BackTalk db | The ICouldBeWrongBut.com Archive | Complaint Department Share
Was $14,345.95— |
|
|
 |
VELOCITY 9 Odd Stories of People in Motion "I came across one of your inspired ramblings while doing some research on air horns. (Yes I know it can’t always be a purposeful life.) I could not stop reading... I have not laughed that hard since I first discovered Carl Hiaasen" Matt B. "I like this. It has waves in it, man. There are waves all through it." Ed Coonce, Agent Provocateur "It is commonly said that Americans don't understand
irony. You obviously do. And I enjoy your writing enormously!" Gara, Australia
|
 |
HAPPY ACCIDENTS "Write. Exercise. Shower. I love this David. And I REALLY needed to read this now. Aside from, "I give this a year at best," I've never tried out my own mantra." Traci Foust, Author of Nowhere Near Normal (Simon and Schuster Spring 2011) "Hot F$#@&(^ Damn! I love this: We're All Going to Die! It wanders and I wonder where we are going but I love the ride. And Golly! Gee Whiz! Mr. Wizard. I understand the free fall but how does that work with Total World Domination? I hope that women are allowed to use the male affirmations in similar situations. |
 |
QUO VADIS, DUDE? "Running Away. Loved it... loved the subtext... Your story really got me to thinking about running away versus confronting, and it occurred to me, after reading your examples of how people run away, that maybe, there’s no such thing as either. When you get married you are running away from the sadness and loneliness of single life and running toward the sadness and loneliness of married life." Edwin Decker, columnist "Grand Canyon will resonate with many, not just angst-ridden self-centered navel gazers such as myself. I want to use the phrase "would give a hundred thousand rat's asses" sometime soon." Patty Kadel, Cartoonist |
Either And Or
©2010 David Boyne
"Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom."
—Søren Kierkegaard
"Don't forget to love yourself."
—Søren Kierkegaard
I no longer read novels.
They burn up far too many hours of my closer-to-the-ending-than-to-the-beginning Life. Besides, all the people, places, and things in a novel are figments of the author’s imagination. (Which is a polite way to say novelists are bullshitters.) Novels are expensive, too. Why would I pay someone to lie to me? If I want to be lied to, I can turn on the television. So many advertisers are competing for 15 and 30-second spots in which to lie to me, that they’ve paid for all the television programs, including the so-called news. (C-Span does not need lying advertisers; it has politicians.)
Reading a novel, I’m stuck with just one bullshitter. Watching TV, I have dozens of channels and hundreds of programs to choose from, a veritable smorgasbord of bullshit.
Both novels and television programs promise fascinating characters having wild adventures while in the pursuit of happiness. But it’s all just pretend. (Pretend is a polite word for bullshit.) When I want stories about real fascinating people having wild adventures while in the pursuit of happiness, rather than buy a novel or absorb the radiation from a glowing television screen, I read an obituary.
An obituary, any obituary, shows how a life, any life, has a far more complexicated plot than a novel. And obituaries are fast reads—an entire Life will flash before your eyes. And if you are Mark Twain, the obituary you read could be your own, and you would then make the immortal observation, “The reports of my death are greatly exaggerated.”
I could be wrong, but in every novel, and in every television advertisement-program, there is an ulterior motive to convince you that different roads will take you to different places. (Ulterior motive is a polite phrase for hidden bullshit.) Obituaries are open, honest, and make the casual chain of events we call Life—vividly clear. Obituaries prove that we influence everything—and control nothing. Obituaries prove that all roads lead to where we are going.
Recently, I read the novel obituary of a Japanese man who ended his very long life, by dying.
The road he took to get there included being a young man on a business trip in Hiroshima on August 6, 1945 at 8:15 in the morning. Which was when the 139,928,165 or so people of the United States of America, acting through their duly and democratically elected government, dropped a nuclear bomb on the 350,000 or so people who lived in and around Hiroshima, Japan.
The young man on a business trip in Hiroshima survived the nuclear bombing.
He hit the road again, leaving behind the instantly holocausted city of Hiroshima, and made his way home.
To Nagasaki.
Three days later, on August 9th, he was home in Nagasaki when the 139,935,786 or so people of the United States of America, acting through their duly and democratically elected government, dropped a nuclear bomb on the 240,000 or so people who lived in and around Nagasaki, Japan.
The young businessman survived that nuclear bombing, two.
So, I ask you, and while I’m at it, I shall cc God on my question:
Was this guy Incredibly Lucky—or—Incredibly Unlucky?
Since both you and God have failed to reply, I shall find my answer the way I find all my answers, by moving on down the road.
The longer I wander through this wind-tossed world of forms, and the more roads I take that bring me back to where I started, the more I understand that all the many splendored disguises of the choice Either-Or, are false. (False is a polite word for bullshit.)
How does one detect the disguised versions of the false choice, Either-Or? In the open source code called English, one clue is any word ending in “est.” From the shortest, Best, to the longer, Brightest, to the longest, Bullshittiest, any word ending in –est is about excluding all but the Chosen One, or Chosen Few. You are either the Richest or the Poorest, the smartest or the dumbest. There is no Middlest. But there are also more subtly disguised Either-Or choices, far more difficult to detect. I shall now perform a public service by outing a few: yes or no; have or have not; to be or not to be; do or do not; for or against; paper or plastic; good or bad.
That last one is a real piece of… work. Good or Bad.
We are taught from birth to label everything we encounter as we navigate this wind-tossed world of forms as either Good, or Bad, and to then place each thing we label on the continuum between those two dead ends.
I think (deep breath) this is bullshit.
I think (deep breath) it would be a far, far better thing to do, if we taught ourselves from birth to label everything we encounter as we navigate this wind-tossed world of forms as, And.
And also comes in many splendored disguises. So that I can claim to be Fair and Balanced, I shall now publically out a few: yes; maybe; okay; I haven’t a clue; is that so?; thank you; come in; how may I help you?
Either, and its Siamese twin Or, do not exist outside of human thought.
And exists in our thoughts, and in the outside world. Everyone is alive and dead; every glass is half-empty and half-full; every answer is yes and no; every color is black and white and Technicolor®; every particle is here and there and at the same time. Just ask any quantum physicist, Zen Buddhist, and human being under the age of three.
Or is the Great Excluder. Or is Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus standing on the school steps to prevent children having failed the Black Or White test from getting a public education. Or is Clarence Darrow arguing that Man made God in his own image, not an ape’s. Or is George Bush deciding that you, yes you, are Either with us, Or against us, and if with us you should continue shopping, and if against us you should prepare for mini-Hiroshimas of drone-delivered bombs raining on your homes, Toyota pickup trucks, and wedding ceremonies.
Either-Or requires you, when confronted with a question, to make a choice; one, single choice. And requires you to become aware that Life is nothing but an endless series of multiple-choice questions that have the same answer: All of the above.
Or requires endless exhausting effort, because Or is a struggle against entropy, which is a word to describe how everything inside Universe (other than humans thinking thoughts of Or) flows along the path of least resistance. Or requires a policy of Zero Tolerance. And requires a policy of Zero Maintenance.
In fact, And requires only that when you encounter some thing, any thing, you accept it. That’s all there is to And. Do not mind anything that happens. Do not decide that what happened was meant to happen. Do not decide that what happened was not meant to happen, should not have happened. It happened. Accept it. And move on down the road. Any road. Even the road from Hiroshima to Nagasaki.
Once upon a time, everyone who was anyone believed the Earth was flat. Lo! They discovered it was an oblate sphere. Then they believed the Earth was the center of a spinning Universe. Lo! They discovered the Earth was spinning around the Sun. Then everyone who was anyone felt exhausted and declared, “Fine. The earth is an oblate sphere spinning around the sun. But let's stop here. Let us rest on our self-awarded laurels. What’s for lunch?”
However, the advocates of And, also known as heretics, continued making new discoveries. They discovered more planets spinning around our sun. Then discovered other Suns—with planets spinning around them—and then discovered our sun and its planets and these other suns and their planets were spinning inside a galaxy of 100 billion stars. Followed by the discovery that our galaxy was spinning inside some thing containing 300 billion other galaxies of 100 billion stars. Each. And then it was discovered that the Universe was, and is, running away from home. That is, expanding.
And while all of this was unfolding, other heretics were busy discovering molecules, inside which they discovered atoms, inside which they discovered sub-atomic particles, around which they discovered the stuff that was around the planets and stars, Space. They also discovered that light, which traveled through Space, was both particle and wave, depending on the road it took, and maybe on its mood.
Those who spend Life fighting wars of Or are always defeated. Always.
Those who spend Life as conscientious acceptors are always defeated, too. They just realize it, and accept it, sooner. And later.
About that young Japanese businessman upon which our American ancestors dropped two nuclear bombs? He was unlucky. And lucky.
His revenge was the sweetest, and in fact, the only true revenge. He lived long and prospered, having many adventures while in the pursuit of happiness.
Click this link to BackTalk db!
Want to waste some more of your once-in-a-lifetime Life? Visit the ICBWB.com Archives!It's All Your Fault
©2010 David Boyne
"Be the change you want to see in the world."
—Mahatma Gandhi
Once upon a time, I was a world-weary fifteen-year-old. My first mid-life crisis, which had come at age seven when I became convinced I would be dead by 14, was safely passed. But the shock and awe of still being alive—was shocking and awesome. In response, I had my second mid-life crisis, and became convinced I would be dead by 30.
Confronted with the hard reality that I must continue to live until I died, I became desperate to find a posture, or failing that, a philosophy. My hope was that I could use that posture or philosophy like a map, and it would guide me, if not through the rest of my once-in-a-lifetime Life, at least across the terrifying terra incognita of my well fed, well sheltered, well doctored, absently parented and indifferently educated adolescence.
It was then that I made a Major Discovery: The absurd philosophy of Marx.
I refer of course to Groucho Marx, not to Karl Marx, an equally absurd but utterly humorless philosopher.
One of Groucho Marx’s greatest treatises became the anthem of my adolescence and did in fact guide me through the dark age of my high school years.
An excerpt for your enlightenment:
Whatever it is, I'm against it.
No matter what it is or who commenced it,
I'm against it.
Your proposition may be good,
But let's have one thing understood,
Whatever it is, I'm against it.
And even when you've changed it or condensed it,
I'm against it.
Curiously, the same anthem of Universal Opposition that I held at age 15 is now the anthem both of the 156-year-old Republican Party, and the infantile We’re Sick And Tired and Not Going To Take It Anymore Tea Baggers.
(Pardon me, whilst I don my powdered white wig, adopt my most snidely condescending tone, and employ my snuffbox.) I must say (sniff!), I find it amusing (sniff!) how angry these parties are. Apparently, the bumbling effort to provide affordable health insurance to their fellow Americans is a far greater threat than even the madman Saddam Hussein who, lest we forget, had amassed enormous quantities of biological, chemical, and nuclear Weapons of Mass Destruction (sniff!), all of which, according to these same angry people, were aimed and ready to launch—the moment Saddam’s mad fancy was tickled to see mushroom clouds over American cities.
But that’s another essay.
I can tell you from personal as well as impersonal experience, that being angry and being against everything is hard, thankless, and completely unrewarding work. A lot like being a high school student, or teacher. Nevertheless, those who shirk the hard work of anger and resistance are beneath contempt. They should be heaped with scorn, and made to pick up the litter we throw from our cars along our roads and highways.
Yes, they should be punished. To Punish, lest we forget, is the third and final step of the Rule of Law. It comes only after the second step, to assign Blame, which comes after the first step, to find Fault. Only when we have successfully persuaded a judge or jury of our peers that we have found the Faults of those we Blame for what angers us, can we then, with a clear conscious and elevated contempt, trundle them off to the hoosegow.
Which is to say, Punish them.
And then forget about them.
Until the cost of their incarceration becomes burdensome, and we release them, tagging a choice few, like trout, with ankle-strapped satellite monitors, a cost-effective means of catching them at Fault again, Blaming them again, and Punishing them. Again.
But that’s another essay.
(Wig, condescending tone, snuffbox) I must say, I also find it thoroughly amusing that Fault, Blame, and Punishment do not exist in Nature. These are no more than conceptions conceived by man.(sniff!) They are unnatural, like artificial sweeteners, which are confections conceived by man. (sniff!) Much like humankind’s other magnificent concoction, Time, which also does not exist in Nature, yet allows us to pretend that everything is not happening at once. Yet, what else would one expect from those who create God in their own image? (sniff!)
But that’s another essay.
Up to the age of 35, I was, to varying degree, angry and against, at and about, practically everything. It was Me against the World. Alas, this battle was as scripted as any in professional wrestling, and I lost every round.
But after 35 years of the World Headlocking me, Bitch Slapping me, Leg Choking me, Pile Driving me, Clotheslining me, Modified Swinging Neckbreakering me, not to mention Samoan Dropping me, and Top Rope Bulldogging me, I began to see, through my bloodshot eyes, stars.
Or rather, I began to see a shining Law of Nature.
Yet, I could not quite translate that natural light into the open source code we call English.
It was then that I made a Major Discovery: This time in the teachings of yet another absurd philosopher, Carl Jung.
What we resist persists.
Slowly, ever so slowly, sunlight began to penetrate my benighted world. Slowly, ever so slowly, I began to cut some slack for myself, and for everyone around me. Slowly, ever so slowly, I began to yield, to bend, and to flex, to give in, and to give up. I petitioned the World for a negotiated surrender.
But the World would offer no terms, only absolute submission. Yes: Total World Domination.
I was left with no choice but to stop being angry all the time and fighting against everything all the time. Slowly, ever so slowly, I perfected the art of surrendering without a struggle. I became a pacifist, a conscientious acceptor.
Well, not really.
But it sounds so much better when presented that way! As if all my battles were won! I mean, as if all my battles were over, without having to fight them.
They were not, and are not.
But that’s another essay.
While I wholeheartedly believe the judgments of Fault, Blame, and Punishment are paranoid delusions I share with the rest of humankind, there is one really big and scary thing Out There that is not a delusion. It is real.
Response Ability.
Or, when said fast, responsibility.
Response Ability is irrefutably real. (Note how I do not write, undeniably real, as we humans are masters of denial, and have denied everything, absolutely everything, at one time or another.)
But that’s another thousand essays.
We have the ability to respond to everything. And in fact, because Response Ability is a Law of Nature, we have no control over it; like gravity, or electricity, our ability to respond exists apart from us; we respond to everything, absolutely everything, on all levels, biologically, emotionally, intellectually, electro-magnetically, whether we are aware of our responses or not.
Every breath we take, every move we make, every kiss we fake, is a response.
The only people who do not respond are dead people.
But that’s another essay.
Last Tuesday at 7:17am, I made a Major Discovery: While we cannot turn our Response Ability on or off, we do have a shocking and awesome amount of control over how we respond to what is, to what happens, and to what could be, or what could happen.
When we choose to be angry, to be offended by, to be against what is or what has happened, our Response Ability is diminished. The World has us in a headlock. It is only when we first accept what is, that we have the option to slip out from its grip and go about our merry way.
Reality never changes. Only our response to it does.
Go ahead, be afraid, be very afraid. Be anxious. Be angry. It doesn’t change a thing.
Except you.
Go ahead, be confident, be very confident. Be peaceful. Be happy. It doesn’t change a thing.
Except you.
Haven’t you ever wondered why it is that every single time our planet is invaded by Superior Beings From Outer Space, they all have the same advice, "Resistance is futile!"
How do they know that?
Maybe that’s why they’re superior.
But that’s another essay.
Share on Facebook
Click this link to BackTalk db!
Want to waste some more of your once-in-a-lifetime Life? Visit the ICBWB.com Archives!Feng Shui This!
©2010 David Boyne
"Arrange what comes to you ."
—Virginia Woolf
Why do so many people need eyeglasses?
To find the answer, I lighted candles, burned sage, and queried The Oracle Who Lives In The Cloud.
In other words, I Googled: Why do so many people need eyeglasses?
Depending on which source you source, The Oracle Who Lives In The Cloud revealed that 50 to 75 percent of us require some form of vision correction. I could be wrong, but if our ancestors had vision as poor as ours, would we have evolved to the top of the consumer credit chain?
Digging deeper, The Oracle Who Lives In The Cloud revealed that in 1977, two scientists, Torsten Wiesel and Elio Raviola, were so keen to learn why so many of us need eyeglasses, contact lenses, and radial keratotomy, that they got some newborn macaque monkeys to volunteer to have one of their two eyes either sewn shut or sealed with injected glue. From this experiment the two scientists learned that the eyeballs of the volunteer monkeys, and perhaps those of we humans, their genetic cousins, were shaped by the focused light that falls on the retina. Apparently, the eye's way of learning to see, is by seeing. Wiesel and Raviola then learned, this time by cutting out the optic nerves of volunteer newborn macaque monkeys, that the eye independently continues to respond, and grow, and develop in accordance with the light entering it—even though the owner of the eye is blind.
How does this answer the question, Why do so many people need glasses?
Damned if I know. But isn't science amazing?
Besides, that's how Oracles traditionally answer all questions, with riddles.
And besides besides, the test of good science is not so much that it yields answers, but that it raises brave new questions.
For example, after their experiment concluded, did Wiesel and Raviola gather all the volunteer monkeys they had made myopic, pile them into their station wagon, and drive them to the mall to have them fitted with discount designer eyeglasses? And in gratitude to the volunteer monkeys they had blinded, did Wiesel and Raviola provide them with white canes and golden retriever guide dogs?
After further consulting The Oracle Who Lives in The Cloud, I learned that the most widely held theory on why so many of us require corrective lenses—is the very invention of corrective lenses—back about 700 AD or so. Our wearing of eyeglasses led to the super quick, in evolutionary terms, devaluing of human sharp-sightedness in natural selection. You see? In other words, wearing eyeglasses allowed dweebs, weenies, wimps, and geeks to reach maturity, seduce mates, and pass their myopic genes on to their progeny who then created the Renaissance, followed by the industrial, scientific, computer, and information revolutions. (Folks who think ubiquitous video games, phones, instant messaging, texting, email, internet, and 24/7 information bombardment will have no influence on human evolution should think deeper. Or maybe get a few monkeys to blind.)
Everything influences our evolution.
Now.
The reason I was wondering why so many of us need eyeglasses is that recently, while driving my sofa, I visited myself when I was eleven-years-old and in the fifth grade.
But damn if someone in the audience doesn’t interrupt me, asking, Drive a sofa? How do you drive a sofa?
Annoyed, I choose to answer as an Oracle would, in a riddle. My car is my preferred mode of transport for getting to my job, getting to the beach, and getting to other places that can be found on maps. But when I want travel to a place that cannot be found on a map, to a place over the rainbow, or in the frothy and expanding wake of my past, or perhaps to a place in an imagined future, one in which I am spending two weeks at the Plaza Hotel locked in a suite with Marisa Tomei—it is for these journeys, that I drive my sofa.
My interrogator fails to solve the riddle, and asks, What's that got to do with how to drive a sofa?
I choose to answer by wrapping a riddle inside an enigma. While driving your car to work in rush hour, and listening to the radio alerts of obstacles in the road, have you noticed that sofas are the third most common object reported as blocking the number two southbound lane of Interstate 5?
My inquisitor pauses to absorb this. Then asks, What the fuck does a sofa in the number two lane have to do with how to drive a sofa?
With Zen detachment, I answer. Nothing.
There is a commotion in the audience as Torquemada rushes the stage, wielding a scalpel and threatening to cut out my optic nerves. Just my luck, a scientist.
I then answer quickly, forthrightly, and fully:
How To Drive A Sofa
by David Boyne
©2010
Licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works
3.0
United States License
Driving a sofa is easy, fun, and safe! You do not need a license, or insurance, and It is definitely one thing you should try at home—and not in the southbound number two lane of Interstate 5. Whereas driving a car under the influence of alcohol or drugs greatly impairs your ability to refrain from killing or maiming yourself and others, driving a sofa under the influence of alcohol or drugs greatly increases your ability to journey to magical, mysterious, and unmapped places.
Enough pep talk. Here it is:
There are three steps to drive a sofa.
First, sit or lie upon the sofa.
Second, lift the remote and use it to dim the lights, and to turn off the televisions, music players, phones, pagers, and computers surrounding you.
Third, be quiet, and stare into that final frontier, Space.
That's it. Simply do steps one, two, and three, and the next thing you know, you will be driving your sofa.
And oh, the places you'll go!(While this primer on How To Drive a Sofa is offered as free shareware, if you found it useful, please consider sending a donation to the programmer: db@ICBWB.com.)
And this, my fellow travelers, brings us back to my having recently driven my sofa to 1968, to visit with myself when I was 11-years-old and in the fifth grade. (Try that with a Subaru and a GPS.)
Fifth grade was the year I finally ran out of evasions, impromptu exits, and excuses. My teachers discovered that I could not see what they had chalked on the chalkboard. I needed eyeglasses.
Having artfully dodged the necessity of wearing eyeglasses for so long, I wound up spending my most formative formative years in a hazy world separate and different from the world other kids and grownups lived in. Since that time I have learned that my lonely separate world was not terribly unique. In Victor Villaseñor's memoirs, he tells of his rage to avenge the humiliation he endured from mean spirited “educators” over his inability, among other things, to read. Not until in his forties, did an accidental diagnosis give Villaseñor a name for the harsh world of his childhood: profound visual and aural dyslexia. By then, the boy who could not read had become a National Book Award winning author. The visionary genius R. Buckminster Fuller gratefully attributed the development of his visionariness to the fact that, through his most formative formative years, he was as myopic as a mole. Before being fitted with thick-lens eyeglasses, Bucky Fuller had a beautifully inspiring haloed fuzzy dazzling aura-aware perception of the world he was passing through. For all his long life, he managed to hold that vision.
Before getting my eyeglasses in the fifth grade, the world looked to me like an impressionist's pointillist painting—viewed from two inches away. Like the parable of the three blind men encountering an elephant and each describing the animal based on what he could touch, the trunk, the tail, the side, the world was my elephant, and I was free to imagine it any way I chose.
The moment I put on my new eyeglasses, it knocked me three steps back from the pointillist painting— everything was instantly sharp-edged, vivid, and clear. The shock of this sudden visual acuity had transported me to a new and precisely bordered world. I was seeing things the way everyone else was seeing things. But over time, this new world became ordinary, without the intrigue and promise of my old, vague, nimbus-filled world. Everything had become so… obvious.
Before getting eyeglasses, my days were spent rafting on a strongly flowing current of emotions and sub-verbal sensations. Once I began wearing eyeglasses, the rushing emotional river began drying up, and through the coming years, its dusty riverbed became filled with the hard stones of words, words, words.
But.
We have, finally, reached the point of my driving my sofa back to visit with myself in the fifth grade, and the point of this shared journey, called an essay.
Stuff comes to us. We arrange it.
We begin arranging what comes to us from the very moment we are conceived in our mother's womb. If she feels unhappy, afraid, or depressed, we arrange it. If she uses coffee, alcohol, cocaine, or thalidomide, we arrange it. If she feels safe, happy, and loved, we arrange it.
After arranging our births, we then arrange what keeps coming. It could be myopia, or blindness; living with acne or Aspberger's; roaming the borders of an IQ of 80, or 240; being sexually abused and abandoned when a child, or growing up in a two-parented, well-fed, warm-sheltered, emotionally protective and encouraging family. Whatever comes to us, we must arrange it, and snug it in with everything that has come to us before.
All of us do this arranging, all of the time, all through our lives.
To be human is to be a master of Feng Shui.
Which is not to say we do not make mistakes. Trial and error is the way of all Feng Shui masters, and all enlightenment. Just ask Siddhartha before he became Buddha, or Augustine of Hippo, before he became Saint Augustine.
Sometimes we know exactly where to put what comes to us. But more often than not, we put things in wrong places until we find a right place. And it can take a long time to find a right place for some things. And then too, something we placed well at age 11, can become dislodged and dangerous at age 22, or tucked away and forgotten at age 52.
Everything is always shifting. We are always arranging, and rearranging. Did I mention? Everything influences our evolution.
Weak eyesight came to me. I arranged my world with a hyperactive and secret imagination. Then eyeglasses came. And I began arranging my world with words.
Sometimes love comes to us. We may arrange it into overnight stays with no breakfast, and then into overnight stays with breakfast, and possibly eventually into marriage with breakfast, lunch, dinner, and grocery shopping included. When love leaves, we arrange its absence by breaking up, separating, divorcing, or beginning a new relationship.
Sometimes unemployment comes to us. We arrange it with meager government-provided unemployment insurance, perhaps supplemented by selling marijuana to our circle of friends. Or we go back to school while working for cash at our brother-in-law's house painting company. Or we drink alcohol in death-defying quantity.
Sometimes an experience comes to us and we fail to find a good place to put it. We keep tripping over it; it keeps falling from the shelf we put it on, down onto our heads; it will not leave us alone or give us a moment's peace. We become obsessed with finding the right place to put this experience, and so we try arranging it by writing an essay, or painting a painting, or composing a symphony, or making a 12-foot high and 30-foot long glistening pink aluminum sculpture of a balloon dog, or we run for elected office, or we simply dance for hours alone in our dark rooms.
Sometimes, failing to find the right place to put this past experience, we relive it, over and over, until it ruins our ability to experience anything new that is uninfluenced, uncolored, by its power. We then arrange for therapy. We then learn that we are suffering from PTSD. And we then slowly, slowly, begin to arrange that experience back into our past, back into a place where it fits, where it belongs.
We arrange everything in our world.
The arranging we do is continuous and never stops.
Until, finally, we arrange the death that comes to us.
Share on Facebook
Click this link to BackTalk db!
Want to waste some more of your once-in-a-lifetime Life? Visit the ICBWB.com Archives!©2010 David Boyne
"A person starts to live when he can live outside of himself."
—Albert Einstein
Often, at random moments, including when driving a car at high speed on a crowded interstate highway, I get lost in my thoughts.
Of course, I am still there, still driving the car, but the real star of the show has gone missing. Elvis has left the building.
By that I mean this: There is a Me who is driving the car. And there is a Me who is watching Me drive the car. I am ‘of two minds’. All the time.
It is that second Me, the watcher, the thinker, the questioner— call him Me.2—who so often is disappeared.
As I pilot my way through this one forever Present, I may start out together, but at any random moment, I.2 may bail out, and I must continue driving the car at high speed on a crowded interstate highway, sans co-pilot.
If You are anything like Me, then You and You.2 are just as rarely and briefly in the same place at the same time as I.2 and I are. You.2 is always coming and going; just dropping in to show You a few out-of-focus snap shots; tell fascinating stories about people You have not met, places You have not gone, and things You have not done. Then, after a quick change of clothes, a hot shower, and a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, You.2 dashes off on another safari. Leaving the laundry and dirty dishes for You.
Where have all the flowers gone?
Wait. Wrong question.
Where have You.2 gone?
Over the rainbow, to a place far, far beyond the reach of satellite locators and Google Earth.
What are You.2 doing there?
Time travelling.
If You are anything like Me, You.2 goes off to do exactly what I.2 goes off to do: Ricochet like a hammered pinball among an infinite field of bumpers, each bumper a possible Past or a possible Future.
(Yes, Dorothy, you can travel through time. And you don’t even have to click your heels together three times when you want to hit the road.)
Two things to understand about these infinite possible Pasts and possible Futures: They all exist simultaneously in the one forever Present (in which I am driving a car at high speed on a crowded highway). And they all exist in one place (coincidentally, the same place where I and You, and I.2 and You.2, exist): Inside our hot little brain.
Think of that. An infinite number of possible people, places, things, and actions all packed into one steamy wet compressed grey and white mass weighing in at three pounds and carried around inside our bone-headed heads.
It’s a small world after all.
I think, therefore, I am. You think, therefore, You are.
But the place where I do my thinking and the place where You do your thinking are separate and unequal worlds.
If You are anything like Me, You do most of your living in your thoughts. (I sometimes wonder if the only reason our body exists is to bring sensations to our brain to give us stuff to think about.)
By this I mean that: From the split moment our ancestors evolved to the point of being human, there have been only two things every single human who has ever lived so far has in common. First, they have thought. Every single one of them. And not intermittently, when the mood struck, the light was right, or the passing lane open. They thought constantly. All the time. Incessantly. Obsessively. Compulsively. Until the moment they stopped thinking. Which is the second thing every single human who has ever lived so far has in common, dying.
I and I.2 have a running argument over the existence of “parallel realities.” I say they don’t exist. I.2 says, “You want proof that parallel realities exist, Bub? Simple as rhubarb pie: Go have a conversation with another human being!”
I.2 has a good point.
We each arrive on Earth packing a separate and unequal 3-pound parallel-reality-generating time-travelling-movie-projector (batteries included, some assembly required). Scientists think the movie projector is located in our frontal lobes. If true, this means when I.2 goes missing from the one forever Present, which is just about continuously, I can assume that I.2 is really still at home, ricocheting like a hammered pinball in an infinite number of possible time-space continuums, all of them spinning inside my 3-Pound Universe.
Let me ask you this: Why do we all project these infinite possible Pasts and Futures?
Let me answer you this: We do it for no better reason than to ask an infinite number of questions that all begin with the same two words, “What if…?”
“What if I do this? What if we do that? What if she did not do this, or he did not do that? What if I were to throw the spear slightly ahead of where the running Dodo bird is at the moment I release the spear? What if I run away? What if I could ride on a beam of light? What if our company applied the Ponzi principle to bundles of sub-prime mortgages?”
I could be wrong, but this elaborate projecting of possible realities seems to be a trick that only individual humans can perform. No other animals, no plants, minerals, governments, industries, or mobs—can think.
Our 3-pound frontal-lobe parallel-reality-generating time-travelling-movie-projectors (batteries included, some assembly required) would be impotently unreeling their kaleidoscopic possible Pasts and Futures inside the soundproof vault of our skulls, except for One Perfect Quirk of Nature: Spaceship Earth—is a giant holodeck.
Allow me to demonstrate.
First, what is a holodeck? It is a type of theatre in which simulated realities can be projected.
Earth is a holodeck. We, via our frontal lobes, are programmers of the holodeck. We write the script, and then we direct ourselves and everyone we can imagine in strutting and fretting upon the stage. But we do this at the same time everyone else is doing it. This results in a big dice game that is so complex and unpredictable it appears to us as intelligently designed.
Of course, I am an idiot. But for the sake of not arguing with an idiot, let’s pretend that I’m an idiot savant, and I happen to be right: Earth is an empty holodeck that we fill with our minds.
If You are anything like Me, by now You have a headache.
Which makes this an excellent time to slip in Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and Schrödinger's cat.
Keeping in mind that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I shall do what all idiots do, and simplify, simplify, simplify. For the purpose of this meandering essay, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle just means the act of observing something changes that something. And Schrödinger's cat just means that everything is, and ain’t. At the same time. And nothing is or ain’t until somebody observes it.
Which begs the Big Question: Why are we alive, here, now?
I spent over 40 years of my once in a lifetime Life wandering this holodeck called Earth trying to think up the Big Answer.
Then I gave up. And immediately found it.
It happened on a cloudy chilly spring day in 2005. My wanderings brought me into a conference room in a hotel in San Diego. There was a man in a wheelchair there, speaking to a rapt audience. His name was, and I believe still is, Ray Bradbury.
Ray Bradbury told everyone in that room, including me, why we are alive, here, now. He also told us what we are meant to do while we are alive, here, now.
The Big Answer turned out to be simpler than I had ever imagined.
Universe, like every child and adult inside It, wanted to be seen and wanted to be paid attention to. Universe, Ray Bradbury explained, wanted an audience. But it wanted an audience that was smart enough, and self-aware enough, to appreciate It.
Entrez nous, stage right.
We are all of us here for no better reason than to observe Universe. And by our very act of observing, we bring Universe into Being, and also change It. The rest of our job is to simply be amazed by the Show.
We are the audience. And we are in the cast. And we are co-authors of the play.
And it’s always show time.
I think.
Click this link to BackTalk db!
We're All Going To Die!
©2010 David Boyne
"I don't want to achieve immortality through my work... I want to achieve it through not dying."
—Woody Allen
I could be wrong, but in my mind, the summation of “humankind’s predicament,” and the root of all philosophies and religions, whether East or West, is eloquently delivered by a certain stock character found in science fiction B Movies from the 1950s and 60s.
The moment comes early in the movie, when that minor character, usually played by a nervous, continually complaining skinny guy, or a nervous, continually complaining fat guy—suddenly realizes that the storyline includes a homicidal zombie mummy vampire, or a giant bug-like alien, or an implacable man-eating plant.
He does a lightning-fast calculation and screams the result, “We’re all going to die!”
Having thus served to remind us of the one thing we all have in common, whether we are in the cast or in the audience, he makes his exit —being drained of his O-negative before being ripped to pieces by the zombie mummy vampire, or abducted, eviscerated and impregnated by the giant bug-like alien, or swallowed whole by the carnivorous plant.
I cannot think of anything to add, subtract, multiply or divide in the doomed man’s equation. Try as we might, reality, whether we see it or not, is irrefutable. E=MC2, and we are all going to die.
All of this has next to nothing to do with what follows. I’ve included it only because for years I have wanted to write an essay with the screaming title, We’re All Going To Die! Now I have. Consider this a reminder; a wake-up call; a Public Service Announcement akin to the anxiety-inducing, stern male voice that would suddenly come out of the television when I was 7 and watching black-and-white science-fiction movies, “It’s ten o’clock. Do you know where you’re children are?”
Which brings me to here.
Recently, while riding my bicycle, I experienced a sudden failure to remain perpendicularly tangential to the gutter.
That is, I crashed my bike on the side of a busy road.
But don’t ask me how. Like so many of Life’s transformative events, it happened so fast! One moment I was skimming the road surface at 12 miles per hour, singing my standard gosh-I-feel-good-song, If I Only Had a Brain, and enjoying the abundant Southern California sunshine warming my bare arms and legs and face. The next moment, the right side of my body was being banged onto the pavement, as if an invisible hand wielding an invisible spatula had flipped me up and smacked me down.
While many who have known me have long predicted my fall into the gutter, no one had foreseen that I would manage the trick from a sudden and complete failure to control a bicycle. All my life people have underestimated me.
About the crash.
I have heard accounts of people who have been stabbed or shot or battered but feel no pain and continue to fight, to run, or to lift cars off of screaming toddlers pinned beneath. Yet, when I hit the pavement, pain shot into my body like a high-voltage electric current, and the switch was stuck in the On position. All I could manage to do was to hobble around and around in a tight little circle while wincingly reciting the universal male mantra for acceptance and healing, “Shit! Fuck! Shit!”
When I was back home, lying on the sofa, pressing against my knee, thigh, and butt, plastic bags filled with ten pounds of ice cubes serendipitously left over from a recent party, I performed a quick inventory of gratitude.
I was grateful for ice. All ice. The ice in the plastic bags pressed against my side, and the ice in the polar caps keeping the Atlantic coast from being in Ohio.
I was grateful that, although I had been travelling on a busy road when I fell, I had not been run over by a behemoth two-ton vehicle piloted with one hand by a mom programming the GPS while ordering pizza on her cell phone while admonishing two-thirds of the fifth-grade girls soccer team to shut up and watch their television monitors so she could hear herself talk.
I was grateful that all my bones were unbroken; my cranium was uncracked; my face remained unimproved by asphalt-dermabrasion. True, most of the skin that had covered my right shin had been grated off by my bouncing along the road. And true, the pink skin from my ripped-up knee, along my flank, and up to my butt now displayed a politically correct rainbow of black-yellow-red contusions.
Yet, as the ten pounds of ice chilled down my pain, I felt a profound gratitude for having managed to NOT join the one minority group that all people, regardless of race, creed, or color, can suddenly find themselves card-carrying members of: the disabled.
For two hours, I lie on the couch wishing rewind buttons worked on people, not just machines. And recalling the dumb joke: “The (insert targeted racial or ethnic group) are so dumb they lost the formula for ice!” And, trying to piece together the plot points in a story by Tolstoy that I had read long ago and far away while in the throes of teenage nihilism, The Death of Ivan Ilyich.
Whether accurate or not, I recalled that Ivan Ilyich had lived his life rapt by materialism and social jockeying. Then, while Ivan Ilyich was happily hanging curtains in his new, Make The Joneses Writhe In Envy Home, he fell. He bumped his side. (A much milder version of how I had fallen, from my bike, and bumped my side.)
Life went on for Ivan Ilyich. (And for me.)
But. (But.)
As the days passed, Ivan Ilyich began to feel increasingly intense pain from the injury to his side. (Perhaps he had lost the formula for ice?) He behaved toward his wife and family as even more of a flaming asshole than he was before the fall. Soon, it was apparent to everyone, including Ivan, he was dying. He knew it, yet he could not understand it, could not accept it. Why all the pain? What was the point? As death closed down, Ivan Ilyich realized he had lived only for himself, without compassion or contribution to others. Tolstoy, having neatly delivered the moral of the story, takes away Ivan Ilyich’s pain, allowing him to find peace, deep down inside (the only place it exists). Then Tolstoy snuffs the bastard.
Which brings me to here.
It has been a few weeks since I crashed my bike. There is fresh, new, bright pink skin on my right shin. There is a fresh, new, bright pink patch of scar tissue covering my knee. And there is also a fresh, new, whomping big lump on my upper thigh. Upon seeing this whomping big lump on my upper thigh my general practitioner doctor said, “Whoa. I’ve never seen anything like that before.” He then wondered aloud if it could be some kind of hematoma, and then wondered aloud if it could have been a hematoma, but had somehow morphed into a cyst. He then wondered what could be inside such a whomping big lump. He then gave up wondering and referred me to an orthopedist.
As I’ve manage the pain in my leg while waiting for an appointment with the orthopedist, it has occurred to me that Tolstoy meant for Ivan Ilyich’s story to dramatize two facts about Life. Fact One: We’re all going to die! Fact Two: It happens so fast!
One moment we’re driving our family in our car, the next moment we’re the sole survivor waking from a three-week coma induced by a drunken driver who crossed the median of the freeway to smash into us. One moment we’re walking down the road in Afghanistan carrying 70 pounds of weaponry and warmongering gear, the next moment were taking our first tentative steps on a treadmill, trying out our new prosthetic legs. One moment we’re riding our bike to meet some friends for a long ride, the next moment we’re lying in the gutter of the road, and the next moment were inside an MRI tube. One moment we’re sitting at our desk in our office, and the next moment we’re lying on the floor with Dennis from Accounts Receivable, a guy we never liked, beating on our chest and doing mouth-to-mouth resuscitation on us.
And the next moment we’re dead.
Of course, there is the slight, statistically insignificant chance that I could be wrong, but I suspect the truth is, we are never, ever, in control. Of anything. But we need to pretend we are. Without our delusion of being in control, we are stunned motionless. But, made brave by our delusion of being in control, unto the breach we charge, again and again, refusing to accept that every moment of living we are in free fall.
Dying is when we hit the ground.
Click this link to BackTalk db!
Owning Up©2009 David Boyne
“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.”
—Maya Angelou
Recently, I bought a house. Or, more accurately, I bought a mortgage. It came with a nice little house.
The nice little house has a well-fenced, dog-ready backyard. Which is why I wanted this house, as the politically incorrect owner of the apartment I was happily renting would not allow me to have a canine domestic partner. Now, as owner of a house, Society recognizes my right to have a domestic partner of the golden retriever orientation, should I desire to. I do.
But here’s the thing: I have never owned a house before.
And here’s the other thing: I’m not convinced that I own one now.
In fact, I am much more inclined to believe that I don’t own this house. I just pretend to. Fortunately, Society pretends along with me.
When Society pretends something, it constructs an elaborate infrastructure, designed to keep anyone from disproving what it pretends. Curiously, that is also what a person suffering from delusional paranoia does. Be that as it may, the infrastructure of collective pretending which Society constructs to allow people to believe they “own’ things, creates employment, something our country needs more of. People who own things create work for lawyers, who are experts in society's pretentions. And also for insurance companies, who are experts at gambling on most folks being, more often than not, competent, and wanting first, to do no harm. Our societal delusion of owning things creates many other jobs, too. For realtors named Kent Johnson, electricians named Zach Cornelius, drain uncloggers named Chris Kilkenny, and handymen named Smokin' Joe Osborn.
But, I wander.
When I promised to take on the mortgage that comes bundled with the nice little house and well-fenced yard, Society promised to reward me with tax breaks. People who do not join in Society’s game of pretending to own houses, or businesses, or planes, trains, ships and baseball franchises, are not given tax breaks. In fact, Society is so entranced with its delusion of being an Ownership Society, that it actually paid me to play! Once I opted-in to the collective delusion of owning a house, and the earth it rests upon, the no-break taxes I had paid for decades when a renter in places from Maine to Florida, and Manhattan to San Francisco, came back to me in the form of a government-financed mortgage.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m quite happy with the social contract I’ve entered into. I shall hold up my end of this shared delusion that I “own” the nice little house that came with my big fat mortgage.
But.
I must ask, How can anyone ever really “own” anything?
Isn’t all we ever really own whatever we brought with us into this world, added to whatever we take with us when we leave this world? And, if you stop to do the math, doesn’t that add up to nothing? No thing?
I could be wrong, but I’ve sometimes wondered if all we ever really own is our DNA. Maybe we own it, because we can choose to pass it on. Or not. The gift of Life, and the genes that come with it, are the only real inheritance. For millennia, our DNA could only be remodeled by the designs or accidents of Nature. This is called, “evolution.” But now we are on the verge of Society remodeling our DNA by design or accident. This is called, “evolution.”
Keeping in mind that I don’t know what I’m talking about, I shall employ bolding, italics, underlining, and exclamation marks! This will make my statement emphatic, and it will sound like I know what I’m talking about. Here goes:
We never own anything! We just get to use it while we’re here!
Despite the brilliant clarity of my emphatic assertion, very few people see ownership the way I see it. That’s because I’m retarded. And because everyone has done growed up in a Society that, if enough other people agree to conspire with you to pretend you “own” what you say you own, you are allowed to state, emphatically, “Yo! I own this!”
We can then put sensor-tripped recordings of stern voices on the vehicles we own, to tell anyone who approaches, “Back away from my car!” And we can create piles of notarized paperwork filed with title companies to say, “Back away from my house!” And we can put gold rings on another person’s finger to say, “Back away from my spouse!”
Our Society, like any person in the throes of a delusion, can be terribly cruel to those who will not share in and support their delusion. Look at what our Society did to Native Americans. Indians just could not get into their heads, our fundamental belief that we own the earth. Just as we could not get into our heads, their fundamental belief that we belong to the earth. Lord knows, we tried to get them to play nice. We invited them, at the point of repeating rifles and Gatling guns, to join in our game of owning. We gave them deeds and treaties, bills of sale, even big mortgages that came with little houses on hardscrabble land. But the unenlightened savages thought the inky scratch marks on parchment and paper we gave them were…inky scratch marks on parchment and paper. They could not grasp that those inky scratch marks were the very code of our collective delusion of owning things. Frustrated by the Indians declining to join in our Society’s reindeer games, we were left with no choice but to deconstruct their societies. This is called, “evolution.” Now that enough time has passed since the deconstruction, we can afford to feel a bit guilty, without having to surrender our ownership of anything. Magnanimously, we salve our guilt by giving the post-deconstruction Indians a reward. You guessed it; tax breaks.
But, I wander.
There is one assertion of ownership I think may be legitimate. I call it the Ratso Rizzo Manifesto of Ownership.
In the movie Midnight Cowboy, there is a scene in which the character Ratso Rizzo, played by Dustin Hoffman, is crossing a street in Manhattan. A taxi driver competes with Rizzo for ownership of the same few feet of pavement, and attempts to intimidate Rizzo into relinquishing the bit of contested pavement by aiming the two tons of his moving vehicle at him. Outraged, Rizzo pounds his hands on the filthy hot hood of the taxi and yells at the driver “Hey! I’m walkin’ here! I’m walkin’ here!”
And that, grasshopper, is The Ratso Rizzo Manifesto of Ownership: We are all just passing through, and all we ever really own is the space we take up at any given moment.