Equals Force Times Distance

Of course I can't sleep.  Apparently I forgot to pay the mental peace bill.  Perhaps they went paperless, but I don't remember it coming in the mail, and not one phone call, not one.  Did I overdraft my account?  Did I not keep it current?  I've lived in the same house for over 6 months now, I should have a constant billing address.  But I'm still awake..  cringing.

I have been unemployed for over a month and a half now.  I have lost 15 or so pounds and I am going to the gym with my wife, something that I am not philosophically aligned with, but participating for the novelty of a 50 dollar a month bill.  It's not that I feel that it is silly, or I am too healthy for the gym, or that I would rather be fat, or that "Da Geem's too hawd... I huwt aw ovew."  It's more on the physics definition of work.   W=F*D that indicates that when I move equipment up and down, back and forth, around and around, and it returns to the same place, D=0 Therefore 0*F=W=0, nullifying any force that I expend at this supposed bastion of health.  In the end, working out in a gym according to physics is an oxymoron.  I am in fact convinced that for every hour spent in a gym, a person gains an hour at the tail end of their life, so spending the cartilage in your joints will ultimately yield a net gain of 0 years.  But I go despite this.  It's something I can do with my wife.   I still have a wife!  Lucky me.

Of course, I am using this formula of work to illustrate other things in my life as well.  I got fired from Wal-Mart over a stupid mistake that I made a few months ago.  It started much like this evening of latenight blogging.  I couldn't sleep.  I was finishing homework for class, reading texts, sorting MTG cards and found myself showing up late for work by a matter of minutes.  I clocked in late a few times, which I was reprimanded for and sent on my merry way.  Now fast forward to a month and a half ago.  I was scared to lose my job.  If I was running late, If my schedule was not perfect, if I wanted a few more minutes of study or a few seconds more with my family, or if someone needed something before I went to work, I was guaranteed to be stopped at every red light to work, and come in late.  If this sounds like an excuse you miss the point completely, in fact this is my mistake.  I seem to have been a push-over in my social life enough to take it upon myself to be a good person and care for my kids, make sure I had things covered, as well as slightly absent minded to not realize what time it ACTUALLY was.  I never wanted to be this guy who was always late, but here it goes, constantly over estimating myself and always finding myself lacking.  It is not the reason I got fired, it is the mistake that lead up to it however.

I started adjusting my hours, by a minute or two.  I did this a couple times, not to get paid for work I didn't do, but to try to keep a job I really needed to provide for my family.  My second sin was fear.  I felt that I could get away with it for a while, and when summer rolled around, I could get my shit together, show up early, work hard, go home and feel good about providing for my wife and children.

They fired me for misconduct.

Completely ineligible for unemployment, completely out of a means to pay for anything, completely back where I started, all of the force I was exerting  was canceled out by the amount of distance I had covered.  W=F*D, D=0 therefore F*0=W=0.

School as well has demonstrated that I am back where I started.  I am out of student loan money.  I had been using that stuff to live off of for the past 7 years, supplementing my shitty job with money that seemed to always disappear into last semesters expenses.  I remember a time in my life where I had 2000 dollars in my savings account, 1000 in my checking, a combined total of 3000 dollars of credit, a good attitude and a credit rating that looked like the record holder's score at a bowling alley after 3 games.  Now, I have nothing.  I have sold everything that I can sell, traded everything I can trade, I literally have no collateral to borrow, no money to use, no income, no force.  I am almost done with my schooling, but I have no foce behind it anymore, F=0, W=F*D Therefore W=0*D=0.

So I can't sleep.  Perhaps it is the lack of work I have done, not for a month and a half, for 7 years, I have expended force until I don't have it, and have gotten nowhere.  The bill collectors for my peace are hassling me now.  If the work was complete, I would have the distance and the momentum to pay them.  The penance of my sin I would figure is the collections department trying to take my stuff and realizing that all I have is shit and stone.  Nothing to pawn, nothing to put up for collateral.  I am out of options. 

10 commandments for a modern audience

     We as Christians have spent a long time trying to make ourselves (rather others) feel bad.  A grand history we belong to of torture, self-flagellism, inquisition, and incineration, and all for the betterment of ourselves and for those who are not in our world of invisible fathers and blood drinking.  It gets fairly extreme when we are in charge of things, but when we are not leaders of our realms, not the pope, not the pentecostal preachers with a large congregation, not the evangelist commanding a crowd of loyal ticket holders, we still try to turn the mood on things that could be enjoyed, and all for the sake of our piety.  For instance, when given the 10 commandments in a modern context, we ran into an interesting predicament.  The first rule of God Club was "No Gods Before Me."  The second was "you can't have their merch either."  (well technically, you could not make their merch, but as we will see shortly, what the words say makes little difference.)
      Now, most of us who were reading or hearing this were being taught about following God.  These tablets came from God himself  in order to make us better people after all, and everything in the bible is "Useful for teaching, instructing... uh... gimme a second... wait, REBUKING!  we have rebuking in that line from Timothy!"  This begins our search for the anti-God in the room.  Well, most of us, if we were learning the 10 commandments belonged to a homogenous group of Christianity who, throughout 2000 years has crystallized the beliefs into the only correct interpretation, and embodied it in our denomination of faith; the other denominations are all going to Hell.  So, we have a good bead on things.  What is our other gods?  We all believe there is one God!  Even if you ask the drunk guy in the bar, he can say that there is one God!  Our God totally kicked the hell out of every other heathen god in our country and is continuing the proud tradition of kicking asses and taking names. 
     This is when we looked at our world and ironically deified things that God could fight.  "Movies are a God" we said, and pitted Sunday morning against Friday night at the multiplex.  "Drinking is a God" and now God could go after everybody's wine, except for the ones that turned into the blood of our savior on Sunday.  "Television is a demon that we have in our very livingroom!"  and so to watch TV became a religious experience.  If you were even thinking about a sitcom or the news, you may as well have roasted a chicken in your living room in honor of the cult of Nielsen and Farnsworth.
     We were molding graven images of False Gods, in violation of God club's second rule, in order to follow the first rule.  No one realized it.  As a result, we became oppressive, hypocritical and elitist, but most of all, we started to condone sin.  Instead of being in the congregation, we began to gossip, which if you didn't realize yet is to bring false witness against ones neighbor.  In reaction we said that gossip was alright so long as it's true because then you aren't lying.  (See, the wording of the commandment is not important, rather the ignorant translation.)  We walked around in our smugness and told people to stop saying "Goddamn, and JESUS" while we called on his name while full of our self-righteous sin.  We never killed anyone (An improvement from our days of burning Muslims) or stole, or committed adultery, (unless of course we did, then we would ask for forgiveness)  We never coveted other peoples things, but we did try to dress in our "Sunday best" in order to inspire the covetous attitude in others.  We honored the Sabbath day very well, including resting our wallets when it came to tip the servers at the restaurants we ate at after church.  She would probably spend it all on her false gods of baby formula or rent.  She isn't honoring the Sabbath today because of her god the power bill, so we are going to be rude.  Then, for compensation for her minimum wage job, we'll leave a tract to save her eternal soul, instead of the 2 dollars on a $60 bill.
     So we went home and repented of our worship of material things, and went to bed with most of the 10 commandments broken.  Of course, we break commandments in the way that Moses broke them, to prove to sinners that God hates them and put their sin in the drinking water (Well, at least rub it in their faces.)
     I do not know why our group wants to put so much suffering in the world.  I don't know why we waste all this time inventing sin when Jesus pointed out that sin is everywhere so long as you care not about your fellow man.  You sin against the other sex not by raping that person, but by treating that person as an object, not as a fellow human being.  The moment you justify a bad situation for a man as being a flaw in his moral fiber, you have in essence ruled on his character before knowing the whole story, effectively baring false witness to yourself against your neighbor.  The moment you invent a god out of innocuous items, you are making images of gods. And finally, by doing all of these things and still walking around with the banner Christian, we take God's name in vein.  We are a destructive bunch for some reason, and for that I've tried to keep a safe distance from those who call themselves Christians, glue fish to the trunks of their cars and tip badly on Sundays.  Those are the ones who crave power, who want inquisitions, who want to beat themselves with whips and convince those who don't that it is fun.  These people are the ones that can't stand sin so much that they refuse to see their own, and, while I am aware of mine, I work my faith out with fear and trembling. 

The Endgame is Absurd(ist)

When my generation was born, we were sat in front
Of a chessboard, the Babyboomers on the opposite
On a preplayed game that the Boomers wanted to finish
In the stead of The Greatest Generation.
And boy were they impatient, We didn’t know how to play
We learned quickly though, But realized that it
Was rigged, despite the fact that The boomers assured us
That it was always a fair situation.

My first observation that
They played white,
Got their turn first and
Controlled 99
Percent of the board,
And the only pieces we had
Were a king, a couple of
pawns, and rooks.
“If you feel jealous,
Maybe you should have
Saved your pieces
Across your line,
And played the game as
Well as I,”  They said.
We retorted “however, we have
Bought some books

In preparation for this game,
They tell me you had
Your daddies’ help you
With your moves,
To make sure you had
A chance of winning, then thanked them by
Cutting his social security,
Until of course you needed it
Yourself, then you said thanks
For the head start, now
I need to collect.
My need behooves.
So you took pieces from me
To secure your old
Age, to continue the game
Perhaps to prolong it.”

And here we were, ill equipped,

going through our lives,

made to suck down Ritalin,

when we spoke up, when we challenged the authority

Drugged up and strung out, 

commiting suicide, and other

atrocities while the doctors said 

our activity was a symptom.

imbalance or disease, opinions 

are the proof of infirmity

ailment, not thought.  You called 

our opinions hyper-activity and

through drugs, guilted our parents 

and into buying them, but perhaps we need return to the game.

 

“Taking pieces is part of the game”
said the babyboomers to my peers
Said us, “but you took our best and brightest,
and took them for your own gain.
Look, my knights are dead
because you disallowed to be used,
a few moves from my most powerful
pieces, the most keen
The ones that could speak Arabic,
that were proficient with their weapons.
And you decreed this,
because in your brain
It was better to keep up
with appearances while escalating war.
Personally our generation
doesn’t care if he was a Queen.”

“That was a moral choice”
blurts the boomer smirking slyly
“you want to talk of morality? 
Let us look at your bishops gyrate
Crookedly across this whole board,
covering each other
With relocation, for they never
cross the same path since
The one in the light prevents
the contraception of rape
While the one on the black squares
exercises his ability to participate
in it, by sneaking up on
the smallest of my pawns from behind
And taking them off of the board,
and with it their innocence.

Is it any wonder then,
Why my generation
Has forgotten its religion,
Sacrificed all of its bishops
In favor of protecting ourselves? 
To decide for ourselves
What is right and wrong and
Not listen to a central fallible
Human?”  We asked rhetorically
To this bloated spoiled opponent
Adjusting in his seat,
Sweating like he was doing push-ups,
Speechless. We continue
To question the game we play,
“I have covered war then morality,
What other things are allowable?”

“Look at our castles, 
We can’t move to them,
We can’t seem to live in a home
That’s not a wreck
With my job we can’t get,
The degree that we were given
To insure that I’m not flipping
Burgers, but that insurance was denounced,
So every time I move
In position with my rooks
To endanger your king,
To put it in check,
You throw a tantrum,
And hand hits the table.”
“Well, far be it from me to concede a castle,
 Can’t you see your checks bounce?”

“Well, that’s pretty funny,
But with all of your money
I can see that you’ve pinned in
My king.  Your mansion,
Your castles, to the left and to my right
Of him; even my king is a pawn,
Moving slowly to
Your side of the board,
But none of my pieces
Come back when he reaches the
Other side, and if he did,
Would he be, pinned down.
Oh there goes my pawn,
My rooks, what fun,
Now my King is in stalemate,
Finally peace from this game.
I cannot move now and
Now the game ceases.

“No, the game doesn’t end” 
They said with a giggle
And gave us a sadistic grin
And leaned back. 
They had control of all the toys
In the playroom, including
The ones for the outside,
Surely even by the balls
They had us.
When we tried to tip the king,
To forfeit and occupy, they said
We had nothing to say,
And into our eyes
With a pepper spray attack.
So we have to wait for the
Babyboomer to die, just so we
 

Can pick of the pieces. 
Then the board will be just,

But in the midst of the
Game we were playin’
They set up another
Board for their spoiled children.

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.