pagans aren’t those of the conquered people but those of their own people (Norse) and those that are “necessary” to provide historical weight to Christianity.

Completely conjecture, but this was interesting to think about today.