Spent several hours on Sunday down at the Silver Leaf Renaissance Faire. I couldn’t bear the thought of dressing up in Renaissance Garbe this year so I did the tourist thing, armed with camera and money, and just wandered around staring at the sights. Just before I left I made an impulse purchase:

The axe was made by Christian Michaels Arms and Armour , makers of beautiful, high quality, expensive weapons.

In other news I went bowling for the first time in seven years (bachelor party) and discovered a disturbing event called “extreme bowling”.

In an effort to make bowling interesting to the younger generations it has been combined with a techno club atmosphere to make for an environment conducive to neither bowling nor dancing.

Picture, if you will, a bowling alley. Turn off the overhead lights. Turn on blinking runner lights along the lanes. Then turn on blacklights so the silly-putty colored bowling balls glow like miniature suns, difficult to look at. Now turn on the laser light show and spin stars and squares and mushrooms across the length and breadth of the bowling alley.

Then try to hit the pins. Unless you have the concentration of Musashi you will be lucky to break into the double digits.

I should have brought the axe.

Train of thought. Stream of consciousness. Randomness. Turbulence. Complexity. Dimension as metaphor for movement. Movement as metaphor for entropy. Entropy as metaphor for ennui. Pattern. Predictability. Ordered chaos. Chaotic order. Heirarchical programming. Holarchical philosophy. Genetic drift as metaphor for luck. Luck as metaphor for perception. Reptilian brain. Artificial evolution. Potential energy. Kinetic art. Faith in the scientific method. Magic (square/cube/tesseract). Width–height–depth–time–alternity. Zero one infinity. Infinite universe==infinite possibilities. Eternal universe==infinite repetition. Thought invalidates thought. If magic is to exist magic will create the conditions necessary for magic to exist. Self-fulfilling prophecy. Return to luck. Perception alters reality. Meditation increases perception. Magic is to the interior what mysticism is to the exterior. Bounded space and unbounded time? Bounded time and unbounded space? Branches forward, straight road back. Are we in space, on space, or of space? What is PI rotated on it’s side? What if we perceive things that don’t exist? Probability. Flow. Grace. Consciousness of streams. Language as degraded poetry. Poetry as elevated language. Chuang-Tzu’s butterfly. Kafka’s cockroach. Karma as metaphor for irresponsibility. Metaphor as metaphor for metaphor. Sleep as pipe dream.

This past Sunday I found myself at a small pond at one end of the Aquinas College campus. It was not yet noon, so the grass was damp and the small trees cast shadows long enough to sit in, away from the already too-hot sunshine.

The only visible movement was dozens of large dragonflies skimming the surface of the water, putting a serious dent in the local mosquito population and providing me with over an hour of entertainment. There were maybe five different species, some powdery blue, some iridescent green, red, brown, clear-winged, black-winged, and some with spots. The occasional brawl, sounding like a crinkling of cellophane, was the only sound.

After a while a woman and her six-ish year old son arrived. The boy had a fishing pole with him, maybe four feet long, with a big red-and-white bobber and a trout fly for bait. Now, this pond is lightly populated at the best of times, but what with the complete lack of rain in the last month, it is now at most two feet deep. The only surviving fish are minnows, three-inch bluegills, and twelve-pound carp.

Not really fly-fishing-type fish.

There was no way, other than accidentally snagging a carp half his size, that the kid would possibly catch anything. Carp are scavengers, and unless the kid had rubbed the trout fly in roadkill on the way to the pond, the carp would never even notice it. The kid was having fun, his mom was taking a break from her routine, and it was a beautiful day to just hang out and watch the fish.

So I was kind of surprised — and a little disappointed — when a police officer showed up on a bike and told the kid and his mom that there was no fishing allowed, and that they would have to leave. And he didn’t even help the kid retrieve his fly, which he had managed to cast into a tree.

After struggling to free the fly — and I offered to help, but they didn’t want any — mom and son packed it in and left. I felt kind of disappointed. The kid should have jumped in the water and tried wrestling one of the carp to shore. That would have showed that cop.

So I woke up just before 6am yesterday and haven’t been to sleep yet. Worst bout of insomnia yet. At 1am I picked up The Green Mile, and I finished it at 6am today. Then I tried to sleep again, then I went to work. I left work at noon, came home, tried to nap for an hour, couldn’t sleep, then went back to work. Now the time is 10:15, and I feel no more tired than I did at this time yesterday. I decided that the idea of missing a night’s sleep is a big part of the hell of actually missing a night’s sleep. And with that realization I woke up a lot.

Part of the problem was a thought that occurred to me at work yesterday: can we actually perceive the three physical dimensions, or are they metaphors we use to orient ourselves to the space we inhabit. After a night of something loosely resembling thought, I have to say the answer is {b}. There is no objective width/height/depth. These parameters exist only in relation to physical space. There is no platonic ideal of “3 dimensions”

That got me thinking about time, and the perception of the passing of time. Again, is that something we actually notice, or do we only notice its effect on the world around us? Again, I think we are only aware of the symptoms of passage through time: entropy, chaos, age, change, hunger, boredom… things and events which change, not through obvious physical intervention, but merely by existing for a while.

On a completely different note, for a mild spot of amusement, go here . Do a search on a word . Any word . (may take a while to load)

Sheesh! The stuff people throw away…