What I’m Listening To, Pt. 6

“Don’t Look Back Into the Sun” - the Libertines

Last one of these I’m doing. Heading on a mondo-road trip, so we’re gonna change the format again. Gotta keep changing directions if I want to keep up the challenge, the excitement, no?

 But as to tie it into things (and prevent Andy from just booting me off the blorge), today I learned about the Taman Shud Case, which is….guys, seriously: Capital F Fascinating.

 Here’s the thing though: like…what does it matter anymore? There’s no human element to cracking the case on something like that. It’s 60 years old, the only people who get any closure are the detectives and scholars who spent so much time trying to pick away at it and make it make sense. And keeping with the honesty kick, does anyone care? Does anyone lay awake wondering who this guy was, or where he went to school, or what his sisters were like? Does anyone care that this human being is dead, and that he maybe and horribley outlived his mother? That he had poker buddies, or a dentist? Nah, it’s just a big great mystery that we all went to delve into. For the edification of our own intelligence, and for the satisfaction of classic Human curiosity, we focus on the glitzy smack of wonder and adoration.

Ya know, there’s a lot to be said about self-reflection. A lot! That shit’s important. But you can only learn about the present and past what’s already been done or decided. I know that’s a heady sentence, but it’s the notion that (the impersonal) you become a historian of your own expeiences; one can spend their life categorizing the who and what and why, and not thinking to move forward and just persue a new thing. Hey man, I swear: you can do both!

 What is it that makes us want to kick around the bones of a crime scene and figure out how it could’ve happened 60 years later? *METAPHOR ALERT* Is it the same thing that compells us to dig around in our own lives, in our own failed experiences and not think about the “why?”, when the answer can be defined as simply as “Because. Because that shit goes down sometimes. Please look around at what’s going on now, please.”

 I’m rambling a bit. I’m gonna close this up. God, Andy’s so annoyed with me at this point. Let me not tie this thing together snugly:

 ”She will never forgive you, but she won’t let you go, oh no.”

 No. No she won’t. Lay the bones to rest and close the cover of that book. The past is…gone. It’s done. It’s had it’s say, and it isn’t moving from it’s position. Deal with it or ‘fuck off’, because the past is the most stubborn and hard-headed thing you’ll ever have to deal with. Set in it’s ways, uncompromising, bound to follow one track, the past forces you to accept it (or not), and allows you no opportunity to change it (or not).

 In short, the Past has got nothing on the Future.

-diggy

or “Time and Relative Dimensions in Cyberspace”

Firstly let me apologize to no one in particular for the tardiness (TARDIS-ness) of this post, but it only goes to further a point. These monthly catch-all articles are pretty tough when compared to the daily ones we do, if only because those can be whimsical and spur-of-the-moment, and these have to have, ya know…a well thought out theme. It’s the easiest way for me to remember the clear dilineation between “Blogging” and “Writing”, but I digress. Once again. Allons-y!

—-

A funny things has occured while working on WILI2010 with Andy, which we’ve chatted about from time to time. By writing about what you’re learning as you’re learning about it, you’re removing a lot of the passive elements of observation. Put more simply, by staring at the thing you’re changing how you learn it. It makes things that you’ve even already experienced and are ruminating about different by changing the perspective and lens through which you view it.

Andy probably has a more thoughtful way of explaining something like that. He’s a subtle man. I on the other hand am a caffeine-soaked melodramatic nerd, so I’m instantly reminded of Schröedinger’s Cat. You know Schröedinger and his Cat? Ostensibly, it’s a theory used in quantum mechanics that states that observation affects the outcome. Apt metaphor, no?

Which brings us to what I learned in February. There’s a pretty distinct correlation between the media I’m consuming on a given day, and what I end up learning/writing about. It just so happens (and probably not coincidentally) that things this month were largely concerned with the concept of Time. From a beloved television show that I absolutely let consume my life, to the song that I found myself humming every day, to the relationship I’ve entered into, to pitcher’s and catcher’s reporting.

So it should be no wonder that I found myself thinking about it so much. When I wrote “7 Days is a long time in human years”, it was my reaction to things changing in my life in a staggeringly concentrated amount of time. When I became obsessed with the MTA and their train schedule (or lack thereof), it was because of how much time I spent on them, and how they were responsible for the way I managed my time, every single day (and the hours and hours I lost on these broken fucking rails). There was also the notion of how fast time goes by, like how it feels as though it was just yesterday things were beginning, and now they’ve already finished up. And let’s not forget the almost haphazard disregard both of us had for deadlines. This is supposed to be updated daily for god’s sake, and I constantly felt the burden of time to get something/anything up by 11:59 PM so I could claim it as being “on time”.

But this is nothing new, is it? It’s not like I’ve never thought about time before, about how it never seems to go at the ‘correct’ speed, things are always way too fast or far too slow.

Can you believe it’s March already, holy-shit does time fly. But God, I can’t be-lieve it’s still fucking winter.

It’s just that staring at time is what changes it. You’re experience of it isn’t steady, it’s completely relative. Just like Schroedinger’s Cat. And just like what I have learned and will continue to learn throughout the year.

So yeah, that’s what I learned. Oh, and Dr. Who. I learned a lot about Dr. Who. Mostly just Dr. Who. He was a time-traveller though, so that counts! Right?

…

Fuck off!

-diggy

I had tried to cheat and put something up as a time-stamped place holder for another article. I’ve done it before, and never got around to finishing that one either, so we’re gonna move that one to tonight, and this is me time-traveling by a couple days and rewriting history. Like all attempts to re-write history, it will bring forth the unforeseen consequence of becoming boring rather quickly (like in Lost), and then be course-corrected (like in Lost):

*whooooshind sound* …here’s something I don’t remember writing AT ALL last night:

as I placidly assault the year, we come to another instance of having to derive great meaning. Great self-imposed meaning, upon the structureless and unknown and wonder aloud about the importance of finding suich solid structures in the wake of the ever present tumult. Are we arrogant to do so, are we unfortuante. Are we simply human? I’ve never known what was the proper response, I suspect it will be a long time before I do.

Yeah, yikes.

-diggy

I couldn’t get an opportunity to post anything yesterday (a bit too busy having…fun?) so let’s hop in the ol’ TARDIS and pretend today is Wednesday, January 6th and that I’m good with deadlines…

FWOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOSH

Wow…the ancient past. I must seem like a God to your primitive minds (I had to spell-check that one because I misspelled ‘primitive’). ANYWAY…

Today I learned that there’s really brilliant fruit called a Jackfruit. You can get it fresh in the Philippines and in Brazil and the flesh of it is a really tasty meat substitute. It’s not as heavy as tempeh or seitan and it takes the taste of whatever sauce you cook it in, so it’s perfect for like faux-pulled pork sandwiches or any of that stuff. None of that matters because I have no idea how to cook anything and Andy doesn’t need meat substitutes

So getting back to time travel, I was thinking the other day about a sort of dilemma. Let’s say, assuming you could come back and resume your normal life once your little adventure is over, that you could go either forward in time or backward in time. So you can set the time and the date, but it was up to you whether you traveled into the future, or visited something in the past. Which would you go for?

I think a lot of people would probably lean to the past. Either see something historic or affect things, change things about. Kill Hitler or something like that. I mean that’s what people get most frustrated with, in terms of the science of time travel, we really can’t go back. See, theoretically we could create things that could allow us to travel back to a fixed point, but only as far back as when the thing was created in the first place (sorry. If this seems needlessly confusing, go watch Primer or something. It won’t make things any clearer, but it’s more needlessly confusing than me. So this whole thing was seem like..less bad in comparison, you know what I’m saying?).

Not me though, I’m pretty sure I’d go forward. I mean I have absolutely no idea what the world’s gonna look like in a hundred years. We all thought that by 2010 we’d have spaceship cars and mechanical falcons named Mordecai who sit on our shoulders and give us updates about news and the weather and help us hunt and stuff. At the same time, no one had any idea that communication technology would speed up at the rate it did. Yeah, definitely the future. See if everyone’s still around.

Alright, back to drinking. There’s so much to write about tomorrow/today about the Midwest, and what I have will be doing in the future-present. Ta!

-diego