on thinking

I’ve been thinking lately about, well, thinking. Particularly the kind of thinking you do when you are almost asleep. A few days ago I was hovering between the realms of consciousness and I could tell that something was wrong with my thoughts. And the strange thing was, I had just enough awareness to realize how crazy they were. Does anyone else understand what I’m talking about? Imagine that you’re falling asleep. You begin to dream, but you see these dreams through the eyes of a sane man. Part of you is dreaming, and part of you can’t believe what he sees. This is what I’m talking about. If your brain is like mine, then it is always very active. Near sleep I start to lose track of my thoughts. They are like dogs, getting off their leashes. Sometimes, I’m awake enough to realize that they’re getting away, even if I can’t catch them. All I can remember from a few days ago is thinking about a woman. This is hard to describe and even harder to recall. She had a line coming out of her side. I kept imagining this glowing line shooting up from her hip. She was a blur and I don’t know why I was thinking of her, or what else my impressions were. But let me be clear, I was AWAKE. This kind of strange thought is usually reserved for dreams. In that semi-conscious state I thought of other things too. Those didn’t make any sense either. It was something about me re-naming myself and claiming a name for humanity. I know, it sounds stupid, and it probably was, but it made so much sense. It was profound. It was epic. At least I think it was.

I realize while writing this that I’m using the word “think” a lot. And I THINK that this might be part of the problem. The English language only has one word to describe the richness of activity in the human mind. How can we constrain the idea of thought so? There is so much to think about. There are so many kinds of thought. Even without emotions, we as humans can think in a million ways. We can imagine, we can conjecture, we can analyze, we can synthesize and we can split concepts. And yet all I can say is that my THINKING was strange. It was so many things. I guess you could call it unconstrained thought. Thought that was not limited by physics, or practicality or the world. These were the thoughts that we keep caged until we sleep, until we dream. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to see these thoughts come out and play. It’s just a shame that I always forget what they look like.

Detritus of Time

Today I started sorting out my old room. This proved to be a mammoth task, largely because I hadn’t really cleaned it in about 10 years. Now this isn’t to say that my room was really messy. It had some semblance of order, except that amid the piles of books were old high school merit certificates, college dorm pictures and even a junior high yearbook. Ah, the memories. When I found amongst the bric-a-brac a picture of myself when I was in kindergarten I thought, “when did I become old?” This is no doubt a common thought but a scary one nonetheless. I’m only 22 goddamit. Already I’ve got enough memories and knickknacks to fill a large corner of the basement. The basement is of course the place where my family stores all the detritus of time. There one finds memories of a past that was close to being good but didn’t quite live up to expectations. I took a look around there as I placed my old belongings in storage. I could see my engineering books next to my fathers and I wondered how I ended up in his shoes. That however is a long story that needs many more entries to explain. I also saw my old school drawings, most weird and some inspired. Old tests that I’d aced were also abundant (I was so smart). Indeed all I have to show for myself as a human being is in that basement. It’s a sad thought. Sad and troubling to be complete. I feel so connected to this past that I can’t bear to throw it away. I need to know that some part of me will always exist in that basement. But as my family and I grow older, our pasts take up more and more space, becoming horribly unorganized. We are in desperate need of a family museum or at least a warehouse. The clutter of the basement oppresses us. It hangs over our heads, a reminder of our failure to control our lives, to control even our belongings. Old luggage, bicycles, pictures, my grandparent’s furniture, generations of crap lay all around. O God, let it all burn and set us free.

The East Is Red

I love china. Besides producing some of the world’s most attractive women, this nation has accomplished something else that makes me very happy. China has proven that democracy is irrelevant. Every day I waste time at work reading news articles from right wing ideologues who get hard-ons whenever they write words like, freedom, or liberty, or moral values. Even the guys on the left like nothing more than to trumpet the triumph of democracy over every other form of government. Well China is the most effective counterargument to these assertions. China, the nation, is a big fuck you to every pompous American news columnist.

Perhaps a little history will be useful here. Back when Gorbachev became head of the Soviet Union, he decided to institute two radical new policies. The first, called Perestroika, would open the Soviet economy and move it further away from the centrally planned communist system. The second, called Glasnost, would open the Soviet society, and allow such rights and freedom of speech and of the press. China was in some turmoil around this time too. I suppose the centrally planned peasant economy of chairman Mao was showing weaknesses and not going very well. The Chinese looked to their former communist brothers hoping to draw some lessons from their policies. Well, the Soviet’s new experiment in openness didn’t go over too well. It turned out that Russian wanted Levis jeans and Coca Cola more than submarines and ICBMs, and they were willing to take to the streets demanding the rights and privileges enjoyed in the West. They protested in Red Square while the Soviet tanks stood there waiting for orders. The Chinese faced had faced a similar situation in Tianamen Square, except they happily gave orders that Brezhnev or Stalin would have given. They crushed the protest and vowed to punish any opposition. At the same time, they proceeded to open their economy to foreign investment and capitalism. Today, China is set to become the world’s second most productive nation in a few years, albeit while acting as the world’s sweat shop.
The Chinese economy, with it’s small ruling elite and masses of impoverished poor are the new alternative to Western liberal capitalist democracy. Personally, I think that their system is going to win in this century.

Celephais

So far, I have done a pretty good job of not telling anybody about this blog. Despite whatever intentions I had when I started this thing, it serves now only as a way for me to waste time. Truth be told, I haven't even succeeded in that respect and have made few entries. However, today is the dawn of a new day in the blog that no one knows about and that no one reads. The astounding lack of readership has actually freed me to post some random crap that I have written since having this blog but have been too embarassed to post. The first hidden gem that I'd like to share with nobody is a strange brew of thoughts that escaped from me one morning right after I had a strange dream. The entry below that describes this dream makes very little sense, so I'm quite fond of it. Here it is in all it's glory, the story of a strange dream.

Earlier today in a semi-sleeping state of half thoughts and fragmented dreams I was brilliant. Not that real brilliance that Poe and Goethe could claim to have, but a more insidious genius. A rush of love and self-congratulation that only dreams, or rather the hope that is their cause can bring. In this dream I questioned the dream itself and it’s existence. I saw the dream in myself and saw its absurdity. Then, I thought an essay called “On the existence of dreams in others”. The conclusion – which one could easily infer from the title – was that they don’t exist. Only the self’s dream is true. The other is part of our dream and so cannot dream for itself. It was here that my subconscious Sartre weaved this well-worn cloth and called it clothing. In retrospection I always see myself as the thief that I am, and yet I lose little clarity.
I saw the perfect building. It was a landmark of the great land that Lovecraft called Celephais. I knew its greatness in my mind yet could not remember it even for a second. The more I grasped the further it grew. I could not focus on parts but could only observe it in its entirety. It was an organic thing with windows and terraces that I barely comprehended. Only for a few moments did I understand it. Only when I let myself go, when I surrendered to the dream and obeyed its irrational rules did it accept me. In that surrender I could keep but part of myself to record the perfection that I now struggle to recall. From my sketchy imaginings I can tell that this structure was by no means as awesome as I believed. The perfection existed only in my mind. An impression of how divinity would feel if it were real. And yet, it is the only perfection I have ever known. Maybe it is all I can hope for. Fooling myself into seeing a god and vainly recreating his works in waking life, knowing them to be my own. And in this realization I knew that the dreams of others were false because mine were false. The dreams of another would be even less than lies. They would be facsimiles of impressions that never really had form. At least my lies are my own, even in their plagiarism. Let us from now on only dream of ourselves. To dream of others is to steal their lies.

A Hazy Shade of Winter

Why do people do drugs? In our war on drugs and those who use them, no one has really asked this simple question. Why would someone ingest chemicals that they know can’t be good for them. There are probably lots of reasons for drug use and everybody who’s done them must have some decent ones. I can’t speak for anyone else but I can tell you a little something about my reasoning. Unlike most teenagers, I never smoked pot. I did the opposite of what peer pressure dictated, and that was to abstain from smoking weed. All of those school lectures by police constables and former heroine addicts had me convinced that drugs were a risk better not taken. It wasn’t until I got older and societal norms changed a little that I saw that propaganda for what it was. In college I caved in to my curiosity and blazed for the first time. I guess you could say that in drugs, as in other areas of life, I was a late bloomer. I didn’t get high my first time but after trying some more, I began to see what all the fuss was about. It turns out that drugs are a lot of fun. I’ve never done any of the really serious ones like cocaine or heroine, but even the slightly less illicit drugs that I tried seemed great the first time. They totally change your perspective on the world. Granted that change means an overall decrease in reasoning ability and motor skills, but still, it’s a big change. Smoking up is the chemical equivalent of lying upside down and looking at the ceiling. It’s the same as before, but you see things that never really looked at before. Suddenly all of your priorities in life are different and everything that you cared about seems less important. At the same time, things that seemed trivial take up most of your attention. I guess the surge of endorphins that is released into your blood stream is pretty good too. The newfound happiness and the departure from normal realty make drugs perfect for one of the most common activities of the modern person, escape. It is here that drugs become dangerous. While escapism is healthy in small doses, it ruins people when they become dependant on it. This is as true of all non-chemical addictions. At the heart of addiction is the desire for escape. For those with hard lives, drugs can provide the only respite from suffering. I think that this particular aspect of drug use is largely ignored, to the detriment of those who really need help. I think that if more people understood the allure of drugs, they would be less critical and more understanding of those who become addicted to them.

Happiness Log

So lately I've been thinking about the past a lot. In particular I find myself thinking back to happy moments in my life and trying to decide if things were better back then. I've decided that nostalgia and other psycological effects make it impossible to accurately compare different periods of your life in terms of happiness. So, I came up with a brilliant solution. It exists on my computer desktop in the form of a file call "best life ever.xls". Yes this is a spreadsheet in which I rank every day of my life on a scale of 1 to 10. Now on the surface, this might seem like a stupid idea. And if I bother to think about it for a really long time, I might be inclined to agree with you. Nevertheless I believe there are some great advantages to logging the relative happiness of each and every day. Firstly, it's a lot easier than keeping a diary. Frankly, I don't often feel like writing after a long day of work and can't be bothered make a journal entry. The sparse postings on my blog should make this fact clear. Secondly, by giving a numerical value to ones general happiness, all kinds of data manipulation can be performed. For instance, after ranking each day for say 3 years, you could graph the data and look for general trends. Now this isn't to say that the graph will be 100% accurate in showing how happy you were, but it would give you a rough idea. If you were honest with yourself you could see which year, month and day were the best. You might even be able to make correlations. Say you had a girlfriend for a year. You could track that initial euphoria of meeting someone new and watch it peak and then wain with boredom. If you continued to keep data for say 10 years, you could literally compartamentalize your life into good and bad times. You might see that having kids or getting married really made you miserable. Now a big problem with giving a quantitative value to anything qualitative is the use of subjectivity. In this case, I think that's the whole point. You may not be sure why you suddenly think of an average day is a 6 instead of a 7, but that could tell you that you are less happy than before. Of course, complete subjectivity is a hard place to start from. You might not have anything interesting happen to you one day and ask yourself "What score should I give?". To deal with this issue, I created a basic ranking system to use as a guideline should there be any doubt. I wrote it in about 2 minutes so it is very rough. Here it is:


ratings
1 - worst possible day (ie someone close dying)
2 - incredibly bad (multiple horrific events)
3 - just plain hurtful (something that damages life in lasting ways)
4 - really bad day (everything seems to go wrong)
5 - not horrbile but far from good ( ie worked all day with few breaks)
6 - decent day (unpleasant but bearable)
7 - good day (did some fun things)
8 - great day (something really fun)
9 - amazing experience (something new, exciting and worthwhile happened)
10 - best day ever (really really amazing stuff. Eg. Sex with hot girl, huge job promotion etc)
11 - that rare nearly impossibly good day that must be cranked to 11 (ie winning the lottery)


I hope that if anyone reads this they'll take a few seconds each day to start their own happiness log. It might just tell you a lot about yourself some day.

Mugged by the Right

The other day I was shopping for some simple yet interesting gifts that I could mail my friend back home fore her birthday. I drove to this smoke shop that I thought might have some marijuana paraphernalia that would be small enough to mail and cool enough to distract her from the relative cheapness of the gift. In any event, the smoke shop turned out to be the old fashioned kind that only sold cigars and fancy lighters. I was about ready to give up my search until I stumbled upon one of those strange stores that sell odd bric-a-brac for young people with money to burn. Being one such young person, I entered the store. I was pleased to find some political buttons that I was sure my friend would like. Unlike myself, she is comfortable in the clothes and attire of the laisser-faire protester. I knew she would proudly don buttons with slogans like “Iraq is Arabic for Vietnam”, while not being so wrapped up in the war to already be sporting 20 such buttons. The point is; if she were that waitress from Office Space, she would gladly sport these as part of her flair. So, I happily took some of these buttons as well as other mildly amusing gewgaws to the counter to purchase. The middle-aged woman behind the cash register took one look at my buttons and quickly decided that I was one of those young radicals who must make up a substantial percentage of her clientele. She saw that Iraq button and proclaimed “well isn’t that the truth”. It was, but I did not like how quickly I had fallen into a political discussion. The next thing I knew we were talking about Hilary’s chances in ’08 and that new Air America station. I quickly acquiesced to her left wing views, which was harder that I anticipated, because I actually shared them. Deep down I’m an old lefty too. So why was it so hard for me to be as enthusiastic about it as she was? The reason became quite apparent to me as I left the store. I simply don’t respect liberals. I mean I like them well enough. They’re cool people who are generally tolerant and easygoing. And yet I still consider them to be naïve and obtuse. They talk and make fine points about politics and human nature, but to steal an easy quote, they’re all sounds and fury signifying nothing. They have been losing the war for the hearts and minds of America for 25 years now and it is only getting worse. I mean nobody respects a loser even if he is a really nice guy. In my opinion, there are many reasons for the death of liberalism but there is one that bothers me more than all the rest of them, liberal politicians, and even their supporters, are largely wimps. Now this is not just Rush Limbaugh and Anne Coulter talking. Case in point, Al Gore. Here was a guy who was running on the heels of one of the most popular presidents in American history and he lost. Why? Because he was afraid to be what he really was. In his drive for votes and popularity, Gore positioned himself as a moderate. His fear of being labeled a soft lefty or a bleeding heart liberal, made him look weak and heartless. This kind of behavior is pandemic in leftist politics. This is why I didn’t care about what that old hippie woman had to say about Hilary Clinton. I know that unless someone truly inspiring comes out of that mess called the Democratic Party, the battle is already lost.