How Much Fun Is This?

https://aeon.co/essays/how-evolutionary-biology-makes-everyone-an-existentialist

New Series - What Did You Have For Dinner?

Dearest readers, please meet my new series What Did You Have For Dinner?

It will go something like this:


A: What did you have for dinner last night?

E: Chinese Mustard.

A: Oh yeah, dipped some egg rolls did ya, maybe some of the ole crab from rangoon?

E: No, just the mustard.

A: You can't just eat Chinese mustard for dinner.

E: It's rich in vitamin C.

A: Maybe by eating 3 cups. How much did you eat?

E: Enough.

See/Do

we are products of our sight lines.

There is no me in Ohio University but there is a you

Where I became a man, where I learned how to play music, where I started my career, where I bought my first working automobile,where I ran my first (and second) marathon, where I met my wife.

It's just a beautiful place:

Dream Forgetters

No dreams filled their minds. No dreams they would remember in the morning anyway. Everyone dreams, every night. But chemicals filled their brains. All of them. Every last soul in Gamertsfelder had chemicals and electricity in them. 
What else do souls have in them? Robert Fulghum asked where do the mermaids stand? and somebody, not just anybody, wants to know, what is in souls? Souls account for a lot in this world but for the life of somebody, not just anybody, how do they contain anything? Anything at all? 
Don’t lives have to be in something? But souls aren’t like Tupperware containers. Are they? Or like empty gas cans in a shed somewhere in Ohio, just waiting to be filled…with life…or dreams.
Everyone dreams, every night. But no one in Gamertsfelder would remember a dream come Sunday morning when a sheepish star began climbing to light up their life, no pun intended, as the necessary and sufficient condition for all of them, those ingrates and dream forgetters!

https://iwl.me/s/8ccf5154

 

Who Gave Us Modernity? Becasue I Want My Money Back.

I need to invent a word to capture the something like irony, something like paradox, something like paradigm-less superimposition, radical objectivity meets facticity and both lose, feelings/ideas I had reading Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

As someone who feels like he is fighting his history and facticity, like Rebecca Goldstein feels Spinoza did on some level, but with the hope that there is some intellectual/rational solution to my facticity, as Spinoza ultimately felt there was to his own, via his radical objectivity (pantheism),...

I…

have my doubts.

Just can’t help thinking that happiness can’t be derived from a priori knowledge like 2+2=4. 

Human, all too human I guess.

Re the subtitle: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity.

Historians like Stephen Greenblatt, author of The Swerve, might offer that Spinoza played a part in modernity but that it began with Lucretius.

After all, modernity is time sensitive, by definition.

Rationality isn’t time sensitive though.

Or is it…

(cue ominous music)

 

Not A Choice

I wrote about the will here

And I asked “is choice at all a meaningful concept for addicts?

I guess it is up to a supreme court to decide:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/health-science/the-latest-court-eyes-drug-free-probation-order-challenge/2017/10/02/ea4c7124-a784-11e7-9a98-07140d2eed02_story.html?utm_term=.2ccd6f615bab

http://www.wbur.org/news/2017/09/24/probation-drug-test-sjc

“...she was unfairly punished because her relapse was the result of a disease, not a choice.”

I ask you dear reader, what is happening to free will?

What are the parameters of your quote unquote choices?

I also asked in the post noted above: “Is choice a meaningful concept in obesity?”

Consider: 40 Percent of Cancers Are Related to Being Overweight, Says Study

https://www.menshealth.com/health/cancers-linked-to-obesity

 

That's Pride...

I am so proud of this:

  She was alone; no one else in the car. She was young –no more than eighteen. Had been crying he could see – the mascara a purplish moat around her brown eyes. He noticed her hands were at the proverbial ten and two but they were shaking. He knew they were both up against a regret that would delineate so much, define almost everything hence and remind them that this brief fury is inexcusably tenuous.

Why not? Twas my birthday yesterday and I feel like a little auto-fellatio.

Sue me.