Does Today Refute Yesterday?

I change too quickly: my today refutes my yesterday. ~Friedrich Nietzsche

Is change really too quick if today refutes yesterday or is it just fast enough so that yesterday doesn’t overshadow today?

In an age when there is enough new information generated every 24 hours to drown us daily, it is reasonable for change to occur every day if not more frequently. The scarier prospect is to change less often despite new knowledge or to cease change all together…a living death, the dead life.

I other words, change or die.

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I’d Like To See A Viagra For Curiosity

Curiosity is the lust of the mind. ~Thomas Hobbes

A facet of humanity setting us apart from but not above our animal and plant and mineral brethren is our seemingly insatiable curiosity. It is a human quality tempered by few things;

1. The formal schooling designed to ensure we vomit out the answers to standardized tests instead of questioning answers, at the expense of questioning questions.
2. The idiot box which has shown to flatline human brain activity approximating a comatose state.

It is fascinating that the intense creativity needed to generate a half-decent television show results in a complete lack of creativity in its victims.

Desert Fantasies

Somewhere on a desert highway
She rides a Harley-Davidson
Her long blonde hair
flyin’ in the wind
She’s been runnin’ half her life
The chrome and steel she rides
Collidin’ with
the very air she breathes
The air she breathes.
~Neil Young

I love this song for the melody and the lyrics, more so for the images painted by the lyrics but the lyrics drive my growing delight with the melody. I resonate with the fantasy of motorcycle existence on open desert roads buffeted by sand-laden wind scouring dead city life cells from our bodies leaving them sensitive to the temperature, my mind intertwined with the mysterious terrain.

Wrapped In Flesh

Armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan tree in the old graveyard and drive across the city like smoke. ~Arundhati Roy

I used to watch them from the backseat of the car on the way home from the office when we drove across the crumbling bridge burdened by belching busses held together by bailing wire and spit. They appeared at dusk over the river their large wings undulating to a rhythm sensed by their tiny, triangular ears.

Sometimes, The End Is A Centipede

I go into a dark room looking for a record album and feel in my hand the wriggling form of a centipede who has chosen to sleep in the binding. ~Julio Cortázar

With my writing, I explore the dark rooms of my soul, those buried places visible briefly at the tail end of a blink but only in the instant the eyelids stick together and focus is blurred, a moment that might just as well be in the dead of a moonless night. In that unfocused blackness, a blind man is a better guide in my labyrinthian corridors than a sighted one for the blind man has learned to travel great distances bodily focused on the echoes ringing forth from eternity past to future unrevealed. It’s a type of echolocation.

A Sisyphean Legacy

I realized at once that in order to see you as I wanted to I would have to begin by shutting my eyes. ~Julio Cortázar

If I avoid the cruel mirror, I fall into reverie and see myself as a svelt hunk in the prime of my life ready to conquer the world in leaps and bounds with my guapo brilliance by accomplishing spectacular feats, bigly executed.

Scientific Mysticism

They sealed their oath drinking from the same earthenware bowl a mixture of rum, grave dirt, and rooster’s blood. ~Eduardo Galeano

The age of science extricated us from the miasmatic superstitious bindings of the past replacing them with equally fantastical fantasies. Case in point, science once believed the Neils Bohr declaration that an atom could be modeled as satellites spinning around a nucleus in perfectly spherical orbits. And the scientific community bowed down to the god of atomic structure.