Toward Me

Just finished rereading Camus’ The Stranger and this beaut:

Throughout the whole absurd life I’d lived, a dark wind had been rising toward me from somewhere deep in my future, across years that were still to come, and as it passed, this wind leveled whatever was offered to me at the time, in years no more real than the ones I was living.

Death happens from you, not to you.

In Theory

Remember this scene from Back To School?

Ah, the ole in theory and in practice dichotomy.

Well in theory, everything is negotiable and everything can be bought. After learning that the senate voted to reject the repeal of the ACA, I couldn’t help but think about, in practice, democracy working…

IN THE SENSE THAT, Mr. Trump can’t just buy everything he wants, even with all of his wealth – he can’t buy his way in or out of replacing the ACA.

Please don’t assume or insinuate too much from this. Don’t assume I think that our “democracy” isn’t influenced by money. It is.

You don’t have to read Lawrence Lessig’s Republic Lost to know that money influences our so called democracy.

https://vimeo.com/30212221

It’s just that there is some joy in knowing that the “president” can’t just blatantly buy what he wants.

I realize this bar is low.

Guess we’ll all get better at the limbo. 

PB&J

My son advised this past Saturday that: “Daddy, I never want to hurt your soul.”

“Thanks Ju Ju but are you forgetting the classic problem of parallelism?”

*son runs off to play with leggos…

“You see Julian, Descartes defined the…

*son runs outside...

Later on that day as I was having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich it hit me: they can continue to run parallel but we can experience them both at the same time, just like the magic of a peanut butter and jelly sammie! Clearly peanut butter and jelly never mix, interact. Obvi! but in my mouth, mmm, a heaven of non-interaction.

My mouth is the arena for the clear and distinctly defined peanut butter (clearly the body) and jelly (the cogito) just like experience is the arena for the material and immaterial.

So I guess I went ahead and solved that paltry parallelism dilemma. You are welcome. 

What is Love? At 6am, in Stop-n-shop?

True Story:

I am outside Stop-n-Shop at 5:50am waiting for them to open. Finished my workout I headed there as we needed some items as my wife has taught a summer course for the last two weeks and we've run low on some things because I've been doing drop off and pick ups plus track and yadi yada.

Wheeling around, I got the bananas (god dammit honey crisp apples are out of season!), got the salad dressing, where do they keep the friggin' naan - of course the other side of the store. Is that it? Doesn't matter, gotta go.

No self checkouts are open, why would they be?

There! Lane 6.

What is that on the loudspeaker?

Of course:

The Valetudinarian

"Her hair, straining to be blond, had washed out into a color resembling sugarless gum after a long chew."

This Means, The End

I am near the end of Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser.

I started the book because I learned that David Foster Wallace was heavily influenced by it.

I’d read Elkin had Multiple Sclerosis. The Franchiser suffers from M.S. and near the end Elkin writes:

“I almost forget my teeth have goose bumps.”
“Goose bumps?”
“This M.S. is no respecter of feelings. It blitzkriegs the nerves, gives your hair a headache. You think there are splinters in your eyes and the roof of your mouth has a sunburn…

And this reminded me of Heidegger. Who would have thought that I would get so much mileage out of Being And Time –a book I read in the Spring of 1992!? -for an Existentialism Course.

I remember the professor for the course stressing the point that we often look past things, like tools, until they break down and we have to look at them, not as a means but as the end.

Heidegger provided this distinction: ready-at-hand and present-at-hand

I like the Alan Dix’s description here:

ready at hand — when you are using the tool and it is invisible to you, you just focus on the work to be done with it

present at hand — when there is some sort of breakdown, the hammer head is loose or you don’t have the right tool to hand and so start to focus on the tools themselves rather than on the job at hand

Your hair, doesn’t usually have a headache.

We use our bodies as means to ends –to get us here and there, to lift this and that.

We never, well, rarely, look at it or treat it as the end.

But it is.

And we do take it as the end, when it starts to break down. The Elkin passage shows just when you, we, might start to take account of our body.

Remember the year I read Being and Time?

1992

I was 22.

I am now 46.

I have, recently, had to take account of my body. Good lord I have taken account of my body.

I try to work out consistently. I ran a half-marathon in late April, and under two hours.

Not bad for a biped like me.

Then, about two weeks later, two gluttonous weeks of “sure, I’ll have another bowl of Dark Cocoa Karma before bed, why not?” I felt a little twinge in the ole lower back.

Don’t worry about it, a little twinge. What would Dad do? He’d go to work.

So I kept going.

Then there was the morning I could barely put on my shoes.

Then another week of pain.

And thoughts/images on an infirm me, unable to play with my kids start rummaging around up there; unable to chuck the apple? Unable to rassle or epic tickle fest?

I think not.

Vigilant I will be. Observant of my intake and output.

Because my body is more than a means.

I mean it.

The End.

You're Gonna Like The Way You Look

Had a thought/daydream that I wrote a novel and it sold like hotcakes and I was asked to help write the screenplay, which, of course, won an Oscar. Then there, on the red carpet, some beautiful interviewer asked me who I was wearing and I replied “Men’s Warehouse.”