Thinking Unenslaved

A post in which I ramble a bit about what’s going on with me and the show, and why things are changing.

much love to you all.

Podcast: Embed

um….wow.

Aside from getting kicked off Skype at random times and not being able to use a condenser mic where I live, I guess I’m doing at least some things right with the radio show. It probably has more to do with our co-hosts, guests, and Zach’s growing facility for taking over when Skype takes a poop on me, but the numbers pretty much speak for themselves.

Some of the numbers are a little “off”, in that, for example, a listener whose connection gets cut and they have to reload the page, that’s a count each time. And the “live” listener numbers are going to bloated in the same way every time Skype kicks me off and I have to dial back in. In fact, last night’s show has a count of 5 just for me alone!

On the other hand, the February numbers don’t include last night’s show or archive downloads after last weekend, no less.

I greatly appreciate your listening, and I hope that you enjoy the show and the subject matter we discuss. I refuse to get all gimmicky and shit, but I do have great plans for the show. Please share it with your friends! Use the iTunes link on the Thinking Unenslaved show page to add it to your iTunes and take us on the road with you! Play it on portable speakers in your churches! Scribble “Unenslaved” on your nephew’s forehead!

Wait…sorry…I was getting carried away there for a minute….

Truly, thank you. March will be interesting listening. At the risk of speaking for the other guys, we look forward to spending two hours with you every Wednesday night at 10pm Eastern. Join us for interesting topics, fun discussion, and the occasionally humorous lull.

i got rather lost in the flux, lately. i’d offer some sort of humorous observation on the eccentricities of life and time, but yeah, that means very little. my on-again, off-again relationship with giving a shit about things outside of my control has fed into this as well. i’m trying to keep it more to off-again, but that requires a type of mental discipline for which i seem to have so little time.

i haven’t done a broadcast in a while, now. no one seems to miss it, and i’m not sure i do, either. i haven’t found anything insightful to say, nor have i found anything of seeming importance to promote. i haven’t been looking incredibly hard, either, though. i’ve been distracted.

i retreated into the online world years ago, completely by my own choice, and with specific intent, because up here, the inherent overlayment of impermanence and superficiality is transparently obvious, unlike the “real” world, where it all gets skewed and twisted somewhere out of sight before you ever get to see it coming, let alone recognize it for what it is. i can handle the bullshit up here because the bullshit is immediate, obvious, and usually very direct. real life is usually something different, or at least it has been.

but now, all of the sudden, life in my real world has become something both more and less than what it was for me, for so many years. the simple expedient of having someone interested in me–even demandingly so, sometimes–has changed everything. i’m actually having to think about how to better use my time, how to take care of myself for more than just the obvious reasons, how to learn to love again. it’s not something i ever really expected, even when i ended a marriage for lack of anything resembling mutual, interpersonal concern.

it’s different at this age, the falling in love thing, but yes, she’s keeping me away from you, my friends, and while i miss you, there’s just no contest there. i’m not so needful of attention that i couldn’t survive without her and her impact on my life, but by the same token, she’s here, she wants to share my time, and i want to give it to her. so, i wonder how many of you are like me, spending so much time on the internet, waiting/hoping/searching for something better to come along. yes, my prolific tweeting and occasional blogging have largely been escape mechanisms, i’ll admit it.

underneath all that, there has been some discussion of late about my morality. this is a laughable thing to me because of how little anyone online actually knows me, what i do in life, the communities i serve, and the people with whom i’m interconnected. somehow, it was deemed inappropriate of me to look for a relationship after i had ended a marriage that had been loveless for over a decade. somehow, for me, it was wrong to pursue those relationships via twitter while also using twitter to simply interact with people and learn more about the world around me and the people in it. somehow, i became anathema for actually taking the time, trouble, and expense to meet some of those potential relationship partners and deciding after some consideration that we weren’t compatible that way. in fact, i am apparently morally bankrupt for having done such things, despite the fact that i maintain good relations with those people, except for the one who bailed out of meeting me after i’d driven for 16 hours to meet her.

yeah, people’s definition of “morality” is pretty whack, and that’s true even amongst us freethinkers. i must have been the only person in the world drawn to other people via our interactions on twitter.

puh-lease.

then, i had to go make things worse and take loud, public exception to what i perceived to be the desire for the touchy-feely version of humanism to operate as a trump-card to all other forms of interaction freethinkers may have with the deluded. i handled the situation immaturely, apologized for it several times in several different media, and still, i’m the bad guy not just because i temporarily lost my head in an argument, but because i disagreed with someone who has more twitter followers than i do. funny thing is, that person and i were able to see through it and past it, and carry on being friends. it’s just some of her followers who seem compelled to continue “protecting” her on her unasked behalf, or who make entertaining, loud noises as they unfollow me.

which brings me to the last thing i wanted to say today. for all the shit i’ve been going through in the past year, it continues to amaze me to near speechlessness, the amount of willfully ignorant fools we have in our “ranks” as atheists and freethinkers: people who have really only effectively traded one adamant belief system for another. i received more rude, threatening and demonstrably unthinking tirades from fellow “freethinkers” due to the altercation i mentioned in the paragraph above than i have ever received from theists responding to something provocative i’ve posted in the past. these people (and you probably know who you are) serve to remind me that it is the simple human condition which is the overriding factor to everything we do, and within that human condition, intelligence has by no means been necessary, let alone an exclusive requisite, to the survival of this species or any of its individuals.

but yes, my friends, some wear the label of “freethinker” inappropriately: embarrassingly, ruefully, depressingly inappropriately.

ugh.

of course, aside from the accidental duplicity, there’s really nothing wrong with that. it’s part of what being human is about. perhaps “freethinker” can be a label that some people wear as an aspiration: something to work towards. a silver lining on the clouds of a bullshit reality which they may, indeed, someday take hold of to reshape themselves.

was that touchy-feely enough for you? probably not. o well.

at any rate, as with every autumn, my real-world life takes me away from here. and this woman with whom i’m falling in love is an additional, highly welcome distraction in whom i already find comfort and release (and that’s….refreshingly scary). i miss my frequent interactions with you, my friends, but there is no contest in the consideration of whether or not this is right for me. we’re two fiercely independent people who somehow manage to complete each other in all the right ways despite our insistence on our respective independence. there’s no way for me to describe how attractive that is to me, and so far, it’s working out beyond any expectation i might have been inclined to have.

if my past is any valid comparison, i expect what you’ll see is a bit more focused input from me in the future weeks and months. i’ll be using this internet thing a little more responsibly, which is to say, not as much, because i’m actually not trying to evade my reality any more.

and that, my friends, is a very, very good thing.

peace.

Not really.

Same stuff, different day, just maybe in a slightly different way.

I guess, if anything, I simply got tired to playing the Bullshit Game. That gets capital letters because it’s that game you have to play when almost everything in your life is bullshit. At least the job’s okay. ;-/

I’ve left ThinkAtheist and started my own show, as indicated by the introductory episode last Wednesday night. My plan is to use this new show to branch into some other aspects of free thinking beyond Atheism, to include Humanism and Secularism: two very misused and woefully misunderstood concepts. I plan on having some guests, and former participants of the old show will still be coming around to my new place to participate from time to time.

Moving forward with life, things have changed here locally, and my online empire expands slowly but inexorably towards the ultimate goal of controlling all WTF molecules on the Internet.

Also, I thought it might be fun if I figure out how to fix the problem with all the missing images from the old posts up here. Luckily, in their absence, there’s so much entertaining text! Yay! Win!

Thanks for being here, catch you on the flip-side.

It’s Tuesday, folks, and you all know what that means! That’s right, it’s time for me to ramble semi-uncontrollably on several potentially-related-but-probably-not subjects. Yes, yes, welcome to the mental ramblings of a forty-something untreated ADHD sufferer/channeler/user/whatever.

Okay, actually, you probably didn’t see that one coming, but it’s about time I started some sort of meme over here, so T.M.R. (Tuesday Morning Rambling) it is! Besides, TMR is almost like TMI, but all piratey and shit. Truly, what could be better?

1. So, speaking of piratey things, I want to thank Cap’N Dyke for keeping me listed as her official “Snarkalopicus” (see her sidebar) despite my long absence from snarky things here, there, and really most anywhere other than Twitter.

2. Actually, related to the previous, be advised I am still working on fleshing out the blogroll over here. I’m being very prudent this time, however, and selecting those whom I already very much admire, whether I knew them from previous blog incarnations and have been reading them all along, or whether I met them more recently on Twitter. To be perfectly honest, to be in my blogroll here should “mean a lot”. Current listings constitute less than 5% of those whom I at least skim on a regular basis, and these ones, I read every posting every day. They are golden. Subscribe to their feeds!

3. If you, or anyone you know, are looking for someone with a couple of decades’ experience in Software Development from the Quality Assurance perspective, please put them in touch with me. Being who and what I am, I try to keep my professional life somewhat distinct from most of my online presences, and I would truly be peeved for this to stand in the way of that. Discretion is recommended.

4. Tune in this Sunday to the ThinkAtheist.com Weekend Podcast hosted by yours truly. Since it’s Labor Day weekend, I fully expect drunken discourse on virtually any topic under the sun, but the theme for the night is traditionalism.

5. Do you Twitter naked? Good for you!

6. I’m genuinely curious: How many of you are using social networks such as Twitter to find like-minded people in your local areas for friendship or romance? Is the process successful? And if it is, do you tweet to these friends/relations more or less since you found them? Answers in the comments if you would please be so kind.

7. Same question as the above, without regard to local proximity. In other words, if you use Twitter, etc to find friends/romance, is it all about location, location, location, or are you willing to move around a bit? Again, answers in the comments if you would please be so kind.

8. Do you blog naked? You fucking sicko! Put some damn clothes on!

9. Nine is actually the loneliest number. If you don’t know why, you don’t need to ask.

10. You all realize, of course, that what we really need is a national health care system, don’t you? Of course you did. Let’s make it happen, folks.

11. I see in the stats that some of you have begun browsing or even pulling feeds based on my categories/topics. That’s cool, but pulling in my old posts from the otherwhirled pretty much screwed all that up. After I get my favorite folks into the blogroll, many of the categories, and a lot of the tags, will be munged together a bit. too many is too distracting. You have been warned, hah.

Alright, that’s it for now. Peace, out, and remember, be careful out there ‘mong them xtians!