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I have been hit with a tsunami at work along with a personal project that I am trying to get done. The result is that I am not fulfilling my self-imposed blogging duties. I am frustrated over this lack of time to get it all done, but I have to accept the fact that I only have so many hours in a day. All I can do is try as hard as I can to get it all done.

I am writing this after getting off work. My face is dirty and grimy. I need a shower. I need some coffee. Yes, I drink coffee at night as well. I get jacked up on that shit. One day, I'm going to try that Voltaire shit of drinking 50 cups in a day. They must have been the small cups.

I am sleepy now. I hate sleep. Sleep is like a rehearsal for death.

Just woke up from sleep. This post is being written over the course of days. Between activity and sleep deprivation, I have been one busy guy. The week so far has been a blur, and it is almost over. Today, I have another full plate that I need to get through. So much to do and so much to write.

I love living in flow. It sucks when you have to stop to sleep, but it is what it is. You just want to cram all the living into your days that you can. But you can't. It is like having a massive treasure in front of you but having very small pockets. You just have to adjust to the fact that you can't have it all or do it all. But the upside is that you can be assured that there will never be a day going forward that you will not know happiness.

Life is not about positive or negative experiences. For me, they all blend together now into optimal experience. I have good things and bad things happen to me daily, but they all wash into the Flow. The Flow is where it is at. I will explain that more fully. An agnostic friend thinks I am into some Jedi mind bullshit when I talk about the Flow. But it isn't supernatural or mystical. In fact, everyone has had the Flow during moments of their lives. They just don't recognize the Flow. I do. Consequently, I cultivate it, extend it, expand it, and immerse myself in it.

My body can't always take it. No good thing comes without a bad thing, and the Flow comes with the sleep demons. I make war with the sleep demons on a constant basis. I should do the minimalist thing and try to moderate my life in this flow. But I don't. I just let it take me.

Happiness is the Flow. True love is two people living in the Flow. This is why I have become fascinated with John Lennon and Yoko Ono recently. Clearly, both people lived in Flow as John and Yoko were both creative types. John made music while Yoko made art. My favorite lyric from this era is when John writes, "Thought I'd been in love before but in my heart I wanted more." That something more was what Yoko had.

Lennon never met Yoko before he started to become attracted to her. His interest in her began through art. Before they were ever together in body, they were attracted to each other in mind. I already know what the attraction was. It was the Flow. Lennon and Ono would collaborate on many projects. They were two endlessly fascinating people who met. They had to be together. Even when circumstances and events drove them apart, they found their way back to each other. They had to be together.

Yoko catches a lot of grief for supposedly breaking up the Beatles, but this is bullshit. Bands break up on a regular basis. By the admission of each Beatle, Ono was not the cause of the end of the Beatles. The truth is that it was amazing that those four guys ever came together in the first place. And we can see what they went on to do after the break up.

The problem with any collaborative project is that some people must at some point subordinate themselves to the wishes of the others. This is the nature of comparative advantage. But it is a waste when you have a guy like Dave Grohl serving in the shadow of Kurt Cobain. Similarly, the Beatles felt constrained by serving within a group. They needed room to spread out, and the fact that they remained friendly and admiring of one another should tell you something.

Lennon and Ono were also a collaboration of two creative types, but they worked in different mediums. Lennon was a musician while Ono was an artist. They both served the other's projects. I think that difference made their work complementary. Where the Beatles rubbed and chafed against each other because they were all musicians, Lennon and Ono did not have the same antagonism and rivalry. They were mutually supportive.

I am a cynic on matters of love taking much of my viewpoints from Arthur Schopenhauer and biology. I think people just want to fuck in the biological drive to make babies. My viewpoints on all of this are unchanged and undiminished. But I must also acknowledge that there are couples who seem to defy this viewpoint. I now see that John and Yoko were one of those couples. Ono was not physically beautiful, and John could have done way better than her. In fact, he did. Cynthia Lennon was way better looking than Yoko. John left her to be with Yoko. This would be like trading a Porsche for a Volkswagen.

Yoko's appeal to John was clearly on a mental level. Yet, you can't see a picture of those two without seeing the sheer love and adoration he had for this woman. This was not mere passion. This was not about fucking or making babies. They shared Flow. This is not Schopenhauer but Aristotle. Schopenhauer said that happiness was impossible in life and the goal was to make life as painless as it was possible. But Schop was wrong on this. The fact that he wrote and did philosophy should have been some clue to him that there was happiness in life. Clearly, he enjoyed writing and philosophizing. I see people all the time in flow to greater or lesser degrees. These people flourish. Flow is real.

If Schopenhauer was wrong on happiness, I must also consider that he is also wrong on love. Schop is not entirely wrong. He shines the lights on dead ends. He is valuable in this regard. I am indebted to the man because he is a cold bracing wind of reality. But if people can be happy, we must also admit that there are people who truly love each other. I have seen them and met them.

True love comes from the shared flow of two happy people. I don't think John and Yoko understood what they had. Many people I see in flow have no clue about Aristotle and wouldn't know what the fuck I was talking about. But when I describe to them their experience of life, they immediately recognize that I am describing their state of being almost exactly. These people are naturally autotelic. They flow because of their nature. I flow as a consequence of thought and strategy. I had to make myself like this. When I tell these naturally flourishing people how to amp up, they blow it up.

I've had to come up with new terms for the love thing. There is true love, and there is bullshit love. Bullshit love is mere fucking and maybe keeping the guy around to pay the bills. True love is flourishing. It is a totally different animal. Sex and all that become expressions of that flourishing. But true love is the real deal. Bullshit love is to true love what hedonism is to eudaimonia. Hedonism is not happiness. It never can be.

I am now what a friend of mine calls a "love elitist." Basically, everything I believe about love still applies. I think the mass of humanity is under a fucking delusion in much the same way that they fail to be happy. When they say they love each other, it is a complete fucking joke in much the same way that a fool with a credit card thinks he is rich because he can buy shit. You can go through the motions, but it is all counterfeit. I can't be too harsh in my judgment because I have been just such a fool myself. I look back on all the times I said "I love you" and recognize it for a complete lie. I was sincere when I said those words in much the same way that a person who has his bank account drained by identify theft writes what he thinks is a perfectly good check. Sometimes, you just don't know any better.

Bullshit love is the rule not the exception. True love is the exception. If you don't know Flow, then you don't know happiness. If you don't know happiness, then you don't know love. Essentially, the world is enthralled to counterfeits and substitutes for the real thing, and people are too stupid to know any different. I know because I was one of those people.

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