Neural Home-Ownership

The inevitable response to a stabbing is to bleed; the proper response to a fear of stabbing is a subversive brain smile.

(Another example of the frustrations of neural-home-ownership), Answer the following:

Which of these statements is the correct one?  “The basement’s flooded – quick, call a plumber," or, “Whoa, the basement’s flooded – call the roofers.”  (On many planets mental-rental has become the way to go.)

Those who will believe that “man is a sham of his former self,” should, (as they will), speak for themselves.

One fine day the old man took the kid aside and said, “You have long been asking me what life means to man, and now’s as good a time for me to respond as will be next Friday, so listen up:  Human life is…life is either a test, or a punishment…oh, add, a laboratory.  Life is either a test, a punishment, or a laboratory…yeah…well, you could add to that that it’s also possibly an opportunity…an opportunity, or a joke…Now we’ve got it.  Life is either a test, a punishment, a laboratory, an opportunity, or a joke…yeah but it could also be a sport, so add sport to the list, and that’ll about wrap it up, (except to add that it could also be either irrelevant or unfathomable)…Ah, forget it kid, run on out and play.”

Can there be strength without energy?

J.

Virtually, Me

In all visible constellations with those familiar dimensions – the unknown forever reigns supreme.

This other guy assures me, indubitably, that he is “so in favor of fun,” that he even periodically tries to have some.

The Question Of The Day,
(soup not included):

Is human knowledge
discovered,
invented,
or imported?

On this one planet, there is talk of abolishing the normal lag time between action and thinking-of-action.

The ultimate, operational definition of the word “virtual” is in accepting the voice saying, “I” AS I.

J.

Stuck Together

A Real Revolutionist takes all available information as MIS-information.

Part of criticism’s job is to furnish the feel of continuity…you remember “continuity” – the illusion that history’s all stuck together.

Fat is ungrateful.

One guy’s planetary, planning advice: “Invest your resources where they’ll do the most good.  In the next decade, growth will be THE growth industry.”

Apparently, by way of attempting to explain something or other, this one chap with a sweaty brow and wringing hands sort of sobbed, “It’s come to this – I’m down to my last brother.”

J.

It Is What It Is

You can’t even dream properly about freedom as long as you hold any permanent alliance with either of the three dimensions.

Come on, ease on over in the passing lane…the time for guilt was back when you had the time.

All earthly growth is ultimately at the expense of the sun …(any possible elevation of the father carries a not dissimilar cost.)

This one hombre said, “Madness is of the heart, not the head.”  And a short time later, by way of development, if not defense, his brain added, “Hey, I’m just repeating what I heard."

Make no mistake about it – Everything is actually what it is…and also something else.

J.

The Dumb Don't Dream

Suicide is but another undistinguished attempt to expand the concept of the “movable environment.”

Graffiti scratched in the dirt near a Revolutionist camp site:

“The dumb
don’t dream
and the intelligent
don’t dream much.”

Words To Live By If You Live By The Tracks:
Many people don’t actually believe they’ve driven a car until they’ve wrecked it.

Even in the lands of “free speech,” they have slander laws…or, you can think anything you like, all right, but do remember how earth’s gravity causes even anything to have its costs.

Now-a-days most reputations are made in a small village just outside Brussels.

J.

Intensity

Hey – don’t stay forever in mundane debt…and, oh yeah, “P.S.” oh yeah, if you’re in debt you’re in mundane debt.

Being ordinary is not a social condition, but a cellular stagnation…(if you let it continue).

“Dad, I want to go see a war.”
“No need son, that’s why I put a mirror in your room.”

By-the-by:  Can any of you conceive of my “Three Circuits Of Man’s Nervous System” as three differing temperatures of the blood?

Intensity don’t count for much unless you’re intensive ENOUGH.

J.

The Impotent Climax

I ran across this one free-lancer over on that rambling planet who, for thirty kopeks, will “prove you are happy”…(for an additional two pesos, he’ll prove the same regarding himself.)

He finished their conversation by telling the few still standing around the burning table, “Why yes, there are blueprints, but your problem will be that they are as alive as the structures they represent.”

In man’s day-to-day, non-primary affairs, there are moments of almost total frustration which have evaded analysis; let me get the game started by throwing out the first curve: I’ll name the phenomena for you…let’s call it, “The Impotent Climax.”  (This could update an old adage so that it would read thusly, “There’s no rest for the secondary.”)

More Things You Might Remember, (If You’re Only Having A Few, or You’re The Day’s Designated Thinker):  Information, even “facts,” don’t really change things; they just re-name them.

In the often overlooked words of one forgotten philosopher:
“Many things mean many things to many people.”

J.

Dimensionally Impaired

All catastrophes
consume
all expectations.

The 9:00 a.m. Version:
Only straight forward things can be presented in a straight forward manner.

Twelve O’clock Version:
Things may be presented in a straight forward manner to straight forward people.

Only one
who doesn’t care
could actually care.

On this one helpful planet, they’ve opened up a clinic to treat, (and here I quote their brochure), “The dimensionally impaired.”

On a curious, nearby time planet, they seem to have solved the kinds of dichotomous divisions and struggles that normally strain the social weave of a moralistic peoples; for instance, on their world there are drugs, prayers, and abortions for those who believe in them, and none for those who don’t.

J.

Growth

The difference between a masked, professional wrestler, and a tenured intellectual, is a lot messier than you would wanna hear about before dinner.

Growth is the only justification growth ever needs.

One ole sore head called the kid aside and told him, “Look, before you go and get too smug about our position relative to the rest of those bozos, I should point out that here in everyday life EVERYone’s brain is on auto pilot.”  (Not long after that one of the kid’s uncles contacted me and insisted he be given his own news space or at least some space here for him to tell the kid that it’s impossible to be “TOO smug.”

The intellectual health of the City depends on continued thievery.

While enjoying a cup of something hot, over in that little diner near the museum, a fellow on the adjourning stool remarked that the “True stigma”, (he quickly corrected himself), “I mean the true sign of being civilized is to resist kicking an economist when he’s down."

J.

Refined Diversity

After thinking about an appropriate length of time, he finally, and confidently concluded, “A real historian wouldn’t put up with this crap!”

In all customary systems below the five dimensional mode, progress comes through a process of refined diversity.  (That is specifically through refined diversity, as opposed to random uniformity.)

Anything that can poison the mind, deserves it.

While the inner life of an ordinary man could be thought of as a Theatre, within a Revolutionist it would be more like a Research Lab, a Court of Inquiry, a Sang Froid Comedic Investigation.

Said the first voice:  “I read that there’s a Greek word for everything.”
Second voice:  “So?”…
”Well, it’s just that I feel so much better now.”

J.

Vacation Tip

When they go out of town, most people shrink.

Don’t admit
to being dumb
until you’re sure
just how dumb
you truly are.

“Hey, why is it that everything can be so satisfactorily divided into two’s?”

“Hey, good question…I’ll pretend I don’t know…now let me ask one:  Why is it that everything can be so satisfactorily divided into three’s?”

Vacation Tip:  At some of the newer, neural resorts, there are cut-rates for silliness.

Since, in the routine, technological world ‘tis true that the more refined is the examining instrument, the more complex become the revelations of the examined, would you expect any quantum deviation in regard to man’s intellect?

J.

The Overlap

At least talking about what you’re up to helps the ordinary remember what they’re supposed to be up to.

And in his fearless, if not feckless, re-sharpening of sequential saws, the old man spoke to his lethargic charge thusly, “Remember kid-o: a journey of a thousand miles begins with a lotta luggage.”

People distract themselves in many ways, but you shouldn’t let you be one of them.

Each person’s area of clearest sanity is where they are closest to being dinner.

You know, just because you forget about it, doesn’t mean that that place where “everything overlaps” ceases to exist.

It is an awesome responsibility to be your own best friend.

J.

The Exchanges

All good science has a certain blind spot, right near the center of its own area of expertise.

Afternoon Variation Listing Red:  No playing field is fair without a hidden water hazard round the fifty yard line.

This one lumberjack used to advise his brother, “Always have some back-up read and in reverse.”

Speaking of fail-safe-systems, and general overkill, how about Life providing man with both religion and government!

And speaking as we were also about armadillos, a mister G.T. writes from Texas: “Inasmuch as I am from Ohio, why am I writing you from Texas?”

All human activities are exchanges.

J.

Trying to Think

"I hate to pick on you kid,” said the blazing, starry sire, “But come on, level with me, are you gonna be a moon all your life?”

For most people, trying to think while you’re mad is about like trying to think. (But don’t tell ‘em I told you.)

(Talk about convenience):  Fits come in everyone’s size.

“Out Of Town Query”: 

Through religion and philosophy, Life seems to be trying to teach man what?  How to think?  How to feel?  or How to act?

Anyone with near relatives in the lower, lower class, is not going to amount to much.

J.

Bus Stop

When everything
looks the same
the bus has
made a stop.

Several years hence, I ran across a splinter group whose adhesives believed thusly:  “A ‘good’ man will not recognize himself in the dark.”

(Here is another of those quasi-useless Test Questions):

Can you see in the following a blatant, though fugitive, non-negative facet?
“Just because someone offers to help
doesn’t mean they CAN help.”

In a subversive camp I passed through one week, I saw the following note pinned to a tree near the latrine, it said, “If you find yourself being serious about some particular something, go on and be real serious, and if you do get ‘real serious,’ go ahead and get rat-assed-SUPER-serious, and if you get that serious about it, and you are a Real Revolutionist at least by then you’ll have had a good laugh.”

On this one mid-sized, pretty hospitable world I visited, they have a certain interesting dynamic:  When confronted with something they can’t control or comprehend, they declare “war” on it.

J.

The Top 40

“Father, I have come to a conclusion – rituals are for children.”  And the padre beamed, “Well, what a real little thinker you’ve become, but if you’re correct, then it would naturally follow that the playground has become the classroom, and that creation is for the nippers.”  (The old man chuckled at this idea, and the kid said, “So?”)

In this part of the solar system, men’s brains are programmed to only play the Top 40.

One galactic gadfly says that his many travels and extensive studies have led him to the conclusion that the ill defined though actual purpose of poets is to try to verbally conjure up future torments, and other world horrors worse than being alive right now.

The operations of most systems are not dependent on their needs. Collusive Corollary:  A relative relationship visible between systems is not very relative.

And now for the final question of this round: Which is more important, that which you say is more important, or that which is?

J.

Celebrity Circuits

It was nearer the third act of this one chap’s life that I overheard him in his back courtyard discoursing thusly, “Entombed, entombed is what I am…I am not yet dead yet I am entombed – in ME!”

Gods were the first celebrities, and history the original National Inquirer.

For those of you who may begin to think “you’ve seen it all,” put your cerebral molars to this one:  I know of a planet where they have toll call first thing every morning, and if you’re marked down an absent, you can’t answer when your name is called.

A man with
no axe to grind
is a man
with no axe.

J.

Killing Kings

Scarce are “odes in praise of work” done by those who do so…or, put another way, cartographers seldom offer directions.

Nothing is one hundred percent…unless you count “non-existence”…and once it is counted, it can no longer fit its own definition.

Killing all the kings
will not destroy
man’s desire for same.

From those high, pole-mounted speakers over near the combat zone, came a booming voice, “Those of you already on the battlefield may leave, the rest of you – FIX BAYONETS!”

There is some question as to whether man could expand, spore, and clone without celebrities.

J.

Seeds

To talk about something – anything, you must first pretend it’s important enough to BE talked about.

One afternoon while alone, one chap thought, “I’ve held myself captive for so long that the whole concept of freedom is now no more than a minor yeast infection.”

To grow, all systems must be based on seeds of self destruction.

Whilst on a hiking trip in that new little flashy bar in the Busy Zone, a fellow told me that he had already settled on his “guiding truth for the new decade,” and being the neon fool that I am, I nodded my preparation to hear same put into audible form, which he forthwith did, by saying:  “If the stars are the brain cells of the universe, then transistors are unnecessary.”

I know of this one neural race track where they all run around real fast clockwise for a few laps, then turn around real quick and race around the corner counter clockwise…and just when you think it couldn’t get more exciting, time puts on a helmet and HE climbs behind the wheel.

J.

Plates or Stomachs?

Over in a corner, one man said, “It’s right along here that I get all confused.  Now let’s say that the gods were our ancestors, and that our ancestors are, let’s say, like food, then I get discombobulated over the two possibilities: are we like plates, or stomachs?”  And a far corner said, “What if we’re more like eating?”

Those disinclined to take anyone else’s word for anything may develop a smaller though richer vocabulary.

Whilst standing navel deep in mud, watching his house float away, and having the winds pulling his eye balls from their sockets, this one upbeat, (or was it “beat up”) fellow thought, “As wondrous and fulfilling as it’s been to be the recipient of the planet’s weather all these years, wouldn’t it someday be nice to be where it all begins.”  And the Great Meteorological Machine, sitting around a poker table with some chums, spoke up and said, “What gives with these guys with two eyes, they always think the center’s somewhere else.”

As he sat toying with his gloves, he said to his ancestoral, though childlike manager, “I’m telling you again, if I’m climbing in the ring with information like that, I wanna know that the fix is in.”

Planets do as they must,
stars do as they please.

J.