Hey Assholes!
Work was uneventful tonight. I halfheartedly attempted to find work in the dept I was assigned to but then went up to packing to mindlessly stuff air pillows into boxes, let my let my thoughts wander, and physically manifest my deep not giving a fuck-ness about goings-on in my workplace.
An interesting place that my thoughts did wander to, however, was to the awareness that I did not fully understand the basis for the use of the word "asshole" as a term of derogation of another person.
What, indeed, do we mean by "asshole"?
What in fact, is a hole? A hole is not a thing in of itself, it is an empty space. A hole in the ground or in a cheese or in a sponge is just a void defined by the material surrounding it. There can be no holes in a void, technical objections based on wormhole theory notwithstanding. A void, containing nothing, is not something really suitable as a comparison to a person whom you wish to insult, as whatever negative qualities a person may have, a person is not likely to be an empty space.
On the other hand, various things are defined according to the empty spaces that they surround. To describe a 5 liter engine is to describe the hollow space inside the engine. The functional zone of a .30/06 is a specially shaped hollow space wherein a cartridge is contained and down which a bullet travels. According to this standard, an asshole might be usefully defined as the flesh surrounding a hollow space.
But one problem with that is that the asshole itself is not really a hole, as it is closed almost all the time. And when solid materials are passing through it, it is not an empty space, except as holes can be understood to contain things, but I would contend that in this case they are not really holes, but areas of one kind of material surrounded by another type of material. At other times gasses pass through this hole, or orifice, but there are muscles trying to keep the orifice closed, and when small volumes of gas escape the walls of the orifice snap back together in a percussive manner, which, when a steady stream of gas is being expelled, can sometimes produce a recognizable buzzing sound or squeaky tone, according to the mass and tension of the annular orifice-closing muscles involved, and the volume and pressure of gas being expelled.
If you look at a doughnut or a piece of macaroni, you can see that you have a continuous surface; an ant walking on either can continuously walk on either object in any direction, sometimes being on the exterior or interior of either object, but the surface on which is walks is continuous and borderless. If you have a mountain and a valley, where does one begin, and the other end? halfway up, are you halfway up the mountain, or halfway down into the valley? Likewise with the human body. A particularly determined ant could start at any point on the human body, walk through the mouth, down through the digestive tract, out the anus and return back to its starting point. It could make the same trip in the opposite direction. It would experience a continous surface upon which it had walked. Much like a more geographically complex donut.
You could therefore define the human body as a complex assemblage of tissue forming a tube, which has an unfashionable end known as the "asshole".
The mouth and lips are just the other end of the same tube, so why isn't the term "lips" used as an insult interchangeably with the term "asshole"?
Overall, I'm inclined at this point to regard the use of the term asshole as an insult as just a cultural mistake.
It seems to me that the term "asshole" would be more appropriate for use as a friendly salutation that acknowledged the continuous interconnectedness of all phenomena. An asshole derives its identity from the ass surrounding it. And an ass is only such because of the overall structure of the human body of which it is a part. To state that there is an asshole is therefore inextricably intertwined with the statement that there is an ass and therefore an entire human being. One could perhaps make reference to an asshole just by itself; you could arbitrarily select a certain few tissues such as the annular muscles that keep it shut, and say that these things by themselves comprise the Asshole, but how could such things function, let alone exist, in isolation like that? About all you could do with such a form of asshole would be to lightly fry it and serve it with marinara sauce as a sort of calamari.
For this reason, I strongly feel that the usage of the term "asshole" should be changed to a holistic salutation which refers to the unity of structure and harmonious interplay of the structures of the human body. It should be a reference to the overall oneness of living systems, from cells to tissues to organs to organisms to environments.
Therefore,
Merry Christmas, Assholes!
Work was uneventful tonight. I halfheartedly attempted to find work in the dept I was assigned to but then went up to packing to mindlessly stuff air pillows into boxes, let my let my thoughts wander, and physically manifest my deep not giving a fuck-ness about goings-on in my workplace.
An interesting place that my thoughts did wander to, however, was to the awareness that I did not fully understand the basis for the use of the word "asshole" as a term of derogation of another person.
What, indeed, do we mean by "asshole"?
What in fact, is a hole? A hole is not a thing in of itself, it is an empty space. A hole in the ground or in a cheese or in a sponge is just a void defined by the material surrounding it. There can be no holes in a void, technical objections based on wormhole theory notwithstanding. A void, containing nothing, is not something really suitable as a comparison to a person whom you wish to insult, as whatever negative qualities a person may have, a person is not likely to be an empty space.
On the other hand, various things are defined according to the empty spaces that they surround. To describe a 5 liter engine is to describe the hollow space inside the engine. The functional zone of a .30/06 is a specially shaped hollow space wherein a cartridge is contained and down which a bullet travels. According to this standard, an asshole might be usefully defined as the flesh surrounding a hollow space.
But one problem with that is that the asshole itself is not really a hole, as it is closed almost all the time. And when solid materials are passing through it, it is not an empty space, except as holes can be understood to contain things, but I would contend that in this case they are not really holes, but areas of one kind of material surrounded by another type of material. At other times gasses pass through this hole, or orifice, but there are muscles trying to keep the orifice closed, and when small volumes of gas escape the walls of the orifice snap back together in a percussive manner, which, when a steady stream of gas is being expelled, can sometimes produce a recognizable buzzing sound or squeaky tone, according to the mass and tension of the annular orifice-closing muscles involved, and the volume and pressure of gas being expelled.
If you look at a doughnut or a piece of macaroni, you can see that you have a continuous surface; an ant walking on either can continuously walk on either object in any direction, sometimes being on the exterior or interior of either object, but the surface on which is walks is continuous and borderless. If you have a mountain and a valley, where does one begin, and the other end? halfway up, are you halfway up the mountain, or halfway down into the valley? Likewise with the human body. A particularly determined ant could start at any point on the human body, walk through the mouth, down through the digestive tract, out the anus and return back to its starting point. It could make the same trip in the opposite direction. It would experience a continous surface upon which it had walked. Much like a more geographically complex donut.
You could therefore define the human body as a complex assemblage of tissue forming a tube, which has an unfashionable end known as the "asshole".
The mouth and lips are just the other end of the same tube, so why isn't the term "lips" used as an insult interchangeably with the term "asshole"?
Overall, I'm inclined at this point to regard the use of the term asshole as an insult as just a cultural mistake.
It seems to me that the term "asshole" would be more appropriate for use as a friendly salutation that acknowledged the continuous interconnectedness of all phenomena. An asshole derives its identity from the ass surrounding it. And an ass is only such because of the overall structure of the human body of which it is a part. To state that there is an asshole is therefore inextricably intertwined with the statement that there is an ass and therefore an entire human being. One could perhaps make reference to an asshole just by itself; you could arbitrarily select a certain few tissues such as the annular muscles that keep it shut, and say that these things by themselves comprise the Asshole, but how could such things function, let alone exist, in isolation like that? About all you could do with such a form of asshole would be to lightly fry it and serve it with marinara sauce as a sort of calamari.
For this reason, I strongly feel that the usage of the term "asshole" should be changed to a holistic salutation which refers to the unity of structure and harmonious interplay of the structures of the human body. It should be a reference to the overall oneness of living systems, from cells to tissues to organs to organisms to environments.
Therefore,
Merry Christmas, Assholes!
fuck you too fucking fuck face
xxxxx