Bigsley the Oaf

Behind a cloud
Is a clay world
Which we may not touch.

I (we all) have issues with the scale of things.

"You are the light and the way that they'll only read about"

The Little Things

Did you know (?) that it actually causes me distress when Jen eats the food that we've bought at the supermarket? The thought "great, now we have less food" actually goes through my mind. The thought is small, of course, but it's undeniably there (not to mention that the thought is completely batshit - we buy food together. There's no reason that either of us shouldn't eat it - what am I even thinking?)

When I was living in Somerville, Raju and Jason would sometimes eat cheese and bread that I had purchased. Of course, I ate their bread and cheese, too. But there was something primally (?) irritating about the fact that THEY were eating MY food. 

There is a desire to not escalate since these are such small disturbances, but like all disturbances they build up with time. They grow until explosion, which leads us naturally to the question of what the best strategy for dealing with such disturbances is.

But the disturbances are not just interpersonal - I am disturbed when the toilet paper seems to be getting low, I'm disturbed when the trash is filling up, and I'm disturbed when I think that I am getting closer to death by infintessimal bits.

There's always a feeling, when I change the trash, replace the toilet paper, or go shopping, that this is the LAST time that I'll have to do it. I will never run out of food, I will never get dirty, I will never die.

Time

Being an adult means that you have to deal with time on all sorts of scales. It's not enough to just worry about the assignment due next week, cleaning your room so mom doesn't get angry, scoring with the hot chick in French. The lack of necessity to think about anything but this moment's concerns is a luxury we afford to children. [1]

I think that a lot of people spend a lot of their energy trying to restore time to the state it achieved, fleetingly, in their childhood. Drug use/abuse, sex, games, TV, movies, god. These are all immediate, all-encompassing.

The immediate is the eternal because it is without end.

But anyway, I've really felt the rub of time, recently. I'm starting a job, soon, which I'll stay with for at least a year. I am here to be with Jen, and we'll be happily together for god knows how long. But I have immediate concerns!

This is disjointed, probably because I'm exploring. It's hard to think about time! Time is the big problem, really, if you think about it.

It's kind of surprising how little we talk about time, given that it's one of the only things that we certainly know there to be. There's space, simple objects (such as trees and toasters), and time. That's pretty much all that 99.999999% of us can agree on [2].

Wait Wait Slow Down

Thinking about time is hella-stressful. I have started to pick up on this tiny intuition regarding necessary states, hmm. Hard to explain.

Like, say you're depressed. There isn't shit you can do about it, knowwadimean? But knowledge that there's nothing you can do - that you merely have to wait it out - isn't very comforting. It isn't comforting that I'm going to get laid in five hours when it is right now. 

Maybe I'm talking about a generalization of impatience. We get more patient with time. For instance, I can travel as far as you want me to and won't get stressed [3].

I'm talking about the fact that when you're setting out to learn a new skill (violin, say) it doesn't make it easier at all to think that some day you'll be good at it. It still sucks to learn, day-to-day.

But wait, I'm talking about something deeper - sometimes you know the whole path of things, even. Sometimes you know that you must fail to succeed, but it doesn't make failure easier.

Maybe I'm talking about the flawedness of all of our abstractions. No matter what we think or say, do presides. Think and say are so utterly weak. What use are they of, at all. 

Isn't it weird that I have so much power? What have I done to deserve it?

Something must be wrong.

-----

Footnotes

[1] Perhaps this is a good definition of incubation or, at least, a necessary condition thereof. 

[2] http://www.timecube.com/

[3] The result of many road trips/22-hour flights to Japan/etc.

There's a pressure
I feel a pressure or
Perhaps delude myself that there exists
A pressure.

Was I ever lighthearted?

I suppose that I pose change in terms of a loss.
I feel such a weight, now, so I've lost my lightness.
But perhaps I have just gained a weight. 

Weights

The inescapable conclusion that No One Gives a Fuck what I have to say. 
Social obligation.
Special occasions.
My relationship.
My friends.
My (new) job.
The looming commute.
Death.

I have such a strong urge to smash it all, leave it all behind. 
It bores me to death.
And there are meta-weights!

Like, I quit smoking. How do I know whether or not all of this is just a lack of neurotransmitters?
How do I know what my real state "would have been?" had I not smoked?
Maybe smoking has allowed me to construct a fake life. 
Maybe maybe.

And then people around me are so unstable. 
My mom sent me an email, telling me she's going crazy.
Emma says she's going crazy.
Jen says she's going crazy.

I'm not sure I can deal with it.
I feel bad about even saying it, here, since you're not supposed to talk about other peoples' instabilities in a public forum. 
But whatever. I'm tired of it. 
I can't deal with it.
I don't know what to do about it.

Is there any option other than running away?
If not by foot, then emotionally?

I have a job, now.
I quit smoking.
I went for a bikeride.

-----

I feel like something's missing.
I don't know what it is.

-----

I feel as if I lack abstract thoughts, these days. 
Life is very concrete.
Concerns, conditions, solutions.
Every piece has a place, every place a piece. 

 Oh god. I typed that last message while my desktop-sharing software was still activated. I wonder if they saw.

It wouldn't be -so- bad if they did. I just showed my excitement (if in a strange way).

Boo. 

Success!

God, that was easy. I did the task that was supposed to take 45 minutes in like 20.

I am so sexy. 
Oh yeah.
All up in my booty.
 

My face is so big and puffy
Drippy white corpse eyes
Blah!

God, I am so nervous about this interview (at 3 pm). It is so nerve-wracking. So nerves! Blah! Bah! Beh!

Face face beh.

Best!

I worry sometimes is the wind going to
turn.

The black of the monitor seems, to me
with its blackness it seems so brightly
and the orange of my clemintine rind.

A thing that seems so simple so easy
as soil and plant is seeming so simply
that can it just be me with my overwhelmingly complex model of the world and its interactions which renders this complex phenomenon simple?

Dependency

A few days into the move, we stopped in Chicago, and I had a long talk with Jen's friend Jon about the nature of dependency relationships in politics. I forwarded the thesis that culture is largely the accumulation of "wisdom" regarding the nature of the environment in which a group of people are living.  It is "wisdom" because, of course, it is not a reasoned accumulation - it is often the mad thrashing of a group of people attempting to solve a problem. As time progresses, however, one expects useless culture to fade.

But how do I define "useless?" What are the crucial elements of a relationship between an environment and its people? What defines the "use" of a culture?

The answer must be something unchanging - something eternal. Something such that, when it changes, the cultural forms related to it no longer make any sense. The obvious answer is dependency. The nature of a society's needs will determine the forms of its culture.

A culture which must grow its crops has a dependence on the earth. Their culture will reflect this. They may have "irrational" culture such as rain-dances and ritual sacrifices, but they will also surely have some measure of knowledge reflecting the proper preparation of the earth for agriculture, perhaps burning forests to fertilize the soil for next year's crop.

Here I am using "culture" in a very general sense; this theory would be worthless if it only applied to "traditional"/old cultures - cultures of extremes. It applies to the United States equally well. The United States has an infrastructure to obtain and distribute food to its people. To ask "whose" interest this is in is wrong-headed. Instead, we should think about the historical evolution of the United State's food distribution system and the complex interplay between that system, the people of the U.S., the government, etc. This complicated mess is the whole of the pertinent "culture" in the United States. It is advanced and complicated, it has very different structural properties, but really it is the same thing as a "rain dance." 

It is my belief that this sort of analysis can also explain a lot of the degradation of culture which has occured throughout the last century and which continues to occur today. Many societies lack dependency relationships which would act as the backbone for their culture. There are cities in Northern African with populations in the millions which subsist entirely on foreign aid (I can't find the link to the NYT article where I read about this). We expect such cities to lack culture reflecting the cultivation of food, maintainance of infrastructure, etc. A culture without need for X will not have infrastructure to produce X as time -> infinity. 

---

Friendship

An interesting question is whether these abstractions can be applied to understand relationships between individuals; friendship, animosity, etc.

Trivially, yes, since two people together is just a two-person society.

I reject the hypothesis that people have a fundamental "social need." I think that people have needs which can basically only be fulfilled by other people, but this is:

1.) Subtely different
2.) Not necessarily fundamental

What are the natures of your dependencies? To what extent do these shape your friendships? Who are you dependent on and what dynamics does this dependence create?

I am in San Francisco.
It is overcast.
I am tired. 

 More new posts at PotatoGames!

Yo!

a squirrel eats 

I just played a game of go which felt like MAGIC.
Invasions are MAGIC.
When i invade
I am doing MAGIC.

Let us sit in a small space
And talk in small voices

I will not disturb
You will not disturb

We will be just parallel
Rubbing ourselves together,
My cat's paws

Jason: Oh really, because I thought he was male. 

This post is inspired by the following quote from Airwalker:

“The insanity of the collective egoistic mind, amplified by science and technology, is rapidly taking our species to the brink of disaster. Evolve or die: that is our only choice now.”
-Eckhart Tolle

-----

It is strange to me that Ayn Rand espoused "Individuality" as a virtue and then turned around and cast dispersion on collectivism. 

Did she not recognize that "Individuality" as symbol is necessary to a collective view of humanity?

It is necessary metaphysically: a society cannot be properly called a "collective" if it is not a "collective" of something.

It is necessary culturally: by applying the "Individual" label to a man, his peculiarity is displaced. He is simply a physical instance of an abstract prototype. 

In fact, it is precisely the underlying concept of fundamental, eternal self that has enabled the most monstrous examples of collectivized thinking throughout history. Communism/Socialism could not be ideologically justified without the concept of a single worker's dignity. Christianity  without the concept of "a soul to be saved" would be empty. The Fascist state would not thrive without each individual being defined in terms of the state.

But it is precisely these archetypes which give cultural systems the leverage they need to deal with the individual as cog, slave, worker bee, sacrificial goat.

For the "soul" of a Christian is not a flat identifier or a personal vessel to be filled with content at the whim of the owner. The "soul" has definite properties - it is capable of sin, it is free, etc. These properties allow the church organism to act strongly on the body of the soul.

The "worker" of a Communist system is not free to work as he wishes; his autonomy is earned in parts from the state.

The nationalist of the Fascist state is defined as an element of the nation. 

Without the underlying fabric of "self," what would these archetypes be defined in terms of?

And the clincher is that the "individual" of Ayn Rand's Objectivist fantasy world came, after years of Objectivized discussion, to attain similar properties that have made Ayn Rand's followers into the soulless drones we occasionally come into contact with in the shady back rooms of Universities accross the United States.

---

The Eye makes the Object Object. 
An Object with Eye grows in Objecthood.
An Object without Eye becomes no Object.

Starting a new blog about video games with Jason/Graham:

http://potatogames.wordpress.com/

I was going to wait to post about this until we got a lot of content, but I think that we're going to continue posting once every few days for a while, so I thought I'd let you in on it.

Read the first post/the "goals of potato games" post to see what we're up to!

Am I hitting a plateau?

How can  these 6 dan players be so good?

I guess they probably just:

1.) Know more situations
2.) Set up shit to be good for them
3.) Set up situations they know, which I don't

Is there any more to go than this?
Perhaps this is the ultimate, boring nature of all things.

There are no silver bullets.

The possibilities that you are most afraid of are no less possible for their being fearsome.