magicbeans. nothing if not awkward.

read the new cerebus in the library. there was six or seven pages of text at the end which dave sim introduced as his "last words on gender". reputation pegs him as a misogynist. and in reading any of his essays, and to a lesser extent cerebus itself, it's clear where people could get that impression. personally, i think i'd label him more of a masculinist. he doesn't necessarily hate women, he just places them below men (those actualized males who haven't bought in to feminist ideas and culture).

he's got plenty of ideas that i don't agree with (his axiom that women are by nature inferior to men, to begin with, as well as some of his musings about religion) but i found myself in agreement with a surprising amount of what he said. maybe it's only surprising because of his own continual assertions that his readers are likely not to be in agreement with his own positions. that the number of non-feminized men that hold these or similar opinions is terribly small (and shrinking) and that even then most of them would not vocalize them.

maybe, in setting himself up as an iconoclast, he's marginalizing all of his ideas, even if some might have a more universal acceptance. maybe it's because his more . . . unique . . . notions cause most people to out of hand dismiss everything he says. or maybe i'm the one in the minority for seeing any truth in his ideas.

i smelled bread baking on the way home. at different points, many blocks apart. it's possible that there were a number of people around the city baking the same sort of bread at the same time. it's possible that i was hallucinating the aroma (i've hallucinated smells before). it's more likely that the wind was blowing in such a way that the scent, which was coming from a single location, continued to find me.

because of dave.s's essay, this got me thinking about god. my thoughts were likely sparked by a comment about mohammed who, as the seal of the prophets, was the last human to truly know the will of god. (dave.s's brand of religion seems to borrow heavily from jewish, christian, and muslim sources.) i don't think i can buy that. if there is in fact an all-knowing, all-seeing god, as per those abrahamic traditions, and he has in fact passed his words down to mankind through the necessarily flawed mouthpiece of various human beings throughout history, what's to say he's stopped?

what's to say that the smell of bread wasn't a message about the will of god? along one block i heard three different sets of windchimes. i walk this way three or more times a week, and have never heard them before. at the end of the block is a church and light from within was pouring through a stained glass window that i had never before noticed.

i don't believe that god was speaking to me. i don't even believe in god as in individual entity. i know this doesn't have much to do with cerebus or dave.s's thoughts on gender. but in a way, it is all connected.