What keeps me up at night

Let me ask the faceless mass a question.

If you think about your existential status, and provided you are not concious for any sort of afterlife, a hypothetical-at-best scenario for even the most devout religious person, and you have imagined what it is like NOT to exist, have you ever found yourself on the cusp of revelation, yet scared of the reality of such an existence? Have you thought about the experience of no experience? The existence of null? The being of not being? The Thing of Nothing?

I do.

I do and I feel like it is a place that will kill me.

I try to imagine not existing and a remarkable thing occurs. It is almost like a gate appears before me. My mind, acting as a regulator, advises my wandering imagination to avoid this gate, but my curiosity pushes me closer. The latch swings open and gives me a taste of oblivion.

I dictate to my imagination the scenario of oblivion. "Blackness, no, not even, no eyes, no senses, no body, just infinite emptiness. " Then I think of the inevitability of such an experience, how we are in a constant state of decay, and realize that I will one day experience this emptiness, and that at a certain time in this existence, I will not. I will experience non-experience. After death, my body will no longer receive electrical impulses, no longer be able to interpret stimuli, and cut off forever my consciousness from the rest of the world. The gate swings open, and I am given a profound sense of dissonance, and worse, angst of crossing, as though I found the self destruct button to myself and I am coyly brushing the dust from it's red cylindrical surface, flirting with the idea of just mashing the button.

This is when the experience begins to disturb my psyche. I try to think of Heaven. I try to think of becoming a cow, or a fly, or a beetle. I try to think a great spirit will take my soul to join those who have gone before me. I try to think of existing beyond the universe. I imagine I become the pieces of a tree, as my body fertilizes the roots, embodies the bark, and reaches out from the branches. Then, the escapism of the impending null is broken by my own inquisitive imagination, recreating the prescribed scenario of empty nothing. It is almost like an alter-ego forcing me to look beyond at a possible reality of having no future beyond this "Mortal Coil". It is my Tyler holding my hand in the lye, reminding me of existence now and the void to come. "Don't look away. Don't block this out. We are learning something here. We are becoming enlightened"

I feel my life slip away. My finger outlines the Self-Destruct button. I take a breath. I put my index finger pad on the button and push until the resistance begins to give, and the button flexes. It feels like the emptiness is pulling my senses away, and for a second, I really do not exist. I never push the button until activation, mind you, but something sadistic and malicious inside me likes having that power, to tempt fate, to push only so far.

It's the same angst one feels looking over a high drop. Even with the arm rail there, a primal fear kicks in that directs your body to fear this height, to walk away. However, the charge and the rush of knowing that impending doom is only a misstep away also has its intriguing elements.

It is an interesting concept, the terror I feel imagining death without a conscious afterlife. It just causes so much dissonance that I can't sleep some nights. I start crunching fuzzy numbers in the waning light about the odds that even if I get into heaven, my spirit will be conscious for it. No one really knows if your consciousness is involved in the afterlife. Something not a lot of people have considered: your spirit mignt indeed go to Heaven, but there is no guarantee that you will experience it. What if even if there IS an afterlife, your consciousness only exists with the sensory array of the biological machine? Your spirit gets a "well done" and your body no longer experiences the world. Your spirit sees pearly gates, your body no longer functions. Your spirit gets a mansion, the body has no idea, and by this I truly mean NO Ideas.

What if what we call "consciousness" is really just your brains UI and when the system shuts down, the user gets up and leaves through the gate, we are left in this virtual OS of molecules and energy? What if the button powers off the system and leaves us in consolation, a pass up for a new model and our hard drives won't reformat or become an external drive to a new machine?

In the end, I sometimes lose myself in this concept and find myself later horrified. It ruins my sleep and traps my brains when I am tired and left to my own devices. I simply have the compulsion to explain this to the empty faces, until the feeling goes away, ignorance sets in, the lye is neutralized with vinegar, and I walk away from the gate to forget about its existence, and more importantly, my inevitable nonexistence. Life goes on, and I can continue with my cyclical, fractalized existence in this world. I can continue to punch my card and spend my time, go home to rest for the next day... until its facade is ruined again by my own imagination's wandering.

Why can't I just go on pretending I will live forever like all the other deaf-mutes?

Entropy and biology: the birth of the conflict of philosophy

As a future english teacher, I figure I need to write more. So as I find time waiting for the bus in the SUB, I figure I should flex my rhetorical muscles and do some reflecting, or something along that line of activity.

Well, I believe that I have rounded the spheres of philosophy into two schools. One of entropy and the other of biology. Entropy understands that everything is in a delayed state of decay. The world began as nothing and so it will return. Null and Void birthed light, matter, substance, structure, system, and it is within that understanding that we operate, understanding that life is slowly returning to the null and void. our right eye understands this world, as it is the eye that is connected to our left brain, that understands black and white, light and dark, and binary logic. Our words and language are a product of our understanding of the fact that all will die, and it is in the increase of decay that man excells over all other creatures. We created tools to speed up entropy and breakdown. We make sticks and swords and bows to hunt animals. When tribes rise up against tribes, it is the entropy that is being sped up to consume the other. Even in the binary understanding of "the other" we see that light and dark are a matter of being able to understand how the world decays.

The other philosophy, one of biology, emerges through the understanding of process. From the void comes order and purpose. From light comes mass, mass is organized into states, states create the composition of planets, stars, chemicals, and amino acids, amino acids are the building blocks of life, and on the top of that life is man. Our other eye, the left eye, the other eye sees the composition and is literate in the image, the big picture. We are all dying, that is true, and war increases the entropy, but we can also nurture, dress wounds, and make medicine. It is through our understanding that biology is forever fighting the null and void by making process and structure.

A balance between these philosophies are an ideology, a culture, a society. How far one establishes the ideas of either sphere demonstrates what kind of culture you belong to. A guilt culture understands that it is individual guilt that motivates the actions of a human being. A personal failure to dominate among others as an individual ultimately demonstrates the proness to entropy, and therefore it is the dominance over others that indicates status. Entropy is the bear that consumes the slowest camper, as the old joke goes. I don't have to outrun entropy, just be faster than the other people around me. Shame culture however, acknowledges that the system of community can combat the effects of entropy, and therefore the tennants of community and hospitality reign over all else. To fight against a force in the face of entropy is to be revered. People do not die; they return to the earth to continue the progression of the system. Entropy becomes nothing more than an inevidability, not the enemy. In fact, enemies are only those who practice these expediant methods of increased entropy. The image, the big pictuer is important. One dies for the many and the network of bards and oral teachers immortalize you in the system. The culture then picks and chooses its tennets of faith through the understanding of how entropy and biology play out. Every culture has a mix of all of the spheres of philosophy.

Hmm... The bus will be here soon. I'll refine this in subsequent posts.

The 3 Rule Challenge or, How I Completed a 14 Hour Car Ride by Bus in 28 hours

I have this theory. Inside a Greyhound bus, time speeds up. Somehow a novel pedestrian conveyance such as the cross country bus has mastered the control of time and space, a feat that quantum physicists are still striving for. For instance, by car it takes fourteen hours to reach Minneapolis, Minnesota from Bozeman, Montana, provided that the roads are icy and the vehicle that is being employed on such a trek is an inefficient SUV, forcing a stop at every gas station.

By bus this trip doubles, although the distance and speed limit stays the same, proving that time outside of the bus is moving slower than the inside. To break it down further, for every one hour a person spends outside a bus, two hours are spent by the people inside of the bus. A shift in temporal stasis is the only real scientific explanation. Or perhaps was it stopping every five minutes so that the driver could take a five minute smoke break? This answer seems more reliable than quantum theory, but not nearly as entertaining.

The first rule of bus travel is that the person sitting next to another person cannot be someone who the original person wanted to sit next to. This plays out thus. I sat down in my seat, threw my backpack into the overhead compartment, and removed from that backpack The Cheese Monkeys by Chip Kidd. The gist that I received of this book was the tale of an undergrad student in the 1950’s, and his struggle with the power of influence versus being within the constructs of societal generated safety. I had just reached the part about his art professor saying that everyone can call her Dotty, and thus providing the frame work for the rest of the book that nicknames can seem like they make someone naked. That is when a beautiful red headed woman sat next to me.

The odds of this gamble were that I would be sitting next to a middle aged man named Carl that had a pack of zigzags, cheap pipe tobacco to roll them around, a prosthetic appendage and never ending ‘Nam stories that always ended with the whistling through the gap in his smile where a tooth should have been. Instead of having a little peace, I would become privileged to experience the stench of latex under body odor under the smell of cheap liquor and Listerine, as the fellow’s leg disconnected at the knee to “air out” for a few miles.
For this more attractive outcome, most males would become quite religious, mouthing thank you to whoever they look at when mouthing thank you. Whether it is God, Allah, Fate, Brett Favre, Homer Simpson, Mom, either way, this chosen deity seems to live on a thankful person’s forehead as they appear to stare at the heavens looking for something deeper.

She asked what I was reading. I said that I was reading The Cheese Monkeys. She asked “Oh. Is it good?” I said “so far,” and continued reading. She then sat and faced away from me. Not only did she seem turned off by the idea of sitting next to me, but I knew that despite the initial attraction that I had to this women, I was going home to propose to my girlfriend which trumps any notion of a shallow flirtatious fling. On top of all of that, I have never been one to be that forward with my notions of attraction, in fact I had been best friends with my then girlfriend for three years before I asked her out. Hasty relationships were not what I was about. She sat next to me none the less, and as I speculated a nickname for Elisabeth, (For there were many: Elle, Beth, Liza, Libby. It’s like verbal Kama Sutra with a name. ) I remained tied to Chip Kidd and his novel. All I wanted now was the chance to read; she probably wanted a tattooed bruiser of an army man who just came back from war looking for a warm bed to give him a welcome back party. Both of our interests were thwarted by each other's presence in an uncomfortable seat.

I continued reading the book. The plot took me to a point where a professor was asking a group of students to create a poster that influenced someone to do something. One submission was a simple black and white text poster that read “Whatever you do, don’t think about elephants."

The second rule is that no matter where the location, the bus must stop every five minutes for a smoke break. The Non-Smoking bus drivers would bend this rule a bit but the hard core smokers seemed to pull over every time their Camel logoed watch pointed to a number in the minute hand. This allows for common souls to huddle together in the elements, freeze outside, and talk to people they would rather talk to instead of those they have been paired with in accordance with rule one. This brings up Chet, a navy guy from San Diego. While on this smoke break, Chet walked up to Elisabeth and introduced himself. She replied with her own title as “Lizzy,” and began to talk about who she was, what she liked, and why she was attractive to
this fellow. Chet had recently got on the bus at a stop on the fringes of the twin cities, in fatigues, so his exposure to the three rule bus game was short. It was only later in the trip that I noticed he was a 3 rule challenge hustler. Not only had he played before, but he was an expert on this little travel activity.

I stayed on the bus. I don’t smoke, although I do believe I have a second hand addiction to smoking. Sometimes I am just more relaxed and less edgy around people who are lighting one up. My minor addiction to nicotine is satisfied by standing next to people that have a more profound attachment to the substance. I fear that the only way to break that addiction is chewing already used nicotine gum or wearing a spent patch to cure secondhand nicotine addiction. We all have our corruptions, this is plain to see, and we are told to glance over them like they don’t exist, but the difficult part of that is avoiding the pachyderm sized flaws
that we are told not to look at. I stayed in the bus reading for 10 minutes, the smokers came on the bus at five minutes, so now the relative time warp of the Greyhound bus was satisfied at stasis again. The Diesel engine fired up and we were on our trek again.

The third rule is also very simple. All participants must acknowledge that the trip is temporary, and therefore acknowledge that all personal connection on a bus be superficial and anonymous. This is the demonstration of Chet’s savvy when it came to the three rule game. I try to bury myself in Chip Kidd, try to concentrate on a funny moment when a person in class demonstrates a word by signifying the word in its presentation. The fellow painstakingly made the word HOT out of match sticks and was given a C due to its inability to burn his finger when he touched it. The Professor threw him a Zippo lighter and told him to burn his project for an A. Not only did the student incinerate the project he worked so hard to achieve, but the glue he used exploded and left a large char on the wall of the cinder block classroom.

I couldn't pay attention. I was eavesdropping on the conversation that I knew I shouldn't be listening too. The problem was that his conversation was such a mammoth display of the power of anonymity it was hard not to listen to something I told myself not to listen too. Not two minutes after introducing himself as Chet, he puts his hand through his Mohawk and says “I’m sorry. My name is not Chet, it is Steve. I lie because I am insecure about myself and had a rough life growing up without a dad.” Lizzy, as it were, across the aisle, was enthralled with “Chet’s” "honesty" and continued on her smoke and mirrors rant about how so many people were shallow.

It’s one thing to be caught in a lie and have to tell someone that the person in question is not who he claims to be, but it seems that “Chet” had other things in mind. His idea was to burn the façade of what he was immediately to demonstrate a soft, scorched, vulnerable side, so that girls would like him and start a hasty romance that ends when the trip stops. This could only happen in the anonymous fling situation of the bus. Rule three was Chet’s advantage to take advantage of another person. It just so happened that Elisabeth was shallow enough to allow that advantage, or perhaps dying to be exploited by that advantage, to fall for such an obvious ploy. The flames consume the façade and they both get the A they wanted. The bus trip ended and Chet and Lizzy got off the bus hand in hand. Chet lit Lizzy’s cigarette with a Zippo and went on their way to the bus station restroom. Their time normalized while I still had 10 hours of a 5 hour bus ride to go. I finished my book, closed my eyes and reflected on the events of my travels. Perhaps in our anonymous selves, we have smoke damage of the corruptions that we want others not to see. We create illusions to demonstrate ourselves in one form, as well as metaphorical nicknames to demonstrate our seemingly unconscious desires, until we are touched by an observer that should not be looking at our faults by decree, but cannot resist. We are found to be false and then either burn away that falseness for our own credit, or allow it to take the form of the average everyday grade that is passed on to the people we meet. The final purpose of all of these illusions and monikers persists to create an illusion for ourselves to perceive the individual as more powerful than his faults and controller of his own destiny. This then contradicts itself in the practice of the flaws dictating how fast we progress along a highway of personal freedom and achievement of goals. It turns our claims of understanding liberty and freedom into understanding the boundaries of what is socially safe. We are afraid of ourselves and rely on the preservation of anonymity to spare us. The danger is that there are those among us who have learned to benefit from this dissonance and with that advantage, take what he wants from people who are sitting in the false security. Safety is at its core a social construct and leaves us ironically unsafe.

To sum up, Bus travel leaves way too much time to think about things. If ever given the chance to fly or go Greyhound, splurge on the coach seat. There is very little philosophy dealing with an hour flight there and back than a more than whole day’s worth of what should be a fourteen hour ride.

In Process

I have started the passing of my MySpace Blog to this location on Blogger. pork ay? you ask, well, after much encouragement by my wife to switch over, and the fact that no one uses MySpace anymore, I have decided that this is my best move. I will continue to place things in the blog every now and again, but at the end of all of this, there should be new stuff coming out soon.

Larger than Life (tissue warning)

I recently attended my Uncle Matthias's funeral.

Due to the fact that my father had about 17 brothers and sisters, there are many of my aunts and uncles that I don't really know all that well, and Uncle Matthias was one of those people. All I really remember was that at the baby shower/Wedding reception we had a few years ago, he and his wife Jane brought us a tree to plant for Lilas. According to his Obit, He was a man who loved life and those that were alive.

Let me explain a little bit further. He had a lot of cats. 11 cats, mostly walk in strays that he took care of. He also tended to his garden a lot. This seems kind of like typical things a 63 year old fellow would partake in, but it is a little deeper than that in my family. We are, from my observations, the stewards, caretakers, and the ones most attuned with life and lives.

See, my father enjoys it when the lake water runs over the bank in the stream. I always assumed it made for good fishing, but one day my dad related this to me that made him tear up a little. "Ryan, when I was younger, there was so much bad around me, so much death, then I would see the water rise over the bank. The water was just so full of life, I could forget how tough things were and revel in the living. There was just so much life..."

I think that we as Riojas's are quite attuned to life. We are sensitive to the little behaviors that are exhibited by living things and life in general. That's why we got a tree. I mean, Karen and I were registered at Target for gifts, and we had no place to plant a tree where we were living, other than at my parent's house. It was not a practical gift at all if one looks as it in a useful way. But this one gesture of good wishing seemed more a representation of Life than something that could be used for any useful purpose. My uncle was saying, whether he meant to or not, "Here is life! I'll give you life for your new life starting."

My father also is a man who is preoccupied by the essence of life. He is a hunter and a fisherman, as well as a 4wheeler officionatto, and spends his day at work providing heat to people who are cold. I myself find myself getting choked up about silly things like when people are offered jobs to be able to continue providing for a family. My dad is also an empathetic man, which I inherited from him in spades. We both have a desire to fix bad emotions in other people, to experiment with human reaction, and to make people laugh. By the same token, I guess I share the same sort of anchor to the well being of life to enrich my own.

The format of the funeral was to collect the family and have people share fond memories of my uncle. My dad took a turn.

"I remember that Matthias had a pretty blue car. He would give me and Danny each $2.50 a piece for our allowance and get into his car. Then he would say... 'Hey, each of you gimme a dollar back.' We would give him a dollar and he would peel out in front of the house. We would cheer and yell and have a grand old time. My brother Matthias was someone who was Larger Than life itself..."

I'm kinda choking up right now as I draw conclusions and parallels with my own life. I am seeing with each day that I grow older and older why my dad was the way he is; why he would ask me where I was going before I would hang out with my friends, and why he would give me 5 or 6 bucks to enjoy the outing without thinking about it. That's what my dad was shown about how to take care of someone younger than himself. To be larger than life is what it means to be a Riojas, to be a part of this family, to be a person so tied to the ebb and flow of life.

I now look at my dad with the eyes of a father. I see things that he is too humble to admit. My father has a million people that would take a bullet for him. The conversations I have with people I meet on campus is "your Tino's kid aren't you" that is followed by "Your dad is a great guy!" There are children being born in the family that people, on purpose, are naming after my dad. As sad as it is to lose a brother, an uncle, a father, a friend, a soldier, a caretaker, and a gardener, I believe it is Valentino Riojas's turn to be what Uncle Matthias was to him. It's my father's turn to be larger than life.

This post in particular made, and makes, people in my family cry.

Long time survivor of S.I.D.S

I am a year older and a year wiser. Ok bullcrap flag on the thirty, 15 yard loss.

Here's the world as I see it after a quarter century of breathing without choking.
1. Everything sucks.
2. Everything is beautiful.
3. Life is hard
4. Life is simple.
5. Sleep is optional
6. Don't believe the hype, what people say is bull to compromise your freedom.
7. Always get a second opinion. one person's word is hype, 2 people is solid science.
8. God is real, but the God most people follow is imaginary.
9. I enjoy video games, and drink coffee, but do you know what's addictive? Heroin!
10. Don't go outside. You know, global warming and all that.
11. All is legal until one gets caught.
12. A person cannot take someone's freedom, but when panicked, a person can give up their freedom to someone else. War is one of those panic inducing events
13. Money is a numeric value of what an employer feels that your freedom is worth, and upon purchasing your freedom on a pay as you go plan, they capitalize on working you more than they feel your freedom is worth. One day, You become a salaried manager, and thus you are updated to a subscription basis, where your employer decides that your freedom is totally expendable for the sake of his or her own ends. Then you retire and spend whats left of your freedom on not finally succumbing to S.I.D.S.
14. Everyone in this world is an ass. There are two kinds of asses in this world: Ones that are smart, ones that are dumb. The luckiest of us can choose which ones we will be on an hour by hour basis.
15. I have no problem with God, it's the fan club that I can't stand.
16. Giving your 110% is what stupid bosses ask of employees who probably have a better grasp on statistical math then they do.
17. Most controversy is not worth talking about until it can be talked about in a non emotional manner. Since most controversy evokes emotional reaction, this means that to effectively discuss controversy, we must wait until it is no longer controversial.
18. Politics is a way to place all of our responsibilities on someone else. Its how grown ups shirk their chores.
20. Most Americans are minorities. Ah, the English language, it is beautiful.
21. English is a stupid language.
22. I love sarcasm. Stupid people think I am complimenting them, and smart people get the joke.
23. I think Helen Keller said it best...
24. Those people who tell you that everyday is the greatest day of their life are lying to you.
25. Never cook bacon naked. The blisters are unattractive.

After all this time, you would think I had something deeper to say about the human experience. Well, I'm not that old yet. I can't spend too much time reflecting on that which is deeper than this. I have to wait until I retire to really understand what I just went through and what I truely know. If I were Descartes, I would have deduced that all I can really know is that I think. (Yes, most people get the quote wrong. "I think therefore I am" is actually a combination of two conclusions Descartes came up with in hes meditations. It really goes that he knows he could only conclude if everything is a deception is that he exists, and he thinks. It has nothing to do with generation of self as the dumb ones from the 14th point might conclude

here's to the night folks. Here's to another year under the belt. Yay, I'm not dead.

Wasting Time

One quick thing before I earn my nights repose.

I make 9/hour+tips at outback

Take out for taxes and my first paycheck was 75.07 for 10 hours of work creating basically, 7.51 per hour

3 of it went to cashing it
20 of it went to lunch of which I spent 10 on myself
30 of it went to take out for dinner of which I had a wonton or two and bites of each thing

43 dollars in one day converts into five hours that went to expensive food and over 50% of my assets (overshadowed by ridiculous amounts of over draft and credit charges) and 1 hour got to spend on myself for a burrito and a Sobe. Roughly 6 hours in essence got spent in roughly 6 hours. Every hour I do not work is an hour that gets spent in this case. I hope this pattern does not continue.

With this set of circumstances, is it any wonder I flip out at the slightest provocation and stay up all night with indigestion? Add in the fact that I don't really do much for myself and just about everything for the other two and 2/9 of a person that live with me and you will find a guy who just needed a good time for one day. So, I had a much needed release hanging out with my friend consequences be damned. It is 2, Lilas will be up at 7. I will take care of her, fall asleep on the couch and have nightmares of credit card companies calling my phone and doing chores to the point where I work a week in my sleep in reoccurring dreams. Only to wake up to credit card companies calling me and doing chores while I am awake. At this point, I need to say this and once again, consequences be damned. I needed tonight so anyone can say what they will and I will give them the bird and begone with it. Its late and I am going to sleep now.