Echo: a voice reflected
2002-07-16 - 11:25 a.m.
Gary Gygax: *poking his head into the coffee-break room door* Has anyone seen my magic deck?
Other philosophers of the coffee-break room table: *stare at him with half a mind*
Freud: Come my boy, that was indeed a Freudian slip...I know what's on your mind now! you must have been thinking about it, long and hard, in the back of your skull...
Gygax: No Freud. Deck. d-E-c-k. You see, there's this collectable card game, and you need a set of cards to play...and when Wizards of the Coast bought us out, they gave me a few cards-
Freud: Oh, don't try to fool me with alternative definitions. Tell me, did you like your father as a child?
Gygax: *growls* I refuse to answer the question. If I say that I liked my father, you'll blow it out of proportion and say that I had some sort of ambiguous attraction to him, while if I say that I did not like him, you'll say that I have some sort of envious complex.
Freud: Aha, but your refusal to answer the question is indicative of at least one of the two being right-
Hume: *rushing into the room* Has anyone seen an early 20th century clock lying round?
Freud: I've got one for you right here, my boy!
There's this book...'A Separate Reality' by Carlos Castaneda. I've had the image of the cover burned into my head for the last week (I'm told by the microphone mirror* that some people get songs stuck in their heads the way I do books). Anyway, I made sure not to buy this book at the used book store...reading it would be like eating a may bug while it was still kicking (thanks goes to Tesla's neighbour-friend for the demonstration). Anyway, I found this book while cleaning an old box in my room. Evidently, I bought it and put it there to hide it from myself, because it was, mark-for-mark the same exact book from the used book store, and the one that had been on the shelf had gone missing. But I have no recollection whatsoever of buying it...don't really even know what it's about (something to do with practical parapshycology, I'm sure). Not sure if I can sleep in the same room with it, but I know that if I put it outside the door, it would find it's way in, doubling the mystery.
Dream: Short. Driving from one place to another, and the right-front tire of the van blows up. I had always pictured that when a tire blows up, flames are involved. Hence the name 'firestone', eh? But the tire seemed to simply expand (the air inside the tire had warmed) making it pop something awful. Then there was some spinning involved...and the spinning stopped sudenly, just when I was starting to get adjusted. Then the flames came, on the dash. They just sat there, a carbdoard prop of fire. Couldn't really tell where I was cut, there wasn't any sort of pain...adreneline has some wonderful effects. But I felt myself go into groggy mode, and then into passive-reflective, before I awoke.
I once heard it said, in the microphone mirror*, that this world is composed of one-steppers and two-steppers. I am a devout two-stepper, and I'd run everywhere (not just up steps) if I could get away with it without looking suspicious. Look suspicious enough as it is. But there's just no reason not to run, you know? Good exercise, of course, and who has the time nowadays to walk? Oddly enough, I find that it's more often the double-step-takers that walk, while the single-step-takers would rather drive a car around the block to avoid...whatever it is they're trying to get away from. And somewhere, I suppose that there are three-steppers, probability speaking. These are the members of the Polar Bear Club (TM), seventy-year-olds that get a kick out of freezing their balls off. One day, I wish I could be That full of the Energy.
Typos, continued. Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, page 194: misspelling; page 210, misspelling. The microphone mirror* tells me that Pirsig is one of the few writers that comes close to using my own natural writing voice. Methodical, theoretical, neurotic. But the content of this book is Child's play for Simon, back-burner thinking. Mitch and I were long ago comprehending the functionality-driven mentality of Americans, this 'underlying form' that he speaks of. A toy just isn't a toy unless it Does something. As for the romantic side of Quality, well, that's been something floating in my head for a while now. A drifter. I have no official definition of my 'romanticism' because I realized that it's more romantic not to have one. It's simply understood. Simple stuff, but I must say, I much enjoy the Everything of the book: 3.5 stars.
Woke up late one morning, 7:12. Raced around to get my clothes dry and ironed while trying to shave and brush my teeth at the same time. Long relaxing shower, and then back to rushing. Today's mystery Dissabled Sour Patch Kid (TM) was just a belly...no head, no toes. Walked through two time zones to get to work...the bank clock is ahead three minutes, Tony's is ahead two more; so the three-minute space between my house and my work takes roughly eight minutes. But I get to work, and see no 'open' sign on the front of the used book store...it's Sunday and no one succeeded to mention it [not neccessarily that someone failed].
The anti-materialist materialist. My generation, I may have mentioned before, tries very hard not to be concerned in affairs of money. They're too sick of the greedy baby-boomer attitude to care about such things. They want to think that they're beyond such trivial desires. But they are slowly realizing that worrying about money and being greedy are necessary evils in this country. You can't just rack up 30K in debt to go to college and expect to never have to pay it back. And there is talk in the wind of a new depression...it says �Warning: Stock up on rolls of Charmin!� Or maybe that was just a scare-tactic advertisement I saw on TV.
Got my first funeral junk mail last week, a hallmark in my future career: 'Mortuary Magazine'. I read through some of the articles, but it didn't really tell me anything I didn't already know. There isn't enough chemistry-talk in such publications.
Expression Problem: Ego Trip. Characters with this trait (ie Tony) generally only do the things that they think will give them more friends/credibility/etc. Around one type of company, they will act one way, while another type of company will make them act entirely differently. Most of the time, when the character's real personality is exposed, it is malformed/juvenile, because it has seen very little use in the sunlight of reality. For example, a character may pretend to be a generally nice host, but insult everyone in sight when they're driving down the street and thinks that others can't hear them. It's nearly impossible to get directions from such a person, as they will commonly mistake your right for theirs, or replace the word 'you' with 'I', 'yours' for 'mine'. When writing, their sentences may be overpopulated with references to themselves.
Expression Problem: Inability to Compliment. A character with this trait. While not inherently making the character evil, this trait makes it nearly impossible for him/her to compliment another living being. In extreme cases, a person with this affliction might have such high (or oddly placed) standards that only he/she can fulfill them, causing a general feeling of disconnectedness from what are really peers. When combined with the trait 'callousness' or 'gift of gab' the result is disastrous, making the person nothing but critical of and demeaning to others. ie myself.
Called up Lucy while I was downstate this weekend, mostly just to find out her current excuse not to see me...blackout. Hmm...new one, at least.
�I think she's going though menopause, but she hasn't paused yet.� -Mum, describing 'Babe', one of the local crazies of Exeter
Six people died in central Maine from car accidents this week, and one was from Exeter. Maynard...This guy kept a lot of people's cars together, at a reasonable price. Hell, he kept a lot of the people together directly. I think the whole town is showing up for his funeral. His wife is still in the hospital, and will most likely go into some sort of mental rehabilitation program to cope with the depression; the two were very rarely apart.
After telling me about this, Mum and I went on to discuss what people look like when they come out of electro-shock therapy. Surprisingly, she said they don't twitch; more surprisingly is what the therapy is commonly used for. Schizophrenia, of course, but more often it's used to 'treat' depression. So a woman gets into a car accident in which her husband dies and she is hospitalized, as in the case of Maynard's wife, and what do we do but try to 'shock' her out of her already-shocked and depressed state? Excuse me, but I do think there is such a thing as reasonable depression (otherwise why would the body use it as a reaction to loss?). I think that depression is something that has to be confronted, experienced, integrated into a person. Loss is so necessary to life that the doctors may be doing more psychological damage by taking it away (assuming the procedure was dependable, and didn't cause psychological trauma in it's execution, which it does [new term: excess trauma]). We went on to talk about the increasing levels of mental illness in the United States, as roughly three in every four adults have some sort of mental 'illness', most of which are clinical depression, chronic depression, et alii [latin: and similar others].Schizophrenia is rising, and Mum think that this is because of the improvement of radio technology. She thinks that people may be able to 'tune in' to radio frequencies, using parts of their brains that we think usually remain dormant. This also brings up the issue of mind-to-mind communication (telepathy), and/or the communication of more general 'emotional' states...tele-empathy? Anyway, she sees that eventually we'll need to repeat history again, and this radio-smog issue might be one day similar to our CFC vs O-zone problem. And at the end of the movie, the precogs get to live far, far away, in a countryside free of murder...
The majority of the remainder of this entry will be written in the style of post-american-chinese-food-stuffed-and-sleepy. Expect fuzziness to follow.
There's always a little message, just before someone says goodbye on the phone...it's not even something that has to be said, but it captures the essence of the conversation prior. Often, this message bears a certain 'sweet dreams' or 'luv ya' or pet phrase. I just got off a shortshort conversation with Kelly, in which she said �okay, well...have a good day at work, I guess�. I just smiled and reiterated, like all answering machines should.
�This concludes the service of her-name-here.� So far, this is the thing that pisses me off most about funeral service. The pastor/minister/what-have-you will say this at the end of a graveside service, basically saying to the family 'Okay, we're done. Get in your cars quickly so that I can get back to my supper.' It's to mechanical...the funeral service does not operate like an ATM...we can't thank the family for 'shopping with us' or offer two-for-one-deals. So, when/if I'm a funeral director, I want the officiant to say something more to the effect of 'thank you for coming, may god be in your hearts during these dark times.' (mostly because if I said something like this, I'd be looking down an atheist�s shotgun-barrel of a lawsuit for advertising God). But this statement also encompasses the same attitude, with a religious twist. Just another stone from the quandary quarry.
*'microphone mirror': They says that talking to oneself is one of the first signs of insanity, when in fact I think it's more of a low-level defense mechanism against insanity. People, as with dolphins, just can't stand loneliness for long periods.
