post consumed sonora blues

i hate the world i hate the world i hate the world.

i am having a bad day, and it gets worse. i am not codepedent (i don't think) ...

why do our exes have such power to infuriate us? i do not know, i am trying to purge this so i can get on with my life.

i am spread so thin. i am living at several people's houses at once and i don't know where i am staying tonight. i am going to try to be a tutor here in sonora and i will do ZERO editing of my online life. it was difficult enough to get my own self here.

three gangsta bitches... (is that the right term?) anyway, they are not "bitches" in the sense that they are mean or anything... anyway, i am going to live over there and i hope they don't all become my girlfriend(s)...

i am doing pretty well, i think.

w22n51 BSOD

If you got this BSOD it is because you are using an outdated driver for your Intel 2200bg wireless card. Go to the Intel website and download the driver there. It works like a charm. It took me a while to figure that out because the Gateway site had the old driver and I was assuming that they had the right one. They didn't.

True and Proper

 note: this blog was a draft from a long time ago which was for some reason unpublished.



There is no predetermined harmony between truth and human well-being.

--Nietzche(?)

This sentence struck me because up until then I did not realize that I expected the universe to be kind. That was fourteen years ago and a notion I have thoroughly integrated. It came to mind again when reading about other peoples' thoughts on God. The term "omnibenevolence" came up more than once and while initially puzzled, I realized these people believed the God was on their side. It's the same error behind the question "If there is a God then why is there pain in suffering in the world?"

Rust and Dust

I am gradually accumulating power. I am going to trial next week (I am innocent) and then I will send my car out to get fixed and order a more powerful computer and  a kitchen timer and a phone. You see, I  have ambition, but there is too much friction to getting things done. I spent probably an hour today looking for one little phone number so I could make one little phone call...

I am being manic, which entails getting ideas in my head about accomplishing all sorts of little tasks.

I am blogging! Nothing really important to say, but here I am.

Should I buy a set of Safari Cards? I tried to order them when I was, like, in the third grade. I really wanted the little jade elephant pendant and I imagined how cool I would be wearing that little pendant around. Well the people at Recontre must have lost my order or something because I never got anything in the mail. I remember vaguely waiting for years - forgetting about it and then remembering and wondering if that little jade elephant would come.

Well there it is: a complete set on eBay - or at least 2094 cards. That is the most complete set I've seen and I wonder if I got it if I would somehow feel complete, like that little wounded me would somehow be made whole. I will let you know if I purchased them.

Rings of Saturn

I saw the rings of Saturn!! Right there in my little telescope it looked just like a little, tiny Saturn. Like a good scientist, I checked out a star afterward to make sure it was the shape I was seeing and not blurriness, smudge on the lens, or whatever. I focused in on Arcturus and sure enough, it was a little point. The back to Saturn, and in to get the family to share my joy.

This was almost as cool as the moons of Jupiter, but not quite

Transition to Mortality

       I have been living too long under the assumption that I will be rich and I will live forever. Out of (desperation? stagnation? disillusionment?) I have noticed a transition in myself toward the belief, or at least the desire to pretend I believe, that I will continue to be poor, unless I begin to act differently, and that I will die after a normal lifespan.

     This can be to my advantage. When I was immortal, I was in no rush - I could learn Gaelic and Chinese, and read every book in the library.  Now that I am again mortal, I must choose. I will not learn Gaelic and I will have to choose wisely the books I will read in my alloted time. No longer can I say "someday, someday, someday" but must act decisively if things are to change.

     So what's wrong in my life? Just that I use "some day" way too much. It's time to force the issue - to live with intention and direction - to light the dynamite. True, I am once again looking for a job, and I am once again casting my net wide. But this is a step, and a step in any direction is good.

Should I recycle this?

A napkin fell on the ground. Should I throw it away? For a moment my mind tried to glimpse the process that brought it to me. I pictured a tree, then loud buzzing, pounding, and a flake of usefulness flutters down to me. I pick up the napkin and put it back on the pile of napkins, out of thanks to the tree.

It's okay, it is okay, if the sacrifice gives my life a little usefulness. A little doubt comes, as to whether my life as a whole is useful to... whatever...

I push it out of my head ans carry on.

Dream Gathering

Liminal

There is always looking into it - not wanting to plunge in, but to walk in and come back, and the next day walk in a little further.

The solstice is coming. This year isn't going to work for me. Maybe next year.

Maybe next year.
Maybe next year.
Maybe next year.

spring cleaning

I realize that I have been being selfish - that since I left Facebook, and  because no one reads this blog - I have been keeping these thoughts all to myself. Well? Where to begin...

I feel that there is a log jam in here, and I would really like to clean it out. I have been cleaning out my "to-do" list ever since my semester petered out last Wednesday when my last student took his last final. One of the things on my list is to take this list out of my head and put it on these little, 3x5 cards that I used to carry around.

I have done about 50 things in the last several days, which were all taking up space in my head, and now I feel like there's  a little more room to move and... innovate.

My reader may notice that this is entitled "spring cleaning" and we are fast approaching the Solstice (which is mid-summer by my reckoning). Well, I procrastinate. Or as I should say "The moving average of my behavior indicates over-optimistic estimations of times of completion" - so as not to prescribe that this is "how I am (deal with it)".

Nihilism

I am starting this book: The Self-Overcoming of Nihilism by Nishitani Keiji. I picked it up in the Eastern Philosophy section and was surprised to see Neitzche and Dostoevsky and Stirner. Well I liked what I read enough to buy the book. I was validated to see that this was practically required reading for philosophy students in Japan. I do have an eye for quality.

Without having read more than part of the introduction I am remembering how I thought Nihilism was a developmentally appropriate philosophy for adolescents and young men and women. I felt that once a young person destroyed everything they had inherited, they should build up a new world for themselves.

I still see it essentially the same. But I also had this thought that maybe a bit of that destructive energy should be carried forth into adulthood to retard the ossification of blah bla blah

I would also like to retain more f what I read. Maybe give to you a book report as I go? Blogging regularly might help that.

Crazy me make less too. Are good.

test post

this is a test to see if google has suspended my blogging priveleges.

After the Fall

Copy and paste of my elsewhere comments:

We are little boats floating toward a waterfall. Should we link up our boats? Should we paddle to the shore? Should we batten down the hatches? Should we relax and go along for the ride?

There is a lot of godpower up for grabs. Does it matter who gets it first? Is 50 years from now inevitable? We must act as if it isn't. We must decide what survives the fall, because something - a lot of things - are going away soon.

I will join you. I have to join someone. I'm scared. I'm hopeful. I am resolute.

Don't worry how this sounds to anyone. It has to be done. Call it a religion. If there were any time in the history of humans that the creation of new religion found itself necessary, this is it.

google plus bleedthrough

Welcome to all my new g+ traffic. There has been a teeny uptick and maybe I will see more if I actually become a relevant thinker. My writing is shot - I have become accustomed to 140 characters which is something I think most relevant thoughts can fit into. But I can ramble in that with poorly constructed sentences and paragraphs.

I will try to straighten it out for you, dear reader.

One month later....

Okay so I'm sitting in Safeway, and I think, I haven't blogged in a long time, so maybe I'll go Blog... And here's what I see: Title: Sitting in Safeway What the hell? One month later and I'm still sitting here. Still no job, still no girlfriend, still on the motorcycle. I don't know what to do. If I'm still here on July 28th I'm going to drive my motorcycle off a cliff. Just kidding, but WTF? Make progress, Rabbit.

sitting in Safeway

I found a place where I could be on the internet 24 hours a day. Now I will never leave!!! Well, I'm getting pretty tired :-(

I guess to keep all my journals up to date I should share that Monika and I are no longer a couple. Yeah, if you are curious as to why you should ask me. I am thrown to the public and it seems that I am explaining things 5 times a day every day. I'm tired and it's almost 3 a.m. and I should go go to sleep. I know, I wrote "go" twice in a row. you can ask about that too, but I don't really feel like going into it.

How to Euthanize a Rat

Okay, you love your rat and you want to save it from its painful and inevitable death. This happened to me with our pet rat, Mojo, who had a tumor which was a bigger than her and it was starting to rot. The vet wanted $100+ to give her a shot and send her off peacefully. Here is how to do it painlessly and cheap.

What you'll need:

1. A box (it can be open on top - the CO2 is heavier than air and will sit low in the box)
2. A bowl of warm water
3. a chunk of dry ice (I bought one for about $4 at the supermarket. You just have to ask the cashier, but apparently it's readily availabe. Dry Ice is pure, frozen CO2)

Say your goodbyes. Put the rat in the box with the bowl of water. Put the dry ice into the water. With Mojo, I just pet her ears and she licked me as she gradually got drowsy. After a few minutes she was asleep. I kept petting her for a while and made sure she was comfortable. It was very peaceful way for her to go.

future #2

Effective omnipotence is acquired by a local set of humanity. They immediately shut out the rest of the race from significant technological advance and consolidate their own power. They will abolish worldly immortality but allow extended life after death in a virtual world of their design.

this is the future i see

future #1

In the future, immortality will have been found to be problematic and will therefore be prohibited. On one's birthday one will be made to roll a 100-sided die with a skull on one side. If the skull side lands up, the person will be killed immediately.

splitting and merging

After going through the singularity you might go to a dance and meet two beautiful women and not be able to decide which one to dance with. No worry - I will have invented the splitting device where a person comes to a fork in the road of life and they can take both options. So you dance with both women and one of you dates one and the other, the other. Now with one you may fall in love but with the other, all you do is fight and you break up. Well by now I have also invented the merging device where you put two of you, having previously split, back into one.

A hundred years after that, or maybe it is ten years (who can tell?) the earth is overpopulated from lack of death and abundance of splitting (should I eat at this restaurant or that?) so a benevolent, omnipotent Governor decides that a lot of merging should go on.

Now you were told in kindergarten that you are unique and that there is no one else like you. Well that's not quite true. You are not even one in a million, but more like one in 5,000. So this benevolent, omnipotent Governor will merge all 100,000,000 of you into one mind. Even though you have all these memories you still feel like one person.

Now some people are more unique than others. Some great artists are 1 in a billion, so there will only be a few hundred crammed in there. At the other end of the spectrum there are really common people who are one in a hundred so they will be much more crowded.

That's the kind of future i see.

The Singularity is Opaque

You have no business being optimistic about the future. Nor should you be pessimistic, because either of these positions ignores an essential truth:

the singularity is OPAQUE

I keep trying to metaphorize my conception of the transition. Imagine our world civilization is a raft of rafts, bound together with twine and glue, and drifting in an accelerated manner into the future. As we approach this special point, it's as if one portion of the raft gets a jet engine tied to it. Now what will happen? I'd say it would rip apart but I have to remember: OPAQUE.

In that time maybe all the rafts get jet engines together. Maybe it will start to rip but then be tied together in a different way - with steel cable instead of twine.

What do I mean by "raft"? Well, I want to remain vague because I don't know. One raft could be Europe and the other Africa. One could be the rich and the other the poor. The young vs. the old. Maybe the raft is something abstract; one raft romantic love and the other economic activity; or technology vs. wisdom. Society as we know it will go through great stress. That's all we can say.

descartes' folly

I would hate to be the one to tell him, but descartes was wrong when he inferred his own existence. To bring everyone up to speed, Rene Deacartes famously and systematically doubted all there was until he got to one little nugget of certainty" "I think, therefore I am." He reasoned that even if all was illusion and he was being deceivded, he could still be certain that he existed as the observer of such deception.

I think, in the end we might even give up this monolithic, individual observer. Sure, other people seem like individuals, and it is practical to treat them as such, but looking within shows that it's not so easy. I used to smoke cigarretes and I wanted to quit. When it was time to buy more cigarettes I wanted to smoke. How could one person hold contradictory desires? Well, there are multiple voices withing my self. I don't mean like multiple personalities, but competing voices within a more or less healthy and more or less integrated self.

We could say I(a) want to quit smoking but I(b) don't. In this case (b) won out for a long time and (a) won out in the end. It is worth noting that the philosophy of "Do what thou wilt" doesn't really settle anything. What's implied is do what thou wilt at this moment, a sort of impulsiveness, which is impractical. I may want to kill someone for a second but I won't because I live in a larger temporal context.

That brings up another context of multiple selves: that of past, present and future selves. My past self got this silly tattoo and my present self must deal with it. Well I remember putting that tattoo in and it was my present self (at the time) saying, "I will mark you so that you will always remember where you were at this point in life" because it is unbearable to think that those things I currently hold dear will be discarded and disowned, not by some enemy, but by my own self.