Tag Archives: chapter excerpt
Redacted, retracted, redux
I don’t know what it is that puts me in a mood like this, this feeling of smugness, this desire not to believe in myself, to always be wrong, always chasing the perfect 100 on a test score as if I’ll never get it, running from my mistakes, fleeing into the cosmos.
Why?
Because of both my faith in AND my fear of our species’ imperfections.
I do not want to be successful.
Instead, always vigilant, looking for the crack in the veneer, analysing the pinhole leak in the dam, contemplating the lack of understanding everything going on in a cubic centimeter of dirt.
Why?
Because we can make films about our mistakes, films which contain their own mistakes, and we learn from neither, or the lessons we learn and the solutions we apply solve a different set of problems because time is irrelevant, only relative.
That is why we seek perfection in our theosophical beliefs.
Otherwise, tarnish, rust and decay should be taken as normal aspects of our impermanence.
I am chasing my tail in an M.C. Escher print.
According to the IMF, the euro zone will remain the sick man of the world in 2013
According to English translation of an online article on http://www.lemonde.fr, that is.
News that makes no sense
How and why do I live in the past, present and future?
The Contrarian’s Contrarian
Poiu spent all morning in observation of a snail glide across the backyard, grass blade to grass blade, minidirtclod to minidirtclod, and onto the sidewalk where, in the heat of the sun, it retracted into its shell and waited for the cool of evening to return.
The armadillo passed by both of them without noticing their odd relationship.
The scientist and the experiment.
Question: does an observed snail change its behaviour?
Experiment: Pick up snail from sidewalk, move it to starting position. Observe and record its behaviour as it heads toward sidewalk. Return snail to starting position. Does snail’s path deviate when unobserved the next day? Return at end of next day and see where it ended up, check its movements.
Poiu shook his head. Why did his parents decide to name him after a row of English letters on a QWERTY keyboard? What were they thinking?
Poiu looked at the list of assumptions in his experiment.
At age two, his thought-t0-text rate was slower than his older sister’s but his reasoning powers were more advanced despite his mother’s measured intelligence and intellectual output greater than his father’s.
From those thoughts alone, he deduced that gender was not directly related to intelligence, given the same number of inputs and genetic propensity for logical rather than emotional thought development.
Poiu looked at the embedded display screen woven into his optic nerve and glanced at the report detailing the results of the experiment being edited by his onboard computer assistant.
The assumptions were wide-ranging, from the lack of predators to the slight change in the snail’s body weight because of growth and/or water loss to the availability of nutrition between starting point and sidewalk to the number of unseen parasites and snail pests.
What about prevailing winds or UV radiation spikes?
A snail’s central nervous system can’t be too complicated but an outdoor environment can.
Poiu proceeded with publishing the preliminary experiment results.
Within microseconds, Poiu’s playmates provided valuable criticism of the report, some he had thought of and some he would never have guessed.
Back to the drawing board, as they said in the 21st century!
Tuttle or Buttle?
Graham: Misspelling helped Tsarnaev elude FBI : http://wapo.st/12C4rCS
Two data points for the data
Is fat a sin?
Should sugar and fat of foodstuff be taxed according to percentage compared to healthy content?
Should unhealthy snacks have an age limit purchase cutoff like cigarettes and alcohol?
Freedom to think without an assigned theme or classroom score
Being here, with me, an Internet radio station and the sun-fed trees outside my window, I’m free to expand my thought patterns upon this blank canvas of an electronic writing pad.
Mixing metaphors if I choose.
If still waters run deep, why do oceans have waves?
Mixing media of varying density and thickness.
My father…a year ago, we were working with medical professionals to seek a path of better health for Dad, “better” being a term we wished for and hoped for more than knew was an illusive condition.
My typical reaction to “serious” situations, the result of turning nervous worry into positive joking action, constantly kept me on the edge of making comments my father, should he have been in a better mood/thought set, would not have approved.
Our senses of humour were not aligned.
I can ask myself why at this point, without tears or sadness seeping into my wonderment, why Dad did not understand or chose not to encourage my funny side.
He implied more than said that the man of laughter has a harder way to tread to the pinnacle of success than a man who treats everyone with seriousness and respect for their emotions/life conditions (i.e., the burdens they bear that are eased with sympathy and empathy).
That is, of course, my interpretation.
But I have heard others tell me that laughing at the wrong time or not taking adult responsibilities is not what my physical presence inspires others to encourage.
I have had plenty enough of what others expect.
Splitting into nearly schizophrenic thought sets to accommodate others and myself at the same time is not the set of states of energy I want to maintain and nourish.
After all, the self is a self-delusional illusion, a trick of chemical reactions that has brought nature to this point, with black pixels outlined on a white-light background, to examine itself, without reproductive needs being met, to spin in place while setting conditions for the next outburst of creativity that knows no ethical/moral boundaries, no positive or negative thought patterns, simply taking the sets of states of energy as is and moving on into the next imaginary moment/time period.
While our species holds public discussions about the subcultural struggles of how to treat the non-heterosexual members, how do other species behave?
I, for one, have seven billion friends to spend time with, some I have been conditioned to treat as equals and some I have been conditioned to hold at arm’s length for at least a brief period of time because our differences are sufficient to keep me from immediately understanding what makes us members of the same species.
We invoke the ancient writings of our ancestors to protect us from having to question or having to accept that subcultures rise and fall in popularity.
We rarely see that talking about our “enemies,” whether with good or bad word patterns, gives them validity.
Memes…
Symbols…
From the 10,000 year/mile distance, the memes and symbols merge into bigger patterns.
Tempests in the teapot of a planet, barely making waves in a solar system, practically invisible in a galaxy, hardly discernible in a supercluster.
Entertaining, nonetheless.
Because I am comfortable in the meaninglessness of my insignificance, the self a temporary confluence of states of energy, I have found the longer view a driving force in my writing, in my [non]existence, seeing 13528 days, rotations of Earth upon its tilted axis, into an imaginary future while having fun laughing about the tragedies of the moment, including my own.
It is, at the same time, a self-examination of one as a member of a species.
Is it not statistically normal to want to reproduce and provide shelter for one’s mammalian offspring, the majority of whom are right-handed, heterosexual, male, dark-haired and dark-eyed non-alpha primates?
I am left-handed, heterosexual, male, red/white-haired, green-eyed and non-alpha, without children.
Thus, statistically, not normal. Abnormal.
Why, then, am I here recording my presence for the majority to, perhaps, read?
Why, indeed.
The confluence of states of energy, this “me” that “I” say does not exist, is the answer.
Avoiding the messy, daily adult responsibilities of an almost 51-year old man, that’s who and what.
Long ago mentally prepared to die at any time, having successfully achieved the goals of my childhood desire to be a published author.
The rest is an endless buffet of desserts filled with laughter and inappropriate humorous thoughts, thankful that the rest of the species is here to support me with characters and scenes to write during the remainder of my life.

