. . . yet there is no avoiding time, the sea of time, the sea of memory and forgetfulness, the years of promise, gone and unrecoverable, of the land almost allowed to claim its better destiny, only to the claim jumped by evildoers known all too well, and taken instead and held hostage to the future we must live in now forever.

Solvitur ambulando¹

There is no accounting for taste because the boundary conditions for bad taste are infinite like eternal space but those for good taste are sequestered by the boring and the familiar. There is a future in being a gatekeeper of taste but power corrupts etc.

Jun 23, 2021

It was sunny outside, and the light and heat made me forget that it was cold and windy too. I was walking. I walked past people who were baffled by my upbeat attitude, my “walking-on-a-cloud” gait, my luminescent aura, and the big grin plastered on my face. Some of the people who passed me by asked me, “Why are you smiling?” They say, scandalized, “What is there to be happy about?” They asked, “What is your secret?” I don’t say anything. I just kept walking. I will tell them, but first I need to let you know. As I write this, a new year has begun. It is the First of January, Two Thousand Twenty-Two.

"what fresh hell is this?" i ask, surprised by the freshness of the hell at my local neighborhood hell store.

November 16, 2021

Yes, but there is a cost.

A lot of life and living is about fear. A significant part of this is the fear of death, the ultimate undisputable. A significant portion of human activity is a rebellion against death. Propagating the bloodline is ensuring that a part of you lives on. Art is often the only achievable means of immortality for a lot of us. Wanting to leave your stamp on this Life, then, is a fairly natural concern. Some of us choose to do that by creating. Some of us choose to do it by recreating. How different, then, is covering an older song from having children?

You are out on your own. You are waiting for the train to pass so you can get across the street and continue having a good time. You have always been a fan of trains so you can’t wait to see what this one looks like¹. A prickling sensation on your neck tells you that something is wrong. You make a mental note to see a neck doctor. Looking around, you notice there are five people tied to the tracks. A trolley, seemingly self-propelled, suddenly appears and it is headed straight for them. Surprisingly, you see another person tied to a different parallel set of tracks. You look around and spot a lever right next to you. The lever is conveniently labeled “pulling this lever will save the five people and kill the one person on the other track.”

Imagine going to a very fancy restaurant for an expensive dinner. You’ve been told by several famous food critics and chefs that this is one of the greatest restaurants ever. The service is a bit slow so you end up sitting there for three hours. The food is great and the ingredients are timeless. The recipe is fifty years old but it feels familiar and the plating does not look dated. Yet, you wonder if you lack the requisite amount of taste buds to truly appreciate the effort. You feel sated when you leave you feel like you’ve left with the same life you sat down with.