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…