Is It Phenomenal?

O.K.  I'll just tell you straight out.  Dostoevsky.  Or however you wish to spell it. 

The first important literary author also important to existentialism was the Russian Fyodor Dostoyevsky.^[34] Dostoyevsky's Notes from Underground portrays a man unable to fit into society and unhappy with the identities he creates for himself. Jean-Paul Sartre, in his book on existentialism Existentialism is a Humanism, quoted Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov as an example of existential crisis. Sartre attributes Ivan Karamazov's claim, "If God did not exist, everything would be permitted"^[35] to Dostoyevsky himself. Other Dostoyevsky novels covered issues raised in existentialist philosophy while presenting story lines divergent from secular existentialism: for example, in Crime and Punishment, the protagonist Raskolnikov experiences an existential crisis and then moves toward a Christian Orthodox worldview similar to that advocated by Dostoyevsky himself.^{[citation needed]}

I've been reading about phenomenology in the brief time I've been allowed to do so tonight.  Many people should.  It beats "American Family" or whatever it is that people are watching on television as I write.  It is fun stuff, all this thinking about subject and object.  Just thinking is fun.  To wit, Justice Scalia is taking heat for comparing homosexuality to bestiality.  Why?  I agree with him, though we draw different conclusions.  I keep wondering when people sodomizing animals was a big social problem. 

"Hey, that's a cute dog you got there."

"Your ass.  You'd better stay the fuck away from my dog.  I'll call the law." 

Or was there a time when sex with farm animals were breaking up the traditional family?  Was it jealousy or practicality that led to the formation of that law?  Can you imagine being the one to introduce the bill?  Jesus, it is fascinating, really.  I know people have sex with animals.  I've seen it on the internet.  People will have sex with anything.  Truly.  Shouldn't there be a law against sex with inanimate objects?  I think that has caused more problems than bestiality.  I knew a guy when I was a kid who said he used to have sex with watermelons when he lived in Georgia.  Cormac McCarthy's semi-autobiographical novel "Suttree" begins with a funny scene of a fellow taking buckshot in the ass for having sex with watermelons.  It is set in Tennessee.  Same thing.  I guess it's true. 

Good old Scalia.  He's making the news more interesting.  Thinking about things, reducing them to their purest argument. . . then, as always, drawing the wrong conclusion.  Maybe that's what he really thinks, but when I look at him, I see a man with many hidden desires.  I'll bet there are stories to tell. 

We already have visitors here.  I've invited some, and others have simply stumbled upon us.  I get about thirty visitors now where I used to get thousands.  C'est la vie.  It is easier this way.  We are an intimate group, much like a graduate seminar.  I'll try to keep fit. 

I am trying to lay the groundwork for this site, though it gets buried deeper and deeper the more I write.  Something needs to be done about Google's algorithms.  Whatever.

But I am drunk already and suddenly and dare not write more for fear of making a large rather than a minor mistake.  Thanks for coming.  I'll try to do better.