Recent revelations and sub-revelations

• Adults shouldn't have to say words like "panini," "sammy," or "yummy."
  
• If you think you're good enough, maybe you'll be just that. If you think you aren't, maybe you can be great.
  • Here are the particular memories which have led me to this startling conclusion:
    • When I tried out for the track team in 10th grade I was sprinting, and then suddenly for the first time ever asked myself if I could go any faster, and found out that I could, a lot.
    • When I was in 4th or so grade I was in music class and was singing along all bored when I realized by controlling my throat and mouth I could actually sing the actual pitches I had theretofore falsely imaginined myself to be singing.
• Somehow every previous time I listened to Bach's St. Matthew's Passion I just thought it was "pretty good."
  • Bach, as I have recently been told, as paraphrased by me, said writing invertible counterpoint was easy-- he would just talk to God and write down the conversation.
    • Bob Uecker, on the other hand, said catching a knuckleball is easy-- all you have to do is wait until it stops rolling and pick it up.
    • Charlie Lau, on the other other hand, said there were two theories on hitting the knuckleball, but unfortunately neither of them works.
• Doing the dishes is actually pretty easy, plus then you have something clean to put your food on.
  • Example: eggs.
• The right music, editing, and narration can make you feel sorry for planemos that have been kicked out of their solar systems by gravitational conflicts.
  • "...They're by themselves" -- a real honest-to-God scientist, not some wistful poet.
  
  

I was a highwayman

Willie Nelson says:
I was a highwayman
Along the coach roads I did ride
With sword and pistol by my side
Many a young maid lost her baubles to my trade
Many a soldier shed his lifeblood on my blade
The bastards hung me in the spring of twenty-five
But I am still alive.

then Kris Kristofferson says:
I was a sailor
I was born upon the tide
And with the sea I did abide.
I sailed a schooner round the Horn to Mexico
I went aloft and furled the mainsail in a blow
And when the yards broke off they said that I got killed
But I am living still.

after which Waylon Jennings says:
I was a dam builder
across the river deep and wide
where steel and water did collide
A place called Boulder on the wild Colorado
I slipped and fell into the wet concrete below
They buried me in that great tomb that knows no sound
But I am still around..I'll always be around..and around and around and
around and around

and finally Johnny Cash concludes:
I fly a starship
across the Universe divide
and when I reach the other side
I'll find a place to rest my spirit if I can
Perhaps I may become a highwayman again
Or I may simply be a single drop of rain
But I will remain
And I'll be back again, and again and again and again and again..


In this song Willie Nelson is a dude who robs ladies and kills soldiers. A bad ass. An outlaw. But eventually he gets caught, and hanged. But see, then his spirit returns, a bit later in History. Now he is Kris Kristofferson, who is by far the most likely sailor of the bunch. Now who can say how glorious it is to make a boat go around some land (I mean, what the fuck, are you gonna go through the land?), I guess in this chapter it's just he's kind of an idiot and he fucked some kind of thing up with the sails or jibs or whatever, I dunno, go ask some blue-blood yacht dude. Anyhow, you'd think this spirit was gone by now, since it got hanged and also drowned. But nope. It comes back, a bit further into History, this time in the person of Waylon Jennings, who got a hand from FDR what with the WPC building a gigantic dam. Here things might be said to get a little metaphorical. The place is called Boulder but it's getting filled with concrete. The Colorado was wild but they are taming it. Steel and water did collide, but at what cost? At the cost of one Waylon Jennings. Granted, he was clumsy and he was the guy who didn't do the smart thing and be extra careful while walking around on top of a giant not-yet-solidified dam. So anyhow now the spirit got hanged, drowned, and encased in what was at the time the largest man-made monument named after a vacuum in History. This brings us, dear reader, not to the present, because the present can't really mean anything to itself, now can it, so instead it brings us instead to the Future, in the person of Johnny Cash, starship pilot. He is flying the entire distance of the universe, not just lurkin' around outside a town, or going around some land in a boat in the water, or spanning the distance between two sides of an enormous gorge. As we well know the universe is finite and who knows what is on the other side. There are those who say it is the same, only backwards, only you can't even tell it's backwards, since you, too, are backwards. There are those who say it is just sort of boring. Nobody knows for sure. Johnny Cash doesn't even know for sure, but he has whittled down the possibilities to two: either he will become a highwayman again, thus starting the cycle anew, or, alternatively, and I'd like to put in my vote for more likely, he may become a single drop of rain. Here is where I like to imagine that every drop of rain used to be a highwayman, an inept sailor, a clumsy dambuilder, or an astronaut. One of those four. Nothing else. I myself, when I reach the other side, may turn into a single grain of sand. I think that is the fate of the musician, the logger, the banker, and the flight attendant. Whereas it has been demonstrated that piano tuners, butchers, systems analysts, and tinkerers shall return a single breath of air. We will all try to find a place to rest our spirits if we can, but chances are we will be back again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, and again, only each time one step lower in a major scale, until we get almost back to the tonic again, at which point I suppose you should just restart the song because not even Johnny Cash could hit that bottom one if he tried.

the metaphors we live next to

There's this book about metaphors called Metaphors We Live By. It talks about how we use stuff like the concepts of up/down or in front of/behind to describe stuff where those concepts don't literally apply. It says we use them so systematically that it seems like our brains just work that way. Like time, say-- we're pretty consistent when we describe some scheduled event as "coming up," or that golden oldie we heard on the radio taking us "way back." You see how it works. Nothing too philosphical or complicated there.


I heard some radio program about data compression. I was thinking about the kind called run-length encoding, in which strings of data that are repeated are replaced by some stand-in to save space. Like say you took the book of Genesis and said *="and it was good." That would save you a lot of room, because after all that stuff He makes, all He would say was *. You see how it works.


Well, then I was thinking how similar that kind of idea is to the way some people say we use metaphors. By thinking of different kinds of things using the same schemas, like using the in front of/behind schema for a road and for a calendar, maybe we are saving space in our brains. Not just saving space, but keeping things more organized and less redundant. So there it was, my first crackpot revelation of 2008: Data Compression is the new Metaphor.


I looked it up to make sure nobody had beaten me to the punch. Turns out people way smarter than me have been thinking about it since the late seventies. God damn, It's hard these days to come up with a brand new crackpot revelation.


So Saturday night I was talking to a stranger about how her cell phone won't break when she drops it. I said she had to drop it harder. I thought it would be funny to understand her as wanting to break her phone. I said "gravity is not enough." That sounded like a cool catchphrase. I was overheard, but incorrectly, by a short man who plays the pedal steel guitar. He thought I said "gravity is not a metaphor." That sounded like a cool catchphrase.



The discussion turned to the pinball machine against the wall. It was called "Night Moves." We wondered whether "Night Moves" the pinball machine might be named after "Night Moves" the Bob Seger song. I suggested that in "Night Moves" the Bob Seger song, Bob Seger is actually using sex as a metaphor for pinball. I thought it would be funny to say that.



Later I realized that although so many things are used as metaphors for sex, it's all but impossible to use sex as a metaphor for anything.


Go ahead, try it.

hoverboards

Hoverboads, like this one from Back to the Future II, are fucking awesome. Don't try to deny this. You know deep down in your heart that it's true. Everybody thinks so. Just this week I've had four or five discussions about hoverboards, and everyone who talks about them gets this far-away, glazed-over look in their eyes. You know that look-- that look that's probably fueled by the now lost but once near-universal belief that hoverboards really existed when the movie came out. That look that probably looks just like the look you might have when you wake up from an incredible dream-- the look of remembering something wonderful, once close at hand and firmly in your possession, now just beyond the realm of the actual. It's a bittersweet look: though the idea that hoverboards existed is destroyed, the joy that this idea once brought you remains, forever accessible as a source of dreamy comfort on rainy and sunny mornings and afternoons.

Then again, if those happy thoughts aren't enough, and you have $9000 lying around, you can just go and fuckin' buy one, dude.