Drugs are good for business

"Casino owners love customers on benzodiazepines; they don't get upset when they lose and keep gambling" (p. 227).

"Until it lost its patent, the pharmaceutical company Johnson & Johnson doled out LEGO blocks stamped with the word 'Risperdal' for the waiting rooms of child psychiatrists. Children from low-income families are four times as likely as the privately insured to receive antipsychotic medicines. In one year alone Texas Medicaid spent $96 million on antipsychotic drugs for teenagers and children--including three unidentified infants who were given the drugs before their first birthdays" (p. 228).

In Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma"

The conclusion of the Bonus March

"By 1932 the nation was in the middle of the Great Depression, and in May of that year about fifteen thousand unemployed and penniless veterans camped on the Mall in Washington DC to petition for immediate payment of their bonuses. The Senate defeated the bill to move up disbursement by a vote of sixty-to to eighteen. A month later President Hoover ordered the army to clear out the veterans' encampment. Army chief of staff General Douglas MacArthur commanded the troops, supported by six tanks. Major Dwight D. Eisenhower was the liaison with the Washington police, and Major George Patton was in charge of the cavalry. Soldiers with fixed bayonets charged, hurling tear gas in to the crowd of veterans. The next morning the Mall was deserted and the camp was in flames. The veterans never received their pensions" (p. 188).

from Bessel van der Kolk's "The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma

Making successes from outsiders

"In the economic field, for example, the first Italian port to win for itself a share in modern Western maritime trade was neither Venice nor Genoa nor Pisa, but Leghorn; and Leghorn was the post-Renaissance creation of a Tuscan Grand Duke, who had planted there a settlement of crypto-Jews from Spain and Portugal. Though Leghorn was planted within a few miles of Pisa, her fortunes were made by these indomitable refugees from the opposite shore of the Mediterranean and not by the supine descendants of the Medieval Pisan seafarers" (p. 362).

from Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History: Volume One" (abridged)

Toynbee highlights other examples from the Italian Risorgimento that demonstrate where success lies it doesn't settle upon a nostalgic memory of that Italian state's Medieval past but in a forward thinking vision for a new future. Otherwise, it is brought about by an 'alien' influence.

organisms are craggy surfaces

Organisms are craggy surfaces perched upon the precipice of a clime gradient, slowing the flow of energy through selective membranes in order to generate a charge by which it touches the face of god. 

Life is animate electricity. 

The Mechanicalness of Mimesis

"Growth is the work of creative personalities and creative minorities; they cannot go on moving forward themselves unless they can contrive to carry their fellows with them in their advance; and the uncreative rank and file of mankind, which is always the overwhelming majority, cannot be transfigured en masse and raised to the stature of their leaders in the twinkling of an eye. That would be in practice impossible; for the inward spiritual grace through which an unillumined soul is fired by communion with a saint is almost as rare as the miracle that has brought the saint himself into the world. The leader's task is to make his fellows his followers; and the only means by which mankind in the mass can be set in motion towards a goal beyond itself is by enlisting the primitive and universal faculty of mimesis. For this mimesis is a kind of social drill; and the dull ears that are deaf to the unearthly music of Orpheus' lyre are well attuned to the drill sergeant's word of command. When the Piper of Hamelin assumes king Frederick William's Prussian voice, the rank and file, who have stood stolid hitherto, mechanically break into movement, and the evolution which he causes them to execute bring them duly to heel; by they can only catch him up by taking a short cut, and they can only find room to march in formation by deploying on the broad way which leadeth to destruction. When they road to destruction has perforce to be trodden on the quest of life, it is perhaps no wonder that the quest should often end in disaster. 

"Moreover, there is a weakness in the actual exercise of mimesis, quite apart from the way in which the faculty may be exploited. For, just because mimesis is a kind of drill, it is a kind of mechanization of human life and movement.

"When we speak of 'an ingenious' mechanism' or 'a skilled mechanic', the words call up the idea of a triumph of life over matter, of human skill over physical obstacles. Concrete examples suggest the same idea, from the gramophone or the aeroplane back to the first wheel and the first dug-out canoe; for such inventions have extended man's power over his environment by so manipulating inanimate objects that they are made to carry out human purposes, as the drill sergeant's commands are executed by his mechanized human beings. In drilling his platoon the sergeant expands himself into a Briareus whose hundred arms and legs obey his will almost as promptly as if they had been organically his own. Similarly the telescope is an extension of the human eye, the trumpet of the human voice, the stilt of the human leg, the sword of the human arm. 

"Nature has implicitly complimented man on his ingenuity by anticipating him in his use of mechanical devices. She has made extensive use of them in her chef-d'oeuvre, the human body. In the heart and the lungs she has constructed two self-regulating machines that are models of their kind. By adjusting these and other organs so that they work automatically, Nature has released the margin of our energies from the monotonously repetitive task these organs perform, and has set these energies free to walk and talk and, in a word, bring into existence twenty-one civilizations! She has arranged that, say, ninety per cent. of the functions of any given organism shall be performed automatically and therefore with the minimum expenditure of energy, in order that the maximum amount of energy may be concentrated on the remaining ten per cent., in which Nature is feeling her way towards a fresh advance. In fact, a natural organism is made up, like a human society, of a creative minority and an uncreative majority of 'members'; and in a growing and healthy organism, as in a growing and healthy society, the majority is drilled into following the minority's lead mechanically.

"But, when he have lost ourselves in admiration of these natural and human mechanical triumphs, it is disconcerting to be reminded that there are other phrases--'machine-made goods', 'mechanical behavior'--in which the connotation of the word 'machine' is exactly the reverse, suggesting not the triumph of life over matter by the triumph of matter over life. Though machinery be designed to be the slave of man, it is also possible for man to become the slave of his machines. A living organism which is ninety per cent. mechanism will have greater opportunity or capacity for creativity than an organism which is fifty per cent. mechanism, as Socrates will have more time and opportunity to discover the secret of the Universe if he has not got to cook his own meals, but the organism that is a hundred per cent. mechanism is a robot.

"Thus a risk of catastrophe is inherent in the use of the faculty of mimesis which is the vehicle of mechanization in the social relationships of human beings; and it is evident that this risk will be greater when mimesis is called into play in a society which is in dynamic movement than in a society which is in a state of rest. The weakness of mimesis lies in its being a mechanical response to a suggestion from outside, so that the action performed is one which would never have been performed by the performer on his own initiative. Thus mimesis-action is not self-determined, and the best safeguard for its performance is that the faculty should become crystallized in habit of custom--as it actually is in primitive societies in the Yin-state. But when the 'cake of custom' is broken, the faculty of mimesis, hitherto directed backwards towards elders or ancestors as incarnations of an unchanging social tradition, is reoriented towards creative personalities bent upon leading their fellows with them towards a promised land. henceforth the growing society is compelled to live dangerously. Moreover the danger is perpetually imminent, since the condition which is required for the maintenance of growth is a perpetual flexibility and spontaneity, whereas the condition required for effective mimesis, which is itself a prerequisite for growth, is a considerable degree of machine-like automatism. The second of these requirements was what Walter Bagehot had in mind when, in his whimsical way he told his English readers that they owed their comparative successfulness as a nation in larger part to their stupidity. Good leaders, yes: but t he good leaders would not have had good followers if the majority of these followers had determined to think everything out for themselves. And yet, if all are 'stupid', where will be the leadership?

"In fact, creative personalities in the vanguard of a civilization who have recourse to the mechanism of mimesis are exposing themselves to the risk of failure in two degrees, one negative and the other positive.

"The possible negative failure is that the leaders may infect themselves with the hypnotism which they have induced in their followers. In that event, the docility of the rank and file will have been purchased at the disastrous price of a loss of initiative in the officers. This is what happened in the arrested civilizations, and in all periods in the histories of other civilizations which are to be regarded as periods of stagnation. This negative failure, however, is not usually the end of the story. When the leaders cease to lead, their tenure of power becomes an abuse. The rank and file mutiny; the officers seek to restore order by drastic action. Orpheus, who has lost his lyre or forgotten how to play it, now lays about him with Xerxes' whip; and the result is a hideous pandemonium, in which the military formation breaks down into anarchy. This is the positive failure; and we have already, again and again, used another name for it. It is that 'disintegration' of a broken-down civilization which declares itself in the 'secession of the proletariat' from a band of leaders who have degenerated into a 'dominant minority'. 

"This secession of the led from the leaders may be regarded as a loss of harmony between the parts which make up the whole ensemble of the society. In any whole consisting of parts a loss of harmony between the parts is paid for by the whole in a corresponding loss of self-determination. This loss of self-determination is the ultimate criterion of breakdown; and it is a conclusion which should not surprise us, seeing that it is the inverse of the conclusion, reached in an earlier part of this Study, that progress towards self-determination is the criterion of growth. We have not to examine some of the forms in which this loss of self-determination through loss of harmony is manifested." (pp. 321 - 324)

From Arnold Toynbee's A Study of History: Volume One (abridged) 

Power above is power over

"The council was the Minimite form of self-government. It was their apparatus for reconciling differences and choosing technology. It was also the supreme test of willingness, or of self-surrender: only by first yielding power to one another and to what they regarded as the spirit of unity, a spirit from above, could the members wield it over machines" (p. 132).

"Put another way, Minimite councils depended on a secret similar to the one Mary and I had discovered while relaxing with the windows open in the evening: in true leisure there is mastery" (p. 133).

from: "Better Off: Flipping the Switch on Technology" by Eric Brende

The metagut hypothesis

The metagut is the gut of all guts, well, not all guts, just the guts that this metagut ends up consuming intentionally or not. By this I mean the metagut acquires its gut flora, over time, by the piece-meal consumption of other gut bacteria from the bugs, animals, and even bacteria consumed, all by necessity of hunger. 

As this metagut gives birth to its offspring, this child passes very near the exit of that metagut and is thus 'christened' in the funk of a gut and gains its flora. 

Have you ever seen a cladogram?

This is the tree of life, all branches of which lead to one common ancestor 3+ billion years ago. If one can imagine humanity, and the path it took along that tree, all the branches and subbranches its ancestry has passed through to where it is today we get a sense of the lifestyles and predation practices that could contribute to the metagut of humanity. Contained in all those predation patterns, those sustenance practices, all the ancestor organisms from which humanity came provide humans today with both a genomic artifact of this ancestry and an accompanying microbiome, which offers up a sort of unbroken continuity between 3+ billion years ago and now. From the virulent unicellular organism to the colony biofilm into the highly specialized cooperative cell community that is today's organismic life all that accumulated biomolecular programming is both a memory of its past forms and the very scaffolding upon which this current human lifeform is draped like the sheet of a ghost. 

What's important to note is the importance of a gut to the branch of eukaryota to which we belong. Our ancestors didn't, like other lifeforms, form a house for the photosynthetic bacterial analogues, which became chloroplasts, but instead they formed a house for a molecule-to-energy transformer known as the mitochondrion, which, itself, is a vestige of the cooperative unicellular oceanic soup from which all our ancestry derived. This body, its homeostatic parameters, and the biomolecular landmarks provide the keen observer with a museum of some ancient oceanic location that it carries around within itself, specifically forming a within in a double sense. Our class of organisms are discrete locations of ambulatory cells apart from the environment. The gut serves as a sort of interface, a Love Canal if you will, where organism and world find a specific homeostatic environment that perhaps mimics those ancient oceanic conditions where all these biomolecules first learned to form their initial 'within' and interact at that level. This initial within would be the discrete cell, itself, that unit, which had learned how to communicate, cooperate, and coordinate within morphospace with its neighbors. It would find a seemingly higher goal-based unity together that it could coordinate in real-time through manipulation of the electromagnetic spectrum made manifestly available through voltage differences propagated and held within the selective cell membrane, that very thing that established a within, the thing which set the cellular material apart from its environment. 

It's easy to veer off into nonsense land in this discussion. That isn't to say that my attempt here at being concise and somewhat clear in my understanding of life as an organizational pattern of physical phenomena and temporal continuity has failed. This continuity happens by virtue of life's programmatic replication of its basic unit, the cell, to grow itself out and continue against senescence to maintain itself for a length of time.

Training the Janissary

The Ottoman system deliberately took slaves and made them ministers of state. It took boys from the sheep-run and the plough-tail and made them courtiers and the husbands of princesses; it took young men whose ancestors had borne the Christian name for centuries, and made them rulers in the greatest of Mohammadan states, and soldiers and generals in invincible armies whose chief joy was to beat down the Cross and elevate the Crescent. ... Grandly disregarding the fabric of fundamental customs which is called "human nature", and those religious and social prejudices which are thought to be almost as deep as life itself, the Ottoman system took children forever from their parents, discouraged family cares among its members through their most active years, allowed them no certain hold upon property, gave them no definite promise that their sons and daughters would profit by their success and sacrifice, raised and lowered them with no regard for ancestry or previous distinction, taught them a strange law, ethics, and religion, and ever kept them conscious of a sword raised above their heads which might put an end at any moment to a brilliant career along a matchless path of human glory. (p. 210)

...

It is always the way of the Turks, whenever they come into possession of a man of uncommonly good parts, to rejoice and be exceedingly glad, as though they had found a pearl of great price. And, in bringing out all that there is in him, they leave nothing undone that labour and thought can do--especially where they recognize military aptitude. Our Western way is different indeed! In the West, if we come into possession of a good dog or hawk or horse, we are delighted, and we spare nothing in our efforts to bring the creature to the highest perfection of which its kind is capable. In the case of a man, however--supposing that we happen to come upon a man of signal endowments--we do not take anything like the same pains, and we do not consider that his education is particularly our business. So we Westerners obtain many sorts of pleasure and service  from a well-broken-in horse, dog and hawk, while the Turks obtain from a man whose character has been cultivated by education the vastly greater return that is afforded by the vast superiority and preeminence of human nature over the rest of the animal kingdom.

(pp. 211-212)

as quoted in Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History: Volume One"

Appalachian Devo

The modern Ulstermen, however, are not the only surviving overseas representattives of this stock; for the Scottish pioneers who migrated to Ulster begot 'Scotch-Irish' descendants who re-emigrated in the eighteenth century from Ulster to North America, and these survive to-day in the fastness of the Appalachian Mountains, a highland zone which runs through half a dozen states of the American union from Pennsylvania to Georgia. What has been the effect of this second transplantation? In the seventeenth century the subjects of King James crossed St. George's Channel and took to fighting the Wild Irish instead of the Wild Highlanders. In the eighteenth century their great-grandchildren crossed the Atlantic to become 'Indian fighters' in the American backwoods. Obviously this American challenge has been more formidable than the Irish challenge in both its aspects, physical and human. Has the increased challenge evoked an increased response? If we compare the Ulsterman and the Appalachian of to-day, two centuries after they parted company, we shall find that the answer is once again in the negative. The modern Appalachian has not only not improved on the Ulsterman; he has failed to hold his ground and has gone downhill in a most disconcerting fashion. In fact, the Appalachian 'mountain people' to-day are no better than barbarians. They have relapsed into illiteracy and witchcraft. They suffer from poverty, squalor and ill-health. They are the American counterparts of the latter-day White barbarians of the Old World--Rifis, Albanians, Kurds, Pathans and Hairy Ainus; but, whereas these latter are belated survivals of an ancient barbarism, the Appalachians present the melancholy spectacle of a people who have acquired civilization and then lost it.   (pp. 179-180) 

as cited in Arnold Toynbee's "A Study of History: Volume One"

Killing Mrs. Collins

"'November 27. Got one fox and seven grouse; killed Mrs. Collins. She weighed 250 pounds.'

Mrs. Collins, in case it hasn't been guessed was our pig that we had brought along for a midwinter treat" (p. 167).

 from Carston H. Bodfish and Joseph C. Allen's "Chasing the Bowhead"

turbulence

Turbulence in the air. Turbulence everywhere. Tubular, when you're surfing the turbulence, taking advantage of wave action, a vast sinusoidal wave of molecules resulting from a collision between sand and sea. Crash, crash, the waves regularly arrive, rise, and fall. Turbulence is that place between order and chaos. Turbulence is a food, a foothold, an affordance for accumulating non-regular effects. Turbulence is where human behavior becomes invention, which radiates out into a world, copied endlessly, and featured within the epigenetic library of adaptations. This is how turbulence is put back into the tapestry. Food inventions change gut biota. Animal adoptions change the immune system. At the molecular level, all of life is one vast tapestry of surfaces held together by static bonds. And to there we go to understand from where we came. Life's reality is an instar of the universe, a place in the succession of being toward the crystalline ceiling of ultimate order. In the evident instance that life develops it is an instauration as well. Every move, every adaptation over time, every observable behavior is turbulence. Adoptions, adaptation, change is substantiated as changes in the tapestry. Those changes are turbulence. All of life is a dynamic, energy dependent system, that precariously and obstinately maintains its order from birth, development, and senescence. And what all of life essentially does is churn the molecular tapestry around it. All of multicellular life is based upon its non-communal doppelganger, the unicellular organism. In the case of life on earth, several bacterial dynasties over billions of years essential terraformed earth's atmosphere and environment into one habitable for larger life forms. Bacteria were Maxwell's first demon selectively interacting with available elements within its environment and churning out a different molecule as a waste product. A billion years of freeing up oxygen by large bacterial vents within the ocean is what makes possible more varied and complex molecules leading up to life as we know it today. The reordering of elements contributes to the environment in which any potential life form can find purchase as a necessity to existence especially one leading toward the complex. Any one of our communal cells is a simple suppressor gene mutation away from returning to rogue unicellularity making it's cellular neighbors its environment and being a bad one at that. If we're to find a will to life, it's in how the turbulence is navigated, used, that is, in the dynamics of molecular interaction something time-variable to each interaction occurs. Turbulence is the instar, a developmental stage, a manifested feature of the universe with an arrow of time to flavor its change. The modeled and acted upon reality of an organism comes from a bioelectric cell, which represents an outgrowth of electrical gradient asymmetries. The enormous static charge of a mitochondrion is likely what led to its inclusion within eukaryotic cells, welded by static to their surface. An essential life process, the membrane, collides with an electrical potential within a material universe of life defined by how the membrane alters it local properties, shoving thing out of the way while bringing other things in. We can continue to drill down but I must comment that on the whole life is of and in the universe, and in locally sustaining as an order system, establishes asymmetries that potentiate the charge and discharge of electricity to collect locally available atoms from an environment. Every complexification upon this scheme, up to and including human behavior, is the use of life's essential affordances made manifest through its dynamic molecular tapestry. Life is an organizational feature of the universe that establishes differential gradients for interacting with its local universe. The enormity of this realization is in our experience of a real-time dynamic change in countless trillions of atoms that can be ordered enough to substantiate as lifefrom behaviors, built on the basic premise of selectively establishing an interior apart from an environment, and using that potential gradient as the base interface of any cell with its local universe. The orchestration of this, and how we perceive it, is a befuddlingly unthinkable coordination reaching down into a tapestry of the universe: locally available atoms and locally available energy sources. And we must believe, if we're to be unshirking materialists about the matter, that consciousness is encoded in a maintained electromagnetic spectrum potentiated by cell charge gradients. Existing within that realm is what flavors the speed of behavior and experience. Moving electricity makes possible near-instantaneous changes across space and time possible. All of life's mentation and consciousness operates within how its cells have harnessed that inherent feature of the universe in order to encode itself in electromagnetic spectra. 

failed big picture e-mail

Gentlemen,

Imagine your life as this three dimensional volume of the universe being continuously 'redrawn' along a projected surface that by our observation resembles a coil, because our body—that parapet of observation—is ​perched upon a planetary body orbiting a star, which itself is orbiting about a gravitational axis within the solar system, which also orbits some intergalactic gravitational axis. All this spinning and orbiting while careening  ever forward through space and time, occurs as we, mere creatures, emerge from a pluripotent cell, rapidly divide, mature, and senesce. Our experience of time through our lives as a birth, maturation, death cycle reveals how our placement within numerous nested orbits flavors our existence. It's as if our place within the universe as a point, a point, continuously unfolding in space and time is due to the vast digits of Pi that all these nested orbits have calculated 'for ever.' We are, first, a certain point within an ocean of unfolding orbital calculations. That's the seat of gnosis, or more aptly it's both gnosis and the seat. Because at the center of the universe is us, our certainty, emerging as the music of a harp plucked by affinity. Second, being this point tracing an uncertain line plotted by the grandiose movement of all these orbits, like gears in a clock, establishes us as the occult door open between frequency realms and space-time realms. 

the anatomy of a sentence

The sentence has a mouth and an anus. 

interface magic

Interface magic, the magic of the interface, relies upon a visual limitation: the inability to see through the surface of a thing. 

Peering into a three-dimensional structure is a very difficult thing when representing information visually. In a biology book, a cell is represented as a two-dimensional structure, whereas, in real life, that life is a three dimensional, dynamic organism. It's the threshold of the macro, where the micro ends, the cell is a complexification, a higher organization of molecules, which are themselves a higher order of atoms. And so on. There are muons, gluons, quarks, 'and so ons.' the 'andsoon' is a fundamental building block of all phenomena. And so, the 'andsoons' formed what would become the photonic barrier for using vision to apprehend something by way of its surface. 

And yet even the very interfaces built for human-other interaction do just this. They create an occlusion simply for the sake of touching, seeing, dynamically interacting with a discretely designed interface point as a feature of ambiguity reduction, better yet, information reduction. That we cannot see through the lake but a few feet or through the ground at all both become enchanted unveilings as a result of informed interaction with them. What they reveal are the fruits of purposed knowledge, of informed action. Finding ways to fish or to cultivate plants become ways in which the blank surface, the 'matter of fact face' of a phenomenon becomes the tapestry that both conceals and displays that which is revealed through purposive interaction. 

idle games and life

Idle games work within clock cycles of processors and virtual machines. The basis of idle mechanics begins when you click something to initiate an action and it finishes. The product becomes the currency to upgrade this initial mechanic. Eventually, you can purchase another idle tier over and over, each of which is some measurably (often exponential) longer duration but that produces a larger value when it comes to fruition. Given enough of these idle tiers operating you have a successive and continuous flow of currency from which to upgrade and purchase more of each idle tier. In the end, the process resembles a vast, scalable production scheme wherein both time and intervention become the interface dynamics that make the idle genre both addictive and yet casual. 

The reason I bring this up is that it functions analogically when I think about cicadas emerging each year. Having spent upwards of 17 years underground, each of these emerging broods of cicadas, each summer, represents that time-dependent maturation mechanic of an idle game. But in this case, cicadas are living creatures, emerging from a decade-plus long gestation underground, suckling upon tree roots only to become reproductively mature, flighted insects with loud-as-fuck courtship calls on any given summer afternoon to find a mate or die as a meal trying. 

What life, under these time-ascribed features, produces is akin to a maturation mechanic central to an idle game. A cicada, matures for a time, and emerges as a fully productive life form and highly nutritious snack to opportunistic predators. All that cicadas, as lifeforms, do to the idle mechanic is to dramatize it as a life function, seeking both energy in and reproductive fulfillment before becoming merely energy out into the system. 

These are simplistic and lazy analogies, yes, but they do offer a rich analogy for understanding a fundamental feature of life in this universe. Life is an energy-derived system, maintaining optimal order for a duration only to unload that order as a reservoir of accessible energy (in the form of food) to other life forms. And as we drill deeper and deeper into what is energy it becomes a gradient-positive chemical reaction, one where molecular products flow increasingly toward easier levels of availability until they reach chemical stability in some bond, not as decaying bug parts or organic molecules per se, but as universe-stable atoms afloat in a dynamic system. And what is energy that at level but a readily available molecular interchange fuel for potentiating otherwise-locked-up chemical reactions. And so life is an energy reservoir, awaiting this moment where something catalyzes its change into some either some constitutive or constitutive element. 

In the way

At various times when I was a kid both of my parents worked. 

My dad always had two jobs: ironwork by day, security guard at a horse racetrack by night. I can still remember, as a kid, always looking up from the floor, watching dad kiss mom and leave in his rent-a-cop uniform and Dirty Harry-style revolver. Honestly, he didn't need that kind of 'strap.' 

Mom worked various places, all retail. Her highlight was Montgomery Ward, which had a store on Main Street in my hometown, back when main streets were still places of commercial activity. She had a degree. Dad had none. He was loathe to mention it. I'm loathe to mention that I got one, now that it's of little use to me in my current work-a-day occupation. 

Something I've come to realize over the years is just how much socioeconomic forces bear upon the family. The weight of it registers in the creaking timbers of family relations. The kinds of squeaks the boards registered in my family were simply time-management and fast and "angry" shouting to keep us 'babes in toy land' in line. Some of this was simply the stress of trying to live like their parents by contributing more and more of their time to work. Time was a factor, massively so. I still believe my dad's real family were the young men he spent 8 + hours a day 5 + days a week working around for the majority of his life, while those kids at home just got in the way when he was ready to shower up, eat, and unwind. My mother wasn't all that different in that she was frantically recreating the life she had without the benefit of time that her mother, aunt, grandmother had. While I know grandma worked out of necessity as a widow with only her then-deceased husband's railroad pension, Aunt Jo had the luxury to quit once she and Uncle Pete adopted their first kid. My mother's mom, well, she died of a brain tumor at 49. My mom's other aunt, Ginny, also worked, but she was a career-focused professional, no qualms about it. She was a bellwether for what would come. But in her day, with no kids, and a husband working for the post office, the two could afford a Porsche 911 and a Cessna. 'Those were the days.'

In those instances when my mother worked, she had to rely upon daycare. Lucky for me, my grandmother was always available to watch and care for me and my brother. My grandfather, close to retirement, would also take us on his little journeys through town, bar hopping, or heading to Tosh's farm. I still recall being driven down the highway, standing in the back of his pick up truck on the way to the farm, a snapshot of a time and context that would be viewed today as much as that dog we kept chained to the shade tree all day every day. Then, both sights were much more common. If we widen our focus, incarceration in the form of that dog chain formed a perimeter around the risk of the dog running away, as much as incarceration would form a perimeter around my grandfather in the form of jail bars had his beer-addled driving resulted in two kids being launched into a mangled piled of misshapen and bloody heaps, crying at the very least, breathing maybe not, on the side of the road. 

But the time I spent with my grandparents wasn't abuse. It was bliss. They were millionaires, nee, billionaires of free time and wisdom that they piled upon me and my brother as much as they piled mashed potatoes, gravy, roast, and carrots onto our plates at lunch. And all of it was cradled, in heaps, by a love that wasn't so time-dependent, so time-harried, so time-truncated, so time-aware. Even though my grandfather liked, collected, and maintained at least a dozen cuckoo clocks in the house they were less about the marking of time than they were about maintaining that metronome-like regularity of the tick-tock that established the white noise in the background of the house. I still remember watching 'Back to the Future' for the first time and seeing all those cuckoo clocks in Doc Brown's mansion gonging simultaneously, thinking that this movie spoke to me very deeply. My grandmother had probably experienced that loud cacophony of all clocks gonging at the same time, and so, through blindness, she read their analog faces and set them all 5 minutes apart every time she rewound them. To this day, I cannot have a room or a house completely quiet as a result, nor do I think my exposure to that house led to this so much as it was a genetic precondition. I am my grandfather's grandson. 

As my grandfather's grandson, I was set in his room before his dress shoes being taught by my blind grandmother how to tie a shoe. Over and over, I'd practice the hitch and the loops. I'm almost certain that I can still hear the voice of an old TV personality coming from a television in an adjacent room as I learned how to tie my grandfather's vacant church shoe as Joan River's voice echoed off of the bends I made in those laces as I tied that shoe over and over again. 

Kids get bored, and so after they lose interest in the task they've been set to, I set about exploring my grandfather's room. The closet where he kept this shoe was opposite the door to the room. Each of them had a full length dressing mirror mounted on them. I learned that if you closed the entrance and looked into the opposite mirror you could look at an image being passed back and forth, over and over and over again. This was my first glimpse at what passed for an infinity slowly snaking off in a retreating 3/4 perspective from the original rectangle frame of the mirror that cast it. Each mirror got smaller and smaller, going further and further back into infinity, and try as I may, I couldn't see into that infinity because that 3/4 offset perspective, snaking out of frame terminated at its origin point: me staring into it. What I couldn't do, to see infinity, was get out of the fucking way. My face, my youthful, inquisitive face was in the fucking way. 

Early soul-body distinctions in Greek practice

If we may judge by the furniture of their tombs, the inhabitants of the Aegean region had felt since Neolithic times that man's need for food, drink, and clothing, and his desire for service and entertainment, did not cease with death. I say advisedly "felt," rather than "believed"; for such acts as feeding the dead look like a direct response to emotional drives, not necessarily mediated by any theory. Man, I take it, feeds his dead for the same sort of reason as a little girl feeds her doll; and like the little girl, he abstains from killing his phantasy by applying reality-standards. When the archaic Greek poured liquids down a feeding-tube into the livid jaws of a mouldering corpse, all we can say is that he abstained, for good reasons, from knowing what he was doing; or, to put it more abstractly, that he ignored the distinction between corpse and ghost--he treated them as "consubstantial." 

To have formulated that distinction with precision and clarity, to have disentangled the ghost from the corpse, is, of course, the achievement of the Homeric poets. There are passages in both poems which suggest that they were proud of the achievement, and fully conscious of its novelty and importance. They had indeed a right to be proud; for there is no domain where clear thinking encounters stronger unconscious resistance than when we try to think about death. (pp. 136-137)

As quoted in "The Greeks and the Irrational" by E. R. Dodds

George Berkeley

The account of George Berkeley in Bertrand Russell's "A History of Western Philosophy," starting on page 647 reads that the presence of GOD the observer of all is what makes possible the universe. Without observation there is no there there. Russell notes that Berkeley's argument rests upon sensation and its seat within one's mind and not upon a tangible reality, per se. The point we can make upon this foundation is relaxing the conditions of an observer to that of an 'interactant' an encounter, a chance collision. Nothing more. Nothing less. 

To speak

The human vocal chords are butterfly wings for navigating through sound. Key to the evolution of sound production is the affordable universe of sound production that gives purchase to such an adaptation. In the probabilistic framework of the universe the voice precedes the sound that produces it. 

Plants have eyes

Plants have eyes. They are green.