It’s not really about anything, he explained. So it’s about nothing, she asked. No it’s everything, but not really about anything. She didn’t understand, but she knew he was trying to tell her something. That’s the way of it, sometimes, you just can’t get it, though you know it’s very profound. The way the clock ticks through the seconds, the way the water flushes down the toilet, the way the sunlight turns blue as the day fades away.
Blue o’clock, beer o’clock, it’s all really the same thing, a defined moment, an attempt to put limits on miscomprehension. We sit there and we talk about the secrets of the universe, certain in our uncertainty that we can never really truly understand.
Imagine the boredom, if we could. A landscape of dead thoughts and discarded theories that play havoc with our minds of instincts and instances, memories and plagiaries of things that we wished we had experienced but we’d just been told in passing by strangers that wouldn’t be our friends.
Sometimes, it asked, I wish you would just ask me what’s the matter. I didn’t respond to that, I didn’t tell him that the question was really whether I cared. That’s the thing with life, as the end lies near, just behind the corner, waiting to pounce on its next meal, napkin around its neck and an appetite awakened by the smell of death. It’s the stupidity of it all, the lack of a gleam in your neighbours eye.
I’m not very happy with my anus right now, it told me about when it cheated. It’s not very happy with me either. Too much shit flowing out my mouth, so it feels neglected. It feels like there is worms crawling around my stomach, unsure about which way is out, so they burrow their way through the lining of my consciousness, slowly eating their way through my sanity till the whole is joined, patches of light playing through the darkness of her patience.
So, to continue on this weird theme I’ve got going, I just finished watching the movie Waking Life, by Richard Linklater. Now, this is a weird movie. There is no other way to describe it, but it is both profound and bizarre at the same time, which is quite an accomplishment.
Is it a great movie? I’m not yet sure, I think I’ll need to watch it again a few more times before I’ve decided that, but it is certainly a movie worth watching, if can avoid falling asleep (I’ll tell you straight out that for most people this movie will just not be worth their time).
I think the movie might be slightly too high brow. That’s probably why it ended up in the discount pile in
I’ll just finish by saying this is something that might be profound, or might just be mind bogglingly boring, but at least it won’t be ordinary.
The problem with many western countries has been that they believed the same thing for a very long time. Now quite a few are discovering, or should be discovering, that they’ve lost out. They are no longer the most advanced, the most gifted or the most impressive.
It lacks an independently minded enough people to push the country forward when (not if) the government fails. It lacks an open enough society to try to understand, rather than challenge, any criticisms that are made against it and it lacks the confidence to give its individual people enough power to decide for themselves what direction the country should take.
Nobody listens, with the black and white coded bars forming their reality. Keep out the gray, they explain and you keep in normality. Skid marks down the rabbit hole. No time to wipe as, after all, truth remains firmly fixed in the realm of fairytales.
The search engine finally works up the courage to ask ‘Why’ and the wino explains that its search –‘Why’ – did not match any documents.
The farmers in Indonesia that are currently burning their fields do this because they believe this is the best way to live their life to the fullest. This is how things have been done for generations and if it worked for their parents, why shouldn’t it work for them?
Their perception of the world around them is limited by their lack of opportunity to go abroad, as well as their lack of education as to what lies past their horizon. Their lack of education has made it impossible for them to truly conceive of the damage they are causing elsewhere (let alone to their direct environment).
As a result they continue to behave in a way that is damaging for their neighbours and ultimately damaging for them selves. Their customs were created in a time of thousands, not of millions, and these customs are therefore not calibrated to correctly measure the impact of their actions on their environment. Education, based on the scientific method, is meant to adapt to the changing environment. Customs, on the other hand, are much slower to adapt, or even non-adaptive.
In a non-democratic country the government could then intervene and possibly improve the situation, but in a democratic country the (uneducated) values of the people are (supposed to be) represented in the government, meaning they also do not fully understand why they should intervene.
The first step to a functioning Democracy is, therefore, an aware and educated population, who can understand the significance of their own actions, at home and abroad. Democracy is ultimately ineffective among the uneducated.
(Taken from 101 Philosophy Problems by Martin Cohen)
An imperial Court Philosopher is often asked to prove things, such as a Baron’s wager in an argument to the effect that:
All ravens are black
To do this, he realised he would have to find all the ravens in the world, past, present and, ideally, future, and check that they were black. This, it looked like, would take a long time. Alternatively, he thought of a (cunning way) of finding all the non-black things and checking that there were no ravens among them.
‘Find all the non-ravens and check that they are not black’ instructed the Philosopher to his assistant, speaking loosely (and getting confused), as non-ravens could be black anyway.
But the Philosopher decided to try and brazen it out anyway, and returned to the
‘My Lords and Ladies, the answer is, simply, we define ravens as being black. In which case even, say, a green raven is not a raven at all, merely a green bird withal the characteristics commonly associated with ravens, except that of its colour. None-the-less, it most certainly cannot (by definition) be a raven! All ravens really are black!’ There was a ripple of applause at this. But then the Keeper of the Imperial Ravens stepped forward holding a ghastly, sick-looking bird.
‘But what,’ the Keeper asked, ‘is a raven with a disease which makes its feathers temporarily go green?’
I don’t think there are many movies which are significant in a specific year, but I am convinced that Hostel was one such movie for the year 2005. The acting wasn’t particularly good, nor was the budget particularly big, but it was none-the-less a significant movie in the western horror genre.
‘Why?’ I hear you ask. Well, let me tell you. Hostel does something new. It doesn’t just show the mind of the hunted, it also shows the minds of the hunters, the psychology of the killer and the concept of what the rich will do to get their thrills.
I don’t want to give too much away about what the movie is about, but I hereby would like it to be noted that I say this now, not later, when everybody else is saying it. Of course I can’t be sure that everybody else will be saying it, but if they don’t then that just goes to show that not every great movie is discovered or recognised.
Yes, I am waffling. Just make sure you watch it, if you like the unpredictable, the original and actually manage to get your hands on a copy.
I am not dependable. That is the long and short of it. Though I mean well and always try to do my best, I find that I don’t do everything I should, often forgetting or postponing semi-important activities. As you might well understand, this greatly frustrates the people around me and, what is more, makes them unwilling to take the risks they might otherwise take.
My poor dependability is the handbrake of my life. Having grown more and more aware of this problem I have decided that it has got to stop. For that reason I have started to work harder at being dependable. I don’t know if I will ever be as good as my girlfriend (one of the most dependable people I know), but I do know I will be better than I am now.
The first step is to collect all my old magazine articles and other writing material, fill my portfolio with them and then start sending them out to people interested in free lance writers. I know quite a few of people are looking for writers right now and I would be a fool not to fill out my portfolio further (as well as earn the extra money that freelancing would bring).
She sat there in the haze of the mobile light, darkness leaking in around the edges of her sanity. The earwig had warned her that it wouldn’t be easy, but who would have thought that the memories would rise up against her?
In the corner they boxed with common sense as their referee. She wasn’t doing a very good job, though. It was the Alzheimer’s that did it. It built a nest in a tree of my subconscious, always collecting the shiny trinkets that would have slipped through the cracks.
Eat, drink and by merry the cannibals told each other, but the magazines weren’t the same thing. Skin and bones were one thing, but what was the point of print, the zebra asked.
Your mind, you see, tries to connect the dots, tries to create a story, but the tale has been lost, with Eeyor asking his friends to find it. That’s what comes with depression, I explained, that’s why the tooth fairy stopped collecting outstanding payments. The medication didn’t help, it just made us think of cataclysms, nude women slick with sweat and apple pie.
Through a hole in time I peeked out at the whole of it, looking for that part which made it all tick, but it’s difficult to find the timer after the explosion. When I find him he tells me, You could have warned me about the questions. You could have told me that ruling the universe would be mainly an administrative job. I didn’t get any choice, you know, it was forced upon me.
But nobody really believes he’s a reluctant ruler, so I gave him half of my lunch. Two sandwiches with cheese and afterthought. No cigarettes, though. I need those for after I’ve given birth to reality. It’s a tough thing, forcing everything out through your mind's anus, but somebody has to do it.
I’ve heard it said that those features we hate most in others are actually features that we ourselves posses. Now that probably isn’t true, but it does sound good. Take for instance one mate of mine, he’s consistently critical of the Asian way of avoiding a situation rather than confronting it. He always laments loudly about how many Asian people do not know how to deal with confrontation.
The problem is that he is guilty of that himself. This evening, for instance, I tried to reach him to meet up, but he apparently decided that he didn’t want to talk, so he chose not to pick up his phone.
I know that, because after a few hours of him not returning my messages I said ‘never mind, enjoy your trip’ (yes, he’s leaving for a week tomorrow) and not soon after he sent back a message saying ‘thanks and I’ll see you when you come back’.
It kind of put a dampener on my whole evening, which is a shame as tomorrow I don’t have to start work till six o’clock in the evening, so I should he trying to have a good time. Go figure. Well the world is full of little disappointments.
No, that's it. If you're expecting something uplifting to follow that statement you've come to the wrong blog.
n. Attribution of human motivation, characteristics, or behavior to inanimate objects, animals, or natural phenomena.
Sometimes you read essays that just change the way you look at things. This essay right here was one of those for me. It explained certain concepts about AI that I hadn't considered before and as such made me reevaluate what I thought about AIs and the future, both concepts that play a role in my creative thinking.
So, if you're interested in the future of intelligence and don't mind a bit of a mental slog, make sure you read it.
I’ve got a serious problem with my projects. I start a whole lot, but I don’t finish very many at all. When I first get started I’m always filled with enthusiasm, but then when the project moves on I start to lose interest. Soon I go down from working on it every day to working on it every other day, then one day a week, soon it slows down even more and after a while it just stalls.
Take the book I’m trying to write, for example. I have now not written a word on it for over two weeks, having got distracted with a computer game. It’s (fortunately) still banging around in my head, which means there is still a good chance that I will restart it, but it worries me. I put so much effort into these projects to begin with, but it all comes to naught.
How will I ever get where I want to go if I can’t finish anything on my own? I can’t hope for people to always push me. I must learn to be my own motivator. I’ve had enough of twenty entry blogs spread around the internet that started with a good idea but never made it any further. I have to push myself and I have to use as my motivation, if nothing else, the fact that if I don’t then I’ll be stuck in obscurity for ever.
That is something that particularly frightens me.
So this is how it all starts, in the end, with a sentence on a page, with time betraying itself all too readily. That’s the way of the thing, really, that's how things go. You can't escape the finality of progression, not in words, anyway. It defines us, gives us our history.
Different art forms have different limitations. Most art is confined to only showing a moment. Not so with words. Words have the opposite problem; they can't help but show the passage of time, as the reader moves across the page.
But never mind that. That is for later. Now it’s time for other things.
I feel I should explain myself, but somehow I don’t think I should. I have done it so many times before. Always explain your purpose, at the beginning, and then lose it as things progress. I believe it has been my original purpose that has always held back my work from evolving into what it could be.
So many things begun and so very few finished. That’s time for you, again. It turns enjoyment into routine and adventures into chores.
So I will leave things undefined. I will see where natural progression takes me. I aim to set no aim and to allow myself the freedom to do what I will within the restraints of the public domain.
Sometimes it’s just good to write and let this be the place where I write it.
Unexplained and unfettered.
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