In this little college town I grew up in, during the time I was growing up, there were certain cultural artifacts that might have been particular to professors and college students. One of them being the book Be Here Now. I’m not sure it was read, but it was displayed in many homes. In this house it went into the attic. I live in the attic. It’s not an attic the way you normally think of attics. The builder of the house meant it to be a den/ office. There’s a side room in the basement that’s more like a den. It has a fireplace, but it’s more like a family room den and we used it for it’s most obviously purpose; a tornado room and a game room.
Be Here Now. The paper was brown like recycled paper and a crinkly bond, something between 30 bond and 20, only brown and crinkly. The cover was blue and had a sort of mantra that spiraled in like a mandala. Baba Ram Dass was Harvard croney of Tim Leary and not some guru. I’m doing this from memory so I may be off a bit, but , calling himself Baba Ram Dass, the way some radio and TV pop armchair hosts call themselves a Doctor. Dr. Dre doesn’t pretend to be a doctor, neither did Magic Johnson back when his nickname was Dr. J.
I think about time from time to time, sometimes, when I have the time. Be Here Now was a sort of verbose and sometimes contradictory pseudo philosophical concept about living in the moment. There are a lot of such things ranging from books with crinkly paper to conventional wisdom, clichés and old wives tales. They are used to make people feel better or patronize and are often contradictory. Things like ‘It’s unhealthy to live in the past’ and ‘Those who don’t know the past are doomed to repeat it’ (I think I just paraphrased, y’all who know that one verbatim were correcting it as you read it). The former is used when your friend is crying about losing a significant other and long walks on the beach, the latter is used when your friend is about to purchase another used Buick on the cheap.
Be here now is more of a philosophy and there is a point to it, there’s also a point to ‘there is no present except in a relative way’ which is kind of accurate (again paraphrasing an idea you know). Living in the moment is a bit different than embracing the present. I’ve met a number of people who ‘live in the present’ because they have no plans and their past sucked. That’s not embracing anything, it’s like a jail cell with tigers outside the bars. I know people who live for the moment and spend at least an hour a day ohmmmming up the joint and burning patchouli, that’s not exactly seizing life by the short hairs and making the present your bitch. That’s spending an hour humming and smelling. Though I’m the last person in America to tell you that leisure time should be spent doing shit. Relaxing is a fine use of time, but, it does burn the present, it makes you mellower for the future.
There’s all sorts of contradictory things about the future, and it comes in all forms of philosophies, wives tales, old saws and conventional wisdom. Often when someone is called a dreamer it’s not a compliment, it means they spend too much time imaging a bright future. Insurance is like gambling and is almost exclusively future based, well, one hops that, say, life insurance is, but any will work. No one tries selling you car insurance as you are having an accident or health insurance in the ER. Less direct sort of sayings — Man plans; god laughs. Theologically there has always been a schism between pre-destination and … not pre-destination. I was going to say free will, but the idea has been kicked around so long that not every philosophy involving the twain has them mutually exclusive.
Time is really a human problem. Neither the universe nor your dog wear a wrist watch; it’s not a fashion statement, it’s irrelevant. Dogs like human live in linear time, they also live within the confines of cultural more’s, socio-economic downfalls and windfalls, and are subject to rain and snow and sunshine. Difference is a dog is more likely thinking “I like crackers; crackers are good” than “Oh my god the mortgage is due, peasent blouses are out, I’m going to die one day.” The universe doesn’t live in linear time. Sure you’re going to tell me a star is born and later there’s a supernova and it doesn’t exist. It’s true, but it’s true from our perspective. It’s very likely that most bits and pieces or let’s get radical and say the soul of the star has done that a hundred times; the universe doesn’t keep score and doesn’t differentiate from the second existence and the 51st.
I know, that was simple and you could argue it with two degrees more of complex, but twenty degrees of more complex leads us into relativity and beyond. Einstein suggests mathematically that given the right speed and direction linear time might lose it’s relevancy. Again oversimplified and again a theory. I know, to some of you theory sounds diminutive and to some of you the whole concept sounds heretical. Instinctively without any sayings or science to back me up, it seems probable that in the universe and of the universe there are several instances where linear time just doesn’t have nothing to do with nothing. Although it’s very large it is, within our concept of time, a closed system. A closed system with, again given our bi-nary opposition manner of thought, a seemingly infinite set of possibilities.
The concept of God, the Judea-christian one but I think it fits with most of them, linear time at best is beside the point. Simple god fearing folk what thumb through the good book on Sundays have this idea that god created everything and has already figured out when it’ll end, but it doesn’t end end, it shifts to something based solely on morality. Yes, that too is a lot more complicated, but my simplifications aren’t completely off the mark and there are a significant number of folks simpler than I am. Hmmm, that sounds … different than I intended. I like simple, and I also am nowhere near as simple as this entry implies. Let me qualify that for the purposes of this entry I’m making simple statements. Baba “the Fuck” Ram Dass had an entire crinkly paged book on living in the moment. He wasn’t the only one.
I had a half hour doctors appointment yesterday that went on for two hours. No, there weren’t tests, no, no one was late. We talked. We talked about things great and small, though this is out of context at one point I said “I’d rather live more capable than longer”. It was a conversation about treatment and discontinuing meds. It made sense in context. Even out of context it makes sense, but out of context it would have raised eyebrows. I am treated like a psych patient. There are no shrinks around here, it’s the meds that make them think I’m a psych patient and it would be detrimental to some of the treatment I’m not really getting to prove to them that I might be the sanest motherfucker within a thousand miles. The only way I can sleep is with a class of anti-anxiety meds. I’d just as soon they thought I was bubbling over with anxiety.
I do have anxiety, I’m suspicious of anyone who claims they don’t. I’m not afraid of anxiety, often it makes me do things, productive things. Not sleeping, however, is a problem. I used to do well with sleep deprivation, now it just makes me wonky, loose and hard to swallow, crunchy, makes me feel like fahrfenuggen sounds (not like what it means), makes me feel like a natural born woman (not really but I like the way it fits in this list), it dog ears my pages, ashes my phoenix, curdles my cream, puts the ankh in Wank(h)er, it types my arches, puts the near in my linear, spells my name with a K — Ok, that bugs the shit out of me. In my few centuries on this planet, this backwater of the cosmos, I’d been asked if my name was spelled with a K maybe three time. In the past year? Every single god damn time. I have fucked with them and added one to the end. Oh, shit, I forgot, I don’t use my real name here. Facebook made me copy my drivers license and changed my screen name to my real one — if anyplace on line needs a secret identity, it’s facebook.
Crane, my last name is Crane, I even say “Spelled like the bird” and still get asked if it has a K. And yes I have said “yes, C R A N K, wanna take a spin?” And I’ve certainly asked “What bird are you thinking of? A Kheron?” It wouldn’t jack me up if it were an occasional event or, and more importantly, have you ever met one single person named Krane? If you have it’s one more than I and I think a Krane would be dying to tell me they were a Krane with a fucking K. I haven’t done that one yet “yes, Crane with a K, that’s f u c K i n g Crane.” Y’all can still call me Mr. Drools or Kdrools if you like.
If I were real concerned with time and privacy I wouldn’t have downloaded windows ten. Just saying.
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