Which Is a List of Everything Cool to Do That I Could Think of in Twenty Minutes

09/30/2007 7:19 AM – 7:42 AM

I did everything, he said when he came to die. Alright then, what is everything? A list, I say, I list! To buy rural land with my own money, build a house on it with my own hands, and make and tend a garden large enough to feed 'til the next harvest.

Further, to write, publish and be paid for many novels. To thru-hike the Appalachian, Continental Divide, Pacific Crest, North Country and all the various cool smaller Long trails. To live for a year in Ireland, a small town on the Mediterranean coast, Alaska, a desert and a tropical isle. To find, meet, seduce and marry a woman that’s worth the trouble and will remain so for as long as we both shall live. And to be worth the trouble myself. To read too many comic books and write at least one long one. To read all the Great Books and many, many Damn Fine ones.

And finally, to have and raise children who are driven to enjoy life and are able to do it fairly effortlessly. To be wise. To be cool. To laugh a great deal. To get and keep a body and mind that are able to undertake any adventures that may present themselves. To spend the majority of my life without a boss. To believe in, love and enjoy God while I’m alive but not so much so that I neglect all the wonders of this life. To not worry except to the extent that it is useful. To be able to build a fire with only the stuff I can find around me. To be able to build a bow and arrows from scratch and then take down a deer with it. And then eat the deer. To be able to play the old, good blues on some instrument and sing along with it. To have a workshop and be able to make cool stuff in it. To keep making lists of things to do and then do them until death sneaks up behind me, whacks me on the head and drags me off to heaven, laughing. Me laughing, though death can laugh too, if he wishes.

On the Problem of Planning in the Playground of Probability

09/28/2007 7:06 AM – 7:28 AM

Up then and dreaming of possible worlds, gear lists and quiet land. The rain and clouds befitting a pseudonym. Coming up from the bottom to sit at the top, feeling the breeze essay across the surface, eyes closed.

There’s words in it and thick calluses for walking long ways. The abstract concrete can get a hold, geeking out is enjoyment for a geek. Lists then, and many of them. But there are others in the woods and where one is and how to get there and what will we do when we get to the thing. Where do the ideas find their form? and How do you get there from here. The words on the edges falling off into that which lies below the horizon. Neither here nor there. It’s only words and they aren’t here for this. This is warm-up.

What is perceived is what is, but the frequency with which that which was not previously perceived intrudes upon the system makes prediction difficult. There is a need to act, but to act is to discard data. But this is always so. One looks at the system and assesses its probable outcome. One must, because one must act. But probable outcomes are notoriously unreliable. The meteorite and the pot of gold both obtain, if only rarely, but those rare events often have massive effects that skew the system to chaos before settling into a new predictability. But one must act. Chance favors the prepared mind. A flexible rigid system accommodating chance while following a reasonable course of action. How hard can that be? Pssht. Stupid, stupid reality.

Which Ends In a Sort of Idealistic Subjectivism

09/27/2007 8:15 AM – 8:45 AM

There’s still 10,000 things ahead, that’s the thing to get. At every point, there’s still stuff to do. It’s still 1981, somewhere, and there’s still things that have to be tried. It’s not much of a thing, maybe, but it’s something. And it counts if it works.

What does it consist of? I suppose the physical necessity is money, but the primary is desire. There are still interesting things, and even on those mornings when your mind is slow and dull, that bug in your guts is still there, even if it twists only slowly. Bullocks and bedposts, get up then and do something. If you swallow the fly, swallow the spider. You’ll have a story in the thing and like the man said, you either need to write something worth reading or do something worth writing about.

In the meantime, you do whatever it is with plans for something else. Being here is being in your daydreams. Here is here. There is that problem of imbued verses inherent and I don’t know the resolution for that. I’m just here doing the thing that I’m doing. Arrgh. And the dullness of the whole is bothersome. No flickers. Wake up and wheel around awhile. There. You wake up and wheel around awhile. The clouds of leaves on the horizon sneak over months into the sky until they’ve found their footing in the unpredictable coloring. When the winter comes, their base material seems intransient and falls more vividly that that which they had aspired to attain, leaving behind the fractal skeletons to hold their place while they rest in preparation for their next assault on the clouds. Given time, and effort, all aspirations attain. The trick to being felled is to be so ensconced in pursuing desire that you do not notice and mistake the axe for the gentle breezes of an autumnal blanket pulled slowly over tired feet. And perhaps it will be. Percipi est esse. Willing it, it obtains, Berkelian, where it matters.

On, Oh, Let's Say, Epistemology. Again.

09/25/2007 6:45 AM – 7:07 AM

Why start today? I don’t really know. But then, we have concluded by verification of repeatable experiments, that I don’t really know anything. Except of course, those odd little things that I do. What do we know? But not a list exactly, more an attempt to classify. Then we venture into the tricky territory of claiming a place on the spectrum.

Because we do know some things and to claim otherwise merely to fulfill an abstract notion of aesthetic rightness is rather dishonest to reality. I suppose that we could start with a list, but I don’t really feel like it. Odd, isn’t it – that this little bit of notes indicates to my mind a progression. There are many things that the Zen masters were right about. But they were wrong about stuff too. Life isn’t about fleeing the tigers unless one has managed to become a being pathologically fixated on death. Screw that shit. Somewhere between the naiveté of the palace life and the moronic aestheticism of the forest is honesty that can be put to use.

It’s true that we don’t know a lot, but neither do we know nothing. For now, one can leave it at that and my cozy little hermit’s cell is warmed by desires. There is another thing that the Zenites overdid. The rebuttal is simply bad poetry because it is overly used, not because it is untrue. Desire, says the old man sharp in wit and vigor, desire, desire, desire. We stay alive to grasp something. We love living for the moments when we do. If the ends are far, far away, you must fall in love with the means, and most good ends are far, far away. What do you want then, O Spike, of Dread and Delight? Well, for one thing, to move the fuck out of Dread. This place sucks and most of the chicks are fatties. But apart from that, I want what I’ve always wanted. To have a nice solid home that I can abandon and return to at whim. Me, mine, my, no one taking, no one giving. To be given something, no matter how small is to put your balls a little more between someone’s teeth. Unless you’re an asshole, then it’s fine. Nothing to latch onto, see? But I rarely enjoy being an asshole. Except for those times that I do. But the bell rang and what I meant to say was, “write, run and save money,” these fine little commandment issue forth from reality, which does not give a shit how you feel about the weather.