Wanzology

All That Anything Is

 Betcha by golly, wow, you're the one that I've been waiting for forever. Forever!! Hey, how are you doing? What's happening? This is The Wanz coming at you and welcome to another episode of you guessed it, WANZOLOGY. Ha ha ha!! How you doing? You alright? I hope you're good. Um, yeah, I'm kinda getting sad. It's getting to be the dog days of summer. Which means that summer's gonna be over and the rainy season's coming back here up in the great Pacific Northwest. But, you know, one of the reasons that I like living here is because we have seasons. It's not either you're in the oven or you're not. If you catch my drift.

Today, we're coming down to it, man. This is like one of the last chapters of, uh, #THEBOOKOFWANZ, and it is, uh, titled, ALL THAT ANYTHING IS, IS ALL THAT EVERYTHING WAS.

I think the past is an interesting phenomenon created by humans. No other creature on Earth has a recollection of its existence like humans do. When we're younger, the past seems to be this picture book in our minds of places we've been and people we've seen. As we get older and accumulate more experiences, the past takes on a new role. It becomes a reference book that we turn to, referring to pages filled with people, places, things, and situations that help us learn what to do next. I've often said, the cornerstone of learning is repetition. My dad used to say, “the lessons not learned will be repeated”.

We all have things in our past, some good, some bad, and most of them in between. We file these experiences away, and depending on what we're doing in the present, we access those memories, and feel those feelings, taste those tastes, appreciate that we lived through an event or enjoy those smiles in good times. Every experience we go through becomes a matter of record, shaping the fabric of our lives. My therapist told me once, “we are, at any given time, the sum of all our experiences.” This blew my mind. Every second we're alive, every moment that passes, becomes a part of us in the same way. Whether we're sleeping, or stuck in traffic, watching a show on television, or at a concert, every moment becomes a part of us in some way, shape, or form. Anything that was for us is for us. The question is, can we not make anything more than it actually was? Our brains access memories. Our minds and hearts make them into experiences. Good, bad, any and everywhere in between.

Profound. That's the only word I have to say for this one. It's profound. I mean, people talk about living in the moment. They say, you gotta try to live in the moment. Well, there's a problem with that. The problem is, as soon as you recognize a moment, it becomes the past. So how can you really live in a moment? As soon as you recognize that moment, now you’re living in the past. This was a huge conundrum for me. For me, this was like long division. Okay? Annoying as crap, but you still had to show your work. I had to understand it. What I came up with was, I reframed what time was. Instead of thinking of a moment as ticks of the clock, I thought of moments as multiple ticks of the clock. Sometimes a moment for me is a couple minutes, sometimes a moment for me is an hour, sometimes a moment for me is a day, if things are going incredibly horrible, but that reframing allows me to be more present.

How do I live through this moment, or that moment? How do I get from one moment to the next? The answer? Breathing. Breathing for me is the center linchpin of everything in my mental existence. Cause I figure if I'm breathing, how could things really be that bad? What problem at all couldn’t be made worse by not breathing? Don't know. So now it's kind of what I say, “How you doing?”, “I'm still breathing. So that's good.” Yes, it is. Yes, it is. Cause if I stop breathing, oooooh, ooooooh, then I have a real problem.

Nothing but nothing with me works unless I'm breathing. Lack of oxygen is not only a thing, it is the thing you can't do much if you're not breathing. Really. Why do you think it is that the charge of breathing is not left up to you, hmm? Why? Because you're all over the place. You'll forget and then you'll pass out. And then what happens? Are you going to be conscious enough to keep breathing even though you've passed out? Oh, that's a neat trick. No, that's not the way it works. The way it works is that you're always breathing. Your heart is always pumping, blood is always flowing, and you're always thinking, and therein lies the rub. Therein lies the rub. It's that thinking part. That's where the challenge of living really is. That's where the rubber meets the road, man. It's true. Because life is going on all the time, but it's what you think about life going on all the time that really matters. It's not what you see, it's how you see it. That's perspective, right? Today it rained. There are people in Seattle who are like, “Oh! I'm so glad it rained today.”, and there are other people in Seattle who are like, “Dang it!! I want the sun! I want the sun to stay out!!” Yo, the sun comes out every day, that's how you know it's daytime, fool!

But seriously, humans are almost never satisfied. They're forgetting where they are in the process of a day. Anything that has a beginning and an end is a process. Sunrise, sunset. Go to the bathroom, you start, and you finish. Any task you do. Cooking something? Start, finish. Getting Pop Tarts out of the box, there's a start, and there's a finish, it's a process, and life is like that. It happens all the time, but rarely do we take into consideration where we are in any given process, and that's kind of the nub where one can start to think of this particular chapter: ALL THAT ANYTHING IS, IS ALL THAT EVERYTHING WAS.

I've said it before and I'll say it again, everything comes from something. Everything. You came from something, that's your parents. Your parents came from something, that's their parents. It's really hard for me to think about anything that is in my world right now that didn't come from something else. Automobiles, traffic, food, I don't know, think of stuff. Just think of stuff that's in your world, and I can guarantee you that it came from something.

Now, since my big thing is music, man, that makes it easy. There are people out there who live and die by Led Zeppelin. They think Led Zeppelin is the best thing that ever happened to music ever. Not me. But then again, that's not what's important. If you know and love Led Zeppelin music, then you know that all three of those cats grew up listening to other people, which helped formed their musical background and how they learned. Which in turn, created the style of each one of them. John Paul Jones, John Bonham and Robert Plant. Together, they made Led Zeppelin. And I'm not knocking them in the sense that they're not classic, they're not one of the pillars of rock and roll. I just didn't really like the way Robert Plant sang. I used to always say, “Man, everything was fine until somebody started strangling that cat.” But that's just my personal opinion. That doesn't mean anything. Other than, because of Led Zeppelin, there are people who listened to music, their music, and it influenced them.

Almost every guitar player in the 80s, at some point, was influenced by Led Zeppelin. There's no way of getting around it. It's really hard to find a guitar player who came up in the late 70s, 80s, 90s, 2000s, and so on, pop music in general didn't take a foray into Led Zeppelin. What would pop music be like if there was no Beatles? My personal opinion is, if you want to be a really, really good songwriter, and you haven't listened to Rubber Soul and Revolver from the Beatles, you don't really know how to write songs. You can listen to music before those two records and listen to music after those two records, and all the way up to today, you hear things that were done on those two records. Still. A zillion years later. Everything comes from something. You just have to realize the past. The past is always the building blocks of the present, and those building blocks step you into the future and that's the way it is for everybody.

So, what does this mean on a grand scale? On a grand scale, what this means is you can learn a lot from what has already happened. Take today's political climate. Today's political climate, and I don't know when you're listening to this, but right now there are 99 days left in the presidential election cycle, and the big talk is what is Trump going to do, because Kamala Harris is killing it right now and he really doesn't have a, a retort. He doesn't have a way of pushing back against her yet and I really hope that he finds one, because it's important. He has put forth a lot of proposals that I personally don't agree with simply because they go against the concept of democracy as it was constructed by the forefathers. His approach totally mimics authoritarianism, which is not democratic, it's not a constitutional republic. Hungary, Russia, they're not democracies, and that's what he's aiming for. SCOTUS is helping him, and that's a whole thing. My whole point is that we've learned from Rome, we've learned from England, we've learned the journey of becoming Ireland, Scotland. Those are the things that teach us how Americans should view history. Right now, I think we're living in a reenactment of French history. All that's missing are the people who are taking power saying, “Well, just let them eat cake!”, which to me was exactly what was happening between 2016 and 2020, and you want to go back to that? You want to go back to being subjected to the will of others without having a choice to do so? To me, that just. It just flies in the face of everything democracy was built for. Don't forget, this country was formed to escape the tyranny of a king, so why would you want to go back to that? Why would anyone want to go back to that? Oh, because gas was cheaper. Oh, because groceries were cheaper. You know what, the only reason that those things were cheaper was the companies that manufacture, distribute those things, they were making less money. Now they're making more money, so why in the world would they ever want to cut prices?

When's the last time you remember health insurance, car insurance, any kind of insurance reducing price? Not discounts, reduced the price of the services they provide? I can't think of one. You want to go back to that? You want to go back to a time when the company charges whatever it charges because it can charge that, without being able to, like, raise a stink about it? Without being able to put government on their ass to get them to stop? Because you as an individual, you can't do anything.

Look at voting rights. Can't do anything about voting rights, if you're a Black person, and claim that you've been discriminated against, because SCOTUS has already said, only, only, federal offices, can bring claims against federal policy. So that means you, the individual, have no leg to stand on. You, the individual, cannot go to a government and say, you're mistreating me. You're stepping on my rights. You'd have to be part of a federal organization in order to do that. And it didn't used to be that way. If it would have been that way in 1962, there would have been no Equal Rights Amendment, no Voting Act of 1964. And where would we be? Still in Jim Crow? Still slaves? Yeah. That's what I'm talking about, and you want to go back to that? Where you as a person in this country really had no recourse.

Remember, everything comes from something and we, as humans who live in ‘the now’, so to speak, we only get a choice of how we react to that something. But everything comes from something. I'm still trying to find something that didn't come from something else. I'm more than willing to learn if you've got something to teach. So always keep in mind where you're at right now is based on where you were, be it yesterday, a week ago, a year ago, five years ago, because even you came from something else.

ALL THAT ANYTHING IS, IS ALL THAT EVERYTHING WAS. With time moving forward, the world revolving, as humans we get the choice of how we interpret all those things we've been through. I really wish you luck with all of those things. There are lessons there that hopefully will benefit you in the future when it becomes your present. And there you go.

Thanks a lot for being a part of this episode. Sometimes I can't get my mind around some of these things, but I try and I hope you do too.

So this is your host, The Wanz. I really hope that you're digging on #THEBOOKOFWANZ, you can find it at amazon.com, and you know what, reach out to me. Let me know what's going on. You can always find me at info@thewanz.com!

Right-on right-on crouton!! I will see you next week on WANZOLOGY!

Peace and hair grease.