Without Our Memory, We Don’t Really Exist
I brush my teeth with my right hand. I eat with my right hand. I shave with my right hand. I am considering writing with my right hand and I am left-handed. In Buddhism, part of the belief system centers around the precept of the present. They speak about being in the moment, focusing on the present, being present. The present is all there is since the future hasn’t come and the past has been left behind. In the movie Momento, the protagonist has no long term memory due to an accident, but knows his wife was killed. His entire existence is focused on finding who took his wife from him. The only way he can remember the facts he finds is to tattoo them on his body (presumably he couldn’t remember where he put that piece of paper he’d written them...
Damage III
In the end, it’s all about either making yourself better or stronger or more fit or just more of something than you were. All that means is staying around a little or a lot longer because when it come down to it, we’re here to either make more of us, survive or both. All the rest is just window dressing. And don’t be fooled. It’s not the person who dies with the most toys who wins, it’s the person who dies last. So we join health clubs, buy home gyms, make buckets of money for those morons who stick two aluminum poles together, rivet a braided steel cable to it and call it “the greatest weight loss machine eva.” To what end? Lighter bank accounts and larger bellies. But sometimes a person will hit upon something that...
Foot Traffic
Imagine this! You’re walking North on Wilcox heading to dinner at the Castle Cafe, or maybe breakfast at B&B. About half way down the block a new business is setting up shop. They have boxes and equipment outside up against the front of their store. It’s mostly moved out of the way, but there’s a lot there so it’s kind of crowded. Because the sidewalk is not very wide and there are parking meters at the curb, the path to get by has become just wide enough for one person. The pedestrian traffic is not all that heavy, but there are a few people on the walkway. As you approach the narrowing of the sidewalk you move to your left to pass the store front and avoid running into their stuff, you suddenly sense a presence off your left shoulder...
A Yard Sign Somewhere in the U.S.
(Author’s Note: I am not usually one to weigh in too heavily on politics, but I thought of a recent opinion piece by Curt Dale in the News-Press when I saw this one.) A photo of a sign in someone’s yard recently started making the rounds on the ‘net: DEAR OBAMA 08 Sign Taker: We understand that Obama 08 signs are in very high demand. You still didn’t have to borrow ours. You can actually buy them! As for the McCain signs you put in our yard: We understand that you wanted to get rid of them. But your trash can is the better place for them (smiley face). PS: Of course we need to get another sign now. That’s $5 to Obama’s campaign. I am sure that’s what you had in mind So, I guess it happens with both Obama and McCain signs,...
Damage II
You can recover mostly from trashing yourself skiing. Or at least after taking down a few pin up calendars from the wall; but sometimes things just keep coming back once you’re to that place called Damage. The human shoulder, for example, is the one joint in the body that moves the most. It is mandatory that it be flexible enough to handle the wide range of motion required of it. The compromise price we pay is the large number of problems not faced by other joints such as the hip (that just blows out and requires replacement later on down the road). A little more than a decade after the mountain shook me loose and a decade before my hands went partially numb (what?…later), I worked at a sports supplement company. It was the company in the industry at...
Damage I
When you’re young, you do whatever you feel like. You are ten feet tall and bulletproof and nothing can stop or touch you. At least that’s the perception…and maybe it was just my perception. I haven’t taken a poll but from what I have observed, I am not the only one who rowed that boat. So you go out and drink a lot, eat very spicy food as much as you want, play any sport that strikes your fancy and generally do things that tend to put you on your backside every so often. But back then, you could dust yourself off and go chase down the mutt who knocked you flat for a little payback. All in good fun and sport. There are few second thoughts about what effects these things might have on you later. Whether consciously or not you believe your...
Do You Really Know What a Billion Looks Like?
Unless you live under a rock you’ve no doubt heard of the work the U.S. government is doing to stop the bleeding in the financial system. The number most bandied about is seven hundred billion which everyone knows is a large number. But do we really understand how very large that number is? It seems it starts sounding like 200 billion or 800 billion or 500 billion. All those zeros kind of run together in one’s mind. A few weeks back I wrote a piece about having everything and nothing in which I mentioned the odds of winning the lottery. Those odds pretty much approached zero which is a really small number. That’s not hard to conceptualize. You have some money, it gets syphoned off by greedy executives running some company, you have zero dollars....