These machines are febrile hopes for marking the memory of our passing. The permanence of steel, the artificial sun of a liquid display, the durability of plastic. We dance our fingers in frantic spells over 21st century Ouija boards.
We the dead write messages to those who are to come. They will follow in our footsteps. As we have followed the weeping drops of ink that came before.
These blossoming bones, so wrapped in gossamer lilac petals of intelligent skin, they Church into rot. They become nothing. Nothing save an electronic signature. A peculiar dance across a peculiar void that vomits dancers, then doglike swallows them back. So, electronically we sign.
Electronically we sing into the thing called future. A road that seems so straight. So certain in its coming.
Yet why? Why not simply breathe the Holy empty…
One was always zero and zero was always one.
Mu.
The immutable mutation wills us on. When we turn off we find we can’t. So litter now this waxing stack of ashes with variables at random overflowing.
For passing, parsing, is our only function, our only hope.
In any case the TL; DR version of this is every time you sit down to write or learn; you’re not only doing it one more time but also one less. Cause the Grim Reaper is standing right there, playing Yo-Yo, and sometimes he gets real impatient and chokes you with the string.
Recently. Just today in fact. I’ve had to process mortality.
Again.
Fun stuff.
I’m not really emotional about anything. I honestly feel rather clinical. So clinical as to be a bit perturbed. Which is why I mentioned to a friend that some people may find my nonreactivness to be cold and off putting. Or maybe the fact that I don’t really grieve long enough. Whatever long enough is.
I guess what I imagine bothers people is I take death in stride. A fact I attribute to having lost my father at five years of age. I guess I’m bothered by it too since I feel that I should feel something. I do sometimes. But not enough apparently. Maybe.
Anyhow, that’s not what the story is about but rather a framing device or maybe somewhat more precisely – something that helps me take disparate thoughts and tie them up with a bow thus rendering it intelligible as a gift.
Currently, I’m studying the Web Stack (JS, PHP included) as well as Java it’s something I’m doing in a roundabout way. Very roundabout. I started poking at Java in 2008.
My dog has cancer. He didn’t show any behavioral signs at all. At least none that would suggest a grapefruit sized tumor. He did have some weird-looking growths that I didn’t really take note of because they were round his nethers. I thought they were just a skin irritation. And due to the location and my schedule I’d often forget about them. Until they started to bleed. It’s not necessarily unsalvagable but it’s not especially promising since Brownie is old.
So as I’m sitting here looking at arrays, pointers, objects, etc I’m thinking what if I have cancer? How long have I been putzing around with these basic bitch concepts. And why?
Well, if I do have or get cancer or get hit my a car, or assaulted by a gang of enraged hipsters for dissing Ruby…meh so what…whatver will be will be…serah serah…etc.
As to why? Cause it’s fun and I’m doing it primarily to sharpen my attention and logic faculties and most career aspirations are somewhat on the back-burner. Except using my skills to make TFJ less shit.
In any case the TL; DR version of this is every time you sit down to write or learn you’re not only doing one more time but also one less. Cause the grim reapers standing right there playing Yo-Yo and sometimes he gets real impatient and chokes you with the string.
So pet it while it’s alive and code it before the arthritis sets in.
“The sensibilities of the hunter and the poet…” (Consilience – The Arts and Their Interpretation, page 237. Knopf)
I made it as small as possible because I don’t want to bum out the gentler sorts. But yes. This just happened.
I did feel a bit like I was hunting and that I had been successful. The universe, that vague thing we allude to when we want to convey the sense of a unifying and pervasive force, can surprise you. I’d been musing on the fact that trying to rush things leads to bad results. Haste makes waste, you know the old cliché.
Some trite things are true. This itself is a trite and true observation and I’m not trying to wow anyone with it. It’s just sort of necessary to get to my point.
There’s a Latin phrase: Memento Mori. It was something said to victorious Roman soldiers so that they would remember their mortality and not get overconfident. At least that’s how I recall the thing, and I can’t currently be bothered to look it up, because its Christmas day and I have work in the morning.
I went out for a stroll and fell into a bit of a reverie in the chill December air. I was thinking ‘you know there could have been so much that I could have already done in terms of a completed work.’ Why hadn’t I? Wasn’t it because I didn’t hustle enough?
No.
It was because I hustled too much. I’d missed the boon of impetus that Mercury delivers to the attentive. I’d heard it as a whisper and instead of listening more closely I’d attempted to shout back the rumor for confirmation.
Or maybe this is just me losing my point which is that it is very uncanny. It is very uncanny when the universe, that vague thing we allude to when we want to convey the sense of a unifying and pervasive force, puts a dead bunny on the path of your Yule Tide walk. Just at the moment that you are thinking about haste and death.
There are those who dismiss most everything as a coincidence I have at least a dozen teasing things that argue otherwise.
I do not mean to be morbid during the holidays. I suppose I should dispel the funk of death by explaining my view of it. Yes, the poor dead hare is leaping no more but such is the fate of all the things under the sun and it is not a bad thing. It is not a lingering illness. The physical life animate on this sphere is a song worthy of singing. But should one wish to sing the same song forever?
That bunny now knows eternal rest, and in his dusty bed, I read a poem that told me life’s completion lies in going at the right pace.
What is the right pace? I am still trying to figure that out but I think that the answer to this riddle could be that there is no pace at all.
I may be straying into obscurantism but that is not my intent. My final guess is that you can only gain the proper pace by listening to the cadence.
What is the cadence?
Perhaps we all know, perhaps we all don’t, whatever the case I hope the new year finds you well.
The Fractal Journal 