Just Dilly Dallying

[Desiremakesmeweak]

I know where this story I'm working on will end up (as far as the story-line goes, that is!).

...I'm really super happy with the way things have proceeded up to this point.

And now, I'm messin' 'round on this board here just because that's what I do at this stage of matters.

Dilly dally dilly dally dilly dally.

Last week I read a recent story from Oggbashan which kind of amazed me that he was able to pick up such a difficult theme and run with it, constructing an actually fairly positive story around it. It was a very brave thing to do and he pulled it off.

Frankly I think it rates as something that easily would have made the big league during the heydays of Playboy. It's intelligent and casts an incident-of-light onto a very dark area.

I've been trying to deal with a similar kind of subject oh, maybe over the whole of the last year even longer perhaps.

Right now I have friends who live in Woodland Hills and nearby gated estates (I'm not on the West Coast virtually EVER!) and from what I understand, down in the associated main cities there are up to sixty thousand plus homeless people living on the streets.

I used to do dystopian sci-fi when it was visionary. I can't do it anymore. I don't feel right about it.

Years and years ago when I was, ACTUALLY WAS, one of the local 'wealthy,' I stayed away from the 'elites' and the society parties and most of the charity events and I was something of an extreme rich hermit, really. To an extent it was also because I was DECADES younger than ALL the other rich people. I didn't have a lot in common. And then of course there came along the generation that made millions when they were eight years old from some App... So I guess I've been betwixt and between since forever.

But now, now I want to engage but I'm really wary. I'm slowly growing back some of my past business connections and networks and putting back together the type of capital base I once had in a very centralized, integrated form.

I used to trust older people a little, now I don't trust anyone at all.

What is getting under my skin is that over the next few years those of us who survive will be FORCED to be elusive, reclusive, and apart from the evident public social 'tribes.'

There is hope. I think there is hope but it is a slim hope.

The world has once again come to a potentially very dark place.

Potentially, and 'schizophrenic-ally;' some of us will do really well materially and then there will be this whole set of layers run by governments and dominated by the conforming masses and their bureaucrat overlords, who will be lumbered with geo-political burdens they never even saw coming but that are really quite obvious to the even slightly thoughtful: China is a total basket case. For one thing.

They need around 11 million new jobs there each year to be generated from somewhere real, just to maintain level growth - so that's not going to happen and the result of those kinds of disequilibriums in history has always been catastrophic murderous war.

So...

I'm going to 'win' again because that has been the pattern of my life and certainly of my business life and whilst I won't be complaining, the world has reached the point at which the fools running it literally do need the aliens to turn up in space ships just to take notice of the common sense those advanced intelligent beings might offer them.

This is the fin de siecle. We are at 'decadence.'

At least as a creative person and a writer I can steep myself in what the great thinkers of those 'labelled' eras in recent history did and how they accommodated what they must have known was going on all around them.

 

[ChloeTzang]

Ever read “The Fourth Turning.” One reason I like living where we live, but Australia strikes me as rather more socially cohesive and able to react intelligently than ourselves.

 

[CoffeeWithMonkeys]

I love the words...phrase?...dilly dally. I read that and had to go listen to a song, Stuff and Nonsense, where they sing dilly dally, and it made me sad so I'm sitting here crying.

I'm working on my post apocalyptic series atm. Well, that's a lie, I'm not working on it right this second, I'm procrastinating I suppose. I just submitted the latest chapter yesterday, and happily it will be up tonight!
Trying to be better about getting chapters posted, and the past two have gone up pretty quick!

I should try to write some today, tomorrow I'm going to volunteer at the food pantry and Wednesday I have a job interview.

 

[ElectricBlue]

Ever read “The Fourth Turning.” One reason I like living where we live, but Australia strikes me as rather more socially cohesive and able to react intelligently than ourselves.

We don't want the half of America who are trying to escape from the other half, though, just saying. Drop bears are relatively slow breeders, and would never keep up .

 

[Rustyoznail]

Ever read “The Fourth Turning.” One reason I like living where we live, but Australia strikes me as rather more socially cohesive and able to react intelligently than ourselves.

We have our fair share of nutcases, but they’re usually unarmed.

Reacting intelligently... NSW is the only state left where abortion is a criminal act. The Conservative government (!) there put up a bill to repeal the law, but you’d think Doctors are ready to go out and commit mass murder the way some sections of the media are carrying on. Which feeds the vocal minority, which feeds the media...

And as long as you’re not from the Middle East, the Federal Government welcomes medical professionals with open arms.

EB and will tell you the secret to managing drop bears

 

[Desiremakesmeweak]

One real advantage of Australia is the low population versus the entire land mass, and yet also, the proximity to South East Asia. So there is some cross-cultural positive effect because some things are in a rough kind of balance of social/cultural forces. And that even includes the Aboriginal culture now.

It is certainly true the demographics show a strong concentration of the population at the capital cities, and so you get the 'impression' (from the cities) the place is a modern, urban society with the usual advanced urban culture; it isn't.

The place is a spectrum of from 'near to end of modern era' cities like Sydney and Melbourne, all the way to anachronisms like Darwin, and peculiar 'toy sophisticated towns' like Perth and the Gold Coast (the latter of which is the most international place you are ever likely to encounter anywhere on the planet).

That was a very interesting range of responses to the OP here - and it confirms my view that writers are in the lead pack of socially- and personally-sensitive of the whole 'artists' grouping within society.

The Fourth Turning is this theory about societal/generational change that happens in America - and frankly, it does appear to mirror relatively recent Western human history; I am not in the boat of those academics who dismiss the theory out of hand. There are reasonable grounds to suspect the theory has some basis in fact.

That Split Enz song is almost typical of that group's writing - which can have a plaintive theme running through the lyrics and the choice of musical mode.

Personally on the one hand I am very upbeat but have been more and more aware over the years of the conflict between my own experienced reality, and that of virtually the whole of the rest of society(!): with one consequence being I have a great deal of difficulty 'enunciating' or just describing anything from out of my own life without it being heavily disputed and gainsaid instantly by those who doubt any of it can even be true.

In philosophy and analysis of religious beliefs, the same main element of discussion occurs there, and is known as 'the theistic problem...' IE, 'if He exists and is Good, why does God allow,' et cetera.

So for me it is more like this - 'if He exists and is rational and fair, why do good things happen to me continuously, while they don't appear to happen to or for others, as lubriciously(?) LOL is that even the right word; it sounds right for what my meaning is...

To me society seems to be militantly incapable of 'seeing' through its own very basic and fatal self-defeating flaws, even though it keeps gaining access to greater and greater ways and means (technology).

So can't it be that a few people now and again, even if just a tiny few, can come into the easy or easIER flows of the material currents of human existence...?


We shall see. I think I've set myself A TASK here!!