The Unreliability of All Our Pasts

While digging through the old posts here in the Kingsbury Run, I discovered this little gem that somehow didn't get published when it was written on January 4, 2010.  So prepare yourselves, my Dearies, for a trip back in time with in the mind of your Narrator

(imagine the image swirling and tripping music playing.  that is the official sign that time travel is happening)

I have another unofficial New Years Resolution. I will no longer tolerate a Piddly-Pooper. Too many times lately I have been the victim of a PP'er and I've had it.

You may be asking yourself just what is a Piddly-Pooper and how do I spot one. Well, it's simply. They are sort of like a procrastinator, but more immediate. I'll give you some examples: It is the guy in line ahead of you at McDonald's that is looking at the menu board like he's never seen it before. It's Mac-Fuckin-Donald's, everyone knows what they have. Just order the Fillet O Fish and get out of the way. It's the car in front of you on the highway doing 50 in a 70 zone. It's the lady at the bank that wants to stand and talk to the teller about her kids while you are trying to make a quick deposit on your lunch break. These are all Piddly-Poopin people. They share two basic traits: slowness and being in the way.

So beware Piddly-Poopers of the world. Woe be unto those who wander into my path and stand in between me and my goals. If they are lucky I'll just bypass them and go on my way. But some will not be lucky and shall taste my wrath. And Cousin, my wrath tastes pretty damn foul.

But you, My Tender Lumplings, my beautiful, infallible children of the Cat's Eye, never fear. We'll be fine. Until we meet again...

So, here we are in the now and nothing really has changed.  I still hate them.  I still want to beat them.  But I don't.  Cause you can't.  Which is really sad. 

Until next time...

My Soul Intention Is Learning To Fly

I do not believe airplanes should be able to fly.  I don't.  It just seems wrong to me.  I have read the physics, I've seen the math and I know it all works out.  But when I look up and see a hunk of metal the size of a house sailing over my head it just seems wrong.  Especially when they are very low and still seem to be going so damn slow.  And somehow all I can think about while watching one pass over me is imaging seeing a puff of flame come from one of the engines, then the sound changes ever so slightly.  Then it starts to fall.

Actually, my Tender Lumplings, I've been on a bit of a science kick lately after having watched the new COSMOS series.  It has gotten me reading about scientists and calculus and a bunch of other stuff.  And has re-ignited my interest in electronics.  I was always fascinated by the subject but could never really get my head around it.  I'm still not doing very well but at least now I have begun to understand some basics. 

Science is really such an amazing thing.  To think of how far we as a species have come in just a couple thousand years since we really started questioning our world.  For countless eons before we had just existed, hunting and gathering, barely even able to communicate with the person next to us much less someone on another continent.  We were just a bunch of dirty monkey men not long out of the trees.  But then someone said "why?' and everything changed. 

It went pretty slowly those first many years.  Our bodies had evolved to be much as they are today, but maybe our brains had not?  It was only in the last few hundred years that we really started to make some headway.  And in the last century alone we have gone from being tied to the ground and pulled along on carts by other animals, to walking on the moon.  In just the last twenty or so years we have taken all the computing power that it took to put men on the moon and condensed it down to the size of a wristwatch.  Think about it: the early supercomputers were housed in buildings the size of apartment complexes and yet were orders of magnitude less powerful than the processor inside your smart phone.

Where will technology be in 20 more years? 

Sci Fi writers have been much more effective at predicting the future than Nostradamus was.  In the early fifties, Isaac Asimov's novel Caves Of Steel predicted Netflix.  Some say a scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey predicted tablet computers and the Internet.  Today's writers, taking all our modern technological wonders as the norm, are coming up with even more outrageous ideas about what tomorrow may bring.  And, frankly, it can be both exciting and terrifying. 

Still, I will cling to my original statement:  I do not believe airplanes should be able to fly. 
Until next time, my Tender Lumplings, I remain your humble Narrator...

Animal Farm Revisted: A Parable

My Tender Lumplings, my world has been shaken.  My very sense of reality is in a state of flux.  Everything I have ever know, my beliefs and faiths, my hopes and fears, have been ripped from me and twisted into something new and foreign and ugly.  Though I am managing to hold on for the moment I don't know how much longer this facade of normalcy will hold.

What has caused this you ask?  How could anything shake me, your humble narrator, who has shown nothing though all these years but a seemingly rock steady foundation of character.  What could possibly reduce this lighthouse of perception, who's beam of truthful light illuminates the way for wisdom seekers through the rocky shores of deception that the world has laid in their paths.  Well, a ship of unsought knowledge has escaped my beam and crashed itself upon my reef. 

There was a discussion at work yesterday about astrology.  I've never really bought into it much though I admit that I think people born under certain signs can, and do, have similar traits.  Not that a Gemini can't have the traits of, say, a Libra.  But I understand a lot of what they are saying.  Sort of the same with any ancient beliefs, I think they have some good bit and some bits that are just crazy shit.  I guess what I'm saying is that I may not buy everything they believe in but I respect the old ways enough not to just write it all off as crap.  I mean, the great pyramids are laid out in the form of constellation, they are.  And Stonehenge is aligned with the stars.  So the ancient peoples believed there was something there.  Aliens?  Who knows.  But back to astrology and birth signs.  I learned, or rather, realized through our talk at work a rather disturbing fact.  I have know for a long time that my birth sign is Taurus.  And Chinese restaurant place mats have been telling me for years that based on the year of my birth my sign is the Rooster. 

So, does this mean my entire life has been one long Cock and Bull story?

Have I just been some outlandishly over-exaggerated tale?  Is the story of my life the living equivalent of a extravagant fabrication?  Not a lie, per se, but a highly embellished form of the truth?  I am seriously concerned here.  If I am really just the protagonist (or, horror, a bit player?) in someones elaborate fiction, then what is it all for?  Do the stars control me?  Am I not that master of my own will?  My own destiny?  Some would say, no, I'm not.  These are the people who believe in destiny and fate and all that crap.  How THOSE people can even get out of bed in the morning is a mystery to me. 

Of course I'm not controlled by the stars or aliens or God or anything else.  Do I believe there is a energy, a power, bigger than us all that runs through the fabric of reality and binds us all?  The Force, so to speak?  Yes, but it can't make you fly or have mind powers, and it doesn't control you.  My dearies, we have to make our own fate.  We decide our own path and if it is the wrong one, well, we deal with that when it happens.  Until next time...

The Four Eyed Couch Potato: or the joys of being a middle aged slacker.

As I was walking down the hall at work today there were two guys standing having a conversation.  As I passed them, I didn't say a thing not wanting to interrupt, one of them pointed at me and said to the other guy "that fella ain't right".  What?  Now, I know both of these guys and they know me pretty well, so it doesn't surprise me that they would say something.  And I'm not really disputing the claim.  It's just that it was unexpected and sort of out of no where.  All I had done was walk by, staring at the one guy (the speaker) with my creepiest wide-eyed unblinking stalker gaze.  What's wrong with that?

But he was right.  I, your humble narrator, am not right.  Not at all, Dearies.   I would say that about 8 out of 10 times, that is about four fifths of the time, I am not doing anything that is at all right.  Probably as much at 82.7% of the time whatever I happen to be doing is something that no good can come from.  That isn't to say that I am actively pursuing some endeavor that is in some way criminal or morally reprehensible.  It may well be that through my inaction I am not doing good simply by not doing anything at all. 

Why am I like this?  I don't know.  I'm not especially lazy.  In fact, being "not right" is very hard sometimes.  It takes a lot of time and effort to pull off wrongness.  It's sort of the same thing as when Dolly Parton said "it takes a lot of money to look this cheap" when talking about her wardrobe.  If I refocused this effort on doing good deeds and achieving personal and professional goals, I could be president or something.  Wouldn't that be a hoot, me in the oval office.  Things would be a little different around here. 

Of course this means that 17.2% of the time I am being responsible and doing honest productive things.  But in the grand scheme of things that is not much time at all.  What is that, about 4 hours a day?  About half the time I spend at work?  Or am I splitting it up like two hours a day or working at work and another two doing things I need to do at home?  Either way it ends up being that I spend much more time on my screwing around and being goofy activities than I do on anything else.  And I'm really fine with that.  Because, at the end of the day, I have fun. 

So, no, I ain't right.  But I'm not always wrong.  But I am happy. 

Until next time my Tender Lumplings...

Insanity For Fun and Profit

I have been having a problem lately, my Tender Lumplings.  I had an idea for a really good blog entry about a week ago and I didn't get the chance to write it.  Nature and life conspired to blog block me at every chance and I just couldn't get it done.  And now, of course, I can't remember what it was about.  I'm sure it will return to me, I hope it does, I think you would have enjoyed it but for now I will have to deal with other topics. 

So what shall we discuss today then, hmmm?  How about the human brain.  That dense mass of gooey gray matter that, arguably, makes up our entire selves.  Nothing happens anywhere except in our brains.  We believe we see things miles away.  We believe we smell things.  We believe we can hear train whistles blow from around the bend of the tracks.  But do we?  Really?  All those things are just a flash of an electrical synapse in the depths of our brain.  We only know what our brain tells us.  We cannot have any other source of information.  We don't see or feel or hear anything really.  Our brain just tells us we do and we believe it. 

But what if you brain starts lying to you?

I've been reading a book about psychopaths.  No, it is not just a big book of stories about serial killers.  ( I have read that book though and it is pretty good.  You all know of my fascination with that subject.  But now having read about what some psychopaths have done I want to read about why they did it.)  This book looks at the way a psychopath's brain works and shows that being a psychopath, or having certain psychopathic traits, is not always a bad thing.  Few psychopaths become violent and in some areas being a ruthless, self serving, cold hearted and charismatic person is an absolute boon.  Think of the world of business, the stock market, the military and politics.  There is no place for emotion in those worlds. 

The good news is that from what I've read I can say with certainty that I am not a psychopath.  But I do have a few of their traits.  But after thinking about it for I while I have decided that I only exhibit those traits for my own amusement.  I am now officially announcing that I am a Recreational Psychopath.   Because I actually have emotions and feel things I can never be a true psychopath, but I can pretend.  I can lie, manipulate, appear to show no empathy or sympathy at all and be a complete narcissistic bastard but all for my own amusement.  And it is that pleasure I take from my bad behavior that proves I'm not a psychopath.  Stupid emotions ruin everything. 

This all goes against my hindu training.  It's all about compassion and selflessness.  That's great and all but sometimes, my Dearies, you have to have a little fun.  Until next time...

IF YOU ASK ME TO BLOG, THIS IS WHAT YOU GET.

Well, today I was chastised for not blogging often enough.  I am heartily sorry, by Tender Lumplings, for not providing enough of my cutting insight into the human condition which I deliver with my unique brand of wit and style.  I have said before it isn't easy to do this everyday.  So I don't even try.  But, yes, going months between posts is a bit extreme also.

So I will offer up this brief entry to appease my throngs of fans world wide (yes, that is directed at you person in Latvia).

Kurt Vonnegut, Ray Bradbury and Iain Banks are dead.  That is a fact that, unfortunately, cannot be changed.  There are no replacements for them.  And given that we as a species are quickly forgetting how to write and read, thanks in no small way to the Internet, TV and cell phones (I will never text anyone), I'm starting to think that there never will be any more great authors.  While I mourn my fallen idols, I don't really feel that bad about there being no one to take their places.  Why should anyone try to write a masterpiece if no one is going to be able to read it?

Most of the bookstores and music store are closed or will be soon.  In a while the only place to get an actual book or a CD will be in some dusty little shop stuck in a rundown strip mall.  A place that smells of old paper and mold where you have to move the fat old cat off the stack of paperbacks you want to go through.  Sitting behind the counter with a tatty sweater vest and bifocals will be a grey man listening to a flat black disc with grooves in it that makes noise when you set a needle on it.  You'll know his name, my Dearies.  He is me.

Maybe I'm just getting old.  I don't like new TV shows.  I don't get the new style of comedy that passes for hip these days.  Most new music I find boring and lacking in originality, style, focus and, most of all, musicianship.  People don't even play instruments anymore, they don't even try.

But, you know, it's OK.  I don't need new music or TV or "books".  Because although they may no longer be among us, the so called living, I still have Kurt and Ray and Iain.  And all the other great authors, artists and musicians who are gone.   I have their books and albums and therefore part of their souls.  I can feel my soul is richer for it.

A Dark And Stormy Night: The Backyard

It was a bright spring day in early April, oddly warm for a part of the country where winter usually keeps a firm grip on the landscape well into May.  The flowers in the garden were taking full advantage of the anomalous weather and had begun to bloom.  Reds and yellows cascaded over the rough rock walls that lined the walkway from the main house down to the many levels of the tiered patios.  Even the myriad small creatures that lived in the woods just beyond the lawns had started to peek from their slumbering holes and began to frolic in the warm morning sun. 

The sun rose toward the summit of the sky and the heat increased.  Children appeared and the expansive lawn became a medieval field of games.  There were great jousting tournaments with broomsticks as steeds and lances.  The crack of yardstick swords floated across the grass as mighty duals were fought.  The air was filled with cries of victory and celebratory laughter until the afternoon grew too hot and the competitors retired to the house for lemonade and to revel in the days events. 

Clouds shaded the landscape as the evening approached and the flowers grew weary of sunbathing.  They slowly folded their delicate petals into themselves and slumbered.  The forest creatures, there bellies now full of nuts and clover, returned to their holes, saying furry prayers to whatever gods they believed in, that tomorrow would come and be as glorious as today.  Lights began to glow in the house and soft music played until, hours later, the windows gradually grew dark there too.  The warmth of the day evaporated into the cool night, only the soil beneath the grass holding on to a small bit of heat. 

Late, when all was quiet, the night creatures came out to hunt.