Author: Alex V. Weir

Hello. Welcome to my blog. I am here to write on a variety of topics. The title of the site 'Fractal Journal' reflects the way I see the world and wish to explore it. I believe that everything is interconnected and the best way to understand it is through studying perspective. I suppose some may find it pompous but I view what I do as, 'Perspective Journalism.' There will be recurring themes throughout. For instance there may be long spells in which I will write about a single topic from many angles. One such topic will be water, the natural resource about which I am currently writing a book. If you find that you enjoy what I do, please subscribe.

Communication at UPS – Should I File A Grievance (Vlog)

On December 22, 2019 By Alex V. WeirIn Alex Weir, Current Events, Social Commentary, Technology, The Fractal Journal, Uncategorized, VlogLeave a comment

This video is about my recent experience as a preloader. If you came here looking for advice on filing a grievance click this link https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xPHjXmLobfE . I’m just here to lay out some concerns peculiar to my hub in the interest of promoting communication and on a personal note to vent a bit.

I’ve held the position for two years. This is my third peak as I started in December of 2017. I believe that what one of my full time supervisors asked me to do today was in violation of Past Practice. I learned that term after I made this video. But I’m glad that my ideas (if I understood the concept correctly/there is no fine print) about something being amiss were legitimized.

We have had three injuries in my hub this year, if I’m not mistaken. Sure you could say that’s because some of our employees are sub-par. But as someone who has been here for two years I’d say that’s definitely not the whole of the story. The management style and company culture is severely compromised by corporate pressure.
I understand the need to profit. But I think that UPS has had a wide enough margin that this corner cutting, union dodging, irrational authoritarianism is not only unnecessary (it never is) but compromises the ability to perform the job safely.

It is just a few days shy of Christmas, meaning that we have already worked a good portion of peak season, does it make sense to approach an employee at the end of the shift and tell them to rescan all the packages on the trucks because of an alleged misload registration. Especially if the misloads are not misloads as admitted by management? Especially if there was no prior practice of manually scanning out of the trucks? Especially if the supervisors do not do it and the employees do not do it.

There are further details of counterproductive and arguably abusive practices in the video. I will likely follow up in the near future as I get a better handle on the situation.

Neither my coworkers nor I should have to work under these conditions.

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Rings – The Meditations of a Mortal

On December 20, 2019 By Alex V. WeirIn Alex Weir, poems, Stories, The Fractal Journal, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Hand holding a cigarette with smoke rings, a stylized monochrome vector image.

You.
You there.
Yes, you with the hair so like the leaves that autumn brings.
Do you know why fall is my favorite season?
It is not just the hint of chill in the air.
It is because rings are made.
Yes.
I love fall because I love decay.
Because I love the evidence of life that has been lived.
The gentle descent of death into rivers as cool, and deep, and gray, as those eyes you’ve fixed upon me.
You shudder and wonder what’s so great about rot.
Well look at the tree’s hair that’s just landed on that delicate shoulder, so near your own leafy crown.
How I love the slight bend in your neck.
How tenderly the angle travels to the collarbone.
You know I see you as a skeleton,
Shhhhhhh… relax a bit,
you’ve drowned your cigarette in gin,
I’ve no desire to harm you.
Here take mine,
a famililar act should steel the nerves.
You know that such lovely lips should not be chimnneys.
But while we’re on the subject of smoking,
why is it that we love it so,
the wrapping of these dead dry leaves and their cremation?
We inhale decay.
And in rings the evidence of life’s passage curls round us.

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The Most Valuable Lesson I Learned

On December 19, 2019 By Alex V. WeirIn Alex Weir, Philosophy, Psychology, The Fractal Journal, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Image result for hills scotland

The most useful thing that you can do to improve your odds in any situation is one that I learned from Alan Watts. The thing is a realization. That realization is that all those factors working against you are like the ground that pushes up your feet or the hills in your way that take you higher.

Whether this was an original thought from Watts or some bit of wisdom he picked up, I do not know.

And really it’s irrelevant aside from the fact that Watts is peculiarly appealing for me due to my development.

Wish I had the clip on hand to share. But no such luck. Perhaps I’ll find it, at which point I’ll share all this again, since such things are worth the repetition.

Image result for alan watts — AlanWatts.org

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My Thoughts on Jordan B Peterson

On December 19, 2019 By Alex V. WeirIn Alex Weir, Current Events, Humor, Psychology, Social Commentary, The Fractal Journal, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Pretty sure it’s your pituitary gland that causes you to grow up. And the desire to learn cliffs of dover is what causes you to improve. Women generally distract you from learning cliffs of dover in between sessions of telling you that you work too much. BP is a classic salesman using FOMO: hey bucko you arent a real man! let me tell you what a real man is! ….and then he’ll close the deal by telling you chicks will dig you. It’s like the coors light twins except with a lot more wordsalad.

I think he’s a great lecturer and can give useful albeit oftentimes generic and omnipresent advice to folks looking for a daddy. His stand against political correctness and bucking of the Patreon Politburo are highly admirable.

But…

I just don’t understand people’s fascination with him. I see no genius here, I see nothing spectacular, or particularly useful. Just another self help guru with some academic chops. Hailing from a discipline which is pretty much the shakiest form of ‘science’ around.

No JBP doesn’t inspire me to clean my room. Because my room is already clean. Not because I’m conscientious or a big grown adult man that all the ladies dig! But cause I got tired of tripping over my barbells.

If you love Peterson and he really gets your needle moving: all power to you. But he keeps popping up all over my suggestions and it’s time I threw these thoughts out there before I explode with bewilderment.

I just don’t get the desire of people to be told that they’re lacking, then be given a though guy pep talk, just so they can feel they’re overcoming something.

Que the fanboys telling me how I’m a basement dweller, who thinks he’s overcome everything, who isn’t even an award winning academic superstar!

I’m sorry lads I already have a god and his name is Eric Johnson:

I need Cheetos money to fuel my woman hatred and self pity. Please help.

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Rapt (Poem)

On December 18, 2019 By Alex V. WeirIn Alex Weir, poems, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Image result for i raise ebenezer

There upon the minute hangs a phrase

Summit of salvation

Dares a finger raise

Cardinal point

Full of form beyond dimension

Honey fountain angel lips annoint

Beside the aeon

In musty hall

Shining ray dispels the Eidolon

No more in thrall

Dancing now

Through electric gardens

Electing how

These rings of wardens

Would uncoil

To blossom through

The dusty soil

True as true

Rapt in the silence

Of eternal song

Yes the dead can dance

As far as long

Here amongst tobacco leaves and gin

Where porches bake

And ages grin

Her hand I take

To celebrate the passage

Of an aeon

As magnolia spills upon the page

The everpresent dawn

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Ten Joys of Simple Work

On December 17, 2019December 17, 2019 By Alex V. WeirIn Alex Weir, Humor, Philosophy, Social Commentary, The Fractal Journal, UncategorizedLeave a comment

I bitch a lot about my day job so here are some of the perks. I’m too shagged out to make it terribly witty or poetic but I’m trying damn it!

1) My feet are strong. I got buff feet yall. They conform to surface and balance all dance like as I carry 5 to 140 pounds of christmas cheer for 4 to 7 hours.

2) I laid down to sleep absolutely exhausted and drifted off deeply into my secondhand mattress to dream of playing billiards with Boris Johnson and Bernie Sanders. It was the most vivd thing in the world. I was in a futuristic megacity with my best friends and two mad lads one of whom parachuted with a union jack flag into a mini cooper. Felt like I knew both for years. Because fuck yeah. Serious no lie. This dream pretty much happened sans the parachute.

3) Beer is 9000+ times better.

4) You have a tangible result almost immideatly ready to gauge against your last best speed and accuracy.

5) When I lay down I am very aware of my calves and all my musculture. Sure this has just as much to do with my gym habits but I feel this intense vigor pulsing through me despite the exhaustion. Physical labor especially at UPS is basically paid functional strength training.

6) When you’re done you’re done.

7) It’s always interesting to see how much my body can overcome when I get home and decide to workout and write on top of all my daily responsibilities.

8) You appreciate how much work goes into making modern life possible. And do not have any illusions about economics and where produtivity origniates.

9) Food is instantly absorbed and allocated to the most efficient use.

10) Leprechauns whisper secrets in the dawn. If you don’t like them – just add coffee. They’ll be replaced by paranoia that makes you plan your life out to the T for the next twenty years as you learn to pickle and buy farmland in western Tennessee. \

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Beware the Boffins – MechaShiva Rides MechaGanesh (Vlog)

On December 14, 2019 By Alex V. WeirIn Alex Weir, Current Events, Humor, Social Commentary, Technology, The Fractal Journal, Uncategorized, VlogLeave a comment

The Atlantic gives us the skinny on some DARPA shenanigans.

Shenanigans like so:

During the Vietnam War, DARPA tried to build a Cybernetic Anthropomorphous Machine, a jungle vehicle that officials called a “mechanical elephant.”

MechaGanesh…

to be ridden by….

“Let’s say I gave you a third arm,” and then a fourth arm—so, two additional hands, he said. “You would be more capable; you would do more things, right?” And if you could control four hands as seamlessly as you’re controlling your current two hands, he continued, “you would actually be doing double the amount of work that you would normally do. It’s as simple as that. You’re increasing your productivity to do whatever you want to do.” I started to picture his vision—working with four arms, four hands—and asked, “Where does it end?”

MechaShiva…!

……………………..

Time to opine.

Sources

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/the-pentagon-wants-to-weaponize-the-brain-what-could-go-wrong/570841/

Music

Creative Commons royalty-free music from incompetech

External_metadata_update: 2019-04-11T02:05:45Z

Identifier: Incompetech

Scanner: Internet Archive HTML5 Uploader 1.6.3

https://archive.org/download/Incompetech

Image result for mecha shiva — Mecha Shiva – Cosmic Peace or Else

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Where the Lillies Lie (Poem)

On December 14, 2019December 14, 2019 By Alex V. WeirIn Alex Weir, poems, The Fractal Journal, UncategorizedLeave a comment

Roll forth now and down the way

Through the depressions go among lillies lay

There you’ll find the sunshine in strange pockets

There in atmosphere too rarefied for rockets

For far beyond the sun there is

All that is a whispered breeze

Yes to learn of all of this

Far beyond corporeal symmetries

Is to grasp the writhing Asp

Pluck the tail from its fanged grasp

And hold a fresh flower in the dew

For there’s no such thing as you

A poem to hold you over dear and patient visitors. I am in the process of rendering a video which will be uploaded sometime in the next twelve hours. Thanks for stopping by. You are always greatly appreciated.

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