Both optimists and pessimists are incorrect. Life is good. Life is also bad. And, yes, life can be downright horrifying to look at. Though it comforts people to develop some label for individuals, to boil them down to either absolute positive or negative personality traits, this is extremely misleading for each individual is complex, multi-faceted and tragically misunderstood. Yet still people continue to try to separate the good from the bad, the intelligent from the stupid, the wheat from the chaff. But this is an impossibility. No one is good at everything and so no one person is always good. No one knows everything and so there are no people who know it all. There really is no such thing as expertise; there are only people who tend to be correct more than others. There is no such thing as a good leader, only leaders who are satisfactory and unsatisfactory. Even a five star meal will taste like a cow pie if we are sick. Perception is the ultimate judge of character and what is true varies from experience to experience. And so there is goodness and ugliness in everything on the earth. I think a perfect example of this in the modern era is a particular incident I once saw on the news, where a car thief furiously drove back to the scene of his crime only to get out and berate the owner of the car for leaving her child in the backseat of the car. The car thief returned the child to the mother unharmed, got back into the recently jacked vehicle and went along his merry way. That was a somewhat comical example, but there is truth in humor. That car thief, in a sense, is a bit of a hero. He risked being arrested to return the poor child to his mother; of course he would have never been in that situation in the first place had he not put himself there by being a thief. While the car thief may be in the wrong, there is a certain romanticism about a person who risk going to jail all to reunite a child with his mother. There is always beauty in tragedy, always love to be found in hatred. This is the natural way of things. As I listened to this episode, I was reminded of the story of Medusa, a beautiful young woman turned into a mutant being by a vengeful god. Medusa was mortal, but her siblings were not. She was beautiful until she disgraced the temple of Athena, provoking Athena's wrath. It was Athena, the Olympian goddess of war and and wisdom, that punished Athena for being raped by Poseidon in Athena's temple. That's right, Medusa was punished for being raped and it was Athena, the goddess of wisdom and, paradoxically, peace who saw fit to torture Medusa by stripping her of her natural beauty. The irony there is so unbearable that just thinking about it almost turns you to stone. Athena was also quite beautiful, but she was also quite territorial and downright spiteful at times; this is not only proof that wisdom can harden the heart, but that beauty is only skin deep. Even the gods are never perfect; in fact, they're often prone to madness. Indeed, perfection itself is nothing more than a myth. I think that many people vainly hunt for things like wisdom, beauty and perfection for the same reasons the ancient Greeks wrote about vengeful and sex obsessed gods, to feel a sense of connection to the heroic, the valiant, the perfect, even when life itself, at times anyway, is a horror show. I personally cannot point at any one person or group of people and say that they are all bad, nor can I say that they are perfect. I was never all that good at writing myths. I can only tell you the whole truth, even while knowing that you secretly desire sweet nothings. There is goodness in those you consider evil, just as there is evil in those you consider heroic. I used to be a right wing conspiracy theorist and now here I am searching for the truth, but in an honest way this time around. Though I once played the role of the villain, I now make up for it by playing the hero. And so the struggle continues.