The World Needs More Skateboarders

Happy Holidays, readers.

I would like to acknowledge the growing respect that I hold for the sport of skateboarding. I am not saying that it is an especially sophisticated sport, nor is it mainstream or flashy. However, as I was watching a skateboarding competition a day or so ago, I noticed something that is seen in few other sports, especially in exhibitions as competitive as those that I have seen. I saw, in each participant, a great awe and respect for every other player in the competition. When they were being interviewed by journalists on the scene, they mentioned the other competitors without fail, and said how honored they were to be in competition with them. They would mention that yes, they had been working hard and they would really like to win the competition, but it would really be OK if they didn't because they would have been fairly beaten by someone with greater skill who had also worked hard. When they were not being individually interviewed, they showed solid comradery and unparalleled sportsmanship.

In skateboarding competitions (and in similar sporting competitions such as surfing and snowboarding) there is always an extremely diverse group of competitors. They hail from all around the planet in a patchwork of accents and ethnicities, always showing great respect for one another as athletes and peers, and a great admiration for the sport to which they devote their time and talent. Also, skateboarding is one of the few sports that allows people of all ages and both genders to compete and be successful as equals. As skateboarding is a technical sport involving very little brute force, men and women compete together, and children as young as eight or nine years old are doing the same tricks that their 25-year-old co-competitors, sharing the same ramps and high-fives.

You could see that the people that were not actively competing or were waiting their turn were watching the competitors and enjoying it immensely. When someone did something especially good, they were thrilled for them, as if they were watching their favorite athlete or even their sibling doing something amazing. In other sports, this would never happen. The other competitors would be watching to find ways to take them down, and would see them as obstacles in their path to greatness. Skateboarders seem to be just as happy to see other people in their sport succeed as they are to see themselves. Even so, there is always a winner, and every competition brings forth winners and great successes for most people who participate.

If the whole world were run in this way, I wonder what it would be like. Very different, I suppose.

Peace,
DJ

Shameless Self-Promotion

Some links to my other frequented sites.

www.twitter.com/i_am_dj

www.lardbars3.deviantart.com

This Could Get MAD Interesting... Guest-Starring AJ

HOWDY.

Ok, so there is this concept I was introduced to a few weeks ago that really caught my attention. It is called the Higgs boson, or "the God Particle." In the way it was explained to me, the Higgs boson is a massless particle comprised of pure energy (read: string theory) that somehow causes things like quarks, electrons, protons and neutrons to have the property of mass. Supposedly, it is truly the smallest particle; its lack of mass makes it so that it does not have any smaller components that make it up. That means that every tiny particle that makes up the entire universe is completely suffused with... God.

That also means that such things as thoughts are divine, because they involve the interaction of particles in the nerves of the brain, through the movement of neurotransmitters and potassium and sodium ions, all of which are made up of hundreds of thousands of Higgs bosons.

Complex things such as music are as holy as the deity himself in that they involve so many different forms of the divine reality working in symphony (pun intended) to exist. First, the nerve impulses of the musician, then the movement of their holy muscles to the movement of the instrument, which produces vibrations that move through the air, knocking the gas particles together in patterns until they get to the human ear, a complex contraption in itself, from whence the human brain detects it through a series of nerve impulses, at which point conscious thought takes over, interpreting the sounds into a song, provoking thoughts of aesthetics and beauty, that are in themselves heavenly. All of these parts involve hundreds of trillions of Higgs boson particles.

This brings to mind extremely complicated questions as to the nature of consciousness. Are these not-particles self-aware? Do they have something to do with life and death? Maybe they are connected to the fact that all animals are born with knowledge: instincts. They are built into the animal’s genes based on the behaviors and such that worked for their parents and ancestors ad infinitum. Genes are made of sugars and phosphates and nucleotides, which are made of atoms, which are caused by our friend the boson.

Also a consideration is that maybe the parents aren’t the ones that give the instincts to their progeny- maybe it is the childrens’ own boson-thoughts coming back to them by way of the parents, such as when the mother eats when pregnant. She takes in material containing bosons, and those that were “part” of the child in a “past life” are integrated into the new child, along with those of millions of other beings, which allows them to process new information that enters the mind after birth. Therefore it appears that the environment molds who you become, on the physical and emotional level, from the time you are a zygote.

If everything is completely MADE of God, then does that mean we’re already IN heaven? Should we be like the aborigines and worship Mother Nature? [hail yea]
If exfoliation is us removing dead skin cells, then does that mean a hurricane is like Momma Nature taking a shower?

Obviously, should the Higgs boson be discovered and verified beyond any objective doubt, it would have enormous religious implications. Having “God” be “proven” as an object, omnipresent in all things, neither male nor female, would be a revelation for some religious sects, but for others it would be devastating. Here is a sampling of the possible reactions of modern religions.

Quakers and Shintos: HA! I TOLD YOU SO! Nature is God, balance is God, that of God in everyone! OH. I mean…love thy neighbor :)

Hindus- well um…we were kind of right, right? Technically…there is more than one god…right? And Reincarnation! BAM. I was once a heifer, I’m not taking this bull! (LOL)

Christians, Muslims, Jews- …shit. Well there goes everything.
Christians- does that mean Jesus WAS God and that he never left earth?
Muslims- that means so was Mohammad. Bitch.
Jews- and that means everyone you killed in the Crusades was also God.
All- God DAMMIT!

Wicca and Pagan- Well sure… Lots of Gods.

Scientologists- Cool.

Unitarian Universalists- AAAHAHAHAHA! There it is, right in our name! UNIVERSALISTS. AAAAHAHAHA!

Buddhists- well now that we know this much, I guess we’re ALL enlightened. Everyone is the Buddha. Huh.

Satanists- We’re based on Christianity, so we’re done… crap, no one goes to hell because hell is god…craaaap.

Communists- COMMON PROPERTY, bitches. That includes the hi-def TV in yo’ family room! That thing is GOD. And SO AM I. so hand it over. In the name of God, hand it over!
Everyone- But you don’t have a religion… And I’m God too.
Communists- Let me reiterate. I AM GOD. This IS SPARTA!
Everyone- o.0

So think about that for a bit. Let me know what comes up.

Peace,

DJ

Co-Authored by AJ