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When I was a child growing up in my village in there were two main factions who controlled our little community.
They were the 'Big Ears Clubs'.
Admission wasn't so difficult, given the correct temperament. One had merely to attend meetings regularly and find the man with the biggest mouth. Then simply kiss his backside publicly. For this you would gain approval for your obvious wisdom and a giant pair of false ears to glue on. Ears which you could never ever take off (not publicly at least)
Despite this apparent ease of joining some of use just couldn't manage it. We lacked the right stuff. We were driven out of town.
We would hide in the bushes as esteemed members walked passed with their giant stick-on ears, either green or red. There we would crouch for fear that we would be chased away or scolded for having only the ears that god gave us.
Then at other times a great row would draw our attention as a group of redears would meet some bluears and the would have a big fight. These were strange affairs indeed as they consisted mostly of the hurling of abuse, and the strangest ululating gibberish it sounded to us.
Now of course this abuse didn't fall on deaf ears, well not quite, it fell on great big foam ears ..... which is completely different.
Clicking on this thread I felt like when Alice stumbled upon the tea party.
It is true that into any fable,however humble, the reader may incorporate their own subconscious preoccupations. So Richard sees the dying ethos of the sixties generation and Lenador the Tea Party. This is part of the joy of that uniquely human and delightfully fuzzy logic that we call metaphor.
Generally though I prefer a more conscious incorporation of self into a purported analysis. And sometimes,oddly, that means striving for the general. On this foro for example we DID not all live through the sixties and we DO not all live in America.
I guess it is more of a puzzle than I imagined..... just more typically sloppy work from poor old me. Or maybe,at the risk of immodesty, it's more general than I had hoped ?
Either way to be compared to Swift via Lewis Carol or even poor old Tim Leary honours me, I fear, unjustly.
John Lilly gave LSD to cetaceans in the late 1960's. Then he tried to telepathically converse with them. Then a book called Dune was written and it had telepathic cetaceans in it.
Sometimes a club member would find our earnakedness so confusing that out of pity and incredulity they would construct for us a fine pair of ears in their minds eye. Thus they could address us in their natural idiom of 'ululating gibberish'.
Much could be learned from their guesses as to the colour, but not about us.
Local fashions often come and go. Thinking of rural friends of mine and their community, I recall years of passionate tafli playing and after that sorts of okkukltism which certainly has long since been exchanged for some other trend.
Just yesterday I was telling a youngster about humans´underemployed brains that spin into irrelevant but sometimes nonetheless seriously taken fashion, when the cognitive potence is neglected by zeitgeist.
Such it seems is how irrational trends rise and run. Probably introduced all the time, sporadically, mostly though vanishing again as flash in the pan. Only sometimes the spectacle becomes lasting. ( Historically by accident.)
It has happened with craving-for-admiration tricksters and their story weaving followers who got celebrated beyond local public and became the Golden Calf. With now billions of stultified who are instructed to reject the screaming secular on behalf of crass rubbish, resulting into billions of fundamentally uneducated heads who no less are ready to set everything on fire for assumptive and baseless tales. Just as retarded minds as originally, despite modern world´s culture products, comfort tech and gadgets that one would think should help connect to rational ground and shake off the Middle Age finally ... but won´t.
Blinding trend phenomenons are not funny at all, and yielding trillions of victims since thousands of years. Every day on all continets.
"Our brains as hardware and cognitive skills are prepared for a high state, but our software has been set back by millenia", me tried to analog yesterday.
There should urgently be put an end to false peity for superstition. The more aggressive the superstition the more rigidly it should be illuminated and dismantled. Pull off foam ears!
The opposite approach of tolerating violent retardedness is a `generousity´ at expense of innocents sacrifice.
I understand your story. It's an allegory. You see, there are people who like solo flamenco guitar, and there are people who like solo classical guitar. It turns out that if you are in one camp, something happens and you have to hate the other type of music. It is actually impossible to like both. You can't even perceive that top players in the other camp are also incredibly talented, dedicated, and artistic. You have to choose and only like one.
If you are in the CG camp, you have to wear black turtlenecks, talk about Bach a lot, and carry around little pieces of grade 00 sandpaper. You watch foreign films (that means French, British, etc if you are Murican). You don't get many chicks.
If you are in the flamenco camp, you have to start smoking and doing drugs. You start drinking red wine (tinto) and sherry, and change your bedtime to 6 am. You will die early, but you will probably get more chicks.
Even though you play almost precisely the same instrument, using only marginally different technique, and even though you both play Malaguena, you must distance yourself from the other camp as much as possible. Your internet reputation is at stake!
I have real big ears that stick out, this is no fable but a trick that the universe(God) played on me. Ohh and the bad back.
He was sitting there and thought" this Gabriel kid isn't gonna listen and work to hard and play guitar for hours on end in life so lets give him protruding big ears and a bad back".
I cant wait to have a talk with him and my Dad up where souls go, about there sense of humour.
It's humbling to have pain and something wrong with your body, that way you can be more forgiving in your judgments of people.
That was a great story Buddha. sorry kinda off topic but when you mention ears you get my attention.
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May we find God through Flamenco instead of Angels and Demons
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sorry kinda off topic but when you mention ears you get my attention. 
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