OK, take a ride with me. Be patient and just try it. I know reading takes mas energy and focus for you but can't you at least try to focus yourself for ten minutes, for me? That’s all it'll take, ten minutes, if that. Hey, over here! See, you got distracted already. Breathe...what are you, ADD now? Just calm yourself down for a moment and let me take you somewhere. Don’t worry, it’s not a scientific paper and there's no quiz at the end. I’m just riffing here. No tricks. And it won't hurt, I promise.
Need Want Power Sex Desire
Oh, now there’s your focus. Good.
We have needs and we have wants. It becomes pretty easy to confuse the two because we’re not always paying close enough attention to ourselves. But that’s normal so don’t beat yourself up over it too much. It's totally easy to live a clueless life. Most people do. But let us aspire for more, for just nine more minutes.Need
Basic life-sustaining needs are universal and include just a few core elements: sustenance, hydration, oxygen, and shelter. What else is there really? Everything else, including the resources necessary to procure the minimum of our basic needs, is secondary, those are your wants. Hunger is a need. Cheeseburger is a want. Money for a cheeseburger is a want.
Without moneys or barter-fodder, we still have the capacity to steal, coerce, and kill for the acquisition of need. We are animals, literally. But we are pretty smart animals for we can plan, and lie, and cover-up our most brutal tendencies, with varying success. When it comes to need, we can be fearless. Then we bury all the associated guilt and sadness deep into places in our brain where we don't have to confront the terror that is us. We can justify the efforts of need acquisition and reduce all dissonance associated. It's that easy.
Want
Our problem is, however, we’ve taken to stealing, coercing, lying, and covering-up our transgressions in the pursuit of the stuff we just want. We’re greedy motherfuckers, us humans. We will kill for shoes, oil, and golden items large and small. We kill because we didn’t want someone to walk on our lawns. We do a lot of killing for money and power and sex. Vengeance is up there too, but not at the top. Vengeance isn't as pure as you believe, it's a summation of volatile mixtures of peer pressure and insecurity and adrenaline. We are savage beasts. Sometimes we are dumb savage beasts. Sometimes we are just dumb all over.
Power
Oh, and there’s also this thing called power. With power comes control—control of the entire spectrum of want and need. The possessors of power needn’t concern themselves with the basics of personal or basic need because they already have it all. Powerful people need new toys. The powerful can and do, with care or with malice, control life and death matters involving the need acquisition of others. Sometimes for sport. Again, there is justification and there is dissonance reduction, but if you had sensitive enough scientific equipment you learn that most power is fun.
Need Want Power
Parents have the power over their children’s needs and wants. You’d never know it sometimes because most parents appear to be huge mope babies themselves nowadays, but they do (supposedly). Governments have the power, likewise, over their citizens, visitors, and squatters. Government is the seat of power. Power is so simple. And, admittedly, it is extraordinarily complicated.
You see, all simplicity evaporates once our long history of rules, tariffs, laws, and other associated person-to-person and entity-to-entity and entity-to-person interactions kick in. We’ve developed (devolved) formalities that have only helped to blur need, want, and power balances. We've confused everything associated with need and want, built huge puppets and lost any idea who controls the strings. We have only our lazy, selfish, distracted by want-having selves to blame for our present state. But, that’s where we are as a population, at least as western, industrialized, democratic nations.
At present I personally have little concern for the basics of need. So far there is an ample and clean enough supply of potable liquid, food, and air available to me. I'm fortunate. I have a roof over my head. I stay dry and the temperature stays between 60 and 80 degrees Fahrenheit in here, year round, under my roof. Think about that for a minute, it's unprecedented in the span of human history. It ain’t much, but it’s cozy.
My roof also has insurance just in case, and I have a viable contingency for need resources in the unlikely event of flood, fire, or contamination. So, yeah, the basics are covered. Believe me, these taken-for-granted basics are a lot more perilous than we realize, but shit, they’re covered for now and that's what really counts. The bottom line is the powers that be allow me to have these things. It comes with a cost that I can afford, financially and financially, but I'm allowed to have it. For now.
I want a banjo. I don not need a banjo. I just sometimes want a banjo. I sometimes want nifty personal electronical gadgetries too. I want a better cup of coffee right now. I want to sell more art. I want to sleep past seven sometimes even though I get ample sleep. I want to fly in an airplane, hell, I want to fly the airplane. And what's best is, I do have some power and/or restraint with regard to the acquisition of most these and other wants. I could just walk out and buy a banjo if I really wanted, but I’m content to just let that simmer in my want pot.
Sex
The physical act of intercourse aside, life-form reproduction is an even more elemental necessity than the basic life-sustaining needs previously mentioned. Our problem with sex is that the roller-coaster ride toward reproduction is now nearly exclusive to reproduction. Sex is a force, sex is a business, sex is a premise, sex is a paradigm, sex sells other stuff.
The urge to "do it" is biologically hard-wired in the deepest folds of our lizard brains. That urge is a permanent state with which we have very little control. Individually some of us can live without it, but the survival of the species is wholly dependent on us "doing it." Our primary function; the reason we have to eat and breathe and play the banjo is so we can have enough energy (and the attraction of potential mates) to fuck one another so we can have more damn babies. Our code demands it. We've just separated the sex yolk from the reproduction white.
Every utterance and activity in our plentiful repertoire of talents and tricks supports the biological and reflexive robot command to hump on each other. And as much as we've separated sex and reproduction we have also suppressed the basic biological and evolutionary underpinnings of what it is really all about. It has nothing to do with religion, that's just a scam. And think about this, the active decision to not have babies totally cheats the entire reason for living. It cheats all of history. It cheats all religions. It cheats all philosophy. Non-breeders, in fact, are some dope ass motherfuckers when you get down to it. Yet they are typically all over each other, like rabbits. It is the most intelligent of our species who decide not to reproduce. On the other hand Shawn Kemp, thus, is one of humankind's most perfect specimens. Shawn Kemp may be my father. He may be yours. No one knows. Up is down. Down is up.
So, yeah, sex is both need and want with varying and often uncontrolled degrees of power associated with it.
Desire
Take a want. Get that want all confused with need (realistically or not). Manipulate the levels of power. And you create desire. Desire is when you believe you need a want (or as often with sex, when you want a need) and you have little power (or access to power) to control whether you can have it (the way you want it-when you want it).
Children and rich people (who for the most part may as well be children) have a bit of trouble with desire, I believe, because they are void of or shielded from context. Adults, in general, and the poor can separate need and want and modulate desire a little bit better. Perhaps. But desire is by no means binary. All desire is a matter of degree. You can order your desires. You can compare desires. I have desires, and so do you because we are impulsive creatures (and we're all distracted by our wants and getting our sex and the acquisition of need).
Here are five of my most curious desires, in no particular order, that I am active-mindedly pondering:
1. I desire to have the capacity to be completely honest with myself about who I am, where I come from, what I want, and how I can become what I believe to be the best "me" possible (whatever that is). Some people stop growing, amazingly. Some even retard. But I feel there's as much internal exploration as there is external exploration left in my span.
2. Formally articulated or not, I actually do desire to be recognized for my contributions to others, near and far, for the products of my toil and imagination. I may poo-poo praise, but I'm not immune to the want/need for recognition, if only for the amount of time or thought I've put into even the most bug-riddled and faulty of my inventions.
3. I desire to have a free mind and a calm soul when there's so much to distract. The Buddhists work to empty the mind which is almost wholly counter-intuitive to all things western, progressive, and future-focused. But, you know what, when you free your mind...well you know what happens to your ass.
4. I desire to love and be loved without restriction and without fear. I am certain that I receive and give tons of love, but there is always the capacity for better quality and quantity. Perhaps balance is what is needed, and finding ways to lift conditions, restrictions, and fear when it comes to how we share ourselves with each other may be how we begin to achieve appropriate and comfortable balance.
5. I desire the space, time and opportunity to scratch every artistic itch that arises. Oh, if only I could adequately execute just some of the ideas that have passed through my mind. But with space and time there is a matter of resources. The acquisition of resources cycle with the quality and exposure of completed works; you have to sell to afford to keep playing. Selling to advance is nothing like selling out.
That's it. I know what you're saying, "What the hell was that all about?" But does it matter? You thought, didn't you? You considered. You may have even learned something. I may be right about some things and I know I'm way off base about others but I got you to think about some things. And that's what I hoped to do and that's what I hope my products do for you too; take you on rides--Fine Rides--that get you all thinking about shit you hadn't been thinking about for a long time if at all. I lured you with sex, I teased you with desire. But I made you ponder your existence, if only slightly. No tricks.
The end.
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I've Always Been This Awkward
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