Fighting the Universal Spider Too

I went off and forgot my reading glasses – oh well. I can walk across the street to Walgreens and get another pair or sit here and try to make out the letters on this here screen. Besides the ones I left were getting scratched. You left them on the coffee table last night when you took them off to watch TV. Now don’t forget to pick them up when you go up to the get the dog for its walk – and the books, get the books that you were intending to read the night before. I did, I went up put the leash on the dog who jumped up and down, and I picked up the books and left leaving the glasses where I left them the previous night. This problem is easily solved, get up and walk across the street and get another pair and you need a new pair anyway. Dwayne called and said he found Dave’s hearing aide – God, they are expensive to replace. Put them on a chain that you wear around your neck, I told him. And to make up for what he saved by having them found he wrecked the front end of his car going off into a ditch in the snow and ice. One big bill turned into another – at least it didn’t double.

Perhaps their faith was so absolute that it resembled fatalism, which is a type of fearlessness – Robert Macfarlane – The Wild Places, 2009 p27

We love best what is rare
We worship mysteries
We adore the unrepentant


Yet we demand security
        A lowering of our risk
        An accommodation with
                  The predictable and mundane
We want what we can depend upon


But we do not desire this
We want our thrills
       Only upon demand
Cheep thrills at the carnival
       Of life

That ‘uninformed state of mind’ – and the organizations looking to fill the vacuum it creates – is the crux of the problem when it comes to consensus – Leslie Berliant – SolveClimate, Nov 24, 2009

An artist overcomes
     Circumstances
Just as a businessman takes
     Advantage of them

Some of the limitations and failures of economics result from its modeling itself on the discipline of physics rather than on biology or of history. But for economics to have defined itself as a subdivision of biology or history would have had other limitations – Herman E Daly – For the Common Good., 1989 p32

Receiving a windfall of cash causes cognitive dissonance – we think it would make us elated, it does not – it makes us sad, we suffer from mental strain and anxieties which can only be elevated by making ourselves feel as if the money was as deserved as earned income. Hence financial executives always feel that they have earned those huge bonuses – we are always willing to fool ourselves regarding our self-worth.

It is beyond dispute that the sign of standard economics is the fallacy of misplaced concreteness – Nicholas Georgescu-Roegen – The Entropy Law and the Economic Process, 1971 p320

Darkness is identified
     With evil
This is untrue for evil
      Is not dark
Evil is claustrophobic
Evil and the unknown
     Are not the same

 I’m in a home supply store owned by my uncle, I think (that is I think that my uncle owns this store not that I'm unsure of where I am). There is a back room were martial arts classes are conducted. A transsexual Chinese martial arts master uses me to demonstrate a specific pressure point - one that supposedly is very rare. She notices that I have this unusual pressure point because I have undressed, I was in the locker room getting ready for the next class. I was taking the same class - the one held right after this one. I have several lockers in the store in which I keep extra changes of clothing. I go to one of these lockers and put on a very colorful robe. It is made to slip on over the head rather than opening in front and it is tied with a sash, obi like - but it is not a kimono. The Chinese Transsexual and I discuss Oklahoma and World War II singers. (The Andrews and the Boswell Sisters, the Ink Spots and sweet Deanna Durbin).  I gather that she is old enough to have personal experience with the that time though she does not look that old at all. I hate being confused - about age, about sexuality, about what my place is in all of this but espically about what I should wear.

The cost of a hobby is limited only by your resources

I go to another of my lockers and find a bunch of clothing that I have squirreled away. “So that is why”, I say to myself, “I seem to be missing so many pairs of pants” (why are they always referred to as pairs when there is only one anyway?). I put on a pastel orange pair of slacks and the light blue long sleeve shirt. I had worn the same outfit the day before. I encounter a man casually stuffing jewelry into a bag. He asks me if Bailey knows that I am in here. I tell him “Yes, I am his nephew”. “He died you know” he tells me. “I didn’t know that,” I tell him and then he informs me that he is in charge now.

But as long as you pay tithes, believe in a goat if you like - Bishop Andrzei Zebrzydowski