GO FERAL: PART 1

GO FERAL: PART 1

TRAGICALLY, YOU CAN’T CUT THE THROAT OF EVERY COCKSUCKER WHOSE CHARACTER IT WOULD IMPROVE.

A PREFACE:

Of late, I have received a tremendous volume of emails from people who wish to have me hold their hands. Like small children as they make their way through the gym, constantly looking to me for affirmation and recognition as they make exercise, set, and rep selections.  Those are the “good” emails.  The bad ones are the nebulous requests for assistance in designing a program to achieve equally nebulous goals issued only after a tremendous amount of dick sucking and bullshittery. In stark defiance of every single word I’ve thus posted on this site.  As such, it seems that my readership has devolved into a pack of mewling babies. Who wish to have me push their carriages through the gym and suck my cock rather than their mommy’s tit as I do so.

 

The entire purpose of this site is to encourage free thought, strength of will, and conscious action.  I don’t wish to mollycoddle a pack of pussies through their daily lives and resent the implication that I do.  Should you think I’m addressing you, emailers, I more than likely am.  The shit is getting way out of hand.  I like helping people out. Many of my readers will attest to the fact that I’ve gone to great lengths to do so.

When I receive an email, however, that essentially amounts to “I want to be exactly like you, Jamie, so please tell me everything I need to so that I can be your doppelganger". I want to smash my goddamn computer on the ground and set fire to everything I’ve ever written.  I want to club baby seals and mail their shattered bodies stuffed with dogshit to these idiots as a reply. Rather than turn off my computer in disgust and wonder why the hell I even bother.

Instead, I shall make yet another lofty intellectual appeal replete. Anthropological reason for why humans shouldn’t suck as a rejoinder to this spate of bullshit. In hopes that for once you people will get the goddamned message.

That message is simple:

YOU CAN AND SHOULD BE BETTER, STRONGER, FASTER, LEANER, AND MORE LEARNED THAN YOU ARE. AND THE ONLY ONE WHO CAN MAKE YOU SO IS YOU.

Don’t send me an email how to start down the path. Forget asking me for recommendations on what stupid ass shorts you should wear to the gym.  If you need that much handholding, have your parent or caretaker lead you to the nearest gun shop. Buy yourself a bullet and a gun, and put yourself out of your family’s misery.

THE GODDAMN TRUTH: 

I shall now point you to some of historical precedents the lot of you have likely never considered yet serve as an awesome reminder that the human animal is far more capable than we allow it to be at everything that animal wishes to do.  The only thing preventing people from achieving the amazing is their brain, which due to a variety of factors tells us that we’re weaker, slower, dumber, and more pathetic than should have ever become acceptable.  This is reinforced by a couple of individual issues, namely your brain’s reliance on automaticity to conserve energy and the fact that groupthink is overwhelmingly negative and influences your thinking in a similarly negative way.  When unencumbered by those things, however, humans are capable of incredible shit- in particular, people who’ve never been told they cannot do something physically challenging end up being nearly superhuman.

There’s only one way to avoid the odious influence of your fellow man- to grow up in an environment isolated from humans.  People who do so are typically referred to as “feral” and as you can imagine, are 10,000 different kinds of awesome.  Though many of the most amazing stories have since been debunked as hoaxes (most notably the gazelle-boys who were reported to have outrun Jeeps and helicopters to evade their pursuers), there are still enough true stories about people who became incredibly strong and fast simply because they didn’t know any better to evoke a response in even the toughest of critics.

“WHEN COAXED FROM A TREE IN SONGI NEAR CHALONS IN THE FRENCH DISTRICT OF CHAMPAGNE IN 1731, SHE WAS AGED ABOUT 10, BAREFOOT, AND DRESSED IN RAGS AND SKINS WITH A GOURD LEAF ON HER HEAD. IN A POUCH SHE CARRIED A CUDGEL AND A KNIFE INSCRIBED WITH INDECIPHERABLE CHARACTERS. SHE SHRIEKED AND SQUEAKED, AND WAS SO DIRTY (OR POSSIBLY PAINTED) THAT SHE WAS MISTAKEN FOR A BLACK CHILD. HER DIET CONSISTED OF BIRDS, FROGS AND FISH, LEAVES, BRANCHES AND ROOTS. GIVEN A RABBIT, SHE IMMEDIATELY SKINNED AND DEVOURED IT.

“HER FINGERS AND IN PARTICULAR HER THUMBS, WERE EXTRAORDINARILY LARGE,” ACCORDING TO A CONTEMPORARY WITNESS, THE FAMOUS SCIENTIST CHARLES MARIE DE LA CONDAMINE. SHE IS SAID TO HAVE USED HER THUMBS TO DIG OUT ROOTS AND SWING FROM TREE TO TREE LIKE A MONKEY. SHE WAS A VERY FAST RUNNER AND HAD PHENOMENALLY SHARP EYESIGHT. WHEN THE QUEEN OF POLAND, THE MOTHER OF THE FRENCH QUEEN, PASSED THROUGH CHAMPAGNE IN 1737 TO TAKE POSSESSION OF THE DUCHY OF LORRAINE, SHE HEARD ABOUT THE GIRL AND TOOK HER HUNTING, WHERE SHE OUTRAN AND KILLED RABBITS” (WILD THINGS).

For those of you who are unfamiliar with the practice of coursing, you’re likely unclear on exactly how hard it is to outrun a rabbit.  To put it plainly, if you can outrun a rabbit, you’d set records at the NFL Combine in the 3-cone drill and the 20 yard shuttle- you’d be able to change directions at speed faster than many greyhounds, and could haul ass uphill.  Thus, not only did this broad have elite-level speed at the age of ten, but she had the upper body strength of a gymnast- thus making her the uncrowned female champion of the CrossFit games simply because she was never told she couldn’t be amazing by the people around her.

There have been many other feral children reported over the ages, ranging from bear-children to wolf-children, and even children raised by goats, pigs, and birds.  Those that weren’t evidently abandoned by their parents for various infirmities (the Russians seem to be fond of that, and most of the dog-children and wolf-children seem to come from Russia or former Russian Republics) are by all accounts superhuman and are generally regarded as being insanely fast quadrupedal runners.  Many of them, Indian wolf-boys, were said to be faster on all fours than the fastest people in the area, which is fairly ridiculous given that humans are in no way suited to running on all fours (Wild Things, Wikipedia).

“FOURTEEN WOLF-CHILDREN WERE FOUND IN INDIA BETWEEN 1841 AND 1895, SEVEN OF WHICH WERE DESCRIBED BY GENERAL WH SLEEMAN, THE NEMESIS OF THE THUGS.  THE FIRST WAS CAPTURED IN HASUNPUR (NEAR SULTANPUR IN WHAT IS NOW UTTAR PRADESH) AND SHOWED MOST OF THE TYPICAL WOLF CHILD CHARACTERISTICS. HIS FAVOURITE FOOD WAS RAW MEAT, AND HE WAS UNABLE TO SPEAK. ‘THERE WERE EVIDENT SIGNS, ON HIS KNEES AND ELBOWS, OF HIS HAVING GONE ON ALL-FOURS,’ WROTE SLEEMAN; ‘AND WHEN ASKED TO RUN ON ALL-FOURS, HE USED TO DO SO, AND WENT SO FAST THAT NO-ONE COULD OVERTAKE HIM’” (WILD THINGS).

Additionally, these children were all reported to be much less sensitive to pain and the elements than the average person, which is a trait shared by Buddhist monks who have trained themselves to ignore pain (Wild Things, WikipediaA).

“MONKS IN TIBET-THAT MOUNTAINOUS COUNTRY SO BLESSED WITH ODDITIES-CAN CONSCIOUSLY RAISE THE TEMPERATURE IN THEIR HANDS AND FEET 6-7º C (10-12º F), IN LABORATORY CONDITIONS (BENSON, ET AL., 1982). THERE APPEAR TO BE SEVERAL METHODS OF G TUM-MO MEDITATION, AS DESCRIBED BY ALEXANDRA DAVID-NEEL (1965), BUT ALL SEEM TO INVOLVE THE VISUALIZATION OF ONESELF FILLED WITH FIRE. WHETHER, FOR ADEPTS, SUCH VISUALIZATION IS NECESSARY FOR CONTROL OF BODY TEMPERATURE IS NOT CLEAR TO ME, BECAUSE BENSON REPORTS THAT ONE OF HIS RESEARCH PARTICIPANTS BEGAN UNDERGOING G-TUMMO CHANGES EVERY TIME HE SAT DOWN. MONKS WILL EVEN HAVE LITTLE CONTESTS WHERE THEY SPEND A NIGHT ON A RIVERBANK, REPEATEDLY DRAPING THEMSELVES WITH WET SHEETS, AND SEEING WHO CAN DRY THE MOST. I GET COLD JUST THINKING ABOUT IT.
IT PRESUMABLY TAKES SOME TIME TO DEVELOP THIS ABILITY, BUT APPARENTLY NOT SO MUCH THAT IT IS RARE IN TIBET: DAVID-NEEL CLAIMS THAT MOST TIBETANS HAVE THE KNOWLEDGE OF HOW TO DO IT, AND THAT THEY PUT IT TO PRACTICAL USE” (SAVAGE MINDS).

Thus, you have a bit of scientific support for the anecdotal evidence I’ve provided- the only thing standing in the way of your greatness is the giant, bloody vagina sitting atop your shoulders.  Ellen Langer explained in her book Counterclockwise that the second step in the “psychology of possibility” is to try out new things without evaluating ourselves as we go along (Langer 16).  The lack of evaluation of essential for exceeding who you are, and who you think you could be.  

If you push yourself to try new shit, shit you never thought you’d be able to do, you could surprise yourself.  The key, however, is to leave your judgement of yourself behind.  You cannot walk into the gym wearing a powdered wig and swinging a gavel at every opportunity- should you do so, you remove both the possibility for experimentation and any probability of greatness, because you’ll be too busy talking shit to yourself, convincing yourself that you’re incapable and weak and useless as everyone around you to attack the goddamn weights and be a goddamned superman.

It’s also essential that you ape the feral children I mentioned earlier at this point and isolate yourself from people from time to time (or as I do with my headphones), because society will tell you that you’re incapable, that you’re weak, that you’re unable to handle the workload, or the weight, or the exercise.  In interdependent communities, people will turn against you if you’re perceived as different- ‘people who departed from the norm could be dangerous to the whole community- whether they were rich or very poor.  Either way, there was a tendency to seek the center and to resent people who were misfits” (Brafman 124).

If you haven’t looked around the gym recently, you might want to take note of this, because gyms are thoroughly interdependent communities.  Everyone’s screwing everyone, everyone’s watching everyone, and everyone is all up in everyone’s shit.  You probably know more crazy bullshit rumors about the assholes in your gym than you do about your own family members, and you know more about the guys who lift on your “shift” than you do about the most prominent lifters in your sport.

 As such, anything you do that runs counter to the norm is being constantly evaluated, judged, and likely talked down when you’re not around if you’re doing anything out of the norm.  Thus, if you wall yourself off from all the nonsense and naysaying and bullshit with a massive wall of shrieking metal, you can create your own feral paradise in which anything is possible, so long as you believe it’s so.

Sources:
Brafman, Ori and Rom Brafman.  Sway: The Irresistable Pull of Irrational Behavior.  Doubletree: New York, 2008.

Cromie, William J. Meditation changes temperatures.  harvard Gazette.  18 Apr 2002.  Web.  12 Aug 2019.  https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2002/04/meditation-changes-temperatures/

Feral Child.  Wikipedia.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Feral_child#cite_note-28

Langer, Ellen.  Counterclockwise:  Mindful Health and The Power of Possibility.  New York:  Ballantine, 2009.

Savage Minds: g Tum-mo Heat Meditation.  International Cognition and Culture Institute.  10/08/2009.  http://www.cognitionandculture.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=525:g-tum-mo-heat-meditation&catid=40&Itemid=34

Sieveking, Paul.  Wild Things: Feral Children.  http://www.forteantimes.com/features/articles/232/wild_things_feral_children.html

 

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