What’s the most ridiculous thing you’ve heard recently?

Gives new meaning to the phrase “I don’t give a flying fig about that!!”

Well, tell her that the hard, shiny candy coating on candies, like M&Ms, is made from bug poop. The shellac bug.

I’m ya Huckleberry.

@Dutchess_III Psst…trying to keep this free from politics. I know. I know. That cuts out so much material. :P

Not recently, but also along the line of vegan. I used to know someone who was really stuck in his vegan way because he was against animal cruelty (to him eating meat was cruel) and he believed the animals being eaten would be too disturbed to move on to the afterlife. I once asked him why it was ok to eat plants if everything had a soul. He replied that plants were natural forgiving so they wouldn’t mind being eaten.

That’s a new level of hypocrisy right there.

That’s a new level of weird.

My mother once tried to explain to me when I was quite young, probably five or six years old, that no one could be exactly six feet tall. This, she said, is because six feet is the perfect height for a man, and the Bible says there was only one perfect man: Jesus. Everyone else must be very slightly taller or shorter than six feet as a result.

I thought about this and asked her, “How do people get to be more than six feet tall without being exactly six feet tall at some point?”

This made her very angry. She refused to answer, and never brought it up again.

@SmashTheState That’s pretty nuts. It’s going to be hard to top that one.

Do you ever think a large part of your personality developed as a reaction to your mother?

I think some of my more stubborn streaks are equal and opposite reactions to my parents.

Religious people are trained to come up with, and believe, crazy shit.

@raum I’m certainly not irreligious, at least not in the sense most people would mean. If anything, I’d say I inherited my mother’s eccentricity. These days I’m a professional tarot reader and run my own occult shop.

Not about being irreligious necessarily. More about being logical, yet still dogmatic.

I may be opposite in some ways to my parents. But in many ways I’m also the same.

That is an interesting profession!

@raum More an avocation. When I entered my 40s I discovered that my life as an anarchist shit-disturber was over. The so-called activist “community” is run by and for the young, and I started to be regarded as the weird old beardo who didn’t know he was supposed to sell out and get a cushy middle class job as a poverty pimp. First they stopped inviting me to the social events where the real networking took place, then they slowly froze me out of their organizing.

In the end, they sent a delegation of a half-dozen kids to basically say, “Thanks for 30 years of sacrifice and struggle, but you’re creeping everyone out and we want you to leave.”

I blinked, looked around, and realized I’d dedicated my whole life to other people’s problems, and now I’m in my 50s with health shattered by decades of stress, destitution, and poor diet, a police record the size of a telephone book which renders me unemployable, and no vehicle, investments, insurance, property, savings, or credit rating. With no family or friends to fall back on, I had to find some way to survive which didn’t require capital or connections.

As a natural intuitive with a lifelong interest in Jungian psychology and mysticism, I’ve always been very good at tarot, so I’ve parlayed that into something which, while not really financially viable, at least gives me something to do with my time while I wait for death.

@SmashTheState If it’s something that’s truly important to you, fuck what a bunch of punks think.

Life is just a process of learning to accept death. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t spend that time doing something meaningful. If not tarot, might be worth exploring something that really taps into that intuitive side.

I wish you well, sir.

A college professor who said “I’m speaking my truth”.
I’m thinking… WTF?
NO SUCH THING as “your” truth or “my” truth.
People who say that phrase are basically saying “I’m lying” or “I don’t know what I’m talking about but I feel strongly anyway”

The truth is the truth, period.