Destination Unknown

I’ve
seen blogs that are so good and blogs that are so bad. Both of them
can almost make me cry. The latter also make me
want to bang my head on every brick of the Great Wall of China.

Now,
I do respect people’s blogs. They’re, after all, the electronic
equivalent of diaries or journals. Whatever people choose to post is
their business. Some people want to go en route to Anne Frank,
others walk the road of Song-hits (cheap
lyrics periodicals, for those not in the know). Who am I to tell them
what not to do?

What
I’m not comfortable with is the criteria where a feature blog is
measured. Feature blogs are those promoted by blog accounts’
moderators, i.e. Friendster, Myspace, Blogspot, etc. Now, I’ll be the
first to admit that I’m not a big fan of feature blogs, and that I
find it criminal how Sam Oh’s isn’t in it (unless I’m mistaken). But
after I had promenaded into Chronicles of a Headcase (whose
link I won’t post to save the author some dignity), Friendster blog
has to me lost all its credibility!

Chronicles
of a Headcase is, simply put, the most pointless and the vaguest blog
I’ve ever read. Bar none. Not even phrases like "oil cola" or "jeepney’s keyboard" or "elephant’s feathers" or "garter
satellite" or "Chinese democracy" or "Peace in Middle East"
or "crystalline bra" make as little sense. Heck, "qwertyasdfasasdf" is a better sentence than anything you’d see
on that blog! It’s so bad, you can use [parts of] the title as a
derogatory remark! "Just how low can he get?", said Ian. "As
low," retorted Mark, "as a headcase."

Ahem.
Excuse me for a minute while I contain my hate. As a break, here’s a
sample post from that blog, for your edification:

————————————

Monologue
to a Reflection

Do you count
yourself among them? the countless tales to tell and dream forth
about. Look at you… isn’t that what makes you special? Forgive me
for being mean but its just another way of letting you know you are
still alive. Though it must take much more to move the warmth that
had been smothered off your chest from all the years of vermin and
leeches of the world. I realize the shock that such a fabled soul to
be released into the wilderness of reality would be quite traumatic,
but how does one live without breathing and if you breathe than you
must exhale… if you exhale then you must taste the air in which you
live and it is the same air that all of us breathe. So don’t pretend
that you are larger than this life at any point of your life… come
back down to earth before you fall so hard that you become grounded
to the dirt. Where the vermin will walk all over you, and leeches
suck out whats left of your rooted carcass. In other words, only you
can save yourself when it counts… there won’t always be someone
coming to help rescue you from your whim. Think about it, don’t let
anyone feed it to you.

————————————

Let
me tell you what that was about. Frankly, nothing. It used copious
amount of polysyllabic dictions to wax rhetorics that make no sense
whatsoever (figuratively, what the hell IS a vermin and leeches of
the world?) Have you ever heard a drunk man speak? Probably. Now
imagine that same guy meta-lecturing on Philosophy while he lies
semi-unconscious on a railroad track, thinking this is how to wait for
a train.

Ok, so the blog actually had a theme: self-reflection. Why then did
the author use such a circumlocutory language instead of using a
straightforward one? Why did he choose to say "So don’t pretend
that you are larger than this life at any point of your life… come
back down to earth before you fall so hard that you become grounded
to the dirt." Why couldn’t he instead say "Be down to earth"? End of story, in four words!

To
even compound the absurdity of it all, this is actually one of his
better entries! I’ve seen worse, like "Idleness of the Ideal", "A
Stage for the Strange" and "Escape Case" whose writing were as
pretentious and crappy as the titles implied. It’s so funny how his "personal entries" become infinitely more comprehensible; they
are more direct, even though he hasn’t the foggiest on how to shorten
a sentence. Like this. Or maybe he’d "embellish" the previous
sentence to "Synonymous to the entity that is within the presence
of the tandem of articulation."

Of
course, you can say that I have biases: I don’t know about you, but I can’t
stand preachy blogs. Doubly so if they mingle with too much obscure
philosophy and psychology. How about we amplify those with poor
syntaxes, bad punctuations and vague rhetorics? I’m not the best
writer in the world, but his blog is just plain dumb. What the hell is an
"Idleness of an Ideal"? What a "thought-provoking" title that
is! What’s a "headcase" anyway? Is it the skull? Or as the
author would put it, "The achromatic infrastructure that
encapsulates the nut-patterned mass of synapses that manipulates the
entirety of humankind’s anatomy"?

"Nutcase" is a more appopriate name!

Some
people try too hard to exude an illusion of brilliance. I can only
think that this author is of this ilk; only, he does it so poorly.
Even worse, he receives tons of comment from some equally obnoxious
people who engage in intellectual masturbations by posting "intelligent disquisitions" (and people say sincerity is a lost
virtue). And to think that friendster had to feature this blog! [Note to
friendster: send this guy a dictionary, sign him up for writing
lessons, and confiscate his thesaurus.]

All
this may make you curious as to how the rest of his entries read
like. But no, I don’t want your involvement in it. There’s nothing to
see. Beyond all those flowery words, the contents of all his
"articulations" are as insipid as an instant noodle without the
seasoning. I can think of other things I’d rather do than read his
blog. I’d rather slit my wrists in a bathtub filled with Mercury while I drop a toaster into the liquid, upon which the bathtub
would be on a catapult throwing me directly onto a spiked wall 20
feet away. Score: 0 out of 5.

And
as I conclude this post, let me tell you that philosophy can be
written in a forthright manner. How about we post an example from
another author:

———————————

Tao’s take on Suicide

Literally,
what is “Tao”? In English, it means “Way”. Naturally, there
is a way to doing everything, therefore there’s a Tao to everything.
However, since Taoist teachings abide by the duality principle a.k.a.
Yin and Yang, this means they do not approve of suicide. How?

“Yin
and Yang” is a principle that polar opposites are not separate
entities. We don’t call it “two” as opposed to “dual”; and
the only means to define a “dual” is when there is coexistence.
For example, we can never define what “big” is without the
existence of a “small”. We cannot define what “lightness” is
if there is no “darkness”. Every nature of opposites fit within
being called a yin or yang; all those aforementioned are
examples.

One of the most salient “Yin and Yang” for
everyone is the “Mind” and the “Body”. Suicide is when the
mind is overly discontented not only with the body, but also with the
world outside the body, a.k.a. the mundane. The reason why Taoist
don’t approve of suicide is because, at least in most cases, in the
desire to commit one, it means that the mind clashes with the body. The
body continues to function, and it still doesn’t want to stop
living; so the mind should be subservient to this particular desire
of the body. Of course, there are also certain mental attributes that
the body has to abide to.

The other extreme end is
narcissism, and with that the Taoists also disapprove. Narcissism is
when the mind is too contented with the body, oblivious to the fact
that it has limitations and that it’s not an absolute, an end-all.
This is also disdainful, because when there is
narcissism, one fails to understand the world that surrounds the
body. Rather, in doing so, the mind ceases to function intellectually
and becomes subjugated to the body, making one a hedonist. This does not actually make
for a unity of duality (what most Taoist seek), but the elimination
of one of the two, which eliminates the existence of both.

As
a summary, Taoists think that in living, there should be a compromise
of mind and body; and most importantly, both of them should find
contentment.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, August 31st, 2006 at 10:55 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.