Meditations on the Nature of Our Existence

You may want to skip on down to one of the, ahem, “entertaining” entries because in this post I’ll be dealing with thoughts and concepts that hopscotch along the border of my conscious and unconscious mind. Philosophy is a slippery creature. You have this thought about truth, beauty, the divine, life’s purpose, and whatever else; but you can’t communicate it, because it’s a pure abstraction, it has no context outside your own skull. Try and tell people about your brilliant idea and you leave a trail of glazed eyes and misconceptions.

So then what? You could become a hermit and write long rambling screeds on clay tablets decrying the debauched state of petunias. Of course to keep the riff-raff out you’ll want to write in your personal shorthand; start with a Basque grammar and a dictionary of Sumerian hieroglyphics and get creative. Unfortunately this route won’t get you far; petunias will remain damnable decadent and a diet of tree nuts, grasses, and squirrel will make you constipated. Option two is to build a bridge of thoughts. You start out with ideas that anybody can understand and then you add convenient assumptions, strange little diagrams, and classical allusions until you arrive in triumph at the big thought. Make sure the big thought is something catchy like “I think, therefore I am” or people will be just as confused and perturbed as they would be if you had told them about your strangely sexualized demonic cat dreams. Keep that freaky shit to yourself.

What the point of all this? Well I have no intentions of going hermit and I never dream about cats, demons, or demon cats. I guess that means that this is the start of my thought bridge, “But it hasn’t started traversing anything.” True, but you can’t just go building bridges willy nilly, you need some sort of crevasse to cross, and if one doesn’t exist, well you go and pile up dirt and dig holes until it does. So consider this the construction of the crevasse soon to be bridged for your convenience. Really, just as soon as I remember where the hell I was going with all this.