The influence of gaslight or electric light on the growth of paraheliotropic trees

Charlie Chester had rolled out of bed some time between 10 and 2 that morning, checking his email on his five year old laptop (none, if it could be trusted), ate some Raisin Crunch cereal with orange juice instead of milk, thrown on a sweaty dirty t-shirt, lit a half-smoked joint, and slipped his Bob Ross VHS into the VCR and collapsed on his couch.

Approximately two hours (and seven happy trees) later, the Thong song by Sisquo started playing on Charlie’s phone. This — like always — was somewhat of a rude awakening for Charlie, who scrambled — a half-hearted scramble — to locate the device before the music stopped.

Movie industry wants the right to take your house off the net without full judicial review

Mass psychology. Group rights. The Rule of the Mob, and the Individual, the Unit, as a deficient organism in our 2nd Level Biosphere. Memes, and Ideas, and spheres, and the Ego shrinks as the Superego grows, the Superego being the Mediator, the Filter, the Frame, the Master of the Face, the Eater and the Disgorger of our Social Selves.

Think of all these non-famous people — aware of the wider world but unable to effect — a certain powerlessness there — an anxiety and fear that history will eat us up and chew us out with none the wiser — fed back into the soylent green machines quicker and quicker —

And even now — we live in this digital soup — where all information is quickly going flat — horizontal — and vertical history just becomes one more component of horizontal culture — the shared living space (cultural lebensraum) of All Now Living, with the Ghosts having a derivative say as well through their descendants, biological and spiritual. Or are Ghosts now simply also funneled down into the great Culturepool, the Well of Mimir, from which god-children seeking wisdom go drink and gamble limbs.

It’s going faster now. Accelerating. The 2nd Derivative — the Rate of Change of the Rate of Change. Faster. Blinking. Miss it. Business plans. Projections. White hospital rooms, and hospices, and then the new class, mewling and squealing are the words used to describe it.

Sharing this world. This space. The Sharespace. The Set. The Possibility Set. Possible Worlds. All Possible Worlds. Heterotopia. What is this blog? A Whiteboard? A Mindmap? Thought, Extrusion.

I am an individual, with a small amount of individual thoughts and ideas, my private space that is still left to me, but most most most of me has been mortgaged off and sold to Civilization, which has allowed me to even be here. What do I owe Civilization for life? What is the term of my servitude? At what point can I go back to being an animal, scratching for my own food? (well, would I want that? Seems like a shitty job — though its nice to walk beneath the trees)

“What is it like — to have a baby in your belly?” I ask my mother. “Isn’t is really strange?”

“Well I knew you — I felt like I knew you. I would play with you — feel you kicking. I knew your name — either Josh or Sarah — and I knew you were a boy.”

“You mean you guessed it.”

“I knew it.”

“Ok.”

“So, it was a relationship. With a person. Not with a ghost, or a spirit, or some potentiality.”

“No, right, you were a person, real, a baby, not imaginary or artificial at all.”

“Hmm. That makes it even weirder, and grosser, slippery and living.”

“Sure. There’s a little bit that Alien thing” (which clearly is a devilish yanked-from-the-subconscious attempt to tap into those anxieties of growth and good growth/bad growth — baby v. cancer) “but then you get to know the person and you’re sort of anxious to meet them already.”

——
Later my father tells me that he has told his childhood (youngadulthood) friend about this blog, and that the friend likes it.

I think about my father then and my father now and me now and me later and me then (the twinkle, as it were) and say to him:

“It must be crazy to have children.”

“You have no idea,” he says.

Jerry Garcia died today, fourteen years ago. The baby born that day is a teenager now. I imagine that to those and knew and loved him it sometimes feels like yesterday and sometimes like an entire lifetime ago. Jerry Garcia — troubled troubled Jerry, wonderful player, full of such bright and wonderful songs, and clearly, some daring, some edge, some pain that needed to be assauged, and was assauged, and no restraints, and no controls, and there he went, and there he goes — and half his life, gone, in the fluid from the needle.

But he died clean. That’s what his biographer said. He died clean. Some consolation, but something to be proud of, sure. What was the meaning and dark secret of his pain? Or was it just the natural end of the simple good-seeming road he walked? Mysteries within mysteries, and wheels within wheels, and this is the secret Odin whispered into Baldur’s unhearing ear.

Today. I learn about the Murdering Lonely Man who hadn’t had sex in eighteen years, cooked up a plot to kill “Woman” in the form of several actual women, plotted and planned it for nine months, and went into a LA Fitness yesterday and opened fire, killing three.

He documented his madness. His loneliness. His detachment and isolation. Mitdasein and Non-Mitdasein. Alone, choking on his own ego. Cannot become that. Not violent. No need for glory me. I respect the lives of others — yes, they’ll die. But not for me to say how or when. I let things be.

Still — scary. There are people who love me. And I am normal. And not violent. Not even towards myself. Still — in twenty years? What madness would an isolated whiteboxed room wrought on my imaginary life? The life lived within the skull that looks exactly identical to the life lived in the world. Can’t even tell that you’re living in your head instead of in the world, with others. The first step that you’ve falled down that rabbit hole is that the lives of others — their significance — falls away. In a twist on the Philosophical Zombie Problem, we identify the Zombie Hypothesis as being this:

If Others are plausibly Zombies, You Are Living in a Skullspace Simulacra instead of in the World. You are using your perceptions to Simulate the World in real-time, instead of pulling yourself into that Hard, Harsh, Moment that Will Kill You.

And therein lies the question: Can the Solipsist, who lives the Imaginary, actually experience Death? Or, distracted by the elaborate set he’s built, will he miss it, and then be gone.

And maybe this is the Ultimate Distinction:
Those who experience death, and those who can’t. Those who experience life, and those who experience their experience.

Some strange ad on MSNBC with white lettering — hipsters with polaroids don’t be ordinary or bland in other words don’t be so mayo — miracle whip hipsters? the hip sandwich? we won’t turn it down? who are the ad wizards who came up this one?

(google thinking thinking)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_70xGUxznYY

Youtube Comments say:
It’s a condiment, not a lifestyle.

I say:
Hipster Yuppies Go HOME Go HOME

Pre-Conception (10,000 Days)

Twinkle In My Father’s Eye

Potentiation at the Meeting of My Mom and Dad

Story of My Mom and Dad’s Meeting

1. College Road Trip (I’m a college road trip.)
2. Randi follows Mike down to Florida for the winter vacation. (Who knows / who remembers what they did down there, who they talked to, what furtive breast-touching went on?)

3. Plans to Spend the Summer Together / Summer Plans of Two Youngsters Had my father dropped out of law school yet? No, no, no. (This was my dropping out of law school. What year was it? 1976? 1977?)

4. A phone call to my my mother, breaking up with her.
5. Dad got his law school grades – shit.
6. Dad smokes cigarettes. Dad flees law school. Dad works that summer at a JAG office in Georgia. Dad decides not to go back. WHAT DOES DAD DO INSTEAD? WHEN DOES HE SEE RANDI AGAIN?
7. Dad moves to Philadelphia and dates Randi.
8. Dad and Randi move to Oakland and bum around.
9. Randi decides to come-on-back to Philadelphia, and pulls Old Michael with her.
9.5. Dad and Mom get a dog in California named Art Deco.
10. Dad asks Mom to marry him.
11. They get married in a civil ceremony.
12. Dad and Mom move in to a small apartment.
13. Dad and Mom decide to have a child // what strange wonders went into that decision?? What??
14. Mom and Dad meticulously plan and practice for my conception.
15. Awash in all that love, the moment of my conception is unknown, forever and always a mystery, what Odin whispered into dead Baldur’s ear.