Hey! Happy 5/4 Day, Eh!
Today is April 5th, which, in Canadian calendar shorthand, can also be referred to as ‘5/4’ — AND — since I have been doing stuff around the numbers 5 & 4 for awhile now (because of that whole ‘@hi54lofi’ thing), and since I’ve already done a similar thing around the 9th of May with another project of mine based off of highway 95a eh (because ‘9/5 Day’ seemed like a clever dumb thing to try out)… let’s just say that doing something on HI54.BLOG for the 5th of April (ie. 5/4 Day) has been on my long list of ‘Dumb (Question Mark)’ ideas to try out for quite some time.
Well, today I cross ‘5/4 Day?’ off that list!
Now, ideally, I would have something more noteworthy to announce on this inaugural ‘Hi! It’s 5/4 Day’ blog post, especially since the day only comes around once a year (unless celebrating again ‘Merica style with a May 4th ‘5/4 Day’… may the forth be with you too), BUT, unfortunately, I’m not quite there yet with an announcement about some IRL stuff I’m hoping to start trying out with a few URLs I am responsible for. But, that specific idea (I’ll just say that it involves something I’m calling “Mutually Beneficial Employment”) requires trying to incorporate more “music blog” thinking into the work I do on my attempted-collaborative local area site 95EH.CA while also incorporating more 95EH stuff onto this HI54.BLOG site now that I’ve moved the 95eh.ca domain from a paid-Squarespace account to a free-Tumblr site. That ‘specific idea’ also involves interconnected ‘pretend, for real’ diy radio station MOUN.TOWN/FM + my human labour market skillz (plus a bunch of website/process changes that I’d need to figure out & implement once/if the ball gets rolling).
So… maybe the 9th of May (9/5 Day, eh) is the better date to aim towards for sharing an update about that stuff anyways?
And on that note, for this 2023 “celebration” of 5/4 Day, instead of some kind of update that explains what’s going on with this “music blog” that stopped taking music submissions over 1 year ago (after being sent over 45,000 submissions from Feb 2018 to Feb 2022), I figured I would just fire up the digital typewriter for a few hours while I hang out with a one-eyed cat named Maple @ the house I’m sitting at & see what comes out of a high 5/4 brain dump:
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Y’know, Maple… there’s a good Jesus quote — that I read in a Buddhist book — that I think really gets at the challenge of trying to live in a late stage colonial/imperial capitalism gong show of a society WHILE ALSO still trying to maintain your spiritual sanity amongst all the bs hypocrisy & contradictions that everyone loves to point out in anyone other than themselves (which is everybody & anybody else, hence why all the division feels so relentless and from every angle). And I may be paraphrasing here, as I don’t have a Bible on hand (more of a buddha guy myself), but the way I have remembered the JC quote is:
“You have to be in this world, but you don’t have to be of this world.”
And when you tie that thought into the reality that ‘we all only have control over our own actions & reactions while we go about interacting with the parts of the world that we can actually touch’ (which is a reality that Buddhist thinking is very good at reminding you to remember), and if you can also remind yourself to remember to turn the mirror back around to yourself & your own actions/reactions whenever you find yourself about to rage about someone else’s actions/reactions, and if you are as honest & compassionate with yourself as you would hope someone else would be with you or with someone who you care about, it should start to become more apparent to you all the ways that you can stop being such a pre-programmed participant of the irrational worldview we were all born in.
Because you can’t change THE world, but you can change yourself (and once you make that change in outlook, and once you start actually following through on all the cliched wisdom you instinctively recognize as wise and start putting into action all the good advice you already know yourself, you should start to notice that you can actually start to change YOUR world, which is THE world that you actually interact with and experience yourself).
Of course, everybody’s situation is different, and we’re all at different points of our lives, and the systemic part of our collective issues are very complicated, BUT, I think we can all agree that we’re obviously not all doing our part individually of following the ‘treat others how you would want to be treated’ rule — BECAUSE — there are way too many people being treated the way that none of us would want to be treated (and we all know this, as oftentimes we are those people being treated that way… when we’re not the ones devaluing someone else before they get a chance to devalue us). But there’s a reason why it was dubbed ‘The GOLDEN Rule’ all those years ago, and if you cut out most of the obviously man-made additions to most religious texts, you’ll find that most of these big religions are all saying a version of the same thing at their core (and I bet we’d all be more than fine if we just forget about all the other ‘religious stuff’ for awhile until we can collectively prove that we’re doing a better job of consistently nailing down this one agreed upon ‘golden rule’ first).
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But, just in case anyone has started to feel their feathers puff up while reading so far, I would just like to point out that one of the most useful self-help habits you could ever pick up is to start being more mindful about noticing when things get you agitated & worked up… and then making a note to unpack why those things are getting you so agitated & worked up. Because this is usually a ‘you problem’ to sort out (ie. so go unpack for yourself self-reflection style OR go talk with someone else, professionally or just friendship-ly, to get to the bottom of where/why the internal agitation exists on certain topics). Your body/mind will let you know what’s bothering you… you just have to listen & be willing to try and get to the root of what’s making you feel so conflicted and/or threatened by just the mention of the topic (instead of always defaulting to a self-defense mode of reactive behaviour… take a beat, conversations don’t need to be fight or flight situations, no matter the “controversial” topic).
Because if you keep finding yourself arguing on behalf of the kind of human & resource exploitation that allows for the existence of multi multi-billionaires (corporations AND individuals), at the cost of almost everyone & everything else (humans and the natural environment we need for staying alive) — ESPECIALLY if you’re not a billionaire already and don’t have any desire to build a life of waste & excess on the backs of others’ suffering, like a dickhead — I’m sorry, but we’re all going about things in such a circular way that it’s never going to lead to any lasting contentment for anyone.
And contentment is the goal in life.
It’s what you (and me & them & Bono) feel like we’re still looking for.
And not having contentment (or not realizing that we might already have almost everything we need to feel content) is why we hardly ever feel satisfied with our lives for longer than a few fleeting moments, no matter how many of life’s check boxes we keep checking off the list our culture gives us.
Ironically, what we really want is to not always be wanting (or not wanting) whatever is (or is not) happening enough (or not happening enough) during our finite & always changing experience of getting to experience life in the body/brain that we’re stuck with until our inevitable human death (which is an agreed-upon guaranteed outcome… whatever comes after that is ‘best guesses’ at best).
We want to be content with what we have (when we have enough). We want to be content with who we are & we want to be content with what we do with our time/energy. That’s the place/state where we want to be spending most of our time (and that should be the place/state that we want other people to be able to be spending most of their time too).
But more of us feeling content doesn’t serve the selfish desires of the owner-class fantasy of being able to hold unfair power over others & play life on ‘ego-stroking’ mode — so the majority of us get locked in the basement of Maslow’s Pyramid (and anyone who makes it out tends to pull the ladder up behind themselves, as that’s usually the only way up to the next level).
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But we’ve all felt this feeling of ‘contentment’ before, so it’s not some unknowable promise you have to wait for the afterlife to receive (while following all the ‘do as I say, not as I do’ rules of the current life, the only experience that you know to be real for sure). Because when you think about when/why you’ve felt ‘content’ before, even if just momentarily, it doesn’t seem like it should be all that hard to feel that feeling more often. It comes simply enough. After all, being a human on earth has a lot of good stuff going for it (music, food, orgasms, humour, animals, nature, art, sport, books, etc) and we can use our accumulative knowledge & technology to make a pretty good time of our shared experiences here… we just gotta stop defining “success” by the version they literally try to sell us on.
Because we don’t have to keep organising our society around an ego-driven unsustainable infinite-growth grift (where the people who do the actual work receive the least of the “value” created); we can demand to participate in a better society and we can start by trying to find ways to participate better regardless of the current status quo thinking (for example, there’s a rule about the minimum businesses can pay people, but there’s not a rule about businesses making it a part of their business model to pay a “living wage” and then consumers agreeing to make more of an effort to support businesses/people who make an effort to make things fairer).
But, unfortunately, we also all have basic needs that need to be met before feeling truly content is ever possible — AND — for the most of us, our basic needs are held over our heads as something that could be taken away or made worse if we don’t continue to play our roles for the evil empire that is ‘colonial/imperial capitalism’ (or, if you’ve got a better word for what to call a system where corporations own all the land & resources & government policy makers, let me know in the comments).
Meanwhile, we’re expected to go about our days nodding & smiling while also hearing about how half the food gets thrown out or how there’s more empty homes/buildings than people who are unhoused OR how the reason that living costs are constantly going up, no matter how many technological advances we make (not to mention the ones we don’t implement so a few dinosaurs can keep bleeding our wells dry), that this blatant display of ‘profit over everything’ greed is somehow not connected to all the corporations/people boasting about millions/billions in profits while wages stay stagnant & this hard-to-pin-down thing called ‘inflation’ keeps getting the blame for why so many people struggle to make ends meet.
“But who will pay for all that?!” somebody’s media-programmed subconscious will interject when you point out that it is insane that we keep letting our society be run this way and suggest less insane ways we could be organising our collective labour & needs — which, of course… “sounds like marxist communism!” to that same media-programmed subconscious (where ‘right of centre’ politics is considered ‘the left’).
And now we’ve entered the slippery world of arguing about ‘boogeyman words’ that nobody has the same definition for — communism, capitalism, socialism, liberal, conservative, democrat, republican, marxist, fascist, religion, reality, right, left, etc — which also means we’ve entered the world of people getting extra defensive about topics where almost all of one’s expressed thoughts are surface-level call-backs of opinions & headlines that a bunch of loud-mouth talking-heads have infected their daily consciousness with (and of course hardly anybody has done any of the same required reading & thinking on their own to have a more nuanced opinion than shouting “fuck Trudeau libtard cancel culture freedumb sheep!”).
In other words, you quickly reach the point where everybody has their own facts and thinks that the most important thing that can happen is that one feels like they did not “lose” the interaction — and when that’s the only thing someone really stands for, they can change their point/s as much as they want, no matter how many hypocrisies & contradictions get revealed from what one says versus the consistency of their actions and/or inactions in the real world (as we’ve all been taught how to do by our celebrity-debater politicians for generations).
But, again, you only have control over the actions/reactions on your side of any interaction — SO — at a certain point you just have to get on with trying to make sure that you’re doing your best to not just be mindlessly made of the same toxic worldview that we were all born in. And how that plays out for you will be different than what it looks like for me (for example, no kids over here + I also live in a small mountain town in colonial Canada), BUT, as long as it involves enough of us agreeing to hold up our end of the ‘treat others how you would want to be treated AND stand up for others being treated ways you would not want to be treated’ bargain in our respective orbits, I don’t see why we can’t start making faster progress towards a society that is organized around meeting EVERYONE’s basic needs as the new social contract standard (unless we genuinely have more fans of all the unnecessary waste and out-of-control greed lifestyle that is destroying the planet).
Because, in the same way that you don’t need to hit rock-bottom or be diagnosed with a terminal disease before deciding to change your individual life for the better, we also don’t have to wait for those same kind of fates as a society before we decide to change our collective lives for the better. So much of this stuff is just blatantly stupid selfish greed that we’ve allowed them to normalize through our own fantasies of one-day also getting some version of that same blatantly stupid selfish greed for ourselves (via one of the finite spots of hierarchical “success” available for us to compete over in the highly rigged market that exploits unimaginable amounts of wealth/power to a level of the hierarchy that does NONE of the work & that 99.99% of us we will never see/be).
But I’ve written/rambled about this stuff before (and waaaaay smarter people have written/ranted much gooder than I), SO, on that note, I am going to leave with you with an impromptu ‘Hi! Here’s FIVE things FOR…’ on the topic of better programming one’s brain for dealing with all the grifters out there trying to rile up division for the power of distraction it provides the ruling owner-class to operate so unjustly behind the cover of all the other noise.
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THING #1: Go watch this 2016 Noam Chomsky documentary “Requiem For The American Dream’ for FREE over on Tubi (or at least it is currently available in the Canadian Tubi catalogue, but you might have to find it elsewhere if you live elsewhere). A lot of populists like to take snippets of what Noam Chomsky is talking about, but only applying it to ‘the other side’ — which is probably why a lot of those same populists like to paint Noam as an “extremist” that is best avoided (same with a lot of other related people/ideas that get labelled as ‘boogeyman’ by status quo defenders that want you to think what they tell you to think and then don’t think too much more about it). Also, watching this documentary is way easier than reading a bunch of Chomsky books, so please give it an hour & 12 minutes of your time (ESPECIALLY if you’re the type that likes to make bold statements about people/ideas you haven’t actually got around to learning more about yourself).
THING #2: Every time the algorithms try to send you down a right-wing grifter rabbit hole, whether it be Ben Shapiro or Jordan Peterson or whoever the next debate weasel is that sees an easy way to stir up dissatisfaction without ever addressing the full-picture, go listen to some George Carlin stand-up clips instead and ask yourself whether George would call bullshit on their ilk. Because, if you want an angry white man ranting about the problems of the world, you want that angry white man to be George Carlin (ok, I see you Bernie). Related: if you have a Crave/HBO login, you should watch the 2-part Carlin doc to get a wider picture beyond all the timeless bits & observations found scattered around Youtube.
THING #3: Related to ‘if the Youtube algorithms direct you here, redirect yourself here instead’ topic, if the Youtube algorithms keep trying to send you to Joe Rogan, send yourself to Terrance McKenna instead. Because this is the '“have you ever done dmt?” guy that you want to spend 3 hours listening to talk (and you can find some other fave McKenna clips I’ve recommended before here).
THING #4: We all need to come to better terms with the fact that the foundation of North America is built on literal genocide and slavery. “Reconciliation” will only be achieved by ousting the colonial/imperial capitalist MINDSET from the land and the people who live on it now. Acknowledging that land was taken unjustly while continuing to feed the machine that unjustly took it (and continues to take), that doesn’t really do anything except badly disguise our collective guilt/shame for past & current inaction. For me, I think the book that nails the message in the most “yep, I get the message, say no more… that’s f*cked up & I don’t want my life to be associated with that kind of thinking” is THE RED DEAL: INDIGENOUS ACTION TO SAVE OUR EARTH, a concise 150 page read that doesn’t hold back necessary punches and that I’ve also recommended before.
THING #5: Another book I’ve recommended before that I think anybody who feels a bit disillusioned with “religion” should check out — and I don’t know how anyone could not feel disillusioned with modern “religion” given the literal history of horrible things that have been done & that still get done by powerful religious organizations — and that book is called Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World by the Dalai Lama. The book lays out a very rational & secular way for people to think about "spirituality" and "religion" (especially the closed-minded organized versions of "religion" we're all pretty familiar with), and it is done in a very digestible way. And since the human being making the case for a more secular approach to society is THE DALIA LAMA, and he does so without specifically pushing his “religion” or shitting on anybody else’s “religion”, it’s a book that shows how easy it is to be tolerant of others & not obsessed with trying to convert others when you’re genuinely confident in your own approach/path to life (but also still curious to speak to others about their approach/path). Because, as the Dalia Lama is famous for saying, “my religion is kindness” — and we sure could do with A LOT more of that kind of religion being practiced.
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Okaaay…
…I think Maple has had just about enough of my blah blah blogging for today.
So I’ll just add that this 5/4 Day is also a Wednesday, which means that I’ve updated the MTR ‘Side A’ and ‘Side B’ mix tape radio players over on MOUN.TOWN/RADIO with some new-to-somebody human-made digital mixtapes at the top of their play-mixtapes-all-day rotations (if you’re into listening to human-made mixtapes for free).
ANNNND… Have a Happy 5/4 Day from HI54, eh!
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JEREMY / @HI54LOFI
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