(From Asides)...
DEATH CAR - Regarding that business with the Porsche. Maybe I did exaggerate. Maybe not. Bill was driving (with brio and panache) his wife's Mercedes around a long sweeping curve at the end of I-95 in Miami when the Porsche appeared out of no where. If everybody had stayed the course he (she?) would have hit us somewhere between the right front fender and my door. The closing speed was maybe over 100 MPH. But Bill and the Porsche both twitched and we passed with feet to spare. It happened so fast there wasn't time to be afraid. (My one impression - not a thought - was that Bill's car was going to get messed up.) MORE
In my recent writing trying to explain the relationship between my dead wife and me I have used both terms - dark matter and dark energy. The former relates to hidden material - not necessarily pleasant or light, but necessary to explain the content of our lives. How we got to be the way we were. Dark energy is the motivation provided by our dark matter. MORE
I wondered if an adventure is any activity (trip, whatever) where there is the possibility that something good will happen and also the possibility that the whole thing will go horribly wrong. Younger people (I pontificated) often embark on adventures without much thought to the horribly wrong part but older people might embark on adventures anyway, either because they don’t care or because their need is so great. MORE
Allie wrote...
My brain is full of chocolate. MORE
I think we were ordained by our family histories to become joined if fate ever did bring us together. She was impelled by The Fall of her father (when his furniture business went bankrupt) and I by The Death of my mother. These events occurred in the mid-1950's and were followed by degrees of personal and family ruin. Of course both of us had been predisposed from childhood to become our adult selves. But these events made us worse. By the time I called that night we were so much alike that looking at each other was like peering into the same mirror - a flawed mirror with cracks. MORE
The story of an old man transported back in time to relive his life and participate in history, becoming a ghost in his own machine and the machines of others. The events shift between 1941 and 2010, culminating in Dealey Plaza on November 23, 1963. MORE
About Brenda, blind cat, and me. MORE
So, you ask, “What’s your point?”
Well, I think it’s pretty obvious. Stuff has gotten out of hand. It’s too hard to figure out. We often have to depend on experts; but, we don’t know which experts to trust. And sometimes to defend an unlikely position or just because we don’t know, we’ll proclaim “Anything is possible.”
It’s bad.
I think (for what it’s worth) that this is THE issue of our age. It’s not the questions we ask but how we figure out the answers. MORE
Bill Moore's transcription of a letter by Professor Jones when Jones was secretly living inside the office building of Cardinal Associates - posted on Bill's blog, Strange Room
Warm day. Rained like hell this morning. Got caught in it as I was on my way back from the post office. My porno didn't come.
"Darkness, darkness, hide my yearning for the things that cannot be."
(*Fair line from an otherwise inane and pedestrian rock song I just heard)
Had breakfast with my good drinking buddy Sam McA at the Trailways station. Rip off. Only place open though. Later we went to the poolroom on Sixth Street. Sam and I shot the shit with Dennis, Dick, Bubba, Mister Chollie, Shortie, Chico, and Rudy the wino. None of you know these dudes. They're all right. MORE
I have always been interested in the notion of context - how things get meaning from their surroundings. (Is meaning absolute/transcendent or relative/subjective? You know, existential shit.)
The latest round started when a friend complained that there were no overview manuals at her new job, just a lot of detail documentation. She was having trouble figuring out how stuff fits in. She needed a big picture, some context.
That reminded me of something I had read and blogged about a few weeks earlier, about how cell phone users create their own private conversational context and lose contact with their immediate physical context - which can cause problems, say, when driving a car.
After that, examples of context (or the lack thereof) kept popping up. MORE
...(aside) Both categories of conservatives in the new taxonomy seem self-centered. The wild-eyed crazies who fling spit and proclamations are self-centered in the way of children screaming me! me! me! The other conservatives are more subtle. By emphasizing competition and individualism over cooperation and empathy they diminish the social side of human existence. Like Nietzsche and Ayn Rand (who admired the German philosopher before she didn’t admire him) they have created a philosophy based on self-centeredness. MORE
Several European Union communities are experimenting with an approach to controlling traffic that seems to contradict the socialist style that is supposed to be the model for that region. Rather than being regulated by traffic lights and signs at intersections, people are left free to fend for themselves. Motorists, cyclists, and pedestrians must decide on their own who goes and who stops.
...My questions is would such freedom work in the United States - where at least half the population already passionately believes there is too much government control of our lives? Would the freedom-lovers cooperate?
Of course no one knows. But perhaps, paradoxically, those who value freedom most might need the most regulation. (Just as predatory social animals, like wolves and Southerners, need elaborate ritual behaviors to keep them from killing each another.) MORE
How do you know what you know?
If you don’t know what you know, can you trust anybody else to know it for you?
Be very suspicious. MORE
It's probably an age thing.
But I dislike being around people using cell phones. It isn't just the voices - loud and oblivious; it's the generally distracted air that envelops such people. The sense that they are somewhere else. To me, cell phone users look vaguely foolish - sort of the way people look when having sex. (Somebody - Chris Rock, Richard Pryor did a piece on that.)
I'm sure part of it is simply resentment. (I refuse to text. I will not tweet. And sex... well.) However, based on something I read, my bias, although still mostly an old person's nattering, might have some scientific justification. MORE