Reading harold_maude's journal

The bigger, better more wide open, have more stuff, obtain..to wit, to be a more complete individual.
Or so it would seem.
To expand, to open, to take on and then step back and consider the experience.

That's what gateways are about. The things we participate in that lead us to more.
A bigger vista, or in some cases, a wider variety of things.

Anything can be a gateway. I think what defines something as a gateway would be the question does it make us want more.

We have this friend who loves tuna fish. The stuff that comes in a can. He said that the fresh stuff is too rich, and so he went back to the tuna in a can.
He would eat it several times a week.
One day while he was eating and we had been talking about the movie "reefer madness" and all the laws concerning industral hemp, and how it used to be leagal and the farmers in the midwest were encouraged to grow it durrning world war 2, I decited that tuna was a gateway fish.

And told him so. We laughed at the idea that tuna could be looked at that way, and even thought that it would make a great t-shirt.
I would wear one, and on the back it would say something like,
tuna leads to other fish, or this is your mind, this is your mind on tuna, and have a frying pan and then one with a can of tuna in the pan right next to it.

Sort of poking fun at all the hysteria put out there by our goverment.
Things that don't work, such as DARE. It was intended as a drug intervention education program, but all the people that I know who went through it said that all it did for them was show them what the drugs they eventually ended up trying looked like.

There was some disgussion as to what the best deterant might be to keep kids drug free, and the general concenses was to have them watch "Requiem for a Dream"
That show the reality of what happens to people who use drugs and get hooked. It's pretty intense, but the message is clear.
And effective.
I know that it had a huge impact on me, and everyone who has seen it has been greatly distrubed by it, and if they were thinking about thoes drugs, it made them walk away from the idea.

The thing about gateways is that there is only desire involved, for more, that's why they are gateways. And to close the door to the gateway, the end result must be seen, not the tools to get through the gateway.

The desire to have what others have can be a gateway as well.
I think about all the recient posts I've read that have to do with relationships, and it occured to me that if one were to watch the end results of the relationships around them, and then make a choice based not on peer pressure, but rather the end result, there might not be so many people getting disapointed and hurt.
just a thought.

I'm not sure how I feel about gateways. It's a mix I guess.
I think what determines how I feel about a particular one is whether it's something good or not.
But then learning lessons obtained by walking through gateways arn't a bad thing...so you see my delemia in all of this.

I guess you could say, to gateway or not to gateway, that is the quandery of the moment.

It only looks that way because your standing on your head.