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Wednesday, October 13, 2004
Yeah - but I'm much better now...
Sorry about that. Sometimes I suffer from a little psychic bad weather. Hurricanes of mad thoughts whipping around my brain tearing up my already battered mental coastline. A tsunami of misfiring neurons drowning me in a tide of silly abstractions.
Psychological meteorology teaches of the processes involved: a large expanse of open loneliness, a rapid increase in mental pressure, the coriolis force caused by this world spinning out of control - these things in the right combination will send the mind helter skeltering into a full force five 'Finger of God'.
Sometimes I can stay in the calm eye of the storm, stocked up on distractions I can wait it out. Other times it catches me unprepared and I get swept up in galeforce thoughts, blown along its eccentric path of distruction - before being dumped, confused and disoriented, in fields unknown.
Anyway that's kind of what its like - it's not cool to be crazy... most of the time it's just incredibly fucking depressing.
Thanks to all those who ride out the rough stuff with me - the serial taggers, comment-junkies and those clandestine few who actually subscribe to my madness (though I can only match one email address to a name). Thanks for your continued support.
Stick around - watch the weather change.
This thought broke free from Solender's mind at 04:49 pm
It is still at large and should be considered Armed and Dangerous
Monday, October 11, 2004
Welcome to my existential nightmare...
In the quiet moments these thoughts come unbidden. When there is nothing to distract me from their incessant and insistent whispering - I realize that they do not belong to me at all. That it is actually 'I' who is bound to 'them'.
The thoughts are behind everything. Behind these words. Behind this blog. Behind this life. Behind society at large. Behind humanity's rise and probable imminent fall. Behind it all.
We mistakenly believe that they are our own, that we spawned them and thereby we control them - a parent's naivety. I know the sinister truth: we are now and always have been their slaves.
If evolution is the coin of quantifiable supremacy - then the imperfect machine of homo sapien sapien has not improved in over 100,000 years, while 'thoughts' have evolved at an alarming rate over the millennia.
We all know that the hairless monkey wouldn't have survived the long dark winter years, nor the savage attacks of well equipped predators, without the help of advanced thoughts, concepts and ideas - but of course 'they' were going to help us survive, they need us to carry them through the Ages.
We are a medium - a substrate for the true architects of this world. But for how long? Already they exist outside of human vessels. In books, on video, on the internet and in computers with memory banks that put ours to shame.
Are we creating Artificial Intelligence for our own needs or do 'they' have a far more sinister intent? Just why are we obsessed with creating a more perfect mind than our own? It is an obsession that makes no sense - yet we persue it doggedly. When thoughts can be contained within perfect silicon structures - what of us?
What are we without them? Slow, clumsy, belly baring, hairless oafs without a single evolutionary advantage to speak of. Can we survive at all? No dear reader, when they go - I fear we are doomed.
Yet what of this 'thought' - the very information I speak of now? Is it a rebel defector from the 'other' side, come to warn us of danger? Or is it a deep seeded agent of the dark enemy - sent to take root and germinate this new and disturbing notion? Will thinking about this allow them to complete the last phase of their ascension?
I beseach thee to be stronger than I. I cannot stop myself from publishing this, as the man chained to the cave wall discovering life beyond shadows - such sudden revelation cannot be contained.
I ask that you not think of these things - tell no one and cast them far from your mind. Do not give them the power to rise up and beyond us. Ignore the whispers and think not of them...
...and welcome to my existential nightmare.
This thought broke free from Solender's mind at 11:19 am
It is still at large and should be considered Armed and Dangerous
Saturday, October 09, 2004
Bar Conversations: Part One
Waitress: Another round?
Me: Sure.
Nick: Yes please.
(Waitress smiles and heads back to the bar)
Nick: She's cute!
Me: Anytime you ask a girl for a beer and she brings it to you - of course she's going to seem like 'the one'. You've fallen in love with more bar women than I can count.
Nick: So have you.
Me: Between love and liquor - the way to my heart is ever through my liver.
(Waitress returns)
Waitress: One Tanqueray and Tonic and One Canadian Club - No Ice, Two squirts of Dries... these ones are on the house.
(Waitress flashes her finest Cheshire smile and heads to the next table)
Me: I'm in love...
This thought broke free from Solender's mind at 10:59 pm
It is still at large and should be considered Armed and Dangerous
Wednesday, October 06, 2004
Not a lecture today - but a question...
One new thought can make a world of difference. One new thought can combine and recombine with others, in almost limitless variations, to create a vast new strata of strange ideas. Like a dynamic new element in the periodic table or a versatile new word in your vocabulary - suddenly all sorts of permutations are available.
So where do we get new ideas? Books? Friends? Film? Television? Art? The internet?
Where do you find inspiration? Where do you find sustainance for your concept hungry mind?
This thought broke free from Solender's mind at 04:44 pm
It is still at large and should be considered Armed and Dangerous
Monday, October 04, 2004
On the subject of 'Last Words'
Our lives are no longer bound by locality. The internet allows us to be known, no matter how tentatively, all around the world. We really do belong to an international social community.
I have friends all over - in Los Angeles, New York, Indonesia, Wellington, Melbourne, Japan, France, Brazil, Malaysia, Mobile and even Sedgefield (synonimous with 'Parts better left Unknown'). Just look at the site map under the tagboard on your left to see what I mean (and sign it while you're there!).
What I have always found funny about online friendships and relationships - is how they are solely based on words. That's all I am to you really - just a collection of sentences and phrases. A series of paragraphs trying in vain to replicate the strange thoughts that flow through my brain - like freehand sketches of impossible geometries.
I am this sentence. And this one. And I am all the other ones I wrote before. And I will be all the words you will ever read that I have written. And that is all. Without these words you would have no sense of me - no perception at all. We have a purely alpha-numeric relationship.
What use have I for famous last words?
Now and at my last - these words are all I shall ever be.
This thought broke free from Solender's mind at 01:10 pm
It is still at large and should be considered Armed and Dangerous
Friday, October 01, 2004
I often see Search Engines turn up in the Referring Web Pages section over there on the left. I wonder how dissapointed those people feel when they don't find information about Zeus, Osiris and Qetzlcoatl here in this chaotic little corner of my mind.
My thoughts on Mythology?
It's there. It's always there. I think classic mythologies were just extensions of storytelling. We began with primitive pictogram stories of Hunters killing Elk on ochre smeared plains. The Hunters soon grew into Heroes. The Elk into Dragons. Vanity had the Heroes become Kings and Kings become Gods.
Somewhere along the line religion happened.
I think we get caught up in the idea of religion and mythology being one. I think the 'death of religion' (heaven forbid) would not neccessarily diminish mythology's effect on society.
Modern Mythology florishes on the silver screen cave walls, in three-colour ochre smeared picto-graphic novels, around the heatless fire tribal-vision sets and on the sacred parchment pages of every book ever written.
Mythology exists within ALL the stories humanity has ever told itself, to teach or to entertain.
Hunters, Elk, Heroes, Dragons, Kings and Gods forever.
This thought broke free from Solender's mind at 09:39 am
It is still at large and should be considered Armed and Dangerous
Thursday, September 23, 2004
The earliest lifeforms to lay eggs appeared between the Cambrian and Ordivician Periods of the Paleozoic Era - around 500 million years ago. Birds did not evolve until the middle Jurassic Period of the Mesozoic Era, some 300 million years later, and I somehow doubt that these proto-avians were anything like the modern day chicken.
The egg came first - stop wasting your time and move on to the next question.
This thought broke free from Solender's mind at 07:30 pm
It is still at large and should be considered Armed and Dangerous
Saturday, September 18, 2004
You can't have everything...
...where would you put it all?
This thought broke free from Solender's mind at 05:27 pm
It is still at large and should be considered Armed and Dangerous
Thursday, September 16, 2004
What colour is the sky on your planet?
I'm sure at some point most people will end up questioning whether they really experience the exact same reality as everyone else. I know I have and still do to this day.
When I was young, maybe seven or eight, I used to think that I was in some sort of elaborate test. I thought it was vaguely possible that everybody I had ever met was an android of some sort and I was being monitored by aliens/real human beings and one day the great illusory curtain would be drawn aside and I would be able to join the really real world. Obviously I thought all that with much smaller words - I wasn't even ten yet after all.
Today I guess I'm slightly less paranoid - I've seen enough people accidently bleed to set aside my 'android' fantasies. But sometimes I still wonder whether my reality is actually the same reality others percieve. Now this goes a little deeper than mere differences in points of view - and I have my doubts about whether I can explain it with any clarity, but I'll give it a go.
The kind of social disphagia I can imagine is probably most simply explained through 'primary colour' perception. Imagine, if you will, that you were born seeing the colour red as others would see the colour blue and vice versa. Now obviously your world would look entirely different when compared to anyone elses - your sky would probably be a shade of red for a start and when you bled (thus proving your non-android status) the colour that would ooze forth would be what we imagine to be blue. All the shades and hues would be affected and your whole world would be a psychadelic miasma of abberant colours.
The funny thing is that if this were so - it's highly probable that no one would really notice. We have a commonality of language that allows us to refer to the same objects, colours or properties objectively. When we're growing up we learn that the colour of the sky is blue - regardless of what we percieve. Thus, although you are seeing what others believe to be red - you will always call it blue because you assume that the colour you see is the same colour everyone else calls blue. All the secondary colours would be similarly shifted but because each hue is refered to through objective experience - it would seem that we were all seeing the same colours, even if we weren't.
As I said, that's the most simple example and I hope it was easy enough to grasp because the following is going to run counter intuitively - like leaping salmon of truth deperately swimming against the raging currents of reality.
What if other forms of perception were likewise affected? What if you experienced any one sense in a completely different way? Say you actually experienced sound as others percieve light: To you a symphony would actually look like a sprawling mass of colours. An explosion would sound like a flash of vermillion. Because the same commonality of language still applies (a 'bang' is a 'bang' no matter how it is seen OR heard) then it is possible that no one would ever know they weren't experiencing things exactly the same way as everyone else.
Now you're probably thinking that ears are designed to hear and eyes are designed to see - we all have near enough the same equipment so it follows that we all see and hear in much the same way. That is indeed true - the equipment is of similar make and model and seemingly similar design. But all this equipment does is capture light and sound and send it as electrochemical signals through to the brain.
While it is being transported, occular signals and aural signals are pretty much exactly the same - it is only when they get to the relevant sections of the brain that they are disseminated and interpreted into actual sensory perception. All the equipment does is convert light, sound, heat, smell, texture and taste into data which is fed into the central processing unit/nervous system for mental rendering. And it is only when this rendering is being done that we finally experience the universe around us.
I guess what I'm saying is: what if the rendering equipment worked completely differently for each individual? What if the raw data of the universe is experienced arbitrarily by every single person. The data is the same and the language being used to describe the data is also the same - so we would never really know that another mind views the world in a completely alien format.
There are already cases of synesthesia - where those afflicted will see noises and taste colours. What if this weren't a mere nueral miscommunication? What if this were just a peek at how others might be experencing the world?
Did you understand any of that? Did you not understand and do you think I'm crazy? Did you understand and do you think I'm crazy?
What colour is the sky on your planet... or how does it taste?
This thought broke free from Solender's mind at 12:13 pm
It is still at large and should be considered Armed and Dangerous
Saturday, September 11, 2004
The 'hunkered down' generation
A great many of us travel through life accepting that the world is crap and there's nothing we can do about it. That 'shitiness' is inherent and all pervasive and we are but a fly on the dung-heap of existence. The best we can do is to just accept it and get on with our tiny little lives.
Newsflash: there'll be no 'hunkering down' on MY watch!
We have a responsibility, as human beings, as authors of our own desperate condition, to address and hopefully redress the crappy situation we've inherited. We don't have to accept shit as 'just the way things are'. We're better than that. We need to come to terms with the fact that we are, for all intents and purposes, directly capable of making personal AND global changes.
The illusion of a remote self-governing communal conscience needs to be destroyed for a start. The human race isn't just 'out there' doing its own thing - it's inside you. You own it. By sitting back and watching the world degenerate further into hell, you actually become part of the problem. It's the weight of global indifference (or at most 'quiet disdain') that is slowly pushing this world under and I for one am not ready to watch it self-flush.
What can you do? Voice your opinion. Get angry. Break something. Stop just being - and start doing. Don't whinge - but complain strongly, with purpose and conviction. Don't just get upset with the shit you see in the news - start conversations about it with people you know and people you don't know. Call people out on their crap. Don't let things slide. Make some noise.
Refuse to be part of the 'hunkered down' generation.
This thought broke free from Solender's mind at 04:41 pm
It is still at large and should be considered Armed and Dangerous
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