Snakes On A Plane
Yesterday Terren took my 2 cent softball and tried to knock it out of the yard. He's gay like that.
Terren
"Honestly, I'm having a hard time figuring out how to shit in the oven. It seems like at the very least you'd have to remove the wire racks and then awkwardly stick your ass in while straddling the oven door, all while maintaining your balance. And if you're considering this act, you're probably not sober. Anyway, to your point about the news. I think most everyone (myself included) seeks escape in one form or another from things we think of as bad. For some it takes the form of news, but it can also be food, sex, sports, drugs, video games, tv, the internet, gambling, and so on. Even say, I don't know, biking. :-] There can be a fine line between healthy activity and escapism. You're not usually aware of it when you cross the line. I'm constantly examining my crystal meth habit to see if other things in my life are suffering. They are. Not. I meant not. As in not suffering. Much."
No actually this is good because it keeps this from becoming JOBABOFP (just another blog about biking Orion fucks pie). Does it do me any good to throw in references that I know only 1 person understands?
Walter, any chance you can get details of how exactly this guy was shitting in the oven? Was it just on the door? Or did he really stick his ass all the way in? I know it's probably a touchy subject with soon-to-be-ex-Mrs-Oven but do your best. We're curious.
I think this conversation could go on forever. And I think a clean, cohesive discussion is out of the realm of possibility sitting on the train to Hoboken. But I'll throw out random thoughts as they come. One "deep thoughts" question is, what is reality?
I have read part of the book, Wherever You Go There You Are. Same premise as Be Here Now but without the funny format of book. The basic premise is to stop diverting your attention from the here and now. I tried this on and off over the past few years and the question that invariably spring up is, what if Here sucks? When I'm on the subway going to work, "here" is the last place I want to be. So I read to escape Here. Is that bad?
This happens a lot, too much maybe. Is it too much or is it normal? Is my tuning out on the train to write this blog entry too much? What about in the shower this morning? I was thinking of how to approach this entry and basically went through the motions while I got ready for work. Without realizing it I'm rarely Here, Now.
Body of woman found in car
Does that headline do anything but convince me the Here and Now sucks? Or does it desensitize me to the Here and Now? If I read that the government was selling low-rate caskets in 2000 because there were not enough deaths in Dessert Storm do I think it's good that people didn't die or am I reminded that death is just another industry? Or do I ignore it all and seek the sports scores from last night?
I do think there's a difference between discussing back-fires and biking, but let's leave that alone because it's too personal to be objective, since I see biking as participation in life not escapism from it. I also think food, sex, and drugs are also in the realm of participation not escapism, within reason of course. But I'm being naive if I suggest that Americans aren't overweight hogs that fuck anything that moves and gets high to free themselves from their caged reality.
At this conversational juncture I'll ask the question again, what is reality? Is it what we observe? What's in our head? Or is it what Huxley experienced when he took peyote? Is reality with the Doors of Perception opened or closed? There's no answer but the conversation invariably comes back to this no matter which avenue you take. Some suggest that reality is an illusion, one of the Big Questions posed by philosophers and some scientists along with Is time an illusion? Why do we need to sleep? How do entangled particles communicate? Where does information inside a black hole go? Why don't we understand turbulence?
Seriously on the entangled particles question, how does information travel 7 million times faster than the speed of light? Why does the solution to Bell's Inequality suggest that either we have no free will or that reality is an illusion? When I get to work, am I going to say fuck it and get a buttered bagel?
I know, I know I've gone into the realm of mental gymnastics except with the last question. It's fun, neat, entertaining. But it always begs the question, what is reality? And if I have a set answer to that question do I then ask, should I immerse myself in it or seek escape from it? Is life on earth really Hell and we seek that Heaven in some form of escape?
Or getting back to the ground here, are we just bored? I'm bored with work. It's my generational upbringing to get sick of any job in 2 years I guess. It's not that it sucks, per se. It's just not challenging. At the same time I admit that my daughter and biking present enough challenges in my life so I don't really need another one. So I'm fine with the status quo as long as they don't wake me up.
I'm going to wrap this up because I really haven't gotten anywhere other than flinging a bunch of shit on the walls. Maybe this fall we can build a fire in my back yard, drink beer, and discuss it further. I'll invite Walter and Woody as well. Figure the more people the more different kinds of beer to try.
Time to pick up a book and divert my attention from the Path and then the subway. You ever try and just be on the Path? People hate eye contact. Look around in most public places. Here and Now isn't where most of them are.
PS. I got the bagel
PPS. This morning apparently my daughter looked at this image and said, "Daddy."
Terren
"Honestly, I'm having a hard time figuring out how to shit in the oven. It seems like at the very least you'd have to remove the wire racks and then awkwardly stick your ass in while straddling the oven door, all while maintaining your balance. And if you're considering this act, you're probably not sober. Anyway, to your point about the news. I think most everyone (myself included) seeks escape in one form or another from things we think of as bad. For some it takes the form of news, but it can also be food, sex, sports, drugs, video games, tv, the internet, gambling, and so on. Even say, I don't know, biking. :-] There can be a fine line between healthy activity and escapism. You're not usually aware of it when you cross the line. I'm constantly examining my crystal meth habit to see if other things in my life are suffering. They are. Not. I meant not. As in not suffering. Much."
No actually this is good because it keeps this from becoming JOBABOFP (just another blog about biking Orion fucks pie). Does it do me any good to throw in references that I know only 1 person understands?
Walter, any chance you can get details of how exactly this guy was shitting in the oven? Was it just on the door? Or did he really stick his ass all the way in? I know it's probably a touchy subject with soon-to-be-ex-Mrs-Oven but do your best. We're curious.
I think this conversation could go on forever. And I think a clean, cohesive discussion is out of the realm of possibility sitting on the train to Hoboken. But I'll throw out random thoughts as they come. One "deep thoughts" question is, what is reality?
I have read part of the book, Wherever You Go There You Are. Same premise as Be Here Now but without the funny format of book. The basic premise is to stop diverting your attention from the here and now. I tried this on and off over the past few years and the question that invariably spring up is, what if Here sucks? When I'm on the subway going to work, "here" is the last place I want to be. So I read to escape Here. Is that bad?
This happens a lot, too much maybe. Is it too much or is it normal? Is my tuning out on the train to write this blog entry too much? What about in the shower this morning? I was thinking of how to approach this entry and basically went through the motions while I got ready for work. Without realizing it I'm rarely Here, Now.
Body of woman found in car
Does that headline do anything but convince me the Here and Now sucks? Or does it desensitize me to the Here and Now? If I read that the government was selling low-rate caskets in 2000 because there were not enough deaths in Dessert Storm do I think it's good that people didn't die or am I reminded that death is just another industry? Or do I ignore it all and seek the sports scores from last night?
I do think there's a difference between discussing back-fires and biking, but let's leave that alone because it's too personal to be objective, since I see biking as participation in life not escapism from it. I also think food, sex, and drugs are also in the realm of participation not escapism, within reason of course. But I'm being naive if I suggest that Americans aren't overweight hogs that fuck anything that moves and gets high to free themselves from their caged reality.
At this conversational juncture I'll ask the question again, what is reality? Is it what we observe? What's in our head? Or is it what Huxley experienced when he took peyote? Is reality with the Doors of Perception opened or closed? There's no answer but the conversation invariably comes back to this no matter which avenue you take. Some suggest that reality is an illusion, one of the Big Questions posed by philosophers and some scientists along with Is time an illusion? Why do we need to sleep? How do entangled particles communicate? Where does information inside a black hole go? Why don't we understand turbulence?
Seriously on the entangled particles question, how does information travel 7 million times faster than the speed of light? Why does the solution to Bell's Inequality suggest that either we have no free will or that reality is an illusion? When I get to work, am I going to say fuck it and get a buttered bagel?
I know, I know I've gone into the realm of mental gymnastics except with the last question. It's fun, neat, entertaining. But it always begs the question, what is reality? And if I have a set answer to that question do I then ask, should I immerse myself in it or seek escape from it? Is life on earth really Hell and we seek that Heaven in some form of escape?
Or getting back to the ground here, are we just bored? I'm bored with work. It's my generational upbringing to get sick of any job in 2 years I guess. It's not that it sucks, per se. It's just not challenging. At the same time I admit that my daughter and biking present enough challenges in my life so I don't really need another one. So I'm fine with the status quo as long as they don't wake me up.
I'm going to wrap this up because I really haven't gotten anywhere other than flinging a bunch of shit on the walls. Maybe this fall we can build a fire in my back yard, drink beer, and discuss it further. I'll invite Walter and Woody as well. Figure the more people the more different kinds of beer to try.
Time to pick up a book and divert my attention from the Path and then the subway. You ever try and just be on the Path? People hate eye contact. Look around in most public places. Here and Now isn't where most of them are.
PS. I got the bagel
PPS. This morning apparently my daughter looked at this image and said, "Daddy."
1 Comments:
At 10:02 AM,
Anonymous said…
Heinz Von Foerster wrote "objectivity is the delusion that you can make observations without an observer." Which is another way of saying that you can't separate reality from your experience of it. We can treat reality "as if" it exists outside of us, but that's a construction, or model, and one that breaks down at the extremes (which is why quantum mechanics is so weird). Unfortunately, we can never know what the ultimate nature of reality is, if it even exists, since we invent our personal reality based on information from our senses. There's no guarantee that the way we construct our own personal realities corresponds with anything "actual". In this light, you can see that schizophrenics who suffer from hallucination and hear voices are living in a world just as real as our own.
Regarding escapism: anything at all worth doing can become an escape, that was my point. I'm sure somewhere out there is someone who sews too damn much. But I think what you're wondering is "is it bad to escape". In general, no. I mean, that's what a vacation is, an escape from routine. But if all you do is escape then that's a problem. Put another way, I don't think "be here now" means too much unless you also have "go somewhere else for a while". It's all about balance, which is different for everyone.
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