It seems it is attempting to find a way to talk to you.
It is a dizzying sensation. You feel faint.
You manage to grab something to eat, you are hungry. You stumble, with a pillow it seems, there tucked into your right arm,
around the kitchen counter and into the study.
It is dark in here. You move to sit on the dark couch, Right Arm puts the pillow on the couch first, then takes the food.
Meanwhile you manage to avoid the black cat, he seems grateful with a soft welcoming meow, but you can’t respond.
well it took me long enough i suppose. 18 years ago i was possessed by an urge to climb mountains, hills whatever.
i don’t need to conquer the tallest peaks, but at least those that are around me i wanted to see the top.
there was a hill behind a church that a couple of my friends found back in San Diego. You weren’t really allowed up there
but no one was there to stop you. just like right now. 18 years later.
Most of the biosphere cannot see the infosphere; it is invisible, a parallel universe humming with ghostly inhabitants.
But they are not ghosts to us - not anymore.
We humans, alone among the earth’s organic creatures, live in both worlds at once.
It is as though, having long coexisted with the unseen, we have begun to develop the needed extrasensory perception.
We are aware of the many species of information.
We name their types sardonically, as though to reassure ourselves that we understand:
urban myths and zombie lies.
We keep them alive in air-conditioned server farms. But we cannot own them.
When a jingle lingers in our ears,
or a fad turns fashion upside down,
or a hoax dominates the global chatter for months and vanishes as swiftly as it came,
who is master and who is slave?
“Man the food-gatherer reappears incongruously as information-gatherer.
In this role, [digital] man is no less a nomad than his Paleolithic ancestors.”
On a philosophical level, [the phenomenon of chaos] struck me as an operational way to define free will,
in a way that allowed you to reconcile free will with determinism. The system is deterministic, but you
can’t say what it’s going to do next.
At the same time, I’d always felt that the important problems out there in the world had to do with the
creation of organization, in life or intelligence. But how did you study that? I always felt that the
spontaneous emergence of self-organization ought to be part of physics.
“Don’t just do something. Sit there!” - Zen proverb
I received the gift of a lovely New Yorker essay from a relative, which blessed me with this opportunity to reflect on and clarify my
feelings towards travelling.[1] I was at first reminded of my time spent online dating. “I love to travel” became a clear signal
to me to just move on! But why? That essay put words to some of my feelings that contributed to developing that heuristic.
Why do the houses stand
When they that built them are gone;
When remaineth even of one
That lived there and loved and planned
Not a face, not an eye, not a hand,
Only here and there a bone?
Why do the houses stand
When they who built them are gone?
Oft in the moonlighted land
When the day is overblown,
With happy memorial moan
Sweet ghosts in a loving band
Roam through the houses that stand–
For the builders are not gone.
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story.
From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked.
One fig was a husband and a happy home and children,
and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor,
and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor,
and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America,
and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila
and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions,
and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion,
and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
