Mark Victor Hansen

I’m not going to name and shame, but I figured out what to say about CSS#2 when I compared it in my mind to another popular contemporary inspirational memoir. It was a pop Buddhism thing: religion, death, ultimate meaning. The cool kids, and the villain’s cat, dismiss this popularization of intellectual themes as a betray, you know, but for better or worse it is sometimes similar. Of course, it does touch on the difference between deadening to feeling and healthy detachment, but it remains to be said that even attempting healthy detachment is not the right answer for all people at all times. Of course, CSS#2 does mention the mystery of death—it’s nothing to scoff at—but this book also emphasizes various forms of healthy love, you know. I notice in my own case that being embarrassed by love and trying to be “an unenlightened Buddha”, as someone once put it, just ends up making me nom love until I get sick or at least a little tired, whenever love is mentioned, either by the attention-seekers or the scoffers, you know. Like a man in the desert, then all water is holy, and not just the pure, or so it seems…. So, I don’t know, I used to think that decent love was permissible and even “occasionally interesting” 🧐, but now I see it as more desirable. I never really wanted to be a scoffer, as much as an attention-seeker can grate on you in public, you know…. But now I think that giving in to embarrassment all the time is to forget something good. Dale Carnegie (I think it was) seems to me much less dated than some even later sales guys, you know, some of whom are kinda macho, kinda apologetic in their defense of joy…. But anyway, once Dale (or maybe it was Nappy Hill) said, ‘People who are blessed with a highly sexed nature—/yes, blessed/….’
Or as Toni Morrison put it, yes the dirty man loves a dirty love and kills himself, “but the love of a free man is never safe.” You don’t quite get the sense of danger from CSS, it’s true, but there is the sense that you’re endangering your reputation; and I don’t think it’s some average sitcom, you know. It’s the lessons of holy and decent love, and that’s a good thing, right.

…. Lord knows if you find good love, you shouldn’t give it up to become Professor of Knowledge, you know. They won’t really let you be professor of knowledge anyway, and they’ll just call in you for bureaucrat meetings about the correct way to eat cereal, right. —We’re going to have fun in the correct, bureaucratic way; lord knows people don’t want love, they don’t respect that. So c’mon guys, doing the drudgery of life for people you don’t even like, what’s tiresome about that? 🤪

If you find good love, don’t give it up because she’s not the clerk at Knowledge University, College of Bureaucracy, you know. 😸

…. Although they’re thematically similar in an abstract way, the death & dying stories are so much better than the famous Dying Professor memoir I read. “Ah, I never really liked people much. Maybe in the next life, there won’t Be so damn many of them.” Versus, cultivating courage, you know: finding the good.

…. And Mommy has to take care of herself, you know. Otherwise, she’s teaching the girls/the “good” kids to be victims, and the bad boys to play hard and loose because people will take it, you know.

People have a way of taking it for granted that people say that now, or even pretzel-braining a reason to argue just for the sake of arguing/shaming the plebs, or because a lot of radicals don’t want the world to change, deep down—they’re too comfy with the world of sin and judgment and hyper-masculinity, you know.

But it needed to be said, and somebody had to say it; she was right. (And people didn’t always say it like that, either!)

…. There is a value to kindness, and not just to knowledge, or even avoiding harm, as worthy as those two things are.… (mais)

This series of Chicken Soup for the xxx were quite popular twenty or thirty years ago. I picked this one up at a free site and was surprised how much I enjoyed it.

I read an entry or two along with my morning devotion and it helped put me in an upbeat mood for the day. Some of the stories will seem familiar, some a bit corny, some seem downright impossible, but all satisfied that part of me that wants to believe that even with everything going on in the world today, people are at heart good.… (mais)