Five Questions

We’re back in the meme business temporarily. I found this one the Bit’s blog and was intrigued. The particularly fun one about this is that its different questions. It depends upon what someone else wans to know about you. Feel free to ask for questions below, I shall provide to the best of my ability. If I don’t know you that well they might get quite random…but then…that’s part of the fun.

But let’s get going:

1. Why did you move away from the religion you were raised in?

 This is a long and complex story. I’ll try and keep it fairly simple though. I was raised Catholic, and attended Catholic church. I always thought the morals and the lessons learned from the bible made sense (we never got told about the stuff about being gay being evil or anything like that….it was just an issue that never came up).  Be kind to people…I could dig that.

But for almost as long as I remember I remember having to edit what I said during services. It was the bit that happened at bigger events. Easter, Weddings and other generally more important times. Basically there’s a big list of things that you say you believe in and that you reject. You follow along this big list of stuff and say yay or nay to the bits your supposed to say yay or nay to. There’s little room for deviation. That didn’t stop me.

I was fine saying I believed in God, I was even okay believing in Jesus, and the Saints, and I was happy to reject Satan and all his works.

But then there was the bit about the Church. You had to say you believed that the church and the people that were part of it were the workers of God on Earth and you believed it was the one true Church and stuff like that (I should research this and find the exact words). I couldn’t buy it….it didn’t make sense. These were people…these people were fallible. They couldn’t be perfect…that doesn’t make any sense.

So I didn’t say that bit.

Bear in mind that this was when I was about ten or so.

It got me thinking.

Particularly it made me think that I didn’t believe in the church. Then I realised that all the teachings were by the church. By people. Fallible, human, people.

Sure the ideas were still pretty damn good…but the rest of it…it was all just words from people.

I got bored of going to church. I realised that I did believe in something greater than us…but that it was indefinable and unknowable.

Also there was a chance it didn’t exist.

As people close to me started dying. I wanted to believe again, but I knew I was doing it to console myself…I saw how easy it was to want to believe in these things…and convince yourself they were definitely real.

But the more I thought about it the less I believed it to really be true. No God would want you to believe in God purely because you were scared he didn’t exist.

So I still talk to my dear departed….but knowing that they probably can’t hear me. I talk to my memories of them. I talk to the energy caused by their actions. The traces they live in this world.

There’s no guaruntee of another one…so I make the best of this one.

When I was supposed to be confirmed I simply didn’t go. I had to lie to my Nanna to convince her it wasn’t time for it yet. (She was the driving force of religion in our family…my mother didn’t even go to church, my Dad did, but I always thought it was just because of Nanna. One of my most horrible memories is of visiting her in a nursing home and her saying that she was in a lot of pain..but she just had to think of the suffering of Jesus of the cross and she realised she was still nothing in comparison to him….it really disturbed me….I hate the Catholic emphasis on suffering.) So I never got confirmed…I then stopped going to church at Christmas and Easter (I hadn’t been going to Sunday services for quite a while beforehand). I haven’t really identified myself as Catholic since I was about 14-16 at the latest.

But I still try to love my neighbour.

Right…that was too long…and it’s still not the whole story…but that’ll have to do for now.

2. If you could only read one book for the rest of your life, what would it be and why?

That is not an easy question. For a start I’d want something that would last me. My instant reaction would be the Pliocene Exile/Galactic Milieu Cycle by Julian May, but, well, that’s actually eight books. So that’s cheating. They generally stand as my favourite books to read.

But to be honest, they aren’t really thinking books…well they are…but I’d probably want something that I could really rip into again and again and again.

I’m tempted to say Ulysses, because I might just stand a chance of finishing it one day. Then I could read it again and again trying to work out what the hell it meant. I really enjoyed it when I studied it, but I’m not sure…I would want something more coherent.

Then I think spiritual…something that will make my life better over time. I always feel enlightened by reading the Tao Te Ching. It provides me with a feeling of calm and makes me think about how I’d live my life…so that’s definitely right up there.

Then there’s Dick. I’d miss Dick sooooo much. He’s re-readable and he’s fun. Only problem is his books are too short and unlikely to be rereadable. My favourites remain VALIS, Ubik and Do Androids dream of electric Sheep?. They have a lot of sway over me…but I don’t think any of them would last my whole life.

There’s more things I could list, but I’d better draw this to a conclusion.

Basically, it would be a punch up between Catch 22 and the Tao Te Ching.

Catch 22 would win. It’s one of the few books I wanted to start reading again as soon as I’d finished.  It’s so much damn fun to read…like real damn fun. A strange journey and a wild ride. I could reread it and try and grab meaning from it, or I could just dip in and laugh until my balls fall off. It’s got that depth of interpretation, and can make me cry and laugh (often within one page).

Hands down winner really (well…the Taoism would be a close second..but not as close as I thought initially).

Damn….I rate having a laugh over spiritual harmony.

3. What’s your prefered writing implement?

 Has to be a computer. I can type faster than I write, and both of them are slower than I think…much slower. Writing for me is about keeping up with what’s going through my head before it floats away.

Also there’s practical matter of the fact that I can’t read my own handwriting. My handwriting hasn’t improved since I was in Primary school, and I was bottom of the class now. It’s just appalling illegible scribble. Absolutely useless as a form of communication. You can’t read it unless you already know what it says.

4. If they could ‘grow’ meat, that was never actually part of an animal with any kind of consciousness, would you eat it?

This is a bit complicated. The quick answer is probably.

Let me explain. For a start, when I first stopped eating meat it was a reaction to a strange circumstance. The ethical side had always bothered me but not enough to counter the fact that I liked eating meat. Anyway, basically, I took some acid and had a very strange trip. It kind of screwed with me a bit.

The one really weird thing was that after it was over, and I got back to normal (over the years I’ve got better at getting myself back to normal) all the meat I ate tasted filthy and dry and dull and horrible. Like really foul. It just had no flavour and was too dry to be really edible. I decided quickly to go Veggieonce I finished the meat in the freezer. The last thing I cooked was a honey lemon Chicken that was beautiful and didn’t have the same effect; it was gorgeous. But I’d committed by that point, I figured my body had been trying to tell me something.

So I might not eat it simply because it might not taste good.

The rest of it depends on what kind of a process we’re talking about. I reckon that if the ecological impact of the process of ‘meat growing’ was small enough and the whole thing was sustainable and inexpensive, then I’d see little ethical reason not to, but I’d have to investigate that a lot before I’d feel happy about it. Also no farmed animals could’ve been involved in the inventing process.

So it depends on the process, and whether it was tasty.

So maybe.

Does that answer the question?

5. Who are you all time top three bands/singers?

 Fuck me. That’s not easy.

Well, the first one is. Talking Heads/David Byrne - I love the whole output of the band and artist. The Live DVD Stop Making Sense is just incredible, and what initially turned me on to the band. His voice is incredible in the most amazing way. Really amazing.The music is still daring, differnent, and dynamic today. It’s still a challenge to the ears. It’s still brilliant. There’s no question, the band rock hard and play hard, the lyrics lose me in their simplicity and depth, and the voice takes risks and goes places I can barely imagine….and makes me want to follow. I can’t really hear it without singing along.

The second choice becomes incredibly hard.  There’s so many things that I love that I want all of them to be represented. I also don’t want to seem like I just love the oldies, or just love new flash in the pan bands. Plus I want Hip Hop and Dance music to be better represented, as I spend so much time listening to them.

Anyway, I’m going to go with my gut reaction, following my heart to the Beach Boys.  My friends Parge and Will got me into the slightly more obscure stuff (post the aborted Smile) while I was in my teens and I fell in love hard. Really hard. It’s all about heart you see. Beautiful harmonies and fun bouncy tunes, but there’s depth. Brian Wilson is a production genius and they could all get the music just right. There’s diamonds throughout their career. I could listen to the album Friends forever and I’d always be smiling.

Okay, so Third is still challenging, but I’m bringing someone up to represent the modern music that fills up so many of my hours. Squarepusher has to be the one for me. It’s the sheer experimentalism, the fact that he can make me cry and make me laugh and make me dance like a psychotic at the drop of a hat. It’s the fact that he plays electronica/drum’n'bass/jazz/hardcore/anything else you can shake an ass at and yet still brings in live bass and drums (incredibly good live bass and drums) and do it all himself. It’s the fact that he has a sense of humour, and it comes through in his music. It’s the fact that he’s just really awesome (and quite a nice guy).

So there we go….I apologise to all those I left behind.

So there we go. That may well be much more information than you ever needed, but I think we found out some stuff. I could clarify more but I don’twant you to actually explode with boredom.

So, any further questions or matters arising?

And perhaps more importantly…does anyone want their own five questions?

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