I spoke to the autodidact today on my break at work. The autodidact works in the fish department. He used to work with me in the deli. Before that, so he told me, he worked doing construction. His formal education goes no further than high school, but he is more intelligent than a lot of college graduates in a lot of important, practical, ways. His intelligence is skewed, though. In a lot of ways he is not very socially aware or emotionally mature. Sometimes, he is annoyingly cynical. But he knows how to make things. He brews his own beer and grows some of his own food. He fishes, and he cleans and cooks his catches. Cooking is another of his hobbies. He’s a hands-on person.
Today he told me that he’s getting into mycology, and proceeded to nerd out about it for the rest of our break. He told me about all the precautions needed to keep one’s fungal cultures from being contaminated. He told me about the incubator he built from parts he found in a dumpster (he just needs some scrap wood to build a door, and it’s done). And the discounted home laboratory equipment he bought cheaply online (he needed a new microscope, among other several other things). It was pretty fascinating.
I nodded, and grinned, though I didn’t have much to say about it. But I always wonder just what the autodidact is doing working in the fish department of a grocery store. Somebody as self-motivated as he is must want something more out of life than to just putter around with his hobbies while he wears himself down at a job he doesn’t like. I don’t think he’s legitimately happy with his life right now; more often than not he seems miserable so I just steer clear of him. Still, I admire him, and I wish I was more like him sometimes.
old poem & a fragment.
Sip factory nectar
and pray for sleeplessness.
For insomnia is the genius of genius,
or so we have gathered from the celluloid
evidence we disinterred from
the west coast catacombs.
There were plenty frames missing,
but as big pictures require only outlines,
we got by using our wits
or something.
—
He worked third shifts until his eyes grew large and luminous.
I hate it when I make you feel this way. I only want you to feel loved and valued, the way you deserve. Now I feel like a sad and broken thing.
looking out.
The things that other people believe about love have me questioning the depth of my humanity.
Am I a cartoon character?
I’m not naive; I’m aware that the world is a pretty fucked up place. But I also know that people’s beliefs determine their reality to an extent. But I believe in a lot of rather simple things. Am I simple? Is my world simple?
I believe, for one, that humans have outmoded the necessity for cruelty. Cruelty is a vital trait for many forms of life. It ensures the survival of wolves and hawks and viruses. But a person has no need for it, even if their instincts take them there. That is the tragic thing about us: we know better, but when the chips are really down (or even if we just think they are), we will be brutal, because brutality has saved the necks of our countless ancestors. It is our inheritance. But now I think our survival depends on rejecting it. The game has changed. Human beings were made in no god’s image. We are not a finished product. We’re evolving just as life always has, and we’re caught in the middle.
I believe that if people choose to be kind to one another, then that’s all there is to it. It is a very simple choice to make, but it isn’t at all easy. It takes a lot of conscious effort, and sacrifice, and sometimes it just fucking hurts. But the benefits of cooperation outweigh the costs, especially when compared to the benefits of blindly selfish competition. And there’s nothing complicated about it. I am no idealist and I hold no hope for an age when humanity just all holds hands and sings songs all day. That’s silly. There will always be something to fight about, to one extent or another. But I do believe in a world where people don’t have to live in fear of one another, or of themselves. And I believe that the macrocosm has to start with a microcosm. If two people (or three, or four, or whatever) make an agreement to treat one another with kindness and respect, then they are bringing that world into existence, one clump of humanity at a time. And it can hurt, but that doesn’t mean that people have to get hurt by it. That’s the whole point of cooperating, right? We keep one another from getting hurt.
But oh, what do I know.
I keep having to remind myself that I am somebody and not nobody. But I’m not sure which somebody I am. What the fuck am I about, anyway? I want to know what my deal is. But all my mind wants to focus on right now is who I’m not. Shut up, mind.
The one thing I really need more than anything now, is the one thing I’m told that I’m not supposed to rely on others for. But…other people help me maintain a sense of function and identity, and I need that. In the eyes of others, I become a person, instead of a skinny coat rack. Which is funny, because I do like to spend an awful lot of time by myself.
I don’t know. I’m going to go take a shower.
NPM041211
# I guess I’m cheating, since technically this is a rewrite of an older thing. I can’t remember when I wrote it; I’ve got to start consistently dating my stuff. I estimate 1 1/2 - 2 years ago. But who knows, really.
ONE REPORTER’S REPORTING.
Herds percolated razorishly through irrigation canals
and sept straightaway into fruitless whatevers.
It was a dark and dorky circus we beheld.
Inglorious youths
emblazoned with home-made gold
chucked paper spears in the throes
of pitched battle.(Somewhere in the vast
and fractal universe,
a trillion palms
slap a trillion foreheads
all at once.)From the safety of our coven, we could laugh
but the dwellers near the genius
of language knew better.
Write it in your little green pad.
It’s National Poetry Month! I need to start doing this again! I’m already 8 days behind! Time to play catch-up.
digger, builder, remnant.
The brass has been honed
by the floodwaters, toned by axe;
the callouses are walls around the palm.
With swaddled knowledge in your arms,
you dug your trenches where the still earth firmed,
and found some artifact just how you left it.
ITS THE REMIX
a conjecture for you: “oh my god, it’s so refreshing.”
It was microburst-thunderstorming. very dry and unexciting. discontinued soft. sustain that fusion over time. when I looked in the mirror in high places on the internet, I have a suspicion. Give it a different name, and I will.
GOLDEN ORCHID DESTROYS GLASS PALADIN
Before I could cross
a lean sharpened kid
with a little shark’s mouth
took a hard left into my home street.
He sped on
in his mean metal chariot.
Sipping Coke
with avid lips
without wonder.
just riffing
A little mental/verbal exercise from a prompt a friend gave me, it fits in pretty much with what I do here:
Education exists to spare us the inconveniece of being cavemen, to prod us down the path of discovering how to think, along with, not unimportantly, the inculcation of masses of facts, of varying degrees of usefulness, but that’s not a problem for mass production. Every day I cook dozens of roasted chickens, and people eat them or they don’t. Every day I throw a fistful of darts at the dartboard, and hope a few hit. It would seem education for the most part works the same way; we’ll throw more or less the same thing at everybody, and if it works for them, great, and if it doesn’t, well, shit. That’s not to say that educators don’t do their best to individuate despite these constraints; but these are the rules of the game—if you change the rules, you get a different game. And if you get a different game, you have to give it a different name, and I will here note that not a single one of the aspiring marketeers I’ve had occasion to take alcohol and pretend weariness with, can proffer an appealing one. At any rate, the old name has brand loyalty, why risk shaking things up? Even I can’t muster the what-have-you to disagree with that one. This is where we reach the limits of pretend weariness and start to dig into the real thing. It’s an acquired taste.
It reminds me of how children parrot many of the actions and emotions of adulthood as a playful ritual, without really knowing what they are. Play doctor, play nurse, play angry, play cynical. I have a suspicion that this is something many actual ‘adults’ still do. What did I just type—‘pretend weariness.’ But I will not pretend to be so savvy as to always spot the difference; I just know that I moonlight as an actor sometimes, not to fool others, or to even fool myself, but because of weird, external forces. This is just what people do, and I suspect you know it too. I can’t make any claims to new knowledge. Depending on how you think, that’s either a failure or a success of education.
It was either Socrates or the dude from Operation Ivy who said, “all I know is that I don’t know nothing, and that’s fine.” But isn’t knowing what you don’t know clearly contradictory? I guess a distinction should be made, between knowing what you don’t know and knowing that you don’t know. The latter doesn’t necessarily indicate the former. I know that I don’t know lots of things, because yesterday I knew less things than I knew today, and presumably tomorrow I will know more than I did today. So there always has been something new to know, going all the way back to when I, and you, and all of us, were just useless fragile lumps of loud flesh. Now we like to think we’re so much more, but if what we now know is still an infintesimal portion of the knowable, can we really make such lofty claims? I guess it’s a relative matter. Every day I clean the rotisserie, and, so long as it’s cleaner than it was before I started, that’s good enough. The rotisserie has known the original sin of having chickens inside of it; it shall never again know true purity. But that won’t stop me scrubbing. <- THIS IS A JOKE
Wittgenstein was on to something when he said he wanted to write a philosophical treatise consisting entirely of jokes. I don’t know if anyone has done that yet. If they haven’t, I will. I’ll format it like the Bible. Ever wonder about the formatting in The Holy Bible? How every chapter has a number and every verse it’s sub-number? Who decided that, anyway? Whoever it was, they were a psychological genius. I think the sense of authority of the book comes from that numbering system. It was clearly put together by somebody very put-together. If there is a God, and if God is the spiritual author of the Bible, as certain people hold, then God must have the most organized work-space ever. Where is the Bible’s section on work-space organization? Or time-management? Maybe they’re there; I haven’t read the whole thing. Or maybe those are non-canonical texts, preserved on parchment in an archive, waiting for Dan Brown to write a terrible book about them.
I think the real disjunct between religion and science is in their basic idea of what knowledge is. In the religious view, knowledge is revealed from on high, or else acquired by eating magic fruit (which reminds me of an esoteric school of thought which holds that the location of Eden is Yoshi’s Island). In the scientific view, knowledge is something which can be discovered via the human capacity for reasoning, and is never definitive; what we now know is subject to change, as we continue to refine our theories and observations. That a lot of people are religious should shock no one, but I for one find it shocking that some people still cleave to religion’s conception of knowledge. This, I suspect, may be an unintended consequence of education.
