Remeber fun? Pure fun? I miss pure fun.

Somewhere along the way I started being more "serious" (and I mean that w/quotation marks) and it was good and important to be able to do, but it became a norm. I've been waking up to the fact that my seriousness, my skepticism, my increasingly reserved nature have pushed out other things that I love and are natural, really part of the organic composition of my soul. The human flower sprouts not from plastic, and so on.

There's no use in getting serious if you can't have fun. All the points you can rack up are... uhh... pointless, unless you can enjoy them, si?

The utilitarian view, that human hapiness as the only verifiable good is pretty persuasive. It's a basic thing that drives the emergent complexity of life, a rich tapestry of experience, etc. Happiness itself is complex, I think, because over the long run it rests on contrasts, challenges, risk, novelty, and most of all the happiness of other beings. It's certainly greater than stimulating a pleasure center in the brain; I'd argue that most crackheads aren't really happy, and those monkeys who starved themselves to death didn't seem to be enjoying it too much eaither.

In my mind there's an antogonistic relationship between recreation and responsibility. Is this true? I remember a common catchphrase from my youth, the "consequence free environment." That was Fun.

Can Coach Koenig learn to cut loose? I don't really know. I don't know that Coach Koening is doing a very good job right now, so I'm wary of even trying. But it's an issue, and it's one that's probably not going away.

This is hardly a novel topic for me, but I'm feeling now more than ever the cleavage between the Wild Bohemian Values in my heart, and the process of growing up. If I keep viewing these as a conflict, one or the other will prevail (which means one or the other will lose), or I'll continue half-serving both ends. I don't like either of those scenarios, but the great synthesis isn't happening yet.

Maybe that's because I haven't really worked on it beyond bitching.