Monthly Archives: December 2013

Vested Interest

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Systems can be fragile, only working under ideal conditions. Other times, they can be robust, designed to work even under inhospitable conditions. A particularly robust system can have the quality of being biased towards self-preservation. Not a bad thing in and of itself.

Problems arise when a system that includes the input of intelligent designers (as might be the case with computer systems and technical engineers) has a morally-irresponsible bottom line.

Many systems, however, are completely incapable of being personal. And good thing, too! Can you imagine if a hurricane was fully aware of the impact it was having on human life and local ecosystems? If they were aware and could do something about it yet elect not to, then they’re more than just destructive forces, they would be evil entities. If they’re aware of their impacts but can’t change anything, assuming they would if they could, then they come away from the experience carrying extreme guilt. Considering how unpreventable they are, extending said extreme weather system’s sensitivity to such a degree would only torture the poor cyclone with guilt and self-loathing (if it were biased to favour the well-being of living beings. There’s nothing saying that that must be the case). All for what? It’s not like it can do anything but follow the course of events as they unfold. A system like that isn’t designed to make it’s own decisions and direct it’s own actions (as far as I am aware. Correct me if I’m wrong). It would appear that such systems follow the teachings of Chaos to the exclusion of all others.

For other systems, it’s too bad they could not be more sensitive to their impacts. Perhaps there’s plenty of potential for intelligent decision-making, but such capability is poorly exercised. A lot of things that we take for granted come from this second kind of system.

Some systems are so complex, however, that intelligent, decision-making stages are too far removed from other stages, ones where, say, consequences are experienced, and where feedback is imprecise at the best of times.

So, too many times, intelligent decision-makers are not even aware that systems they’ve put in place may be causing more harm than good. The focus is in the wrong place (profit, 9 times out of 10). In the pursuit of misguided goals, we make barbaric choices. We’re quick to dismiss ethical concerns we’re confronted with, justifying our actions, minimizing our faults, shifting the focus on ‘greater evils’, twisting the facts, and basically doing anything and everything we can to cocoon ourselves from the negative realities of events we’re directly or indirectly responsible for setting into motion.

If there’s money to be had, we’ll engage and indulge in all manner or inexcusable behaviour, with no more regard for human, animal, plant, or any other natural creation’s inherent dignity than we can get away with neglecting (and even abusing) in the court of law.

And even then, with enough money on our side, it’s perhaps easier to pay the wrong people in the right places off than actually grow a sense of real responsibility and start making some genuinely good decisions. It’s more profitable to keep existing systems in place, and improve them only towards widening said profit margins than to do just about anything and everything else within our power to influence and control.

When we have these kinds of deeply vested interests, we will go so far as to destroy the pioneering spirits of entrepreneuring individuals, people with dreams of changing the status quo for the better, and keen vision for how to do so. [edit: while there’s an incredible number of awesome humans with commendable values, unless or until the kind of humans I have talking about (the kind who exploit anything and everything out of greed) are dealt with, I don’t see good odds of being allowed outside this universe (and go any other place, like Drendast where universes intersect)]

It doesn’t matter who we are. We all need to take a good hard look inside every once in a while and, with as little bias in our own favour as we humanly can (never a perfect check and balance, but it’s better than nothing), admit to ourselves what patterns of behaviour we have in our lives which contribute towards the perpetuating of systems that, in all seriousness, insult the very core of our beings, ultimately bringing harm to the well being and dignity of ourselves and others here on the only planet we’ve presently got.

Oh, and it never hurts to gain the perspective of others, especially others who can be trusted to be honest. How do we know who those others might be? We can never be sure (another imperfect check and balance), but if the feedback we get from others is ever uncomfortable, odds are it isn’t being candy coated, and that, at least, is never a bad sign.

Dissonance

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I have to admit, I haven’t left the shell of my comfortable existence very much lately. Since moving into the place that I’m currently in at the beginning of September, I haven’t once spent a night anywhere other than in my own bed up until the night of Christmas Eve. I was invited to spend the night and Christmas day with my girlfriend’s family, most of whom I hadn’t even met yet.

Sleeping somewhere other than in my bed wasn’t uncomfortable in and of itself. It was a bundled package which included other events, such as meeting a respectable number of new people (~10), getting all kinds of friendly attention from an almost equal number of their pets, visiting 3 entirely new places these new-to-me people and their pets lived in, and otherwise being completely out of my element for a period of approximately 30 hours.

In all of that, I have no complaints. I actually had an enjoyable time. I keep forgetting that I have that quality. I’ll explain. I’m an introvert. I spend most of my time lately in my living room with my laptop in front of me. Leaving the house is not something I actively seek out opportunities for, and I’m generally happier not having to be involved in social functions where I know less than 2 people, but I was invited. I agreed to go and spend time with her and her family instead of stay at home by myself ’cause, let’s face it, not even I’m that anti-social.

And, for once, I didn’t even hesitate to agree. She’s invited me to one or two previous family functions, but I hummed and hawed my uncertainty and skittishness before eventually declining. I felt guilty almost immediately, but I also felt relief. I don’t like that I tend to be so nervous and shy, but in this instance, I wasn’t going to let that stop me from finally biting the bullet and meeting everyone. Sure enough, I had absolutely nothing to worry about.

The only dissonance I felt and can discuss, however, pertains to differences in world views. We all know the social etiquette advice warning people to avoid bringing up religion or politics during family functions. That wasn’t really an issue in this particular adventure, but I’d say there was something like it afoot.

I am open to the idea of Panspermia which is the theory that life may have arisen elsewhere in the cosmos, and bits and pieces of that life could have hitched rides on asteroids and other things in space we too often call “debris” and/or “materials”, ending up all over the place, including Earth. Or like in the opening to Prometheus. Cool. Or even like on Ancient Aliens.

Or maybe not. I don’t know.

And that’s my point. I sure as hell don’t know everything about everything, but I’ve heard a lot of different ideas. I like ideas. Nay! I heckin’ LOVE ideas! But… they’re just so weird when other people talk about the same sorts of things. It’s not as easy to connect to people with some of the same weird ideas as me as I thought it’d be. I mean, sometimes it’s great. Other times, like recently, I find myself hearing things that I partly agree with mixed with other things, hard to place things, which have the effect of turning me off from the conversation.

For example, I can get excited about ideas and pop off all kinds of ‘what ifs’, but when I hear someone else discuss the same things less from a speculating and theoretical standpoint and more from a “here’s how it is” point of view, I withdraw.

I feel cognitive dissonance each and every time I hear an opinion presented with the same authority one might use when presenting a fact, even if I happen to almost fully agree (‘almost’ because, if I completely agreed, I’d assume my opinion was based on fact, and that, therefore, their’s  likely was as well. I am aware that that isn’t always true). I’m too long winded and reliant on the typed word to formulate an effective, balanced and fair response in the event that I think someone is mostly right when sharing their thoughts in person, but that they might do well to keep an open mind. Just in case.

What I can say is that it is, nevertheless, a thing of beauty to hear new voices with varying degrees of conviction in a number of things I don’t normally hear people discussing, whether or not I agree.

Nuts and Bolts and Progress!

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I try to do too much at once. I have been sitting on the same story now for over a decade. Obviously, it’s evolved. It’s nothing at all what it was when I originally envisioned it, but my problem is that I have a bit of a hard time committing to any particular version of the story. Who knows if, come tomorrow, I’ll see the story from some new, unforeseen angle and what to redraft the whole thing through the filter of the new vision.

Also, I can’t fully settle on what events should happen when. Lots of ideas, but they’re all disjointed. There’s a few overarching themes I have in mind, but very little substantial glue to bring it all together and hold it there in a way that feels quite natural. At least not just yet.

What is becoming more and more obvious to me is that certain things cannot be planned. There are a great many things which can only be discovered during the writing process itself. I’m finding myself increasingly guilty of letting ideas evolve exclusively in my head on their own to such a highly specialized extent that they suddenly start having very little in common with the heart of the rest of the story as a whole.

Instead, when I take to writing my ideas out in the direct context of actual story material, no matter how simple and incomplete they may be at first, they’ll at least have the benefit of being cohesive with the over arching vision. I’m now facing a turning point where I may need to open myself to some serious pruning. Eventually, the lofty and abstract concepts I’d like to feature in the story will make their appearance, but will they express themselves to the same refined extent which they currently exist in my head, or will they take an unexpected turn and show me something new instead? I’m getting closer to finding out each and every day.

Speaking of which, I’ve been busy the last couple of days. I’ve written a chapter for my story, Elyen, and will be looking to get some feed back from friends soon enough. If all goes well, I’ll share it online for anyone who’s interested in actually reading what I’ve been working on, rather than reading me talking about what I’ve been working on. Keep an eye out for that in the coming weeks.

Also, I drafted up a short poem called “Intentions” (originally called “Pretentious”), hosted on Wattpad. If you get a chance, please check it out and let me know what you think! It’s a quick read.

https://embed.wattpad.com/story/10888194
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Nothing To Do With Thermal Lensing

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I have an idea, but it’s hard to explain. It’s about heat and life and stuff.

And, after a few days of being stagnant in the keeping-up-with-blogging department, I feel as though that is precisely what I should ramble about today: my difficulty explaining things.

The idea that I had been struggling with trying to share has lead to a deeper vice of mine, and that is that I struggle with describing things that are of a somewhat unfamiliar nature, period. If it were up to me to describe what snow looked and felt like to members of an uncontacted tribe in the Amazon in order to not be cooked alive (for whatever reason), I’d be screwed. Doesn’t matter how well acquainted I am with the concept, it’s others whom I must enlighten.

So, when I want to write a book that’s intended to be chock full of interesting, weird, abstract concepts, and each of those concepts reinforce other strange ones, I am forced to go at it from a developmental approach: Start with the basics, establish a foundation, then build up.

The reason I find this difficult is because I want the reader to be plunged right in. I want to throw a reasonably diverse mixture of both familiar and unfamiliar ideas at them from the outset, so that way, there’d be things they can latch on to, and there’d be things they’re left wondering about.

From there, I fully intend on developing those unfamiliar threads in such a way that they gradually evolve in the reader’s mind, like a jigsaw puzzle slowly coming together, until they eventually become something they find intimately familiar. And/or, in the weaving of other concepts and threads, I will put a foundation together in such a way that all of the unfamiliar bits (which, to be fair, I would only mete out a reasonably little at a time) become instantly clear all at once, as though the reader were given the cipher for a crucial code they’ve been unable to solve for a long time.

So, my idea involving heat and life and stuff could be an unknown concept that instantly pops when the right information comes along, or one that slowly evolves over time, or, more likely, one that’s best left alone until the right fundamental principles that the universe of the story happens to abide by are first established. But therein lies another difficulty: it seems to me almost that all of the story’s universe’s fundamental principles are, themselves, unfamiliar and abstract.

So.

What does my story, Elyen, have in common with anything a human from Earth alive shortly after the turn of the 21st century might find familiar?

– The main characters are usually humanoid, so there’s often strong physical resemblance
– There are, more often than not, weather events that are similar to what we might expect here on earth
– Though the grander setting is nothing at all like Earth, from the perspective of a given humanoid character on the ground, the existence of mountains, bodies of water, forests, plains, desserts, etc., are all Earth-like enough for most readers to connect with
– Fantastic technologies exist which should be explainable in a way that fans of Sci-fi would have little difficulty appreciating
– Various forms of magic exist that fans of Fantasy will have little trouble understanding

I’m sure there’s more, but that’s just a cursory list for now. Here’s a list of some of the concepts I’m toying with which, I believe, are less common and therefore much trickier (but not impossible) to explain:

– “The Singularity” is the name of a type of major event that happens at various points throughout the history of the people of the story (yes, as in, there’s been more than one such event in Drendain history)
– Drendast is the name of the planet most of the events of the story takes place on. Drendast is a mega Aether-world, so large that it has multiple stars the size of Earth’s sun revolving around it, and not the other way around
– Most of the characters and beings on Drendast are photovores, naturally evolved [or, in some cases, genetically engineered] to subsist solely on the nearly perpetual light from the planet’s suns
– Physics on an Aether-world like Drendast are conveniently exotic. ‘Anomalies’, such as tri-pole magnetism, are taken for granted here
– The overarching philosophy behind the story incorporates, among other things, an offshoot of Taoism, which, if I understand anything at all about, only proves to me that I understand nothing at all
– Drendast happens to serve as a kind of ‘hub’ within it’s local multiverse, bridging connections via Conduits (think wormholes and you’ve basically got it) between universes both near and far.

And there’s loads and loads more concepts besides that.

The point is that I don’t always know where to start when it comes time to describe something. When I want to talk about a race of beings based on heat (rather than, say, carbon), I soon find myself struggling to explain their environment and behaviour, both of which involve (from the what I assume is a typical human perspective) altered states of reality, vaguely spiritual themes, Immersion (another very key concept I’m aiming to expound upon in the near future), and so on and so forth. Not easy.

Suddenly, explaining just one thing (what this race of heat-based beings are all about) is no longer just one thing, but many things, each of which are equally tricky.

I’m long winded. I’m still new to this whole blogging thing, and I don’t think I’ve quite figured out the most appropriate and tasteful format for presenting ideas, especially in terms of length, so, my biggest concern is not going on and on forever. To this end, I think I’m gonna start explaining concepts in parts. Starting after this blog, if I want to share a complex idea, expect to see it presented in chunks.

Or maybe I can do up a sort of wiki reference page, since I’m almost certain to reference earlier blog entries when presenting new ones related to Elyen. Something for me to look into. Anyways, that’d be all for now.

Window

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So I’m an over thinker. Most of the time, I don’t even realizing when I’m over thinking. It’s been my natural state for long enough that it takes a substantially over charged level of over thinking before I feel lost in the swirling inertia for some time, as is often the case right before trying to go to sleep, and even then.

Speaking of sleep, I’m pretty sure that, for the first 20 minutes or so of laying my head down, I am fully conscious of the random and rapid fluttering of my eyes’ lenses. At first, they’ll twitch to the rhythm of something I’m listening to, especially if it’s something catchy and it’s my first time hearing it, as tends to be the case when I’m trying out new stations to on jango. My guess is that there’s a underlying level of sensitivity that comes with listening to something new but not completely unfamiliar.

In the case of a song, if it’s in the same genre as others I listen to, my brain is already expecting to hear certain patterns. Even in borderline sleep, my nerves are all but raw from synthesizing what I know to expect against what I am actually currently experiencing, ready to judge whether I’m liking the new presentation or not. This period and level of automatic active listening and pattern recognition/prediction doesn’t last for very long, so I’m not losing sleep over it.

It’s also in this state of borderline sleeping that I sometimes imagine what’s going on in my brain as though I were looking at it from within on a micrometer scale, in which case, I imagine a light show the likes of which I realize I can never, ever be capable of fully imagining in the first place. It’s simply beyond the scope of my human comprehension. The firing of billions of neurons as they respond to stimuli that was passed along to them by their neighbouring neurons via synapses, making and reforming connections by the thousands at almost every instant… Unreal.

It’s exactly that process that I can’t help picturing even as certain seemingly major new connections feel as though they’re being initially formed.

I feel as though I have ridiculously frequently ‘eureka’ moments resulting from this almost-passive ability to mentally keep my finger on the pulse on my own thought processes. And before anyone goes concluding that I’m full of myself, I should clarify. What I experience in my head, when in hyper over thinking states like this, often borders on absolute chaos. So, unless chaos is the same thing as genius, then I’m just a thinker, feeler and a dreamer, as many of us are, and nothing more.

Nonetheless, I’m occasionally compelled to believe that I sometimes come a lot closer to something more. Whether that belief is based on anything factual rather than pure myth is a debate for another time. As I lay with my head on the pillow, eyes closed, loads of images appear in my head, fluctuating and morphing into different forms, sometimes very quickly, and often accompanied by equally ever changing thoughts, feelings, things that I “know”, and lots more besides. They all take on new expressions within a fluid milieu of pure potential. Makes me wish I had a better knack for visual arts. I would paint the most peculiar things.

Anyways, it’s in this state that my brain very rapidly makes all these new connections, new associations between things that, only moments ago when I was awake, I would have considered to be separate entities in every way. When the implications of some of these new associations occurs to me, I can get very excited, like I’ve hit upon some lost secret of the ancient shamanic world, or some message from beings from the future, or some hidden inner truth, or something, doesn’t matter what, ’cause regardless, it always feels profound.

The problem invariably arises when I try to retrace my thoughts to see how I arrived at my latest, hastily formed new epiphanies. More often than not, I fail to connect all of the dots the same way twice. My thoughts have a tendency to accomplish their most robust evolution while the rest of my brain is accomplishing it’s best impression of a very tired and soon to be sleeping person. Needless to say (but I’ll say it anyways) that, in this state, my focus begins to breakdown, missing steps and stages, leaving me with an incomplete record of events with which to later reconstruct entire world-shattering revelations.

All it can take to derail the spark of discovery is for one element within the chain, the list of ingredients, the compilation process, to derive from something I can’t identify a reasonably sound source for in the morning. When this happens, coupled with the missing steps mentioned above, the entire logic of my oh so grand insight suddenly looks ridiculously absurd and baseless.

But still, for what it’s worth, there’s a lot that I can do with the incomplete material my brain serves up. Yes, there will be holes, sometimes even blatant ones, but it can still be art. I can still create entire fictional worlds from some of these cognitive tid bits. Stories can still be told, and go on to live in other people’s heads, where they can be shared again and again.

In this way, I can set off a single light in response to what light was given to me, and from that, it can emit outward, becoming an unstopable cascade of waving, pulsating lights in the minds of others all resonating with one another.

We’re all neurons.

[edit: okay, maybe we’re a LOT more than just neurons, but the fact that neural complexity is as complex as it is is still amazing to me]

Lesson Learned?

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You know what sucks? Losing something you spent a lot of time working on. For example, a nearly-ready-to-publish draft of a short story.

I take autosave for granted. In fact, I’m taking it for granted right now with WordPress, which, if I might say so, is precisely what it’s designed for. Anyone disagree? Not that I care. My blog. My rhetoric. Anyways. The funny thing is, not everything in life has autosave features (believe it or not), even if it seems like certain bits should. For example, Wattpad doesn’t have a native autosave feature.

So.

When one is working on a typed something something, doesn’t matter what it is, if one happens to be doing this using Wattpad, one would be wise to consider manually clicking the save button every so often. Another way of thinking of it is to compare this recommended strategy with one that this author highly discourages: The one who is perhaps not so wise might draft up a lengthy typed document of whatever sort, and even if it falls short of being a masterwork the likes the world has never before seen, it still requires due diligence to proofread and edit the whole thing. After a long day and a late night of typing, such a task might best be served with a fresh set of eyes, as would be the case after getting a good night’s sleep. Wouldn’t want to be hasty, skimping out on a quality clean up prior to publishing, now would we?

However, one might happen to notice an icon in the system trey awaiting their attention in the morning. An icon, as it so happens, indicating that updates are ready for one’s computer. Perhaps, never having any prior issues with installing updates before, one might be tempted to rubber stamp all updates as soon as they are made available. A sensible notion, keeping up with security fixes and what have you. And certainly, just because the updates in question happen to be specific for the browser one evidently happens to be using to type the soon-to-be-published literature, there is no mention that following through on said updating process might cause the sturdy, never-failing interweb-bearing application to suffer, how shall we say? A ‘minor’ hiccup.

What could possibly go wrong?

Ah yes! After a good night’s rest, a fresh batch of updates successfully installed, it is now time to — oh whatever. You already know how this story ends. I didn’t think to save my shit. Not even once. I leave all the data in the text field, let it sit over night, install an update for my browser, everything freezes, aaaaaand…

Gone. All gone.

🙂

Hard Reset

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So, I’ve been meaning to readjust my sleeping pattern for… years? Jesus, k, well… It’s definitely one of my more difficult vices to wrestle with. Maybe this will help: Yesterday evening around 6 pm, I felt overcome by a wave of fatigue out of nowhere. Thought to myself that it’d be a fine time to take a nap. Heck, even slept in my clothes with the intent of getting up again before 9, probably.

Didn’t.

Instead, I slept right through the night, but not without tossing and turning, waking briefly a few times and checking in with myself as to whether or not I was going to keep sleeping or if I felt the need to get up before the morning (proper) came around. I held out. I managed to resist waking up fully right through ’till about 30 minutes ago, at which time, I nom-chomped an apple and then set out to boast to the world that my lazy sleeping habits must surely now be behind me!

Well, that remains to be seen. Sure, it’s not easy to force yourself to sleep an additional 6 hours above the threshold of already being “well rested”, and certainly, having done so will now make it infinitely easier to be asleep again tonight before midnight, but is that what’s going to happen? Even if it does tonight, is that what is going to happen consistently for a period of at least, what is it, 28 days or something?

Anyways, the plan for today at least is to publish this, get a bit more food into me, and then go for a hike in the trails around my neighborhood as the sun rises, ’cause I haven’t done that more than once in years, and the last time was on a drunken adventure with my best friend in Toronto (good times, that). This time, it’s gonna be for my personal enjoyment, with the intent to connect a bit more with what land the city I live in has tried to preserve, and what better way than with a mobile sun salutation while I’m at it?

Maybe I’m still lazy, or maybe it’s smart, but who’da thunk that taking one extended nap would potentially lead to hitting three birds (sleep adjustment, physical and spiritual exercise) with one useful accident?

Learning Curve

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K, I’ve said before that I’m an adherent to (a rather bastardized version of) the Multi-Worlds Interpretation of quantum mechanics, and to parallel universes by extension. Don’t ask me to elaborate on that in anything approximating a technical jargon, but I can spin loose and fast notions and concepts together all night if I had to. Certainly not with any authority, but with wonder and awe to anyone willing to listen.

More importantly, I have a hard time stating up front whether any of what I’m about to say next is “real” or not, because, for all I know, it very well could be. What I can do is assert that I have no bloody proof one way or the other, but, in classic fashion, I won’t hesitate to speculate and conjecture up some ideas as they come to me.

I wonder about the collective conscious. If it exists, it’s notorious for being invisible, intangible, and otherwise non-directly knowable. We can only infer it’s supposed qualities based on it’s perceived effects, which are highly subject to, well, subjectivity. But like most things, it’s difficult to disprove completely. It may be more sensible to discount it until we discover something more concrete about it, but doing so could be limiting our full view of what might really be going on.

In the meantime, I’ll take the difficulty in disproving negatives (or rather, the art of ignoring established improbabilities) under advisement and proceed, regardless, with a suggestion that the collective conscious may, in fact, exist. In some senses, it may be indistinguishable from certain concepts of “God”, if that helps (it doesn’t, I know, but just humour me).

Here’s my supposition: I can’t help but wonder if there is not some kind of over-arching consciousness that serves as a memory or experience bank for us temporal beings, one that allows us to draw on future learning without necessarily being aware of what we’re accessing or even when.

Think of it this way: A large majority of non-open world videos games still follow a vaguely linear progression. Hell, even open-world games still have fairly established event sequences, only with more flexibility. But in whatever case, when something goes wrong, the power is in the player’s hands to revert to a prior save or check point, and redo certain actions, only with a heads up. Knowledge gained from prior attempts now carries over and allows the character to accomplish things they might not have before.

The thing is, the character, even though they’re the ones directly living out the events, does not retain memory of their actions or of the events they experience. All of that lies within the domain of the player (in so far as I am aware of the level of sentience typical video game characters possess. Please correct me if I’m wrong). It’s a classic divide that anyone who’s ever played any table top RPG’s, having given it any real thought, has probably stumbled around.

Player-character lines may also make up a wider relationship dynamic within a larger multiversal structure. I have no idea what exactly that structure looks like, but it wouldn’t surprise me if the collective conscious is (at least from our perspective) a kind of passive monitoring system.

Maybe that’s a bit of an ego-centric head trip. If we’re the character, and the collective conscious is whatever passes for a player on that level of existence, then we’re the passive sensory platforms feeding information back up to it, and it, whatever it is, is ultimately what may be calling the shots.

But who can say for sure? Maybe it has nothing to do with ‘up above’ and ‘down below’. Maybe it’s no more a lofty, executive-level operating system overseeing our lowly, experiential-level of existence as yin is to yang. Perhaps it’s just two (possibly interchangeable) sides of the same coin.

What I would assume, however, is that there is a multitude of alternate versions of ourselves out there in the multiverse, not only in same-moment parallel universes (where similar events are happening in sync), but also dynamic-moment parallel universes (where similar timelines are being experienced at different points along their sequences). So, this would mean that the me that I was 3 years ago, say, is experiencing the events of 3 years ago, only that it is doing so presently. Equally true, potentially, is that the me which is experiencing events taking place at the tail end of 2016 (3 years from now) is also doing so presently (albeit without my direct awareness of it, of course) as well.

In fact, any point in time that has happened, any alternate version of events which might have happened, any version of events which could be happening now instead of those which presently appear to be actually taking place now, as well as the host of all possible future events which the present me has no direct knowledge of as of yet… all these things and more would be plain to whatever over-arching collective consciousness (or god-like being) may or may not exist.

What’s fascinating to me is not so much that it brings my free will into question so much as that I feel safe trusting it, whatever it is (could be nothing, and I’m wasting my breath and effort even trying to describe it. Who knows?). As far as I’m concerned, this collective conscious behaves in such a way that I can only infer to be for my good, in the same way that a player, more often than not, conducts a character’s actions in such a way so as to lead towards favourable events and outcomes more often than not.

I believe that “luck” is a direct result of unknown collective conscious processes

I don’t feel compelled or controlled by anyone or anything in particular (that doesn’t exclude the possibility that I actually am, only I am unaware of that fact or incapable of perceiving it), but I do see that my life, for the most part, is good. I understand that an untold number of other versions of me could very well have met unfortunate demises in other universes, but that an over-arching, memory-and-experience-banking side of me (whatever my place might be within the collective conscious) learns.

It believe that it (that I?) makes mistakes and adapts, and as a result, there are an equal number of untold versions of me (including this one that I have explicit awareness of, the one that I call ‘me’, the one that is typing this up right now), who benefit from the ability of my collective self to learn from my collective experiences in order to realize beneficial outcomes whenever possible.

I don’t know what all there is to learn, but if it’s good, then I don’t want it to be for just me. I see no reason why this dynamic wouldn’t also be true for every person rather than just me. Perhaps there’s an ever wider enveloping collective conscious that not only looks over all versions of a single person at all points in their multiple existences, but also a grand collective conscious that brings together all of the collective consciousnesses of all people.

[Edit: I believe the classic sense of “collective conscious” refers to something consisting of the conscious impressions of many souls in a given realm or area, such as perhaps that of humans — or of all life — on Earth. The description of “collective conscious” I have been talking about instead looked at an isolated individual’s potential collective self spread across multiple universes/timelines first before giving consideration the more classic sense second]

Now I begin to wonder if there wouldn’t be a perpetual blur between where one person ends and another begins… Perhaps this is evidence for the need for what feels like immutable separation of persons. Or, perhaps, that is just a natural side effect of being ego-centric. Maybe other versions of myself have absolutely no trouble feeling a fluid sense of oneness amongst ourselves and likewise with others. Such a concept eludes my ability to imagine vividly, but I find the idea fascinating nonetheless.

Aversion

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In front of me is a plate. But not just any plate. It’s a square plate. But not just any square plate. It is (presently serving as) a platter. A platter for what, you ask? Oh, you’re… you’re not actually asking, are you? K, fine, I’ll carry on with this conversation myself. On this makeshift platter, there happens to be nothing but the best that the fresh produce section has to offer my ignorant consumer mind.

That is to say, I’m just starting out. I don’t really know any better than to buy and consume the staples my parents tried to raise me on: peppers, celery, broccoli, cauliflower, carrots and tomatoes. The thing is, I pretty much despise the taste of vegetables. I can’t help it. They just straight up do not taste appetizing to me, though I wish they did.

I’m forcing myself to acquire a much belated taste for them. Turns out, though, that my roommates and I have recently procured an abundance of perishable veggie matter from more than just the grocery store. In fact, fair amount of it will likely go bad. That is, unless I get over myself and pound back as much as I can over the course of the next few days.

I have been doing well so far, but I can’t help but notice that I cheat. I use salad dressings and/or salt and butter which, by the way, tends to involve frying (low heat, but still). Also, when I am eating them raw, I have to cut their flavor with something, usually cheese (in this case, Havarti. I splurged a little).

In discussing it with my girlfriend, it turns out that we have very, very different levels of fondness in our special taste bud areas for vegetables, mainly due to the fact that she is completely warped and demented in her love for raw and unadulterated greens and such, and that I am a perfectly sensible human being who knows when some things are just plain gross.

Or, more likely, this is my blog, so I can get away with passing along as much biased information as I damn well please and conveniently ignore the the fact that she’s awesome and I’m probably just jealous. Maybe. Anyways, I’d like to reach a point where veggies are like Buckley’s to me. Tastes awful, but they work/are good for me. You’d think, based on what I’ve been saying up to this point that that’s already where I’m at in terms of my relationship with the disgusting-tasting goodness, but not so. Here’s a weird fact about me: I actually like the taste of Buckley’s. I mean, yeah, I think it’s strong af, but it’s not actually awful to me. I kinda dig it.

I want that to eventually be my attitude with vegetables. In addition to that, I’m also hoping that a day may soon come where I gleefully look forward perusing through the produce isles and trying out loads (/reasonable amounts) of new gross flavours each and every week. Wouldn’t that be great.

Title Optional, So Long As It’s About Routiney Stuff

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I’m still most definitely struggling with getting into a consistent daily routine. I have been trying to get up before 11 am for a number of mornings now, but I never seem to have the foresight or the discipline to place my phone, which acts as my alarm clock, somewhere out of reach before I fall asleep at night, leaving it at the mercy of my sluggish-but-nonetheless-somehow-cat-like reflexes fighting tooth and nail with the touch screen’s “reset” button just for the sake of resuming, for the love of god, that blissful state of sweet dream-filled slumber before the audible assault disrupts and ravages my still barely conscious-level of sensory awareness well into submission, utterly beyond some unfathomable point of no return or other.

Also, I have a thing for elaborate, extended-but-not-quite-run-on sentences, by the by.

Anyways, I am under the impression that most people are up between 7 and 8 am most weekday mornings. How awful. Unless they’re simply morning people, in which case, they’re just plain weird in my books. It is inconceivable to me why anyone would voluntarily torment themselves so, but it’s not my place to judge. I suspect that a great many people abide by such a torturous weekday morning routine out of some dreadful sense of ‘responsibility’, such as being able to get to work on time, in which case, the effort might be considered anything but ‘voluntary’.

Casting my old and deep-seated beef with forced work schedule-related anything (morning wake up times not the least of which) aside for now, I can see a number of benefits for being able to experience this thing normal people call “morning” after waking up rather than the part that occurs at the ass-end of night time before going to sleep. You know, at least once in a while.

On the up side, I have been meaning to change up my diet to something that can remotely be described as “balanced” and “healthy”. Apparently poutine, perogies and pizza (the three P’s) don’t count. I am happy to announce that I have successfully begun to implement some of those long-awaited changes. This passed week has brought veggie matter and my internal digestive fluids together in abundance for the first time in… Gosh, I just don’t have that many fingers…

I’ve been careful to keep existing sources of protein in my current dietary intake, as well as to include some new ones. Also, I’m making a conscious effort to cut back on wheat, which ain’t easy since I pride myself on my ability to happily subsist solely on often wheat-based, sugar-saturated breakfast cereals at all hours of the day. Doesn’t mean I don’t still eat junk, but I do so far, I’m managing to do so far less often as I was.

I’m not what most people would ever think of as being over weight, so it’s not for physique reasons that I’m pursuing these changes. I just want to get my body used to running on higher quality fuel so that it stops retaliating with loads of acid reflux every time I have a coffee, or with irregular bowel movements as a result of me pushing my digestive track practically to the brink of a complete “shitty work” stoppage. Something about union dues for kidney workers, the rising price of gas in the intestinal energy sector, a breakdown in the management of the enzyme department, and just a rotten cultural attitude on the local gut-based microbial level in general.

Other routines I’m trying to get into, with mixed success, include being physically active a little every day. Even a simple 30 minute walk around the neighborhood every day or two would be a huge step back to my old, healthier habits.

And then, of course, there’s a range of creative endeavors I want to become fluently productive with. I’ve been a singer-songwriter for years, but I still have to push myself to practice singing and playing guitar (whether it be original material or covering a song by someone else) for at least some amount of time each day in order to keep my chops up, as well as to hopefully develop further as a musician.

If I can share some honesty with you, sometimes, I’m afraid I’ve hit my potential as a musician rather pathetically short of what I had dreamed, and that all I’m doing now is performing maintenance upkeep on a rotting corpse of what once might have amounted to genuine talent. I’m hoping that that fear is baseless. I’m too stubborn to quit, but I can’t stand the thought of being stagnant forever.

When it comes to writing, I struggle even more so to invest adequate time practicing, but that’s precisely why this blog exists. If nothing else, my goal for writing is to post a blog entry as close to once per day as I humanly can. Obviously that isn’t always going to be the case, but the ‘real’ goal sits more at posting no less than one entry per every two days which, so far, seems to be well within my means to continue accomplishing. Better than nothing.

And, as stated in my very first entry, the whole point of this blog is to provide writing practice. The way I see it is that, ultimately, this is all meant to eventually serve as scaffolding for a major literary project I’m working on slowly but surely. In the meantime, it is also my hope to eventually cultivate something of a community where people can go to to get up to date info on what I’ve been up to in life.

Not that my life is normally ever exciting enough to warrant having online followers or subscribers, but I do have enough of an artistic passion to create content that may hopefully one day be of great interest to a great many people. These are still the humble beginnings. Establishing and keeping to a routine is one of the major keys I have towards realizing my long-term goals, and it ain’t easy. Not for a world-class slacker like myself, at any rate, but at least I’ve begun proving to myself that it’s never too late to get started and make real progress.

[Edit: Nearly 10 years on, and while things have variously been better and high points had been reached, little of what this entry includes differs from what I could describe today. It’s almost a relief: I thought then that I just wasn’t trying hard enough. I can see now that I couldn’t have tried hard enough to make an appreciable difference. I need to focus on other dimensions of self-improvement, since diet, exercise, and sleep consistencies are fundamentally out of the question]