So, now’s kind of a weird time. I mean, since everything is happening in massive parallelism now, of course it’s going to be weird. But as with the future, the weird is not evenly distributed so there seems to be pockets of higher than normal concentration of weird. I suspect that the distribution of weird follows a power law, with most of the weird trapped in pockets of really weird shit, floating in a omnipresent medium of significantly less weird.
Anyways, I found myself sucked into one of these over the last – what has it been now? – few months. I model this phenomena as akin to big globs of water floating in zero G. Once you come close to one, surface tension just sucks you inside before you even know what hit you. And so I brushed up against some that just happened to be floating my way and I soon found myself surrounded by it and quite unable to figure out how to escape it.
Now, before you ask let me say I really can’t give you an accurate description of the phenomena. Much of it is personal and so it would be just meaningless blather to pretty much everyone except a select few who know of such events intimately. But you wouldn’t get an accurate description from them, either. Odd how much context this stuff takes before you can even get a tiny hope of using efficient communication protocols instead of hilariously long conversations about a single concept, axiom, or perspective transfer. But thems the breaks. It’s how this shit is done in the real universe.
But there’s a lot of stuff that can be spoken of. For example, I got this bitchin’ tattoo while I was down south. It was a thing. Been wanting one on the back for quite some time. Seems like I have been planning one for years, you know? Never could really think of what the hell I wanted to put there; what the hell I wanted to bind there for as long as I have skin. At least for the two tattoos I have, they’re bindings of particular times and places. Emotions, complex state vectors. That kind of shit. Since I’m fully expecting to get more tattoos, I’m sure I’ll come up with even more pretentious reasons as to why I got them. But hey, I mean, you’re having stuff carved into your flesh that never goes away. So, if you can’t have pretentious reasons for doing that, it’s my general opinion that you haven’t had things permanently etched on your soul before. That shit is the very definition of pretentious.
And so that happened.
I think it looks pretty good. But of course I would think that. No one else has one of those, though, as it’s original artwork. Everyone asks me what it means. I just kind of grin and out of mercy I simply don’t launch into a 15 minute recitation of the executive summary of my wacky inner world and how that expresses itself. Nor do I expound on what the artist was thinking because, frankly, I can only likewise guess. But it seemed to capture what I was looking for exactly. Or maybe it simply became a focus for such energies once it appeared in my visual receptors. I’m not sure I could tell the difference and the brain being the rationalization machine that it is could come up with any logical sounding explanation for that. So I don’t really bother at this point. It is what it is and at least it means something to me.
It’s enough.
But that’s not the really weird part to tell you the truth. As most people’s lives go, that’s probably well within their boundaries given that a significant percentage of the population know someone who has tattoos. Hell, they work with people who have tatoos these days.
No, life is weird beyond my normal ken because of an odd confluence of events that, perhaps in retrospect, were not entirely random. For instance, it’s not random that scheduled events occur. Planes regularly fly. People take them to destinations. They stay at hotels. It happens with planning and usually at least some sort of conscious intent. I like to think that shit doesn’t just happen. But then, who knows. Sometimes people do things impulsively, for no reason they can themselves discern. People have whims, of course. Usually these are relegated to small scale space time events, such as buying a package of M&Ms at the checkout stand. Sometimes they change the foundations of their life on a whim.
So I was a part of some of that. Weird stuff of the kind that you experience when a person or persons go through life changing events that will leave a permanent mark on their soul – well, while they still have it. They say that even that, in the fullness of time, eventually fades away. Or gets crushed inside the last black hole of the universe. I’m unclear as to whether everything is going to simply dissipate or ultimately get crushed when inflation ends. But regardless, that’s as good as forever to small scale, time bound entities like we find ourselves to be. Sometimes an hour seems like an eternity to me, so I’m not too picky on my scales wrt this domain.
And experiencing tumultuous changes turns out to be a pretty sensitive time. Because everything in your life is shattered, it sometimes turns out that one can experience things that normally would be too subtle – or too strong – to be noticed. Myself, this borders on the painful, at times, because – hey – when my life is in turmoil, you don’t see me running headlong to find more to jump into. Well, at least that’s the theory that I have which has oddly failed to generate any empirical evidence in support.
But hey, who needs evidence based reasoning anyway? Highly overrated. People who are shattered are, by definition, vulnerable to suggestion. And perhaps that’s why the do even weirder shit than normal. I don’t know.
But you can have some pretty good weird times when you’re trying to put shattered self back together. I think the key is to have some damn strong people around you that care for you. Or at least don’t suck and aren’t mean. But given you really can’t schedule these events (unlike airplane flights), you kind of have to take what you get.
Sometimes that shit works out and the result of the shattering of your life is that you can rebuild it from the ground up. Do it enough times, and sooner or later it becomes easier to do and not as much of a shock when it happens yet again. Through these cycles, sometimes you even get a glimpse of what remains despite the shattering of everything. Kind of the form that remains sort of stuff. Nothing revelatory, but I’m sure you understand what I mean. Also, too, it sometimes feels pretty good to simply shed all of what you thought was real, decided and for really, really sure and just stand naked in the middle of the pieces that no longer fit together. There’s a certain freedom in not knowing what comes next or how on earth you’re ever going to put things back together after all that shit went down.
So there’s that at least.
But people can’t stay shattered forever. Well, I mean they can. Obviously. But they don’t generally remain around that long. There’s a reason why we’re tool using creatures and build shit like homes, cars and frickin’ lasers. You can’t remain naked in a universe that is no safe place for the naked. Pretty soon you have cobble something together if you’re simply going to remain warm at night. And then there’s all those strange glowing eyes in the trees peering down on you. When you’re naked, you’ve got precious little to kick those would be predator’s collective ass. Well, I suppose if you’re the Buddha, you can. Eight fold path and all. But for the rest of us caught in māyā, we’re pretty much fucked if we don’t get our shit together pretty soon.
And so it goes. Eventually you find the boundary of the highly concentrated pocket of weird you find yourself trapped within and manage to swim out of it into the cool mist of weird that everyone else inhabits. You carefully note the blob of weird for future navigation, take a shit load of pictures and upload them to Instagram or something. You giggle at how lucky you were to be a part of that and wonder how on earth you survived for so long in such a high concentration of weird. And the memory settles into a bin that you label, categorize and file away for future replay.
Because, in some sense, we don’t really have the now. What we have are memories of the past. And replaying the weird times never really ever gets old, does it?
Especially when the universe starts reminding you as to why you’re a tool using creature and suggests that you might want to pay more attention to those glowing eyes that appear to be growing larger as they quickly approach.
A while ago, Robert Reich had a blog post up regarding the upcoming (now hopefully in progress) swing from liaise faire capitalism – where things have been for the last 30 years or so – 
I must be well into my fourth day of sensory deprivation because I’ve seemingly passed the hallucination stage, blew right past the psychotic stage of the second day and have been transported a place where newspaper taxis appear on the shore, waiting to take me away.