Get your Modicum Away From Me!: A Nameless Podcast

Nameless:  Welcome to the Nameless Podcast.  However, since we have lost our modicum, we appear to be floundering at the present.  Sidekick, have you located my modicum yet?

Sidekick: As we approach this rock of Gibraltar, perhaps some modicum of something may be evident for us.

Nameless:  Perhaps we should call this the no modicum podcast because I have no modicum.  I have no modicum of anything, I have been told this.

Sidekick:  I think perhaps you should go down the Mississippi and take a flat boat to your left next to Abraham Lincoln and we can find your modicum.

Nameless:  I think you should find your modicum because it is raining and you are going to burn out all your electronic devices.  That would be a modicum of common sense that you are lacking right now.

Sidekick:  But I think that you should settle here on the north side of the river and take a ten mile walk westerly and you may very well find your modicum.  Next to a log cabin that is built upon the sod whereupon you could raise a crop of corn having secured your modicum.

Nameless:  But then you would have to endure the famous winter of `68 and time travel.

Sidekick:  Perhaps with our newly found modicum we could avoid the perils of time travel and not go back to 1868 but go back to some other place where the mulberry are lush upon the flora and the fauna.

Nameless:  You clearly do not have a modicum as you are seeking to transgress upon the "do not cross barrier" preventing entry to all past and future time travelers.

Sidekick:  I eschew all barriers.  How do we know that we cannot cross it?  I crossed many barriers to transact linguistical linguistics with you.  If I stayed behind such artificially constructed barriers, I may never have know the sweet delights secondary to my many discourses with the Nameless.

Nameless:  If there is a barrier that says "Do not Cross"   you should heed it.  That is a modicum of common sense.  It is raining harder now.  You do no have a modicum of common sense to come out of the rain.

Sidekick:  The sign you are referring to also refers to a "Danger"  in conjunction with the "Do not Cross."  I wonder what this so called "Danger" is.   I eschew all "Dangers" as illusory, much as this so called modicum of reality.  We must penetrate beyond dangers to the pure lands beyond such dangers.

Nameless:  The danger is that you have no modicum of common sense.

Sidekick:  We must take a brief interlude from this podcast while we take a photograph of this sign while we stand here in the rain and contemplate our next move.  

Sidekick:  It is now raining and there is no modicum to be found.

Nameless:  There is no modicum because you are in charge.  If we want to find the modicum, I should relinquish my position of not being in charge and take charge.  It is the natural order of things.

Sidekick:  Ok, you are now in charge.  I hereby bestow whatever modicum I have to you.

Nameless:  I think we should probably get in shelter.

Sidekick:  I think as Bill Murray once said, "I don't think the heavy stuff is going to be coming down for quite awhile."

Nameless:  And Bill Murray was an ass.  He had no modicum of common sense either.

Sidekick:  Well, if not he, who did have a modicum of common sense? Would you rather take a train in vain, Mr. Strummer, or a walk in the rain?  Where does the train in vain go to?  I have often pondered this question with my small amounts of modicum.

Nameless:  It goes to the Kardashian household.  Where all things end that are in vanity

Sidekick. Was't there some character in Star Trek, the New Generation which discussed such Cardassians?  Or are you talking about something else?

Nameless:  I think I am talking about something much more contemporary.

Sidekick:  But I wonder which came first, the Kardashians or the Cardassians?

Nameless:  They both are figments of the media empire of the universal overlords of the modicums.

Sidekick:  All hail the modicums, our benevolent despots:-).

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.