Don't Wake The Dog

The lessons of life are relatively easy. Eat well, keep warm, get plenty of sleep. Try to get along with people. It’s easier to avoid people, so if you can do that, that would be the ideal thing, but if you’ve got to be around people, it’s hard, I know, but try not to kill anyone.

Above all, pay attention. Notice things. Care for things. Love animals, they have to put up with human beings.

Most everything in life is easy to figure out. Religion can be a tough nut to crack. Watch out for that one. What none of us really expected was to have a front row seat for the sixth mass extinction and the death of a planet. That’s a bit of a surprise.

I hate giving advice. I’m not really cut out for that kind of role. I’m just saying things to say things. Saying things is fun. It’s fun to say things. Saying say is fun and so are guffawing and duplication.

It’s somber to guide a milkweed through a forest of prepositions. But it’s good to have lots of soap. Snow transforms the world. I’m an inveterate homebody so when I see snow out the window I can’t wait to get outside and cease being an inveterate homebody. Maybe I’m not so inveterate. Just an ordinary homebody waiting for some snow to come along and urge me into the public sphere.

Life can also be thorny. I should mention that. It can hurt. Painful things include romance, paper cuts, and war. Avoid war. At all costs. Avoid war and those who endorse and begin wars.

I no longer have any family. Parents are all gone. What has taken its place is a feeling of detachment, of being untethered. The burden of one’s-self is lightened. When there are fewer people around to mirror your being, to reflect your image back to you, which is going to be highly distorted, that’s inevitable, you’re left with a distorted view of yourself. Quite often, that’s not good. If you pay attention to the Buddhists, you’ll eventually discover the true self is not-self, or anatta. There is no essential self, no core at the center of one’s being that is permanent and unchanging. There is just a bubble, and bubbles pop.

I blow soap bubbles for our cat. She likes to sit and watch as the glistening little spheres come drifting down to the floor where they repose for a few seconds before popping.

What does it take to produce a fact? Verifiability: whether the item at hand can be demonstrated to correspond to reality. For this, you need witnesses. Reliable witnesses.

But what the hell, let’s take a chance, fill a thermos full of coffee, and go to Mars.

How does one weigh a thought? Do thoughts have substance?

Thoughts are waves. They capsize canoes and lead to languishing under willows in lonely English meadows waiting for inspiration to bring us food and silverware. It’s good to be around water, especially when it’s deep and still. This is where reflection takes place. Ideas emerge. The horse is saddled. There is a reckoning to resolve. An experiment to conduct. And so once again thinking causes microcosms to roll around in the head like coconuts.

It’s difficult to be honest, particularly with one's-self. But if you can pull it off, you will solve the problem of people. People don’t like being around honest people. Honesty hurts.

But why say that? Why should honesty hurt? Aren’t there occasions when honesty opens the eyes to something that feels good? I’m sure that happens. But no instance presently emerges to confirm it.

I want to be open to things. I want to be open to the world. But that comes with a price. It helps to be numb. Numbness costs money, and leads to addiction. So be careful. Be careful being numb.

Do you have a favorite tool? I’m partial to the shovel. It’s good for burying things.

Books, on the other hand, bring back the dead. We hear the bells of Notre Dame, we see a cowboy riding through a stand of cactus, we feel the emotions of emperors, we smell the freshly ploughed dirt on a Nebraska farm in 1882.

Technically, heat is an excitation of molecules, but the sensation is something entirely different. It’s one think to analyze the phenomenon of heat and another to feel it.

Follow the parabola of an idea across a sheet of paper and you’ll discover a pot of gold in your cerebral cortex. We can go onto the parlor and discuss this. I think we may be on to something, don’t you? Something light. Something drifting slowly through the air. Empty inside. Shiny outside. A bubble. Drifting down. Reposing. Thinly. Delicately.

Pop.

What is the interaction between the body and the mind? They are one and the same.

Or not.

Maybe the relationship is based on interrelation with the world at large. Would it make sense for a mind to be confined to the head? No.

It makes sense to find a living dynamic in stone. A dollop of morning unrolling on the ground. The voyage begins with a single scooter. The organ can make music but the object itself is not music. This is the lesson of pipes.

And air. At my age it’s easy to sift through the ashes and find something worth saving. What did I learn in life? I’m not sure. It’s temporary, I can tell you that. Closets are weird. Houses are expensive. Diseases are dismal. Outlines are powerful tools. Fiddles are actually violins. The doors of perception may be opened by psilocybin, but don’t wake the dog.