Concerning Matches and Redneck Women…

It’s an old saying, an old superstition if you will that has a solid basis in fact.  I’m pretty sure it began among the infantrymen, the soldiers of the great wars and it has to do with not getting yourself shot.  It’s said to be terrible luck to be the third man to light his cigarette from the same match.  Makes sense, by the time the third guy gets a light the sniper out there in the darkness has a bullet on the way aimed at that tiny dot of light that just happens to be right in front of your face. It dawns on me though I’ve seen something concerning women that also comes in sets of three, and in point of fact is exactly opposite the first consideration.

Life at my House Number 39

At times I think to cut it off,

            this world of art

            this world of soft

Turn return the world that's real,

            fire and flame

            torque and steel

Leave the flowing emo-stain

            to cover hearts

            that brandish pain

As fortunes burned to buy

            …

            a name.

I might join... would you?

We are not young, but neither are we old.  Life is not before us, nor behind us, we are astride our life, living in it, making it what it is.  We each have our mate and family, the in-laws and outlaws and friends, we are not part of each other’s world of real life.  But here in this place which is not the world of our real lives we have each other to help us build a second and secret life from the dreams and desires we set aside to live in the world of our public reality. 

You see, in this place the perfect stranger rule holds,  we don’t share the names we use in our world of real life, we don’t share the details.  We have no more idea about those than you do.  We really don't know each other at all, even though we know the most intimate details of each other's dreams. What we do know is there is a freedom here to be found nowhere else.

There is only one exception to the perfect stranger rule and that is of course Mrs. A and myself.  We were on the periphery of each other’s world when we co-authored the first of these stories.  No one else in our real life knows of our stories, but we do know each other's name and face.  We carry a love for each other and to protect the love between us we refuse to become part of each other’s first and public life even in secret.  When she moved away a few months after we began I didn't ask, and she didn't offer, her new address... we put ourselves as close to perfect strangers as we could.

But as the affair played out in it's strange intimacy we found the stories we'd built between us proved of value in understanding how the person we are beneath the surface fits and functions within the world of our public reality, and so we’ve agreed to share these stories with you as an invitation to take a pen name, and a partner, and when you and your partner are satisfied with a story share what you built between you.  Who knows who might find some bit of understanding in someone else’s story that will, in the end, become the wisdom needed to nurture, preserve and protect what is wholesome in the world of real life.

***   ***   ***

===originally published 7/2012===

So, is this the flyleaf from some publication of a writers club, or is it perhaps the first of the stories in such a work?  Would you join such a club?

Of Man and Muse

The verse pretty well says it all, but if you want the back story read on...

Flat...

Woman in Water
image has nothing to do with anything

That would be the word of the day: flat.  Flat world, flat life, flat hope, just your basic planer existence revolving around a serious skirmish with yet another iteration of the public school proto pneumonia grunge-bug.  It’s been over two weeks of intestinal infighting and bronchial raid and run to dislodge the invaders.  They’re losing ground, I’m winning, no mercenary antibodies in the fight, but damn.  It do eat up time and after a while you just feel... flat.  That thousand yard stare starts taking over.  Still though there are things to be seen at the end of that thousand yards, usually in the reflections populating a windowpane in one of those intoxinated fever dreams.  You know, the things you see in the reflection that just flat aren’t there when you turn and look into the room, but they’re still there in the reflection when you look back.  Seen some sights in that window last couple of days, yup, yessir I have.  Not totally sure what to make of some of them.

For a tamer example:  I walked out a back door I did, didn’t think much of it, something to do with the dog I think, only to discover a twenty, thirty head orgy rolling around in my backyard.  Didn’t think much of that either believe it or not, pretty normal looking people indulging in a pretty normal looking fuck fest.  One of the revelers, a pleasingly plump English looking lass who was riding reverse cowgirl (she reminded me of Lulu in “To Sir with Love” ) looked up at me and in a tone of voice somewhere between petulant and bored said  “please tell me you’re not gonna go all grandma judgmental about this” to which I replied “This, nah, no problem with this but it would have been nice to have warned the roommates ya’ll will be using the garden hose a lot... been nice to know why there’s no water pressure in the bathroom.”  Right.  

Interesting thing was the skyline beyond the back fence... I recognized that horizon instantly, that was the scene as seen looking out the back door from the rent house next door to the hell house... makes me wonder which back door I walked out of.  The back wall of the hell house is still a total blank, no effort of will awake or in sentient slumber has ever shown me that back door even though I know it has to be in my memory somewhere.  Oh well.  The dreams of intoxination can be as strange as anything induced by any deliberate indulgence, and often of more value once you can connect a line from the dream to the circumstance that gave it form.

Then of course there was the concurrent case of porous insulation, a condition rumored among the garage horror stories but never seen before in the real world.  I’m now on record in support of the legend, do believe I’ve now bumped into a case of just that on Brutus.  Little to tell, just a slight discoloration and a blistery looking deformation as if some tiny drop of solvent had attacked the insulation on the wires, allowing them to cross connect anytime relative humidity made for a nice wet kiss.  Right.  The answer? A whole lot of electrical tape wrapped most carefully.  Ok, readings back to normal on that leg of the harness, just have to wait for a good rainstorm to see if it worked well enough.    Old fart is beyond running great, he’s getting into the awesome ranges, but… still cantankerous as his owner. I’m tired of chasing wiring problems.

And of course it can’t really be called a proper hack bs filler post without something from the wonderfully dysfunctional world of world news.  Based on a picture I saw (purportedly  taken from ISIS’ recruiting effort) I’m starting to wonder how many of the ISIS fighters are in actual fact biologically homosexual living in titanium coffins instead of closets and dedicated to dying for the cause because the bonds of battle are as close as their culture will allow them to get?  I mean really, about the only thing that will weld two lives tighter than sharing a lover’s bed is sharing a goddamn foxhole and the boys in that picture sure looked queer to me.  If true what a bitter joke that would turn out to be, a viscously bitter joke in so many different directions.

Carrying Chaos

Anyway, the word of the day is flat.  Which, if this thing is unwinding in alphabetical order, might mean you’ll want to stay up wind for a bit because there’s really no telling what the word of tomorrow might be ;-)

JPEG Humanity… 60% Compression, 40% Smoothing

Let’s face it, probably the largest threat to humanity at the moment is population pressure.  Even more than the demands for physical resources is the challenge of living with the stress generated by so very, very many personalities attempting to cohabitate on one rather overstuffed planet. 

The physical options for fixing this look rather grim, they involve things like “random population reduction” (read war or plague) or perhaps “compulsory population attrition” (read mandatory sterility), you know, those good old Orwellian desperation generated double think euphemisms for “we need to get rid of about half of us.”  Hmmmm… all very biblical when you get right down to it.  Maybe the mark of the beast will turn out to be a USDA stamp of some sort like in the movie “Soylent Green.”  I don’t know, I don’t really want to know.

But that’s just the physical side of the coin.  Maybe the brains that be have decided to approach the problem from the other side of the issue, decided that if enough personalities can be structured as functionally identical then the stress levels can be held manageable for long enough to not need such drastic measures.  After all, the stress is being generated by so many different personalities, so many unique personalities putting unique loading's on the social systems.  Perhaps they’re thinking that if ten or a hundred or a thousand physical bodies share one unique personality then the stress levels will fall by the same order of magnitude and genocide of one form or another can be avoided.

If that’s the case then the Machiavellian maneuverings of mass technology take on an entirely different perspective.  From that perspective the digi-drone gestalt resolves out as the saving grace of the human race, their essential suicide of self a noble sacrifice to save the race. 

What a thought: AT&T saved the world with a smart phone.  What a thought.  Think that one deserves a full double shot of good whiskey.

From the Odds and Ends File...

You know, it dawns on me I've never, ever, encountered a neglected kitchen where there wasn't just a running river of mommy issues ranging from heavy to severe in direct proportion to the depth of the pile.  Oh well, I suppose this shouldn't really be that big a mystery, not really, not since the only thing more maternal than washing dishes is childbirth.

The Subject was Coffee...

===originally published Jan 25 2012===

Back in 1968 when my dad died we took him to his home in southern Idaho to bury him.  His heart never really left the high plains of his birth, it was really the only choice.  My mom's brother drove us up there, it was a long haul from Los Angeles.

Let me fill in few details, so the rest of this makes sense.  My father was from a pioneering family that arrived in Idaho with the Mormon migrations, the family had subscribed to that faith for several generations at that point.  They were good people, they lived their faith rather than exploited it, I have no complaints with them even though I myself do not subscribe.  My mom on the other hand was a recent convert to Mormonism when she married my dad, and as converts so often will took everything to the extreme.  First fervor the Catholic folk call it, although I suspect my mother had motivations even beyond that.  

The e-cig Affair -or- Practical Paranoia in the Pursuit of Pussy

They tried, Gods above know they tried.  They had the motives understood, but the scientific and technical understanding to support those motives were beyond their reach.  I’m speaking of course of the great dystopian writers: Orwell, Huxley, Levine and the like.  Now, if the good doctor Isaac Asimov had been one to write horror stories based on social deformities HE might have been able to foresee the potentials, he did have both the imagination and the academic scope to infiltrate and  expose the darker realms of science.  But sadly he just liked to write good science fiction yarns, the world never had the advantage of his perception in such terrestrial realms beyond the power of statistics wielded benign.  Rust in Peace, R. Daneel Olivaw.

Such science-horror stories are nothing new, of course not, Mary Shelly started it all back when what passed for science couldn’t pass a modern high school course on the subject.  The writers did what they could, it’s up to the rest of us to understand and actually mount a defense against the nightmares they presented being translated into reality.  Normally I’m not one to go paranoid just because I’m ignorant of something, that would be destructive foolishness for there must be a motive before the most lethal of things becomes a threat.

Into the fray...

It’s just a little crackerbox of a two story duplex, and it should have been my first clue as to what kind of shape it was in when it was part of the deal to begin with.  You know, one of those ‘Here, I’ll sell you this comfortable old house sitting on this big corner lot if you’ll agree to take this damn duplex off my hands…’ kind of deals   Yea. 

The whole affair does not have a happy history for me, but history or no history it has to be finished out one way or another.  After letting the whole sad affair steep for a-while, and sampling the extract for toxins (came back reasonably clean, I’ve dealt with worse)  I’ve decided the best way to put the whole affair to peace is to honor my word that was given to perfect strangers.  Story goes like this, and it’s true.

Perpetual...

Opening of a conversation

I doubt I'll ever even get close to finishing this story, not unless I find myself locked in a castle in Scotland or some other strange circumstance of acute isolation.  Telling a story in pictures just takes an awfully long time when you're no faster at painting than I am.  Still though from time to time when my world of real life turns towards burdensome issues that are beyond addressing it is pleasant to drop in on Sha and Keyanna, First and Second and their conversations concerning the nature of the floating nodes who call themselves Human.

News of my world?  At the moment I'm treading the edges of half a dozen life traps, some set by my world, others no doubt of my own devising.  I'm stepping very carefully these days, watching where I put my feet in both the inner and the outer realities.  The traps of the outer reality are not nearly as dangerous as the traps of the inner don't you know.  Most of those you can, as the song says, defeat with lawyers, guns and money.  It's the inner traps that carry the greater risk.  Oh, well.  That's life, comes in the mail.  Who's gonna carry the mail? Right. Catch ya'll later, life is banging on the back door.  Again.

It’s always the last thing you’d expect…

Mission made, Brutus roars again.  Damndest thing I’ve ever seen, if I hadn’t seen it I’d be inclined to say “well, maybe in some other universe…”  But I did see it, and reality trumps all opinion.  I’ll tell the tale here, and toss the Gods of Google a couple of bottles of Gatorade (contrary to the rumors the volcano gods of technology don’t really give a hoot about anyone’s sexual history, what they’re interested in is potassium based electrolytes, they actually like the sports drink better than a virgin daughter… no annoying calcium to dispose of) to pass the story on to those who might need and/or deserve to know. 

The culprit?  Sand.  Silicate heavy blow sand to be specific.  Where?  That’s the odd and interesting part. If you’re here trying to fix your truck skip to the bottom of this post for the answer.

Bench stock – or – Patton had it right…

It was in the comment section afterwards, and it said something to the effect of “if you read this article, if you even hovered to long over the headline, you’re now in their database.”  I’d say those are probably true statements.  All I can say is freedom ain’t free, these days that’s the price of patriotism.

“You hold ‘em by the nose and kick ‘em in the ass…”  You’re fast, aggressive, arrive with overwhelming firepower and don’t stay any longer than it takes to dispose of the target you were sent to neutralize.  The kind of warfare Patton learned from his mentor enemy Rommel.  The way wars used to be fought, WW2 evolved into version 6.4 or so by now (I don’t play Call of Duty so I’m just guessing at the version number), the styles of warfare where physical geography is the prime factor in separating the combatants out into those called US and they known as THEM.  The kind of warfare Patton espoused as a necessary evolutionary function within the global community of mankind.  The kind of warfare every nation’s military was designed for, what the vast majority of mankind thinks of when you say “war.” 

The key factoid (to understanding today) is in the paragraph above.  Did you notice it go by?  I’ll be back to the thought here in a bit, but in the meanwhile a humble example of what I’m talking about from me world of real life.

Pavlovian Pillowblock…

Pretty sure that’s what they call them, in the catalogs where you buy such things, they call them pillowblock bearings.  You find them carrying things that turn, things that ride on shafts with electric motors and pulleys and belts like the big exhaust fans that keep the air in a commercial kitchen breathable, the ones that suck the fumes off the grill and dispose of the contaminated air. 

Just one of the ten gazillion and one humble things providing us our techno-industrial way of life. They are humble and they are noble and they commonly labor for decades totally unnoticed.  When things are right there’s really nothing there to notice.  Even when they start to wear out it’s not uncommon for them to run for years, vibrating just a bit, making just a bit of noise, but still turning, still doing their job, just complaining a bit I guess you might say.  Can’t say as I blame them for that, like I said, they get ignored an awful lot when all they really ask for is a nickels worth of good old axle grease every six months or so.  Such things as they have my deep and sincere respect, I often feel akin to them.

On the other hand the fellow Pavlov was a psychologist whose work is so well known his name is all but synonymous to what he investigated.  I suppose that’s about the highest honor a true psychologist can aspire to, having your name migrate out of the nouns into an adjective or adverb defined in terms of the thing you studied.  Pavlov made it, in greater or lesser degree what he studied will impact on pretty much everyone, me no exception. 

Tech Note: Buried...

It were the bitch bolt from the fornicating front gates of hell it was. Buried beneath everything, barely visible, about the last thing I pulled loose when I pulled the engine out to overhaul it, the first thing to go back when the engine was back on the mounts.  And of course pursuant to Murphy's law, chapter five, section thirteen, that was the one bolt that had to come loose.  Go figure.  I had the victory though,  at the cost of multiple minor wounds to me knuckles and a new set of fancy flex head ratcheting box end wrenches and eight hours of most deliberate patience it did, finally, come off.  Nike!

Concerning names

Originally Published 5/13/2010...  the beginning of this blog

Cyranos DeMet is not the name the government knows me by. It is my pen name, my public name, it is the only name I'm known by on the internet. My reasons for maintaining a pen name go beyond personal privacy. Think me a raging madman if you wish, imagine me an icon of the academic if that is more to your taste, either might be true, or neither, both is not beyond the realms of the possible. It is my intention the truth of that issue remain undefined. So long as the name Cyranos DeMet cannot be linked to a street address, a social security number, a face, a life, so long as it remains the only call sign for an otherwise anonymous writer then only my thought is on display, the life that produced the thought is not available to mark which social bias or political bigotry from a reader's private stock of assumptions should be assigned to my work.

I want my work judged only on the accuracy of the observation expressed, as some thought might accrue support or rebuttal within the contemplations of my reader. I may at times present personal anecdotes to illustrate the manner in which a thought arrived, but I will not be citing sources for these are my thoughts shared, not a collection of the world's thoughts on some subject presented as a proof of study. It is entirely possible I will cross terrain already mapped by another, if so it is of little concern to me. I walked that terrain without the map they drew, my reader is most welcome to compare our two maps for accuracy against his own observations.

Why such drama you ask? Why such arrogance? My answer is this: in posts to come I will be developing a theory concerning the human condition, a theory that bridges between what in conventional studies would be the disciplines of psychology and sociology, a theory offering a unique explanation for the complexity of the interface between the individuals and the society in which those individuals make a home. The theory to be put forth in some ways simplifies the task of understanding the human condition, and yet in other ways opens an entire new dimension of complexity. I use the word dimension here in it's most literal meaning, an expansion to the stage of reality equivalent to a two dimensional "flatland" creature (whose universe existed on a single geometric plane) being enlarged into the three dimensional space you and I take for granted.

This theory is either a work of genius or a work of insanity, and I myself do not know which. What I do know is that it is in my head, and I'll have no peace from it until it has been let out of my head into words. Since it is being offered to the world essentially anonymously I'll never make a dime from it, but equally I'll never have to carry the burden of it on my real life either and so can assign the effort of sharing it as nothing more than the effort of providing one's own entertainment when what the world offers has gone stale, which is I suppose my ultimate motive in the matter.

Shaken, not stirred...

Originally Published Nov 6, 2011

We've had a couple of earthquakes today.  No, no bullshit, genuine honest to goodness earthquakes right here in Oklahoma.  Nothing terribly bad, high fours, low fives maybe, no damage here but definitely enough to get your attention.  Thought I'd left those behind when we left California.  I guess that's what you get for thinking.

I was there for the one in '71 that rumbled Los Angeles to a standstill for a couple of days.  In the end I think they decided to call that one a 6.3 or so.  Of course, those numbers are deceptive, they're on a log scale so a 6.3 would be like fifty times more powerful than a 4.9 or a five.  That one tore up more than a few things.  Got us a week out of school, almost got the school itself. 

A month or so after the quake old man Raleigh snuck a few of us in where we weren't supposed to be to show us what had saved the school for us, to show us just how strong wood can really be.  Awesome strong, in point of fact.  Stronger than steel.  The school was originally built in the 'twenties as two three story buildings sitting over full basements, concrete and steel construction with a brick veneer.  But during the thirties, during the depression, the WPA added a large auditorium between the first two structures to create one "T" shaped building about four hundred feet long from what had been two.  I know how long it was because me and my buddy Jay stepped it off trying to get a comparison to the main saucer hull of a Constitution class starship.  The starship was bigger. 

Anyway, it was a nice auditorium, dished out for theater seating, big stage, proper arched ceiling three stories above the floor.  There were six huge laminated beams carrying the roof across what had to be at least an eighty foot jump, and it was those beams saved the structure.  Mr. Raleigh had been there when the engineers first surveyed the building, told us both of the older structures had tried to collapse towards the middle, that the walls were something like six inches out of plumb after the quake.  The roof was in ruins where those huge oak beams, each one was like two feet by three feet of solid laminated oak, had bowed up taking load, but they'd held.  Held both buildings.

I remember feeling very small right then, thinking of how much force they'd carried. I remember feeling kind of spooked by the huge jackscrews they'd bolted across under each beam, big hunks of threaded metal they'd screwed out until the walls were again vertical.  The jackscrews would never be taken out, they stayed on to reinforce the wood, made of soft iron designed to bend if they couldn't hold strait and reinforce the wood.

Up until that point I hadn't really been scared by the earthquake, not really.  But looking up at those beams and the big rods and being told if the next one was no worse than the last one they might be able to hold again well, yes, that was scary, the thought of another one.  Yea, that brought it home to me, that if nature loses her temper mankind don't stand a chance.  Kind of makes a lot of other things look rather small by comparison.

***   ***  ***

In postscript?  This fracking bullshit has got to be brought to a halt, the habit of putting back dirty water (so very thin and prone to transmitting vibration) where there had once been crude oil (so very, very thick and prone to defeating vibration within its' own molecular structure).  Is oil an important resource in the modern world?  Of course it is.  But... it isn't that important.  I've got this distinct sense that mother nature has about had enough, and yea, when she loses her temper you really don't want to be on the same planet with her, much less sitting right on top of what pissed her off in the first place.

Third Reality of Man Ch 6: Who Mourns Adonis?

The myths and legends concerning deities, the Gods and Goddesses, have been part of the human condition for a very, very long time.  Upon rational inspection these stories, be they fossil remembrances of actual events or simply projections of imagination, are quite often found to be where a people and a culture store the accumulated wisdom of their lives.  The richer mythologies, such as the Greco-Roman or Indian pantheons, clearly reflect these peoples understandings: of themselves, of their times, of humanity in general.  Some deity comes to represent a common trait of humanity, that element of the human condition then set to motivate mythological flesh as a dominant personality trait while some other trait is represented by say that deity’s sister or cousin or consort, the story of the relationships and motivations for those relationship between the two that carry down the generations as legend give the host culture’s understanding of the associated interpersonal dynamics, ultimately the social dynamics,  commonly found along the interface between the traits. 

Even in this age of exponential advancement in the sciences and technology these entities are still power players on the stage of human affairs.  How is it these entities, ancient as they are, still command such power?  From a functional perspective obviously these entities must still provide some needed service to still have value within the lives of those who offer them their fealty.  For all that science can now explain the mechanics of human life with an appreciable degree of fidelity it is obvious science cannot even fully duplicate the true functionality of these entities much less surpass them or they would not remain the powers they are.  To rational observation it is apparent there must be things these entities provide which science simply cannot. 

What do these deities of antiquity provide to humanity that assures their continuance?  What do they provide that science cannot?  A deep question, a very deep question, and yet the answer is not so very hard when the simple minded arrogance of fact  is set aside: they provide a needed service in places where science does not, because it truly cannot, operate: the realms of ethical choice and aesthetic opinion, the issues of self definition and self judgment that exist exclusively within the inner first reality of each individual’s self perception.  The Gods and Goddesses, the realms of the supernatural, exist and persist on the value of a vocabulary pertinent to the most absolutely intimate of things, the matters of heart and soul from which are derived the motives and ambitions, the dreams and the nightmares that power the totality of a life regardless of where or when that life might be lived.

I will assert these thought structures built upon perceptions of the supernatural, evolved and inherited as they are, are evidence of mankind’s oldest involvement with collective entities and those entities’ place in the human condition.  Examined from the perspective of an ongoing effort at self definition all of human history easily becomes  a testament to the effect of some collective entity expanding out of the inner first reality of the host individuals to become a consolidated force vector impacting the common second reality where originates the history of the race.

From antiquity the works of mankind have all, each and every one, shared one trait in common: they ultimately originate from someone’s desire to make the second, external, reality match some specific element of their internal first reality.   Perhaps little commented on, but true.  Any and every change mankind has with deliberation introduced into the environment of life began with a precipitating vision that at some point existed nowhere save in the inner first reality of some one individual’s imagination.  (appended 6/8/15... this thought belongs here, not later)

In all of my wanderings across the landscape of the human I’ve not found a more powerful phenomenon than the one just mentioned: the expansion into the second (common) reality of a collective entity originally evolved to serve the needs of its’ hosts individual and private inner reality.  The story of these migrations across that first and most primal of frontiers is the story of the human race, a full understanding of the motives involved, the alliances formed between the various collectives both inner and outer, the running river of blood and mortality for both host and collective is the story of the human race.  Oh yes, a collective entity can die, it can be killed, the collective entities know war just as do the individuals.

Convoluted and contradictory as the answer might be the question must be asked: what motivates, what could possibly motivate, these migrations whence originate so very many of humanities miseries?  This thought will be continued, and expanded, in the forthcoming chapter “Dancing All Around Me Hat…”

Oh, and just as an IMO footnote?  Who Mourns Adonis?   That’s easy.  He’s mourned by every lesbian lass who from time to time desperately wishes she had his truly divine  beauty to inspire her and give her permission to reach out with her heart open to the other half of the world.

...to be continued...

Something Very-Very Fishy Here...

I’d thought about calling this post “General Motors and the Quest for Corporate Communism” but somehow that seemed just a bit premature given the evidence at hand.  The evidence against General Motors and John Deere is still a bit, ummm, suspect shall we say but the ramifications of any major corporation succeeding at what they’re accused of attempting are profound to say the least.  This one is important, it deserves a dedicated microscope and a crew on duty 24/7 to keep an eye on what transpires, with appropriate counter measures ready to launch on a moments notice.

It is alleged that General Motors and John Deere are petitioning the Federal Patent and Copyright folks to invoke provisions of legislation passed in support of international copyright treaties (intended to protect the intellectual property rights of those producing software and entertainment) in such a manner as to allow them to revoke and render meaningless the very concept of ownership of any modern machine incorporating “computerized” control systems (yes, that means your automobile) and substitute in the place of “ownership” a “life of the device” lease agreement similar to that found in the EULA (End User License Agreement) of say a modern computer operating system.

So what’s the big deal you ask?  In a word, the maintenance and upkeep of such machines.  The intent of their petition is to by law  deny the general public (which means any mechanic not specifically employed by GM) access to the specific technical information needed to maintain such machines, effectively establishing a monopoly not based on exclusive production but rather on an exclusive ability to maintain such machinery.  Since it is already well known by those who work with such machines that they incorporate very sophisticated engineering guaranteeing device failure within well known and quite deliberate time spans the potentials for blatant abuse are obvious. 

The focus of their claim is the firmware incorporated into their new “drive by wire” offerings.  In case you didn't know drive by wire is the severing of all mechanical connection between the operator and the various subsystems of the machine… for example, lose power steering on your way home from work and you don’t have difficult steering, you have NO steering… a massively dangerous concept so utterly idiotic it can’t even be blamed on Al Gore! And that’s saying something.  They are attempting to claim that the necessary diagnostic devices for performing effective maintenance on such machines constitute a violation of their copyright protection on such firmware programming, and therefore all such devices should be illegal unless specifically owned by a GM sanctioned shop (read that as extortion city far beyond any Mafia protection racket!).

Having invested in such lunacy General Motors is now attempting to protect themselves from the obvious legal liabilities of such stupidity by establishing a system whereby they can financially entrap anyone naive enough to invest in such a machine into a situation where they MUST pay whatever General Motors demands to maintain the machine or purchase a new machine at intervals determined by General Motors (such that to protect their initial investment they must return to GM or forfeit any accrued equity!) when GM is no longer able or willing to counter and contradict their own built in failure modes!

(just a heads up for those who know their ass from a hole in the ground… in the late ‘90’s GM took to wiring their ever more electronic dependent offerings with wire where the physical properties of the insulation of that wire degrade to unusable in a matter of ten years or so… boy howdy, random cross circuiting just does wonderful things for reliability!)

I’m not even gonna get started, in this post anyway, on the human travesty of utterly destroying the livelihood of every independent mechanic in the nation, nor will I speak to the ultimate social consequences of being denied by law the right to be personally and fully competent in any part of such a primal function of modern life as the operation of an automobile!

Folks, this one?  This one isn’t the American way.  Not even close.  I’m sure somewhere Lenin and Chairman Mao are sharing a drink and laughing their asses off.  The Americans, so stupid as to think that only government can inflict and enforce communism on the masses.

Promoted...

I don’t know what I’d do without the stream of folks who come through the diner.  Well, I do know, but it would be terribly boring by comparison.  I’d be reduced to living on movies and internet computer games and such like, and I’m sorry but those just don’t really cut it where I’m concerned.  Far to contrived and simplistic for my taste.  As is so often the case the thought of the day began from a snippet of someone else’s conversation that drifted and echoed and bounced into my ears sitting as I often do in the little booth in the back corner where all such echoes converge.

If I were going to describe them I’d have to call them successful people.  Attractive and wholesome, and somehow they carried that understated air of genuine success about them: works accomplished that had shaped their history, works underway shaping their dreams and ambitions.  No doubt academics of one sort or another, they left me no clue as to their chosen focus of study.  There was an air of easy intimacy about them, they were comfortable in each other’s company.  Could have been man and wife, could have been just coworkers pulled off for a bite of midnight breakfast before going back into the fray, might have been a pair of young lovers enjoying a fine affair in the height of its’ glory.  Since I’m a dirty old man at heart I’m gonna go with the third assumption and wish them five dimensional fireworks for a lullaby and a quicky at dawn just to help jump the eighteen hours until there’d be another chance.  If you were going to make a movie about them you’d likely set it in Paris and cast Meg Ryan opposite a young Cary Grant to portray them.  Yea, first impressions they just felt like that kind of people.

Anyhow, their conversation came into focus as they were discussing a common acquaintance, someone it would seem they’d both known but from different beginnings, set in a different time frame than their relationship.  There was a subtle tone of warning to the fellows comments, I don’t think he really trusted this person.  Judging by the point by point nods and soft sad smile I’d say she was likely in agreement with his assessment, but it wasn't a happy thing for her, not really.  In the end she closed the segment with the statement that popped the thought for which I’m indebted to them.  She said “Yea, I knew him before he was Doctor…”

She’d known him while he was still human, before he was Doctor So and So of something or another.  Her comment became an edge, a guarded frontier, the fall of the guillotine.  As Doctor So and So he was judged by a different set of expectations than normal folk are.  Empowered by the whole Doctor thing what she’d once known as simply endearing or annoying quirks of personality became dangerous anomalies for those who dealt with him from the same perspective as the fellow who didn't seem to really trust him.  From her tone of voice it would seem it was the whole Doctor thing that had precipitated a set of less than happy changes. 

Their gift to me was the realization of how very often this happens, and a perspective opening onto an expanded understanding of the consequences.  For those who live in society (unlike myself who lives beside society) the various ranks and positions within create quite different degrees  of expectation burdened on people.  Since the expectations people live with, societies or their own, play such a major role in the ultimate state of their happiness I’ll call it a gift to have a little illumination on the subject.

If you've only known someone at some given level of “success” within society then of course there’s no point of comparison to what they were before, or what they might become later.  It’s only if you know someone as they cross some social boundary that you get to really see the full price of success.  You know, Joe was a good dude until he got promoted into management and all his old friends drifted away because he turned into an asshole just like the rest of them.  Did Joe really change that much?  Who knows.  What is certain is that Joe transitioned into a new environment where the Joe that was had to adapt to survive, and those who had held Joe in their sphere of empathy found that the old motives for including him just didn't seem to apply anymore.

The thing that pings on my thought is how if you were one of the ones who supported them in their quest for some success above your personal experience you’re terribly likely to be blindsided by the consequences of success, get to share in the cost but not the value, seems I’ve heard so many whispered stories where that was the underlying motive.  Most of them were not happy stories at all.

From the perspective of actually understanding Happiness it seems to me that each such event is the proverbial pebble falling in the pond creating ripples that intersect and overlap and all to often it would seem Doppler themselves right out of existence leaving the overall system no richer in happiness than it was.  One of those hidden functions of the human condition that promotes the status quo rather than improvement in the quality of life.  One of those things that if it were to be fully understood from the perspective of the common humanity could be promoted out of the status quo to be a thing of genuine value justifying the cost of success. 

But how? How do impart such an understanding to those who’ve yet to cross such a personal boundary if indeed they ever will?  Damn good question.  Another damn good question to join the ever growing pile of good questions on the subject of happiness.  This may take more than a year.  A lot more.

Cowboy Departing...

Yup, it’s that time again, time for the great diaspora at the end of the school year, the end of the semester coming into summertime, them that aren’t in despair over finals are getting ever more euphoric at the prospect of parole from the dungeons of academia.  Needless to say there’s a lot of celebratory beer flowing in this town right now, and nowhere more than out at an oversize country dive known as “Tumbleweeds” where they’re currently hosting the umpteenth edition of what has become a bit of a local tradition.  

Officially it’s the calf fry, that’s the official name of the yearly party, but what the locals call it is the testicle festival where the cowgirls take the cowboys to celebrate the emasculation of the bovine, their descent from proud bulls into docile McBeef to be herded off to the butcher.  Maybe someday someone will convince me they aren't flocking to the affair wearing their very best raggitty “Daisy Duke” hot pants and cowboy boots as a show of solidarity with their soul  sisters among the bovine to celebrate the triumphs of feminism.  Maybe, but not likely, because when they get back to town to drunk to hide their hearts most of ‘em are wearing that look so common to the fashionably feminist who spend their days whining about how they just can’t find any men worth their time.  Poor fools.  You’d think that after all this time they might have figured out the relationship between castration and contempt.  But, it hasn't shown up on the cover of Cosmo so even if they do have half a clue they hide it dark and deep.  Oh, well.

Anyway, the whole crew of ‘em is leaving town (yea!) and I wish them all a safe road to where ever they’re headed, a great summer, and hey… don’t let the door hit you in the ass on your way by.

Continuance of Characters

Soap

---originally published 2/25/2011---

Think of all the people you've known who don't really exist.  You know what I mean, all those characters the writers invent.  We get dropped into their life, they entertain us, educate us, distract us from our mundane worlds, they become our heroes, our role models, our villains.  But what do they do when the show is over, when the actors and actresses take them off and go back to their real lives?  What becomes of Picard and McGee, where will you find Mrs. Peel or sweet Abby?  Somehow I think they settle into lives not so very different from ours, they live with us and in us after all, and somehow I don't think anyone ever interrupts Abby's favorite soap opera. Well, not twice anyway.

An Open Question...

Plato's Purgatory...
a diner doodle

It’s an old saying, an old challenge, and it goes like this:  “Are you willing to put that in writing?”   Methinks it, like so many other old sayings, now has a mutated meaning.

I’m beginning to wonder about something, specifically, I’m beginning to wonder if some folks’ preference for texting rather than talking is indicative of  more than just a fad of using the (relatively) new gizmo simply because it’s there to be used.  I’m beginning to wonder if the whole texting thing hasn’t evolved into a defacto new talisman of conformity.

 

The anomaly that trips my curiosity is this: I’ve observed those who prefer text over voice would seem to be the same set who tend to speak, when they do speak, in politically correct but incomplete euphemisms that buzz like an out of balance transformer, the same set most dedicated to texting those who to all visible evidence have surrendered personal freedom as a casualty of the covert cultural warfare being waged by the oriental influences of silence and conformity so critical to installing the slavery of caste and class into the American culture.  The prohibition is against speaking it, writing it in a little note isn’t taboo (just bad judgment allowing for the corporate sponsored government spying on all forms of electronic communication). 

Nothing nada zip by way of any confirming evidence of course, just a growing question and ongoing curiosity.  Oh well, time will tell if told it be.  Doubt I’ll be here to see the final on this one.

Gothic...a Diner Doodle

Pencil on paper, touched up lightly in PhotoPaint on it's way into the pixel forest.

A Minor Matter of a Temporal Phase Mismatch…

About now all you Trekkies out there should be thinking ah, ok, yea, that’s what produces wormholes and wormholes are what turn starships into 42 shades of petunia flavored blubber.  You’re absolutely correct space cadet, but TPM can apply to more than just a warp field, it doesn’t do anything good for the realms of psychology or sociology either which is where this post is going, so stay sharp on station or we’ll be picking up Voyager’s trash all the way home.

In response to my last post my buddy Pip asked me a question that went sorta like this: “is there so much girl-girl partnering going on (and the young men noticing) that it's somehow making them more aggressive and predatory in reaction…  …same sex experimentation being much more natural for young female humans, leaving young males feeling totally…  left out ?”

A good question, a deep question, definitely requiring a multi-generation range kind of question because any answer that can even circumnavigate the edges is going to be traveling a long, long way across the human condition.  Putting “IN MY OPINION” in bold red type before every paragraph I’ll go ahead and take a swing at it subject to the understanding what I say can be little more than preliminary guesswork within my best understanding of an untested empirical model of the collective subconscious.  If I get two out of any three points anywhere close to correct compared to reality I’ll be amazed. 

Beneath Running Water…

Just a tidbit to share today, but perhaps a pertinent tidbit harvested from Ron Howard’s award winning movie “A Beautiful Mind” starring Russel Crowe (imo one of his very best roles, I highly recommend the movie) portraying the life and experiences of the Nobel laureate economist John Nash.

She was a beautiful little girl, truly, and she never grew up.  She was always the same beautiful little girl every time she appeared, and this across a span of time measured in decades.  Her perpetual youth and beauty were his proof she wasn’t real, at least in a conventional corporeal sense.  Nor was she the only character who refused to age, there were two others who equally endured the years unchanged.  In the end they were John’s proof that his mind was projecting active and dynamic characters into his world that others quite simply did not perceive.  In the movie these characters were set as symptoms of the schizophrenia John Nash endures, his understanding of them leading to his classic counter to the problem, the elegantly simple question “do you see him?” 

Symptoms perhaps, and yet in light of the extreme fidelity of their endurance perhaps a bit more than simply symptoms allowing for the power and precision of the mind wherein they made their abode.  You see, what dawned on me is that the three characters do a fine, fine job of personifying the social forces involved in John’s primary work of defining in mathematical terms the social dynamics of the modern world. 

In my little insanity the three characters become a personalized  perception-as-projection of low order collective entities within the social dynamic: the government man reflecting the fear and desperation driven world of the aggressive and/or parasitic forms of collective entities; the roommate those collective entities whose presence reflects the nurturing and positive influences of society, perhaps a bit aloof and abrasive at times and yet still benign in essence; and, of course, the little girl who must  remain a beautiful little girl in order to personify the attribute of the human condition she represents.  You see, I think the little girl represents hope, and hope as such simply cannot mature and still remain hope.  Matured into womanhood she can become many things… mother, lover, wife or mistress… but she can’t remain hope for she has transitioned from a dream into a reality.

There is far more in this understanding than I’ve touched on here, for it opens to consideration not simply the collective entities as such, but the impact each of our unique level of perception and/or projection of those collective entities might have on the dynamics found within our individual spheres of empathy, their personal impact on our conscious lives.  More to come as the thought matures.  For now though I simply wish to say “Thank You!” to John Nash and all those who cooperated in bringing his story to me.  Thanks guys.

Oh, and concerning the title of this post?  You guessed it… the thought dawned on me in the middle of rinsing out the shampoo.  Please don’t ask me why there, because I don’t have a clue.

ReRun: Floor Show

==originally published 8/27/11 ==

It's three thirty in the morning, which has become mid-afternoon for me these days, and I'm doing it again.  People watching, that is.  It costs more now than it used to back when a cup of coffee was just a quarter, now it's two bucks.  But I'm not complaining about inflation, that's about the furthest thing from my mind.  No, I'm not really complaining at all, just sort of chuckling at myself for returning to resample, or maybe it's relive, the kind of roots that really don't have a garden to call their own.

Togs

--originally published 8/27/2010--

Clothing... beyond simple protection from the elements clothing is convention, propriety, power, clothing is societies' first mandate of compliance. To walk fully nude in a major city is to rebut all of those things, deny them traction on your life, to walk fully nude is to set yourself above or beside or beyond the conventions that demand we be covered in the company of our fellows. It is a consummately bold thing to do.

Clothing... is the barrier that defeats the primal troop, breaks the feedback loops of deepest identification and empathy within the species. Clothing is isolation at the instinctive level. To walk through a major city partially nude, exposed, simply screams the loneliness of life deprived of the comfort found in the certainty of the primal troop, it is to set yourself an emotional beggar pleading for alms, pleading for any recognition of the common species. To walk a major city partially nude is a condemnation of society, an impeachment of societies' ability to provide the support which makes life worth living regardless of that societies ability to provide that which makes it possible to continue on in isolation. To walk a major city partially nude is a defeated thing, a surrender to societies siege of the soul.

Clothing... is now as was then the flag of the modern collective entities that comprise our societies when they did battle with the primal arrangements of life, fighting for recognition to support their existence. The legends of Olympus make a fine analogy for the literal truth of mankind: the collective entities, the Olympians, who wrested control of the world from the Titan's of the instinctive, the primal, who actually created the species which is and who are the corporeal cells of the collective entities presence. There was a time when a fashion statement was not simply a turn of phrase indicating a vector and tangent of social compliance, it was a most literal statement of allegiance at levels well below the political.

Mental Mental Radio Rental…

This post is just pure sarcastic vent, you don’t have to take it seriously.  Really, I wouldn't ask a mortal enemy to take it seriously, I’d shoot him instead.  It would be kinder. 

As I said yesterday I’m starting in on the restoring the old VW for a daily driver, beginning with getting some fresh tires mounted on confirmed rims under me old friend.  This of course involves taking the old paint off the rims so fresh paint can take its’ place.  A bit of a chore that is, not so challenging in a technical sense, just brute force applied delicately with patience.  So into the garage I went, set up an impromptu work table out of two saw horses and a chunk of left-over three-quarter plywood, strung the extension cords and spooled out the air hose with the blow chuck, got the Big McNasty wire brush on the angle grinder, went and bought a new pair of safety glasses (you don’t run an angle grinder with naked eyes) and while I was there picked up a couple of little mean McVile brass brushes so the cordless drills could get in the game working the crannies and crevices. In short, I set up the job. In the course of digging around I found an old ghetto blaster that hadn't felt fire in a dozen years, plugged it in and damn, it still worked!  Just commercial FM, but what the hell, it’s Tunes!  I fetched a HUGE cup of soda pop from the quick-rip and man cave restored to minimum functionality settled in for some serious garage time expecting to rest psyche and soul from the running river of bullshit that is modern society.  Wrong.  It chased me in the door.

It was the radio turned traitor on me.  Well, not exactly the radio, just the station.  I’m not gonna specify which station I was listening to, but it plays oldies and classic rock, it’s out of OKC and by the call letters you’d think it had been out cold on life support for quite a while.  Radio stations have commercials, of course, and of course the radio station will broadcast what pays the bills, and yea, that’s how the dam got broke and my attitude got soaked.

Her name is… nah, I’m not gonna tell you her name, it’s the name of an adult boutique (read toy store for the they-think-they’re-grown-up kids, aka, sex toys) and I’m not in the mood to put in a plug for her business… (plug… hehehe… he said plug).  Oh, jingly cute little tune and a voice just dripping an invitation to fifteen variations of decadent delight, oh yea, she sounded like the kind you could bang just for whoops and grins with no risk to your conscience at all because what the hell, she’s not gonna remember you anymore than the last two dozen guys she laid down just for feminine bragging rights.  She ended her pitch by informing the region she now had everything needed in stock to satisfy your curiosity about the whole fifty shades thing.  Somehow I think there may be a slight shortage of leashes and dog collars down to the squallmart store, but that’s beside the point.  She has the right to run her business as she sees fit. 

But it wasn't her commercial that got to me, it was the dichotomy of the totally transparent piggybacked theme of the commercial that followed hers, followed hers every time they played commercials, and the comparison was, well, just flat puking puppy sad.  Boys and girls can we say guaranteed overlapping market demographic?

You see, right behind Miss Seduce a Profit came the oh-so-sympathetic sincere masculine voice of Dr. FixYerDick who made a distinct point of saying he works with the Infernal Medical Group trying to convince everyone of the male persuasion that of course you’re not a burned out aging infantile insecure hedonist jaded to the point of literally not being able to give a fuck, of course not, you’re just suffering from low testosterone and modern medicine can fix that (if your insurance company doesn't pitch a bitch and refuse to pay for the lab work). Sure thing.  

WHAT IS WRONG WITH THIS PICTURE??!!!?!?!?!  WHAT IN THE FUCK IS THESE IDIOTS MAJOR MALFUNCTION?  Do they really think they’re fooling anyone ?  Ah, what the hell, they’re not gonna do any more damage to society than has already been done by blaming the whole mess on a lack of the hormone the feminists have already demonized by blaming it for everything  else.

Gentle reader, I’ll let you take a swing at answering that if you’re interested, I’ve got better things to do with my time than waste the next twenty hours beating this keyboard to scratch the surface of what is wrong with that picture.  I’ve got a bus to rebuild, and all I have to do to fix my problem is either change the station or better still dig the appropriate splitter out of the junk drawer of such things to jump the mp3 player into the old ghetto blaster… memory serves it had a set of standard RCA input jacks on the back, and I know the amp and speakers are working just fine.  They proved that proving to me that social insanity, like rust, never really sleeps, it just changes pajamas and goes on.

His name is Herman…

Herman vonViggle Wagon, in full, but that was just a bit of childishness applied in response to the kids asking “what… is that?”  My answer only produced the inevitable next question “what… is a Viggle? Wagon we know, but what is a Viggle?”  My answer was of course, “you’ll just have to wait and see” being as how I really have no earthly idea exactly what constitutes a Viggle either.  He’s been a closet on wheels for years, waaaay to many years, decades in point of fact.  But for Herman like unto myself it’s our turn now.

Technically Herman is a 1974 Type 2 Volkswagen transporter, a good old hippie van from back in the day.  Being as how the bottom line on me is that I’m equally from the line of long haired freaky people from back in the day Herman and I make a good match for each other. 

Like I said, he’s been a closet on wheels for a long time.  And for the most part what was stored in that closet were my dreams, perpetually on hold, perpetually to low a priority to compete for resources against the omnipresent needs  of one or the other of those  I held myself responsible for.  But… those days are gone, the responsibilities have passed on and it is time, Rafiki, it is time.  I suppose it’s fair to say my dreams  evolved to fit the closet they lived in, so since it is my intention to pull up stakes and see a bit of the country it just makes sense to me to restore the closet to mobile rather than try and take my dreams out and repack them into something else. So, soon enough it will be known just what kind of a mechanic I really am, because this is a ground up restoration. 

Ground up?  What’s the first thing you meet going ground up?  Tires and wheels, of course.  Today is wheel day.  Herman is sitting on jack stands so the dry rotted carcasses can come off the rims so the wire brushes on the angle grinder can strip away the rust and dead paint to take a really good look at the steel beneath before the paint and new skins go on.  After that?  Brakes I think, they make disc conversion kits, and four corner disc would be nice, very nice.  As for motive power?  Lemme just say this… it may be a mouse mill compared to the other engines I’ve built, but… itsagonnabe a mighty mouse, yes sir, it will ;-)

Full Yoda Mode: Jealous I am…

The fellows name is Paul Mason, I read his article Who is Eleni Haifa - on information technology and human character online, a place called “eurozine” and it would seem they got the work from a print magazine calling themselves New Humanist, they had a banner beside the title. 

Anyway, the subject of the essay was the fragmentation of self image seen as a result of the information age, the consequences of the technology that allows one (individual?) to present themselves to the world wearing multiple faces, multiple personas crafted to suit the intended audience receiving the presentation.  The essay is essentially a compare and contrast between the consequences of the modern information revolution and the times of a century ago when the industrial revolution was in full swing.  A good read, well worth the time.

The writings of Virginia Woolf concerning the industrial revolution’s impact on the literary world are cited as the reference point from a century ago while the work The Pearly Gates of Cyberspace by a lady named Margaret Wertheim carries that role in the modern, and it was a quotation from Margaret that invoked my jealousy.  It is such a perfectly descriptive analogy to what I’ve been witnessing that I wish I’d thought of it myself.

She wrote that the online self "becomes almost like a fluid, leaking out around us all the time and joining each of us into a vast ocean, or web, of relationships with other leaky selves."  Lives that are fluid, and leaking.  What a truly brilliant analogy.  It so totally explains why you CAN use the digidork punks for top-off oil in a hydraulic circuit but you CAN’T use them to replace a broken piece of wood in say the kitchen table.  Rigidly contained and under pressure you CAN expect them to transfer force, but without the external containment you CAN’T put them in any real load bearing roles, they don’t have any structural strength of their own to contribute to the system. So many things threatening the very foundations of civilization fit so easily into that analogy.  She nailed it.

Extended Warranty? How can I lose?

It was one of my absolute favorite lines from The Simpsons, America’s epic animated tale of Homer and Marge and Bart.  It’s the one where they find out that Homer is really a savant genius about damn near to everything, it’s just that he has a crayon so far up his nose it’s interfering with his brain functions.  They extricate the crayon, and Homer is off to the races.  By the end of the show Homer, utterly miserable with his new state and fate, finds a surgeon willing to put the crayon back.  Millimeter by millimeter the crayon goes back up Homer’s nose,  millimeter by millimeter the IQ points drop out, his answers become less concise, less precise, he’s wrong as often as he’s right.  When he exclaims “extended warranty? How can I lose?” in that voice of the village idiot’s delight he was so known for the surgeon yanks his hands away and says in a perfect deadpan tone “perfect.”  Homer is Homer once more.  The moral of course is that happiness is not conditional on intelligence or ability, in point of fact the episode makes a pretty solid case in the opposite direction. 

Being found superior in the competitions and comparisons of ability is no assurance of happiness.  At a first glance it would seem a contrary thing to say, but a second and slightly deeper look reveals the truth of the matter.  The attributes such comparisons address are matters of the outer reality of facts while happiness, almost certainly a matter of unperceived emotional balances, is a thing residing in the inner reality of the self.  It’s fair to say the higher degrees of ability facilitate a great many positive things for those in possession of them, for the sake of brevity call these things enhanced survivability, and yet the testimony of history does not support any direct correlation between ability and happiness, and less than no correlation between the material things enabled by such abilities and the state of life called happiness.

If it be true that genuine happiness is a matter of an intrinsic balance  in emotional things… stop now, lock that thought… it then becomes almost transparent, almost, how and why the error and the lie of happiness as a function of the outer reality has endured. 

…to be continued…

Feathers of the goose pursued...

The subject is happiness and the achievement of the same, the trail long and long cold, it is as much of a goose chase as I’ve ever undertaken.  As an evolving contrasocial philosopher for most of my life I’ve chased questions of the why variety, enjoyed a beggar’s ration of success in the hunt, but the subject at hand is not a “why” kind of question.  It is more of a “what” or a “how” sort of thing.  Perhaps the question is more suited to the analogy of a prospector than a hunter, but that’s of little consequence.  It’s still a work of analytic introspection validated and verified by observations of internal and external reality.

Allow me to begin with the following statement to set an initial reference point, define a polarity: all positive states of being (happiness, joy, ecstasy, etc. et al) are states devoid of contradiction between the inner reality created by the self aware life and the outer reality shared with all other things which are not self.  

A rather chewy little tidbit of a thought.  Since every human being cohabitates two realities just exactly what constitutes a contradiction between the two? 

Allowing for imagination, dreams, fantasies, the entire creative process which has elevated human life above the animal it’s obvious the inner and outer realities are rarely to never an exacting match one to the other, from this it becomes equally obvious a contradiction is not a simple matter of some mismatch of fact between the realities.  In the inner reality of my imagination mighty starships fold space to cross the interstellar void in a fraction of a lifetime colonizing new worlds, no such vessels (of human construction) exist in the outer reality.  A mismatch of fact on the grand scale, and yet not a contradiction.

No, the sort of contradiction in question is not simply a matter of facts.  When considering the polarity of life matters of fact rarely have the majority say.  Of all things divided by the frontier between the inner and outer realities facts are actually one of the lesser considerations.  A lesser consideration, and yet the reference upon which are mounted the things that are of critical importance to the polarity of any given moment, or series of moments, some span of time given a discreet identity and considered as a unit.

…to be continued…

Dandelion...

Sometimes, at odd and inexplicable times, I really and truly do not give a shit.  Sometimes I wonder why.  Sometimes I don't even give a damn about that.

The moral of the story is...

He's down, one more and he's out...

...if you’re a lonesome cowboy just come to town beware strange women bearing gifts, particularly beautiful women bearing intoxicating gifts.  You’ll lose a lot more than your spurs.

The subject of the year is happiness, and happiness is a decidedly slippery subject to set into words.  Why?  Because where there are several words that name various levels and degrees of happiness there really are not many, if any, word symbols dedicated to defining the dynamic internal relationships which produce the perception of such states of being. 

On reflection I’ve realized this isn’t the first time I’ve bounced off this subject.  In the story “Pilgrim” my heroine SQ engages with this thought at a pivotal point in her quest of self realization.

For two days she floated and did little, the mid point of the voyage passed into the wake.  The mate had been right, a sedative was called for.  The narcotic had broken the tension she’d been building for days with her thoughts.  Things became distant, academic.  What was left to explore?  Her answer came at dinner, overheard between the purser and the mate, a discussion of philosophy and languages of the world.  The purser was holding forth that no language of the world contained as many words to describe happiness as it did shades of the opposite, the mate was trying to prove him wrong using the language of the Polynesian peoples for an example.  He might have been correct, but he couldn’t prove it.

Sundown was drifting with their debate, and taking her own tack with it.  It was quite a thought, really.  Words represent the things known to the people who speak them, the subtleties of their use the structures of thought.  If the purser was correct, as she was prone to suspect, then most of mankind truly labored against a curse of monumental proportions: the very language that set him apart from the animals biased his existence to the darkness.  On the other hand the mate was a good man, she’d seen that in the few minutes she’d suffered that he handle her giving relief from herself, there was no reason to doubt what he said, either.  He’d traveled the world and she suspected him of wisdom beyond what showed day to day.  The people of the south seas were rumored to have a happiness uncorrupted by what most called civilization, which allowed the curse was not native to all of mankind, it could be broken.

Happiness, joy, ecstasy, the English language assumes all of these things are primal beyond any precise or specific definition, states of life that might be experienced but never really understood.  In other words, essentially accidents or gifts of fate.  But if accidents they be then how is it that what is undefined and indefinable has generated multiple names but no understanding of the differences between them by which to pick the most appropriate name to describe such a moment?

No, the fact that there exists more than one word naming a consummately positive state of being is ample evidence for me to assume there must be some degree of understanding at some level or another of the human condition.  Were it not so then one name would suffice.  A path to understanding the things these words name is likely hidden between these words, and it is that path I propose to follow as an initial exploration to build a set of range markers and references. 

Just what is the difference between happiness and joy and ecstasy?  Catch you later world, I’ve got some serious thinking to do.