stuff. And, strangely enough perhaps, I have seen them in the middle of Iowa, in places you might never hear about, but I have managed to see some of the most awe inspiring events of my relatively short existence in a town east of Indianola (a few thousand, a private college, the Hy-Vee and the Wal-Mart are the places to be any night of the week, and you can probably name the five bars in town and their typical patrons, and it has the old town square still in tact…a lovely place in its way) east of Ackworth (populations runs around eighty-five out here—which is only really five miles outside of Indianola, but what’s a suburb of Indianola going to be like, really) east of Sandyville (running a startling sixty-one—or some such preposterousness—and containing one of the largest dead car lots in all of Iowa—or so they say) and south of Beech (the most impressive point in this town in the church or school or used to be a church or used to be a school and is now a church or used to be a church and is now a school with an impressively blue roof—you can’t really make these things up: a Sandyville-sized town with an impressive building with an impressive roof) is a little nook of heaven that most people don’t have the faintest idea about: Lower Beech.
We’ll get to Lower Beech in a second, but first I want to say that all these other tiny towns along the way ooze beauty in a way that not many other things can. When I stay at my former professors farmhouse in Ackworth, I am adding more than one percent to the population. Furthermore, on the dirt road out to the previously mentioned farmhouse, I saw smoke. Lots and lots of smoke. Let me be clear on how much smoke I saw: I thought a house (the thought crept into mind that perhaps it was the farmhouse itself) was literally engulfed in flames. As I crossed the Middle River Bridge, I began to realize that it was just at the top of the hill and “my” farmhouse was safe, but it still begged the question: What the? Rounding the bend I saw that it was actually three of the most massive piles of branches, brush and wood items that I had ever seen. These things were twenty-five to thirty feet tall and running twenty yards at the base, and they were BLAZING! The flames were probably up fifty or sixty feet in the air, and the smoke billowing off of them could’ve choked God. Driving slowly by to take in this sight that few will ever have the opportunity to see, I see that the fire department is at the house and they are standing with a couple of guys who are standing around having a couple of beers and watching the fire. I’m pretty sure the fire department guys came out just to be sure things didn’t get out of hand, but otherwise a pretty standard burn pile.
I wonder about Sandyville. Where did it come from? Why is there a house on the edge (yes, on the outskirts of Sandyville) that has no basement—and we know because a friend of ours looked into buying it that it has no basement? Why are there so many dead cars in Sandyville? At what point did somebody say, “Yes, bring me your broken down coupes and Caddies and pickup trucks and I’ll lay ‘em to rest for you?” Why is the speed limit going through Sandyville forty miles per hour for less than half a mile when it picks back up to the Iowa highway ninety-two standard speed limit of fifty-five? So many questions, and I think that the existence of a Sandyville makes me one happy fat kid, for reasons I can’t possibly begin to explain or understand.
Beech and it’s blue temple. We have driven through Beech a couple of times. There is a corn silo on the corner to the road that leads to Beech—and, alternatively, Lower Beech—where a right turn (to the East) brings you to a road that makes a square around the town, where you can see the sights (big blue roof, families that love living in Beech, and the banker’s house which is twice as big as everybody else’s house). As you exit you think to yourself, “Having lived in a city and lived in the country, there is only one reason why you would choose to live either place: personal desire. They want to live here about as much as others want to live in a big city. I get it. Sometimes it’s all I want.”
But we’re concerned mostly with south of Beech about a mile and a half to a gate to the east. Don’t drive too fast in the fog, because you’ll miss it. [Funny story actually, it was foggy two mornings ago and I was meeting a co-worker our at Lower Beech, and he’s probably been out there more than I have (which is a lot), and he said he drove right past it. Not as funny as I thought in a haha kind of way, more funny that this Lower Beech veteran could manage to miss the turn he’s practiced for so long].
Anyway, there is a red metal gate across the driveway—classic farm-style—that used to be a metal rod attached to steel cables. Unlock it or remove the bolt with a ratchet if your key is not working properly and drive up the quarter-mile driveway to what we could probably call a small clearing. There are crops on either side of you. Last year it was corn, but they’ve planted soy beans this year to help the soil out—even though corn is a more profitable crop, and these are some kind of hulkified beans because they’re growing like three or four feet tall and it’s kind of incredible.
Let’s pretend for just a second that it is incredibly early. For those of you who are not early risers, let’s say that it’s a quarter to seven and you’ve already had your coffee and you’re doing okay, aware of your surroundings if nothing else. There’s a bend in the freshly mowed path—about four mowers-width—and the sun is just coming up over the horizon and you look up, your hands full of tools and gasoline and a lunch for the day, and you stop. You stop because in a field of grass in front of your eyes are no less than ten thousand spider webs. They stretch on forever. Some are massive and almost hurt your eyes as the sun picks up the morning dew on them. Others are very small and less intricately designed but more like a canopy so nothing can get up from below them and nothing can fall to the ground from above them. In a couple of them sits the proverbial artist waiting for a meal. It always comes. You realize very quickly that there is no way to fully appreciate or describe it without actually seeing it. People that hate spiders would probably be awe-struck at the sheer beauty of the sight—or at least lets hope that their sense of what’s beautiful is finely tuned enough to negate whatever negative feelings they may have toward our arachnid brethren.
I had a pretty long day out there by myself in what we lovingly call The Lake House (a.k.a the pond shack) replacing all the screening. This is no small task and requires ladders, spline, a splining tool, a cordless drill, a hammer, a giant flat-head screwdriver, a box knife, rolls of screening, a hammer and nails. There are twelve separate sections, each requiring various flexibility for nuances introduced by the builder (this was an, ahem, non-contract job, and kind of slapped together so everything is a different size). But it’s been nice, hard work. It feels good working with my hands again. But it’s time to close up shop for the day and after cleaning up as much as possible (knowing that you’re going to be back tomorrow to finish the job), you walk back up the trail, and out of a tree that has been providing shade for a car on what was only a modestly warm day comes a hawk, big as life and screeching to let you know it’s going and hopes you do the same. Startled but amazed at the size of this bird. Eyes wide open, as the saying goes.
You gotta wanna watch, it has been said. Sometimes there are things in this world, beautiful things that slip under the radar because of some kind of preposterous prejudice. I would almost wager that most of the beautiful things in this world are overlooked at one time or another because of some kind of preposterous prejudice. But I guess that amounts to irrational beauty hating, and that thought is kind of a bummer.
“I can’t go out tonight, my girl will kick me out.”
“Kick you out nothing. This is Ireland! Kick her in the teeth.”
--J.P. Donleavy
The sublime is all around me I guess.
Monday, September 8, 2008
Friday, August 15, 2008
There’s Just So
Much. It can be difficult to cope with. I guess that’s why I write about it. In any given week, there are so many things (and I use ambiguity for a reason here) that can happen. If one were of the appropriate skill level, they could take all the action around the world and comprehend it, but I don’t think that’s possible. Stephen Hawking be damned, nobody could understand the strings affecting the day-to-day. Come close…maybe, but full comprehension? Not a chance.
And Michael Phelps has seven gold medals.
And suddenly you’re on your way to Korea.
And without warning you owe Cablevision a thousand dollars.
And then you find the depths of your father’s irrationality.
And you have the worst sunburn of your life on the bottom half of your thighs.
And you are scared.
And the weight of history suddenly becomes too much to bear.
So many ands. To be blessed and cursed in the same moment, simultaneously in fact. How does one begin to pretend to see the sublime? The ability to ask questions is a big one, I think, having recently discovered that there are indeed people in the world for whom the questioning of information is an unused faculty.
“Kobe’s thirty-five and he’s been playing for like sixteen years.”
“Actually, according to Wikipedia he’s thirty and been playing for twelve years.”
“The days of spouting quote-unquote facts are over. Prepare to be checked.”
But then there is a feeling that washes over the epidermis, and thoughts flash through your mind about how perhaps you are precisely where you wanted you to be. You’ve been asking these questions of people for so long, and now you are asking it of yourself, even though you’ve already answered it. It’s time for the next question: “What do you plan to do about it? How do you plan to achieve this goal?” Good questions. I’ll get back to you sometime soon, I swear. I just need some time to think. A little quiet time with me and my psychosis to tighten things up a little bit.
“You know that I only live when I am near you… I have said that before, but I don’t think I ever came so near meaning it.”
--Kate Chopin, The Awakening, Chpt. XXXIV
Everybody has to find you. That’s the big quest isn’t it? Your love. He had it right all those years ago when he said, “Follow your bliss,” didn’t he? The words speak to me as nothing else ever has, and I am reminded each time they beg me to play with them, that it is love I have for the act of writing. It is a doing worth doing. There are so many doings worth doing, though, it’s about finding the right doing to do. The capacity of the human character to do is incredible, and it is possible that we haven’t even come close to understanding the peak just yet. Human technology. Athletes, academics, salt-of-the-earth: they are all human technology. Proof positive of evolution. The only real difference is that in this new era where we understand things like evolution, we can begin to see it happening on a very miniature scale. It took the human form almost five million years to figure out how to walk standing completely straight. We can see humanity develop under our eyes, and the funny thing is that it is moving in ALL different directions. A very wise professor once told me that that quality comes from quantity. He was by no means saying that a book or story is better because it’s longer, he was saying that the more material and more variety you have to work with, the better the end product is going to be—and anybody who has ever written a paper they are actually proud of would probably agree with me. The more material you have to work with, the more you can take out without feeling bad, the more you can develop into a recognizable mound, the more you can build a mountain range.
Cheap wine gives me headaches. Bummer.
On russet floors, by waters idle,
The pine lets fall its cone;
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells alone;
And traveler’s joy beguiles in autumn
Hearts that have lost their own.
--Housman
To steal somebody’s attention is a precious thing to take. You’d better be able to give a pretty damned good reason for it when you’re called up to answer for the things you’ve done in this world, and if it’s done for good reasons that turn out good, then sobeit it probably needed to happen. But if it was done for selfish reasons, or even if it turned out badly with the correct motives—which means that the stealer was probably unaware of the nature of their victim—there will be hell to pay. Maybe that’s what worries me. “Well I got that ol’ travelin’ bone, and I feel I got to move…”
Disjointed is funny thing to understand fully. Fuzzy connections looming up through the time fog: executioner’s singing, Orpheus’s emerging, models for writing, powers in their imagining, vanity’s fairing, new world’s braving, and in fuzzy relief they connect, but only to the one disjointed enough to make it make sense. This will be true because I will it so.
Can you see me? I can see you. I bet you’re sitting at your computer right now. I bet you’re a little bit confused. I bet by now you might even be shaking your head. You’ve gotten this far and you can’t see me yet. See me sitting in my basement domicile pecking away at my tiny computer, next to the ancient lamp acquired from my boss in Des Moines. Hear the ceiling fan whirring gently (it’s only set on medium). Taste the awful, cheap Livingston making me feel lower. Smell the smell of stale cigarettes on my fingers as I lean too close to the screen in an effort to make sure I’m seeing things as well as I ought to see them. See this morning’s coffee cup. Hear the Incubus come through the tiny speakers. See the books on my shelf. Taste the cool, circulated air-conditioned air. Feel the goatee with me now. Feel the closeness of my breath in the words. Feel the closeness of me in action.
And Michael Phelps has seven gold medals.
And suddenly you’re on your way to Korea.
And without warning you owe Cablevision a thousand dollars.
And then you find the depths of your father’s irrationality.
And you have the worst sunburn of your life on the bottom half of your thighs.
And you are scared.
And the weight of history suddenly becomes too much to bear.
So many ands. To be blessed and cursed in the same moment, simultaneously in fact. How does one begin to pretend to see the sublime? The ability to ask questions is a big one, I think, having recently discovered that there are indeed people in the world for whom the questioning of information is an unused faculty.
“Kobe’s thirty-five and he’s been playing for like sixteen years.”
“Actually, according to Wikipedia he’s thirty and been playing for twelve years.”
“The days of spouting quote-unquote facts are over. Prepare to be checked.”
But then there is a feeling that washes over the epidermis, and thoughts flash through your mind about how perhaps you are precisely where you wanted you to be. You’ve been asking these questions of people for so long, and now you are asking it of yourself, even though you’ve already answered it. It’s time for the next question: “What do you plan to do about it? How do you plan to achieve this goal?” Good questions. I’ll get back to you sometime soon, I swear. I just need some time to think. A little quiet time with me and my psychosis to tighten things up a little bit.
“You know that I only live when I am near you… I have said that before, but I don’t think I ever came so near meaning it.”
--Kate Chopin, The Awakening, Chpt. XXXIV
Everybody has to find you. That’s the big quest isn’t it? Your love. He had it right all those years ago when he said, “Follow your bliss,” didn’t he? The words speak to me as nothing else ever has, and I am reminded each time they beg me to play with them, that it is love I have for the act of writing. It is a doing worth doing. There are so many doings worth doing, though, it’s about finding the right doing to do. The capacity of the human character to do is incredible, and it is possible that we haven’t even come close to understanding the peak just yet. Human technology. Athletes, academics, salt-of-the-earth: they are all human technology. Proof positive of evolution. The only real difference is that in this new era where we understand things like evolution, we can begin to see it happening on a very miniature scale. It took the human form almost five million years to figure out how to walk standing completely straight. We can see humanity develop under our eyes, and the funny thing is that it is moving in ALL different directions. A very wise professor once told me that that quality comes from quantity. He was by no means saying that a book or story is better because it’s longer, he was saying that the more material and more variety you have to work with, the better the end product is going to be—and anybody who has ever written a paper they are actually proud of would probably agree with me. The more material you have to work with, the more you can take out without feeling bad, the more you can develop into a recognizable mound, the more you can build a mountain range.
Cheap wine gives me headaches. Bummer.
On russet floors, by waters idle,
The pine lets fall its cone;
The cuckoo shouts all day at nothing
In leafy dells alone;
And traveler’s joy beguiles in autumn
Hearts that have lost their own.
--Housman
To steal somebody’s attention is a precious thing to take. You’d better be able to give a pretty damned good reason for it when you’re called up to answer for the things you’ve done in this world, and if it’s done for good reasons that turn out good, then sobeit it probably needed to happen. But if it was done for selfish reasons, or even if it turned out badly with the correct motives—which means that the stealer was probably unaware of the nature of their victim—there will be hell to pay. Maybe that’s what worries me. “Well I got that ol’ travelin’ bone, and I feel I got to move…”
Disjointed is funny thing to understand fully. Fuzzy connections looming up through the time fog: executioner’s singing, Orpheus’s emerging, models for writing, powers in their imagining, vanity’s fairing, new world’s braving, and in fuzzy relief they connect, but only to the one disjointed enough to make it make sense. This will be true because I will it so.
Can you see me? I can see you. I bet you’re sitting at your computer right now. I bet you’re a little bit confused. I bet by now you might even be shaking your head. You’ve gotten this far and you can’t see me yet. See me sitting in my basement domicile pecking away at my tiny computer, next to the ancient lamp acquired from my boss in Des Moines. Hear the ceiling fan whirring gently (it’s only set on medium). Taste the awful, cheap Livingston making me feel lower. Smell the smell of stale cigarettes on my fingers as I lean too close to the screen in an effort to make sure I’m seeing things as well as I ought to see them. See this morning’s coffee cup. Hear the Incubus come through the tiny speakers. See the books on my shelf. Taste the cool, circulated air-conditioned air. Feel the goatee with me now. Feel the closeness of my breath in the words. Feel the closeness of me in action.
Wednesday, August 6, 2008
I'm Doing All I
know. I am living in a fairly messed up world right now. There has to be something I’m missing, a key of sorts, because I cannot imagine why there is nothing out there for me. I have considered the fact that perhaps I am over-qualified for most positions I am applying for, but what kind of place is it that does not want somebody they know will be able to do the job? That has to illustrate something, right?
But all I really want to do sometimes is cry myself to sleep because of my apparent inability to find employment—although it is not for a lack of effort. So much time spent filling out applications and submitting them and re-working my resume and writing cover letters and investigating who’s hiring, and yet not a single nibble on the end of my job-fishing line, so here I sit, doing just about all I know how to do: write. Even that is questionable, I suppose, as I have never had anything technically published.
Let’s run down a list of occupations I have had—as I have been working since I was about fourteen. I started my working career with a paper route I worked with my mother. She drove the van, but I rolled the papers and stuffed them in their blue plastic bags and delivered them to the doors of people who would probably not even read them. I got a job at the grocery store across the street which ended badly and I don’t really want to talk about it. Let’s just say that youthful exuberance was too much for me to handle at the time. After that, I got a job at Maggie Moo’s Ice Cream and Treaterie as an ice cream technologist serving specially mixed ice cream to the masses. From there I graduated, literally from high school, and obtained a position as a construction laborer for a dodgy construction outfit. Then I went off to school and obtained a position as a janitor in the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s student union. That summer I came home and managed to land a job at Target where I worked as an overnight merchandise processing agent for the time when the Target at 169 and Barry Rd was still new. I changed schools at that point and moved to Iowa where I worked in the mailroom of the school and sorted, delivered, and distributed the mail for the campus and the post office. After a while, it became very apparent that this was not nearly enough (5.25/hr) to fund my college experience with, and I got a second job—both of which I retained for my entire career at Simpson—with a wealthy older gentleman who needed strapping young fellows to maintain his yard and his house and his land. This was truly a landmark position for me because, as I like to say, if you could –ing it, I did it: mowing, cutting down of trees, removing said trees, painting, patching, fixing, building, conversating, driving, planting, dusting, organizing. I did it all, and I got pretty good at it—I even started cutting down trees with a chainsaw sans shoesus. Then I went to New Zealand where I was studying to be a teacher. I found out I could work up to fifteen hours a week to help fund my stay in the country, and I hooked up with Adecco and worked in a plastics factory as a quality control agent, an astro-turf laying agent, a grocery store merchandiser and re-fixturer, and I was basically interning to be an educator. Upon returning to Simpson I re-acquired my pair of jobs and worked them until I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English. I was planning to move to New York City and pursue a graduate degree, which I did, but there was an awkward couple of months in which I was living back at home with my mother and father and needed a job, so I became a substitute teacher in the Park Hill School District. A couple of months there and then it was off to New York City where I acquired a job on the overnight merchandise processing team of one of Fortune’s Top 100 Companies to Work For: The Container Store. I graduated from St. John’s University with a Master’s Degree in English and then got promoted to Full-Time at TCS. Three months after my promotion, my supervisor was fired, the other full-timer quit, and I was left to run the operation. They can say what they want, and titles aside, I was the overnight supervisor for six months, managing values and attitudes, ensuring efficiencies were met, communicating, and insisting on TCS core cultural values as the way to get that truck processed.
It occurs to me that I have screwed up a lot of these jobs. Something in me revolts when it starts to sit wrong. I am a bad, bad man sometimes. I get flighty because I have very definite thoughts about oppression, and sometimes all I really want to do is sit in my room and play my guitar for hours, or sit at my computer and type and type and type and let the click clickety click click click of the keyboard help me find zen, or read and read and read until I think my brain is going to overflow. “Gilgamesh went abroad in the world, but he met with none who could withstand his arms till he came to Uruk.”
“Rage: sing, goddess, achilles’ rage, black and murderous, that cost the Greeks incalculable pain, pitched countless souls of heroes into Hades’ dark, and left their bodies to rot as feasts for dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.”
“Paul stood in the bookshop facing a shelf of books.”
“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making there moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs catch an uptown A train.”
“I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
“ “The Bottoms” succeededc to “Hell Row.” “
“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
“While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.”
“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.”
“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.””
“I’ve been called Bone all my life, but my name’s Ruth Anee.”
“It is customary for those who wish to gain the favour of a prince to endeavour to do so by offering him gifts of those things which they hold most precious, or in which they know him to take especial delight.”
“A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.”
“A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.”
But what good does it do me? I think I’m going to go fishing, but if you want to know about Post-Marxist Critical Theory or the importance of Hunter S. Thompson or Joyce’s Hamlet theory imbedded in Ulysses or how to play guitar or how to shade a drawing (I can only work in gray-scale right now, but I’m working into color) or how to tie a fisherman’s knot or how to fillet a fish or what it means to make a good business decision or how to string a guitar or how to roll a perfect cigarette or what Skip James and Robert Johnson meant to the world of music or why Led Zeppelin is so important or why I can’t get enough of Jeff Buckley or what the difference is between Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson or the appropriate way to style a conversation in a piece of fiction or what is meant by Zoom in reference to writing or how to make biscuits from scratch or how to make your own pasta sauce (and your own pasta for that matter) or how to play cribbage successfully or how to average three-hundred and fifty points in Scrabble or how to make a “Perfect Manhattan” or what it means to bruise the gin (and what gin’s made of for that matter) or what’s meant by Kia Ora in Kiwiland or what Surfer’s Paradise, Australia is like or how Fiji is one of the most beautiful places on the planet the philosophical understanding of the sublime or what I mean when I say “The Act reveals the subconscious desire” or how religion and spirituality differ or what Whitman is doing in Leaves of Grass or the appropriate way to create a pyramid introduction or the appropriate things to check before starting up a chainsaw or how to check the fluids in your car or what it’s like to wrestle in Bulgaria under the care of what can only be described as the Bulgarian Mafia or why I know that Les Paul still plays every week in New York City at the Iridium Jazz Club or the difference between an objective and a goal or what is meant by the perfect balance of speed and accuracy or why it is important to not be paying more in rent than in payroll or how to make a Red Devil or if you want go swimming or if you want to go hunting or if you want to sit around and talk or if you want, then maybe you could give me a call.
Or maybe a job.
In New York City they do a lot of painting in the subway, and they always put up very helpful signs that let you know when the paint is wet that say (you guessed it): “Wet Paint.”
I used to take two of those signs and create an alternate message for people to ponder:
We In Pain.
But all I really want to do sometimes is cry myself to sleep because of my apparent inability to find employment—although it is not for a lack of effort. So much time spent filling out applications and submitting them and re-working my resume and writing cover letters and investigating who’s hiring, and yet not a single nibble on the end of my job-fishing line, so here I sit, doing just about all I know how to do: write. Even that is questionable, I suppose, as I have never had anything technically published.
Let’s run down a list of occupations I have had—as I have been working since I was about fourteen. I started my working career with a paper route I worked with my mother. She drove the van, but I rolled the papers and stuffed them in their blue plastic bags and delivered them to the doors of people who would probably not even read them. I got a job at the grocery store across the street which ended badly and I don’t really want to talk about it. Let’s just say that youthful exuberance was too much for me to handle at the time. After that, I got a job at Maggie Moo’s Ice Cream and Treaterie as an ice cream technologist serving specially mixed ice cream to the masses. From there I graduated, literally from high school, and obtained a position as a construction laborer for a dodgy construction outfit. Then I went off to school and obtained a position as a janitor in the University of Nebraska at Lincoln’s student union. That summer I came home and managed to land a job at Target where I worked as an overnight merchandise processing agent for the time when the Target at 169 and Barry Rd was still new. I changed schools at that point and moved to Iowa where I worked in the mailroom of the school and sorted, delivered, and distributed the mail for the campus and the post office. After a while, it became very apparent that this was not nearly enough (5.25/hr) to fund my college experience with, and I got a second job—both of which I retained for my entire career at Simpson—with a wealthy older gentleman who needed strapping young fellows to maintain his yard and his house and his land. This was truly a landmark position for me because, as I like to say, if you could –ing it, I did it: mowing, cutting down of trees, removing said trees, painting, patching, fixing, building, conversating, driving, planting, dusting, organizing. I did it all, and I got pretty good at it—I even started cutting down trees with a chainsaw sans shoesus. Then I went to New Zealand where I was studying to be a teacher. I found out I could work up to fifteen hours a week to help fund my stay in the country, and I hooked up with Adecco and worked in a plastics factory as a quality control agent, an astro-turf laying agent, a grocery store merchandiser and re-fixturer, and I was basically interning to be an educator. Upon returning to Simpson I re-acquired my pair of jobs and worked them until I graduated with a Bachelor’s degree in English. I was planning to move to New York City and pursue a graduate degree, which I did, but there was an awkward couple of months in which I was living back at home with my mother and father and needed a job, so I became a substitute teacher in the Park Hill School District. A couple of months there and then it was off to New York City where I acquired a job on the overnight merchandise processing team of one of Fortune’s Top 100 Companies to Work For: The Container Store. I graduated from St. John’s University with a Master’s Degree in English and then got promoted to Full-Time at TCS. Three months after my promotion, my supervisor was fired, the other full-timer quit, and I was left to run the operation. They can say what they want, and titles aside, I was the overnight supervisor for six months, managing values and attitudes, ensuring efficiencies were met, communicating, and insisting on TCS core cultural values as the way to get that truck processed.
It occurs to me that I have screwed up a lot of these jobs. Something in me revolts when it starts to sit wrong. I am a bad, bad man sometimes. I get flighty because I have very definite thoughts about oppression, and sometimes all I really want to do is sit in my room and play my guitar for hours, or sit at my computer and type and type and type and let the click clickety click click click of the keyboard help me find zen, or read and read and read until I think my brain is going to overflow. “Gilgamesh went abroad in the world, but he met with none who could withstand his arms till he came to Uruk.”
“Rage: sing, goddess, achilles’ rage, black and murderous, that cost the Greeks incalculable pain, pitched countless souls of heroes into Hades’ dark, and left their bodies to rot as feasts for dogs and birds, as Zeus’ will was done.”
“Paul stood in the bookshop facing a shelf of books.”
“I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making there moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a turnstile and two flights down the iron stairs catch an uptown A train.”
“I celebrate myself, and what I assume you shall assume, for every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.”
“ “The Bottoms” succeededc to “Hell Row.” “
“In the beginning, God created the Heavens and the Earth.”
“While the present century was in its teens, and on one sunshiny morning in June, there drove up to the great iron gate of Miss Pinkerton’s academy for young ladies, on Chiswick Mall, a large family coach, with two fat horses in blazing harness, driven by a fat coachman in a three-cornered hat and wig, at the rate of four miles an hour.”
“We were somewhere around Barstow, on the edge of the desert, when the drugs began to take hold.”
“The village of Holcomb stands on the high wheat plains of western Kansas, a lonesome area that other Kansans call “out there.””
“I’ve been called Bone all my life, but my name’s Ruth Anee.”
“It is customary for those who wish to gain the favour of a prince to endeavour to do so by offering him gifts of those things which they hold most precious, or in which they know him to take especial delight.”
“A squat grey building of only thirty-four stories.”
“A spectre is haunting Europe - the spectre of Communism.”
But what good does it do me? I think I’m going to go fishing, but if you want to know about Post-Marxist Critical Theory or the importance of Hunter S. Thompson or Joyce’s Hamlet theory imbedded in Ulysses or how to play guitar or how to shade a drawing (I can only work in gray-scale right now, but I’m working into color) or how to tie a fisherman’s knot or how to fillet a fish or what it means to make a good business decision or how to string a guitar or how to roll a perfect cigarette or what Skip James and Robert Johnson meant to the world of music or why Led Zeppelin is so important or why I can’t get enough of Jeff Buckley or what the difference is between Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson or the appropriate way to style a conversation in a piece of fiction or what is meant by Zoom in reference to writing or how to make biscuits from scratch or how to make your own pasta sauce (and your own pasta for that matter) or how to play cribbage successfully or how to average three-hundred and fifty points in Scrabble or how to make a “Perfect Manhattan” or what it means to bruise the gin (and what gin’s made of for that matter) or what’s meant by Kia Ora in Kiwiland or what Surfer’s Paradise, Australia is like or how Fiji is one of the most beautiful places on the planet the philosophical understanding of the sublime or what I mean when I say “The Act reveals the subconscious desire” or how religion and spirituality differ or what Whitman is doing in Leaves of Grass or the appropriate way to create a pyramid introduction or the appropriate things to check before starting up a chainsaw or how to check the fluids in your car or what it’s like to wrestle in Bulgaria under the care of what can only be described as the Bulgarian Mafia or why I know that Les Paul still plays every week in New York City at the Iridium Jazz Club or the difference between an objective and a goal or what is meant by the perfect balance of speed and accuracy or why it is important to not be paying more in rent than in payroll or how to make a Red Devil or if you want go swimming or if you want to go hunting or if you want to sit around and talk or if you want, then maybe you could give me a call.
Or maybe a job.
In New York City they do a lot of painting in the subway, and they always put up very helpful signs that let you know when the paint is wet that say (you guessed it): “Wet Paint.”
I used to take two of those signs and create an alternate message for people to ponder:
We In Pain.
Friday, August 1, 2008
Psychotropics
Yes.
And maybe it was so good
because I knew how hard
I'd worked for it to be real.
A time investment well spent.
Why is this one here and not there?
And maybe it was so good
because I knew how hard
I'd worked for it to be real.
A time investment well spent.
Why is this one here and not there?
Monday, July 28, 2008
To Blog Somewhere
New. Well, this is the first time I have had a chance to sit at my computer and write as I used to do. Location is an incredibly important part of any writer’s ability to do what he or she does: what was Walden but the perfect environment for Thoreau, what is Starbuck’s but the perfect environment for people writing on their laptops, and what would Hunter S. Thompson be without his amphetamine-crazed glancings around a room full of booze and drugs and news clippings. It’s always difficult to say how a new environment will influence the way one writes, but I guess we’re back to the old experimentation stage—which can oftentimes be awfully sublime…something I’m very interested in.
So, from the wild confines of the freedom of New York City, to the uncomfortable independence of Kansas City, the land of my birth, I manage to make my way. Funny that. But funny also that I have now lived a full third of my life away from this city and I feel at once as if I belong and I don’t.
There are no lowball glasses in my parents house. I’m not sure how to feel in a world without pint glasses, lowball glasses, martini glasses, and general alcohol paraphernalia. That sounds bad, I guess, but the reality is that these are just things you have around the house. How does one explain it? It is not as if there is binging every night on cheap booze and passing out with your head spinning a little bit as was so common during the college years, this is a more respectful relationship with alcohol. You know what it can, and what it can’t, do, and doing is just so important. When it comes to most things in this world, it is simply the doing of them that matters, the particulars of the performance are most generally of little consequence.
“I played The Garden.”
“Oh. How’d it go?”
No. That conversation doesn’t happen, and even if it does, it would be fatuously ended by a brief, “Oh, you know, pretty good.”
It doesn’t matter how it went. It doesn’t matter when your pants are on inside out when you are sitting in the comfort of your own home. It just doesn’t. It’s true. It doesn’t matter if you stand on a chair swinging your Johnson (yes, that’s a Johnson) around like some kind of weird puppet show starring an earthworm and a couple of clumps of dirt because you are in your home, and it doesn’t really matter how weird you are when you’re alone.
You do get into a sticky area there, though, because it is entirely possible that weirdness is a sign of mental instability—or at least the baseline of some kind of social deficiency. You’re missing something when ALL you want to do is stand on a chair swinging your downstairs around in the shape of a cross saying E nomini patri, et Fili e spiritu sancti, or you’ve got something extra, and either way, you’re dealing with some deviation from the norm.
Things seem to mean so much, yeah? Or is that just me? Sunsetwatching could be the name of my religion. Every sunset means that what just happened is in the log books and cannot be undone, while it simultaneously means that a brand new day is on the way. I watched a friend of mine this evening as he fed his three-month-old baby girl, and realized that the fathering, mothering, caretaking, growing, developing, loving, and feeding another human being can be a spiritual experience. I would imagine that it develops a part of our soul that can be developed in no other way, and that is why it is such a significant event. Your life is forever changed in that moment. I am, obviously, excluding those folks that don’t care, because they honest aren’t worth thinking about. If you can’t understand the effect you can and will have on that person’s life, you probably shouldn’t have one to begin with. There is a possibility that it will force that part of the soul to develop, but that seems like an incredible crapshoot. If you go into it with the wrong attitude you will be a bad parent, and a bad parent is nothing more than a parent who can be apathetic to their offspring. Love them, hate them, show them the spectrum, but don’t do nothing.
Jesus, what was all that about. Maybe I’m just taking notes for when (and I’m gonna throw a big IF in here) that happens in my life. This suddenly seems to be the most overtly journal-type entry I’ve ever made, but we’re back to history at that point, and it can be extremely lucrative to have those bits of history to look back on and say, “O, I totally remember that frame of mind.” Which is important, because my frame of mind is like something out of an experimental novel by an unknown author.
But we’re working back to equilibrium, now. The fingers are once again dancing across the stages of the keyboard and putting words together to form sentences and sentences together to form some kind of meaning, as all words mean something when put into the context of other words. It can’t help but mean something, right? The only thing that can mean something is something done, and doing things usually takes the form of revolution. Daily revolution, a guide to keeping life interesting in twelve easy chapters. The future is unknowable, keep your head up. The bill may be a factor, as you have no money to pay for it, but you can’t really be all that worried about it, they plan on this kind of thing happening. As a matter of fact, they hope it will. They are so far removed from it that they couldn’t care less. Your couple of hundred bucks on the bill is really only a big deal to you because you feel like you owe somebody something and that that means something, but the reality is that you owe a couple of hundred bucks to a corporation that only barely cares about your interaction with it because they’ll get what’s theirs one way or another. From you or another source. You’re not putting them out of business.
Good god what a lot of drivel this has turned out to be, but I suppose that there are days when the brain absolutely has to just flush itself of the insanity that is wildly racing through it. I wish I dreamt more. Three of the people I love most in the world dream multiple times a week. I get, at MOST, one a month, and usually more like one a year—obviously these are the dreams that I remember even vaguely. I dreamt consistently one time. They were scary and I’d rather not be there. Am I running away from my dreams to pursue them in reality?
So, from the wild confines of the freedom of New York City, to the uncomfortable independence of Kansas City, the land of my birth, I manage to make my way. Funny that. But funny also that I have now lived a full third of my life away from this city and I feel at once as if I belong and I don’t.
There are no lowball glasses in my parents house. I’m not sure how to feel in a world without pint glasses, lowball glasses, martini glasses, and general alcohol paraphernalia. That sounds bad, I guess, but the reality is that these are just things you have around the house. How does one explain it? It is not as if there is binging every night on cheap booze and passing out with your head spinning a little bit as was so common during the college years, this is a more respectful relationship with alcohol. You know what it can, and what it can’t, do, and doing is just so important. When it comes to most things in this world, it is simply the doing of them that matters, the particulars of the performance are most generally of little consequence.
“I played The Garden.”
“Oh. How’d it go?”
No. That conversation doesn’t happen, and even if it does, it would be fatuously ended by a brief, “Oh, you know, pretty good.”
It doesn’t matter how it went. It doesn’t matter when your pants are on inside out when you are sitting in the comfort of your own home. It just doesn’t. It’s true. It doesn’t matter if you stand on a chair swinging your Johnson (yes, that’s a Johnson) around like some kind of weird puppet show starring an earthworm and a couple of clumps of dirt because you are in your home, and it doesn’t really matter how weird you are when you’re alone.
You do get into a sticky area there, though, because it is entirely possible that weirdness is a sign of mental instability—or at least the baseline of some kind of social deficiency. You’re missing something when ALL you want to do is stand on a chair swinging your downstairs around in the shape of a cross saying E nomini patri, et Fili e spiritu sancti, or you’ve got something extra, and either way, you’re dealing with some deviation from the norm.
Things seem to mean so much, yeah? Or is that just me? Sunsetwatching could be the name of my religion. Every sunset means that what just happened is in the log books and cannot be undone, while it simultaneously means that a brand new day is on the way. I watched a friend of mine this evening as he fed his three-month-old baby girl, and realized that the fathering, mothering, caretaking, growing, developing, loving, and feeding another human being can be a spiritual experience. I would imagine that it develops a part of our soul that can be developed in no other way, and that is why it is such a significant event. Your life is forever changed in that moment. I am, obviously, excluding those folks that don’t care, because they honest aren’t worth thinking about. If you can’t understand the effect you can and will have on that person’s life, you probably shouldn’t have one to begin with. There is a possibility that it will force that part of the soul to develop, but that seems like an incredible crapshoot. If you go into it with the wrong attitude you will be a bad parent, and a bad parent is nothing more than a parent who can be apathetic to their offspring. Love them, hate them, show them the spectrum, but don’t do nothing.
Jesus, what was all that about. Maybe I’m just taking notes for when (and I’m gonna throw a big IF in here) that happens in my life. This suddenly seems to be the most overtly journal-type entry I’ve ever made, but we’re back to history at that point, and it can be extremely lucrative to have those bits of history to look back on and say, “O, I totally remember that frame of mind.” Which is important, because my frame of mind is like something out of an experimental novel by an unknown author.
But we’re working back to equilibrium, now. The fingers are once again dancing across the stages of the keyboard and putting words together to form sentences and sentences together to form some kind of meaning, as all words mean something when put into the context of other words. It can’t help but mean something, right? The only thing that can mean something is something done, and doing things usually takes the form of revolution. Daily revolution, a guide to keeping life interesting in twelve easy chapters. The future is unknowable, keep your head up. The bill may be a factor, as you have no money to pay for it, but you can’t really be all that worried about it, they plan on this kind of thing happening. As a matter of fact, they hope it will. They are so far removed from it that they couldn’t care less. Your couple of hundred bucks on the bill is really only a big deal to you because you feel like you owe somebody something and that that means something, but the reality is that you owe a couple of hundred bucks to a corporation that only barely cares about your interaction with it because they’ll get what’s theirs one way or another. From you or another source. You’re not putting them out of business.
Good god what a lot of drivel this has turned out to be, but I suppose that there are days when the brain absolutely has to just flush itself of the insanity that is wildly racing through it. I wish I dreamt more. Three of the people I love most in the world dream multiple times a week. I get, at MOST, one a month, and usually more like one a year—obviously these are the dreams that I remember even vaguely. I dreamt consistently one time. They were scary and I’d rather not be there. Am I running away from my dreams to pursue them in reality?
Monday, July 7, 2008
Through Movement and
change. We’re going to do this very free form style and just sort of roll with what comes up, because I’m seeing the physics of movement as applicable to the metaphorical, spiritual and metaphysical movement of bodies. Motion in the physical world can be calculated using one of a number of equations involving consistent variables: distance traveled, initial position, initial velocity, final position, final velocity, time between initial and current states, and constant acceleration (where most bodies fall under the acceleration of gravity). The reason that there are so many equations involving motion is because it depends on the knowns to determine which equation is most appropriate to solve for the unknowns.
Calibrating instruments in an effort for maximum accuracy, the instruments of my trade are the pen and ink, pencil and lead, computer and keys, the body and brain and all of them need constant maintenance for optimal efficiency. Complicated notions of erratic motion can be solved with a little bit of hard work and the appropriate equation—but beware of using the inappropriate equation as this can lead to inaccurate answers. You have to ask the most appropriate question, you see, in order to get the most appropriate answer. I’m moving! I’m moving! I’m moving! But what, ye gods, will be my final velocity in comparison to my initial velocity and how far will I go, how fast will I travel there, and where the hell am I, and where will I be.
For example, let’s say we have one of those high bounce balls that you get from the machine outside the grocery store for twenty-five cents (I guess there about fifty cents now, but anyway…). We want to know the distance traveled by this ball as it bounces, but all we know is the initial velocity and how long it bounced. Not a problem. Let’s take: vf=vi + aΔt, where the final velocity is found by taking the sum of the initial velocity and the product of the acceleration and the time. If we’re dealing with a dropped ball, and it bounced for two seconds, then the final velocity would be 2m/s (our known from the beginning) + g (gravity, 9.8 m/s2) * 3 seconds which gives us 2 m/s + 29.4 m/s = 31.4m/s as the final velocity. Then we just plug that guy and all our other knowns into the equation d=1/2(vi+vf)Δt. The distance traveled is then 1/2(31.4+2)3 = 50.1 meters.
I have come so far from the boy I was in my youth—my mantra, it seems, along with “the act reveals the subconscious desire” and “only act, the future is unknowable”…I guess I’m working on a collection of aphorisms, but I feel like it’s important for a man to have at least one aphorism attached to his name, but to return—and the distance traveled has been so great it is nearly impossible to calculate. Although I know I feel like I have lately been traveling at a much greater velocity than any time previous and now I know that this is mainly as a result of the way my life is being lived, which is to say fast and hard. If production is the distance is the outcome of the equation, then I guess I have to feel pretty good about what I have accomplished and am going to accomplish. The pace of existence is largely determined by our circadian rhythms and how our day is structured to help us complete any variety and number of tasks. A simple map can tell us how far we are traveling, and a speedometer can tell us how fast we’re going at any given time, and a clock will tell us how long, but what of acceleration. Is acceleration desire? Put the metal to the pedal to the other metal, Bender, and get us out of here! It’s funny that the one general constant in the physical world is a true variable in the metaphysical based on what we want and illustrated through the way we act.
The details of the trip are as complicated as possible, and for good reason. Stage one: flight to base. It will be an early morning red-eye that we board bleary-eyed from the ingestion of chemical lubricants and then will be promptly missed as a result of lubricant-induced slumber. Stage two: procure automotive transport unit and use it to cross twelve-hundred miles in one revolution of the earth around the sun—and we all know how I feel about revolution—during which it will be an all out burn down the interstate of youth to it’s termination/initiation point. Stage three: old business. When the automotive transport unit comes to a stop at the destination, the clock is already well under-way, and time is running thinner and thinner, and there are so many things to do. Stage four: wander back to base. The idea here is that the only truly appropriate way to understand how far we really travel is to take control of the means.
I moved to New York City two and one-half years ago from Kansas City, Missouri. In nine days I am moving back to Kansas City. There were hiccups in the process, given the expenses of a moving van, but it turns out the cheapest way we can find to get everything back effectively is to fly to Kansas City, rent a car, drive it back to New York City, load it up, and drive it back. The plan, right now, and there are those saying of best laid and mice and men, is that we’ll burn out to the coast, spend a couple of days, and then meander our way back. In a way it’s like a grand metaphor for what happened here in the city. When one gets to New York City it is an all-out sprint, and while one is here the race is consistently moving. The only way to bust out is to take control of the race and make your way at your own pace. When mental and physical capacities are running rapidly at all times with barely any pause, it is only a short time before you run out of gas or throw a rod or step on some glass or otherwise need to reach equilibrium.
Movement is a change. You cannot run away from your problems. This is true. Your problems will be with you wherever you are, but by moving you are changing… something. You can never know what that change will mean. You cannot know how far it will take you. You cannot know the future. But by changing the meaning of one variable, the entire equation changes and the outcomes are all different. It’s kind of like mathematical randomness, because change makes anything possible in math, and anything means that any random point will be the result of the new trajectory. When desiring something new, it is important to change something, otherwise there will never be anything new (you would, after all, simply be recycling the same old equation with the same old plug-ins), and that is counterproductive to the desire (i.e. change). Changing something illustrates the desire for change.
Here we are then, changing things, altering trajectories, and feeling more in control of the previously erratic. It’s a revolution of the mind, of the body, and of the spirit. Maybe I’ll grow my hair out again, I thought…
Calibrating instruments in an effort for maximum accuracy, the instruments of my trade are the pen and ink, pencil and lead, computer and keys, the body and brain and all of them need constant maintenance for optimal efficiency. Complicated notions of erratic motion can be solved with a little bit of hard work and the appropriate equation—but beware of using the inappropriate equation as this can lead to inaccurate answers. You have to ask the most appropriate question, you see, in order to get the most appropriate answer. I’m moving! I’m moving! I’m moving! But what, ye gods, will be my final velocity in comparison to my initial velocity and how far will I go, how fast will I travel there, and where the hell am I, and where will I be.
For example, let’s say we have one of those high bounce balls that you get from the machine outside the grocery store for twenty-five cents (I guess there about fifty cents now, but anyway…). We want to know the distance traveled by this ball as it bounces, but all we know is the initial velocity and how long it bounced. Not a problem. Let’s take: vf=vi + aΔt, where the final velocity is found by taking the sum of the initial velocity and the product of the acceleration and the time. If we’re dealing with a dropped ball, and it bounced for two seconds, then the final velocity would be 2m/s (our known from the beginning) + g (gravity, 9.8 m/s2) * 3 seconds which gives us 2 m/s + 29.4 m/s = 31.4m/s as the final velocity. Then we just plug that guy and all our other knowns into the equation d=1/2(vi+vf)Δt. The distance traveled is then 1/2(31.4+2)3 = 50.1 meters.
I have come so far from the boy I was in my youth—my mantra, it seems, along with “the act reveals the subconscious desire” and “only act, the future is unknowable”…I guess I’m working on a collection of aphorisms, but I feel like it’s important for a man to have at least one aphorism attached to his name, but to return—and the distance traveled has been so great it is nearly impossible to calculate. Although I know I feel like I have lately been traveling at a much greater velocity than any time previous and now I know that this is mainly as a result of the way my life is being lived, which is to say fast and hard. If production is the distance is the outcome of the equation, then I guess I have to feel pretty good about what I have accomplished and am going to accomplish. The pace of existence is largely determined by our circadian rhythms and how our day is structured to help us complete any variety and number of tasks. A simple map can tell us how far we are traveling, and a speedometer can tell us how fast we’re going at any given time, and a clock will tell us how long, but what of acceleration. Is acceleration desire? Put the metal to the pedal to the other metal, Bender, and get us out of here! It’s funny that the one general constant in the physical world is a true variable in the metaphysical based on what we want and illustrated through the way we act.
The details of the trip are as complicated as possible, and for good reason. Stage one: flight to base. It will be an early morning red-eye that we board bleary-eyed from the ingestion of chemical lubricants and then will be promptly missed as a result of lubricant-induced slumber. Stage two: procure automotive transport unit and use it to cross twelve-hundred miles in one revolution of the earth around the sun—and we all know how I feel about revolution—during which it will be an all out burn down the interstate of youth to it’s termination/initiation point. Stage three: old business. When the automotive transport unit comes to a stop at the destination, the clock is already well under-way, and time is running thinner and thinner, and there are so many things to do. Stage four: wander back to base. The idea here is that the only truly appropriate way to understand how far we really travel is to take control of the means.
I moved to New York City two and one-half years ago from Kansas City, Missouri. In nine days I am moving back to Kansas City. There were hiccups in the process, given the expenses of a moving van, but it turns out the cheapest way we can find to get everything back effectively is to fly to Kansas City, rent a car, drive it back to New York City, load it up, and drive it back. The plan, right now, and there are those saying of best laid and mice and men, is that we’ll burn out to the coast, spend a couple of days, and then meander our way back. In a way it’s like a grand metaphor for what happened here in the city. When one gets to New York City it is an all-out sprint, and while one is here the race is consistently moving. The only way to bust out is to take control of the race and make your way at your own pace. When mental and physical capacities are running rapidly at all times with barely any pause, it is only a short time before you run out of gas or throw a rod or step on some glass or otherwise need to reach equilibrium.
Movement is a change. You cannot run away from your problems. This is true. Your problems will be with you wherever you are, but by moving you are changing… something. You can never know what that change will mean. You cannot know how far it will take you. You cannot know the future. But by changing the meaning of one variable, the entire equation changes and the outcomes are all different. It’s kind of like mathematical randomness, because change makes anything possible in math, and anything means that any random point will be the result of the new trajectory. When desiring something new, it is important to change something, otherwise there will never be anything new (you would, after all, simply be recycling the same old equation with the same old plug-ins), and that is counterproductive to the desire (i.e. change). Changing something illustrates the desire for change.
Here we are then, changing things, altering trajectories, and feeling more in control of the previously erratic. It’s a revolution of the mind, of the body, and of the spirit. Maybe I’ll grow my hair out again, I thought…
Thursday, June 26, 2008
What's It All
mean? That’s like the big daddy of them all, isn’t it? But it seems like a real impossibility as the meaning of life is never revealed during life…or maybe it is, but only very rarely.
There are those that would say that the meaning of life is love. I have to admire these people because love is an extremely admirable, if incomprehensibly complex, emotion to base one’s existence on—I guess I’m thinking of the super-powerful flower in gun barrel image. To be sure, if love is what it is all about, then that is an incredible design from the almighty; however, large-scale love has never really worked. The closest we could probably come is peaceful co-existence. Yes, if everybody loved everybody the world would be a better place, but we are asking entire chunks of the world to unburden themselves of the weight of history, which is a mighty difficult task. I think the closest that this relationship could come to the meaning of it all is a love—hate thing, and while the ironic gap is pretty fitting, it only really accounts for part of something.
By this I mean that it is only a part of what the brain can do. The amydgala is small neural cluster in the brain that processes a lot of our negative emotions and the positive emotions are sort of strewn about—an interesting phenomenon in itself. What happens when we make decisions is that these sections of the brain seem to light up and duke it out letting us know how we ought to feel and therefore helping us make decisions. But I think the key here is that these are sections of the brain. The brain is more complex than love?
I don’t think anybody would forego derivatives for the whole unless you absolutely had to—thanks math—and for this reason there is good reason to believe that the first principle ruling each and every individual resides in the brain, and not somewhere specific either. The brain is as complex as life is, and is, arguably, what makes us capable of life or, more specifically, living.
The body is an amazing thing. Have you ever fasted? It’s a funny sort of thing that affects the body, and we feel it. To fast has been a part of almost every major religious or spiritual history, and for good reason because it makes us very aware of the needs of the body. I am still a big proponent of the two biological imperatives: survive and reproduce. From a purely biological standpoint, these two, fairly simple things are all that we need to survive. They are not the meaning of life because these are once again one section of imperatives. We also need to emote and cogitate and decide and do the things that make these two imperatives possible, and meaning should not be something you have to do. You find meaning, but you don’t technically have to go out looking for it—implied of course by find.
I’ve just had a disturbing thought that how I came into the world is how I’m going to go out of it: as a newborn I had colic and cried incessantly.
But if he head back into the depths of the brain, we find something else interesting going on there, and that is that something we would normally consider a positive emotion, empathy, in that it is a positive thing to be able to understand what someone is feeling, actually flares up some parts of the brain that deal with pain: pleasure and pain, a classic battle.
From this one battleground we can absolutely determine that pleasure and pain are not the meaning either because these are once again two separate feelings (opposites), and meaning does not really have an opposite. Meaning and meaninglessness would probably be the closest, but meaninglessness is determined by meaning, unlike pleasure being determined by pain in that it is entirely possible to understand the one without the other, but meaninglessness means nothing without meaning.
So, what are we getting from this? The brain, the intellect, and the question. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might say, “would you deny even spirituality?” Spirituality is a mysterious feeling, but we have already determined that feelings are derivatives of the brain’s functions and that we would not forego first principles for derivatives. Spirituality is different from love in that its mysteries involve asking the question, “What happens when the one we love is absent from our physical presence and we attribute all this power and grandeur and meaning to him or her or it?” But that’s about it. If you have ever been in a long-distance relationship, you have been close to this kind of thing. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend it. It is extremely challenging, and you learn one helluva lot about yourself in the process, but I guess it’s not everything now is it?
I am beginning to think that we are overlooking the most relevant part of the question we asked at the very beginning: the fact that it is a question: a question implies an answer. Now, let’s be very clear and say that there are some questions that are more difficult to answer than others, let’s just say for kicks we were asked to discuss theoretical physics or what Joyce was really getting at. These are nearly impossible questions to answer, but by asking them we are implying that it is worthy of investigation and the closer we get to the answer of these truly difficult questions is one step closer to understanding more about ourselves.
If the one thing we can grant is that the act reveals desire, and that we generally act for what we want, and further, that the act is a question because the future is unknowable, then the boiled down first principle of the thing seems to be saying something like act with the understanding you are questioning because that’s what you can do. You don’t have to, but you can. The more you actively question, the more you are revealing you want to question in general. You are always better for having acted (I am not advocating irrational, premature actions, but even these have the potential to make us better if we learn from them).
But even an action is a question that has no words right away. Sometimes we don’t know what question we are asking until we have the benefit of hindsight, so maybe it’s the question undefined that defines us. We can investigate everything, can’t we?
There are those that would say that the meaning of life is love. I have to admire these people because love is an extremely admirable, if incomprehensibly complex, emotion to base one’s existence on—I guess I’m thinking of the super-powerful flower in gun barrel image. To be sure, if love is what it is all about, then that is an incredible design from the almighty; however, large-scale love has never really worked. The closest we could probably come is peaceful co-existence. Yes, if everybody loved everybody the world would be a better place, but we are asking entire chunks of the world to unburden themselves of the weight of history, which is a mighty difficult task. I think the closest that this relationship could come to the meaning of it all is a love—hate thing, and while the ironic gap is pretty fitting, it only really accounts for part of something.
By this I mean that it is only a part of what the brain can do. The amydgala is small neural cluster in the brain that processes a lot of our negative emotions and the positive emotions are sort of strewn about—an interesting phenomenon in itself. What happens when we make decisions is that these sections of the brain seem to light up and duke it out letting us know how we ought to feel and therefore helping us make decisions. But I think the key here is that these are sections of the brain. The brain is more complex than love?
I don’t think anybody would forego derivatives for the whole unless you absolutely had to—thanks math—and for this reason there is good reason to believe that the first principle ruling each and every individual resides in the brain, and not somewhere specific either. The brain is as complex as life is, and is, arguably, what makes us capable of life or, more specifically, living.
The body is an amazing thing. Have you ever fasted? It’s a funny sort of thing that affects the body, and we feel it. To fast has been a part of almost every major religious or spiritual history, and for good reason because it makes us very aware of the needs of the body. I am still a big proponent of the two biological imperatives: survive and reproduce. From a purely biological standpoint, these two, fairly simple things are all that we need to survive. They are not the meaning of life because these are once again one section of imperatives. We also need to emote and cogitate and decide and do the things that make these two imperatives possible, and meaning should not be something you have to do. You find meaning, but you don’t technically have to go out looking for it—implied of course by find.
I’ve just had a disturbing thought that how I came into the world is how I’m going to go out of it: as a newborn I had colic and cried incessantly.
But if he head back into the depths of the brain, we find something else interesting going on there, and that is that something we would normally consider a positive emotion, empathy, in that it is a positive thing to be able to understand what someone is feeling, actually flares up some parts of the brain that deal with pain: pleasure and pain, a classic battle.
From this one battleground we can absolutely determine that pleasure and pain are not the meaning either because these are once again two separate feelings (opposites), and meaning does not really have an opposite. Meaning and meaninglessness would probably be the closest, but meaninglessness is determined by meaning, unlike pleasure being determined by pain in that it is entirely possible to understand the one without the other, but meaninglessness means nothing without meaning.
So, what are we getting from this? The brain, the intellect, and the question. “Whoa, whoa, whoa,” you might say, “would you deny even spirituality?” Spirituality is a mysterious feeling, but we have already determined that feelings are derivatives of the brain’s functions and that we would not forego first principles for derivatives. Spirituality is different from love in that its mysteries involve asking the question, “What happens when the one we love is absent from our physical presence and we attribute all this power and grandeur and meaning to him or her or it?” But that’s about it. If you have ever been in a long-distance relationship, you have been close to this kind of thing. As a matter of fact, I highly recommend it. It is extremely challenging, and you learn one helluva lot about yourself in the process, but I guess it’s not everything now is it?
I am beginning to think that we are overlooking the most relevant part of the question we asked at the very beginning: the fact that it is a question: a question implies an answer. Now, let’s be very clear and say that there are some questions that are more difficult to answer than others, let’s just say for kicks we were asked to discuss theoretical physics or what Joyce was really getting at. These are nearly impossible questions to answer, but by asking them we are implying that it is worthy of investigation and the closer we get to the answer of these truly difficult questions is one step closer to understanding more about ourselves.
If the one thing we can grant is that the act reveals desire, and that we generally act for what we want, and further, that the act is a question because the future is unknowable, then the boiled down first principle of the thing seems to be saying something like act with the understanding you are questioning because that’s what you can do. You don’t have to, but you can. The more you actively question, the more you are revealing you want to question in general. You are always better for having acted (I am not advocating irrational, premature actions, but even these have the potential to make us better if we learn from them).
But even an action is a question that has no words right away. Sometimes we don’t know what question we are asking until we have the benefit of hindsight, so maybe it’s the question undefined that defines us. We can investigate everything, can’t we?
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