Go ahead - fascinate me!

Posted by Cezary Jan Strusiewicz

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/godzilla-defends-its-recent-attacks-on-cities

The radical urbanist media loves to throw around baseless accusations like “rampage.” “Godzilla rampages,” “cities destroyed in rampage,” and “world in the grip of rampagism.” The word has lost all meaning by this point. And it’s not even fair because the lawful, beautiful actions that I undertook around the globe against the likes of Tokyo or New York were anything but a rampage. It was a precise enforcement of the law meant to keep everyone safe.

I have nothing against cities. There are plenty of good, honest cities out there just trying to get on with their lives. I’ve known some really great cities in my time. But when a city shows up without papers, without proper authorization, just popping up out of the blue instead of doing things legally, the right way, I have no choice but to act swiftly and decisively. These are really bad ciudades we’re dealing with here. You see an innocent skyline; I see a potential security threat. Those towers can be signaling enemy kaiju. Those electric lights may be sending signals into space meant for alien invaders. You don’t know. I’m not willing to take that risk.

Critics always focus on the wrong things and don’t give you the full story, like how I “leveled all of Sydney.” Yes, I did. What you won’t hear is how the city was defiantly inviting lethal threats like a moth the size of a jumbo jet and a giant Marxist lobster (you can tell by its red color) by just existing out there in the open. If destroying the city is what it takes to protect my domain from future attacks and the disastrous open-border policy of my weak-on-crime predecessor, then you better believe that that’s exactly what I’m going to do.

Because let’s not forget that, as King of the Monsters, all the oceans are within my jurisdiction, INCLUDING up to fifty miles inland from any shore. I have the right to stomp any downtown into dust, and it’s all legal. It’s not trespassing, it’s not chaos, and it’s definitely not a “rampage.” It’s affirming my sovereignty in the interest of national security to protect law-abiding cities. If you’re here legally, have all the proper paperwork, and have never harbored a three-headed alien dragon, your skyscrapers have nothing to worry about.

Now, there has been a lot of noise recently about the commuter train I ate in Hong Kong. I once again want to state that the initial comment saying that I ate the train “by mistake” is false. The person responsible for that miscommunication was let go. What I’ve determined since then is that the train was trafficking people and drugs and is not the innocent public transport that the media has made it out to be. My security experts have assured me that the train’s long shape, like that of a snake, is a symbol of the terrorist kaiju Manda. That train was a vicious killer. It had to be removed for the public good.

The United Nations Godzilla Countermeasure Center can issue any rulings it wants. They can’t force me to regurgitate that train.

And believe you me, other cities take notice of things like that. They look at me and see that I don’t play around. They see that I enforce the law. And the survivors love what I’m doing. Everywhere I go, I atomic-breathe new life into the local economy. Construction booms, therapists thrive, sales of I SURVIVED GODZILLA T-shirts skyrocket. A thank you would be nice. Maybe even a Nobel Prize?

So, when people accuse me of rampaging, I laugh. Rampaging implies aimlessness. What I do is highly intentional. There are policies. There are guidelines. And yes, those guidelines do eerily match with Project G that was composed by the Rampage Foundation, but I want to restate that I have nothing to do with them and have never even read the document. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/godzilla-defends-its-recent-attacks-on-cities

Posted by Shruti Swamy

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/heartstopper

Her guru was strong enough to stop his own heart—but was there a more frightening aspect of his power?

DISCUSSED:

Swami Rama, Living with the Himalayan Masters, Biofeedback, The Menninger Foundation, Exquisite Control, Sanskrit, Guru-hood, Child-Memory, The Smell of Cigarettes and Cologne, Palo Alto, Ayurveda, A Fucked-Up Zen Koan, Yoga Journal, Katharine Webster, Sexual Violence, Shiva, Logical Contortions, Pandits, The Rubric of Desirability.

Baba didn’t want it known where his ashes were scattered when he died—he didn’t want anyone to make a shrine to him. But when he died we didn’t call it that: we said “left his body.” He had done it before, when he was younger: had changed bodies while keeping his soul intact. “When you tear your shirt, do you cry? Get a new shirt,” he said. He didn’t worry about mending it. He wore a white T-shirt under the rough maroon robe of an enlightened one; the robe smelled like cigarettes because he could control every aspect of his body and could choose not to die of cancer. He died—left his body—in India, because he did not want to return to America. Of the allegations that surrounded him, one had led to a lawsuit against his organization, and he refused to heed the summons to appear in court. In exile, he maintained his silence around the subject, into death.

I have no memory of meeting Baba for the first time, of not knowing him. Likely because I was so little—only five—and because I grew up hearing and believing stories about him that elevated him to the level of myth, the times I actually spent with him stretched over the times I didn’t. Baba, we all called him, which means “father.” When I was nine, he initiated me in India at his ashram. In my family, the honor of becoming my guru was one he bestowed only on me. On the balcony of his suite I offered him fruits and flowers that my parents had bought for the occasion. In Sanskrit I repeated back the words he offered to me, promising in my heart to be obedient to him, to follow his teachings, to trust him with the care of my soul. He gave me a mantra in my ear. He wrote it down for me but it was secret, and I told it to no one. I still remember it, though it has been at least a decade since I reached for it.

Baba visited me in my dreams, could read my thoughts, wanted only what was best for me. He was the symbol of a world that made sense, one in which our family was chosen, special, protected. But there was another side to Baba, or there was another world, one less magical, at once more dangerous and mundane. For years, I lived joyously in the first world, until slowly, then all at once, I arrived in the second.

In the spring of 1989, my father had a spiritual revelation. He had been in the Santa Cruz Mountains attending a talk by Dr. Usharbudh Arya, the founder of the Meditation Center in Minneapolis, who was on a national lecture circuit to spread his knowledge about yoga. Dr. Arya was a serious scholar, fluent in not one but two ancient languages—Pali, the language of the Buddha, as well as Sanskrit—and was a former professor of South Asian studies at the University of Minnesota. An autodidact, he received no formal schooling until enrolling at the University of London, where he earned his BA and also an MA; he then earned a LittD from Utrecht University in the Netherlands. To me, he always looked a little like a brown Robin Williams, with a square, friendly face bedecked with ’80s dad-glasses, and, for much of my childhood, a white beard that also reminded me of Santa Claus’s. When my dad approached Dr. Arya after the lecture was finished, they looked at each other. My father, deeply moved by the power of this gaze, vibrating with the distress from the conflicts that had driven him to seek spiritual solace, laid his head on the shoulder of his future guru, and began to cry.

This encounter, of two souls meeting in a state of immediate, profound knowing, is reserved for romantic love in Western culture. In our spiritual tradition, however, the instant connection felt between guru and future disciple pointed to a spiritual certainty: that the two had known each other in different lifetimes, and that they had work to do together in this one. Dr. Arya was a disciple of Baba—Swami1 Rama—whom he had met years earlier in a similarly dramatic encounter. Already an accomplished scholar of Sanskrit and a meditation teacher, Dr. Arya took Baba immediately as his guru when they met in 1969.

The guru–disciple relationship is a bond of intense spiritual significance, formalized by the initiation ceremony, after which the disciple is “their guru’s responsibility,” says my mother. “You make this resolve that this is the person who will guide you, and you will follow him unquestioningly. And the guru will do whatever is necessary for your spiritual well-being, which might involve putting you through difficulties and pain. Just like parents, who might ground you for your own good, which you might not like.” The guru figure can be both parent and trickster, someone whose antics would disturb their disciple’s complacency with the illusion of the material world, their attachments, or their self-conception. My mother remembers this aspect of Baba and Dr. Arya’s relationship: times when Baba would belittle Dr. Arya in front of their disciples, cut him down to size—acts that Dr. Arya always took with good humor, my mother reports, accepting them as lessons in shrinking the ego. No matter what: the disciple owes her guru absolute obedience. The guru owes his disciple nothing less than the safeguarding and the development of their soul.

When Dr. Arya took Baba as his guru, he joined the ancient lineage Baba represented, and began to see himself as a vessel for its knowledge. In the dedication to a book about the Yoga Sutras, Dr. Arya writes, in Sanskrit (as translated by my mother): “The tradition that started with the golden source of the creation, continued by Ved Vyas and other sages, and ending at the feet of Sri Swami Ram[a], I bow to that unbroken guru lineage.” When my parents were initiated by Dr. Arya, he echoed this idea: “It is not me who is initiating you. This is the lineage of Swami Rama that comes straight through me,” my mom reports him saying. If my parents’ guru was the most significant spiritual leader in their lives, then the guru of my parents’ guru, Swami Rama, was ever more powerful, almost unimaginably so. Even in absence, even before we met him, he was a constant presence in our lives. I didn’t dream then that the honor of initiation that had been bestowed on Dr. Arya by Swami Rama could also be given to a child—to me.

Read the rest over at The Believer.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/heartstopper

Posted by Andrew Humphries

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-teachers-back-to-school-night-introduction-gets-a-little-too-real

Welcome, parents. I am excited to lead your children through second grade, and I look forward to discussing all the progress they will make.

Simultaneously, Back-to-School Night is traditionally a time to meet the teacher and learn about their life. If we linger on that, the discussion will not be fun. I predict that outside the classroom, my life will continue to resemble the B-plot in a near-future dystopian series on the CW.

Each day, I will rise in my studio apartment, which I share with Charles. Charles recently lost his electrician’s license due to the misuse of multimeters. I will shower and dress, eating a small amount of toothpaste, trying to balance my need for the trace calories found in toothpaste against the danger of fluoride poisoning. Charles and I will bid each other a formal goodbye. He will, without rising from the couch, tip his ball cap, and I will, in turn, awkwardly hold up my shoulder bag in nonsensical reciprocation. Charles and I are roommates only, hardly more than passing acquaintances. His friends call him Chuck. I do not.

I will then travel to school on foot, walking 2.4 miles along the frontage road. There is no sidewalk.

I can see you shifting uncomfortably in those very small chairs I asked you to sit down in—I understand my reality is uncomfortable for you to consider. The story here at school is a happier one: I will teach your children for the entire day. We will have a great time. I will do a great job. Your children will learn a great deal about both themselves and the world. They will master math facts. Each of them will come to understand what it means both to be a friend and to have a friend. We will all wash our hands at least twice a day.

But even here in the place I’m happiest, in the classroom I share with your children, you must understand that my personal reality cohabitates. After lunch each day, I will help your children dispose of what they do not eat. I will look for unopened packages of perishables, like a hummus cup or a Kinder Egg. I will ask your children if I can have these for my own, carefully modeling the right way to ask so as not to create a sense of obligation in the askee. Your children will, by and large, happily give me their scraps. I will squirrel them away into a foam cooler that I found in the parking lot after Back-to-School Night 2019, which I fill each day with nonedible ice from the cafeteria.

These leftovers stored away, I will put sustenance out of my mind. We will do our afternoon lessons. At 1:55 p.m., “Specials” will occur. Our class will alternate between Fitness, Spanish, Library, and Computer Lab. During these periods, your child will leave this classroom, and I will be left behind. Sitting in this silent room, I will ponder this barbarous cycle of departure and stasis, me forever anchored here, your small ones moving away from me, first for short periods and then forever.

I am the center of the carousel, the undecorated pole. I admire your wooden ponies, which you have painted so nicely, but I cannot become them. I am eternally moving but making no forward progress. I am unnoticed, mechanical, and emit groaning noises.

After I’ve sat in that quiet contemplation, I will do some small personal task. I might text my manager at Cold Stone Creamery and see if I can pick up an additional weekend shift. Or perhaps I will check my student loan balance and throw up.

After a brief reconvening in this room, I will help your children to carpool. The carpool procedures have been emailed to you, and I also have copies here. These procedures are inflexible, and Principal Brandt will be furious if you violate them. Do not do so.

Finally, I will walk home, 2.4 miles, the reverse of my morning journey. I will silently calculate the odds that a car hits a pedestrian on the frontage road. Once home, I will have dinner—maybe a packet of ranch and an organic beef stick. I will eat these and allow my heart to fill with equal parts gratitude to your children for sharing and anger toward the bend of human history that led me here. I will drink the water that used to be nonedible ice. I know I shouldn’t, but I will.

Finally, Charles will come home. He may have news about his license revocation appeal proceeding, or perhaps we’ll simply sit and watch Pluto, which is a free, ad-supported streaming source that I pray your children will never have cause to learn about. I will sleep and return here the next day.

I am happy to go further into any of the above, or we can move on and have a great time talking through the SuperKids reading curriculum.

https://www.mcsweeneys.net/articles/a-teachers-back-to-school-night-introduction-gets-a-little-too-real