to those who are interested...

i have another site that is more personal than this one.
wordpress site

thanks,
mike.

a curious exchange...

here's a thought to ponder: how do you know that? not in the sense of how i know it's something to ponder you semanticle weasel, but rather in the sense of a general discourse. take for example you reading the word this. here's what i mean:

you are reading the words on the screen via sensory input through your eyes and decoding their familiar meaning with that lump you call a frontal lobe or something that isn't very far away from it. the characters appearing on the monitor are only constructively meaningful because you made them that way (this, however is no cause to extract support for a post-modernistic viewpoint because quite frankly, post-modernism, secular humanism, and things akin to folly should remain with those who wish to dabble merely in diction.) i digress...and return to the meaningless scribbles. think back to the earliest place which you first were blessed to read the english (or whichever tongue you so choose) language. undoubtedly, it was on bottles, packages, the glorified media hound-box called the tele, etcetera. another step towards my point, you never did understand them until caretaker(s, hopefully) dearest said "this is a dog." henceforth begins the journey into intelligent understanding we call learning.  

this, however, is not the focus of my thoughts. the orthocenter of my scrambled inner-mumblings is the authority by which we subscribe to truth. again, i do not wish to diagnose my hypotheticals as merely those of a cowardly anarchist, confined to the intangible chamber of the counter-cultural internet king. i just wish to combine a few recent trains of thought. i recently saw Inception with the terribly hunky Leonardo DiCaprio. i'll say that i was, at the very least, entertained by it. but i couldn't help but think back to my understanding of the Cartesian systematic theory of doubt. for those ignorant to both Inception and Descartes read the inlay. for those who understand both, you may resume reading below the inlay. 

Inception is about the ability to place a thought into someone's brain while they are sleeping via complicated sedatives and machinery. without giving too much of the story away, you cannot simply give someone a thought. you may give them the beginning of a thought at the most basic level, but it must mature in their own mind. 

Descartes had a systematic theory of doubt which began by doubting the senses and any information that came from them (such as the learning from others as discussed above) and completed with an evil genius who controlled Descartes' everything. Descartes concluded that he   truly existent because he was thinking (most famously put [and misquoted] "i think therefore i am.")

finally, the driving question (sorry for taking so long to get here...the matrix glitched or something.) suppose i was being fed thoughts from someone else, even if it were from another human. what if i did experience an infinite regress of realities only to be construed as dreams? i believe that whomever was controlling that (such as what happened in Inception) would be in direct control of my reality and therefore, my thoughts. how can i then begin to say that my existence is my own? along the same trail, does something like a computer possess it's very own existence, despite the fact that it is completely built to cater to the existence of another, literally programmed to do so? let's leave religion out of this for a minute, a suppose that we are not our own people (to the Christians amidst the readers, i know this to be a bit of a contradictory statement and you need not tell me that it is.) bluntly put, imagine that you are being fed every detail of your life. your senses are controlled by someone else who sits behind a giant control panel pushing your buttons (literally). because truly they need to fabricate at most a few areas with at most one in detail. (you can experience something on the television with the same detail as you can on in real life, until sony makes "sony: lifeDefinition") and flowing from that, why is there heartache? why is there anything but complete elation? is it because your controller had a miserable childhood? if so, what was it like...?

lots of question and no answers as usual. just a thought experiment.

 

 

Some Thoughts, Dudes.

Call this an anthology of the moment.

What happens to thank you speeches that never get made? I just happened to be scrolling through my twitter feed and it indicated to me that the Teen Choice Awards (super awesome, no?) were happening and it begs the question. I feel like if I were ever in that position I would send a really lame thank you card, “because of your efforts we very nearly reached our goal, better luck in another 3 years after we finally finish milking this concept and begin to work on doing it again.”

In an addendum to Mike’s views on music I might humbly suggest this… The flaw in a wide quorum of music today isn’t in the musicality of the songs, if anything I feel that pop artists should be commended for coming up with lines and riffs and hooks that almost define a new level of catchiness. But here my pop insensitivity (thank you Keith) takes over and I look at the message of the song and I’m reminded that these songs have become complete shams of transcendental idiocy. I look at the bands that have fallen out of my playlist in recent times and I notice one constant, I didn’t like to sing their songs. As I say, the hooks were still there, but I couldn’t get into what my emotional state was supposed to be because by attempting to appeal to the largest audience possible I was unable to find any personal connection to the song. For the record, “personal connection” does not refer to my own life experiences coinciding in any direct manner with the songwriter’s, its merely my way of saying that when you come across something startlingly personal and truly earned through a lifetime of work on a project the emotional sense is present and alive and overwhelming. Which is why Coheed and Cambria are such an integral experience for me. Although I have no idea how Claudio is able to relate the story of the Amory Wars to his real life experiences I still cannot help but get caught up in the emotions that he expresses in the work. I have legitimately wept while listening to “The Second Stage Turbine Blade” and that, to me, defines it as great music.

As I look at my own future, all I see is a bleak and indefinable weight, not so much in terms of the burden of affluency or “personal success” but in the sense that I feel like my current life and my future life are like similarly polarized magnets that as they get thrust more and more rapidly towards each other the more rapidly they recoil in opposite directions. This leads me to a couple of different conclusions, either I’m doing something wrong with my current track, or I’m lacking a key piece of the chain that would make an entirely different loop, as it were. I feel like the intention of that statement will not be lost on most so I will jump forward.

To the conclusion because I am tired and have another 11 hour work day ahead of me tomorrow and my other bits of wizened anecdote still need more time in the brain stew.

By the way, I apologize for my excessive run-on sentences. Its just the way my thoughts occur to me, which is something interesting in and of itself.

Brake Master Cylinders...

Hi I’m Andrew and I’ll be doing some contributing posting on this blog. I don’t necessarily know how to introduce myself in this occasion so I’m just gonna spit out what has been occupying my thoughts…

An event startled me while I was at work the other day. I work at an auto parts store, and as the work day was drawing long a man came in with a return. This didn’t really bother me because I was already working on processing returns from a number of our credit accounts. Had the man come in and simply said, “I would like to return this,” I wouldn’t be writing this presently. Instead he proceeded to inform me of his motivations, despite the fact that I had not asked him nor had any desire to know really, his statement: “I’m going to have to return this, I was looking at the box and noticed that it was made in China, I won’t have anything made in China on my Corvette.” Yes, it was for a Corvette. No, it was not a nice one. It was a completely middling, inauspicious late ‘80s model with an engine no more powerful or sporty than a new Ford Taurus and far and away the ugliest body to ever be considered a “Corvette.”

This led me down two distinct paths, the first and inconsequential one was thus, if this man truly believes that there is nothing on his car made in China then he has about as much intelligence as the clay Boba Fett paperweight sitting on my desk. The second more important thought to emerge focused on this thread in the self-admitted age of globalization and global exchange how do so many people remain so culturally ignorant?

To that I don’t have a clear answer and welcome any and all comers. The bigger issue is in the wrongness of the situation, in the age when you can send, receive and process Facebook friend requests in 30 seconds or less using any web-enabled device currently in production, or receive Twitter updates from truly ANY person in the world who has a Twitter, where the world’s political leaders converse using Google’s completely free translation product, why is it that this mutated version of racism is still so popular?

I hope this generates some thought, and if not I promise the next time I write it will be more free flow and with less vexation, but this has been diminishing my other thoughts and I needed to air it out before moving on.

Welcome!

I'd like to extend a warm and thought provoking welcome to our newest author, Andrew Roman!
welcome.

things worth investigating, part 1.

it is my hope to provide the reader with some things that i am drawing influence from in my life.

- dallas green has it goin' on. look into him. (alexisonfire, city and colour) - city and colour's album "sometimes" is what the end of summer should sound like.
- every time i die "the new junk aesthetic" - a raw disc that attacks metaphysics, grief, and lust. it's refreshing to hear about struggle and not just bliss because in case you haven't noticed, life isn't peachy all of the time.
- duke ellington "indigos" - for those days when words cannot express, or at least you don't want them to, your life.
- thoughts on God's wisdom - more aptly put, how He shares it with us and our inability to discern it. think about  it in terms of this: how would your life be different if you would listen in those times, you know, that you don't look back on with fond eyes, or perhaps even regret? yeah, those are the ones worth contemplating.
- the question, "where am i to go?" after a fruitful discussion with a faithful friend, i've determined nothing but the idea that possibility is a foe to those with grandiose ambitions and an opponent to those with plans.
- the idea that success is measured by material wealth and "permanent" possessions. my success is  my calling. if only i had better eyesight...
- perspective. it's heavier than the atmosphere.

this is what my waining mind will let me convey. my, i'm getting older and it's change that sometimes isn't welcome.

nostalgia my friend...?

i'll say this, grinning in the rear-view for too long causes one to wreck a car. i wonder if that is true for myself of late. in a very recent exchange, i'll be open to say that i've grown up for better and for worse this past year. for one, my beard is now thicker (humor ladies and germs...) as well the scratchings on my hands. i know not where my future lies still, but my past haunts like my shadow with revenge wrapped tightly round it's wrist. i look at the things i've done in the name of fellowship, grace, temper, and dare i say love; not one of which has done me the way i intended. rather, God has had a plan all along. as it turns out, i'm a rather lousy listener. looking back i wish that i had seen all of the signs and cues to wave me off the troubled path my stride led me down. still, i have very few regrets (mostly only those that led to bodily injury.) but more to the point, as i gaze back at the hills and depths i've traversed, i see only series of events that somehow seem rather discontent and irreconcilable with my current life. "progress" from a hopeful and prideful young man (in a good way if there ever were such a thing) to one quickly becoming devoid of contention with status; befuddled by unseen observation and coy judgement balanced only by the meek hope for what is next to come. it's an awfully harsh understanding, but one that i think not far off. we as people tend to see what we want, to hear what truly has never been said. as if that weren't enough for the present, our look back to the past makes this practice even more troublesome. what we think to be eye-witness testimony in the form of first person narratives, reveals itself only to be the back end of a pressing 'what if?' conversation held on the picket lines of memory and fraud.

now that's terribly meta-speculative. but it can't help but be asked: how do my memories correspond truly to what i've taken in as experience? a question i don't care to address in this state of mind (also the Cartesians could tell you much more than you would want to hear on the subject). but rather, i've found (corresponding to my original intentions for this indulgent quest) that my past does nothing for me. i look back and see the happy things, and ignore the bad things. you might suggest this isn't such a bad thing. i'll say this, i'n a rough time would you rather see what you once had and lost, or where you've always been? i'd suffice to say that if all i'd known was heartache, the change would be welcome. drama and persistent concern for relation to others is a volatile equation: the products of which possess a viscous reminder, even to this day, of my own mistakes.

i'll submit that, once again, a person's past is his enemy. it reminds the sinner where he had been and sins he's acquired. it reminds the saint of a similar situation and the inadequacies of his current self. Psalm 37:37 reads, "Mark the blameless and behold the upright, for there is a future for a man of peace." my only concern is my own peace. my past offers none. my future is the only semblance of peace i can muster. there, and only there in the comforting arms of a Man who is Peace, will i obtain my favor. my sutchers, fresh though they may be, are naught. admirable and hollow those words echo within my head. i do believe them. i just often forget them.