Generating worlds, exploring them, losing the thread.
A world-historical sleep, maybe eight hours, but, more importantly, a deep sleep fraught with deep dreams. Up at 7 am and feeling pretty good. No time for exercise; Sara’s going to give me a ride to the Skytrain station.
But things start to go wrong. What the hell is this? Can a good sleep cast as dark a pall over proceedings as my usual insomnia? My laptop refuses to connect to our router, so I can’t back it up … Read more
I’ve got a monster cold, the first in years. And the therapeutic effects of last night’s half bottle of wine had clearly worn off by the time I got up this morning.
The fever’s gone, but I remain fluish. So Sara fixed me a mug of hot lime juice with honey, and I chased that with my customary magic potion.
But things remained far from ideal, and the viruses probably reckoned they still had the upper hand. Until I … Read more
Rude revision to one’s life plans: Florida man disappears with bedroom into sinkhole.
The news these days is enough to have us all hiding under our beds. Not that this strategem is foolproof, it seems.
Other network-newsworthy causes for alarm:
Near miss: asteroid.
Near miss: meteorite shower over Russia (largely spares pop. centers).
Near miss: fiscal cliff; sequester still plunging through atmosphere inspiring panic in many quarters.
Etc.
How many other near misses go unnoticed and unremarked? There’s … Read more
This week I’ve been reading On Dialogue, by the late, great physicist-philosopher-neuropsychologist David Bohm. In this book, he presents, among other things, a useful notion he describes as the “proprioception of thought.” I now see that, once again, I’ve reinvented the wheel, though my scuba-wisdom version is pretty primitive compared to Bohm’s.
Never mind that Bill the Mathematician had already asked me how my stop-breathe-think fix differed from counting to ten, an idea that has been around awhile. So here … Read more
Consider the following.
Terrestrial umbilicals. Scuba divers, e.g., carry bottled atmosphere underwater, taking a bit of our terrestrial environment with us.
Marine umbilicals. Whether on land or under the sea, meanwhile, we always bring along some of the marine environment from which, about 375 million years ago, we vertebrate land-dwellers first emerged. That’s right. We veteran fish-out-of-water types have internalized the seawater that gave us life in the first place. Our blood now comprises part of what is essentially a … Read more
“‘Next,’ Guru Bigoati announced, ‘I want you to practice mindfulness of something else altogether. Wait, not yet! Aw, damn.'”
The fishermen downstream were happy. The fish hadn’t been biting, and curried goat made a nice change.
That’s my caption (though it’s possible I’m channeling Gary Larsen). Hypothesis II: This wasn’t a class in mindfulness meditation; instead, these European ibex commonly graze moss, lichen, and salt on the Cingino dam in Italy.… Read more
Leary here.
Adventure tourism? Gosh. It isn’t adventure if you know where you’re going to sleep that night. Or even if you’re going to get to sleep somewhere. When you think about it, though, none us knows for sure where we’re going to sleep tonight, or if we’ll still be alive to do this sleeping. Life itself is an adventure, forget about your diving holidays. It’s all in the mind. Darn it. Life is life, and it’s always what you … Read more