If The Tight Rope Walker Stumbles

It started on the leg. On the knee. Yes, this feels like a spider. This particular sensation is that of eight legs moving in tandem. I touch that spot on my knee, I push the jeans down a bit on the center of the sensation and the sensation migrates further downward. Yes, this was no trick of the body. Not a muscle spasm, or inexplicable tickle. This is a spider.

My first impulse is, "you gotta keep cool, man". I am in the middle of a philosophy lecture. A room of maybe 20 people, where strange heebie jeebie movements will get noticed. I don't want to interrupt the professor's train of thought, and at the same time I am trying to concentrate on a theory of meaning that interprets meaning as usage for any given language. I decide to forget the spider. The sensations aren't as pronounced, and I figure if I don't move, he has no reason to bite. To my right is an acquaintance I met before, he is listening to the professor and does not notice. To my right is a girl moving her legs back and forth, fidgeting, rubbing, but she is listening as well. All is still right. I keep still and quiet and listen and try to think about words and theory.

Ah, here he comes. He peeks his head over the ridge of my jeans. He has emerged on top, and is supposedly coming to meet his transport. I have no idea how long he has been on me. Maybe I picked him up an hour ago lying on the park bench and he has remained somewhere convenient until now. Or maybe he just found his way from the seat, on which he found himself an hour before when the last student dropped him off. It doesn't matter. His body is black and his abdomen is a hairy blood red and his eyes reflect a green metallic luster and he looks absolutely poisonous. Now I cannot control my outward appearance as much. I am gazing intently down at the crotch of my pants, my eyes bugging. To an observer it may seem something is wrong. But no one has seemed to notice yet. I advance my pen towards him, to push him off my lap, and he raises his little black front legs in protest. I begin to realize that I am losing my train of thought, and the professor is continuing in his lecture further and further away, beyond the blur of my peripheral, and soon I will be lost and this lecture will have been a waste of time. I've got to get rid of the spider and return to concentration but I cannot bear to crush him. After all, we've been through so much...me and him.

I finally push him off with my pen and he disappears below. I check the ground around me, and the chair, but he is nowhere to be seen. Dubious, yes, but he is gone for now, and I must continue to concentrate. Words, usage, clusters of agreed-upon thought in a language community, conventionality; words are like tools, forged with purpose and ends, to be used in certain contexts and situations, to further actions. A static theory eventually develops into a dynamic one, as understanding grows. The ideas are beautiful. The class ends and I wonder, "well if I was a spider, I would hide in the large, soft gray structure near where I landed". Damn, my sweater. I look down at my crumpled sweater and there he is, sitting right on top. I am partially glad because this spider has become a bit of a legend, and I thought it would be a shame to leave him to his pitiful devices in relation to a large, alien void full of stomping feet.

Papers have been graded and we must collect them. Now there is the task of somehow retrieving my sweater without shaking or crushing the spider, getting my paper, walking out with the sweater, and dumping him somewhere safe outside. I pick up my sweater and examine it rigorously. I lost him. I turn it all over and hold it with my index finger and thumb, as if it was soiled, and place it on a nearby chair. I grab my paper and retrieve the sweater and proceed carefully outside, still holding it as if it was soiled. All the while students are brushing past me, in a hurry to get to their cars, probably wondering why this nut is blocking their way and fussing so much with his sweater. I finally get outside and walk a ways, relocating the spider and taking care to keep him in sight and safe. I realize that if he gets to my hand and is given the possibility to bite it, something bad and medical-related might happen. He almost looks like the bastard that bit Peter Parker. Maybe I should let him.

I reach a nice cluster of bushes beside the path to the parking structure that seems to have a fair amount of shelter and so blow him off the sweater with a puff of breath, and there he goes.

At this point my head is really off balance. I try to juggle the spider and the concepts I have just learned, and the memories of class and afterclass...what happened to the professor, or my aqcuaintance in that class that I forgot about, but he's ok I saw him talking to some chick outside, and that girl sitting next to me that was giving me looks. I had tried to look over inconspicuosly to see what she looked like, caught a bit, I think she was a babe, but where did she go?

It is getting cold and I put back on my sweater and head for the crosswalk. I am almost to my car. I stand on the corner and take a look around. The sun is getting low and orange. Cars are driving by, people I could know and love or know and loathe and they are all ghosts behind tinted glass, oscillating orange reflections of the sun that flicker to white and disappear. I look down at the street. I look up. The walk light is on, and about to go off, I need to get across. I feel I am just stumbling along, my thoughts are in full motion...too dense, too free to grab onto. I make it across the street and look up again, and there, a girl walking on the other side of the street, the sun catching her face. She is gorgeous. She is far but I can tell she is gorgeous by the shadows under her brow, cast by a good facial structure. I can tell by suggestion. She is gazing in my direction and my first impulse is to quickly look away. I smile down at the street, but I am thinking, why look away, why look away man. Smile. Something other than retracting. Maybe next time.

I finally get to my car and close the door and it is silent and I am amidst my own elements. I start up the engine and the familiar music comes on and there is the drums and the bass and the guitar and the man singing and I drive away from the sun, up into the Laguna hills on the 73. My mind is quieting down and tuning to the music and I watch the light-soaked hills with their houses, their windows reflecting back bright orange squares, and I listen to the dull roar of the wind outside the windshield. Everything is level again, and I think to myself, "Ah this life".

Extrapolate Kindly

I saw this exhibit at the Exploratorium. I was completely stoned out of my mind, but thinking very clearly. I suppose.

It had to do with a magnet. There was some magnetic material under a microscope, and as the magnetic field was increased with a knob, it attracted more material, which darkened the viewfinder of the microscope.

Now as this material darkened the viewfinder, there was something very important happening. There were tiny geometrical shapes, that gradually grew more and more numerous and dense and it was happening in a very organized, crystalline pattern.

I suppose it raises a question about our reason. Do we simply just create an overlay to understand this chaos? "Was the exhibit rigged to pull that trick?", I thought with a dash of paranoia, "or is this simply happening of its own accord with the magnetic field?" Are we simply experiencing what the world already is: perfectly ordered? Or both. Could be both. Reason. Gravity. Laws. Are we crystallizing as a species? As an organism? Seems we have a long way to go.

And I was pretty stoned.

Some Fragments To Clean Up And Dispose Of

• Change continues to loom ahead like a towering cluster of black clouds, threatening rain. I think change causes anxiety or excitement because change is a transition from the routine to the unknown.
  
• Fear or delight in the unknown depends on a person's charge. Contemplation of the unknown inevitably causes scenario contemplation and contingency plans and all sorts of theories and stories unfold of what will take place and what will happen. A negative charge will lead to terrifying visions of failure and catastrophe. That's where the fear comes in. A positive charge will be the amusing contemplation of possibilities and potential for growth and expansion. Take walking into a huge, dense forest, never before visited. The negative will say, "Jesus, what kind of awful creatures and follies lurk here?" The positive will say, "Well, perhaps there is treasure or some sort of hidden paradise."
  
• I happen to be negatively charged in confronting the current unknown, unfortunately. And so it is a source of discomfort, and not anticipation. No, there may be a mixture of both. Of the positive and negative. Maybe there is some anticipation involved.
• I fear that some of this philosophy has over balanced-against the poetry, but I am slowly recovering some of it as well. I grasped philosophical reasoning, rationality, and though I am grateful for what I learned, I did not care for the world it invites, therefore I will slowly let some of it go, and retain what I want to use.
• When a person's foundations crumble away and they are left floating, they tend towards nihilism, the floating ideology, the nothing. It is an uncomfortable state for a person used to foundations, though it is hard to be truly and purely nihilistic.
  

Pretty Tired

This gaming blog has given me things to think about. And I wonder where it will go when traffic starts. I think I sort of rushed into it. It feels like a burden at times, a burden that I have to constantly maintain. I fear it will grow heavier as traffic increases.

If that's not enough, there's school. I have another paper to write. Almost done with these damned papers. Just a few more months and I'm done. But I'm growing increasingly tired the closer I get to the end. Now I just feel like it is all a waste of time. I've learned what I can, and now I can't really pay attention to anything else. I'm just sitting in class doing who knows what with my thoughts. Is anything sticking anymore? Now it is just hoop jumping. Essay writing, test taking, grade getting. I need to be out there with the music, with the writing. Ah, these institutions. These units and prestige and degrees and expectations. What is it we are after? Why these chains?

It is what is. That is the simple answer. Any other way and it would be that. Which it isn't.

There were those who began doing things a certain way and then it began to solidify and further solidify and then crystallize and now no single thing can be separated from the system without altering a whole network. And maybe even that is too much.

And here we are. Just enduring and toiling through whatever this is. Being aware of all this doesn't do anything advantageous at present, because the aware end up being the same as the unaware: we both must bite down and do. But there is hope that the aware have the advantage of the future.