Been listening to a lot of MGMT. I wonder when I'll grow tired of them like I know will happen, but I'm thoroughly enjoying them right now.
I was listening to the song that apparently made them famous over in the UK "Time To Pretend" which I think is also CP's favorite song by them. Anyways, I really liked the following lines a lot.
I'll miss the playgrounds and the animals and digging up worms.
I'll miss the comfort of my mother and the weight of the world.
I'll miss my sister, miss my father, miss my dog and my home.
Yeah I'll miss the boredom and the freedom and the time spent alone.
This song, to me, touches on growing up and leaving the security of childhood. Also realizing this song too has something to do with children/youth. My interpretation of the song might be completely wrong, but I guess there might not be a wrong answer towards interpretation. Either way, if you read the rest of the lyrics there's other lyrics about living a fast life and basically being reckless and crazy. It made me imagine those guys from the 80's who had their leisure suits on with the sleeves rolled up and they just did drugs and had a bunch of sex with whoever. I felt like the song was saying they were pretending to be happy. But who knows.
Religion/Mythology
The main bulk of this post was to be towards Religion and Mythology. It's not going to be about "Religion sucks" blah blah blah, but you'll find out.
To get started, like I mentioned before, I watched The Forbidden Kingdom with Jet Li and Jackie Chan in it and it was about The Monkey King and The Eight Immortals. I did a bit of research on The Monkey King and I found his history to be really interesting and awesome. Basically he was determined and ambitious. He wasn't born with immortality like most of the Gods but he gained it by "battling heaven and earth"
I believe he was initially 'evil' or perhaps just a rowdy ape with a terrible amount of power. There are stories of him causing trouble in the Heavenly Kingdom, where I believe the Gods lived. The Jade Emperor thought giving Wukong a title and job would help keep him in line but they gave him a shitty job (wiki says "head of the Heavenly Stables to watch over horses). Sun Wukong realized what they were doing so he rebelled and proclaimed himself "Great Sage, Equal of Heaven".
After Wukong did that and allied with demons on Earth the Jade Emperor appealed to Buddha, same Buddha who put Raijin and Fujin in their place? Buddha challenged Wukong in a bet...
"The Buddha made a bet with Wukong that he could not escape from his palm. Wukong, knowing that he could cover 108,000 li(54,000 km) in one leap, smugly agreed. He took a great leap and then flew to the end of the world in seconds. Nothing was visible except for five pillars, and Wukong surmised that he had reached the ends of Heaven. To prove his trail, he marked the pillars. Afterwards, he leaped back and landed in Buddha's palm. There, he was surprised to find that the five "pillars" he had found were in fact the five fingers of the Buddha's hand. When Wukong tried to escape, Buddha turned his hand into a mountain. Before Wukong could shrug it off, Buddha sealed him there using a strip of paper with the mantra Om Mani Padme Hum written thereon in gold letters, and Wukong remained imprisoned for five centuries."
He was later released from imprisonment because Guan Yin (a Taoist Immortal) was searching for disciples to protect a pilgrim who needed to travel to India to retreive Buddhist Sutras. This was the Journey to the West, which I believe Lane has in graphic novel form and I'd like to borrow it!
That took a lot longer to explain then I thought.
As a lot of you might know, I'm not religious. I don't know much about it. People who do, I have a question. Does Christianity have epic tales of hero's and demons? It's a legitimate question. The only real tales I know of are Noah's Arc, Jesus' crucifixion (of you want to include that), The Moses Adventures! (Leading slaves through the Red Sea and the Ten Commandments), all of these to me are not 'cool' or epic (that's what we say, right?). Maybe it's because the way I was raised and maybe I need war and violence for something to be awesome, but I feel like there are much better religion/mythology then Christianity in terms of stories, not religious ideals and whatnot. Also, have we classified Greek/Roman/Japanese/Chinese/etc. religion as mythology or has it always been mythology? Could I attempt to saying Christianity is simply mythology as well? I'm not sure what the requirements for mythology are.
I suppose I'm full of questions. Also, found some pretty cool pictures.
Well I found one cool picture. This second one is spooky!
