February 28, 2010
As I understand it, in Quantum Mechanics, the smallest particles are merely probabilities that cannot be observed without changing them. They function as a wave and as soon as you observe them, the wave function collapses and your observation settles on one probability that you determine is reality. All of those other infinite probabilities get lost in other alternate universes.
The change isn’t outside you. The change is in you.
January 24, 2010
I miss Muzak when I am shopping. I miss not really caring what dull, canned ambiance was filtering through the speaker system in a store. It was just flaccid innocuous noise.
But now they play real music in stores; songs that you hear, or used to hear, on the radio.
I’m not a big shopping fan to begin with. In fact, I generally despise grazing the malls with the herd. It’s like an anxiety with me.
But I don’t mind grocery shopping too much. Maybe because I get to pick what I want to eat and drink for the week and eating and drinking is generally pleasurable, as well as necessary.
But this idea struck me about how much I miss Muzak in stores when I was pushing the shopping cart along to the song: ‘Wake Me Up When September Ends’ by Green Day.
I’m not a huge fan of Green Day, but I like several of the songs I’ve heard from them over the airways. This song in particular is a favorite of mine from them because I don’t hear it too often and because it is rather sad and melancholy.
Some say the song is about September 11, 2001 (I don’t think I need to explain that). But the singer, Billie Joe Armstrong, says the song is about the death of his father.
Regardless, it is a sad and haunting song which makes it a rather unusual, if not morbid, selection to be played as the backdrop to a crowd of sullen basket jockeys shopping for sustenance. I felt like I was participating in some half-baked music video commenting on the quiet desperation of modern consumerism. I felt awkward looking at the other shoppers’ faces as they pretended that they were not hearing and experiencing the same oddity of perception that I was regarding the song.
But perhaps they didn’t notice; which is a different kind of sad.
The song is begging for connection through its melodic isolation. Music tends to evoke certain emotions. Apparently, most shoppers want to avoid that.
I don’t know whose brilliant decision it was or when it started, this piping of real songs into grocery stores instead of Muzak. But I think it should stop. When I’m shopping for groceries, I don’t want my emotions toyed with.
Muzak does not toy with your emotions.
January 3, 2010
2010.
Out with the Zips and in with the Teens.
Yeah, I said Zips, not Aughts. I hate the term Aught for the first decade of a new century, even if it was popular at the turn of last century. This is the future; that is why it is Zip.
There was a lot of bad planning in the Zips. By the end, everyone and their mother’s brother’s cat was reassessing their Plan A and falling back on their Plan B or Plan C.
You know what plans are, right? Plan A is your game plan, your go to plan for life success. Plan B is your back-up plan, like those re-writable discs you should be copying your important files and pictures to in case your laptop crashes. Plan C is your contingency plan, in case Murphy’s Law somehow gets past Plan A and Plan B.
You may or may not be familiar with the lesser known plans. There’s Plan D, which is the dummy plan. It’s what you kind of make up on the fly because your Plan C failed and it usually isn’t too sophisticated. Then there is Plan F, which is failure. But since nobody plans for failure, it’s usually something that falls unexpectedly in your lap.
There is no Plan E, because E=empty, okay?
But there is another plan that you have. Everyone has it. I don’t care if you don’t plan anything in your life or if you really have planned everything from A to F. Everyone, and I mean even your mother’s brother’s cat, has a Plan Z.
Time magazine called the Zips the Decade from Hell. That’s a nice sentiment and all, but it wasn’t an accurate moniker. No, you’ll know Hell when you are deploying your Plan Z.
So what is Plan Z?
Plan Z is the plan of No Options.
When the Zombie Apocalypse arrives at your doorstep and one of those mindless puss bags bites your arm, whoever is with you is going to take you down with a machete. There are no other options.
That’s Plan Z.
When you mix a dog with a fish, you’re going to get something weird. When that happens, you better be warming up you Plan Z, okay?
I mean, I’m a pretty patient and tolerant person. I could probably handle a world with cycloptic dogs. But if you throw two-headed, sword-wielding, bat-winged apes in with that… well, there’s only so much I can take. I’m going to have to load up on ammo and get my Plan Z on.
So, while you may be steadily working your way to Plan F, keep in mind that there is a plan beyond that. Because if you have never imagined a world of No Options, then when that world arrives you might just become somebody else’s deftly executed Plan Z.
November 22, 2009
There’s a lot of talk these days about branding and I’m sick of it. I understand what it is for: name recognition. But that doesn’t make it any more palatable.
I just think the concept has gone too far. Great, I get it. You think soup, you think Campbell’s. You think of cola, you think Coke or Pepsi. You think of soft ass wipe, you think Charmin.
Or do you?
Just because you know the name and what it’s associated with, does it mean you use it? Does it mean it’s the best?
Here’s a test for you: Beer. What brand did you think of? How about this: piss-water Beer. I bet you thought of Coors or Miller or Bud, didn’t you. It doesn’t matter whether you like those beer brands or not. Piss water is synonymous with cheap beer, even though those brands aren’t that cheap anymore. That isn’t how they want their brand known, but someone said it somewhere and it stuck in the collective consciousness.
I can’t say that I am particularly loyal to any one brand. Sure, in my house you will find Triscuit or Pepsi or Xbox360 among many other brands. But I haven’t always used those products and I can’t say with any certainty that I will continue to. I drive a Saturn now, but my last car was a Hyundai, and the one before that was a Plymouth, and the one before that was a Ford.
I have pretty varied tastes and opinions. I like to experiment and explore. I will give for awhile to consistency, but surprise can just as easily wrench me away. It really just comes down to value and relevancy in my life at any particular given time.
Am I alone in this?
Maybe so. Because now there is “Brand You.” Now you get to be just like a product: consistent in sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, and memory. Now you get to be packaged and mass consumed. All the rage is to brand yourself.
Here’s another test for you: Paris Hilton. Yeah, that’s what I thought. She will never break out of her brand, no matter what she does.
I’m not a cow. I don’t want to be branded. Do I want name recognition? Sure, it wouldn’t hurt. I could sell a few more books. Think Danielle Steel. Yeah, I don’t want that kind of name recognition.
You might think I’m nuts, but the day I become consistent in what I produce is the day that I lose my soul. I know a lot of people will disagree with me. They are all busy working up their personal brands. Good for them.
I have a word of warning, though. Watch what you get known for. Vince Offer… ShamWow! anyone? He’ll never shake it.
September 27, 2009
I was going to post the last blog entry from my old blog today, but Sunday rolls around quickly and the urge to write something new and connect with my readers (wherever they may be) tugs at my instincts. As usual, the idea of what to write often dawns on me the morning of writing and this morning is no exception.
I didn’t sleep well last night. My body was sore from doing a month’s worth of yard work in two hours and a lot of thoughts danced in my brain. I awoke several times during the early morning hours and every time I laid my head back down to sleep strange dreams took over.
I’ve talked about strange dreams before in this blog (see ‘Paranormal?’ and ‘The Sleep Study’) but all of the dreams I experienced last night (and there were many) concerned my family. I get along with most of my family well enough, but we aren’t super tight and we don’t visit or call that often, and I really don’t dream about them all that often either.
In the first one I remember I woke up from a dream (in the dream) about my mother and father separating. It was early Sunday morning, still dark, and I decided to slip out of bed, get dressed, and WALK to my parents’ house (without telling my wife, who was sleeping right beside me). I’m in Windsor; my parents are in Sebastopol… it’s a good 20 miles away.
Needless to say, I get there later in the day. My parents live on a half-acre on a hill, so they can pretty much see anyone coming up the road. As I get closer, I see the four young children in our family (my brother’s and my cousins’) come running from the house dressed up in cow costumes, excited to see me (I almost never see them in real life).
But as I reach the driveway, they are all gone and it’s just my mother and my dad. My dad is packing his truck and my mother explains to me that dad has decided to leave her. She’s not all that upset about it (I think they’ve been married close to 40 years). In fact, she’s rather pragmatic about the whole affair.
In the dream, my dad doesn’t want to talk; he just keeps loading up his truck. My mom explains that it was his idea to leave. She says he feels guilty for what kind of husband and father he has been. Yeah, he was a hard dude, but I think we’ve cut him some slack over it through the years.
Anyways, my mom is going into town for a few things and offers me a lift back home. When I get back home, Shandell isn’t all that mad that I left (and that I WALKED). She also seemed to care less that my parents were splitting up.
Through a few more interludes of family dreams I come to one about my brother. We haven’t spoken in over two years (this is true); we don’t exactly get along in real life. In the dream, my brother has broken that silence and made first contact by sending me a message over the phone that can be viewed on my big screen plasma TV (I’m not exactly sure if that’s possible, but in the dream it is kind of cool).
So I indulge him and he’s on the screen with his kids showing me this new game where you stick in these big slides into a plastic consol which projects city streets on to the wall. You can drive virtual cars on them with controllers, but the action lasts only a second or two, because you have to keep shifting the slide, ala Viewmaster-style, to get to the next street image.
I’m kind of laughing at this because in the dream (and for real) I have an XBOX 360 and he’s playing with this “new” technology that wouldn’t even be able to compete with a 1976 Atari 2600. So I kind of shine him on and ask him what he’s been up to.
Then he pops through the garage door with a cell phone to his ear! He’s been in our house this whole time! He walks over to the front door and lets his wife in. She is carrying paper plates and Tupperware and stuff. I get furious and yell at him, asking him what he is doing and he replies all matter-of-fact that he just stopped by to see me and share some dinner. My wife and I start screaming at him about his audacity to come over unannounced and we shout at them to leave.
They leave, but my brother doesn’t seem to understand why I’m making such a big deal over it.
And I suppose that’s really how it is in the conscious world, too. All of these surrealistic scenarios are describing real life themes, whether actual or projected. Our hopes, desires, fears, and perceptions play out as abstract dramas within our sleep world and yet somehow we retain our balance over reality when we wake.
Or do we?
I’m a big believer that dreams have a tremendous amount of meaning to the self. I dream pretty vivid and strange and I would have to say the two dreams I’ve described here were rather plain fare, except they depict realistic events that have never happened and are likely to never happen. But the fact that I can describe them means that they did happen… in my head.
And the fact that they are tethered to the characteristics and psychological themes and perceptions existing in the waking world means that they have more substance than would appear. So I suppose that there is some credence to that age old saying: “Life is but a dream.”
October 4, 2008
When and where do the boundaries between reality and dreams break down? How much of the waking world influences dreams and how much is it influenced by them? Is there a place where dreams meet reality and is it possible to stay for any length of time in such a place?
Last night I underwent a sleep study. Several weeks ago my nurse practitioner referred me to a sleep doctor based on some questions she had about my sleeping habits and certain lingering health issues that I have. More and more my sleep has become broken and unrestful. Even when it seems that I get a full night’s rest, I spend much of the day fighting fatigue and sleepiness… not to mention the Full Moon’s effect (but alas, that was a previous blog). I am even full back into exercising and working out… but to no avail.
So my sleep doctor prescribed for me a sleep study, to be monitored by electrodes on my body and by video. I arrived at the office at 8pm in my bed clothes (I actually sleep naked, mind you, so this was a bit different for me). The sleep technician was welcoming and led me to my room where I would spend the night. There was a big, fully made king size bed dominating the room that seemed inviting enough. There was some confusion about what kind of study I would be partaking in and he had to make a call to the doctor to sort it out.
It ended up that my insurance would only pay for a split study: half sleep analysis, half treatment analysis. The technician mused over it, saying it was the cheap way to go and proceeded to describe various study types and their associated costs between here and the Bay Area and abroad, chuckling and shaking his head to accentuate his point. That was when it struck me that we were the only two people in the office and that I did not know him at all.
He was a short, wiry man… balding, greased back hair with a sharp jaw line full of stubble. His nose was hawkish and his eyes were sharp, but tended to wander as he spoke. His facial expressions were exaggerated, almost comical, but equally unnerving. When he laughed, it made you laugh… but not because you necessarily wanted to, but because it seemed the wisest thing to do. Yeah.
The technician proceeded to show me a variety of positive air flow masks that were available for those with sleeping disorders. He showed me masks he could use, masks he wasn’t going to use, and finally settled on the one he would use. He told me he could tell the size of the mask to use just by looking at someone’s face. I wasn’t going to debate him on that.
Then he had me sit in a chair by the bed and laid out all the wires and tubes he was going to attach to me in order to conduct the sleep analysis. I found out that he had been a welder by profession just a year earlier. The shop closed down and a girl friend got him into this business. He described a number of odd tales concerning odd characters and incidents while conducting sleep studies, some his, some from this girl he knew. One notable one was about a guy who wore a diaper to the study and insisted that the female technician change it for him after he was wired up. Another was of a 95 year old woman who described rattlesnakes being tossed into the cabin of her Dad’s Model-T Ford by the spoke wheels while driving on the unpaved roads.
As he began fitting these electrodes and tubes to my legs, chest, throat, face, and scalp he told me of a lady that was coming in shortly for a similar study. At first I felt relief. Then, as he was working, he began describing his viewpoint of women, winking and nodding and chuckling as he did. It was fairly chauvinistic, bordering on misogynistic: how women were weaker, fussier, and always early. He broke in his subtle tirade to peer down the hall. Cryptically, he prophesized “anytime” as he stared blankly and motionless with his hands clutching the remaining wires he was going to attach to my skull.
Just then, the knock came and he snapped out of his trance. He smiled as he came back over to me and proclaimed “I must be psychic” as if it was just a dull common fact that barely warranted mention. He left to attend to the lady and I could hear him laying on the charm… not in a creepy way, necessarily, but in a way to put another person at ease. I started doubting my own perceptions. Was I reading too much into things? He soon returned.
Before he finished wiring me up, he pulled a thin black book from a cabinet and marveled at how he had found it the other day wrapped in plastic. The first page he showed me was an old, sepia-toned picture of a man in a medical room with a huge gash that passed through his entire right side rib cage back to front. Then he flipped the pages so I could see several other pictures: children wearing gas masks, soldiers, war decimated cities. It was a book on World War I. Then, as quickly as he brought it out, he snapped it shut and put it away without another word. He finished wiring me up, led me to bed, asked me to move certain parts of my body to calibrate the sensors, and turned off the lights.
I did my best to fall asleep, but as you can imagine it was a tad difficult, wires and all withstanding. My mind wandered. At one point I opened my eyes and saw a big black splotch on the ceiling. It followed wherever I moved my eyes. I thought I was awake, but I wasn’t certain. I closed my eyes again. Just when I thought I was never going to sleep, the door opened and a lady walked in with a lab coat on. She stood at the foot of the bed watching and smiling at me. There was a light illuminating her from below that cast crazy shadows about the room. I asked who she was and she said she was my sleep technician’s friend. Just then, my sleep technician came into the room and stood next to her. Both looked at me. Both smiled.
I awoke with a start and a shout. Nobody was there. I tossed and turned, sensitive to the glob of wires attached to me. Then I was at home and it was daytime. I was sitting on one side of my five piece sectional couch and the sleep technician was sitting on the other, smiling and looking at me. Where the couch curved there was a dark, lumpy spinning mass that seemed to float in and out of the couch. I asked the technician what it was. He told me to look closer. I moved in and saw that it was a spinning mass of bees, spiders, and other bugs. The technician told me not to worry, that it was contained.
The technician took me outside and we floated above a giant metropolis. It looked like New York, but it could have easily been any other major city. He told me that there were large colonies of bees and other insects living just below the surface of our world. And as he spoke it became apparent that the giant city was resting on a larger structure, a vast sprawling catacomb of bee cells… a giant honeycomb crawling with trillions upon trillions of bees.
Next we were standing at a computer workstation in a mall. I was completely wired up still and he was plugging those wires into the computer. He turned it on and proceeded to walk me through some test questions. After we finished, he gathered the wires and asked me to follow him, but mind the paint. I turned to see a barrier of stools before me with artist paint pallets place precariously upon them. Just beyond was a young actress lounging on a day bed flanked by a camera and lighting crew. She warned me to be careful as I crossed the paint pallet barrier… that she was trying to deliver her lines. I was successful at getting over, but got paint on my clothes and hands. The sleep technician proceeded to lead me through the mall holding my bundle of wires as I smeared paint on my face. He kept bobbing up and down like a hen, all googly eyed as pedestrians gawked at us like we were escaped madmen.
And then I was alone on top of some scaffolding overlooking a construction site. I had two childhood friends with me and we were wearing orange hard hats and vests. One of my friends looked at me and then jumped. His body hit the ground and moved no further… dead. The other friend looked at me and jumped. He ducked and rolled and looked up at me from the ground, waving.
I awoke to the technician entering the room. He had blue rubber gloves on. He wasn’t wearing them before. He removed the air tube from my nose and asked if I had to go to the bathroom. I was groggy. I told him that I should try. He unplugged the main bundle of wires and carried them with me to the bathroom. He left and I did my business. I gathered the cords and headed back to my room, where he helped me back to bed and plugged me back in. He fitted me with a positive air flow mask and left to complete the second half of the study.
The rest was uneventful. The technician woke me up at 7am. Apparently, the lady in the other room had already finished and left, if she had ever really been there at all. He removed the wires, talked about how the other patient’s long hair had been a hassle with the electrodes and glue. He described that out of the 7.5 hours that I was in bed, I was asleep for 4 of them…
I was awake for 3.5 of them…
He looked me in the eyes and said: “You were a good study.”
Then he saw me to the door and I drove home in the cold, wet morning of the previous night’s rain. Only now do I realize I had been in bed for 9 hours.
September 14, 2008
Good morning, my friends. Tomorrow night, while you are snuggled up in your bed with visions of sugar plums (whatever those are) dancing in your heads, I will spend a sleepless night listening to my tribe of cats racing each other up and down the hallway into our bedroom. They will basically be bouncing off the walls and the furniture, doing everything you love them for in the day time, but wish they held the same schedule as you at night.
The reason (as if you need one)? THE FULL MOON. Ooooooo! Yep. That big white ball of cheese that circles our planet will be as big as my fat head tomorrow and it will be driving my cats bonkers-ballistic. But it isn’t them that keeps me up. Because they do eventually settle down, out of exhaustion I would imagine. Yet I will still remain restless and awake.
Oh, I’ve tried things to get to sleep on nights where the full moon blazes incessantly. Sleeping pills, booze, melatonin, blah blah blah. But I don’t try anymore. Because none of it works and I just feel worse in the morning. Instead, I will go to bed when I feel tired and maybe read a few pages of a good book to seal the deal. But, of course, the deal will not be sealed.
I will experience some lucid dozing. From time to time I will look outside my bedroom window and witness the ghostly twilight moon glow of my back yard. The trees will take on an eerie and ephemeral beauty. And if there is no fog (though this time I think there will be) the world beyond my back yard will be bathed in a haunting illumination. It will be a night where you believe anything is possible: werewolves, vampires, aliens, elves and other assorted night creatures and mind fabrications. Heck, maybe I’m a lycanthrope.
It isn’t exactly scary, this near-endless sleepless sojourn. No, in fact it is quite beautiful… almost transcendental.
I just wish I had the next day off.
July 20, 2008
Ghosts, goblins, witches, flying saucers, ESP, telepathy… the paranormal fascinates us.
Rumors of the unexplained have persisted for eons… and yet we have concocted vast reservoirs of explanation for them. But we still have no empirical proof that any of these things exist. Oh sure, we’ve got fuzzy videos and second hand accounts. But where is the reproducible evidence? “Hey, Ghost-dude, come pull up a chair so we can chew the proverbial ectoplasm for a spell. Tell me what the afterlife is like! Must not be all it is cracked up to be if you’re still hanging around here!”
Well you know what? I believe. Not necessarily in the aforementioned “categorized” phenomenon; I believe that there are and always will be things we humans will experience that we will not be able to really explain and for which we will have no credible evidence that “proves” it happened. We will assign names, fabricated explanations, and categories to these phenomenon… and others will swear by their favorite deity that they’ve experienced the same thing (albeit in their own colorful way). But proof, I submit, will remain elusive.
You want to know why I believe? Because I’ve experienced it. Yeah, I’ve seen some lights in the sky, photographed some strange crap, heard weird noises… but that is not what I am talking about. I have experienced ‘IT’. The big Kahuna. The graham-cracker-pappy of the paranormal; something so real and so powerful… and yet so totally not provable. Except, I had a witness.
I had a very vivid dream one night when Shandell and I were in our 2nd apartment in our 20s. In my dream I awoke to the sound of thunder. Rain was pounding the roof and lightning flashed on and off like a malfunctioning fluorescent sign. I saw Shandell sleeping soundly behind me. I slipped out of bed, put my bottoms on, and made my way downstairs. I walked through the kitchen into the living room and stood before the sliding glass door. Rain pounded the cement patio and sheeted down the glass of the door while lightning and thunder had their way with the sky.
Suddenly I heard something behind me. Turning to look, I saw Shandell walking towards me. Then I awoke.
During breakfast that morning, Shandell mentioned that she had this very vivid dream. In her dream she awoke to the sound of thunder. Rain was pounding the roof and lightning flashed on and off. She saw that I was not in bed beside her. She slipped out of bed, put her robe on, and made her way downstairs. She walked into the kitchen and saw me standing before the sliding glass door, watching the storm.
She walked through the living room towards me and I turned around and looked at her. Then she awoke.
I shit you not… and I have not a shred of proof except me and my wife’s respective memories.
