The Middle Distance

Refresh my memory.

2009-05-10T02:26:00.002-05:00

It's been a rough year. I decided to tear myself out of my previous bad mood, by force if need be, and try to regain some sort of positive outlook on the future. Let me regain my thoughts and I'll start writing again. Hopefully, I can make it worthwhile and honest. Otherwise, what's the point?

I remember too much

2007-03-14T04:17:00.000-05:00

I have been trying for so long to leave the destructive nature of myself behind. The simple truth is I cannot. I am destructive and vicious. I want nothing but to leave a path of obliteration behind me. I want to break everything down and stand alone in a field of ash and torn down monuments. I would say that I cannot help it but the truth is that I don't want to help it. I don't want to be other than what I am. I want to be that which casts a shadow over everything you thought you knew. I want to eat your memories and I want spew my bile and acid across your precious few lasting days. That is the little that I want and the most that I will take. Imagine this: a world in which my shadow will remain for all your lasting minutes a blight upon all that is holy and remembered by your life. Taste this bitter ash and wonder what would have become if only I had wanted for the light.

There are lies afoot

2007-02-01T04:25:00.000-06:00

I speak for no one. No wait, I speak for me. There are people who are hurting friends of mine. People who are expecting me to do something. You should know that I would do anything. I would admit anything before a court of law to defend my people. If you attack the people that I protect I will break you down and tear tendons from bones and bleach the remains. I will remember all the words of professors and destroy you. Touch my people and i will come like an avenging angel, like snow in the dead of winter and darkness on the mountain top. I will hurt you slowly and break you down until bare bones remember nothing of the you that was. But I will remember, I will remember you and bare bleached bones in the cold night.

Doctor, there's a castle in my head (part four)

2006-09-16T04:31:00.000-05:00

When there is a situation in my world that I don't know how to deal with, I retreat from it. I move into my interior world and live a life without flesh. I guess this is a point where I need to admit something. Part of the creation of this world is because I was once incarcerated in a psychiatric ward. There is nothing like be strapped to a gurney and left alone in a back corridor to be harrassed and molested by various people during the day and left alone with inmates at night. Helplessness is a fire. You burn up and there is nothing left but the very core of what you are. If you have ever wondered where my interior world comes from, well now you know.
I don't want to tell you any of this. I remember when I was in Florence, Italy, in the base of the Duomo. They were selling wooden rosaries and I bought one. I wound it around my hand and climbed up through the rat-like path to the top where I could look out over the city and beyond. All I wanted was a path, a sign-post to tell me where i was going. There was no such thing. All I could do was look down upon the city and the mist that enshrouded it. I decided then and there that I would create my own sign-posts and that the city I had created within my own head was the only true city in all the world. I stand and rise up with my own world and am pierced by the spikes of consciousness. I am laid out and forced to peer over the edge of the world that I have created. And that is okay. In all the darkness and derangement of my secret mind I have only one message: I would never trade this for any other reality. Take that, you foolish lie of a life. I can't but win.

Just a minor return to form.

2006-09-01T04:36:00.001-05:00

I've been gone. Gone for a long time. There occurred many events almost all at once that matter to me in my life. As for now, let us concentrate on a simple thought. I love this country. The people, the places. We are a nation I can, and am, proud to be a part of. Because of this pride I have a simple message. This message goes out to our government. You had best be afraid. Be very afraid. We will not tolerate your evil much longer. We would have changed things a long while before now, but we so wanted to believe in your good intentions. You see, we tried to believe in your better nature for so long, like a mother trying to keep hope that her son has not gone bad. But we finally accept that you have gone bad, gone so bad that there is no return. And so we reject you. We reject your lies and your desperate assurances that 'this' time it will be okay. My vote will carry that weight and if my vote does not accomplish what needs to be accomplished, then I will violently overthrow you. I choose these words specifically because in legal terms they are considered treason. What I am saying here and now is that if the government is not changed immediately then, by your laws, the only true patriot would be considered treasonous. You have left me and the people who I would defend with my life no choice. You know that in the end, there is no government, only people, citizens who have the power. And you do not want to have to face that power. While it may be one nation under God, it is also one government under that nation. We can give, but we can also take away.

By what yardstick?

2006-04-19T20:09:00.000-05:00

No matter what I do or who I become there will only be two great accomplishments in my life. The first is my birth, and the second is my death. With my birth I passed into the dream that is existence. There is no world but what I see and what I believe. Should I choose to disbelieve some part of existence I cannot. For, like Pandora's box, once I have seen the results of my dream they cannot be undone. The world is a turbulent place, full of strife and suffering, and for this I am sorry. But my mind is a storm and from a great distance it may seem organized, like a theory of chaos, in truth we are all on the ground. We cannot see anything from a great distance because we are here and we live in the passing of now. We can imagine what our lives might seem like from an objective viewpoint, but it is only that, the imagination of ourselves. A dream within a dream. Though we may all be here together on this planet, we are actually alone within the dream that each of us creates day by day, everyone simultaneuously a bit player in each others' play.

This is not real.

2006-04-08T20:44:00.000-05:00

There is a box in a room, through a door, at the end of a hall.
In this room there is nothing but the box.
In the box are the secrets that I keep.
In the box are the things that I've done.
In the box are my memories.
I made the box.
I took a branch from every tree in the world.
A band of every metal.
A lock made of stone.
A hinge made of glass.
After a thousand years I was done.
Yesterday the box was full.
Today I woke up.
The box was gone.

Reading into things (a bit too much)

2006-04-06T17:04:00.000-05:00

Lately I've been obsessed with this one song. It's by Neko Case and called 'Furnace Room Lullaby' from the album of the same name. I'll include the lyrics here:

All night… all I hear… all I hear is your heart
How come? How come…

I twisted you over and under to take you
The coals went so wild as they swallowed the rest
I twisted you under and under to break you
I just couldn't breathe with your throne on my chest

So far under the bed
Into the beams you've gone
I've gone… you've gone

I'm wrapped in the depths of these deeds that have made me
I can't bring a sound from my head though I try
I can't seem to find my way up from the basement
A demon holds my place on earth 'till I die

All night… all I hear… all I hear is your heart
How come? How come…

I can't help but think about redemption. I don't mean Judgement Day and holy hosts and such, that really isn't my cup of tea. I'm talking about personal redemption in this lifetime. You see, there isn't a lot of stuff I regret about my life, but the things I've done that I do regret are of a pretty heavy nature. Sometimes I think my obsession with sailboats is because there is a certain lightness of spirit associated with sailing. I often think I'd just like to pack a solo cruiser up with supplies and travel for a couple years. Out on the water civilization seems very distant, even with land in sight. My solitude no longer feels like penance. On a sailboat there is nothing that is not absolutely necessary (keep in mind I don't spend much time on luxury yachts) and each thing has a very specific purpose. Once you get used to boats, there is nothing that seems arcane in nature. I'm pretty handy, but I get confused by most engines made after 1990. The engine on a sailboat has a very simple purpose, and is used infrequently. I can take one apart and put it back together without even consulting a schematic or manual. Winches, blocks, rudders, and boom vangs seem almost holy in their simplicity and usefulness. Anything larger than a dinghy has color-coded halyards and sheets.
Wow I've gotten off track. I suppose that's a common blog occurrence. Well, back to the song. I've always been primarily interested in certain songs for the lyrics. I mean, the music is what catches me, but the lyrics hold me. (This could be part of the reason I never cared for jam bands.) The music feels funereal, like a country requiem. The mourning is for times past. You see, there was a girl. (There always is, it seems like.) I knew her for a while, but then I went away. I came back after a while and saw her. She hit me in the head without even moving. I couldn't even think straight. Things evolved for a while as fate does that thing that she does. It was shockingly perfect. Except I felt a nagging thing in the back of my head. I think part of it was my own blooming insanity, but part of it was her devotion. She was becoming the high priestess in the temple of me. It became an extreme version of what Plato called the mentor relationship. My insanity was progressing to the point that I felt almost holy. I always had a knack for talking, but now I could tell anybody anything. I felt like I could see right through a person's head. It was like a personal magnetism, an agressive charisma. I became self-destructive. I hurt this girl and some other people (emotionally) and ended up getting kicked out of school and hurting myself pretty badly with a knife. Not quite David Koresh, but in an emotional sense, very similar.
For a long time I thought, what did I do? What happened to make me deserve this? Gradually I came to realize that why isn't really important. I saw the path, I walked down it, I fell off the cliff. There is no cosmic reason for the path, and no one pushed me off the cliff. Every step I take is one I take myself. And now I'm trying to climb out of this hole and it isn't really working. I've withdrawn into myself to such a degree that people don't often recognize me. So where do I go from this point? I often think that somehow I will redeem myself and come back into the light of day, the girl will come back and somehow everything will be restored. However, I'm realized that, like there is no 'god' that sent me into the hole, there is also no 'god' to forgive and restore me either. That's the pesky problem with redemption. There's a quote, from Ecclesiastes no less, that illustrates that even in biblical times people didn't really believe either.

"Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might; for there is no work, no device, nor knowledge, nor wisdom, in the grave, whither thou goest."

A slight deviation from the norm

2006-04-05T03:22:00.000-05:00

I guess I need a quick break from the castle in my head series. I was reading this afternoon (big surprise) and my eyes kept being drawn to my wrist. I kept thinking about all the scars I have. Really, my arms look like I've been in a war. (Or really self-destructive, I hear that's a common thing these days.) One scar looks like I tried to commit suicide when actually I got it caught in a crack in the rockface while climbing. (Pretty scary for a moment.) Another scar is too ridiculous to be believed. I had a pet rabbit when I was little and it got heatstroke. When I went to pick it up it latched on to my arm like a damn badger. Pretty nasty scar and no one believes me. I get lines from Monty Python about it. (No, there was no holy hand grenade available at the time.) I also have a series of burns from various soldering and welding projects in my sculpture and metalsmithing hobbies. Even one of my tattoos has an inordinate amount of scar tissue. I must be prone to these kind of things.
This makes me wonder if someday we will have the technology to make all scars disappear. Where will the stories come from then? My skin contains memories, like etchings of events past. The scars are reminders of the person I have become and the events that made me. Like Paul McCartney once said, sometimes we like old music not because we simply like it, but because we like remembering who we were when we first listened to it. Each scar, like each song, is a signpost on the road of our existence. Something I would never want to erase.

Doctor, there's a castle in my head (Part Three)

2006-04-04T17:57:00.000-05:00

One of the oddities of a personal mindscape is that there are no rules except for the ones you make. There can be mutable laws of phsyics, thermodynamics, space, and time. Once you've established just what you want for your interior world and created a landscape you can step back and look around. This is like a feedback loop within a feedback loop. What does your world say about you? Are you a God? A distant observer or an integral leader? Perhaps you're just a worker in a land run by someone else. Sometimes, as a meditational device I enter the town at the base of my mountain and become a boatbuilder with a small yard and a pier. Even when I am 'the man in the high castle' I have a separate governing body for the port city. I've tried to have it as an accelerated social evolution that is now plateaued around, say, 18th-century Spain. (Minus the ridiculously bad succession of kings and petty disputes that have plagued Spain.) I let everything flow naturally, though I have suppressed some epidemic diseases. I don't let the people worship me, though they try from time to time. I want to mostly be left alone, since I go to this inner world for peaceful meditation and examination of ideas. If I want social interaction, I shouldn't have to invent it, but seek it in the real world. One of the dangers of an intraverse is that it can become more interesting than the real world. I once skipped a class because I was examining the evolution of the ecosystems I had created. I knew then that I had better start getting a life. So, what does this information say about me as a person? Since it is entirely built out of my head, everything within it has something to say about the kind of man I am. Sometimes this introspection can uncover uncomfortable truths about oneself. For instance, I discovered just how completely arrogant a creature I am. This is something I have hidden from even myself. And it is good to know. Not that knowing has exactly changed me.

Doctor, there's a castle in my head (Part Two)

2006-04-02T15:40:00.000-05:00

There are only two things in the room. The first is a chair positioned in the exact center facing the window. It took me a long time to sort out what kind of chair this was going to be. I started out with your basic Eames lounge chair, but decided I needed something more substantial. I cycled through a few different chairs until I finally chose to make my own. It's a solid white oak frame using double mortise and tenon construction. Instead of several large springs I use 45 small multi-stage springs. The chair is an oversized club chair style with a slight incline to the seat. It's covered with a dense and thick cotton fabric in a navy so dark it's pretty much black. I don't really like the feel of leather, so cotton it is. The other item in the room is a single reading lamp. It is positioned behind and just to the right of the chair with a long cord connected to an old-fashioned single outlet in the wall. I picked a Tolomeo floor lamp from Design Within Reach. It is a simple tension arm design that I find quite appealing.
I use the chair to contemplate the world I've created. In the beginning it was designed so it could show me anything I imagined. Since I moved the room up the cliff as an observatory for the town I created I've removed the magical capabilities of it. It is now just a window. Of course an 18x12 foot window is structurally unsound and I haven't found a way to support it without breaking it into sections yet. So it remains a slightly magical construct. I want this inner space to obey the laws of phsyics as much as possible. No floating cities with giant mushroom houses for me. It's just not my style. However, some rules can be bent until I have found a solution. Anyway, I have dry erase boards that fold out of the ceiling for working on concepts and equations. It is interesting how I can meditate on this concept, meticulously applying ideas to the boards and then remember them perfectly much later. This appears to be an effective mnemonic tool since I don't actually have a photographic memory. If the entire concept of the memory palace seems ridiculous to you, just remember that we naturally compartmentalize our memories and this is nothing more than adding a formal structure to a natural process. you may surprise yourself with how enjoyable this effort can be. I went from a single room to a castle and then to an evolving port city and harbour. I like to sit in the chair and watch people race small sailboats out in the bay. I have to expand the boundaries so the people can explore their world.

It's time for a breakdown.

2006-04-02T04:23:00.000-05:00

For fairly obviously reasons, I'm thinking about time tonight. I've been looking at my clock, one of those standard LCD type deals where the digits are made up of a grid of bars. I realized that you could completely remove the bottom line of horizontal bars and still be able to read the clock. I put a piece of tape over the bottom line. I'm not entirely sure why this is comforting. I guess it seems that something made up of simple bars should be made as efficient as possible.
I keep thinking about how our minds have to change just so much to account for daylight saving time. It requires a certain unmeasurable leap in the way we think about things. Is it really 4am right now? Why does it feel like 3? How does 3 feel different from 4? Time is an artificial construct in society, yet the sun still sets, and a certain time after that it rises again. So time is both very real and artificial. And in fact, since the rotation of the earth around the sun is actually 365 days and one quarter (hence the 'leap year'), the time that we perceive right now is not technically correct. I went to the national time server tonight (nist.gov) to get an accurate read on the time since I am studying historical navigation and it requires that I use an extremely accurate time for observing star positions and I read about how the steel and iridium rod used as the official standard for one meter is actually decaying at a steady rate. Of course this is taking place at a microscopic level and can only be measured with unbelievably precise instruments it is not exactly a national crisis. But it made me think about how, if time changed, if it decayed, we wouldn't ever know, since we're linked irrevocably to our perceptions of time. What if an hour right now was only 15 minutes in, say, 1650. What if an hour took an hour and a half in 1979? We would never know since the dilation or contraction can't be measured by an outside device. What if, right now, we are trapped in an hour that is taking 3 million years? There is no such thing as an absolute hour, or a separate and perfect second. Which means that, all things measured by time are subject to its influence. The speed of light is not absolute, because that 186,262 miles per second may take a different length of second in this instant than in that instant. I believe this is the boundary of the unknowable. And now I have a headache. Whatever time it might be, I can certainly define now as bedtime.

Doctor, there's a castle in my head (Part One)

2006-04-01T11:43:00.000-06:00

I don't sleep very well. I would guess that this happens to a lot of people, but for me it feels like a very personal affliction. I feel vaguely tired at night, but not the drifting associated with falling unconscious. However, I don't want to get out of bed and ruin the chance that I might fall asleep. So a couple years ago I started a mental exercise to pass the time while I was lying in bed. I remember reading "Hannibal" maybe eight years or so ago. While it wasn't a particularly interesting book,(This concept of the aristocratic serial killer, or the utterly evil and mad genius, are rather boring concepts. I'm more interested in why normal people hurt themselves than the unrealistic representation of the twisted ubermensch. As for 'Silence of the Lambs', semi-omniscient counterpoint characters are actually a shortcut for a writer.) Anyway, the one thing that was interesting was that Hannibal Lector spent a lot of time inside his own head and he created a 'memory palace' to store all his memories and ideas. It was also an escape for him.
I decided to create one of my own. Of course it would be considerably different, seeing as how I'm not a two-dimensional character, nor a psychopath. (Of course I've always thought of myself as occupying a position somewhere on the periphery of sanity. That is, if you think of sanity as a geographical space, with room for movement, instead of a single point.) I decided to build it from the inside out. I started with a single room 40 feet long, 18 feet wide, and 12 feet tall. I didn't move out of this room for more than a month as I refined the details, adding and subtracting. I took the floor from an old factory building I saw downtown. It had an extremely worn oak flooring made up of very long, foot-wide boards. Old growth wood that just isn't seen anymore. Years of grit and varnish in the cracks but the whole surface is worn soft and smooth. At one end of the room the entire wall was a window. The room started out on a hill and then moved up the side of a cliff, until it became the observatory above my castle, which was built at the base of the cliff, and somewhat up it, as well as being dug in the hill. More on that later. At the other end of the room is a sort of sculpture(I just realized I'm switched tenses, but it's a blog, roll with it.) built into the wall. It is a 10 by 10 grid of wrought-iron spikes that are 18 inches long. They stick out of the wall with a foot between each one. They aren't particularly sharp or perfectly straight. They've been pounded out by a blacksmith many many years ago. They're black and rusty with age. I think they were once the top of a fence, but I'm not sure. I don't know where they came from or why, they just showed up in my mind one night. Sometimes I have dreams about being impaled on them. For some reason the dreams aren't nightmares. This should be disturbing, but for some reason it isn't.

I sometimes find a blog to be a terrifying thing. I feel this need to pour out everything in my head honestly. Honestly isn't always the best policy. Anyway, I'll just live with it. I'm not really capable of being particularly embarassed. This is looking like a multi-part posting, so more on this later.

Adam
"Run for the hills."

The Navigator

2006-03-26T03:02:00.000-06:00

I'm currently reading a book on sailing navigation. That may sound boring, but, in a certain sense, it is really a history of mankind. Though we may now use GPS and Satnav to guide us and many large sailing vessels now have laptops as part of their standard equipment, navigation was once romantic. The telescope and the sextant were developed by people seeking to solve navigation problems. The history of navigation is a history of geometry, cartography, and engineering. The good sailor is also an astronomer and a meteorologist. Before cars and airplanes sailors were the explorers of the world, the boldest of adventurers.
The image of the captain standing over charts and plotting a course is familiar to all of use from childrens' books of the sea life. Pirates and merchant marines, explorers and military clashes. These are fires for the imagination. I have a sudden urge to find a book from the Horatio Hornblower series so I can sit back and dream of a less cynical world.

Perception

2006-03-25T05:05:00.000-06:00

You know, I meet a lot of new people every day. I talk, I listen, and continually, I wonder. What attracts us to each other? What makes one person say, hey, I would like to get closer to that person, even open myself up to them? It can't just be looks, since, to be honest, most of us do not look like models or superstars. I certainly don't. Yet, I consider myself perfect. I know this sounds horribly arrogant, but listen for a moment. In the seed of the universe, the unification and dance of all matter, two people came together and created me. A single sperm and a single egg came together and created a sculpture of living flesh and organs and bones and skin and eyes and hair and it became 'I'. Why should I not consider myself perfect? Why should we -all- not consider ourselves perfect? Not only that, but I have been endowed with the ability to look, not only at the world around me, but also inward, to see what philosophy I make and contemplate, to form the fabric of my existence. What could be more perfect than that? In the expression of life as we know it, even my mistakes are holy. And I'm not talking about God or religion. I'm talking about the shrine that I make of humanity and myself. The wonder that is being human. So why should anyone not be attracted to me? I am a lightning rod of social energy. I cannot contemplate being anything less. nor should you. Existence is a field without borders and without limits. We must seek out and discover all that is knowable. If you are not attracted to me, and if I am not attracted to you, then we are not looking closely enough. We are not making the effort required to see through all space and all time to who we really are. God is not out there. God is in here. We are God. We are the most beautiful expression of existence. How can this possibly be arrogance when I can look down and see the blood coursing through my arm and my fingers move? Smile, and remember, you are better than anything has ever been.

Adam

I need an intervention.

2006-03-20T01:08:00.000-06:00

Every once and a while I'm going to feel an urge to post my bad poetry up here. Since there is no one around to stop me, unfortunately, that's just what I'm going to do. Here's a couple of the latest.

The Divide

The world has become they and we
us and them
I stare at old men who stare at me
and we both say inside ourselves
fools, they don’t know
they don’t even know
my grandfather spoke of world war II
of things seen and worse things done
and I can only say the war has come home
and it is in our heads and in our hearts
all my comrades take pills to smile
and pills to forget
we are walking around shellshocked
where are the shells? Where are the damn shells?
All our guns and we have no bullets
No weapon against this enemy.
All I can see are my friends falling around me
And all I can say is you don’t know
Grandfather you don’t know.

A Devil in the Dark

The devil isn't a cloven-hoofed, horned fallen angel, it is a needle, some white powder, a lighter, a spoon. We feed the devil to ourselves and we are never sated, we become our hunger, it is made endless. The devil is a bottle, the devil is a pipe. And though there is forgiveness, there is never forgetting, and the hunger is never gone.

So here I am, hungry. Curled up on the remains of a couch much older than I, and if possible even worse for wear. I stole a coat from some guy waiting for a bus. I can't do much these days, but I haven't forgotten how to run. I do that real well. So now I got a good coat, wool and lined and long. My only other clothes are a pair of army pants that have been repaired and patched until they're unrecognizable. They scratch my skin pretty badly, after I found them I left them in a bucket of water and bleach and some cleaners I found in a janitors' closet. It cleans any bugs or filth right out of there, but leaves the fabric stiff and hard for a while. I'll work them back soft, soon enough.

Sometimes I wonder just how much I know. It sounds cliché but sometimes there are moments of realization that are the exact opposite of clarity. As if you thought you were standing on a mountain top and you could see the horizon in all directions, but suddenly you realize you're in the dark with the last match burning your fingertips. The horizon is in your imagination and you can't really see anything. You can't really know anything about what is really out there.

The Ninth Sense?

2006-03-19T23:06:00.000-06:00

I had another thought after I finished my last post. I am wondering how to define the soul. Now, it should be noted that I am a nontheist. I use that term because I consider 'atheism' to be an agressive approach, an anti-religious stance. I am not specifically anti-religion. I just feel that most religions if not all religions are ill-considered and archaic, and as such, have become no longer relevant. Considering that every religion has a fundamentalist sect favoring a very strict interpretation of their respective religious texts, maybe whoever put these texts together should have put a little bit more effort into the wording. Also, I know there are people who will think,"But what about Buddhism, they're alright." Well, no you're wrong. Westerners have some fairly romantic ideas about Buddhists, seeing as they have their own problems. There are monks and preachers that have been just as bad as the worst of catholic priests. There are rigid fundamentalists that adhere to the Pali canon, just as there have been rigid rulemakers similar to the Judiac Sadducees and Pharisees. Just visit Sri Lanka. (Though I wouldn't recommend it) The Dalai Lama and all his jolly Hollywood handshaking does not constitute Buddhist life. Interestingly enough, this misconception extends in just the opposite direction with Islam as we cannot but shudder when an Arab walks through an airport. Just as Pat Robertson is a minority opinion (though he doesn't appear to know it) so is bin Laden. If anything, the problems in the Middle East are more about aggressive and clumsy foreign policy than religion.

Wow, I really managed to derail myself there. I've now completely lost my original thought about souls. Anyway, I recently bought the Coast Guard's bible. Which, I dare you, will be much clearer than, say, Revelations. It's an absolutely fascinating book. Perhaps soon I will be able to have an entire conversation using only flags. Diver down!

Change and the Eight Senses

2006-03-16T23:52:00.000-06:00

Yes, I could use a nap. An epic Rip Van Winkle sort of nap. I'm having a fantasy about combing a long white beard. There could be a new president. There could be nuclear holocaust and all that would be left are roaches and fruitcake.
I found an old notebook of mine today (Yes, there was housecleaning involved). It appears that while I was supposed to be taking notes, instead I was writing little stories. A LOT of little stories. Some of them were even good, though not that many. It's interesting to look back on some of the ideas I had, most of which I didn't even remember. I sometimes eschew past writings as a product of a different self, but right now I'm conflicted on that. How much do we really change over the course of our lives? Can we even know? I mean, despite various philosophical beliefs, our minds live very much in the moment. Mahayana buddhism defines eight senses, as opposed to our usual five sense concept. These include the five original senses, as well as a sixth sense that connects the five together so they can work together. For example connecting the sight of an object in our hand with the feel of that object. It's a networking sense, so to speak. The seventh sense compiles all this sensory data together and holds it, sort of like a hard drive and RAM. The eighth sense is essentially the self, it organizes and acts on this data. I think at some point around the seventh and eighth senses you could start to merge the Freudian concepts of id, ego and super-ego into the structure, but that is strictly my theory and should be considered with reservations. I believe the subconscious structures just how the eighth sense reacts to the seventh sense's organization of sensory input. I should note that this is wholly independent of reflection and premeditated action. Though where the boundary is, could easily be a matter of unresolvable debate.
So we have this structure in place and while who I am and who I want to be is often different, the person that I am may remain the same, while the person I want to be is constantly changing. I am starting to agree with Sartre in this, when considering the statement 'I think, therefore I am', he stated that the 'I' that thinks is not the 'I' that is. I'm paraphrasing of course, but you get the idea. Well, I'm so tired I'm not even going to spellcheck this. So, be.. uh... postwarned.

Inaugural Address

2006-03-15T18:28:00.000-06:00

I feel like being pompous today, hence the title. This is going to be a fairly standard blog where I rant and vent and sometimes just tell stories. Today I was getting some groceries and heard an interesting bit of gossip. You see, there's a grocery store called Sendik's that I live right behind. It's on Downer Street in Eastside Milwaukee. The buildings are kind of close together and parking is at a premium. Sendik's owns a little strip of parking on the south sid eof their building. Well, on the other side is a little restaurant called Bartolotta's. They have a deal going where Bartolotta buys all his produce from Sendik, and in return he can use the parking lot at night for his customers. Sendik's is closed then anyway. So, I heard that Bartolotta didn't like the quality of the produce he was getting and told Sendik. So Sendik started chaining up the parking lot at night. Except that there's still alley access that Sendik can't block. So Bartolotta's valets just use the lot anyway. Both Sendik and Bartolotta are blustery men with egos (surprise, surprise) and I would love to see the finale to this story. Meanwhile, across the street is another restaurant called Gil's. His employees are having a great time talking about this. Gil himself doesn't seem to believe this story though, and he knows both guys (I don't). Meanwhile, the parking lot gate is still chained up, so something has to be going on. I love East Milwaukee. It can be incredibly entertaining.