Q4 2011
It was a wonderful ceremony and wonderful reception at the Clark House afterwards.
It seems it will be difficult,
but not impossible,
to live up to the beautiful words we gave each other, and shared with our friends.
Nut we have made the difficult easy.
this
so easily
we forget
how difficult
this
is.
I am getting married tomorrow, and I am very excited.
On Friday I broke a tooth. And noticed a patch of skin not going away. But the foundations are being moved. There are bounc to be a few cracks.
How amazing it is to lie next to a woman who really really loves me.
The wedding day approaches far too fast. I want to enjoy the amazingness. Every day I could go to the restaurant and work on my marriage vows. I could write her vows forever. I can promise you the world, because I can give it to her.
It's not the candle. It's the flame.
People not lead lives of quiet desperation, just boredom..
If we feel that much of art and news is distraction, then what is the undistracted life? How do we know there is anything there?
We have made the mistake of thinking the past is past.
I do not want to live in a world where people watch television and never talk about it.
Here is the chapel where we will wed..
From the beginning it was wow!
I have never said a bad thing against her.
My dreams are not behind me.
The aging optimist: Hey! I can still remember what I just forgot.
No one has taken me up on my Get Real Soon card.
The ubiquity of texting shows us we didn't need full attention to live most of our lives. And we like extended conversations.
What did we not learn from Wittgenstein?
(1) To stop asking certain questions, or at least hesitate, listen to yourself, and examine them
(2) To see the complexity, the language game, not the question.
(3) What to do after it gets off the ground?
We all have our personal vision of hell. One of mine is flying into a large metropolis and seeing block after block of houses or apartment buildings and realize I will have nothing to do with them, I would not even like them. Yet they have the same weight I do. (Now why is this Hell?)
Why do people let their kids watch television all the time (like in a van)?
Why do we think we can understand the world? Why do we not think we cannot understand the world?
(Sometimes I am Mick, sometimes I am Binaca.)
This is the exact opposite of unrequited love. This is love amplified.
there are only two fish in the sea
there is plenty of you in my sea
we amplify, and never dim
maybe we do not look the part
but we feel the part
"You are so beautiful."
"Thank you
for seeing me."
By being a smarter/better I set a new ordinary.
There must be an anti-placebo effect as well.
Is the Lord outside or is the Lord inside?
We can be secular, (thank God.)
Thinkers think, and leave behind aimless schools of thought.
Sure I can write things I barely understand. I do all the time. This does not make me smart, or even unconsciously smart.
In his John Locke lectures, Hilary Putnam argues "that certain human abilities — language speaking is the paradigm example — may not be theoretically explicable in isolation," apart from a full model of "human functional organization," which "may well be unintelligible to humans when stated in any detail." Noam Chomsky, "The Uses of Language"
Today Linda and I bought a marriage license.
I feel my wings.
One more step.
to the delightful brink.
(An exact date has not been set.)
Then there is the beautiful Britta and her beautiful mother (my beautiful daughter)
ProTip: Hide behind the plates between the cracks.
(They can see you through the cracks.)
I wonder if we are losing our words. We now speak in the vertigo of poems, in grandiose swatches of movies and music (with emotions and spectacle). Words are so quiet.
I too am waiting for ad.doubleclick.net
I am tired of art. I thought art would tell me something. I thought art had a privileged communication with the future. But all it did was entertain, distract, confuse and delight me.
Art is a tart surrounded by her sycophants.
Teaching without feedback. What is that?
news is another kind of coalitional behavior, and we love it!
Humans are incomprehensible. so we substitute little pictures, images, scenarios, plays. We declare understanding and go home.
I take my neighborhood walk just as day is drawing to a close and people have turned on their lights.
I see living rooms waiting for living, guest chairs for guests and dining rooms waiting for diners.
We are loaded with hospitality. We are party-givers. But don't being people over, they always spoil it.
I am a posthumous writer, dead to the world. Ten years ago I could have been a contender. Now it is too late.
We don't communicate, as much as we misdirect.
Playing a game is itself a game.
Our oversimplifications of the world are forms of selfishness.
New Car Model Names: the 2012 Toyota Delusion, the Buick Oversimplification and the Cadillac POV
It would be different if architecture magazines should put ordinary people in their ads, the kind you are not particularly drawn to.
The intellectual is part of our natural history. (Wittgenstein PI 27) We cannot see the animality of our humanity.
How would one determine this? What is it to be "fundamentally" not like us?
Oh! Oh! Today I must work.
I could not did not live my life, so I thought my life.
It is so simple. I write a few sentences and post a few pictures I find on the Internet. They take your mind off each other.
At the restaurant I saw two boys roughhousing, pushing, sliding around and hitting each other lightly. What if two older men were to do this?
I am remarkably alive to myself.
I will not explain myself away.
A Starbuck Moment: At times I can't see how people can stand to talk to each other.
Everybody is an individual. How can you not be like everybody else and not be an individual?
Gräfenberg spot on.
Who here is happy?
Who here is here?
phycycle
Everyone may think it, but not everyone will admit to it.
Culture is another word for herd behavior
Is the world good? This too is not a real question.
So, what is none of your business?
"Fundamental to being a person is the process of becoming a human."
People I Probably Don't Understand™: people who never listen to the news.
We are so not a blank slate. The sentences are painted on.
Oh no! Now I have to love this about you too?
We all do some parts of being a grown-up well. Other parts we do pro forma.
It is difficult to state in words, for there is no point. We are not quite impressing anyone else, and we are not quite impressing ourselves either. Impressingness is built-in.
Alas, my life was not a novel.
I wake and begin to pound my head against the wall.
When I start actually working on my book, I quickly stop in an ecstatic dance of self-congratulations and ego-fluffing.
I'd rather blog about my failure than actually fail.
Driving home in a snowstorm I think that I could write stories where I would meet various people... But I don't meet people. Yet I find great excitement in my small hermetic life. Can I write about that?
The self-own is an excuse to be more cell-fish.
Instead of writing a book, people would rather tweet.
A book is a really long tweet — a book is tweet cubed
Life is in the details.
Most people don't seem to love their neighbors. Most people walk around with a mask on. They could be loving; they could be not loving; you can't tell. If you loved people I think you would be happy and smile when you see them.
These over-the-top sayings of Jesus. Are they just travel books for mountains we will never climb?
It is cool Jesus says all those cool things. We trot them out when we want tot show how cool Jesus was. But we don't follow them.
What did you used to do with all the time you now spend texting?
In our surveillance society, we are now more careful in what we post and email. But what if everything were recorded?
What would that be like?
Why do we let young kids be emotional?
Why are young kids so emotional anyway?
News is what amuses us, not what is important. We escape into the bad news, as long as it is other people's bad news.
Internal monitoring programs arise without you knowing it. They monitor at a low level of consciousness.
The slipperiness of language: how unconsciously we slide from one frame of understanding to another.
Is there always a right thing to do? Not if you don't know the future. When would Jesus not do? Is there a time to be indecisive?
We build our knowledge-based society at the limits of human capabilities.
And attempt to modify this through using rules.
When we speak (or write) we always use a large passel of socio-conversational tricks, or gestures of significance.
We are individuals, but we are also a species.
For reasons unclear to me, I am also back working on My Philosophy Book. I am rising to my own Philosophy Book Challenge. Why isn't every other smarty-pant and smarty-skirt doing this? Why are there not thousands of these?
Do the Math™: Suppose I were in the 99.9 percentile, one in a thousand. In a population of seven billion, seven million would be smarter than me – the population of a small countries. We can write a book on the Missoula flood, decipher cuneiform,
Sometimes I talk. Sometimes the words talk.
The easiest way to stop me from talking—make me write.
I am still sharpening my pencil. Oh the arranging of my desktop.
I must guard against just being provocative.
The world is all atwitter.
The world fits together as the shots in a movie camera fits together.
Internet polls should have several more options: (d) I am really not qualified to make a snap-judgment on this issue, (e) this is really none of my business (f) with all the things happening in the world, this is an idiotic thing to concentrate on, (g) people more capable than me are handling this issue; let the process continue.
We now feel we must write "the f-word" for "fuck." But why stop there? Why not write "the n-word" for "the f-word,", where n is a variable.
For so many parts of the modern world e do not know what Jesus would do, or even of he would do the right thing.
What is the a step after taking care of yourself?
Some people (we know) are black holes of divinities; no divinity light makes it out of their inner star
In many tentative fields of study (like parts of archeology and history), we staple in knowledge with staples of evidence.
Listening to an intense video on education, and there is no lever for a truly enlightened despot to pull.
We do not know the world in which we live.
Some people like simple music, some like complex music.
What is the point of letting everyone vote? Is there NO alternative to democracy? What are the problems here?
We do have procedures to interpret if a conclusion is warranted.
Less so for a perception being warranted.
Looking at the earliest civilizations, it is clear that artists among us must always been recognized. Writers and intellects must also have been apparent, and appreciated.
We are under constant surveillance. Cell phones monitoring, pour chase, texting, location are all monitored. ONly now do we realize how free we were in the recent past. And we did nothing of the many horrible things we could have done. We were great citizens, and got no awards. Now we cannot be good citizens anymore, since our society is resting less and less on self-control.
How can I be nice in a contemporary regulation-bound job?
The smoothness of the surveillance society lies in the doors that open, the cards that get your car.
The older I get, the more I see other people as those little selfclueless beings blowing across the schoolyard playground.
(On working on my book:) All I get is small drops. Not enough to fill a small cup, a small book. My book is a small beggars bowl. I hold it carefully with two hands.
If postmodernism is right it would mean that post-modernism could not be right.
If there is no hell, why would anyone follow the teachings of god?
I wish there were a God, so I would have something to thank. But then, who would I thank God for?
If there is no Hell what is judgment day? Realization day? Feel sorry day?
I want to stand before a blank canvas. Not a dark canvas. But I should be able to create on either one.
Toyota Priapus sports-car.
Part of the joy of listening to music, or TV, is NOT thinking.
What is difference between feeling like an old man, and feeling like a disabled young man.
Texting is really just carrying a little typewriter around you.
These days history is merely "history", philosophy just "philosophy."
If you are in a bad marriage, you also may think there is no love, or that you are unlovable. Or more perversely you think this is what love is.
I can hardly wait until I fool myself into feeling I am healthy again. (I want to enjoy the meadows, even as hunting season draws near.)
The video games and DVDs at least keep the neighborhood kids off my lawn. Regretfully, they also keep them out of my heart.
I suspect I may have an imaginary twin brother.
Whenever I count my blessings, Linda is there. Suddenly the cup is full, and there is no need to count any more.
Human beings are substance abuse.
With all the people in the world, one is almost guaranteed to be lonely.
Age is when moving your body becomes work. It is not the kind you can avoid without being ... old.
Sure we can live without religion, but it wouldn't be as much fun.
Linda tells me I make a terrible atheist
Why would God have men vote on what should be in the bible?
Every religion feels the presence of the Lord, or the divine.
The presence of the Lord is no guarantee you follow his ways.
What does it mean to say I could understand the world if only I were a little smarter?
Why do we watch television? (a) No one wants to talk about this. (b) Even if they did, they couldn't: the question is too difficult.
You couldn't form a civilization of cats. They couldn't be routinized.
If a philosopher's arguments are too abstract, we lose sight of his reasons and fall back upon judging the conclusion.
What do we miss when we miss the fundamental insight of Wittgenstein?
Status is now more important than ever, because we don't have family.
In late 20th century our factories need a different kind of worker than they needed before. The burly strong man is out; the woman is in.
It is morning.
I am up and procrastinating.
Failing to come up with many new lines to Tweet on Twitter, I struggle with my ego, like a man fighting an alligator. It may be an old, sluggish and toothless alligator, but it is still strong. And I am often weak.
(Maybe I Kant.)
We can look at the world so many ways. It is not just a duck-rabbit. But a duck-rabbit-slug-bird-cow-brook-plant-star-force-love-atom-language-divinity.
I too can write things I don't understand.
Understan-doing!!! [rhymes with boing]
For the seeker of truth, the world is a series of distractions.
If there is no god, do we then lose words like Godlike, children of god, divinities, heaven, and soul? Or do these words necessitate the word god.
These days I see all people as a little bit of divinity. Oh here is a little bit of divinity being snappish. And here is a little bit of divinity ignoring me. Here is a little bit of divinity coated in adipose.
Must get away from friends assholes others to our pure self.
These day we are living in our avatars, as I am now to you. (In some sense our corporeal self is also an avatar.)
There is nothing better for taking your mind away from understanding the world, than reading philosophy.
The infinite depth of man may be a necessary illusion, like the idea of God.
We cannot keep even a moderately complicated simplification in our mind, any more than we can keep more than 7 numbers in our short-term memory.
The superego is not a person, a super-self, because then he would have his own super-ego. A super-ego is a number of programs or processes situated at an unspecifiable number of level.
So many of our thinkers have uncovered their shards of truth, their partial answers, which nearly always gets placed behind the copyright paywall, like the dishes in a living room that no one can use.
People are constantly asked their opinion of things they know nothing about, things that are none of their business and things that mean nothing.
A change of attitude would not hurt:
I am starting to be brave and twitter a few thoughts in real time. It's a good way to see (one of) my limitations.
I am Starbucks, posing. Reflecting on the nature of women.
Every day I fly.
Do not take your selves too seriously.
Typo of Note: persona life
In a true relationship, sex is foreplay.
I watched all of it and I firmly ascertained that it was the total crap I always knew it would be.
Americans, love em' or leave em'.
You you you!
What if believing in God was more like doing meditation. It is useful and calming, but you may not always have the time. You would recognize it's value, feeling perhaps you should do it more often. Would that even be possible?
Religions can have many orientations. One is the viewpoint that you should "not break the law," (and then you will be fine). This is often the religion of Satan and her temptations. Another viewpoint is that you should become better. You only achieve salvation if you are better, show deep copmpassion or demonstrate Christ consciousness.
You can believe in the existence (or not) of Sasquatch and you can believe in the existence of God (or not). But this is not the same use of the word "belief".
We cannot cover our existing selves fully with the blanket of religion, but we are never encouraged to notice that.
I am still walking around surrounded by little bits of divinity, as I now call people. (When I remember to.) the real change would be to make this permanent. But this brings up the question: Do I want to disengage from being able to disengage from this?
What if bible is not literally true? Could it still be the word of God? Well, you are not perfect. Are you not the child of God?
How about an app that does not only tell you when friends are near but when potential friends are near. Actually this would not work much better than on-line relationship matches.
There are huge parts of our everyday world we don't even look at: gas stations, roads, parking-lots and car-lots. (See the connection?)
We too have gotten use to slave labor.
There should be a filter for the world, and you could turn off, say, all celebrity information and information about people you have never met.
Texting. One more reason not to be here now.
I am twittering now, posting eight times a day. Most of my posts are taken from the aphorisms and small thoughts I have written down over the last ten years.
So I get to hang out with my older self.
I don't know about me.
And who am I now?
I used to rage against the machine/society from the safety of my bed, but today I feel lucky and fully alive - thanks to Linda
I suppose I twitter because I am looking for fame (micrto-fame), or validation. But most of the people who "follow" me on Twitter, like most of the links that followed me on secretions.net are not even people, but bots, spammers and follower whores.
It is all a little virtual,
but it works
for the virtual me I carry inside my head.
Aphorisms are the illusion of agreement.
New Book Title: How to Stop Being a Bitch for Bitches
One can only be so in love with the world without being in denial.
Comedic cynicism is so very sad, but it's only polite.
Is this consciousness I have or is this consciousness I am?
Once again presidential candidates are promising us things they cannot deliver, like a flat tax. Congress promises nothing. It remains an recalcitrant oracle that every now-and-then burps out a thousand page bill.
I am on Twitter and I am inspired.
I am broadcasting and I don't have to do the Facebnook "friend" thing with people I know. Twitter soes not encourage the mindless politeness of Facebook. You say, you publish.
I must watch my words. Stephen Pinker is on board.
I will be appropriately inappropriate.
I wonder who I will wind up being?
I am justifiably proud of my pride.
The world is full of things that draw us away from understanding it.
Why not sell naming rights to nature: the Costco Hudson river, the Lehman Brothers sun?
We may want to talk about the earth. But as we walk about the earth we have to deal with how long that hill in front of is. And how my back hurts. And I know I can never cross the lake...
The Greek mathematicized beauty. And people lived up to it.
One sided cellphone conversations on the street: we're all crazy people now.
Corruption is built in to our capitalist political system.
Humor is dumb. It substitutes shared laughter at the fittingly surprising for the understanding.
Talking about religion is like trying to drink a lake. After a while you can't drink any more. You come back to it and it seems gross.
Because bureaucratic procedures are subject to societal norms and expectations, they are not fully reasonable.
So many people are reading their texts all the time. (On Wednesday I saw a young man texting walk into a glass wall thinking it was a door.) With all the time people spend on this, couldn't there be meaningful stuff. Something non-trivial, and not just sex-facts. (No I don't mean the "news.")
Perhaps there could be a service to text daily spiritual reminders, serving the same purpose as the kusti or the Muslim salah
When we talk about Palestinians and Israelis (for example) we tend to take sides. Is that because we can't be both? We can't be a Dodger and a Yankee at the same time. Perhaps we need to invent sports where we are on both teams.
![freedom [ffffound]](images11/freedom.jpg "freedom [ffffound]")
I have a new real estate agent and I have had my house painted.
I have new hope
to move on
and up
soon
And I am on Twitter. I am the the neopresocratic. I am not pretending to be the new Anaximenes here. More that I seem capable of leaving behind mostly a set of fragments.
And I seem to understand the world in less than 140 characters anyway. Perhaps you are one of those characters?
If you do figure out what I am saying from these fragments, please make it beautiful. (That's what I would do.)
No! Can i be a hipster and a lover?
I have no Twitter followers yet.
Not even Google.
The past is not over yet.
The future home of historic Hayden
It's a good thing we cannot see reality.
(sometimes I am) wor(ld)d weary
Why does it seem irreligious to teach religions?
Perhaps God has sent us a bouquet of religions.
Why does the Bible have to be completely historically true?
If god sends us a book distorted by humans, it makes life more interesting... and true-to-life.
Wittgenstein for Dummies isn't Wittgenstein.
One way of being uncomfortable with someone is to see them as a sex object (or avoiding seeing them as one).
News channels will often "warn" their viewers "that the following footage is very graphic." But why stop there? Why not "warn our viewers that the following footage is very depressing | idiotic | irrational | simplistic | annoying | sensationalist..."
Kya had a beautiful daughter
Britta Sophia Hanson
12:38 PM
Thursday, October 4.
She asked me what I wanted to be called, grandfather or the Norwegian word faerfar. I don't like "grandfather." So I thought, since there is a great aunt, I could be greatfather. Yes, that's it! Greatfather!
Kya says no.
I should have asked for grand (pause) father.
And there is always what I am in my mind: Grandude.
What would the earth be like if it were perfect?
Forgive us our aging singers as we forgive ourselves.
Forgive others as we forgive ourselves.
What would my life be without being able to love and be loved in return?
"Requited love is like realizing that you can fly after all." – Keith Irwin
We understand Freud's structure the only way we can as though there are three people inside us, the ego, the superego and the id, with different personalities as it were. But whatever they are, these entities are not people. For example they have no subconscious or supergepo. The ego is not like a selfish person.
Myths work in bad and partial translations. We know how to fill in the blanks.
canditates for the List of Words We Do Not Understand™: heart, dignity, soul, love...
Last week I had a personal mission...
in addition to my love of Linda.
My vision has given me permission to change.
There is something I do not know.
The older I get, the more I follow the way.
Or, if not the way, a good way, a way that may even get me to the way...
if there even is one...
Books! The better way of wasting time.
Idea: a non-Arabic habib.
Idea: a non-Hindu modesty dress. Like a sexy modesty dress
Idea for car dealerships: hire a bunch of tow-trucks to tow your competitor around town.
Most smiles are but a symbol for a smile.
New Words for New Times™: Heisenberg uncetainty behavior — the way people change when you look at them.
a poem by Olav H. Hauge (1966)
translation by Magne Kristiansen
There is this dream I carry
that something wonderful will happen,
must happen . . .
that time will open itself up
that doors will open,
that the mountain will open,
that streams will spring forth . . .
that the dream will open itself up,
and that i,
early one morning,
will sail into a harbor
i knew nothing about.
Idea for the religion class: Proofs of god from non-Christian religions.
Do I have to go out every day and the world be all magical? Sometimes I just like the world to suck.
Do I have to not worry to be happy? Can I worry and be happy?
People are afraid they can't interest other people. We need to meet them half-way — with compassion and non-judging.
I used to think old people were kind because they were old, and had to be. But it's not that they're old, they're old enough to get it.
The cosmological argument that all creation testifies to the existence of a god, is a way of organizing one's whole world around god.
I have been practicing a silent Amaste. I loook at people and think: the divine in me recognizes the divine in you. I recognize the divine in them, the self beyond judgments, achievemnents and failures. This let's me look at them: whther they be old, pretty, fat or powerful.
I have to have the right energy in order to be kind.
We talk and think as though it is the most important thing in the world.
We can only speak of slippery, deceitful words, in slippery deceitful words.
But we must speak of slippery, deceitful words.
It is true that music speaks to our heart.
What we don't understand is how this speaks to our heart, or what this "heart" is.
Mistrust all abstract nouns.
Mistrust the mind that thinks and uses these words.
Most all people are all sorts of nice. How would we organize our world if people were nice?
She has given me
a story undone...
Do I love her because she loves me?
I don't know.
No other woman has ever loved me
(like she has...)
I am given happiness
I cannot talk about.
No one said
I could not write a poem.
far beyond my dreams,
I no longer know
what to say
or do.
There's a word!
I no longer care
if I am better than you.
I want to be
better than me.
but I cannot say.
When I give,
I get.
I have nothing to be dizzy from.
never send to know
for whom the school bus rolls,
It rolls for thee.
A cigarette in need is a cigarette indeed.
New word for New Times ™:
antarctive
[a cold off-putting beauty. A combination of attractive and Antarctic.]
Things are handed around the Internet. But more and more people have learned to hand.
Don't make me think. Show me a picture.
When I was young (say, three years ago) I would say: "You find comfort in that?! (A candle, an offering, a prayer to an invisible friend?)
Now I say: "How wonderful! What a gift."
"Staring Out The Window" - Fulton Lights
Wednesday I had an experience unlike any other. I was lying in bed next to Twiantya, desultorily looking at Buddhist videos on YouTube, and I began to fade. I woke up in a vision of lightness. And "vision" isn't the right word. It felt light and magical. It is hard to say what it was but it was symmetric and repetitive, contemporary and real. I felt blessed and refreshed. I did not awaken except to mumble out to Twiantia that I was in bliss. (I touched her to share this with her (if I could...)
There was no god. This was god. Or at least closer to god.
The feeling has stayed with me. It is unlike anything I have experienced. There were no drugs, no sickness, no altered states to explain it away. There was just this vision/feeling.
How can we assemble persons from the minimal information provided in a novel?
Do the teachers use the Spark Notes to make the test, while students use the spark Notes to pass it? This bypasses experiencing it.
I finish my vacation with Linda and come home to teach three classes in philosophy. Two on religion and one on critical thinking. (What was I thinking?)
Yet I am dripping with honey.
I am Hopefully in love with Linda.
(The opposite of hopelessly)
I beat my head against the world
It's hard to still believe in your undiscovered self,
yet Linda discovered me.
Power to the (rich) people!
The Name of My Next Blog™: knowblind
People buy books in order not to read them.
... and release us from resentments as we release those whom we resent...
The Bible does not believe in marriage between a man and a woman, but a man and (many) women.
(Abraham had three wives, Jacob had 3 (or 4), David had 7 and Solomon had 700!)
Religion deals in a big subset of reality
In the post-modern rock band, any member can play any instrument. It is that way in religion too,
Religion is presented as truths about the way things are
Philosophy considers those things there are no answers. Perhaps there should be answers but no, and here is why.
It's a shame society makes everyone work. So many flowers do not bloom because of this. (We do not need to have so many people "working,")
What will the super-rich do?
Television is such an obvious tool for keeping people ignorant
Idea: girl scout slut badges, or slut charm bracelets
One of the remarkable things about aging is the weakening of the ego...
We are protected in our lives by an invisible shield that prevents us from seeing excellence in others and the weaknesses in ourselves.
Republicans have no plans or common sense point of view: they will not sit down and solve the problem.
Why are people not as entertaining as television? Why is television more entertaining tan religion?
We would know so much more if we lived longer, and watch our grandkids have grandkids...
What kind of answers can we give to the question of why we like books?
Perhaps all we want is to f**k each other, and enjoy the presence of the desirables.
We do a little dance with our eyes so we won't engage with people. (It's so hard to engage with people.)
Bob Dylan is the only person who can make a successful career out if truly terrible concerts. He gets up and ruins people's favorite Bob Dylan songs.
I take a vacation to New York City with Linda and Jake, to be with Adam and Britta in Ithaca.
I love her more now
than ever,
because I love her better now.
one of the more intense things in the history of Magnekind.
America's got talent?
America's got snap judgments! Why not: America's got intelligence?
Shows are rated for violence, language and sex, but not for intelligence, profundity or thoughtfulness. When we say a show is adult, we mean we permit it to be extremely childish.
It's not that you are old. It's because you are unloved (and you think it is because you are old)
Since the beautiful people are cultural ideals for all of us, it would be interesting to look closer at the marriages of beautiful people and why do they fail.
There is not enough gorgeousness to go around.
Religion is having a hard time articulating itself because philosophers have a hard time articulating language. We are still held in thrall by the old point of view that words stand for things.
There is no need to believe that the phrase "religion is" is the beginning of a true sentence. It is the beginning of a truthful sentence.
Not a common concept: playing with prayer
Most understanding has nothing to do with philosophical wisdom.
We may not think in sentences as much as in inclinations to utter certain sentences.
Do you want modern life with or without fantasy? If without: open your eyes, read, travel and think.
What is a human's relationship to the world? There are several including a material one, a subconscious one and a religious one.
Just as selfishness defines an individual's world, religion is the side in which one is a self.
"the plenitudes of beings"
Humans withhold love from each other.
Being older, it feels foolish to go for what is unobtainable. It helps to have caught the metal rabbit.
parenting throws us for a loop. Suddenly you are a teacher, a chaperon, a tour guide, a security guard.
Social scientist pout the world into overly simplistic concepts. Our herd instinct is reduced to a metaphor of a herds instinct, and not seen as a very complex overlapping orchestrations of behavior in many diverse areas. We follow the herd in groupthink, loyalty, religion, status, normality, etc. (It's the things we are describing with the simple concepts that are complex.)
We leave for New York on Thursday. I am starting to unfocus on Spokane.
We are each others better half. The operative word is "half."
First you must realize there is a way, and that there is a place you need to be.
When the time comes,
when the question is asked,
the answer is Yes!
When I asked her to be my girl
I did not know what I was asking
but my heart knew:
the hidden heart determined on beating life into me.
She saw a me I couldn't see.
Jittery in Starbucks, I remember how it was.
But She is not a beach on which I break,
my energy falling all over itself.
She is the deep green waters where my energy travels silently
unimpeded and free.
I searched for hope and only found "hope."
Hope is standing on a mountain.
How do I fold myself up to fit inside the world?
I retreat into poetry, my womb away from womb
The stories in the Bible resonate with meaning worthy of study and interpretation, not just factual understanding.
After all, we don't know the meanings of our words. We are lost without our dictionaries. Still less know the use of our words.
Why has Internet anonymity not given us freedom and flowerings, instead of trolls and shit?
![Borrowed from [the Interneat]](images11/newspaper-man-615.gif "Borrowed from [the Interneat]")
I am not sure I believe in "soul mates", "miracles", "gifts from God", but when I speak of her, I am driven to use these terms.
Our society has a perfectly safe and traditional valid way of dealing with uncomfortable personal truths: it's called fiction.
... or ambiguity.
You don't have to be loved for your intellectual thoughts, but you do have to be loved for the fact you have intellectual thoughts.
We are simply too stupid to think we will ever build a robot smarter then we are.
People take a great amount of pride in the lines they draw in the sand.
God wouldn't hold it against me if I didn't believe in him. He is bigger than that.
How is believing in God not like impersonating a police officer?
Who wants to take over the world?
Well, who is building the biggest military?
Perhaps we must relearn to live the chaste public life, and not try to make the world conform to morality
One mistake is to think that words in our language have a clear and consistent meaning, and therefore that words like "thinking," "religion," "god," and "soul" are peculiar screw-ups.
Another mistake is to think that if a word does not stand for a Platonic form, or a supernatural entity, it still has to stand for something, like molecules, or brain patterns.
Science is common sense elaborated
Someone took a shot at me.
They missed, but someone took a shot at me, and I am upset.
"You are the lilies the world has given me.
I am boundlessly grateful."
"You are my garden.
I grow wild in you."
My pulled calf-muscle has slowed me down to a crawl. I can now enjoy the scenery as I hobble across the parking lot.
My lovely makes me a man.
On our trip I am happy to sit next to her. It is very rare there is any distance between us. We can turn to each other anytime, anywhere (in a bookstore, on a couch, in a restaurant.) and there we are. This is the opposite of corrosive.
I sit in happiness
Even those who remember the past are still condemned to repeat it.
Humans jumped the shark a long time ago.
I once aspired to be in a fail compilation, but I failed.
Maybe I can only understand the world obliquely, and aphorisms will bounce-pass the truth to me.
Are these illusions real? I hope they are not illusory illusions.
You can hardly be chaste, if no one finds you wanton. The unchased is hardly chaste.
Philosophy asks the questions that cannot be answered.
The Internet is largely an Idternet
It's always today somewhere.
Religion lets us take the eternal view, the perpendicular exit, ignoring the present and our thoughts about it.
Being kind is not only a moral commitment, but a skill, if not a talent.
How can we think about religion when we cannot even talk about it?
I see a student bent over under the weight of the books in his backpack. This is so point challenged. He could have those exact books on my computer and they would weigh nothing. The mind too does not get heavier with thoughts.
Perhaps™: Big corporations often only pretend to compete.
Corporations are not democratic. They are more like dictatorships, or feudal allegiances.
Looking around™: We live more and more in a virtual word: nerf life. Sports are replaced by safe sports. Adventure by travel, or rides. Our bodies, the existential being, is taken out of it.
More people are shot in Spokane than are killed in automobile accidents. So why don't they make people wear bulletproof vests like they do seatbelts?
Television without words is so non-educational.
We lived in surveillance society.
Watching television we are invulnerable.
The world is not made up of subjects and predicates but of subjectizing and predicating.
I have been too busy to think. I am planning my fall philosophy courses on religion and on thinking well ("logic").
I look forward to doing this with great pleasure.
She wants my love. It is wonderful I have so much I want to give.
Each is nervous about making the other one happy. Each is not worthy, each the weak member...
I text "I miss you already."
She texts back: "Isn't that wonderful?"
Mantra for aging wisely: "Do not connect the dots. Do not connect the dots."
If personal narratives occupy a "privileged position" in the mind, they would need privileged processing and storage.
Behind the attractions and the attractiveness of the young are the whispers of the DNA and the biological imperatives.
Philosophy is the non-starter, the way to not-get-it-off-the-ground. So when you do start, where do you turn? You have to go to something else.
It's amazing how much of the world can be described (adequately, to human beings) as a human society. For what would be the opposite? Human society as an unconscious/instinctive
It didn't take a village. It took Linda.
Give a man a fish; you have fed him for today. Teach a man to fish; and he will buy a boat that costs way more than the fish he will catch.
I have recently become fascinated by the IBM Selectric typewriters. I want one. I want to fail to write my novel on a Selectric™ – it's the best.
Sex is satisfying and comprehensible. Love is incomprehensible.
I watched Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange last night and I was struck by how "off" it was on it's depiction of the future. People were tethered to phones, sex and drugs were socially available, and there was no Internet. People read newspapers! But what made me the most sad was that they depiocted a world without surveillance. The Internet itself is a kind of surveillance.
It would be a nicer world if people took a little time to interact in a pleasant way with those around them.
I turned sixty-four today. But my true birth-day was the day I met Linda
She still needs me, (as I her), she still feeds me...
My awkward gestures of tenderness are seen as tenderness.
Was it just an illusion that all love was an illusion?
Linda and I talking about marriage and about moving in together. I love it when my woman talks clean.
I walk about the world, a mental ear cocked towards the heavens.
Perhaps I could save the world with my philosophy book, but I am too lazy, and I am not smart enough, and lack ambition, and is sidetracked easily, and I get tired. And no one would listen to me anyways.
Sixty is the new something.
You may have made your bed but you don't need to keep lying in it.
Do not hide your self under a bushelbasket either.
Why don't they sell dogs at Costco? They could sell them in a handy two-pack, with a convenient carrying handle.
Idea: a charm bracelet for various adult vices. It could contain a cocaine spoon, a peyote button, a bong, a MILF
So why can't a cat watch television?
What you think you know about your fellow Americans mostly depends on what shows you listen to.
Shouldn't people get more and more interesting as they get older? Shouldn't they be learning more and more?
A New Acronym: TITIL (Today I Think I Learned)
There are a lot of things that surround love that are easily mistaken for love. The way weather is related to global warming. Or celebrity to human excellence.
How is it even possible that we listen to one song and really like it and listen to next song on the same CD and we don't like it at all?
Community, like family, is not based on being interesting. It is based on being included in spite of not being interesting.
Linda and I are locked in for an August vacation to NY and San Diego.
She takes my small ineffective gestures of love
as love.
I am growing up old.
I am getting of the age where I am asking as I hike: why is there not a Poang chair right here?
Why do I go around seeking understanding and insights about the world. I suppose because I don't understand it. Why is this not a problem for everyone else?
How great is it to be driving in my car to someone who really loves me?
She doesn't put up with my shit, she likes my shit. At least as much as I do.
Modesty is a form of timidity.
Why do we not know we are dreaming? Where is our sense of reality then?
A Test for Old People™: How long can you walk?
We keep our age and our aging, fairly well hidden, especially from ourselves.
I invite philosophical thoughts to come to me, but they reject me.
Are there any rules on aging? Should there be?
When history first began, were there any inhabitable places on planet that man had not found and inhabited?
There is a big difference between not being into sex (now), and not liking sex.
Inside all these cool metal cars around me, there is a chubby warm little human, with all their emotional dramas and fears.
Most interactions with other people are behind the wheel of a car. We have elaborate rules for this. We do not know the effects of seeing each other always driving around in cars. It becomes an unconscious metaphor for human interaction. Living in a hard candy shell, we are mask-like; we are simple data. There is limited potential for interaction.
My neighbors have limited but nonetheless expensive dreams. A big trailer to go camping in a state park. Kind of a covered wagon.
You can lead the American people to the Internet, but you can't make them think.
Why hasn't there been another Beatles? With all the musicians out there, why has there not been another Lennon McCartney?
Here is what I learned from my garage sale. Do not expect to make money on a garage sale. People still do not like my shit. People are practical. It's time to move my old stuff on.
I am like one of those authors (Bill Bryson, Deepak Chopra) who write too many books — but, unlike them, I do-not-write too many books.
The closer I get to death the less less significant it seems.
We now have "hate crimes." How about "hypocrisy crimes"?
When you understand say Jesus or the Buddha, it's your understanding that doing the understanding. It's not what Jesus or Buddhas says. (But the words are important.)
Not only is it not clear that seeing god is all that important, but it is obviously impossible. We cannot even see the stars. Humans have only have 100 billion braincells, and there are ten sextillion stars in all the galaxies! What makes us even think we can see God?
Idea: Hugeville: big robots the size of our parents will take care of us in a larger-than-life setting.
When a young man talks about death he is talking of his desire for death or his aversion for death, but he is not talking about his death.
In the Eastern karma, reincarnation continues until you lose the desire for it. Then you cease (or de-cease.)
Another on my new books: A True Understanding of the World for Dummies Bright Thoughtful People. But even a dummy thinks they can understand it.
What does it mean to say we are a Christian nation? Do we have good values that we can engage with other nations? or not? Are we better than all other non-Christian nations. To whom are we speaking?
Should we even speak of the universe?
We get confused by presidential burocracies, because our primary (and privileged) understanding is people.
The use of words is highly contextual
America seems incapable of making sensible regulatory changes. It is not clear our politicians even inhabit the same world.
A guardian angel is out of date. We will now have a guardian agent, to watch over us.
Maybe I have never been with a woman who is crazy about me. Maybe I have never been with a woman I am crazy about.
Worrying about money for gas the car suddenly seems heavy, like I am dragging a big pile of metal around. Before I filled my car up with magic and it drove like the wind.
Something magic always happens to me in a bookstore. Like fine wine, you get "notes" from an old book.
My daily walks are a combination of exercise and beauty, and wheezing and burping, and gas.
You must allow for human stupidity, especially your own.
If everyone in the world was like you, would it be a peaceful world?
At first internet was going to change people, then people decided to change the internet.
How do you run for the presidency of a loony bin?
Religion is setting a goal, a direction. Religion is stating an intention.
We are not all lost sheep
That we shall all be saved is almost as fantastic as a fleet of spaceships will come down and carry us away from this mess. And their food will be very good.
There is a deep self-centeredness in religion. We must accept that.
Christianity has instant salvation. Improvement and maturity is optional.
30 year-olds are not in their spiritual prime.
If you can't love your spouse, or yourself, how can you love Jesus?
Jesus does not need to be worshiped, praised or loved.
Was Jesus confused about anything?
How will we ever feel that some basic philosophical questions are stupid?
I rail against philosophers who do not take a stand. To answer a philosophical question means to state your opinion
Just remember, Plato and his "Republic" stands in the wings.
As there is a godhead (ground of all being) so there is a personhead.
I traveled to New Orleans and Albuquerque and did not talk to anyone I did not know. There is nothing wrong with this, but think of what it implies about our ignorance of other people. We should not pretend it does not exist. It is in this way that the world is de trop.
We wear clothes both to cover up our sexuality and to enhance it.
What is love?
Do I now like sex because of the nap afterwards?
A river is not man scaled and that is part of the grandeur of nature — it makes us seem irrelevant.
What if you never had non-assholiness, or gentleness, modeled for you?
On Fat People: It's not that you consume more than your fair share of the food, it's that you consume more than your fair share of the medical system.
On Fat People: Surely some people are fat because they eat too much and get no exercise.
Heart pains and all, I am still terribly alive. I'll be here forever, until the day I die.
I have no clue as to who I am. Still I have a task.
My many masks have many masks.
If you are religious and you are not happy, you're not doing it right.
If you are religious and you are not better than the "non-religious", you're not doing it right. (You are doing something else.)
Like a running stream, Zora, my ten-month-old granddaughter, cannot be photographed.
Babies are the crack-cocaine of human beings,
Life moves on, then life moves on from movin' on.
There are memes and there are seats of memes
What is implied does not need to be put into words.
Were the painting on the cave walls an early forms of television?
Every day I beat my heart.
The seven cities of Cibola, the fountain of youth and my philosophy book. What do they all have in common?
Did philosophers get anything right, or did they just dig the cunning bear-pits.
Can you meet someone without making judgments? Don't ask me.
The different parts of your body speak to you, and to others.
Simplicities are important. It is a problem when the major aspects of the world require a college course, only to come to an indeterminate conclusion
Philosophy books should answer the questions. That all parts are complex with people hopelessly disagreeing are just part of an simplistic understanding of the world.
I spend an afternoon. It is a good purchase.
Today New Orleans is like a steam-bath, a steam-bath with houses, and cars, and streets.
A new Blog-name: Look out rolling donut!
Interest in status often pretends to be an interest in happiness.
I wish I would see the St. Cecelia Gay Church. The obsession with homosexuality is fighting an irrelevant battle; it is morality as a sport competition.
Idea: the antibabelfish – a device that turns all English into soothing gobbledygook.
Talking about family and weather is a kind of baby talk.
I talked to Ian about you today, and you remain too good to be true.
Perhaps the world cannot be put into words — O.K., but we still live in simple scenarios.
Philosophy must ask the simple questions, the ones that have no simple answers.
There are also those people who don't have the intelligence to get confused by the realities we see in movies and the realities we see in life.
IDEA: the advice button/doll. A button or a pull-cord doll into which you can record a series of sentences that get played back randomly as you hit the button or pull the string. This would be useful for the words of advice that comes from Mamma.
Mamma's last words may well be : Alt i orden. ('All in order', or 'Everything is fine')
the bar is set low but set on top of a stage in a tab of whipped cream.
[On watching television] Liars! liars!
Religion is for people who don't want to think.
Idea: a sport where the rules are so complex no one understands them but a computer.
Many television shows show man at his most primitive, fighting and killing. This works as narrative. It works as a comprehensible personal challenge. It fails as history.
I have visited New Mexico and spoken to no one but my mother and my sister.
Some people still believe there is a stage called old age. Apparently it does not involve being sexually attractive or interesting.
I never thought I would find my Linda.
Of the scientific knowledge we say we know at the present time, what can be altered by further discoveries?
If you had every book available to read or to hear, you would still have to know how to navigate such waters.
Why are there no humorous religions? Perhaps humor is a religion?
Linda is so positive towards me. I am blown away, and on-my-knees grateful. I can close my eyes and fall backwards into it. This is the trust of trust-building-exercises but not used metaphorically. I can let myself be carried by her love.
Almost every day I spend a little time being old, a little being young, and a little time not being dead.
Religion is something no one can be an expert on. In religion, and you can stick to your guns
I see a modern house and think I want to live in it. To inhabit that fantasy. But it is an important part of that fantasy that I do not know exactly what it is.
Some of my 'knowledge' about women say, are realizations, and even the beginning of changes of attitudes. So are some of my spiritual advice.
We have no understanding of sex. It is a highly multi-dimensional game. Much of life is like that, like parenting. We do not leave it to the experts.
Our viewport is so small, it is a periscope on the jungle, where life is moving as fast as... a TV set.
Family vacation -- I have done my tour of duty.
We keep a lot alive
Watching television! Liars! Fakes!
The first point of all academic disciplines that pretend to describe reality is to point out that we have no words for it.
There is perhaps nothing new to think under the sun. There may be no new riff on God. But the erudite people who go everywhere and remember so much, are not free from distractions and the love of novelty.
One sign of aging is a preoccupation with aging.
We do not recognize the crises as our own, or our understandings as misunderstandings.
Spirituality is to make changes in your relationship to the world.
I must now go back to my family and take my punishment.
It is a chore being with one's family. So different. I assume they feel something of the same way. It is a salutary effort
Idea for a happier world: the six day week.
Idea: a trailer that plops on the ground, so old people not have to climb up into it.
Bring back the bustle, or at least a costume that tuns into this, and other retro fashions
spiritual thing we need is a less fear policy. dump the family
Instead of a new theology, we need a new andrology, a new study of man.
Idea: wheelchair vacation tours for seniors. The seniors are wheeled about Europe in their wheelchairs. (One can imagine a movie based on this. I leave the details as an exercise for the reader.)
We surround ourselves with superstitions, talisman and beliefs, gathering "proofs" for the way we want things to be.
I see a man stare after a woman who walks by. I think he is thinking about sex. What else can a man think when he looks at a beautiful woman?
On the plane, some read; others sleep. Both work.
Sudoku is a way of dealing with systems where one part affects all the others. It is a kind of solitaire chess.
Without a book or the computer, I hang, unmediated. I am like a man surviving in the vacuum of space. (I crave music)
No. I cannot die in a plane crash. I feel so valuable, much like all these other people, the ones I call "everybody."
Airports are a great way to people-watch, a huge cross-section of those who have enough money to fly. People from the city, people from the country. Selves that usually keep themselves separated. Hang in different crowd. The challenged who are up to fighting way around the country. No one wants to be here, except as part of a transition. A place to simians (and siwomians)
With all these people listening to music on their mp3-players, shouldn't everyone be smiling or toe-tapping? Or at least be moved?
Tom Jones takes on an orchestra – and wins!
I remember the first time I heard the The Django Rineheart part in in Greens Keepers' Low & Sweet. I laughed out loud in delight. I no longer laugh, but the thought still brings me joy.
And do I want to die without hearing the oeuvre of Fletcher Henderson?
In music, at least someone is talking to you.
I like the idea of "being with the family", forgetting it involves being with the family.
My 95 year old mother is like a Energizer rabbit, who keeps going and going in spite of her age. Planning for tomorrow meal, setting out dishes, putting the dishes in the dishwasher, checking everything. Part of me is in awe of her tenacity while part of me wishes she would do something else.
Everything has an indefinite number of handles.
Actually, we live in very common narratives..
Kids are like stupid adults.
If technology is magic, we are sorcerers' apprentices.
Idea: a cellphone with a rotary dial.
Our large scale projects, (solving the population problem, transitioning away from oil, even keeping our supreme army) is our version of the irrigation projects that engendered civilization. It results in a change of culture, governance and the human condition.
I say nature is beautiful but sometimes when I point my camera, say at a big Ponderosa pine, I cannot find a picture to take.
You should not die before your bodies.
What paper bag do I want over my head?
I look down upon simplifications, even while I want to simplify capitalism, philosophy or simplification itself. What then is the difference between a simple deep thought and a bullshit simplification?
Writing a book is a spiritual event. A place to speak and no one disagrees or interrupts us, a place carry out a chain of reasoning. We are King for a Day.