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Michael considered fate at 10:42   |   Permalink   |   Post a Comment

I am grouchy. As per, here I am to complain after weeks of basically ignoring the fact that I once had a blog in which I once wrote semi-personal stuff and waxed philosophical about abstracted conciousness. No longer, it seems. Dead are the leaves on the trees and so, too, is my will to produce - or share - or bleed - or share the experience of bleeding. Does a bear shit in the woods? If nobody is there to hear him, does he make a sound? Somewhere, out there - maybe even right now - is a bear working away at a little nugget of a butt plug? Toiling through some sweat-inducing labour, moving fiberous stool through his lower bits like atlas carried that big 'ol globe on his back: slowly. Does he groan? Grimace? Grunt in pain?

Are animals somehow distracted or abstracted from this, one of life's many unpleasantries, because they do not "think" or "solve problems"? Surely, if you cut a bear then he bleeds. Does he not know, too, the pain of excessive taxation of extreme constipation?

I feel like a bear. I think inwardly, separated from my own experiences like a carbon sheet, pulled away from reality and torn off at the dotted line. It's the same here, but everything is black and white with an odd hue and strange smudges. It all seems so.. farcical.

The winter does this to me and I suppose it does it to the bears, too. Nobody wants a natural butt plug to grow up in there. It's bad enough when you don't expect it but to have to think, throughout the rest of the four seasons, that in a short time your body will, once again, develop it's own butt plug on purpose.. well, that's not pleasant. Winter can be not pleasant, too.

It isn't that I hate winter outright - in fact, I love it. The cold. The wind. The snow. The frozen ice. All of it. I like to ski, I like to romp in the snow, sled down hills, and do donuts in empty parking lots late at night. Something about the buffer of snow makes me comfortable, in fact. Driving in a car the bumps are smoother and less jarring. Falling out of a tree doesn't hurt quite as bad. And then throwing snowballs doesn't hurt nearly as much as stones, either.

But winter has a way of complicating even the most basic things. Air travel. Car repair. Bikini watching.

Truth be told, I've spent an inordinate amount of time indoors lately and the things that get me out of doors are far and few between. Once again it isn't because I dislike being outside.. but it is cold. Give me a valid reason to be outside, and I'm there, but I'm not going to make up excuses to be there. Look, even the bears stay in with the shades drawn.

So this weekend, when it was a balmy 25 degrees out and sunny and snow was dripping from the roof tops with solar-powered efficiency I snuck out onto my back porch with a cup of tea and sat in the sun for what was almost a full thirty minutes. I probably haven't gotten that much direct sunlight in the last three weeks combined. And there I sat, brimming over with those jittery new-born feelings you have waking up in the morning - especially on a Sunday (that feeling of getting up but not needing to get up, those first few stretches of the limbs that feel as though you have never stretched them before). I felt like an atomic nucleus, bombarded with neutrons, Vitamin-D smashing into me and energy coming out.

That energy was just enough to shake my mental butt plug loose and I've been enjoying this frozen feb. week more than I might have without that jolt of photons. But it's still a trudge through the snow. Things still break. Life still floats off, tiny bits of you effervescing, particles undocking from their giant body-ship, black soot flaking off of a carbon copy. Alpha, beta, gamma.. they're all rays of hope, the merest yet dearest the universe has to offer, somewhere between a handshake and a healthy poke in the gut: "Who do you think you are?"

There is no particular freedom in any of it - a model exists out there, as boring as a flow-chart - but the gamble, the random chance of it all.. that is particulate freedom. Not knowing, in the end, is the greatest serendipity of all. Understanding the universe down to the level of nuts and bolts, gear ratios, and nano-calibrations only stifles the belief that we matter, someone made us, or we were choosen as anything but more particles and more butt plugs.

It is unquestionable that our lives, ever intertwined with the cosmos, are collections and our bodies are particles. These induce change on other bodies and so, like even the smallest subatomic iota, we are simply pushing and shoving to effect what we can around us. Even one another. Especially one another.

The difference between prospecting and investing is that prospecting is the implied exploration for wealth whereas investing is the implied guarantee of wealth. Investing is betting on 20 with the dealer showing a 3. Prospecting is betting all your money on double zeros, watching the ball roll round-and-round in dizzying circles and then, *poof*, walking away from the table as half of yourself, a small part of you having been left behind - not just the money - and feeling carbon-thin and light on your feet.

Are animals dumb because they walk through life like a child in a museum, inspecting each exhibit intently but not once reading a single plaque or pamphlet? Or are they cosmically smart because the gamble is all about seeing and feeling and going for the gusto but very very little about actual high-level logic? Is a true explainable model a dead end? What of the species, when we collectively fill in that last blank letter in life's big crossword (smudged, various letters having been temporarily and sometimes open-endedly housed in the small box before)? When we exhale, together, a sigh of relief and set the paper down is there anything that needs to be done after that? Do the chores dry up? With no money to be won, do you buy a lottery ticket?

This anti-serendipity is the laxative for the butt plug we don't realize we need or want. The cruelest joke on the human mind is that we don't know the worst that is to come and yet we are actively seeking it out. A galactic setup, a colosal pun, and whammo- we the people are the butt of this universal jest. Actors in our own parody play. It is the search for these answers; life, the universe, everything, that keeps us going. Not the answers themselves.