Demon wants be your friend!

I remember talking in the tens about the correlation of the aughts with the advent of the means of observation you're looking at now. I remember in aught-one, my first online argument took minutes to dial up and download; once it had begun, its continuation curated, concurrent to the anticipation of a response hitting my observation glass, an adrenaline rush of agitation that augured the required effect of the growing technical efficiency of this process.

 

In case you're confused, I've not got that backward. The tech growth alone can't necessitate its necessity. It requires the effect. You could say, as has been said, that the striving for that effect has taken centre stage, and while "need" is inaccurate, the conjuring of need from the shallow end of desire is just one aspect in these roaring twenties that's not necessarily new.

 

I remember strolling past rows of newspaper boxes prior to the turn. Some required a quarter-&-a-half to access the eye-grabbing content; others you could grab for free. It's important to note here that the truly valuable stuff was behind the flaps without a hitch. Everything enriching was in those pages. People, their pets and their culture, and how to engage with those people, walk those pets, grow in communion with the culture. Everything else was spackled upon the Times.

 

For the most part, back then, the demon that was not so new was the observation glass that projected the urge for all the things that shed destruction. Even if as implied, all that bled was not read — an innuendo that would mock the boob tubers' tendency toward fearful fascination in peak audio visual ascendancy — the Tribunes, too, remained a platform that was gawked upon.

 

It's where you went to dig deep into the news that was afoot. It didn't mean you were smarter than anyone else, although I'm sure there are studies that indicate a level of readers' being more informed. Aside from there having to be a point of diminishing value when it comes to loading one's mind with bits of detailed information, when that information diverges from the headline that got you there, you might call it quarter-&-a-half bait.

After all this time it's tediously cliché to shake one's head at the masses in unbroken stride while glued to their newspaper box display windows. So what if they spend most of their time looking at the personals. For here we are.

 

The business model has not changed. For all the rightful wringing of hands about the big baddies surveillance of minds and manipulation of the same in striving for ceaseless access to attention spans, you'd be hard pressed to make a case that it would be possible without the wilful submission of their targets. So what else is going on?

 

The message is the medium. It undergirds a great notion that survives on vice. The truth in the argument that there's no freewill manifests when there's no will to resist what the argument's selling, the ultimate result of which is the notion life has no meaning except in buying pointless arguments that lend the utility to define the parameters of future arguments.

 

Only if you've supplanted your reality in favor of another are you a simulation. Anybody who makes the claim that alone due to some possibility it's in any way probable we're already living in a simulated reality is advertising to the vice that would rather not take responsibility for one's own.

 

It also happens to use the philo-sophistry that just because someone said it, it's possible. If that someone is a construct-like creature of a human who just happens to be able to cast spells upon the desperate in their need to be pumped and dumped, you might want to take a closer look. Or look away.

Mama reminded me of the lost and found and Ms. G.

December 2012, Berlin

Dear Ms. G,

What can I say? How do I communicate my gratitude to you? Not only for the return of my keys, not to mention the even less expected handing over of the cash! No, that goes without saying, so the thought - if such an exceedingly considerate act was about the delegated responsibility of our empathy, then we would already see in our mind's eye how one reacted to it: filled with gratitude.

Anyway, I can't appreciate how much effort you put in to see your honorable deed through to the end. May I then still claim that I really appreciate it? Either way, I've been unsettled by the possibility that you would not appreciate how grateful I am.

 

But there's more.

As I searched up and down that stretch of road and searched again, one question kept turning in my mind: If I found such a strange possession lying in the street, what would I do?  How?

In any case, I would wish that the property-without-person (i.e. without any determining references to a specific owner) would find itself back in the right hands, back in the right pocket, back at home.

I imagined being confronted with the dilemma: Simply leave it there? Put it on more visible display nearby? Stand around all day where I found it, waving the keys around in the air, yelling out in all directions to make the find  most public?

You see, Ms. G, doing your part to see to the return of my keys together with the cash, you indirectly taught me something else: I had never heard of such a Lost and Found Bureau. When I first heard that word [Fundbüro], I asked, "Is there such a thing?" "I don't really know," came the reply from the same person who had advanced the validity of the word by way of suggestion.

 

I was uneasy being handed a note with the address of the "finder", especially since the woman in the lost and found office had initially spoken of an anonymous person. On that small slip of paper was also a suggested finder's fee of one euro. Or, more precisely, written on the back with your name and address thus: 1,00€. Strange, I thought. How do they come up with that?

"Of course you can give more," the lady said. Of course, I also thought. Here I was again encountering yet more uncertainties.

"Chocolates," said the first person I asked for advice. Yes, that's also a standard, I thought. Subsequently, I talked with my sister and mother, who considered and discussed. Finally, my sister posited that if someone willingly submits such personal information, maybe she'd just like to hear about it should that property and person find themselves together again. Of course! 

 

Hence a solution to my imagined dilemma. I hadn't known what I'd do with unidentified property precisely because I would have wanted to know foremost when and if the things had found their way back home. So you've managed to teach me yet another lesson.

And now I hope you know, dear Ms. G, how grateful I am.

Der Parkbank Pinkler Kapitel XXVI: es geht aufwärts

XXVI.

 

Heute ist ein schöner Tag. Bin früh auf. Frühstück aus Flaschengeld gemacht. Husten über das Essen rüber. Woran sich bloß gewöhnt wird.

 

Das eine kleine Lebensspiel macht manche Tage besser als andere. Jeder Morgen hat eigene Erneuerungspotenzial, selbst nach Abenden schrecklicher Verzweiflung. Er beginnt und endet mit Selbstwertgefühl. Waswertgefühl? Genau. Mittelloser sind nicht gerade Metalllos, und ich bin Alchemist und Entrepreneur. Überlebenskünstlersektor.

 

Seien Sie gewarnt: Während ich hier versuche, die Frage des glücklichen Lebens klarzustellen, auf welcher Straße immer, wie so viele andere Dinge auch, liegt echtes Verständnis allein in der Erfahrung.

Do that it were am!

Newfangled was the brand of the brand I was shoving into my face when the older of my two older brothers made his way through what we called the dining room on his way from wherever he'd been to wherever he was going. He'd always been somewhere and going somewhere else. Sporting what must've been an irrepressible motor, he was probably home for a shower before he headed to wherever would lead to the need for another.

 

We briefly bonded over an appreciation for this act of gluttonous intermission. This was no abstraction, there was no generalized contextualization, but a clear-cut ode to the expeditious clearing of a can of this very substance, wherewith he would relate he could relate to being where I was and doing precisely what I was doing, potato'd on the couch watching whatever and placing stacks of reconstituted foodstuff into a hole somewhere just beneath my nose, mashing more than chewing as the salted starch melted onto my tongue just barely before I repeated stacking and shoving so as not to risk an unsteady presence of product along the chain of hand, mouth, gullet and gut.

The Fine Blurred Line

Everybody's got their own standard as to what's acceptably connotative colloquy and what ain't. There are word books that catalog common use and some people will refer to one dictionary over another if they think the other's gone too far in jotting down what's meant by what's being said.

 

The Burden before the Prince

Good news. I woke up and it was all a dream. Not quite a nightmare, you know. One does acclimate to the horror.

 

I'd been thinking reality was relative since I'd thought really hard about the contrast between the dream during the dream and the realisation just after, and how it'd be extraordinary were it not for thousands upon thousands of bouts of credulity, forever at home ahead of the unfailing revelation that dawns on the dreamer. So I'm no longer sure it's less naive to believe in the dream night after night, when it's proven false by my own senses day after day, than it's to maintain a belief in the same senses reminding me nothing's amiss. What year is this?

 

The good news is I woke up and it was all a dream. Though that's not really a twist. I have gotten used to this.

 

What all? I'd been considering the question with increasing regularity proportional to the accumulating moments of realisation that the sight in the slumbering that'd just occurred was an involuntary illusion. A certain multitude of such experiences wrench the remarkable into a yawn and a stretch. While the distinctness of certainty seems somehow symmetrical, it's only so. How far back can this go?

 

I've got good news. Today is the first day after the last.

Distinctions most never need to make

We're having problems with the undertanding of things. This means we don't like the way people understand things, or that they understand them at all.

 

We're having problems understanding things. This means we probably don't understand their understanding either.

Cant

I propose there are exclusively something like three conduits to imagining the plausibility of allegations against another that are not known as incontrovertible fact: via projection because you've done it before; via the same because you could imagine yourself doing it or, indirectly because you've been direct witness to it's being done; via indirect projection because you've already witnessed it done by another, or because you've already believed it plausible someone else's done it. 

 

If you want to test the authenticity of the second part of the third conduit, i.e. the imagined plausibility previously believed plausible, you should exhaust your belief by recursion to conduit one until you resolve the issue with conduit one or two. In other words, authentic plausibility can only come by way of projecting what you know to be true about yourself. Everything else is something else.