Note

Testing, testing, one, two, three.

So, it's 441 now and I want to, um, my watch is run out of batteries. Um, that's strange, but I've charged it. It's, um, January 21st still. Um, where was I? I am. I'm on my way home now. And, um, I, uh, had a long day. Let me talk about that because, um, man. Uh, it was, uh, of course, I didn't drink enough water today, so I feel my little out of it. I've been still dealing with the, uh, the redis, Python, Django bug. I don't really know what to do with that one. Still dealing with it. Every day, I try to work on it. I get sidetracked. I got sidetracked again today. And a long sidetracked. It's, I mean, it literally took me four hours to figure out this stupid, you know, problem between Chrome Firefox. Chrome is really getting on my nerves there. They're becoming the IE of the browser world. They, they have this market share. And now, um, they're just shoving everything into the kitchen sink. Um, because of it. There's, uh, I guess some kind of feature where, um, in your, I guess it's very strict about the, um, style rules where you'll specify a file. And then I guess a fallback file. But I guess it's not interpreting it that way. Whereas the other browsers do. There's clearly becoming a route. I don't know. In this little experience that I have, there's a JavaScript gap that's growing bigger and bigger across browsers. And in the past, it was, um, the HTML gap. And now it's the JavaScript cap. Maybe it was both. I don't know. But, uh, yeah. It's really annoying. I had to ask people like, I mean, walk gives me a hilarious answer. But he leads me in the right direction. And Matthew, puffs and puffs. Like, how could you ask me such a question? I'm, uh, I'm, I, you know, a bother rob on a sick day. And, uh, but yeah, sucks. But we got it done. So, uh, yeah. But yeah, my, I have yet to have some time to just sit back. And think about flight of horse. I mean, I'm processing new, you know, um, ideas or at least inspirations for ideas or stories at the same time. But yeah, I'm not getting a chance to really, um, put those thoughts into a story. I'm not getting at those two dogs. There's two dogs who always like to go poop. And that dog runs all the way up. You do not care about that dog. Anyway, I guess I, I shouldn't care. And I guess you have to go, I'm watching a dog poop on the side of the road. Come on, man. Anyway, um, let me stop here because I think I'm starting a new, I'm going to start a new train of thought around, um, the life of the prophet or the prophet. Yeah, quote unquote prophet.

Alright, so it's 4.47pm. I'm waiting at the light at Sam Pablo and Buchanan-Slasher-Marin. I'm going to put some air here, but I don't want to interfere with the microphone. So yeah, you know, I... I don't know how I got on to this. I started watching an Egypt, but I think I must have documented it in Egypt as also because I started down this kind of thought thread about the validity of early Islamic history. But where did it come from? I don't really know. And maybe I just wanted to see a documentary on Petra, but that somehow doesn't... I'm not fully remembering what led me down that path. And so I... But I ultimately was led down that path and I was completely blown away by what I was reading. I mean, this is definitely a matrix moment for me to consider the fact that I don't understand why Heidi takes this so lightly. You know, religion was not shoved down her throat, the way it was in my house. It just wasn't. You know, she saw two people growing up. She saw two kind of realities. That was the reality of her parents who drank, who didn't pray, who didn't always fast, and didn't tell their kids anything about their religion. And yet they talk about their religion. And so the religion came, you know, was like, this... Well, that's the... That's the ancient belief system. It's kind of... It's the mythology that we lived with. It was treated as mythology, essentially, the stories that we have. And so she doesn't have this bond where, you know, I have it. It's almost like this was your way of life. You weren't supposed to digress. You were going to hell. Where did she grow up with that concept? I don't think so. I need to talk to her about that. I want to find out for real. I don't think she really knows what I grew up with. I mean, when your parent tells you, don't do this or you're going to hell. Or people who do this go to hell. What are you supposed to do? And sometimes they'll say, oh, it's as simple as, oh, if you have sex before marriage. Or if you break your fast too soon, or if you never fast, or if you don't have good intentions, all that kind of stuff, drives one parent. I don't believe for one second that if you just on the system of sins and good deeds, is there a God period that is clearly a human created system? No God needed sins and good deeds, period. I don't know what I'm going to do now back to what I was getting at. So the possibility that the prophet never existed is just as huge as God, as not existing. It's one thing that one can say, you know what all the prophets were wrong. But they did good things. They became model humans on earth if we want to say that. But yeah, the concept of a higher being, whose intentions were communicated through a holy scripture, is one level of acceptance of beliefs. Whereas, you know, if you were to say that those people, those very people didn't exist, that's even crazier. Because if they didn't exist, God certainly doesn't exist. I mean, you're basically saying that everything was made up. I mean, how do you even trust history at that point? I mean, maybe this is where Heidi's not surprised, and that's why she studied archaeology. And that's why she likes art history because it's like archaeology of art. Except you're not digging it up, it's already there. I mean, to say that Jesus didn't exist, and then all of a sudden you see all this evidence of human art. How can you deny that? But if you, you know, whereas on the other hand, if you say Muhammad never existed, well, how much art is there about Muhammad? In fact, what's fascinating is, you know, the, the concept of, you know, idolatry and image worship, you know, the how it's treated as a, as a sin in Islam, which fits perfectly into a belief system in which you want everyone to follow along. You have to remove any attempt at a schism. That's the right word, I don't know. You know, there was no imagery. So, you know, a devotee couldn't come along and say, you know, we are the triangle worshipers. Or, you know, Muhammad loved triangles. Therefore, we are the triangle, which was, in fact, that there were many attempts to do that, but the large majority of Muslims, you know, don't buy into that. If they do anything that you're not supposed to is that they celebrate the Prophet's birthday, you know, and they, you know, celebrate other saints, actually saints are, you know, as long as you can, it's tolerated because the worshiping of saints is proven that it doesn't really drive people apart, but communities that are sparsely connected, you know, are connected in isolation to their saints. But I can totally see a culture where, you know, every year on the pilgrimage, the pilgrimage was a time in which merchants got together and traded. But they went there, and perhaps they don't even know why they went there. They go there. It was always a trading place. But at some point in time, and over time, more and more people came. And you were there in hopes of, you know, either a successful sale of all your goods, or a successful passage, you know, on to where you're going to sell your goods, or to transmit the goods to their owner. So when you stopped at Mika, or whatever place there was, you needed to rest. You needed to be safe, and your stuff needed to be safe, and you needed to be able to move on. Well, why not create, you know, a religion around that. It first starts out as a simple, you know, a creed of the Meccan trader, you know, TRADER. And you say, yes, I will abide by these rules. I will go to Mika, and I will put down my weapons before the Kaba. And I will treat fellow, you know, my fellow Meccans with respect, you know. And maybe there were a certain set of rules when, when, you know, every idol was placed in the Kaba. And then after that, you were seen as basically someone who cooperated, someone who was a partner, and therefore we could continue to do so, a trusted person. Even if you didn't share the same political beliefs, even if you didn't say, you weren't a Christian, you were Jewish. I mean, that was what was so huge about this time period, is in fact, again, it was an attempt, monotheism had already, you know, was huge, you know, for trade. It established, you know, a community of trust. And a system of, you know, I guess, I don't want to say taxation, but, you know, what the, I forget what the actual purpose of taxation is. And I think that, you know, there's a lot of things that I think is a lot of things that I think are like, I mean, you know, there's an infrastructure to you having to live your life. And before there were concepts of, you know, like the religious society was the civil society. So, you know, you galvanized around your leader, who had a certain belief, you know, ancient Egyptians made the Pharaoh God on earth. But they also had God, because you needed someone to bless the Pharaoh. And then, you know, that went all the way until the Greeks and the Romans even. But, you know, it was replaced with emperor. And the gods were replaced with different names, but more gods came along the way. There was the one God conceived by, you know, honestly. The group that was definitely saw the fragility of the system. I mean, the fragility and this, you know, there were groups that saw the fragility and the corruption of the system. And how, you know, an emperor can be deceived. Although you can worship something good, they can be deceived by forces in between that want essentially access to wealth through them. The, the means, you know, the power that they hold, not because they have, you know, they want to share the wealth. They want to hoard the wealth and maintain it for themselves. So these, you know, these factions who want to force those to give up their, they knew the only way they could do is to force them to give up their position of power. And maybe the wealth will get redistributed. But, you know, if we move on down to, you know, past the Romans, past the Byzantines, the Byzantines essentially merged Christianity with the empire. And so the empire was a Christian empire, but there were still Jews. And they were probably upset because, you know, one, there wasn't, I mean, the concept of a Jewish empire wasn't there. And two, there was a tax on those who weren't Christian. And so there were, you know, if you think about it, a new rebel group had formed on the fringes where, well, if you trade out there, you don't have to be Christian. You could, you know, the, if you're Jewish, you could trade out there without a price, without a tax. And not only that, if you don't have to, you can take your belief, your idols and everything and worship them out there. The fringe, even under Byzantine times, became a place where you could be just that fringe. And it was in the fringe where the idea of, you know, not love all, there's no, there's no love in Islam. There's no, you know, it's really more like, look, allow all. And you shall be allowed. So, you know, it's a total, it's a representation of the benefit of believing intolerance. But how do you tolerate? You have to be disciplined. And so they, you know, the disciplinary aspect of it all is to fight corruption, corruption of the mind and the soul and everything like that. So it's, you know, they, they, there are some contemporary, you know, religious scholars that believe Buddhism had had an influence on Islam. This is absolutely fascinating to me. It's my first time really embracing these ideas and, you know, seeing them as ideas and not as heresy or as crazy thoughts of disbelievers. So I'm just, I feel like I've been giving, given a new set of, you know, a part of my brain has opened up. And it's just exhilarating to think about, you know, I think about when I was younger and my mother would, you know, I would sit us down and we would have to memorize surahs in the Quran. And it's very teaching focused parent. You know, she didn't teach, I mean through books, we, and not just any kind of teaching, there was, there was practice. You know, I mean, there were tangible things that you had to do in order to be a good devotee or a good follower. And so this, this, you know, worked well with my mom because she needed that, you know, she, she needed the distraction of the practice. You don't have a distraction and a healthy one. Then yeah, your brain can run away on you. Your brain can constantly try, because basically it's like constantly probing. And it's constantly trying to imagine if it has the chance there is a part, I guess a part of your brain that's constantly thinking, you know, creative thoughts. And those creative thoughts have to constantly be put down either through the logic. So, you know, if, if pigs could fly, right. You know, in some part of me actually thinks that someone's brain actually suggested this as a rational thought. And there's the, you know, there's the, I guess you would call it the memory of the brain playing memory, where, you know, it's just opening various gates and pairing those ideas together. You know, pulling out a cubby, finding a pig, pulling out another cubby, finding wings and saying pigs and wings. Yes, pigs and wings. Yes. And then the thought process, not the thought process, but the logic center says pigs and wings know why wings have never been on pigs. Wings are for birds. Pigs, birds sit on pigs, but pigs aren't birds. And it tells, you know, this is how the, the brains talk. There must be, you know, some sort of, you know, two different processors in the brain. And, you know, those of us who, I guess, have our brain slightly off. Maybe there's a problem with one of those two processors. You know, maybe there's something, you know, maybe an artistic people, the, the logical processor is, is way too efficient, too strong. And so, whereas in, in like, you know, super intense, expressive artists, maybe that side is, is too strong. I don't know, you know, the, or the fantasy level has to, you know, like the, the person who probably loves reading books, where pigs do fly, wants a little truth. I don't even know why I'm getting on, on this topic. But I'm going to pause because I feel like the file is getting too big again.