— The Metaphysically Objective Nature of Morality

“Exploring the dark recesses of the human psyche, a man’s journey towards self-empowerment and reclaiming his authority from societal norms, set against the backdrop of Pattaya’s Big Buddha.”

It began with reading only a portion of Anthony Colpo’s latest, and surprising, post

It’s OK to Not Be OK, But Please Don’t Do Anything Rash — Reach out, don’t lash out.

This is going to be a hard post for me to write, but here goes. […]

A few weeks ago, I became one of those depressed and anxious people.

Around 3-and-a-half weeks ago, I became Not OK.

Around 2-and-a-half-weeks ago, I became Very Not OK. My mind, a buffet of misery and toxic thoughts, started going to some very dark, ugly places.

When life is seriously getting you down, the way you interpret the actions and intentions of others can become terribly distorted, to the point where they have absolutely no basis in reality.

Been there, done that.

I’ll leave Anthony’s part at that, speaking for himself, for you to explore yourself.

For my own part, my angels and demons are and have been in many ways what this blog is all about—to the tune of 5 million words over the last 20 years. Some of you have had front-row seats. You know what I’m talking about. Some of my demonic disputes have been rather public. At the same time, some of my measured vitriol has been angelic, and I don’t care who disagrees with that characterization.

What I did not like about how I would sometimes do things is to misuse and abuse my standing, abilities, and reach…making it about me rather than about whatever the thing was, at the time.

The hallmark difference between a warrior and a great warrior is when and in what measure to engage his bloodlust in the pursuit of the best thing in life: “to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.”

I jest only partially. To the extent there is evil in the world—and there surely is: Covidiocy and Jabocracy proved just how deep, wide, and entrenched—is the extent to which warriors, great warriors, and bloodlust is required, without equivocation or purpose of evasion.

In short, I look you in the eye and state unabashedly and publicly that hundreds of thousands of people currently living on this planet merit nothing less than public prosecution, conviction by judicial panel, and capital execution in the public square…having every penny of assets stripped from them (and their surviving families), to be distributed to the millions of their victims.

Then let God sort it out, but I lament: there is no hell hot or tortuous enough for them, nor an eternity that’s long enough to fully account for the suffering they ought to endure.

… Thinking thoughts such as these are enough to not only get you down, but to have you skating perilously close to losing yourself into any and all manner of non-productive, irrational, and self-aggrandizing imaginations and fantasies.

You better have the mental fortitude to at least pull yourself back, just as Anthony did; and then to top it off, tell everyone about it.

Finally, knocking off the booze a year, month, and a week ago now was in part because of this issue. What, specifically? I began to fear that I would lose the ability to pull myself back, and/or, that I would do irrevocable and unnecessary damage whilst in one of my “spells.”

For as much as I drank and as often as I got plastered, I was very lucky. Never had a DUI. Never got wrapped up with the law in any way because of it. I always seemed to maintain a presence of mind when that risk was in play, and I escaped unscathed. In some measure, I was beginning to think that my days of good fortune were numbered and that it was best to quit while still ahead.

And I did. And now from time to time, YouTube will serve up a recommended video, typically about someone saying how wonderful cutting out booze entirely has been.

I nod.

… I’m still waiting for a single video where someone proclaims, unjokingly, that quitting the sauce fucking sucks…

Anyway…

I had recently had an email exchange with Anthony on a completely different matter, and so my knee-jerk was to hit reply and write something or other about how I get what he went through. (Though, ironically, in my case, I can’t think of any relationships that I blew up because of alcohol that were a net loss to me…or to put it another way, some alcohol-fueled outbursts had some degree and element of a silver lining.)

But then I thought better of emailing Anthony, at least before reading the entirety of his post, and also before considering how to make any response more meaningful or valuable.

I took a walk instead.

It’s a kilometer and a half to Pattaya’s Big Buddha, and a 100-meter ascent. How perfect, a 3 km round trip and 200 meters up and down.

And I guess, being in a contemplative mood, I waxed philosophic.

About morality.

About this post.

… I returned, hit the pool, thought a bit more about Anthony’s post, then got caught up in the tasks of the afternoon, one of which was to MC it on over to Pattaya to a big electronics mall to see about replacing a GoPro mount for the MC, so I can do some footage again in that regard (success). And then it was meeting my American expat buddies at Mike’s Mexican for our regular Sunday meetup. Then I came back and popped on Netflix for a while, hit the sac at 20.30.

Woke up wide and refreshed at midnight.

So I got up.

I remembered I hadn’t yet finished Anthony’s post.

So I did. Ran into this toward the end:

As my wise friend Richard Nikoley succinctly stated in a recent post:

You can check for yourself what he quoted.

So, here I sit at 02.00, 2 hrs later, feeling quite satisfied. I hadn’t even taken the footage off the camera, now there’s a video (dedicated to Anthony and his post), and this post that frames that video and Anthony’s post quite appropriately, I think.

Good night.