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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 5h

Can't Buy Me Love, Beatles, 1964?

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 8h

Wait till the last book comes out and read the Locked Tomb Tetralogy. If Muir can finish it, it will be a knockout.

Alan Garner's Red Shift is on the middle ground between his early, excellent standard fantasy and his later, odder writing. It is about the intersection of the timeless with time.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 12h

Sure. Rhetoric is fighting with language. It is fine so long as used to make the true seem plausible and the good seem attractive.

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 12h

Pretending that there is one true masculine virtue set does more harm than it can possibly do good.

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 12h

Not really, because masculine virtue is a hotly contested, and thus incoherent, concept. There is the laboring man's and soldier's version, the STEM version, and the businessman's version. The businessman's version permits fatness and ignorance if accompanied by money and confidence.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 13h

Figuring out that appearance is irrelevant gave me fits, because in dojos and gyms, physical conditioning is a mark of work ethic. It took me years to figure out that for rich people money is a mark of work ethic, and poor people look to them like out-of shape people look to me.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 13h

Usual rules, I suppose. Don't mock them for qualities you wouldn't mock a friend for. (Mocking them in ways you wouldn't mock a friend is fine.) In particular, don't mock them for irrelevant qualities like appearance. Be at least a little funnier than you are mean.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 15h

The notion that punching uphill is OK usually amounts to thinking that making unfounded generalizations about more powerful people is OK. But power has nothing to do with reasons for not making unfounded generalizations. One doesn't make unfounded generalizations because they are unfounded.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 15h

Probably cats are incarnate damned souls who can only communicate in screams. It would explain so much.

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 16h

I think either case involves age paring away unused traits to produce a caricature, but that different traits are pared.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 1d

Oddly, getting hopeless crushes on unattainable girls helps. It keeps you human somehow. Attainable girls would be better, but you are but a larva.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 1d

It causes a certain amount of personality damage. Often this takes the form of rage with nowhere to go, because the situation is no particular person's fault. It is likely negligible in comparison with whatever women go through, but it is no fun.

Punk rock helps. Strenuous exercise helps.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 1d

They are likely tyrannical too sometimes, because lunatics, but I think mostly they are too distracted.

"Yeats has proposed marriage to the new maid."

"Here, hold this symbol to his forehead till he has a vision, and then give him his pen and paper. He'll be fine."

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 1d

I think you may be thinking of Trump/King Lear/Platonic tyrant aged lunatics. I am thinking of aged Yeats writing love poems, Matisse on his sickbed using chalk on a long stick to draw on the ceiling, and this kind of martial artist.
www.facebook.com/watch/?v=153...

Redirecting...

www.facebook.com

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 1d

Having Christ fly the Cross around like a fighter plane just before dying, laughing wildly and strafing the city with blessings, cures, and private revelations is probably right out. A pity. It would be cool.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 1d

In some years Peter could turn to actual stone and fight with the soldiers in the garden for half an hour, and Christ would have to bring them all back to life. Some years could be all about the harrowing of Hell. We could change the Stations of the Cross according to what year it was.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 1d

I propose that, in aid of this project, ecumenical councils change the story every year. Some years could have a Spring festival celebrating Christ's and Mary Magdalen's unfulfilled longing for one another.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 1d

Religion is LARPing carried out to make the cyclic rhythms of birth, love, sorrow, aging, death, and the seasons into participative drama rather than the same damned thing over and over again. (Yes, I know, not only wrong, grossly oversimplified and wrong. Shut up. I am on a mission from God here.)

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 1d

It is important to remember that old age is another period of rapid change, and, once again, living for the moment is the way to go.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 1d

It makes sense when one is young. One minute you were a child, then an adolescent, then an adult. There is strong empirical evidence that little about you lasts, and that you had better get it now. Only later, in the long stable period of adulthood, do you have a future long enough for journeys.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 1d

There is precise science to becoming an aged lunatic. You need to be just crazy enough to be happy working furiously as your body and mind fall to pieces under you, but sane enough to work effectively.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 2d

Temperate climates with hot summers, brisk falls, and cold winters build character. Great knotty, twisted, tumorous masses of character. I hate character.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 3d

Ghosts get high off exhaled marijuana, opium, and crack. You can use this to bring them flocking to you, but different drugs call different kinds of ghosts.

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Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 3d

The old elves went around waking things so that they could talk with them, by putting googly eyes on them.

Coleman Ridge @colemanridge.bsky.social · 3d

Christ returned from the dead with googly eyes.

The undead have googly eyes without the black dots.

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