Skip to main content

So, what?


-->

"When writing the story of your life, don't let anyone else hold the pen" 
Warren Zevon

Breakfast was a weekend thing for Mary and me, at least until the whole era of weight loss began. Though we still get up early on occasion, and still eat too much for fun, it’s now more disciplined – we’ve become warriors of the chronically hungry, we are fighting for our fitness. It’s like being in a church built for a cold and withholding god, or just a regular church with bad wafers and cloistered people telling you how to live.

With the season changing to sweater weather and an easier way to hide the fat, it is even more of a treat to eat breakfast out – and the cold firms you up and reduces the jiggles when you walk back to the car of shame and go home.

Los Gatos Café is a favorite -- the potatoes are to die for, the bacon crisp, and they offer a bakery item with every meal. The seating is tight, lots of people have disposable income, kids, and the wish to be served by others – it’s Los Gatos.

We arrive and are seated next to a standard four-person family. I immediately notice the boy opening a plastic baggie of mushrooms and then dumping them on the table. The boy is young and looks it. The mushrooms are dried and stringy – I know exactly what they are.

The mom and dad are talking to each other and the sister is reading a Harry Potter library book. They arrived before us but have ordered and are awaiting their food. I’m amused, but jaded, and look down to my menu out of habit, I already know what I’m getting – if I was Schrödinger’s cat, I’d be dead, and you’d know it. I’ve become predictable, my growth rings are static.

I order, then look back to the table with the boy – the plastic bag is still there, but now he is playing with miniature star war figures.  There is no sign that the mushrooms were ever there.

As my meal arrives, I glance back at the table several times, but nothing changes. Everyone in the room is acting out their own behaviors as I watch -- the eaters eat, the standers wait, the full of food ask what tip to leave from their spouses. Nothing changes, not the speed of time and not the clarity of the room – It just is as it always is – the only variable is me, and I think – when I’m gone, will anything ever move again?

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Satoshi Nakamoto claim

I met a man claiming to be Satoshi Nakamoto outside a building I work at near the SF train station. He asked to talk to me. He was white, 50ish, with a 3 day beard that seemed trim.  He was dressed in high quality, slightly worn Patagonia gear.  He spoke in a quiet voice and didn’t appear obviously crazy after a brief talk with him.  He said that he had worked with people in the building that I’m at, but was confused about the details.  “You ever had amnesia?,” he said, not knowing who he was talking  to. “It’s like that.” Having enjoyed our talk - he then asked if I would do him a favor and,  “get the message out that I’m back in town —that’s all,” he said, “They’ll figure the rest out. “ “marshallmathersfoundation.com,” he added,“ they’ll need to know that. “ He’s wearing bright orange gaiters if interested. He’s probably going to be around for a while.  He’s maybe nutty, but since he didn’t bring up Deuteronomy during our conversation, I’m giving him the benefit of a doubt. Later -

Free Willy

“…Some say it's just a part of it We've got to fulfill the book.” B. Marley Before I completely run away from the point, the subject of this essay is free will, or, more accurately, the illusion of free will. It will be interesting to see if free will even comes up laterally over the next few hundred words now that I’ve set it up as a specific goal.  The imp of the perverse makes it a sure thing that I won’t – but that surety might also double back and force  me to stay on point. There are no dogs to pick  in this fight and it’s not a fight,  and if I’m right, none of this is anything but documentation for a litigious god that will never see it. Like quantum mechanics, life is about either time or place, never both, and how we choose to pretty up our choices is neither the point, or even a choice – it’s after the fact punctuation we use to justify and make sense of our ontological messiness.  (Science has proven that we decide things with our body before the brain

We sit in passionate apathy

"You can’t debate with someone who hates you." C. Hitchens   Reason has become a tool to manipulate you into thinking things are true that you know are not true. Science and math have become a tools for the wealthy to increase the piles of money they then use to Rent the laws.  Religion continues to be a form of racist nationalism – a nation built on manufactured words that demand the permanent death of all humans who follow different words. The more the others believe their truths, the more they need to die. Welcome to the new hybrid theocracy -- based on the Eastern Orthodox, but with just enough Texas to really pop. The intellectual framework for western society no longer works for most people – faith has been lost and now ridiculed; common sense beliefs passed down for generations are being discarded while children are being raised as docile pups to be eventually clubbed into the correct forms of submission. We no longer question and an