time-like entropy

Everything feels like a dream right now. Everywhere I look, I can't help but to imagine myself, or an alternate version of myself, existing in conjunction and in some variant way with whatever happens to live in my field of view - trees and houses, sidewalk and sky, dirt and moonlight; the muffled sound of a distant conversation, and footsteps; a barking dog. I'm imagining myself embedded within the swath of influence that these things have shaped and formed as the phenomenon of existence flows over, across, and around them... like a glacier of time-like entropy winding a path of consequences through a mountain range of causal events; splitting and merging and splitting, and merging again. And I'm aware of how magical it feels to be both an old friend and a complete stranger to myself.

Dang. I sure as heck don't know where all that came from.

A dream - Jerral

I was sitting in a rocking chair in front of this gas station in Mt. Pleasant on the north side of town that we used to stop at on the way to Clint's.  I was rocking back and forth pretty good, thinking about these stunts I'd seen earlier that had put this idiot in the hospital.  It was a news report I was remembering.  It was funny, so I laughed.  Then I saw Sam coming up the hill, and I thought, "Time for a smoke," and started fumbling in my pocket for a couple of cigarettes.  Then to my left, I saw Jerral walking up.  He was just like the last time I saw him.  Stocky and healthy with a shock of unruly blond hair, arms so big they kind of stuck out to the side a little as they hung naturally from his shoulders, and there was this grin on his face that got bigger and bigger as he got closer.  I jumped up out of the chair in disbelief, and I said, "No, no, I knew it, you're ok, you're not dead," and I ran over and gave him a hug and started crying, saying into his shoulder, "Why, why man, why did you scare us like that?"  And then we sat down on a couch and he started to explain how he'd almost died, but it was his wife who had saved him, and then his voice started to recede and things started to fade, and I said out loud, "This isn't real.  You're dead."  And I burst into tears and woke up.

A dream - string of worlds

I dreamed I was on an engineered planet, one of a ring of planets which circled the sun, all of them connected by technology.  I stood on the surface of the world, and the sky was daylight and blue, but a very dark blue, and stars were visible, and the sun was shining close to the horizon, and it was indescribably beautiful.  And in the sky I could see the string of worlds, and they were all attached to this shimmering length and strung along it, and I could see the vegetation growing on each world, and the oceans churning and reflecting sunlight, and each was like a mini-version of the Earth.  A string of pearl Earth's stretching across the sky.  I got so excited I couldn't stand it, I had to find someone to show it to, and there was a station across the field, so I ran to it.  People came out, and I screamed and shouted to them and pointed at the sky, but wind was blowing, and I couldn't hear anything I said or they said.  I ran into the station, and the engineers were in there, the one's who'd created it all.  They were doing something that was being displayed on a screen, and I saw that they were tearing the string of worlds apart and reordering them, and in doing so, making connections which fit together perfectly, as if they'd been made that way but put together wrong to begin with.  I watched as all of the worlds reconnected, and electric lines of blue surged along all of the rivers and rock strata and ocean currents and air currents and through all of the vegetation, and then it was done, and it was all connected and I ran back outside and looked up, and it was all glowing this awesome blue, and I knew I was looking at a huge, cosmic brain which had been formed by all of those connections, and that the string of worlds was now a conscious thing.

Bird

The weirdest thing! Tonight I came across a bird in the road, just sitting there, all nestled up and comfy. Right in the middle of the road. So I went over to it and and said, "Hey bird, hey, hey, hey bird, hey, watcha doin' in the road, hey bird, whatcha doin', whatcha doin', get outa the road bird, hey bird, what's up bird?" And it didn't respond at all. Now, you may be thinking that this bird was dead, but no... I've seen plenty of dead birds. Just plenty of 'em, and this one wasn't dead. But what the heck WAS it doing? I reached down and was just about to grab it and move it off of the road, and as soon as the tip of my finger just barely touched its wing, SHEBLOGINSCHNOGUMUP! That bird flew right off. Crazy bird. Could'a got run over.

Dang. I mean, yeesh. Wow! Weird!

Dang. I mean, yeesh. Wow! Weird! Okay, so here's what happened. I was walking along, and about to cross over a creek. It was a pretty wild creek, with lots of reeds and tall grass growing in it. So, I'm walking across this man-made Road Bridge, over the creek, and I see this thing moving in it. This thing moving in the creek. At the front of it, where its mouth probably was, there were a bunch of reeds and grass sticking up out of the water. It had these things in its mouth, these tall pieces of grass and stuff. So, I pretty much stopped immediately and froze, and looked at it really hard. I thought to myself, dang, what the fuck is this? A fucking platypus or something? Pardon my language, but that's what I was thinking and what I kind of said out loud, in a sort of whisper. I watched it and it kept coming toward me, and I had the ridiculous thought that it was a cartoon animal, swimming along underwater, and using a hollow reed for a snorkel. I happened to be munching on a pretzel at that moment, so I spit it out into my hand and threw it into the creek. I thought to myself, damn, that'll stop that thing. I was sure that it would go after the pretzels. But hell no, that thing just kept on swimming, with the shittiest bouquet in the world, sticking out of the water in front of it. As it was about to pass under the little piece of road I was standing on, I threw more pretzels at it, and I even yelled at it. I think that I said, "Yo yo yo, hey, pretzels! You're missing the pretzels! Dummy! Wtf?" Then I got a closer look at it, and I thought that it was either a beaver, or an armadillo. Or a platypus. or a really hairy turtle. Heck, I don't know what it was, but whatever it was, it was on a mission with that bouquet of weeds.

How we met

How We Met
by
Ash

One day I was cleaning my dust collection when I suddenly had the urge to do something impossible. So, I decided to put this quantum mechanics probability poo-poo and purgatory of uncertainty crap, espoused by such mental midgets as Bohr, Einstein, Planck, and Heisenberg, to the test.

So, using that crazy 'observation must make it real' crap that Schrodinger was trying to teach to his cat as a necessary reference point in this world of bullcrap, I observed a device into existence for the purpose of punishing all of this dumbass quantum mechanical rigmorole. Seriously, it's retarded. I mean... if we are to believe the ass menagerie of modern science, then quarks come in flavors. So, according to these aforementioned dunderheads, there is such a thing as a quark that tastes like 'charmed'. And some of them have to spin 720° just to make one full rotation... I shit you not! Now, does that make a doggone bit of sense? NO. Quarks are stupid.

So. The device I observed into existence was a protractor which could not only measure both the energy and position of a particle simultaneously, but which also shat upon Planck's constant and the Pauli exclusion thing and the Heisenberg uncertainty principle, all at the same time (it was a real protractor, by the way, and not just some crazy imaginary thing... just so you know I'm not making this up) which means that according to this protractor, Heisenberg was stoned and Pauli must have been drunk on elderberry wine, and Planck was just this kid who thought algebra was a vegetable.

So, now that I've laid the groundwork, we can continue on to whatever it was I was talking about, which was how we met... I guess. That's the title I used when I saved this little essay when I started writing it about a week ago, but now I can't remember who it was that I was supposed to have met, and how it was supposed to have happened. It's pretty frustrating. Like when there's something you can't remember the name of.. like a thingamajig, or a whatchamacallit. Or that dream you had last night, or what day it is, or where you are, or how to speak English, or how to breathe... uh. You get the gist.

Anywho, that's what's happening right now. I can't remember any of that stuff. That's ok though, because I don't remember meeting anyone before, ever. I know it's something that must have or will have happened at some time in the future or as a future memory, but that I will have had knowledge of before I start writing this; the knowledge of which has, or was, or will have, or will be, or will be said or will have been said at some point either then, now or whenever, and has become or will become or is becoming or later becomes whatever it is that this is, right now.

Does anyone concur?

Oh, wait a second! I remember now. All of this was supposed to be about how I met this 120 year old time traveling version of myself from the future, who'd been on all these awesome adventures with aliens and dinosaurs. Duh! How could I have forgotten that? Stupid!

That Feeling

Sometimes I dream about that place where reality consists of an abstract feeling tthat describes things, such as family and friends and home and weather and seasons and love and happiness and disappointment and sadness and despair and hope and longing and utter destruction. Don't we all have those dreams? The ones that seem more real than actually being awake... the ones that we long for, that should contain us forever in a shroud of comfort, immune to logic and math, and events and the passage of time? The ones which consist of that pinnacle of perfect sadness that we would die for? A comforting blanket of grief that lasts forever. Murky and warm and deadening, like an eternal dose of novocaine. Does anyone else know about this, or is it just me?

How I turned a million in real estate into 25 dollars cash

It's about... 2:00 am, and I'm just leaving CVS. I have some crap that I need to throw away, so I head for the trash, over there to the right, and... good grief, it's practically overflowing. Doesn't anyone here ever empty the trash on their smoke breaks? Unacceptable.

Anywho. So I walk over to this volatile midden heap to dispose of my receipt and some other crap. I toss it all in, oblivious to the danger... but as I turn to leave, I have to do a double take. What did I just see in there? In the trash? Was that money? I shoved my flashlight in there and shone it around, and by golly, there was a dollar bill! I wasted no time extricating it from the surrounding crap, after which I continued to excavate vigorously with both hands.

As I was thusly engaged, I looked over to my left and froze. There sat a cop in his cop car, about ten feet away, just a-watching me as I enthusiastically strip mined the garbage. Without really being consciously aware of it, I immediately... bounced, I guess, is the best word to describe it... away from the garbage can, as if I had been shocked right off of it with high voltage. I looked around for a strategic exit, but the cop was parked right there at the curb. There was nothing for it except to just walk right on past, holding up that dollar bill and sort of smiling and wiping the invisible schmutz off it, hoping that the cop understood that it was okay, and not at all retarded, or illegal, to go dumpster diving for dollar bills.

Alone and stuck in a bear trap with a bad banana on broadway

Why does it feel this way?

I do this walking around at night thing a lot, and every single time I do it, I'm alone - an isolated thing; a self contained window on the universe. So I ask myself for the umpteenth time - is everyone alone inside themselves, or is it just me? It's how I've felt for my entire life, since I was old enough to remember being alive. It feels natural... this cut-off, isolated feeling. The way cancer feels natural. That's the way I've always thought of it.

Allow me to elucidate. Firstly, we have selfish to the second power - that is, the object of our discussion - multiplied by selfish. Or selfish squared, or the opposite of the square root of selfish. Anyway. Then you multiply all of that crap by altruism, and then divide it all by patience. Then, after all that, the only thing left is to plug in the value of the specific triomial nomenclature pertaining to whatever it was that the poem was about, which is, in this case... the deus ex machina, and you wind up with what seems like a lot of pretentious bullshit. Ha ha ha! But seriously though. Right? Yeah! Hee hee hee. So. Yeah. But seriously. Right? Will you go with me? Yes - No - circle one?

So anywho.

Here I am, and it feels to me like life is an immense bear trap; the dimensions of which aren't measured in space, but in duration... always only a day or two away from its purpose, which happens to be adjacent to, parallel to, perpendicular to, and opposite of mine.

A big dumb truck and a stupid fraidy cat monster

I'm walking down Windsor, going east past the rec center.  There is some kind of waste management truck, driving on the sidewalk, of all places.  There are little mini-manholes along the sidewalk every now and then, which I assume are accessible for some civil engineering purpose, so I guess that truck is doing the mini man-hole thing at 4:00 am. I don't like it - he's in my way.  I have to cross the street and tread on grass to avoid the truck, which displeases me.  It is an inconvenience.  I pass by the truck as it inches forward, and think to myself... supid truck, don't you know that at night, all of this belongs to me?  Yeesh.

Anyway, so I keep walking and finally pass that truck and I am able to regain my rightful place on the sidewalk.  You hear that, truck?  Roads are for trucks, like the one two feet to your right that you can't seem to get a bead on.  And sidewalks are for people.  You know, the guys who invented your stupid self with your too big to be practical tires and your huge storage tank full of whatever and your big, dumb empty brain case that requires somebody to be sitting inside it just so you can decide whether or not you need to take a dump.

Okay, that made no sense, which I now realize.  Whatever.  Who cares.

Now comes the point of all this rambling rigmarole.  So I pass by that big, dumb brainless truck, and after about half a mile of blessed silence and peace, here comes this wolf, just trotting along in the opposite direction on the other side of the road, as if he had every right to.  Wait just a second... was that a wolf?  Let's see.. it definitely wasn't a coyote, because I've seen plenty of those late at night, roaming the streets of Denton.  City coyotes, I guess they are, like in those old cartoons where the city varmint visits the country varmint and hilarity ensues.  You know, city coyotes.  Like these ones; that is, if there were any here.

Anywho, this weren't no coyote, because coyotes are little scraps of fur and bones, and this thing was huge.  Way bigger.  I suppose it could have been a German Shepard, but how many huge, stray German Shepards do you see wandering the country part of Denton at 4:00 am?  It was big, and I think it was a wolf.  Right?  Ok then, it's decided.  It was a wolf.

So this huge wolf monster goes trotting by, and I have no choice but to ready my double-laser club-whip and prepare for battle.  The wolf monster turns its head toward me in mid-stride, and as he sees me, his eyes instantly ignite into two glowing blue balls of super hot plasma, and I mentally prepare myself for the twin beams of million degree energy which will instantly render my atoms into their constituent quarks, thereby returning me to the quagma state; that frothing stew of potential from which all matter is formed and all phenomena occur.

Well, that didn't happen obviously, because that wolf just kept on going and hightailed it like a big stupid fraidy cat.  Stupid fraidy cat wolf monster.

Anywho.

Killed by beauty

I, as a pinpoint of awareness in all of this infinite shmagaluphness, am walking at night with the whole of existence all around me, in every direction, everywhere.  It's night, or what I observe as night.  I am this thing which absorbs the ceaseless input of information from just... everything, is all.  I direct my sight up, and see a thing which astounds me.  Just flat out blows me away.  It always does, I guess.  Clouds are forming a bright fish-bone type of pattern against a darker background of sky... and the reason is - get this - because of the moon, which is half full.  It's over to the left of where I'm looking; where I'm directing my information absorbing attention, for those brief moments of eternity.  The clouds are a kind of gray-blue color, against another gray-blue color.  The sky.  Which is about, oh say... a hundred times darker than the clouds.  Wild guess.  They show up pretty well against it.  The moon is there, about a thousand times brighter than the clouds.  Half of it.  The moon.  Half of the moon, as it's only half full.  And there's this thing around it, a band of dim colors that fade into the background of sky, because of quadzillions of atoms what are scattering the light just so... red and blue and purple, and purple-black, and red-black, and blue-silver, and just so many colors.  I never have noticed before that so many colors can exist between gray blue black and white blue light.  I never knew that before. 

I continue walking, and the stuff around me continues to change as my position changes.  All kinds of stuff.  Lit by moon-light and man-light.  Trees, branches, leaves, man-made stuff, dirt, puddles of water, reflections of trees and branches and leaves and man-made stuff and dirt in the puddles of water.  For a few moments I wonder about the resolution of the universe, and how far down it goes, and how much processing power it takes to continue rendering it into existence, and then I imagine the mind of God, or try to... the mind of God, constantly rendering the universe into existence, and I am afraid, deeply afraid that I'm incapable of ever understanding, and that I'll be afraid for a brief piece of eternity.

Awareness continues and changes as the scenery changes, and the mood changes too, and I understand for a second... I am aware of how it's all attacking me from everywhere at once, all of this beauty, and that it's relentless, and without mercy.  It will never stop being beautiful, and my only defense is to ignore it, which is impossible.  I am being battered with beauty, and I start to cry, and to weep, and tears pour out of my eye holes, but I try to do it silently so as to not contaminate or offend or anger all of that everythingness around me.  I try to weep with a tiny bit of humility, but I know I'm not.  I know that I'm only weeping for myself, and because of my fear, but I don't know how else to be.  I don't know how to weep purely. 

I endure this kind of strange mixture of heaven and hell for as long as it takes for me to realize that this beauty is terminal.  It's killing me.  I'm being constantly killed by beauty, and I don't know if I'm crying with tears of joy or tears of sadness.  I don't know whether to be comforted or terrified.  I truly don't know.  I'm just overwhelmingly overcome with this thing, a feeling or something.  This thing that invades my now-ness and forces my acknowledgement of it.  I'm suddenly aware that I'm alive, so very much alive.  Ah, God.  I don't know.  I don't know what sadness is or happiness is.  I don't know.  I'm feeling very very much, and I don't know.  I'm aware of dying.  That I'm living, and that every moment of living is dying.  That the point of living is dying, and that the reason to live is to die.  To be killed by the experience of life; the beauty of it.  Beauty is killing me, and it always has been, and I only notice it now and then.  It's too much.

Life is but a dream

Sometimes when it's late and it's dark and I'm out walking, and when there are trees... especially when there are trees, I get an almost indescribable feeling of nostalgia for a youth which consists only of insubstantial experiences - as if I've slept through my entire childhood, and all of my memories from that time are just the memories of dreams.

These dreams that I remember consist of summer evening sunlight shining through the tree branches of a particularly dense copse of woodsy pines, leaving dappled shadows on the loamy, needle strewn ground. Always in these dream memories there is a feeling of ignorant, naive comfort. It's a reflection of a child's mindset - my mindset as a child.

When I was about 4 years old, my granddaddy built a fort of tree branches for me and my brother in the woods behind our trailer and called it Kalamazoo. The details of this memory are more like a smudge of the senses than an accurate record of events, so what I'm left with is more of a feeling than an actual play by play of these particular moments which transpired when I was all of four years old. 

These memories are well on their way to becoming nothing more than the remembrance of dreams.  Row, row, row your boat.

God's Own Fingernail

As I was walking back to my sisters house tonight, I followed the moon.  It is almost a perfect half moon tonight, casting just enough light every now and then to lend a dream-like quality to the moment, when it happened to be just right.  I don't know if that's a good thing or a bad thing - the experience I have every now and then when I'm out late at night and walking, when a few elements of thought and observation line up just-so that they twist reality into more of an abstract feeling, rather than this physical matrix in which I normally perceive myself as imbedded within.  These moments occur and I always experience them with a part of myself which is detached.  I don't know what it's detached from... just that it's detached, and not part of the majority for a little while.  For a few moments.  And sometimes this scares the ever loving crap out of me.

There's no such thing as a moment, by the way.  I'm certain that I'm not the first somebody to realize this, but it still seems kind of profound to me, that the thought coursed through my brain and stimulated my awareness.  Kind of like... say, the way a retarded, malformed appendix cell languishing amongst a culture of Isle of Langerhans, with a virus clinging to its nucleus and inserting alien RNA into its genome, causing it to digest its own mitochondria, may realize at some level resembling a few bits of information, that this situation is certainly unique to its existence which, up to that point, might have otherwise been fairly normal... that is, if it had been a regular, non-retarded appendix cell, existing in an appendix, doing whatever it is that appendix cells are supposed to do, as they occupy a series of connected moments, with one moving seamlessly into the next.  Except that there aren't any individual moments.  There is only the one long moment of the present, inside which we are all trapped and imprisoned and enslaved, like a gear in a machine... a gear which has to have THIS many teeth, and which has to interface specifically with THAT gear, and which must turn at a CERTAIN speed, so that its momentum can be transferred to the NEXT MOMENT... so that existence can continue to be.  So we divide up life into little segments called moments, which don't even exist.  It's exactly like pointing to an empty field and saying, "Hey, check out that fire breathing, 20 thousand ton mayfly dancing on the head of that tiny shard of degenerate matter, defecating rainbows and singing a different kind of math."  It's exactly like that.

So, like I was saying.  I was walking back to my sisters house tonight, following the moon.  And while I was doing this, walking along and looking at the moon, marveling at the pure fact that it was right there, shining this silver white light down onto the ground, onto a field of grass which fairly glowed with this blue-green sheen... as if the very atoms which comprised its being were each individually painted over with a physical manifestation of the ether through which dreams flow... anyway, so while I was doing this, the walking and looking thing, with the moon and the grass and all, I suddenly realized something.  I had an epiphany, if you will.  A grand moment of clarity.  That the moon, in its waning gibbous state, was God's Own Fingernail, hovering up there, right in front of me, right at that moment.  And that since there is no ONE single moment, that must mean that it (God's Own Fingernail, that is) is always there, has always been there, will always be there, and won't ever not be there.  God's Own Fingernail, that is.  And then I kind of got scared shitless and hurried up and got here so I could type up this absurdity, rendering the abstract thought of the insane into a few harmless, logical words which fairly obeyed the rules of grammar.

Yeah, I guess that kinda sums me up, if I lived in fantasyland.

You Are A:

Neutral Good Human Cleric (5th Level)

Ability Scores:
Strength- 11
Dexterity- 12
Constitution- 13
Intelligence- 11
Wisdom- 13
Charisma- 12
Alignment:
Neutral Good- A neutral good character does the best that a good person can do. He is devoted to helping others. He works with kings and magistrates but does not feel beholden to them. Neutral good is the best alignment you can be because it means doing what is good without bias for or against order. However, neutral good can be a dangerous alignment when it advances mediocrity by limiting the actions of the truly capable.

Race:
Humans are the most adaptable of the common races. Short generations and a penchant for migration and conquest have made them physically diverse as well. Humans are often unorthodox in their dress, sporting unusual hairstyles, fanciful clothes, tattoos, and the like.

Class:
Clerics- Clerics act as intermediaries between the earthly and the divine (or infernal) worlds. A good cleric helps those in need, while an evil cleric seeks to spread his patron's vision of evil across the world. All clerics can heal wounds and bring people back from the brink of death, and powerful clerics can even raise the dead. Likewise, all clerics have authority over undead creatures, and they can turn away or even destroy these creatures. Clerics are trained in the use of simple weapons, and can use all forms of armor and shields without penalty, since armor does not interfere with the casting of divine spells. In addition to his normal complement of spells, every cleric chooses to focus on two of his deity's domains. These domains grants the cleric special powers, and give him access to spells that he might otherwise never learn. A cleric's Wisdom score should be high, since this determines the maximum spell level that he can cast.

The 'Oh Crap' Effect

A few minutes ago as I was walking south on Bonnie Brae, I had just passed the new electrical substation when a coyote ran across the road in front of me. I immediately whipped up my flashlight and followed it as it crossed. It was looking at me the whole time it was running, and it's eyes glowed blue.

Once on the other side of the road, it disappeared into the underbrush, and I thought that I had lost it. I poked around in the bracken from a distance with the flashlight beam for a while, using it as an appendage to stir up the detritus and to sweep away the shadows. As I approached the copse where the coyote had disappeared, sweeping my light back and forth, I briefly illuminated a pair of bright blue pinpricks. I quickly swept the beam back again, but before I could completely change direction, another pair of disembodied sparks was revealed floating in the darkness... and then another, and another, and another, one right after the other, as if a stage-hand was illuminating them on cue for maximum dramatic effect.

In all, four pairs of eyes regarded me from the bushes. None of them moved for the entire time I had them in my flashlight beam, which was for at least thirty seconds, and nary a sound was emitted. Then I realized that four coyotes could probably have me for dinner, so I high tailed it.

A friend of mine, after reading this, referred to my experience as the 'Oh Crap' effect:

"You find something that seems pretty cool or cute, and you think, 'Oh how cute' or 'Oh how cool'.  Then your brain kicks you mentally in your face going, "Hey you stupid muppet, this is dangerous."  Only then does it dawn on you, that feeling of  Oh crap..." 

Although I think that in order to get the full 'Oh Crap...' effect, you need to crap your pants too.