Self Awareness is a Drag

I feel like life is a slow motion car crash sometimes, and I'm the only one still in real time. I can see exactly where one moving object will collide with another causing much destruction. I scream out. I plead with the drivers to change course, even by just a fraction of an inch. Don't they see what they are doing? I'm the only one who can see what will happen, but i'm powerless to stop it. Like a dream, it repeats and I watch as the cars line up on their collision courses and accelerate only to come to a sickening stop as steel bends around steel and glass and plastic shatter littering the crash scene with a joyless confetti. The twisted metal pings and ticks as it cools combining with the steady drip of fluids onto the hot pavement into a funeral dirge for the destroyed machines and the shattered lives encased in their wreckage.  A second drip joins the requiem, as opaque scarlet drops mix with the ebony oil and neon green coolant pooling on the blacktop. Broken and battered flesh is cut from the wreckage to be healed and set out again only to repeat the same stupid mistakes, only to smash again and again into oncoming traffic, and all the while my warnings go unheeded, and my pleadings are dismissed, as the crashes continue.

Instant Karma from Above

I'm driving back to work after lunch yesterday, when I see a couple walking down the street. They're young and smiling as they stroll down the sidewalk. The sun is shining. They're holding hands, not just holding hands, but swinging their arms in unison with palms pushed together and fingers interlaced. He looks over at her and smiles. I see his mouth move, saying something. The corners of her mouth turn up, as she looks down. If I were close enough, i'm sure I'd see her blush.
"Young love," i groaned mockingly as they shrank in the rear view.

Snuffy Smith, see tongue

I dragged the end of the word love out into an inarticulate blah noise complete with Snuffy Smith style tongue waggle.
As I did so, I heard a flat slap as some disgusting white and green glob of avian refuse connected with my windshield in the center of my eye line and although I can't be for sure, I believe that if that safety glass was not there that bird shit would have splattered across my face and extended tongue. So, i guess I'm trying to learn from that, not to be so bitter, or at least to make sure to do it with my mouth closed.

Free Whataburger! Free Taco Cabana! We're Plummetting into another Great Depression!

The current economic buzz word among TV talking heads is deflation. I think most people are more familiar with deflation's opposite, inflation, where a currency loses value and it takes more and more money to purchase the same product. With deflation, the opposite occurs, products are devalued as opposed to currency, so you can purchase more for less, but the worry is that an economy can get stuck in a downward spiral as industry cuts production which causes job losses which reduces consumer spending which decreases production, which causes job losses, rinse, wash, repeat. The last time the US was in a major deflationary cycle was the Great Depression. I wasn't too concerned with deflation, because we saw prices increase so recently when gas prices shot up in 2008. At that point, prices on many goods increased. This was done in two ways, while you saw your milk was still sold in a gallon size the price increased, while other products saw their shelf prices stay the same and the product size decrease. My milk price has decreased back to pre-2008 levels, but i wonder if all those products that were quietly downsized have been restored to their original size. Anyway, I chalked this fear of deflation up to industries attempt to maintain prices inflated due to the spike in oil prices in 2008. I cynically figured this fear of dropping prices was just a red herring, until August 3.
So, I'm sitting in a Whataburger a little after 5 on a Tuesday, the line snakes halfway through the seating area, every seat is taken, and everyone is wearing orange. A woman with a W painted on her face asked me to sign a release, so my image can be used in potential advertisements. I declined, but watch people sign it, without really reading it. They step up and have their pictures taken. There are orange balloons and streamers. It's bright, and slightly surreal; I feel like I'm in a dream or a figure in a Chagall painting. Orange in every shade is everywhere, on me, on everyone else, on the walls. We all came for the same reason, free food. Whataburger was offering a free hamburger from 5-9pm yesterday if you came wearing orange. They also were accepting burnt orange, coral, salmon, and i'm pretty sure i saw i guy with a pink shirt in line. Ostensibly, it was to celebrate Whataburgers birthday. Hmmmm, ok. I don't really care. I came for the free food. It's not often that all you have to do is wear a certain color, loosely enforced, and get free stuff. Here is where I start to wonder if this is anecdotal evidence of deflation. Taco Cabana was giving out a free taco fajita between 5-9 yesterday as well. They didn't bother with the pretense of birthdays or silly color requirements, no, all you had to do was go ask them for a chicken fajita taco, and they would give you one. That seems like a devaluation of goods to me, first in burgers, then tacos. I started to get an uneasy feeling as the free hamburger, the free taco, and the reasonably priced fried lemon pie settled into my gut. I recalled the people lined up for their free hamburger, and the images from the great depression of people in soup lines. Hopefully the free burger and taco promotions are not economic indicators of a deflationary spiral, but if you see a place giving out free pizzas, then grab your bindle stick, cause it's hobo time.

Witches, Satanic Cults in the 80's, & Accelerating Toyotas

After government review of crash data, it's turning out that the runaway Toyota threat to America was just another mass delusion, one in long line of collective freak outs. The individual cases of unchecked acceleration are appearing to be cases of people stepping on the gas instead of the brakes. These type of accidents are not uncommon, and can result in tragic losses of life, but what i find interesting is our reaction to these events. It became an accepted truth. It permeated our culture. There were Congressional hearings. Fines were assessed. Lawsuits filed, and for what? Because some people regrettably stepped on the gas pedal instead of the brake? It just points to how subjective our reality can really be. Our belief that the runaway Toyota meme was real in some respects made it real. The billions of dollars spent by Toyota in recalls, and fines were certainly real. Whether the belief that your vehicle could suddenly rocket out of control actually resulted in a higher likelihood that you might accidentally step on the wrong pedal, i don't think anyone could say, but the heightened media attention caused any accident of this sort among the thousands of motor vehicle accidents happening daily to be reported on at a national level thereby providing real accidents as evidence for the belief. It's classic confirmation bias.
This isn't a new trend. Our national history, as I'm sure any people's history, is littered with embarrassing events where we all collectively believed something that was completely false, and acted on that falsehood, sometimes quite brutally. We've hanged people and crushed them with stones during the Salem witch trials, because we were sure as a community that people were being hexed by witches. In 1984 a trial in California began that lasted seven years and ended up costing $15 million due to a runaway fear in the community that satanist were abusing children in a preschool. In 1993 three teenagers were tried and convicted absent any evidence for the murder of three boys in Arkansas, based on the fervent belief of the community that the murderers were satanists who had killed the children in a satanic ritual. In all these cases we believed something absent any credible evidence, and acted on it with sometimes horrific results.
I like to think that we live in a world where we predominately make rational decisions based on knowledge, and these events where we let our beliefs be the sole arbiter are few and far between, but I recognize that it's a matter of progression, that we're learning. I guess at this point Akio Toyoda should be somewhat relieved that he wasn't crushed to death beneath rocks for the possessed Toyotas.

I think the cats domesticated us

Let's just say cats and dogs are at war. Cats and dogs have always been at war. A war for survival, a war for a place in the world. This battle raged for 20 million years before humankind began to walk upright, and it will follow us to distant stars.

Ten thousand years ago, the battle was at a bloody stalemate as both sides had perfected their survival strategies. The dogs mainly relying on social structures, packs, to keep fed, stay protected, and stay alive. It's a brute force style approach; if there is a problem, just apply more canines. Large elk? Add dogs. Marauding bear heading this way? More dogs. The cats primarily went in another direction and hunted alone, but relied on more specialized adaptations, and exploited specific environments. Their retractable claws allow them to climb and exploit heights. The structure of their eyes gives them excellent night vision. They found an ecological niche, and exploited it. Cats and dogs were at an impasse, though. When humans began to dominate the earth, both sides saw an opportunity to end the stalemate.

Dogs made the jump first. Dogs were the first animal domesticated, and still to this day are performing many of the same functions that made them such a valuable piece of human technology. Our ancestors and our dog's ancestors probably met while hunting. A human hunter wounds, but doesn't kill it's prey which flees. A pack of canines chase down the prey and take it down. The humans catch up and chase away or kill the dogs. At one point one or both of the species realized it was more beneficial to work together, and dogs became another weapon in the human arsenal. Another job of the dog became apparent when they began to hang around camps, perhaps scrounging for food or following hunters home from a hunt. Night would fall, and humans would become easy prey for large cats and other hunters prowling the dark. They would silently stalk their prey, wait for someone to break away from the group, and then pounce, killing their meal and dragging it back into the jungle. A dog at the perimeter of the fire barked, acting as an alarm, whenever it sensed a threat reducing the number of lives lost to large nocturnal predators. The packs of humans and dogs merged. Dogs took their skills at living in social structures and applied them to their new relationships with people forging a bond. This mutually beneficial relationship between people and dogs persisted and endures. Dogs to this day, hunt with their people and protect their homes, still fulfilling their half of a deal struck over ten thousand years ago.

This was the time of the Agricultural Revolution, when the domestication of food grains irrevocably changed the planet and created a whole new way of life for people. For the first time, your career choices weren't limited to being either a hunter who does a little gathering, or a gatherer that hunts a bit. Instead you could be a farmer. I know it sounds pretty lame now, but back then it was like wanting to be a rock star or an astronaut, your parents would plead for you to reconsider hunting, maybe do some gathering as a back up plan, but you stand firm. "No," you'd say. "I'm going to farm." It changed the world; instead of constantly traveling so you can feed a population without exhausting the ecosystem, humans could grow food at one location, and stop all that walking from here to there and just live next to a field and grow row after row of food. It seemed crazy. Your mom would give you an atlatl when you went to visit them in the forest. "Just in case", she'd say. "You kids and your farming; it won't last." It did last, and with agriculture came the world we inhabit today. The agricultural revolution brought pollution, environmental degradation, and outbreaks of disease. It brought homes, towns, commerce, and it brought cats into our lives.

Last we saw of cats in this story, they were skulking around campfires, snatching us up and eating our meaty parts, but these are different cats. These were small jungle cats, who lived in the underbrush and fed on small rodents. When people began to stockpile all the grain from their fields mice and other rodents flocked to them, and where their prey went these cats followed. The first cats to live with people were probably barn cats. They moved in. We were happy to see a reduction in the pests eating the stored grain, and we tolerated them. At this point the relationship could have stalled. There are many animals that have adapted to live alongside humans, but are not domesticated.
Cat's had waited, as is their nature, until the perfect environment specially suited to a specific set of adaptations appeared. The jungle cats that became the domesticated cat we know today, are small efficient rodent hunters that filled a niche in agrarian life. They also came ready with a few special adaptations with which to manipulate their unsuspecting humans. Domestic cats have large eyes in relation to their heads, people almost instinctively find this trait cute in animals, due to it triggering a nurturing instinct. Cats can mimic our infants with their meow, which shares the same frequency as a human baby's cry, again playing on our instincts to care for our young. These physical traits gave a cats a psychological head start in the process of domesticating humans, or in being domesticated, depending on your perspective. In addition to these tools to manipulate our psyches, cats came with a basic skill set that suited urban life. They fed themselves on pests, so didn't subtract from the food supply. They were small, compact, clean, and relatively unobtrusive; they were pretty good roommates. So to the consternation of the dogs, cats made the jump indoors.

A new stalemate was reached, a new equilibrium. New battles were fought in new places, backyards and living rooms. When you look over and see the cat sitting on the windowsill staring outside at the dog looking balefully in, maybe you're seeing an ongoing skirmish in a larger conflict that stretches back thousands of years, or maybe it's raining and the dog just wants in.

**As of the time of this writing, two recent developments bear mentioning. The dogs recent initiative Project: Tea Cup, has been success in increasing the numbers of dogs indoors as well as completely dominating the purse ecosystem, which cats have yet make an appearance in. The most recent whispering from the feline side are troubling, after centuries of work developing a sixth toe they have as of yet been unable to transition to the next step and develop a working thumb, despite that Operation: Can Opener is slated to continue.**

Stripes Again... Really?

As I pull in to work, I notice that a bee is flying around inside the car. I immediately scream and swerve to the right, smashing into a parked car. That didn't happen. Actually, I rolled down the window and continued through the parking lot thinking that the bee would fly out one of the 4 wide open windows. No luck. I park and the bee is still buzzing around. I get out and leave the door open for a second, assuming that the bee will follow me, which does not happen. I'm going to be late for work, but I don't want to lock the bee in, and I shouldn't leave the windows down because it's supposed to rain today. I go around to the other side of the car and open the passenger door, and still the bee just hangs out inside, but as soon as I open the rear passenger door, it departs. Walking into work I realized I'd been straight up disrespected by that bee. It decided to scam a ride in my car, and then refused to leave until it got the full chauffeur treatment. Like i don't have enough to do, bee! How about I drive you to a field that needs pollinating or to a picnic, next? Can I get a little hat to doff as I open the car door for you to enter and exit? Freaking bee. I don't come to your hive, and mock you.

Unnamed Colonel Mustard Project

As the founding father of a nationally know mustard dynasty, it often falls to me to remind the great unwashed masses of the virtues of this mighty yet tiny seed, and how it directly benefits all humankind. Just as every journey is series of steps, or every forest is a collection of trees, the tapestry of human existence is woven with lives, some interconnected, some intertwined, others oblivious. To tell the story of how the this humble condiment has spawned empires and crushed governments, made kings of beggars and reduced men of god to amoral killers, I'll focus on a life which has been profoundly influenced by this most pungent of seasonings, my own.
My story is one in which mustard which has brought joy and tragedy, poverty and great wealth. I've seen those greater than I squirted from this heartless industry like so much mustard water onto a piece of dry white bread. Maintaining the financial viability of a modern day condiment empire is a never ending siege. Every day is a battle, be it with the Captain Ketchup's of the world or the rough and tumble rapscallions of the relish game. Anyone who has the intestinal fortitude, and sheer force of will to succeed in this livelihood though will have untold riches and power, but what mustard gives mustard can take away.
This story begins in the last days of the Crimean war, as the sun begins its rise over a muddy field, men are beginning to stir. A horse knickers, another exhales, a cooking fire crackles and pops as it's fed. Above the general murmur of voices is a woman's scream. It hangs there for seconds, and stops and then again. A few people look up and over to the medical tents, most don't. A rivulet of liquid streams out from under the filthy canvas flap that acts as the western wall of the field hospital. It turns opaque, as dark as the mud around it in the morning light. Another scream, and then silence. A nurse cuts the cord connecting the now unconscious woman to the tiny baby, so pink he's purple. She cleans him off. He takes his first breath. She wraps him up. Swaddled up in blankets, in the arms of a nurse, they are surrounded by thousands of French troops preparing to return to home after the recent Signing of the Treaty of Paris. This tiny baby, so small, so insignificant in it's surroundings like the minuscule mustard seed, will grow from this inauspicious beginning to become a leader of men and a titan of industry. From the bastard son of a camp prostitute to a decorated war hero to the founder of a benevolent industrial juggernaut, this is the story of Colonel Mustard.

Momentary Flights of Panic

I had a little panic thinking that I had all this stuff listed here. I had an almost uncontrollable urge to get to the nearest computer and log in and delete all this. I haven't yet. It immersion therapy. I'm just desensitizing myself. I'm just replicating being social with this. I may or may not be sharing personal information with other people by writing this. It's like if Schrödinger's box was full of spiders instead of a cat, and then attached to your face. You may or may not have hundreds of spiders crawling over your face.

Sanity from the Point of View of the Insane Must Seem Crazy

For the past few weeks, I started to worry a bit that I was going crazy. I figured I was finally losing it. I found myself compelled to do strange things, and I didn't really know why.
I stood in front of the mirror in the bathroom and scissored off a few inches of long straggled hair that I had just let grow wild for the past few years. I hadn't been shaving much, and hadn't had a haircut in a few years. I had been going for an abandoned lot kind of look. I just wanted the world to know that the premises were not being taken care, that they were unsafe, that you should stay away for your own good. At any point you could stumble through an ant's nest, or step on a rusty nail. You might get an infection from that nail, and you wouldn't die, but it would hurt like hell and maybe the first round of antibiotics aren't very effective and they switch you to another drug, which works, but it makes you sick. You beat it. You feel better eventually, but maybe you'll always have a twinge of pain in the sole of your foot before a thunderstorm or when you stretch just the right way, like shifting forward onto the balls of your feet to get a serving bowl from atop the highest shelf in the kitchen. Sometimes the pain is shallow, and you just remember to never go exploring in abandoned lots, and sometimes the pain is deep and you feel like you're pushing your foot onto that rusty nail again, and it all comes back, the pain, the aftermath, how long it took till you felt better again, and maybe you drop that bowl and it falls to the floor and shatters. You just have to protect yourself.
So I was leaving my hair long, not shaving, not really caring, leaving this lot unkempt, nature's way of saying do not touch, so no one would come around and get hurt, and one day I just cut a few of the worst inches off. I don't know why. I just did. I guess, if you want to take the above metaphor out to it's logical conclusion, I realized that having a lot you don't care for increases the risk of people being hurt. The correct response is that you actually work on that lot. You clean it up. You mow. You tear down the ruins of the previous structures and build a new foundation. You reestablish connections to utilities. You build something. You sell it. People move in. They use the lot. That is being a responsible person.

The other thing I did recently which I thought seemed a little crazy, was make an outline of things to do to improve my life. I know that doesn't sound crazy, but it a had a multiple paragraph intro, a kind of corporate jargon style. It was weird, or at least I thought so. As I made the actual outline, though, I began to get a much better perspective on some things that I needed to work on. All those things that I needed to do, from getting new tires to self development, didn't seem as insanely overwhelming as they had before. I had built this tower in my head of all the things that I needed to do in my life, and was so intimidated that I was effectively paralyzed, but looking at them as bullets on an outline opened a door in the tower revealing a staircase. Maybe it wasn't an impossible attempt to scale a sheer tower, but instead a long journey with many steps. This crazy thing I did helped. I went back to it. I added things. I crossed things out when I completed them. I feel like maybe I am moving again, just a little, but some.
So, these things that I thought were crazy are instead little pieces of sanity creeping back through, bobbing up to the surface. The truth is that I have been crazy a long time. I have been so depressed. The past two years have been real hard, and the two years preceding that were difficult too. I feel like maybe I am coming to an end of this darkness. I think my mind has had enough of this, and is implementing it's own plan to get me better.

Ethereal Not Invisible

I need to stop being invisible, both in life and online . I felt pretty invisible for a long time; i've sought it out. Wrapped up in it like a security blanket. I have a bit of the ole social anxiety disorder, just a tad. It got worse after my marriage ended. If not worse, just more noticeable. I could almost completely opt out of social life when I was married, but now that i don't have a partner to come home to everyday, to talk to, to share with, opting out of a social life is psychologically unsustainable. So, I guess i should stop being invisible. I'm ok with ethereal. I can be tenuous. I can be barely there. It's a start.