I'm Making Halloween Knick Knacks and Dealie Bobs!

So yeah, I decided to swear off television for the month of October (have I mentioned that already?), and look what I'm up to and Christ it's only the 5th.

I Hope NP Would Have Approved

Sung to the tune of Tom Sawyer, by Rush

A modern day warrior
Mean, mean, snide
Today's bum lawyer
Mean, mean pride

Though his mind is not for rent
(cuz it's a spider-filled basement)
Cowering back behind his fence
Hiding out the day's events
The quiver

What you say about his company
Is what you say about misogyny
Drop the baseball
Grab the bat
Feed the incels
Kill the cat

The world is, the world is
Shit, and so are you
Now won't someone buy me smokes

Today's bum lawyer, he gets high on you
Doesn't work for good grades, he gets by on you

No, his mind is not for rent
It's only wasted, warped and bent
Always hateful, yet discontent
That he isn't the President
Or Elvis

And what you say about his spooned out slop
Is what you say about his dye-job'd mop
Eat the anger
Drink the wrath
Suck the wisdom
Have a laugh

The world is, the world is
Shit, and so are you
Now won't someone buy me smokes

Exit the warrior, today's bum lawyer
He gets high on you and the misery you trade
And that Nobel Prize is surely on the way

The One Where Chandler Had His Say

So it's about ten to four this morning and I'm out watching the streets for a bit, walking the alley with my flashlight and pepper spray. I watch a youngish homeless guy walking through the public complex across the street, see him duck into the bushes for a minute only to re-emerge naked and carrying a bundle of new clothes I assume he had stashed away. I see them over there all the time, especially on the weekends when there's no security guard driving around. Watched the guy wander off like a twitchy squirrel and I'm thinking to myself that this is a human being going feral. Whatever conditioning he managed to internalize before he hit the skids is starting to flake off and he's becoming a lot like the urban wildlife with which he shares the midnight streets.

That's the danger of too much isolation sometimes. Of course the legal and illegal consciousness bending chemicals don't help, but you know, not every addict breaks down that far. I've known a slew of them, had them as friends, skirted their world a time or two, but the ones who go real bad are usually the ones who cut themselves off and become mired in the more fundamental, primitive impulses that creep to the surface as civilization's imposed veneer erodes through bad maintenance and general upkeep. Their thought processes and conversations take on the shape of the wounded badger cowering in his log den and sneering at passers-by. Their sense of self is shrunken down on them like a second skin one size too small, no room for inclusivity or even sympathy, really, although such things can be feigned in a pinch for exploitation purposes.

I believe there's a good case to be made regarding what we Americans think of as 'rugged individualism', and any society worth its salt does itself harm by shutting off voices that don't conform to the consensus opinion. However, in rejecting the status quo we sometimes gravitate toward toxic personalities, grandiose big mouths who trash everyone else in order to bring the focus upon themselves. The really bad ones even do things like make up their own physics ad hoc, waving them under the noses of serious people who have opened up the modern world for us, like the kid offering up a handful of his own shit in a cooking contest with all the most famous chefs in the world. Followed by a childish shitfit, naturally.

It's good to remind ourselves once in a while that without the molding of some kind of society, we are just feral animals, maybe a bit better able to count sticks? *shrug* In the context of our illusory sense of self it IS tempting to climb egomaniacal mountain and plant our flag up there. But, yeesh! Some people never leave!

REMINDER: Thin air can sometimes cause brain damage. Come down and read a book once in a while. Consider the unabomber. :)

Plus, Joey believes in spooks and won't admit it to his girlfriends. I mean, yes, he DID admit it, but his subs jumped on that grenade REAL quick. "It wasn't a real explosion. It was a metaphor! A METAPHOR!" And Joey didn't care to correct them as his truth ran from their entrails onto the clean sofa that MONICA HAD JUST SHAMPOOED, DAMMIT! Oh, and Phoebe snort-chuckled. Just like me. Oh yeah, and Rachel was in the other room playing with Ross's monkey. Phew, closure!

Umadum

Sung to the tune of Boogie Woogie Bugle Boy

He's an isolated dude from out New Jersey way.
He'd tried to make a go of it but couldn't play.
He was the low man on the poll,
And eventually wound up on the government dole.
He's in his basement now. He has a lot to say.
He's the boogie woogie beta boy who won't go away.

For almost all his life he's lived off Uncle Sam.
He likes to shake his dick in front of his web cam
And tell his minion hangers-on
That he's bigger than big, and even longer than long.
He knows they'll suck it up, each and every day.
He's the daddy-dom at the efil prom and won't go away.

And such, and such, and suchdiddlyuchnot-much!
He blows it 8 times a week, but we've all heard it.
He can't take a piss unless his audience is all in there with him.
And then he shakes it off (on upraised faces) as they scrape and pray.
He's the blowhard king of the gladiator ring who won't go away

He's the efil spoutin' screamin' shoutin' wunderkind,
Who learned to spell 'life' backwards son now we're all in (apparently).
And when he speaks on what he don't know he really lowers the bar.
He's the YouTube boy from Hoi Polloi who thinks he's a star.

He blinds the kids with science almost every night.
He don't believe in protons or the speed of light.
And while I don't like to seem crass
His erudition and such drops mostly straight out his ass.
He is his biggest fan. He's come to save the day.
He's the Efilus for the rest of us, and won't go awaaaaayyy... *jazz hands*

Choice

There once was a bugger from Greece
Who believed that the world rests in peace
Until given a shove
By the One up above
Followed by a 2-part press release

Of course, now we understand that there's really not an absolute state of rest at all. Aristotle's unmoved stone was actually hurtling around the sun at the time, which itself was making its way around the Milky Way, etc, etc. One can only wonder what our universe is circling. Another proof for God's existence down the tubes.

So is there any place left for a Primary Mover, do you think? A lot of people believe the answer to that question might lie in 'free will', the supposed ability of human minds to make decisions and take action independent of the causal forces that move both universal history, as well as the myriad of substances that make up our being. And really, are any of us immune to this feeling that we are in some sense masters of our own fates, or at least in our ability to pick what margarine to buy?

Understandable. It's because we aren't privy to the mountain of influences that press down upon us in any given second. Each of us are sometimes able to step back a bit and recognize the deterministic aspects of the thoughts we think as well as the decisions we make, at least to some degree. But not always, and almost certainly never completely. And so a feeling of agency, a sense that on some fine level there's a bit of wiggle room within the grip of absolute necessity (what is, is), haunts us, but at the same time fills us with pride because we are not, after all, temporary dunes of shifting sands dotted along the beaches of eternity.

Balloon Belly!

Ghost World

There's a scene in the movie Interstellar (Pound for pound perhaps the worst film I've ever seen), where Anne Hathaway, apparently after experiencing some sort of spiritual epiphany, waxes on in a schmaltzy diatribe that reaches its crescendo with this line: "Love is the ONE thing that we're capable of perceiving that transcends dimensions of time and space." There's a lot of this kind of specious guru-babble throughout the film, along with a dumptruck load of pseudo-scientific hogwash that wouldn't pass muster in an 8th grade science class (is it a coincidence that Morgan Freeman is in 2 of my 4 least favorite movies of the century so far? Also Michael Caine is in 3 of them. :)).

Ugh, I could go on about this black hole of a movie (wink, wink...get it?), but I should move on to my point, I guess. Or perhaps we could say I need to zero in on my singularity (somebody stop me!). Anyway, what crybaby Annie has demonstrated in this scene is the tendency we have to take transient emotional signals and wrap them up in color-coded abstract language bindles. Love in this case, white as the sun and ultimately dominant over all the lesser impulses.

Oops! Because of course, they're not impulses anymore, are they? Love and hatred and values and all those other language infested 'objects' now occupy the world of the materially real. In fact, they dominate, no longer representational but actually more real than reality, sustaining the living world instead of emanating from it.

Thus we believe we 'discover' love, even though in reality 'love' is the abstract byproduct of a particular kind of brain activity. Several, actually, rising from a boiling stew of brain goop. Values work the same way. We like things a certain way, and we want other people to like the same things we do. But no, that's not enough. We want to make our set of likes the only acceptable set of likes, because, after all, our likes are obviously the best likes. No, in fact they're logically the only set of likes that anybody can reasonably like.

In this manner we have built a ghost world. It's a world that works from the outside in. From the POV of the ghost world, the physical world is merely an expression of something deeper, more profound, more important. The hand that shapes the clay, as it were.

Mostly the ghost world gives us something solid to hold onto. Love MUST overcome and ultimately stand alone in victory, or else what's the point? Values are writ in stone, above and beyond what each person merely prefers/desires. Otherwise, where's the authority? Soon, ducks will be in all the swimming pools! Obviously this sort of thinking is embedded in cultural indoctrination, and is probably just as obviously necessary for societies to develop.

Had a bit more, but I'm out of gas. THC is a harsh mistress. :) Laterz, Gatorz!

Machines

If a person wanted to count out loud to one billion, he couldn't do it. Not even if he started on the day he was born and counted for eight hours a day for a hundred years. That's how big a billion is, which might surprise some people seeing how we throw that number around so nonchanlantly nowadays. Next, let's take a jump up to the number one trillion. That is one thousand billion, which is somewhere in the neighborhood of 200, 250 or so times the number of years making up the age of the known universe.

Now consider that the average person is made up of something like one hundred trillion cells, more or less. I'm not sure at this point that a number that big can even be plausably imagined, it's just so fucking HUGE! And yet the numbers get even bigger, for each cell can be composed of around one hundred trillion atoms each, bringing the sum total of atoms in a human body to a staggering ten octillion. That number is ten million times larger than the estimated number of all the stars in the observable universe.

Can the numbers get any bigger? Of course they can! For the atom itself is not an impenetrable, unbreakable unit, but is composed of even smaller units of measure, electrons and protons and neutrons all buzzing around at near the speed of light, gaining mass via the constant movement and subsequent kinetic energy of bound particles inside the nucleus.

Next,think about the incredible number of interactions going on between these miniscule particles that make up a human body. Why, in the brain alone there are tens of billions of neurons each connected to thousands of its brethren via synaptic pathways, sending signals outward at about 200 pulses per second. Meanwhile, the body proper sends eleven million bits of information about itself to the brain; again, per second.

Bottom line? Each of us is an entire universe unto ourselves, composed of stuff that is made up of uncountable tinier pieces of stuff, stuff that flies around incredibly fast and bumps into stuff zillions of times in the time it takes us to take a breath (that was a fun sentence to write:)). Tiny Legos, as it were...though certainly what's going on is really not a lot like Legos but it's probably not the worst analogy around, either...sometimes hooking up, sometimes not, building, destroying, and eventually, blindly, settling into some semblance of very temporary stability here and there, That's us. That's what we are, and indeed that's what everything is; at least according to the present scientific paradigm, more or less.

Not sure where I'm going with this, if anywhere. Stay tuned if you wish.

DISCLAIMER: All the math and number shit are convenient/hasty round ups and round downs on my part, but if I ever get around to writing more about this stuff that'll all seem rather inconsequential, especially when we get into infinities.