Follow Through

A few years ago, someone that I thought was perfect told me that she wasn't. She asked what my greatest weakness was and told me what hers was. Her question caught me off guard. I had never taken time to think about my greatest weakness. I almost instantly knew what it was but couldn't put it into words for fear of setting that weakness firmly into my self-concept. I stalled for time, pushing her to answer first.

At the time, I didn't take her answer seriously. It seemed to me that she had waved a red cloth in a bulls face only to duck away from its horns and spear it from the side. She claimed that her greatest weakness was pride. That's the kind of answer I expected from a girl without fault. Pride is indeed a great weakness, as I know now, even if it is the only weakness a person possesses. The cowardly aggression of the ducking bullfighter drives him or her to exploit a bull, using a weapon to reduce threat. It is exactly this cowardly aggression that I completely missed my first time around.

My answer next. I said it before I could finish thinking about it. "Lack of commitment."
"Really? " she asked in a challenging is-that-so voice.

There are thousands of questions, theories, and arguments that end up in my head. Of these, hundreds consistently absorb my spare attention in the time just before sleep and just before waking, after I've run far enough to forget exhaustion and before I've run far enough to be reminded of exhaustion. Because these opportunities are short and infrequent, I've taught myself to immediately drop an idea from consciousness and return to it with undivided attention later.

#1 Society Is A Conscious Entity. Cell:Human::Human:Society. There is no reason to assume that society, governed by processes analogous to those governing the body of a "living" being is any less "conscious" than a human.

#2 Animals Are More Like Us Than Is Popularly Recognized. An image I saw today forced me to return to consideration of this statement. On the discovery channel, an elephant herd was shown trekking through an area of desert in which another elephant herd had recently been preyed on by lions. Elephant skeletons were clearly visible in the sand. The new herd slowed its pace, then stopped while two of the eldest detached from the herd to investigate. They stood side by side, sweeping their trunks over an elephant skull before them. That footage communicated more clearly than anything before that the mentality of these animals has been greatly misunderstood. Where do we draw the line between human and animal? Anthropologists have tried for decades to arbitrarily establish a border between our territory and that of the wild savages of the animal kingdom, but rational thought and science have denied that this is possible. WE ARE ANIMALS. Our use of language and tools does not change that fact. In many cases it simply amplifies our instinctive animal tendencies to dangerous levels.

#3 Why Are There Common Themes In Myths And Legends Across Almost All Cultures?/ When Did This Stuff Happen?/What Happened?/Why Do We Try To Remember? (Creation, Flood, Lost Continents, etc.)

#4 Life Is An Arbitrarily Defined State. There Is Far Less Difference Between Life And Death As Is Popularly Recognized. Consider a Virus. Living? Dead? WHERE DO WE DRAW THE LINE? This belief initially led me to believe that everything is dead, but as my cousin Michael put it, either nothing is sacred or everything is sacred.

#5 There Is No Fundamental Particle/The Universe is Limitless./Time is Limitless. This belief is based on a personal hunch. I do not claim to present any evidence supporting my argument. I believe that matter can be divided an infinite number of times into infinitely small particles. I also believe that SOMETHING extends infinitely outward, thus we will never discover an outward boundary of the Universe. I also believe that time extends infinitely into the past and into the future. By this I don't really mean that there could not be a beginning of time. I do mean that if there was a beginning of time, something MUST have come "before" that beginning, something must have given rise to that something, etc.

#6 Determinism- All Momentary Occurrences Are Necessarily Determined Entirely By The State Of All Things In The Moment Preceding.

I have just gloriously demonstrated my immense capacity for distraction. There are so many things to do think about and learn, which are equally inspiring to me, that I cannot begin to focus on ten, much less dedicate my life to one.

According to a book I began reading and never finished, entitled Aquarius Now, I do not commit to any one pursuit because I am afraid that I will succeed to the point of alienating others. That isn't how I think. My avoidance of commitment is in most situations simply an avoidance of a level of dedication that would seriously jeopardize my freedom to pursue what inspires me most at a given moment.

Shitluck

Luck is a kid jumping off a swing at the height of its curve and a forty-year-old folding a pair to rags. There seems to be a point in most people's lives at which it no longer feels natural to risk something essential in order to create a moment of perfectly reckless ecstasy. In short, most of us learn that the essentials are the essentials and that those muscle-driven explorations of space and declarations of war on its boundaries must surrender to the brute force of time. We learn that those battles are fought inside time's frame, appearing as a two-dimensional mess of color without meaning to those looking on from outside.

Yesterday, I noticed I was driving forty mph on the freeway. It was raining, I was a little sleepy, and I was being paid by the hour. These are good reasons to drive cautiously, which I habitually disregard. Is it time for me to begin paying life insurance out of my experiential bankroll?

A half hour ago, in the rain, my truck fishtailed, ran off a freeway onramp, and almost tipped. I got out of the truck and checked the damage. The woman in the car behind me pulled over and asked me why I was laughing.

There is a reason that these moments are moments and nothing else. They are framed in time for the same reason a picture is framed in space. If these tangles of intensity were not contained and set apart from the rest of our lives, they would bleed through time, diluted by the slow dull hours from 9-5 and the fast dark hours from sleep to rise. Constraint creates concentrated energy.

A moment being a point in time as a particle is a point in space, it is interesting that the more specifically defined in time a moment is, the more extreme the experience of it usually is. When we consider our experience of last year, it was always much less intense than our experience of the most powerful moment of the year. The more a moment is restricted in time, framed, defined as separate from the rest of time, the more energy that moment must hold. If it is not framed in time, its energy is lost to the automatic averaging of extreme highs and lows that our minds perform.

FUCK CONCLUSION. FIGURE IT OUT.