Birth of a Rationalist.

On the last day before she was to fly to visit Elvis in Las Vegas, the package she'd been hinting at finally arrived in my letterbox. Later that night, after Monsterman had gone to bed, I opened it and to her delighted squealing, put the DVD that was in the package into my DVD player. In spite of the lightness of the material and the writing I was transported - entirely due to the setting for the movie. The movie? Outsourced.

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Those that know me, know I have a rather unfortunate tendency to haunt various debate style forums and discussion groups - particularly of the political, religious and philosophical variety - to the point of finding a place in such groups in discussion boards that are ostensibly about anything but . It is something I have been queried on with moderate regularity. "Why do you waste your time with that?" "How can you get any pleasure out of arguing?" Even, "Why are you so driven to prove yourself right, or convince others you're right and they are wrong? What gives you that right?"

The reasons are varied, though as far as posting in such groups goes, most have to do with a form of disconnect from a great deal of pop-culture, or from an unwillingness to engage too greatly in those that deal with certain sub-cultures. In a couple of venues specifically, it is very much a case of the latter. In a more general sense however, it is more a matter of there being an audience of (generally) my peers to discuss such things with. I do the single-dad thing, with little in the way of fixed income, but rather a mish-mash of part-time casual jobs that revolve around the most important role (to me) of being a parent. I live in a small town in an area with some of the lowest post-secondary school retention rates in the entire country. The state the town is is has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country. And though I was born here, I grew up on the Big island, so I'm not a local.

The opportunities to talk about much more than sport or how our kids are doing at school is rather minimal to say the least. The opportunity to share my thinking on a wider range of subjects, or to learn from the knowledge and experiences of others is even more meagre.

I like to think. I like to question and puzzle and ponder. It might be argued I have far too much time to do so, but it is among my favourite activities regardless. And many things I encounter in my day-to-day plod-along existence spark off all sorts of random thoughts and questions. Sometimes, they are peculiar in the extreme, sometimes perversely personal, sometimes they are on subjects that affect only me and at others they are thoughts or questions to do with the lives and experiences of great numbers of people. These thoughts I track down and find as many answers as I can, from whatever sources I am able.

Every now and then, some of those thoughts or questions requires an audience where answers can be teased out or tested for their fit, and on occasion I come across the questions or comments of others that some of my prior pondering might find its fit with.

Now the sub-culture thing is something I rarely comment on because in the main, my connection to that sub-culture is a somewhat mild one that I feel my personal take on it (and partaking in it) is pretty much that: personal. Where it isn't, I find that I generally take a position that might be deemed somewhat combative or at odds with the bulk of that sub-culture. Instead, I view it as a resource: for like-minded, fun or inspiring individuals, ideas and insights, things to avoid or to enjoy. What I like, I hang onto, what I don't I discard or ignore. For the most part.

Possibly the thing I dislike most is also, in an odd way, the inverse of the reason I partake in those distasteful debate forums. It is the sense of superiority or uniqueness of that sub-culture, and I just can't find it in me to roll with that mind-set. Even that mind-set alone is not unique to that sub-culture - I'm sure Trekkies and trainspotters and stamp collectors and dog breeders and teenagers all share that same outlook. What is also obvious to me is that each person in that sub-culture has their own narrow experience and take on it and that in many respects, these people are also right - theirs isn't a world that is experienced by the bulk of people, and the doings within that sub-culture has little impact outside of it.

This is where the inverse comes in. In one way or another, we've all been affected by or experienced and interacted with people and matters political, social, philosophical, religious, historical, biological, mystical, artistic, practical, cultural, economical, psychological, physical, medical, chemical or spiritual. Regardless of who we are, where we live, what we do in our private or public lives, what we believe or what we know, we all experience and are affected by these things.

Outside of me and mine and getting through each day, these are the things I think most about. And, because of that commonality of experience, are also the things I tend to be more inclined to write and talk about in discussion forums, and even among friends (though with friends there is also a lot more inane banter and fun and joking and general bullshitting and silliness).

There is one other reason I give thought to such things and I think it is a product of the country I live and have grown up in. Australia is one of the few countries where voting is compulsory. It may even be the only one - I've never thought to ask about that. There's my next search for information taken care of. Because of that, I hate the idea that my vote might be wasted - that because I chose not to be informed, what I vote for might be entirely counter to my preferences, beliefs or ethics. So I seek to be informed as fully as I know how to be. The unfortunate downside of that is of course that it can bleed out into other areas of my life at the most inopportune times.

The world being what it is, being informed about politics also requires that one be informed (or even better, gain understanding) about every other possible subject I mentioned back up there and then some, for each one either effects or is effected by matters political - and, by extension, on the lives of me and mine.

Alternatively, it could just mean I have no life.

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She called me again today from the land of Elvis. Very faintly in the background I could hear slot machines and crowds of people losing money. Last night she got to see Cirque du Soleil for the first time. She had been transported somewhere magical, and in her re-telling I was cut into six pieces, for I too was transported back to when and where I first saw one of their overwhelming performances. As I was only two nights previously, I was once more lost somewhere else on this ball of mud. I was simultaneously in Tasmania, in Las Vegas, Portland, San Francisco, India and Japan. I was lost in a world filled with difference and magic and wonders.

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Some time after that as I was browsing through some of the forums I participate in, I came across a link to this debate in one of the religious debate forums. Whether you watch it or not doesn't really matter (though it was quite an interesting debate), what matters is it got me thinking.

I realised that while I identify these days as an atheist in the milieu of spirituality, and while I would dearly love for our political and educational institutions to be secular, I would hate to see religion disappear entirely from the face of the Earth.

Oh without doubt there are certain expressions of religious thought and belief I would gladly do without; but to lose it entirely? No. That I don't want to see. The reason is that there is so much richness and diversity of human cultures that have and do come out of it - just as much as there is oppression and bigotry and suffering.

Just over a year ago, my son and I had the opportunity to see something rare for this little burg - our Hindu neighbours performing a blessing on their new car. For both of us it was fascinating, and for Monsterman, a source of puzzlement, amusement and lots of "why?" questions. We talked about it with our neighbours, and I talked some more with him about my friends Vin and Charles and their family. We dug out books and looked at things online until the "why?" questions finally began to peter out. It was one of his first glimpses into the world beyond the natural sea borders of Tasmania and his very western anglo way of life.

Many years earlier, I had the opportunity to go with Vin and Charles to visit their extended family in India. Not being able to raise the funds in time to do so may be one of the very, very few regrets in my life. Whilst I know that I will have the opportunity to visit India at some point in the future, the chance to have done so with my friends, to stay and live with locals and submerge myself into a culture so different to my own has gone.

What would my experience be if I were to go there and religion had somehow vanished from that world? I can't imagine it would be anywhere near as rich. Even without visiting India with them, my experience and encounters with their immediate family - their mother and father, their borther and his wife by arranged marriage (as their parents had been and both brother and sister-in-law and mother and father were unmistakenly in love with their partners) showed me a care for others and a joy in life that was wonderful to be allowed to be part of.

Some seven years ago, I visited Japan. I'd scored a bit of a study/work based junket and had the chance to board with families in Osaka, Kyoto and Tokyo. Religion was everywhere and nowhere. It wasn't outside the culture, it was the culture. Tucked away in tiny, narrow Tokyo side streets were countless small shrines, well maintained with devotion over hundereds of years. The phenomenal tranquility and beauty of Nara and its ancient temples took me out and away from the rush and press of the modern day. Sitting on the edges of a Zen garden in Kyoto I lost myself in the swirling patterns that had been painstakingly drawn in the loose white stones by an elderly monk with a rake in his hands.

Spending the time with my hosts, I came to realise that while they did not allow the tennets of Shinto or Buddhism to dictate the terms of how they lived their lives, their very behaviours were shaped in no small part by it. And they, and every individual I encountered whilst there, were impecably considerate and exceptionally peaceful, helpful and polite.

Would that I could say the same of my experiences with many who profess a Christian faith. Yet even in good and proper white Anglo Christian centric Australia, religion and spirituality helped shape the person I have come to be. In rejecting Christianity very early on, my hunger to find answers for all the how and why questions in my head had me reading about Buddhism and Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, Taoism and the pantheons of ancient civilizations, ghosts and sasquatches and UFOs and yetis and bunyips and narguns alongside books on biology and geology and physics and history and geography.

In amongst all that, a photo of the Golden Pavilion in Kyoto captured my imagination, leading to a fascination with all things Asian - from Japan and China, through Vietnam, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia, Bhutan, Tibet, Indonesia, Pakistan, India and Sri Lanka. I was undone. My world had been opened up and there was never again going to be a chance to shut me back in to the obliviousness of one small nation or culture. The birth of a humanist began on the day my father sent the school a note to excuse me from religious instruction.

It lead me into the martial arts, which in turn, lead me into traditional Chinese medicine. In spite of it being based entirely upon a form of Taoist mysticism, this, alongside my love of biology and history and the variety of world culture, was to be the penultimate building block in my move away from mysticism towards rationalism. The reason behind that was that in studying Chinese medicine, we were also required to study orthodox medicine alongside the medical students of the local university. For three years, as I studied qi and meridians, acupuncture and herbs, massage and daiji, the five elements and qi gong, I also studied anatomy, physiology, biomechanics, biochemistry and pathology.

My world of understanding had expanded exponentially once more...and so had my questions.

Once more, back into the books I went, and back to asking any I could find who might be knowledgable enough on a given subject to do their part to feed the hunger of my curiosity beast.

The final shift was the result of two people. One was someone I had in my late teens thought of as a friend and a mentor (in the more widely accepted meaning of the word), the other a co-worker.

I met my friend on the first day of what was to be my families final posting to Queensland. He was our neighbour, almost exactly ten years my senior, and he was the first person to shake my hand and greet and treat me as an adult.

We found a common interest in martial arts, and in the tenor of our philosophical thought. With one exception - he was a born again Christian. As out of place and angst-filled as only a translocated fifteen year old can be, I clung to the similarities of thought and either ignored or was swept up in the vaguest possibility that some of his claims might be true. And they were wildly impossible and improbable claims; like using his ability to manipulate qi to level himself through a window seven feet above the ground using only one finger, or that the priests attending the ark of the covenant were actually atomic scientists wearing radiation proof clothing, or how long he was able to fuck his wife without cumming.

Though I didn't believe his claims, part of me wanted to believe, and another part simply wanted to maintain what I thought was otherwise a good friendship.

Not long after that, his wife left him and his two children and he moved to Tasmania. I bought my first guitar and a couple of song books from him, and bought him a pair of mock samurai swords as a farewell gift.

Three years later, I had an offer from a fellow student (from the year before me) to work with him in the town I now live in. I bumped into my old friend one day at the local supermarket and we renewed the friendship. By now, he had a new partner, this lovely, lively woman was only a year older than I. He was even more firmly entrenched in the church by now and the grandeur of his claims had also grown. By this time though, I was more confident and comfortable in myself and in my own abilities and knowledge, and we had many discussions where we would respectfully argue our points of disagreement back and forth. Not long before I left for work elsewhere in the state his lovely partner left him, unable and unwilling to put up with his abuse and use of her and the pretense he made of the situation in public.

More years passed and I moved back to the north of the state, this time with the person who was to become Monsterman's mother. Once again, the supermarket was the venue for the renweal of a friendship. This time however I was slightly more reticent and less eager than I had been previously - there was an air of wild intensity about him, a subtly blazing look to his eyes. I was put in mind of Coleridge's Ancient Mariner. The degree of his intensity and delusion was made evident a few months later.

He called me one day to ask if I would stop by his place to help take a class in meditation, particularly to share some of what I had learned in my Chinese medicine course regarding qi and qi gong.

When I arrived, I found him holding court over a disparate group of awkwardly dressed people, all holding Bibles and notebooks in their hands. The "class" began. I was introduced as a friend who he had taken under his wing and to whom he had, "Taught everything he knows." He began to explain his theories on God and mind and energy and crystals and demons and aliens and partway through this, he dropped the final clunker. He made a statement of something as fact, something as his own discovery, that I knew, knew with one hundred percent certainty had been lifted directly, word for word, from a science fiction novel I had loaned him a few weeks earlier.

I looked at him, astonished at the level of his deception - of himself and his audience.

"So this is how cults begin," I thought to myself. I stood up and left.

When the day came that I was confronted by a masseur claiming in almost the same breathe that: a combination of wormwood oil and electric current would kill the flukeworms that caused cancer and multiple sclerosis and hepatitis and AIDS and motor neurone disease; and that true belief in God and Jesus could cure homosexuality, all the components of my nascent atheism clicked into place. I could no longer idly accept that a person's beliefs were something solely for them, I had become aware that some people acted on the beliefs they held to the detriment of others.

There are many ways in which religious or mystical belief can be and has been damaging, many reasons to chose reason and concrete reality over them, but none of that is quite enough for me to wish for the removal of it from this world. Rather, I would live in a world where our laws and governments were secular and not circumscribed by religious or superstitious beliefs. Where beliefs like that could continue to exist and express their better face without being given the power to enact all that is damaging about them. Just as I would hate to be living in a world ruled by gods and demons with megalomaniacal theocrats dictating how we live and firmly poisoning us against a quest for growth and understanding and mutual acceptance, I would hate to be in a world where some of the fascinating wonder and diversity of human culture had vanished. A world where walking through Mumbai or Wellington or Portland or New York or London or Tokyo or Beijing or Durban orLa Paz offers no more surprise or novelty than walking through the streets of Hobart or Sydney.

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Today, I find my wonder in the small things in life and my awe in the grand and big things. I delight in the chance to take pleasure and enjoy flights of fancy and imagination over such coincidences and occasions of synchronicity that can give rainbows and white butterflies a special and personally magical meaning. I find the delight and wonder and awe as readily in leaves budding on a tree as I do in the growth of my son. I find it in the random acts of kindness of strangers for one another . It is in the acts of extreme daring or courage or wisdom of people adventuring in the most hostile parts of the world or at the furthest reaches of human understanding. It is in music and art and language and joy. It is in the astonishing and wonderous complexity and inter-connectedness of life on our planet and in all the elements of the universe. It is expressed in the amazing feats the human body and mind are capable of and the incredible diversity of the expression of life on our planet. I find it here at my desk, or in faroff San Francisco watching sea lions or in the middle of the bustle of Tokyo watching Cirque du Soleil. I find it in in the love of my boy and my love of Next and the love they return for me.

Ralphie's Going Away Party

My head felt ready to explode.

I don't know if it was the flight attendant's wonderful technique of delivering all her in-flight announcements in joke or song form, or if the cabin was incorrectly pressurised,(my vote is the latter; the attendant was great) but all I could hear as we sat outside the San Francisco Airport waiting for the town car to collect us were distant low pitched rumbles. I felt dizzy and the pressure in my ears and sinuses was phenomenal.

Several hours later, we were climbing into a shuttle bus that would take us from our plush digs in the much-to-be-feared Tenderloin district to the tourist haven of Pier 39 and Fisherman's Wharf.

We had a date with some sea lions.

Our driver, a tall, long-haired, laid-back sorta fella, took an obvious pleasure in talking about his home town; showing us the sites and talking engagingly about the things he loved about living and growing up in SF.

"See that car there? That's drug money there. He used to do deals just across the road from my home not far from here. I had words with him one time and called the cops. He stopped coming for a while, but I still see his car there every now and then. Pisses me off. I mean, there's a school there. That's not right."

I looked at the car, then back at our driver. Yeah. I could easily imagine him doing exactly that. There was a sort of relaxed fearlessness and self-assurance underneath his laid-back persona. Being somewhere around 6'5" wouldn't harm the impression he'd make on someone either.

I went back into tourist mode - checking out store-fronts, watching people in all their variety that we passed, shamelessly goggling at the architecture of the buildings that lined the streets, craning my neck to catch the glimpses of the Bay and the distant hills at every opportunity until we had finally reached our waterside destination just outside Pier 39.

We bailed out of the mini-bus and I used the moment it took to put on my sunglasses to stop my head spinning before we entered the fray.

There is no way you can escape noticing that Pier 39 exists purely for the tourists. All possible manner of paraphernalia emblazoned with the various cliched San Francisco motifs leaped out at you wherever you turned your gaze, and hidden in amongst them small boutique-like stores purveying their wares in slightly over-inflated prices and a bevy of fast-food shops and resteraunts (most of which working on the to-be-expected seafood theme). Thousands of small bright lights decorated plants and buildings alike and further into the crowded space was a two tiered merry-go-round - complete with calliope. And constantly, through the noise and bubble of people and music, we could hear the barking of sea lions coming from somewhere off to our left, hidden by two stories of tourist traps.

I had Next on my arm and I was grinning like a lobotomised chimpanzee.

I looked at her and saw a similar grin directed back at me.

"Well," I asked. "Where to?"

"Follow the sound of the sea lions."

We walked on through the lights and noise and crowds, the barking noises getting louder the further we moved forward until we were standing outside the complex leaning against a railing and looking out over the Bay and the yachts moored at the marina.

I singled two or three out as being suitable objects of piracy on the high seas, then grabbed her arm once more and dragged her to our left.

"They're this way."

We rounded the corner and my grin grew fit to split my head open like a pez dispenser. I started laughing with delight.

There they were - the reason for our pilgimage. There, piled body upon body, filling up every spare inch of space on the gently bobbing pontoons, heads flopped over the sides of their platforms or canted backwards at odd angles, grunting, snuffling, snorting, sneezing, snoring, barking, shuffling over the top of on another, splashing smoothly in and out of the water, were our sea lions. And in the middle of this mass of wood and fur and blubber and insane levels of cuteness was a pontoon reserved for the Pier 39 WWF Sea Lion Smackdown.

Pounding ears and dizzy head or not, I could have sat and watched for hours. Next, I think, could equally have spent hours watching me watching the sea lions in all my fully fledged child-like glee. I could not, however, resist the insistent demands of my innards. I needed to put stuff into them, and, though it may seem indelicate to say so, I needed to get stuff out of them. And I also needed somewhere to sit still and quietly for a moment to let the spinning and clamouring of my noggin subside.

Back into the crowds and shops we went.

We found ourselves on the second level of the complex. Up here, we were removed from the press of people, and also, I hoped, there might be toilets that had somewhat shorter lines of people who shared my increasingly urgent need. To my great relief (well, mental relief anyway - physical would have to hold off for just a little longer) I saw a blue sign indicating there were rest-rooms somewhere off to our left, behind an Italian resteraunt and a handfull of boutique and souvenier stores.

"You go," she said. "I'll wait here."

I went left past the corner of the resteraunt, and then right again as I followed the boardwalk that ran alongside the back half of Louis Italian & Seafood Resteraunt. I could see the restrooms just beyond a small group of cigar smoking men who had spread across the walkway just outside what was obviously the trade entrance to the kitchens of Louis' fine establishment. They were all dressed to the nines. Dinner suits and tuxedos abounded. Shoes gleamed.

"Nifty threads. Must be a wedding," I thought. "I guess this is where all the blokes come to have a smoke and escape their women and talk about football and stuff."

One particular fella caught my eye, dressed as he was in a somewhat louder fashion than those around him. He was standing next to a dapper grey headed man who was obviously at the centre of a smaller sub group of this mass of wedding guests. The collar of his shirt unbuttoned, a heavy chain hanging around his neck, his lapels a bright red silk, a thick and solidly expensive looking watch on his wrist. He was somewhat older than I, at a guess I'd have put him in his late forties or early fifties, clean shaven and a shining bald head. I looked down. The dude was wearing spats. Colour me shallow and all kinds of countrified bumpkin, but the spats impressed me. They looked very cool and I wanted a pair. I glanced up from his snazzy footwear and looked around at the other men around me. There was quite a lot of heavy jewlery on all these swarthy looking dark haired fellas.

As I moved through them, I caught snatches of conversation spoken with a particular Mediterranean bounce, and then, as I passed by Spats, I heard him speak to the old man.

"It's a good send off. I know she's not happy about it, but we'll look after her. Judge has only sent Ralphie down for six months, it'll go quick."

I couldn't help it, I started chuckling. The pez-head grin had come back and by the time I got back to Next I was giggling like a kid on a sugar high.

She gave me smile and a look that said she was a little concerned about my sanity.

"What are you giggling about?"

"It wasn't a wedding, it was Ralphie's going away party."

This obviously did little to soothe her concerns and her eyebrow arched upwards a little more. Which of course, made me grin and giggle even more. In delerious and delighted tones, I gave her the answer I knew she would understand.

"I just had my Sopranos moment."

Sea lions and the Sopranos. Pounding head or not, I knew I was going to love my time in San Francisco.

Atlas Collapsed - a refutation

This is a very long, social, political and philosophical refutation. You have been warned.

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I found it underneath a pile of books and bags of swimming gear about two months ago. Nice and sunny as it is, there aren’t really enough places to keep all the things Monsterman and I own and regularly use in this little two-bedroom flat. The days when I had my bookshelves organised by genre and the books all alphabetised by author are a dim memory.

I don’t remember buying it or being given or even loaned it, and I certainly can’t imagine what could possibly have inspired me to have it in my possession. And yet there it was, in my hands, the cornerstone of conservative thought: Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged. I must have had it for years and I’d never once cracked open it’s twenty-four year old and well-worn covers.

Up until six months ago, I wasn’t even aware the book existed. I don’t mean the book I was holding in my hands, I mean the actual piece of work. I first became aware of it through my unsavoury habit of haunting political discussion boards, where the author and said book were cited as either divinely inspired proponents of truth or as errant purveyors of complete tripe and inhuman drivel with an infrequent frequency. Not long after I came across the first mentions of book and author, it surfaced again in a group discussing literature.

Everything I read about it caused my brain to cringe. And yet at the same time, the insatiable Curiosity Monster that I suspect lurks somewhere between my shoulder blades (a devious lair it has made from whence it can make unexpected assaults on my consciousness, with my only warning being a creeping feeling in the middle of my back) made itself known. Whether said monster wanted to feed on my sense of incredulity, or if it used the tried and true “Know Thy Enemy” gambit, I have no idea, but I was bitten hard enough by it to decide that should I ever come across said book, I’d give it a flick through.

And here it was. In my hands. Next was at work, Monsterman off somewhere with his Pop doing Pop and Monsterman things, all those horrid mundane and necessary domestic things like cleaning and laundry had been done. I had no excuse not to read it.

The Curiosity Monster and the Brain Cringe began a war of attrition, with prevarication and revulsion being the primary weapons of the Brain Cringe. The Curiosity Monster wasn’t so subtle – and had obviously learned the value of patience when it comes to attaining one’s goals.

I opened the book and started to read.

By the time Next came home an hour later, I had hardly progressed at all.

“What have you been doing this morning?”

“Cleaning, laundry, being lazy, drinking coffee, reading.”

“What are you reading? The Generals?”

“Nope. Atlas Shrugged. It’s…it’s really bad. It’s shite. The writing is awful!”

I put the book down having only read thirty-three pages, and wasn’t to pick it up again for two months. There were better things to do and talk about.

There it, it turns out, one thing that can defeat the Curiosity Monster, and that is really bad writing. Maybe two things – ongoing and unremitting stupidity would be another.

And when I say really bad, I mean extremely bad. It takes a special level of bad writing for me not to finish reading a book – sheer bloody mindedness is usually enough to get me through your average poorly written book. This book though was destined to join The Naked Lunch as the only books I have started reading and never finished.

Today, as I was engaged in that rarest of past-times - a quiet and respectful generalised political discussion – the book was suggested to me as a means of understanding what best expressed the underlying principles of conservative and libertarian ideology (particularly of the American variety – though it strikes me that there are echoes of economic rationalism in there as well). Specifically, it was recommended I skip ahead in the book to the chapter, John Galt Speaks.

So I did.

Though that section contained arguably the best writing in the book, it was still profoundly hard to read - though not for the writing style. What I struggled with was subduing my outrage and astonishment sufficiently to keep reading. So I would read a few paragraphs, toss the book aside, fume and digest what I’d read, fume some more and then keep I would pick it up again and continue reading.

So what was it that offended and astonished me so? Simply this: that that long soliloquy was an outrageous offense to my intellect, and my astonishment was that this piece of writing should have sufficient power to be representative of the ideologies – personal, social and political - of such a large number of people.

I can understand part of its appeal. The impassioned and unremittingly emphatic delivery of the speech provides excellent cover for the short-comings of its content and could very easily sway those wanting to be convinced of their individual primacy of place and importance. And it very cleverly sets this up by making repeated statements about the ultimate morality of reason and rationality from the outset – the implication being that every assertion thereafter is the product of that reason and rationality; something that is markedly lacking in the vast bulk of the speech itself.

To explain why it fails of its own weight, and also why it is a poor work to base a personal or political ideology on, it is somewhat necessary to state the essential virtues and truths of Man as given by the author through her fictional character, John Galt.

To summarise, the prime truth and virtue is that of existence, survival and the success of the animal Homo sapiens as a result of its inherent nature. That leads to the second: reality (A is A), reason, rationality and intellect. The third is that of happiness and joy. The last is ownership of and the freedom to apply and benefit from the first three. Anything that inhibits those is immoral.

On the surface, it seems not all that unreasonable. But it is deeply flawed and fails to meet its own demands of reality, reason, rationality and intellect, and dismantles and negates itself as the details of this philosophy is unveiled in ever more urgent and feverish exhortations. Why? Because it fails to address how individuals are inextricably bound up in systems of inter-dependence. Of course, even by writing that phrase, I am guilty of immorality by the terms given in the book, but it remains a reality that, where it is not simply ignored or avoided, is denigrated with astonishing vehemence.

An ideology or philosophy that neglects that fails to meet its criteria of rationality and reason.

In spite of its surface message of an improbably welded together breed of individualised egalitarianism, and lauding those captains of industry and those individuals of innovation as being people of long vision, the position taken is phenomenally myopic and, to commit another act of Randian immorality, impractical. It ignores the reality of interdependent systems. It ignores history, sociology, anthropology, medicine, biology, ecology, meteorology, geography, evolution, computer technology, chemistry, and physics to name just a few disciplines.

It is rare in the extreme that individual humans can or do exist as pure individuals in a social vacuum free from external influence or imparted skills or knowledge. Those few that do do not fit any social contruct. And yet, this is the only way in which the philosophy of John Galt (and therefore Ayn Rand) can hold any level of legitimacy. In the speech, those individuals of excellence were the sole driving force of their (American) society. Indeed, without them American society crumbled when they removed themselves in protest at restrictions placed on them. What is ignored is that just as there are great numbers of people dependent on them, those individuals have also have a dependence on others to help them achieve their excellence.

They are dependent on parents and family to provide their very existence and genetic makeup as well as for food and shelter for them as they grow, to imbue them with the basic rudiments of language and culturally relevant knowledge. They are dependent on their teachers and/or those sources of knowledge that have gone before them – from whose knowledge base they may build on or adapt or improve. They are dependent on those who provide their food for them – the farmers and primary producers. They are dependent on those who help them maintain their health – doctors, nurses, pharmacists, nutritionists. They are dependent on the knowledge, skills and labour of people who indirectly provide for the raw materials of their great innovations – such as geologists, surveyors, miners, smelters, metallurgists and chemists. They are dependent on those who make their visions a reality – builders, machinists, technicians, labourers. They are dependent on investors and patrons and consumers.

But the systems of interdependence extend much further than that. The achievements of those individuals of excellence are dependent on the culture and society they are born into – and all the steps and faltering stages of history that lead to that point in time.Their excellence is also determined by their physical environment. The geography and climate that might afford them greater natural resources or greater protection from the elements and groups competing for those same resources. Their very existence is dependent upon the viability of the natural environment to support and maintain the quantities of food and material resources – and that can extend down to the smallest phytoplankton in the Antarctic Ocean.

To acknowledge that interdependence is not, as Rand would have it, a form of moral or intellectual cowardice; it is an acknowledgement of reality. And, contrary to the sermonising of John Galt, denying it is the surest way to curtail the very goals Galt and Rand claim to espouse.

The assertion of the complete independence of the individual is an outright fiction. To make that assertion and put it forth as the highest form of rational, reasoned ideology is to deny reality and to claim it actually reflects reality is an offense to my intellect.

The astonishment I felt upon reading it was based much more around those who espouse this as some form of moral, social or political touchstone. Most of these people are, of course, Americans. I guess this is to be expected because they are quite obviously the intended audience – there are frequent references and allusions to America being the greatest society on Earth (and by extension, in history).

We therefore have another reason for the success of this failed philosophy – in addition to the appeal to reason, it also appeals to nationalism. At the same time, it also offers an agent of blame for any and every shortcomings or decline they might see in their own lives or their country. A person who endorses this particular world-view is assured that they are among the most rational and greatest people on the planet, and further, that they as rational, patriotic individuals are free of any responsibility in any falls from grace, personal or national.

At best, they have been conned; at worst, they too have abrogated their claim to reason, rationality or connection to reality.

In and of itself that is no great thing - people hold much wilder and even more unreasonable beliefs. When it is put forth as the basis for a political ideology or movement however, it is not only self-contradictory and ignorant of both the realities of the world and its systems and its own philosophy (particularly with regards to the other core essentials of the movements that espouse it), it has the potential to be destructive to individuals, industries, economies and societies.

Remember one of the central tenets of this Randian ideology: A is A? One of those A’s is the reality of the world and society as it is now. Not as it was a thousand years ago, or as it might be in some Utopian future a thousand years hence. As it is now. A very important and central part of nearly all present human societies is that they have grown beyond the level of simple hunter gatherer, and even beyond that of agrarian societies and small city states.

The advent of agriculture enabled humans to being to manipulate their environment by weight of their intellect. Though this is alluded to by Rand, its import is not truly addressed. The rise of agrarian societies enabled greater populations to gather in one place and it necessitated another human construct – that of specialisation. This lead directly to trade and the earliest forms of commerce. Trade and commerce are by their very nature an expression of mutual dependence – an exchange of what one has or is capable of producing for what one hasn’t.

So far, this does not seem greatly at odds with the philosophies of John Galt (of course, at this level of social complexity, neither is it far from the philosophies of Karl Marx). But human society is far removed from such a simple state in the present day (or even of the time when Rand wrote her book). The level of specialisation and the weight of human population have become exponentially greater. Even trade and commerce have become their own semi-detached world of specialisation and near alternate reality – where trade itself is assigned a tradeable value. The knowledge and understanding of the world (including how to manipulate it) is almost incomprehensibly beyond the level of understanding of those early agrarian societies. The level of knowledge and education of the average child in the industrialised nations is greater than that of the majority of adults only a century ago. Health and life expectancy has nearly doubled. Travel between cities and nations is a matter of hours rather than months or years and global communication is near instantaneous.

At each step in that social evolution, there have been the people of vision that Rand deifies – and it must be said, with good reason - but they did not do so in a vacuum. In the present day of near overwhelming specialisation in skills and knowledge, that is even more true. The individual innovators, intellectuals and entrepreneurs are many degrees more dependent on those around and beneath them for their success survival and existence than ever before.

Here we come to another failure of this particular ideology. It presupposes that those with the will and intellect to become such outstanding exemplars of human achievement will, out of self-interest and far reaching vision, be aware of such inter-dependence and of their own volition act in such a way as not to upset that balance. Except that the philosophy itself denies inter-dependence and denies any responsibility to any interest beyond the self and gratification of immediate desires.

Just as it is not an ideology that is aware of systems, it is not an ideology of the long view.

Socially and economically it is instead an ideology of what is often incorrectly termed social Darwinism. This is what is meant when someone claims that markets are self-correcting. Those who abuse the system they are within, work themselves out of the system. Consumers will no longer consume. A parallel meme from the natural world is that of predator-prey balance. Too many predators soon kill off their prey, leaving only those prey animals strong enough to escape predation leading to a reduction in predators until a balance is again attained. To many prey animals and they over consume their resources, leading to a glut of animals for predation or deaths from starvation, once again bringing the system into balance.

The failure to address reality here is two-fold: it assumes that (to continue the parallel) the nature of the predator, prey and their environment remain constant; and that somehow the proponent of this particular ideology will be exempt from the effects of any imbalance or changes. When the necessity to acknowledge interdependence is introduced to the equation, with no other environmental constraints upon them both populations (in this case, the exemplary individuals and, well, everyone else) are destined to extinction.

Those who argue for the self-correcting market overlook the tendency towards rapacious monopolies that can be readily justified in the world according to Rand. Until recently, commerce had the power to influence government. Now, commerce is its own government and one that knows no borders and owes no nation any special allegiance (indeed, it is questionable as to whether commerce has ever known any allegiance other than to itself). When monopolies come into existence unchecked, they have no need for long-term planning or awareness of inter-dependence as they no longer have competition for resources (both natural and their consumers). Monopolies are the cane toad of the economic world. That someone in small to medium sized business can proclaim Rand’s odious work for their own philosophy and not see the potential for their own destruction in it astounds me. There are no words for how astonished I am that paid employees might also advocate it.

Another argument that might be mounted as a derivation of Randian philosophy (and I have seen it put forth with some regularity) is that trade, as I have acknowledged, is a human constant. Governments, cultures, societies and civilizations however are not. A false premise often arising from this is that uninhibited (or at least minimally restricted) trade and markets is therefore a good thing and government is not. There are a few reasons this should be viewed with a degree of contempt for the lazy thinking it represents. It does not allow for external factors to be part of a societal collapse. Nor does it allow for internal factors. It does not acknowledge advances in thought, knowledge or skills, or systemic imbalances that can lead to a cultural explosion or implosion. And finally, it does not allow for the possibility that an unchecked market has the potential to, in itself, lead to the collapse of an empire or civilization.

America is not immune to this. And there are a many nations also susceptible – some for much the same reasons, some by dint of being inextricably tied to the United States.

I was told that Atlas Shrugged as a novel was an illustrative example of how a great nation can slide into decline. It certainly proffers a great many scapegoats for such a decline – that is, any who would be so immoral as to admit to inter-dependence and any restriction on personal independence. Here is the last part of the book that gives it such a strong support base. It gives people enemies. It gives them someone to blame.

Let me say this; America was a great and powerful nation - and it still is the most powerful nation on Earth. Its creation gave rise to widespread social change and it has helped greatly to shape the world as we know it today. It has been the birthplace of a large number of innovations – technological and social. And it is in decline.

For some, Ayn Rand gives them a prophetic vision of the reasons for that decline. She gives them reason to hate, mistrust, doubt, fear, malign, persecute and evade responsibility for their own deeds and actions. Those reasons, like so much more in that ideology, are incomplete and largely inaccurate. Blame can be laid at the feet of politicians. It can also be laid at the feet of the captains of industry, at the stock markets and at the feet of the consumers. It came be laid at the feet of Democrats and Republicans, at the Moral Right and the politically correct.

But mostly, as with almost all empires, the fall began with an institutionalised belief in unassailable right, might and greatness. And just like those Empires that went before it, the fall is inconceivable to those within it. It began with the fall of Fat Man and Little Boy and it accelerated beyond imagining with the fall of the Berlin Wall. America is being demolished by its own mythologies – the very mythologies that are further extolled in John Galt’s speech.

Why do I say mythologies and why are they bringing America down from its heady heights? Because the myths and misrepresentations of current reality and past history enable America and Americans to coast by on past glories and deeds and act in such a way as to ignore the realities that shaped and sculpt events past and present.

How does this manifest? Primarily among those who espouse conservative values, including the works of Ayn Rand, some examples:

The Pilgrims fleeing Britain to escape religious persecution – completely missing the reasons for their persecution was in large part to considering themselves exempt to the laws of their own country, or that they (cultish mob that they were) were kicked out of the Netherlands as well. This gets used as a means of ignoring any changes in Europe since the 1700’s and is sufficient, along with the next example, to name anything from Europe as being evil or contrary to American ideals.

The success of the American Revolution, of a relatively small group of colonials against the mightiest empire of the day, is seen as justification for behaviours today. And while it was a world changing event and a remarkable feat by the colonials, the madness of King George, the length of supply lines, the fighting of multiple wars at the same time and the assistance of the French is all too often glossed over or even unknown. Equally, many would have it that “no taxation without representation” was the totality of the rationale driving the settlers, and ignore the desire to push west of the Appalachians in breach of a treaty. History is what it is though, and had they not done either, the world would be a very different place. However, to a great number, America isn’t the big kid on the block, the most militarily powerful, the largest economy, the biggest mass media, the third most populated country in the world - it is still the brave little underdog fighting against the oppressors.

The Constitution and Bill Of Rights and the creation of “the first true republican representative democracy.” Being the first is often talked of as being the best and even the only. It ignores the thinkers that came before and influenced the thinking of those who drafted those fine documents, and it ignores those, individuals and nations alike, who were in turn inspired by them. It is often linked with the first two to discuss all non-Americans as erstwhile “slaves” of their nations rulers – especially if there happens to be a monarch. Never mind that most of those nations actually have constitutional democracies, they weren’t first, and they aren’t the same, so they don’t count. Once more, a sense of adversarial superiority is fostered. And let’s not forget those who favour a cast in stone interpretation over that of a living document – in spite of the evidence of the latter in the amendments.

We won all the wars since, like, forever. It is undeniable that the U.S becoming involved in the big two was hugely influential and important. What it ignores is the reluctance to become involved in the first place while other nations fought and died and held the Axis at bay, and it ignores that the American mainland remained for the duration of the big two, completely untouched – protected as it was by two big oceans – and was able to continue its manufacturing and lifestyle unimpeded. This one is used to enforce a sense of obligation on all others, and to assert the age old right of the conquerors. It is also a manifestation of might equals right.

We are the best at everything – even when reality can demonstrate that that is not always the case, and sometimes, the complete opposite can be true.

The outstanding success of the end of the Second World War and the end of the Cold War bolstered this sense of invulnerability and with it, the assumption that might did in fact equal right and the U.S could do no wrong. That the American way, in particular, that of unbridled capitalism and convoluted interpretations of people like Rand, was the way – the proof of the pudding was in the fall of Communism. And in part, like everything else before, it was in part true, and in part incomplete.

Even here, there are some aspects of Rand’s philosophy that are antithetical to the things that lay at the very core of modern American (particularly conservative) mythology - such key things as the Bill of Rights. When Rand states that all people start from a zero state of having no rights beyond existence, someone who then takes up her banner is also stating that the Constitution and the Bill of Rights are meaningless (with the exception of one phrase, “…the pursuit of happiness”). It denies “One nation under God,” and “In God We Trust,” and any claim that America should aim to be in any way considered a Christian nation, for such things are crimes against reason in the Gospel of Galt. It denies “…all men are created equal,” because it places a higher value to a certain group of people. And while it allows that the only time force against another individual is in self-defence, it does not of itself support the Second Amendment – for if you start with zero rights and the only right thereafter is existence, you have no right to own a gun. Though there is an unequivocal right to ownership of one’s own thoughts and labours, there is no protection of free speech - again, your only right is existence. There is no provision or requirement for military, defence, police forces or emergency services and especially not for armed militia as any of these could be viewed as infringement upon individuals.

It is a philosophy of anarchy, and though it is often said in jest, it might truly see its ultimate expression in present day Somalia and Victorian era mills and mines. It is a blue-print for sweatshop owners, irresponsible financial speculators, monopoly holders, and for unthinking gangsters, brutes, bigots, tyrants and dictators. It is an ideology for those lazy of thought and, regardless claims to the contrary, for those who wish to avoid responsibility, consequence, causality and reality.

It has been this mindset and glorification of incomplete and contradictory and self-negating ideologies, insufficient and inaccurate history and current affairs that has allowed America (and nations like it – for of course America is not alone in this attitude) to coast on their past success, ignoring the accident of their birth and their state of interdependence, to drown themselves in a tidal wave of consumption, complacency and inanity – to the point where innovation and original thought are almost completely lost and the willingness or desire to change or adapt to reality is almost viewed as treason.

The one area I found myself in agreement with Rand and Galt was in the favouring of reason, rationality and reality over superstition, and the tendency of mysticism to stifle human potential. And yet at the same time it does that, it sets up an ideology that denies reality just as readily as any purveyor of mysticism.

The philosophy espoused by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged was not just an offense to my literary sensibilities; it offended my intellect, my intelligence, my reason and my rationality. As a book of social and political insight, it falls far short of writers and thinkers much greater and more intellectually honest and rigorous in their work and thinking. Writers such as Orwell, Huxley, Marx, Freud, Debord, Wilde, Adams, Rousseau. Or the many great scientists, thinkers and visionaries throughout history and in the current day - on the back of whose revealing of the nature of our reality so many of Rand’s leaders and exemplary men stood to achieve their ends. The list is near endless, and the fact that people would eschew such minds as well as their own in favour of the contradictory and incomplete premises put forth by Rand is beyond me.

...And back again

Quite remiss of me I know, but while I was away, I hardly even glanced at a computer, and indeed for much of the time, there wasn't one handy.

Suffice it to say that I'm back in the land of the two headed, home of wombats, devils and a certain rugrat - who somehow managed to grow an inch taller in my absence and (to use a phrase that'll make sense to the Americans among you) hits like a linebacker when giving a welcome home hug.

I'll get around to putting down as much as I can about my experiences and thoughts there elsewhere when I can put them in some kind of mntal order, but for now, a bit of a response to all you delightful responders.

The observations and helpful insights everyone offered here were all, at times, bang on the money and woefully off-base - sometimes even simultaneously.

As far as my general perception of the bits of the U.S I did get to see, I have to confess that one particular bit of advice as to what I might expect, that the U.S. is:

"...most interesting nation in the world. well, maybe japan, but that's another planet"

was closest to my experience...with a bit of tweaking.

Replace "interesting" with "schizophrenically bizarre" and "Japan" with the specific part of Tokyo known as Harajuku and you've got it nailed.

Which in no way lessened the general friendliness - which from most people felt genuine - or the odd curiosity about my accent.

I had some great conversations with a whole bunch of random strangers, as well as a lot of confused looks (from me and towards me), and a lot of astonished laughing and finger pointing (on my part).

Other quick random observations for the moment:

I managed not to get run over, though I never did master the knack of looking the right way.

The whole system of which car gives way to whom confuses the fuck outa me - if I lived there I'd have to be a pedestrian or I'd rapidly become another car crash statistic - probably on a daily basis.

The meal servings were far too large and the water in the toilets way too close to my arse cheeks for my comfort.

There is something very disturbing about getting a retinal scan and being fingerprinted before entering the country.

No matter what a person might be into or service to be had or wish to buy, there are enough other people after the same thing for there to be a store for it somewhere.

Oregon is stunningly gorgeous, and thankfully, though I was taken to areas where there be vampires (hey, I saw it on T.V so it must be true), I didn't see one sparkly person climbing a tree.

Sealions and albino snakes are much better entertainment than watching sport and taking a taxi can be more thrilling than a rollercoaster ride.

There is more and better reporting on world news and sports in my woeful local rag than there is on any of the major networks or newspapers I watched or read.

There are a lot of churches - most of them ugly.

To contrast that, there are also some astonishingly beautifully designed buildings and gorgeous architecture.

Petrol (read as gas - no, not the meat pie kind) was very cheap.

Diners are a brilliant invention (as I type this I'm reminded of my childhood experiences with the now defunct Australian Milk Bars)and the best french fries/potato chips I've had were consumed with great delight. Eating them with ranch dressing was a surprise and an unexpected epicurean delight.

Mall Ninjas are real.

So are the Sopranos.

It turns out that mythology can very effectively substitute reality on a very large scale.

I will never own that guitar signed by David Bowie. Or the one signed by the members of Pink Floyd or the one signed by the wonderfully tone deaf Bobbie Zimmerman. I think I may have cried a little at that moment.

And of course, Next was a wonderful companion, lover, co-conspirator and tour guide. My time in America with her was disgustingly perfect and wonderful.

And all too brief.

Walking away from her at the Airport was...hard. The lights (and my rapt curiosity for new sights) seemed to dim, everything became bland and lost its lustre and I felt small and hollow and cold.

In spite of three successive flight delays, I managed to arrive home only ten minutes later than scheduled. For the record, the Airbus A380 is much more comfortable than the Boeing 747, though I survived both with no discomfort at all.

I was however, mentally and emotionally numb until the moment I was hit by Monsterman's bone-jarring hug. It's hard to escape from the impact, physical and emotional, of such an assault.

Some of the numbness remains though.

Now that I am back home again, sitting once more in front of a computer screen with thousands of miles separating me from her, I can still feel her under my fingertips, against my body, beneath my lips. I can still smell the scent of her skin and hair, hear her wicked and delighted laughter and the sound of her sleeping beside me, see her smiles and her thoughts and moods play across her face.

And I feel the hard, sharp edges of her absence cutting into me.

Two weeks. All too brief and a cup filled to the brim with experiences, sights, emotions and, of course, love to sip at over the next span of time until the miles and the hard, sharp edges are gone once more.

It was wonderful.

She was - and is - even moreso.

Those are the thoughts I'll end this with and hold onto.

Shields, Playgrounds, Art and Hope

I've decided to resurrect this old bit of bloggery after reading the Dexter inspired bloggerised thoughts of a certain someone whose writing often gives me reason to stop and ponder my navel lint. What she wrote resonated with me and reminded me of some of the things I wrote down here.

Thanks for the reminder Saz.

.........................................................................................................................................................................

I live a lot of my life inside my head and I'm not especially proud of that fact.

Its not necessarily that it's a bad place to be - well, most of the time its not - its just living upstairs of my shoulders is horrendously insulating. And dangerously seductive. This is because the inside of my mind is largely unassailable. It's not subject to the whims and vagaries of the day-to-day grind of eking out a living on this madly spinning ball of rock. Reality, like Mormons and Jehovah's Witnesses need not come knocking, 'coz I don't have to be home to answer. Its safe, inside your head.

I'm pretty sure too that I'm not alone in this.

I don't think that is how most of us start out, or are intended to be. Somewhere along the line in that whole socialisation and education part of our lives, we learn the art of mental camouflage. We blend, we bend, we meld, merge and adapt. And we take on board the most infuriatingly disagreeable pap as the lynchpins of our being.

"Good people don't do that," or

"Don't you think that's a bit risky?" or

"Oh, you'll never make it through life as..." or

"You're so stupid/fat/slow/silly/ugly/weak (add your own descriptor here)."

And then there are all the messages that don't need words. The absences or the abuses or the rejections.

We take these on board and clutch them to ourselves as though they were reinforced titanium shielding against the horror and uncertainty of the world. And we never stop to see that they keep us from the world more than they keep the world from us. Even when we start realising this, its so very damn hard to throw that shield away because, dammit, that fucking thing is titanium! Its heavy!

And yet there are so many ways out of that personal cul-de-sac.

Listening to positive ideas and people. Learning to accept the good things without feeling the need to think "Oh shit. Something bad has to happen now." Daring to step beyond what is comfortable.

Of course bad things will happen. Unwelcome things. Unforeseen things. Unexpected things. Often though, those bad things come from using that partly obscured vision we have from behind those shields and we walk headlong into traps and pitfalls of our own devising, wailing as we fall, "Why did this happen to me? I didn't see that coming!"

But the good things happen too. And here's the thing. They don't have to be connected. Its not a cause and effect relationship between good and bad. Good things have just as much chance of happening to us as bad. And vice versa.

And, as with the bad things, most of those good things are things we have laid the ground work for. Promotion at work? You worked hard for it. A joy filled love affair that fills your memories for the rest of your life? You chose that person. Something you read set you back on your feet again? You chose that book at the time you needed it. A friend helps you out of a hard place? You chose that friend, and your behaviour was the reason they chose you as well.

Life's like that; the good and the bad.

So why is it then that I spend my time cowering behind the titanium shield inside my skull? I could say force of habit. I could say its from a lifetime of finding that as my one last safe bastion of me-ness. I could say its because I enjoy thinking and contemplating and analysing. And all those things would be true.

To a point.

The big reason, of course is fear.

Today, I spent part of my day being absolutely amazed and astonished and transported and bewildered and angered and back to amazed again (this may seem like a digression, but you'll understand why I say this now, later on). I had the pleasure of helping escort some forty of my son's cohort to the nearby high-school to see a performing arts presentation. I will freely admit, I was somewhat dreading the experience. Memories of my own years at high-school and the preponderance of Neanderthal thought that abounded there did not exactly inspire confidence in what I was about to be subjected to.

What I saw there though totally stunned me. In one and a half hours, these kids sang, danced, made music, acted and made art with the most incredible confidence, enthusiasm and one hell of a lot of talent. There were a few hiccoughs, that detracted, and I was infuriated that these gaffs weren't due to the kids, but the adults who fucked up the sound engineering or music selection. That the people teaching them didn't seem able to actually grasp the abilities of their charges annoyed me immensely.

But the kids on stage made that irrelevant in the end. I delighted in it and came away on a minor high.

I'm always impressed when I have the opportunity to see someone with skills I either have yet to, or will never ever have the ability to achieve. And I saw that level of skill and competence in some of these kids. And more than that, I saw that here, in this time, this space, this dinky little conservative, rural, suburban town, these young people were brave enough to take that leap and express themselves and live their art.

Now, some might argue that that is also partly due to the fact that they haven't had to live in "the real world" yet. They don't have mortgages and bills, and kids to feed and cars to take to the mechanics because there's a strange knocking noise somewhere back there. They might further argue that this is due to the fact that at that age, these kids are still primarily ego driven and can't see beyond themselves to have the fear that something they do might not work out right.

But I can't say those things. While there's some truth to that, its a long way from the whole truth. Those kids still live in our world. they live with their own fears, made more complex because they see so much of the world revolving around them. For them, the snapping of a parent who is stressing over the prospect of having no car is something personal. For them who is and isn't their friend is hellishly important because to be rejected is to have the totality of themselves spurned.

And in spite of that, these kids got up on that stage and gave us ART.

And I was humbled, because it was something I never dared.

I was once more brought to the realisation that I had lived my life hiding inside my head. That so many of my hard-won beliefs and ideas come from books I've read, and conversations with people about other people's lives. I had stood on the outside looking in, trying to tell myself it was because I was above such things when in truth I didn't want the risk of not knowing where I fit. I made my niche outside the world.

I hunkered down in my head as I went about the task of raising my siblings while my father drank and my mother survived his drinking. I hid inside my books and comics through move after move as we went from one air-force base to another, as I struggled and failed to make friends. I retreated into my music and guitar when I was told time and again I was "too nice" to go out with. I escaped to my work and my books to survive the mental castration of choosing to stay with someone who wanted a carer and not a partner, and whom I was too afraid to compromise my much cherished "values" for.

I was the good boy, you see. The nice boy. The responsible boy. It was my task in life to make everything O.K for everyone and to make everyone happy. I wasn't necessarily told these things directly, but it was the message I took on and held to my heart. It was the message I chose to listen to and the message that I lived. No matter that it just made me downright miserable.

I sat in my head and thought and dreamed and thought and planned and thought and thought some more.

None of that is an excuse. I can honestly say now, looking back, that I made most of those choices. It was me, and me alone who was too scared to step up and dare life to happen.

And one day, that is exactly what I did.

I started living as though I meant it. And what do you know? I found I DID mean it. I could choose to express myself as myself. To state my thoughts and beliefs and feelings. I could "put myself out there" (to use a trite turn of phrase) in the knowledge that if I didn't, no-one was going to come bundling up to my door and say, "By the way, want a happily ever after with me? Or maybe we'll just fuck?" And I could know that if that didn't work, I would know, that it would never come from not being completely myself.

But I'm still in the early stages of that and starting your whole adult life over from scratch at thirty-seven means I've still got a fair bit of ground to cover before I catch up.

Which, in an extremely roundabout way, brings me here. Another area of expression of the "me that is me." It isn't by any stretch of the imagination the totality of me, but it I have come to realise it is inescapably a part of me, and has been since before I even knew there were more things you can do with girls than just pull their pigtails.

There were dreams of girls and ropes and chains and coercion (at that stage, I was just after kisses, the more fun things joined in the dreams later). As I grew there were books I ferreted out, scenes in films I'd grow almost hungry for. I grew to be passionate, sensual, sexual. Wanting to savour everything my senses could devour. But when I came up against the wall of "That's just not the right thing," - from friends, family, books, films - I packed it away.

In the aftermath of that long dead relationship though, a lot of the other messages and lessons began to surface, and possibility opened up. I allowed myself to see the totality of who I am. To appreciate the wonderful and good aspect of myself and rather than hating myself for the negative, appreciating that they too are part of me and if I so choose, I can change them. A whole damn world of potential.

So I squared myself up and set out to meet it.

Its brought me here. Its brought me the care of my son nearly full time. Its brought me a partner I can share the totality of me with, who wants to explore and grow with me. Its brought me here to a place I can connect with others who will accept and understand the different facets of me as they come to light, and know I won't be judged as an aberration.

But there's still that little demon fear lurking. The awareness that this is new territory for me. That I am walking tentatively in a playground where others have been boldly striding and running around for most of their lives. That in this playground, I have yet to learn the names of all the games, let alone the rules and whys and how-tos.

The temptation to stay in my head is phenomenal.

Each day though, I am learning. I'm reading, watching, listening. And yes, though I'm often still in my head, the horizons of possibility are expanding.

I'm still painfully aware of my lack of practical knowledge and understanding in the playground, and hesitate to join in and voice my thoughts among those I see as being, if not wiser at least more experienced. Now though, I'm listening to myself and hearing the positives. I'm seeing a commonality I share with others and my confidence in my ability to make the leap into the fray is growing stronger day by day.

I think, most of all, what I felt watching those kids performing today, was hope.

Hope for them. That from a town like this such talent can spring. Hope that they will have the courage to hold onto their fearless confidence and not become less than what they are.

And hope that I can do the same in my own life.