SPIRITUAL SOAP: Going Beyond Good and Ye

We're all breaking down, so make it interesting

Before we were The Black Sheep, we were a newsletter named Spiritual Soap. Please enjoy this article from our history!

You can’t remember much from your youngest years. You didn’t know much, so your thoughts probably weren’t complex enough to warrant intellectual memories. Instead you have emotional memories. Your childhood is mostly feelings: a disappointed expression, a moment of fear, watching another kid prevail in the preschool hierarchy where you failed.

Childhood lingers within you like a wordless language, only to be recalled with an ancient spell that merges the past with the present.

I felt a childhood memory today. It came back to me like something smokey, something only a willingness to dive into an irrational, flawed place within me can yield. That memory is why I’m writing this now and sending it only an hour later (two glasses of wine also helped).

If you’re reading this, it’s probably not your first time reading my writing. You know my prose is normally as measured as the high stakes that bomb defusion or brain surgery would require, despite my biggest causalities only being reputation and ego.

I’m careful with my words, always consulting with the collective’s voice lodged within my head reminding me what contains the possible fuel for some stranger’s outrage. My writing is a note on a task list, scheduled into my day among appointments and errands.

And then I did this:

A twinge of humor, curiosity, and amusement will yield the deepest experience from reacting to that tweet. You can choose one-dimensional outrage or subtle judgment, but those filters won’t take you far.

For context, that tweet was followed by this:

Sam Harris tweeted a tiresome condemnation of Kanye’s craziness, which is his right, but struck me with a feeling I keep meeting again and again: is this all there is?

I understand the desire to condemn the condemnable, but there’s something frankly depressing about watching a once intellectual powerhouse place his focus on articulating the obvious. There’s something depressing about an entire culture parading an infamously inarticulate and offensive rapper around the media circuit and feigning shock when he’s inarticulate and offensive. Is this all there is?