Follow the Bouncing Ball

If the mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation, what kind of lives are led by the volume of men?

In my hand there appears to be a wooden paddle with a red rubber ball attached with an elastic string. Over and over I hit the ball with the paddle and it never escapes the elasticity of the string. The propensity of a man to be hypnotized into nothingness is astounding.  Sometimes, when you try to go beyond the basic rote automatic get me through the day please Mr. please stuff, when you meditate and meditate and try to achieve a big picture spiritual understanding, you feel nothing, not nothing but that big empty nothing.  So I put the paddle down and go outside and take flat rocks and skip them endlessly across the small pond because that is what I do.  

Sometimes its different.  Like the other night.   I shouldn't call it just the other night, it should be the "Other" night and I should capitalize it and enshrine it and worship and and remember it forever and perform endless rituals trying to recreate it.   Yes, I should do that.  But I know I won't.   It was late at night, like around 2:00 a.m. and sometimes when I wake up then my consciousness is distinctly different in all sorts of disturbing ways.  But this other night was not at all disturbing and  my heart opened up and love spread out in all directions to everyone and I wondered why it couldn't always be like this and what prevented me from always living in this sea of compassion.  

 And then I woke up to those metallic balls lined up on a string striking each other over and over again and I thought this time the balls are truly a perpetual motion machine but then I noticed that each time the balls on the string struck each other they are slowly losing their force.   For try as they might the balls cannot escape the laws of inertia. Then the balls stop.   And I go to work.

They say if you meditate enough you will find peace and you will find harmony with you past.  But this is wrong.  For you don't  find your past.  Your past finds you.  And all those thing bubble up.  Like those mechanical birds attached to a lever that keeps swiveling down to the liquid and you think that they will go on forever kind of like a perpetual motion machine.  But they always eventually stop.  And you wish that there was some magic that would keep them going forever, but there is no magic.  Only inertia. And the silly mechanical birds with the silly hat with the bulb filled with liquid eventually stop just like the steel balls on the string.   And then you go to work again.

And then it becomes worse with the electronic games.  And I find the patterns in shiny objects of Candy and Soda and then I crush them over and over again.  And I think it will last forever and it will if I keep adding the 99 cent upgrades.  But then I put down the Candy Crush and I go back to meditating and the old memories keep coming.  And I feel like the token male in an all female bar and all the women don't want to dance with me, they want to dance with the louver and I can't say I blame them. 

Why Walls are Generally not a Good Idea.

At times, my future seems all too finite kinda like the future of the Republican Party.   What is the wall made of between the past, present and future?  I wonder that if the future built a wall between the future and the present, would the future get the past to pay for it?  Or what if the past could no longer immigrate to the future, although the present could.  What kind of future would that entail? Why is the future so scared of the past?  Does the future really think it will win an election by keeping the past out of the present?

There are no walls in the air we breathe.   The richest and the poorest in Manhattan all inhale and exhale the same molecules.  Donald Trump, much to his chagrin, inhales the detritus from that street person with the sign near Penn Station that reads "Time is Running out and Money Can't Buy it Back."

The coin which was just handed to the street person was formerly located in my car ashtray until several months ago, when I inserted it, and several coins like it, into a parking meter in St. Louis.   The odyssey of the coin thereafter from St. Louis to Manhattan is convoluted.  Even more nebulous is how that coin will eventually be handed back to me as change for a bulletproof coffee that I will purchase at a coffee shop in Madison, Wisconsin after I take my daughters there for college Freshman orientation. The number of humans who will touch the coin prior to that time is innumerable.   I would like to meet them them all.

In an even stranger twist of fate, the bulletproof coffee that I will drink at that shop will be made in part by water of which several parts per million will be excreted by that same street person with the past aforementioned sign who will piss it into a urinal at a homeless shelter.  The homeless shelter will be built on proceeds that the City of New York acquires though the foreclosure of the Trump Tower in Columbus Circle.  In that foreclosure proceeding, Donald Trump will plead to the Judge that if he has more Time,  he can get more Money to Buy Back his Hotel.  To wit, the Hispanic Judge, appointed by President Hilary Clinton will reply to him that his time has run out and that money can't buy his back his insolvent corporation.

Donald Trump, despondent, will then go to lunch and eat a hot dog which has been inadvertently contaminated at the meat processing plant by feces to be excreted from my body drinking the bulletproof coffee from that coffee shop in Madison.  I can't remember what that shop's name was, but they used a little too much MCT oil for my liking leading to what has been known in the business as "disaster pants."

Strange Bedpersons in Floridada

When I was young, soldiers were selected by a lottery.  No one wanted to participate.

When I was older, the draft was replaced by an all volunteer force.  There was no shortage of volunteers.   Some volunteered out of what they perceived was a genuine sense of duty.  Others merely looked for adventure.   Some volunteered to escape a bad situation.   Most all were poor as shit.  

When I became very old, we were always at war, all the time.  The rules of engagement had changed and there were no civilians, only combatants.  I even did my part for a time.

We thought we were fighting the machines for a time.   Our politicians told us that singularity would emerge like it had in TV and the movies--taking the form of a centralized computer with malevolent control over a vast network.  But when it came, it wasn't in the form of the Terminator, Skynet or the Matrix.  What we didn't realize is that we were fighting each other.

The Darkrider smashed the door in and advanced to the bed where Carla and I were sleeping.  I was already awake, for Carla had been grabbing my breasts, and massaging them, thinking I was Tim, her ex-husband.

"You are Carla," the Darkrider said.

"Yes," she replied, trembling with fear.

"We need to take you in for reprogramming.  Please insert your finger into my slot for the hologram, retinographs, voice prints, and DNA."

"But can't you get that from my passport?" Carla quivered.

"NO, you have entered Floridada.  And you ex-husband has been executed for consorting with a male prostitute."

"Impossible," said Carla defiantly.  "He was killed fighting you in the first war of the machines."

"Incorrect,"  the Darkrider continued, "Tim Cavanaugh, age 53 was initially absent from his phrant consorting with several prostitutes.  His phrant, since then, has been locked in a repetitive loop of illogical despair for the last 3 time parsecs."

"I can vouch for that," I told the Darkrider.   "And she definately is confused.  Perhaps a meditation protocol would assist.  Or perhaps some processed pork on a beach."

"I agree with you, but she has a pair of dumb kids.  The boy wears a funny cross and the girls has some tattoo on the back of her head, all are in need of neuro-programming."

"Please lock the door on the way out when you take her, I need to get some sleep."

"Noted," said the Darkrider, as he left with my friend.