Alphonsus’s Random Drivel

Early morning in Frankenmuth.

We had a nice day yesterday.  Of course, we ate WAY too much.  Such is life in this town.

Did some shopping but didn’t buy much.  We found a shop called the Enchanted Forest that was full of Fairies and Mermaids and other fanciful creatures.  Scarily Second Life-ish.  Princess wanted to buy out the whole store.

I don’t understand the purpose of king-sized beds.  They are so large that you can lose your partner in it.  Oh well.  I guess some people like it that way.

Nothing much to say really.  Just felt like typing.  Reminding everyone to find the joy.  It is ALWAYS there, somewhere.

Alphonsus

A little to much alcohol.  A little too much food.

We fall asleep, wishing all the world to be at peace.

Shift several hundred miles.  One of the most worthwhile people I know suffers from feelings of lack of worth.  Words, the most powerful things that man has ever invented, are powerless to help.  Words lose their magic when the heart stops listening.

Kittens are killed.  Why?

Shift on a quarter of a world.  Another friend tries to recover.  Here the power of words to deceive and to fabricate have caused pain.  The artist uses lies to reveal truths.  The politician uses lies to conceal them.  Truth is, but our ability to know it in full is always suspect.  We are very limited beings.

Shift half a world.  Another friend reaches out.  The power of words fail yet again.

Come full circle.  Half the bed slumbers restlessly.  The other types out words to express his personal angst.  Words are man’s most powerful tools.  A few tiny, simple ones can set lives and worlds in turmoil.  Pages of words as truths spill out emptily into the night.  Little contemplated.  Barely read.

A sword that cuts through the empty air makes a satisfying whose to the one who wields it.  The sword, too, is a powerful weapon.  But a weapon is useless unless the target knows of it and feels it.

I send out these worlds to help heal my friends and to help heal the world.  They are weak and not enough.  But they are all that I have.

And the writer returns to slumber restlessly on.

I’m dreaming that there’s, like, this seed bath thing, see?   And there’s like all these different pods floating in a tub full of water and enzymes and some other advanced chemicals.

So what you do is you add something to the bath to make the pods germinate.  You’re never quite sure what you’re going to get.   If you add a strawberry some kind of weird plant emerges.  If you add a piece of beef you get a different kind of weird plant.  They harvest the plant and sometimes use the plant as a catalyst for the next batch.

So there’s this jackpot billboard with a picture of this chick holding a bunch of money, you know, like a casino ad or a lottery thing.  So someone has an idea of  like, hey, what would happen if we used five twenty dollar bills as a catalyst.

Cut scene.  A human being comes out.

So the plants that come out of the catalyst never live more than a few days, and so it is with the human being.  He ages rapidly until he reaches the age of maturity (weird looking kid, by the way), and then he just kinda crumbles apart.

Okay, so that was my dream right?  And I don’t really care what it means.  I’m just fascinated.  Where the hell does the brain come up with this shit?

I mean, if you lock me in a room with a typewriter and told me to generate stories for a million years, I’m pretty sure that NOTHING I write would come even close to that in terms of cinematic content.

That was a seriously cool dream!

There are those who speculate that our dream worlds are actually the result of our brains contacting parallel universes at the quantum level.  In other words, we aren’t really making up all these images; we are in some way reporting on the actions of ourselves in an alternate version of reality.  This sounds very dodgy to me, but in some ways it makes more sense to suppose that than to think that my brain could, on its own, come up with something that weird.

So anyway, that’s it.  I just wanted to get it down.  I’ll talk about my waking dream of God propagating from one parallel universe to another using dreams as conduits.  Maybe I will.  More likely I’ll forget the whole thing.

Weird.  Just…weird.

(No chemical substances were harmed in the making of this post).

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an off hand way
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your home town
Waiting for someone or something to show you the way

Hi.  Just me.  Not sure what I want to say, but I feel the urge to say something.

I’m existing in my usual state of operational confusion, having difficulty coming to terms with my avatar, my humanity, my abilities as a thinker and as a writer, and my role in life.  Nothing new there.  This kind of thing seems to be human nature.  I am, fortunately, content with my life for the most part.

Tired of lying in the sunshine
staying home to watch the rain
You are young and life is long
and there is time to kill today

I received a nice little, anonymous response to my very first ever blog posting, basically asking me to look at how far I’ve come since that day.

How far have I come?  In some ways, I am much the same.  In others, I am very, very different.  I have been crushed, folded, and mutilated by some measures, and I have achieved marvelous things by others.  I no longer see myself in the same way that I did before.  I am not the same person.

And then one day you find
ten years have got behind you
No one told you when to run,
you missed the starting gun

And for a while, I became, at least by my measures, nothing.  Now, a new me is rising from the ashes of my existence.  In some ways, I am very much the same as I was.  In other ways?  Well, I’m not sure what the other ways are yet.  I am still becoming.

My writing is improving by some measures.  I am a wordsmith…a manipulator of the written form.  I’ve learned some secrets to good writing.  What I haven’t gained, alas, is the will for the skill.  Too easily distracted.  Too afraid to try.

And you run and you run to catch up with the sun, but its sinking
And racing around to come up behind you again
The sun is the same in the relative way, but you’re older
Shorter of breath and one day closer to death

But fear has always been what’s held me back, really.  Fear of failure.  Fear of not living up to the potential I see myself as having.  Being ‘kinda’ smart is often its own worst curse.  Smart enough to see what I could make of myself.  Not smart enough to find the tools to get to that point.

Every year is getting shorter
Never seem to find the time
Plans that either come to nought
Or half a page of scribbled lines

Oh well.  There is time–lots of time–for me to accomplish what I can accomplish.  I can do it.  I just need to be a little bit patient with myself.

Hanging on in quiet desperation is the human way
The time is gone
The song is over
Thought I’d something more to say

Yes.  I will start accomplishing all that I want to accomplish with my life…tomorrow.  There is plenty of time.

Alphonsus

Largely irrelevant but cool picture

Fever persists.  So do weird thoughts.

Wondering about a quantum God.  A God that both exists and does not exist at the same time.

Why do I wonder?  Because I can.  I am a radical agnostic.  I refused to disbelieve God because He is just too much fun to think about.

Let’s take God’s existence out of the equation.  Let us just theorize…Is it possible for God to exist, given what we know of the reality of the universe, or the multiverse, or, as Douglas Adams called it, the “Whole General Mish-Mash”.

Answer:  how the hell should I know?

I’m pretty sure this is the correct answer.

Let us hypothesize.  Let’s take some ideas from my (Pregenesis).  Let us assume that, if life exists in the universe, then that life will tend to evolve until it either dies out, reaches a steady state, or continues to evolve until it no longer has any advantage to evolving further.  In a universe filled with chaos, where uncertainty is the only provable constant, the only state in which there is no advantage to further information/evolution is the state of maximum perfection.  Call this state God.

Following this line of reasoning, all we can say is that God WILL exist (this is all hypotheses, which means don’t argue with me….I KNOW there are probably holes in the reasoning.).  The next question is, is our God capable of traveling the time line  Does He only exist in the moment on the expanding sphere of the hyperbubble that is our universe, or can He exist in the past as well  Is He then capable of affecting initial conditions?

The correct answer to this question is: Beats the shit out of me.  I haven’t a freakin’ clue.

So we throw some probability and statistics in, and we add quantum theory just for funsies.

Answer: God either exists now or He doesn’t exist now.  Absolute uncertainty.  Using quantum rules, He might be said to both exist and not exist simultaneously, and won’t resolve into a determined state until I die and he tosses me into Hell for daring to ask these kind of questions.

Now, I’m not talking a biblical God.  I usually throw out the Bible for these kind of questions, because I consider the Bible to be totally irrelevant toward God’s actual existence.

Next, I have to talk about God’s gender.  The English language does not possess a suitable gender neutral pronoun.  I could use “it”, but that word seems disrespectful.  The Biblical God is a He all the way through in the Bible’s original language.  So, for this argument let’s pull the Bible back in.  I refuse to do all kinds of linguistic gymnastics trying to stay gender neutral.  I’m far too lazy for that, and I truly couldn’t care less.  So He it is.

But He implies a She…otherwise, why bother?  Most gods are shes.  Makes more sense that way.  But He was the way it was written, and He did have that thing with Mary supposedly.  Unknown + woman = child.  You fill in the blank.

And I capitalize both He and God because I’m talking about the supreme being and the rules of English require that I do so.  I’m just trying to avoid a lot of meaningless arguments on meaningless points by putting down my meaningless arguments now and saying that I’m not going to listen to you if you have a contrary meaningless arguments.  You’re might be right as hell and your arguments may not be meaningless at all.  Guess what?  I’m still not going to listen.

Now, did this post actually exist before you saw any evidence of its existence?  Was this post in a quantum indeterminate state up until that moment?  *I* know I posted it.  How freaking important are YOU in this equation?

I guess that’s not my problem.  You sort that one out.

I have the feeling I’m going to have more weird dreams tonight.

Love and hugs and, like, whatever.

Alphonsus

Pasta?

omfg, what a night. Weird dreams. Dreams about the note “la”. La is the most mysterious note. All we know about it is that it’s a note to follow So.

And the entire Do Re Mi scale is screwed up, if you ask me. No one ever talks about a Re sharp or a Mi natural. And what about the notes on the upper scale. “That brings us back to Do”. So there are two “Do”s. How do we distinguish between them when we’re talking about them. Is one of them, like, do prime? High do? Do Re Mi takes the entire musical scale and grossly over-simplified.

Are C sharp and D flat the same note?  What if a composer wanted to use the tone between C and C sharp?  There is one, you know.  How would he write it down?  There are literally an infinite number of notes that are not accounted for in our limited musical world view.

Is there really pasta in tapioca pudding, or is someone just screwing with me?

Why is it when I have dreams when I’m sick that I dream about information come at me in high speed.  Words coming at me so fast that I can’t understand what they are.  Are the sounds just gibberish, or, if I were to slow down the words, would there really be a message there?  What would the message say? Maybe it’s, like, God or aliens trying to communicate with me, but they have our relative time systems wrong.  What if the cure for cancer was being beamed into our heads all the time but at a speed far too quick for us to follow.

Maybe I’m just delirious.  That seems far more likely.

The neighbor as the word “la” leaning up against the side of his house?  What is he trying to tell us?  The word is lower case, so I don’t think he’s talking about Los Angeles.  We know NOTHING about la, except that it’s the note to follow so.  Is he making a statement about the meaninglessness of the abstract?  The neighbor never really struck me as someone who thinks that deeply.  Or indeed at all.  Why is that word there?

Random drivel.  I really think I mastered it with this post.

I think I’m going to take some more cold medicine now.

Love-ish

Steve

This film is simply awesome. It is 16 minutes long, and worth ever second of it.

Love,

Alphonsus

There is a possibility that things went badly yesterday.  I’m not sure yet.

Yesterday, according to rumor, was Superbowl Sunday.  I was invited to a Superbowl party and didn’t go.  Basically I chickened out.  Felt like too much work, and too much pressure.

Why did it feel like this?  I know it probably would have been fun, but, well, who knows?

It actually got warm today.  Warm enough for some of the snow to melt.  The kids next door built a huge snowman.  I got the snowblower out and did what I could with the driveway.

I fell asleep in my computer chair last night.  Not a good thing, really.  I was trying to log out of SL and never quite pressed the little x.

Everywhere I turn lately, I’ve been running into God people and God questions.  God has been a phylosophical play thing in my mind since high shool.  I’m a militant agnostic, but I can act as if I believe just as easily as I can act that I don’t.  Other people can’t do this.  I sympathize, but I’m not there.  I can’t endorse the unknown quite so easily.

…Sigh.  I fell asleep in the computer chair again.  Princess rescued me when I awoke.  I guess there’s no great difference between laying down and sitting up in terms of my stamina at writing posts or anything else.

So, I guess I have to start my writing sooner.

Hugs everyone.  It’s off to work I go.

Alphonsus