Interview with Musicman30mm

I think I formulate my opinions pretty conscientiously, and with good supporting premesies. I also know I am sometimes slow to leave them when proven wrong. However, when someone who's opinion I trust, a credible source of information or an event in my own life proves me wrong, I try to make room for better ideas.

I really enjoy analyzing my dreams. My best dream probably involved sex, thats a common theme. But my most interesting dreams are as follows:

Sleep paralasys, it happens to me about once a week to varying degrees. I've had severe episodes on many occasions. I open my eyes and look about my room from the deep pit of REM. I become aware that I am no longer asleep, but I am not awake either. I am in-between. Often I can hear my own heavy, slow breathing as-if it belongs to someone else. It's like my mind is its own entity, trapped in a dead body. I try, but cannot produce physical movement. Often, shaddows cast nightmare creatures into my mind, and voices can be heard from every direction. The voices grow loud, filling my head with hatefull chatter. The creatures take on form. I am certain there is some intruder, and I can't move to defend myself. It's scary as hell. Eventually attempts to move flex a muscle, and I keep at it until I awaken flopping about on my bed like a beached fish.

Once, I woke up screaming bloody murder. Sound goes right through my bedroom wall to my neighbor's bedroom. I can only imagine what they thought, a grown man next door screaming, "Noooo fuck! Heeeelp! Nooooo! Help!" Oddly, no one ever checked on me or said anything about it. Which means either the screams were all in my head, the neighbors are exceptionally deep sleepers or they just don't care.

My parents, they are the hub of most of the most important people in my life.

Sorry, I hadn't noticed it.

My av is a "plastid". Its from a museum exibit called body-works. It's a human corps with plastics injected into to preserve it.

I do play chess, but not very well.

Ive had that happen to me, lots of sex dreams of course but I have woken up to see dark spectres at the end of my bed, cackling, ive also experienced the whole succubus thing, ancient man would regularly feel the paralysis of sleep at that moment of waking up, combine that with their sex dreams and that dark, ominus, half dreaming state and people imagined they saw a dark, evil looking women ontop of them, preventing them from moving, sometimes having sex with them and sometimes sucking the breath/soul from their mouths, it was scary, especially for ancient humans, they came up with a supernatural reasoning for it, its pretty interesting ...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Succubus


So your journey is not over, your ideas are changing with the calendar, where is it you think your going exactly? You say your an atheist but whats the end goal of ur existence? not just what you want to accomplish ...

Ever had a pet?

Where do you see the human race in 10,000 years?

Whats more important? an imagination or fitting in?

Well, being an ateist, I don't believe there is a universally imposed plan or fate. In-fact, I believe strongly in a kind of cartesian determinism. However, I do have wild dreams. I would like to live to see the distant future. Of course this is impossible, so I just want to see as much of the now as I can. I'd like to travel the world simply to see it with my own eyes. I'd like to die satisfied. After that, it's all moot.

Several. Too many cats to remember when I was a kid. A buch of dogs, horses, chickens, geese, rabbits, gerbels, goats, snakes, chamelions, an iguana, a salamander, a cockatoo, a love bird and a few aquariums. I think that about covers it.

My favorite has been a dog named Trip that my housemates and I raised in college. We got him as a pup and I lived with him until he was three. Then I went off to the army. I got a letter from one of my friends saying he had fallen from a 200 foot cliff called Garvin Heights and been parelysed for a week. They were going to euthenize him. Then miraculously, a few days later, he got up and ran around. He still has a limp, and now lives with one of the other housemates mom and her dog in a nice house with a big yard. I visit him from time to time. When I do, the bond is immediatly recognized by both of us.

That seems like a long time, but I think we'll still be around. Actually it's just a tick of the clock in the grand scheme. Things will be so different I can't even begin to speculate, but I suspect we'll still be dealing with the same basic issues just on a different stage.

We could be doing the Star Trek thing. We could be doing the post apocalyptic, collapsed infrastructure thing. We could be doing something completely inconcievable. Its impossible to know.

Depends on who you are. I need both. I think I keep them pretty seperate, my imaginative world involves few others, and my social life involves little imagination. My brother has done a good job of carving an artistic social nich. I would like to work on the same thing when I get out of the army.

Did you grow up in the city or in a rural area?

Id like to hear more about your thoughts on the war, on the u.s. involvement and on your job as a recruiter ...

Who, living or dead, do you see are your hero? who seems, to you, to be most like yourself?

Rural, hence the farm animals in my answer to the pets question.

Well, I like to look at the war in a practical sense. I think this one is impractical. I'd love to see America pull out of international affairs as much as possible, but I know that's just not going to happen. There is alot at stake. Free trade around the world is dependant on stability, and America seems to think it can make stable an unstable region through military intervention. There are the lessons from Vietnam that have sorely ignored, then tried to make our actions just with the lessons of WWII.

I have come to the conclusion that there is no "right" thing to do. There is only what has been done, so in retrospect, I'd say if there was something positive to come from this war, we fucked it up. I don't think the world will collapse and terrorists will start mailing nukes to orphanages if we pull out. Oil prices might come down. We could start paying down the war debt. Soldiers could come home to rest. The Iraqi's would have to hash it out on their own, but they'd probably do a better job of it without us. They tell infamous stories of what we did for generations, but that is undoable. We have alot of civilian contractors over there with big money investments. Those are ultimately the people we are fighting for. Hopefully the next president listens to the common people, and leaves those investors out to dry. They took the risk.

I'm excited for the presidential elections. I hope America chooses peace, and their votes are counted.

Heros:

Those great explorers who set out to discover the planet before it was known, and those who explore its last uncharted corners and the vast reaches of science and cosmology. I imagine striking deep into a wild without amenities or lifeline, and think how exciting it must be. Imagine visiting Tibet today, knowing that it is the ceiling of the planet, totally alien society and topography. Now imagine stumbling into Tibet on some distant expedition, not knowing what was there or even that anything was there at all. When Columbus crossed pond for the first time people thought he was sailing off the world into a void. He found a whole other world as vast as the first. Imagine discovering the creatures of the African plains. Aside from space travel, there is not much of that left over for me, but I try to live those fantasies in whatever way I can.

Most like my-self:

Of real people I am most like my younger brother. Of my heroes, I am, or at least want to be, like the explorers I spoke of.

Well thats 4 pages of Q & A's ...

What else would you like people to know?

Anything anyone wants to ask through this thread is fine by me. I shal do my best to answer.

Thanks for the interview, Monkey, I appreciate your time and effort. It was fun.

All in a days work, it was fun, I always am curious what peoples background are, thanks for being so open to it ...

Holy fucking hell this is one of the greatest moments of my life.

I signed out of my recruiting battalion a few hours ago. That means I have no official ties to recruiting command anymore. I threw out all of my awards and the distinguishing badges a recruiter wears on their uniform. It's finally over.

As I walked out of the building, I felt as if I had been sprung from prison. I thought about all the 70 hour weeks, the stress, the moral conflict, the negativity, the tyrranical leadership, the corruption, the straightjacket on my soul recruiting has become and said to myself, "Fuck you USAREC. I'll never concede a kind word about you again. Fuck you it's over."

FREEDOM!!

You mentioned 'Cartesian determinism' as part of your vision of how things are for us. Now Descartes viewed the mind as essentially separate from matter; I am rather confused as to how determinism can therefore be placed alongside his thought.

I won't refute your claim about descartes. I don't actually know that much about him. I was referencing his ideas about the world as a machine. Weather or not Descarts believed in free-will I cannot say, but from what little I know of him I would make the hypothesis that had he the benefit of twenty first century scientific knowledge, he wouldn't.

Our sense of free-will is simply an illusion covering up of whatever underlying mechanical processes organize matter and energy. Of-course we are the result of those processes carried out a great distance from say a simple hydrogen atom, but there is a undeniable chain of causality spanning that gap in complexity. In short, all of our so called choices could be predicted given total knowledge of the environmental variables that act on us. We are puppets, the natural laws are the puppeteer.