SurrealPolitiks Paywall Jailbreak – On Beauty

The following aired as paywall content on the SurrealPolitiks Member Chat for Wednesday July 12th 2023. I am very proud of it. The members enjoyed it a great deal. I think the content is important enough to share with the public. You as a non member have had to wait over a month to receive this, and you have missed a great deal of other enjoyable experiences. You can change that today if you like by becoming a member at https://SurrealPolitiks.com/join. It is normally $10/month, but if you sign up using code agenda33 you can get your first three months at 33% off. Enjoy… Last week, before I found out my friend’s mother died, I had occasion to contemplate beauty for awhile. Hours, as it were. I ended up binge watching videos by this female violinist named Lindsey Stirling. Turns out I have her discography up to like 2017 in my MP3 collection, but I don’t listen to a lot of music and as far as I was concerned I was seeing and hearing this beautiful and amazingly talented woman for the first time that night. After watching these videos I started to compose much of what I am about to say, and I was proud of it because I had poured my heart into it. I am not complaining when I tell you that doing this can take a lot out of me. I can get into something of an emotional feedback loop where I am having this intense emotional experience, and to translate this into text while it is underway causes me to think about it more deeply. And then I realize things about the experience that I didn’t realize, which creates a whole new loop. Then I’m thinking about thinking about it, and I’m thinking about writing about it, and I’m thinking about the impact this will have on other people, and there are feelings of power and guilt involved in that, which have their own complicated emotional implications. Suffice it to say, I spend most of my life as something of an aspiring psychopath. I tend to think that getting emotionally wrapped up in things is a hindrance to clear thinking and purposeful action. It is useful to the extent it inspires creativity, and it can be a powerful motivator, but for me, those emotional feedback loops can be a lot like doing drugs. Even when, perhaps, especially when, those are not happy emotions. I get totally carried away, I find myself tempted to dwell in things. I have to try to manage this and say “OK, time to stop”. And that is what I had done about 4,000 words into what I’m about to tell you about around 11am last Wednesday, and with all of this energy depleted and me in the emotional state this causes, I found out that Matt Hale’s mother died, and whoa, boy, was that a hell of a thing. This was all the more significant because, although he didn’t figure into what I was planning to say on Wednesday, I did think about Matt Hale as I was putting it together because, as we’ll discuss in greater detail, I realized I was so intensely appreciating the beauty of what I was seeing, in some part because I hadn’t had much beauty to appreciate while I was in prison. I really feel terrible for Matt Hale because, even beyond the fact that he has to do a year for every month I had to do, I really think his general disposition makes prison an even more awful experience for him than it is for me, not that he tended to show this much. Matt really appreciates beauty. Particularly the beauty of women, and the beauty of nature. He doesn’t like m