Zen and the Art of Being Frickin' Hot
Jul. 27th, 2005 06:34 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
flatvurmIt's frickin' hot, people. I realize that this is not, say, the hottest place on Earth right now, nor in the scheme of my life, is it the hottest I've ever been, nor will I never be this hot again. But it is frickin' hot, and I can't rationalize my way out of it. It's too hot to think. After sweating it out for a while in the ol' homestead, I decided to retire to the local library to soak up a little air conditioning and at least get some writing done. While there, I figured it wouldn't hurt to pick up a little reading on statistics, which I'd been meaning to do, because the study of statistics has suddenly become uncomfortably germane to my life. And I, like many of my counterparts in our early schooling years, discounted that shit as being irrelevant. (Ironically, I really should have been paying attention anyway...I thought for a while that I was going to be an actuary.)
Anyway...it's hot. It has been for a couple days, though Momz, an inveterate Weather Channel junky, tells me that this should be the worst of it and that it should be getting better soon. What kills me is that it's hot when I wake up. How can it be hot in the morning? It seems unnatural. On my way out of the house yesterday (afternoon, not morning), I took a little detour to check out our local bank's LED clock/thermometer on the way to the bus stop. It read 102 degrees. Surely not. I looked forward to my air conditioned bus ride to my air conditioned casino where I would happily spend the rest of the day.
I saw some young 'uns cuddling on the bus on the way up to Atlantic City. They seemed young to mine eyes, anyway...teenagers, I guess? The girl was draped over the guy, half-asleep and clinging to him for the whole ride. Ah, young love. It might have made for a pretty little scene, I guess, except that the guy looked just like Telly from Kids. I spent the whole ride wondering if he was just some serial deflowerer. I guess that's how media influences our lives.
I've started commute-reading again...this is basically in lieu of having an iPod. :) It's funny...I never would have noticed this except that I started reading on the bus, but...it seems like no one reads on the bus around here. I was so used to public transit in New York and San Fransico...having a book just seemed like par for the course. Here, though, I was the only one. Bizarrely, it felt strange. I was suddenly transported back to my youth, being the nerd in a group of...whatever non-nerds call themselves. It was a strangely uncomfortable feeling. All this time being an adult, all this time spent among my own kind, finding that nerds are not nerds after all, but cool people in their own right, and suddenly I'm having trouble with this one bus ride and my book. I never would have thought I'd carry around childhood issues like that.
Anyway, I've started reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There's no particular reason for this, except that I saw it laying around the house, and it was brought to my mind when I picked up (wait for it...) Zen and the Art of Poker by Robert M. Pirsig. It's...interesting so far. Not what I expected, frankly, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you what I did expect. The book is older than I thought it would be...this baby was published in the mid-seventies. I can't remember now what exactly it was, but something in the book or the writing or the story made me flip to the front to check on the publication date. I briefly wondered if it would be worth reading anyway, and then I wondered why I wondered that.
It's strange how time acts on context. In a certain way, the mid-seventies wasn't that long ago. Thirty years...less than a lifetime. And yet...it might as well be ancient history as far as relevance to my life goes. Thirty years is still longer than my lifetime, anyway, and certainly longer than my adulthood. In the pace of this modern, 21st century information age, it seems like forever ago. I guess I had thought of the book as some kind of pop philiosophy primer or something, and judging "pop" half-life by today's stadards, mid-seventies just wasn't going to cut it. In any case, though, I'm about a quarter of the way through, and it's going down well so far. I'm still not actually sure what the book is about, though that's fine; I'm enjoying myself. I came across this passage recently which sort of jumped out at me, so I will reproduce it here for all y'all.
So I don't know. It sounds a bit hippie-dippie, I guess. Taken out of context, the passage seems to rail against rational thought, but that's not really what it was about. Pirsig was more punching the idea that things we think of as "real" are really just ideas that came out of people's heads. The ideas sort of became real, but that doesn't change the fact that they're still just ideas. And if you want to fix something, or change something, or whatever, it isn't about "real" things, it's about the ideas these "real" things come from. You don't fix "things," you fix ideas. Or, rather, "things" are just expressions of ideas, and "fixing" them is really just getting them to express (to become?) the ideas from whence they came. I dunno. I'm starting to smell Heidegger again.
Right now I'd like to fix the idea that it's frickin' hot around here.
Oh, also, just to highlight some more of my neighborhood rusticness (rusticity?), I was walking home from the bus last night and started to smell skunk. Skunk is one of those smells...you just don't mistake skunk for anything else. There are a lot of dogs in my neighborhood, and dogs are notorious for being skunk-stupid, so I wondered if there had been some kind of incident. The smell grew stronger as I approached my house, so I was sure as hell hoping it wasn't my dog that got hit. When I got there, though, it appeared that there was no dog involved at all. A skunk had apparently been road-killed outside my front door. (Either that, or...I suppose it could have been a message from the Odor Mafia.) Anyway, if skunk is a smell you never forget, then skunk corpse baking on 100-degree asphalt is a smell that you really should forget. Bonus points if you can do it when it's outside your front door.
There's an interesting postscript to this story, by the way, related to me this morning by my mother. Momz, upon waking this morning, also discovered the skunk. She, apparently far more civic-minded than I, called someone to do something about it. She called our local equivalent of the non-emergency government number (like 311 in New York) and reported a dead skunk on the road, and the operator told her she'd send someone to take care of it. Checking some short time later (maybe 15 minutes later), the skunk had been removed. She, apparently being far more civic-minded than I, called the number again to thank them for the prompt service. She talked to the same operator, by the way, which tells you just how much is going on in this town. She thanked the operator for her prompt service, and the operator replied, "Er...I haven't called anyone yet."
Creeeeeeepyyyyyyyyy.
So I think that's about it from my neck of the woods. Here's what's going on elsewhere...
Human plague, baby! That's right, bubonic plague rides again, apparently striking right here in these United States. New Mexico, to be exact. I don't know if this has been big news or not, but I didn't find a whole lot about it, so I'm not sure if it made CNN or whatever. I kinda liked the article here, but this one handed me the choice quote: "'Plague changes your life forever,' said plague survivor John Tull. '(You) will never be the same again.'" Remember back when the plague could wipe out signficant chunks of the populations of entire continents? Now it's one person here or there in New Mexico and it barely makes the news. I find myself thinking, once in a while, that we could use a nice epidemic like in Ye Olde Days to thin the ranks a bit, know what I'm saying? I guess bubonic plague ain't what it used to be, though...something else will have to step up.
And with that cheery thought, I think I'll leave off for now. I've still got some junk in the queue, so stay tuned for further updates. Peace!
Anyway...it's hot. It has been for a couple days, though Momz, an inveterate Weather Channel junky, tells me that this should be the worst of it and that it should be getting better soon. What kills me is that it's hot when I wake up. How can it be hot in the morning? It seems unnatural. On my way out of the house yesterday (afternoon, not morning), I took a little detour to check out our local bank's LED clock/thermometer on the way to the bus stop. It read 102 degrees. Surely not. I looked forward to my air conditioned bus ride to my air conditioned casino where I would happily spend the rest of the day.
I saw some young 'uns cuddling on the bus on the way up to Atlantic City. They seemed young to mine eyes, anyway...teenagers, I guess? The girl was draped over the guy, half-asleep and clinging to him for the whole ride. Ah, young love. It might have made for a pretty little scene, I guess, except that the guy looked just like Telly from Kids. I spent the whole ride wondering if he was just some serial deflowerer. I guess that's how media influences our lives.
I've started commute-reading again...this is basically in lieu of having an iPod. :) It's funny...I never would have noticed this except that I started reading on the bus, but...it seems like no one reads on the bus around here. I was so used to public transit in New York and San Fransico...having a book just seemed like par for the course. Here, though, I was the only one. Bizarrely, it felt strange. I was suddenly transported back to my youth, being the nerd in a group of...whatever non-nerds call themselves. It was a strangely uncomfortable feeling. All this time being an adult, all this time spent among my own kind, finding that nerds are not nerds after all, but cool people in their own right, and suddenly I'm having trouble with this one bus ride and my book. I never would have thought I'd carry around childhood issues like that.
Anyway, I've started reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. There's no particular reason for this, except that I saw it laying around the house, and it was brought to my mind when I picked up (wait for it...) Zen and the Art of Poker by Robert M. Pirsig. It's...interesting so far. Not what I expected, frankly, though I'd be hard-pressed to tell you what I did expect. The book is older than I thought it would be...this baby was published in the mid-seventies. I can't remember now what exactly it was, but something in the book or the writing or the story made me flip to the front to check on the publication date. I briefly wondered if it would be worth reading anyway, and then I wondered why I wondered that.
It's strange how time acts on context. In a certain way, the mid-seventies wasn't that long ago. Thirty years...less than a lifetime. And yet...it might as well be ancient history as far as relevance to my life goes. Thirty years is still longer than my lifetime, anyway, and certainly longer than my adulthood. In the pace of this modern, 21st century information age, it seems like forever ago. I guess I had thought of the book as some kind of pop philiosophy primer or something, and judging "pop" half-life by today's stadards, mid-seventies just wasn't going to cut it. In any case, though, I'm about a quarter of the way through, and it's going down well so far. I'm still not actually sure what the book is about, though that's fine; I'm enjoying myself. I came across this passage recently which sort of jumped out at me, so I will reproduce it here for all y'all.
To speak of certain government and establishment institutions as "the system" is to speak correctly, since these organizations are founded upon the same structural conceptual relationships as a motorcycle. They are sustained by structural relationships even when they have lost all other meaning and purpose. People arrive at a factory and perform a totally meaningless task from eight to five without question beacuse the structure demands that it be that way. There's no villain, no "mean guy" who wants them to live meaningless lives, it's just that the structure, the system demands it and no one is willing to take on the formidable task of changing the structure just because it is meaningless.
But to tear down a factory or to revolt against a government or to avoid repair of a motorcyce because it is a system is to attack effects rather than causes; and as long as the attack is upon effects only, no change is possible. The true system, the real system, is our present construction of systematic thought itself, rationality itself, and if a factory is torn down but the rationality which produced it is left standing, then that rationality will simply produce another factory. If a revolution destroys a systematic government, but the systematic patterns of thought that produced that government are left intact, then those patterns will repeat themselves in the succeeding government. There's so much talk about the system. And so little understanding.
So I don't know. It sounds a bit hippie-dippie, I guess. Taken out of context, the passage seems to rail against rational thought, but that's not really what it was about. Pirsig was more punching the idea that things we think of as "real" are really just ideas that came out of people's heads. The ideas sort of became real, but that doesn't change the fact that they're still just ideas. And if you want to fix something, or change something, or whatever, it isn't about "real" things, it's about the ideas these "real" things come from. You don't fix "things," you fix ideas. Or, rather, "things" are just expressions of ideas, and "fixing" them is really just getting them to express (to become?) the ideas from whence they came. I dunno. I'm starting to smell Heidegger again.
Right now I'd like to fix the idea that it's frickin' hot around here.
Oh, also, just to highlight some more of my neighborhood rusticness (rusticity?), I was walking home from the bus last night and started to smell skunk. Skunk is one of those smells...you just don't mistake skunk for anything else. There are a lot of dogs in my neighborhood, and dogs are notorious for being skunk-stupid, so I wondered if there had been some kind of incident. The smell grew stronger as I approached my house, so I was sure as hell hoping it wasn't my dog that got hit. When I got there, though, it appeared that there was no dog involved at all. A skunk had apparently been road-killed outside my front door. (Either that, or...I suppose it could have been a message from the Odor Mafia.) Anyway, if skunk is a smell you never forget, then skunk corpse baking on 100-degree asphalt is a smell that you really should forget. Bonus points if you can do it when it's outside your front door.
There's an interesting postscript to this story, by the way, related to me this morning by my mother. Momz, upon waking this morning, also discovered the skunk. She, apparently far more civic-minded than I, called someone to do something about it. She called our local equivalent of the non-emergency government number (like 311 in New York) and reported a dead skunk on the road, and the operator told her she'd send someone to take care of it. Checking some short time later (maybe 15 minutes later), the skunk had been removed. She, apparently being far more civic-minded than I, called the number again to thank them for the prompt service. She talked to the same operator, by the way, which tells you just how much is going on in this town. She thanked the operator for her prompt service, and the operator replied, "Er...I haven't called anyone yet."
Creeeeeeepyyyyyyyyy.
So I think that's about it from my neck of the woods. Here's what's going on elsewhere...
Human plague, baby! That's right, bubonic plague rides again, apparently striking right here in these United States. New Mexico, to be exact. I don't know if this has been big news or not, but I didn't find a whole lot about it, so I'm not sure if it made CNN or whatever. I kinda liked the article here, but this one handed me the choice quote: "'Plague changes your life forever,' said plague survivor John Tull. '(You) will never be the same again.'" Remember back when the plague could wipe out signficant chunks of the populations of entire continents? Now it's one person here or there in New Mexico and it barely makes the news. I find myself thinking, once in a while, that we could use a nice epidemic like in Ye Olde Days to thin the ranks a bit, know what I'm saying? I guess bubonic plague ain't what it used to be, though...something else will have to step up.
And with that cheery thought, I think I'll leave off for now. I've still got some junk in the queue, so stay tuned for further updates. Peace!