A Real Beast

The real beast of this blog-inflected writing I’m doing is when you lose everything to a glitch.

It happened via app strangeness earlier this year (I’d be able to link to a post about it if I wasn’t all glitched).

This time, I saw it coming and got smart to it… I quickly grabbed a CTRL+C of the text.

But then I came over here to grab the email address I can use to post to my blog and of course I grabbed that with a CTRL+C, thereby wiping out the writing I’d “saved.”

Brilliant.

Some mistakes are made once.

Some searches that did not give me the answers I needed:

“how to access previous cut and copies”

“how to access old copied text in windows”

“anyway to access old copied things ctrl+c”

Some mistakes are made more than once.

The wiped out writing closed with a  note that I was going to write through this cheesey sentimental something.

It was called, “I miss things (sometimes).”

It was pretty good.

"And They Are Equal in Your Eyes"

There is a world that is love.
There is a world that is competing.
There is a world that is why do you do this to yourself.

There is a world of crying at last.
There is a world of hurt -- and everyone's heard of that world.
There is a world of maps.

There is a world of you and a better you, still.
There is a world of just hoping not too many people get hurt along the way because you realize there are necessary evils.
There is a world of like and don't like woven into a basket that is part of the world that is love.

There is a world where you can get what you want if only you had the courage to want.
There is a world of courage.
There is a world where you belong but that isn't the only world where you belong.

There is a world where I hate to watch you do this to yourself.
There is a world where all you can do is watch, and this is the powerless world and the anxious world.
There is a world of illusion that is fast-friends with a world of delusion and they've been known to trade clothes.

There is a world where you try new things and I am amazement.
There is a world where boundaries dissolve and yes and no and you and I and competing and love and new and new are entangled in the best ways.
There is a world of honesty and the world of honest error.

Today, let there only be the world where you try.

---

The quote is from Andrew Cuomo in this excellent New York Times article, Behind N.Y. Gay Marriage, an Unlikely Mix of Forces, that got me going after a failed go at writing earlier this morning. What a week -- this Times pieces lensed it somehow, or maybe just opened the floodgates.

---

There is a world of penguins, too. That's part of all this somehow, and here's one of the penguins, courtesy of my daughter.

Good Night, Mr. Clemons.

We played Bruce last night and had a great time with it -- were you already gone by 5:30pm?

Did You Forget How Awesome Wikipedia Is?

Take for example...

Homunculi in alchemy

In Carl Jung's studies of alchemy, he believed the first record of a homunculus in alchemical literature appeared in the Visions of Zosimos, written in the third century AD, although the actual word "homunculus" was never used. In the visions, Zosimos mentions encountering a man who impales himself with a sword, and then undergoes "unendurable torment", his eyes become blood, he spews forth his flesh, and changes into "the opposite of himself, into a mutilated anthroparion (a Greek alchemical concept of a being somewhat similar to a golem but possessing a sense of will and intelligence), and he tore his flesh with his own teeth, and sank into himself", which is a rather grotesque personification of the ouroboros, the dragon that bites its own tail, which represents the dyophysite nature in alchemy: the balance of two principles. Zosimos later encounters several other homunculi, named as the Brazen Man, the Leaden Man, and so forth. Commonly, the homunculi "submit themselves to unendurable torment" and undergo alchemical transformation. Zosimos made no mention of actually creating an artificial human, but rather used the concept of personifying inanimate metals to further explore alchemy.^[1]

In Islamic alchemy, Takwin (Arabic: تكوين‎) was a goal of certain Muslim alchemists, notably Jabir ibn Hayyan (later known as Geber in Europe). In the alchemical context, Takwin refers to the artificial creation of life in the laboratory, up to and including human life.

There are also variants cited by other alchemists. One such variant involved the use of the mandrake. Popular belief held that this plant grew where semen ejaculated by hanged men (during the last convulsive spasms before death) fell to the ground, and its roots vaguely resemble a human form to varying degrees. The root was to be picked before dawn on a Friday morning by a black dog, then washed and "fed" with milk and honey and, in some prescriptions, blood, whereupon it would fully develop into a miniature human which would guard and protect its owner. Yet a third method, cited by Dr. David Christianus at the University of Giessen during the 18th century, was to take an egg laid by a black hen, poke a tiny hole through the shell, replace a bean-sized portion of the white with human semen, seal the opening with virgin parchment, and bury the egg in dung on the first day of the March lunar cycle. A miniature humanoid would emerge from the egg after thirty days, which would help and protect its creator in return for a steady diet of lavender seeds and earthworms.

You can't touch this.

This is why we must all work together.

Every Day Seems a Little Closer Going Faster (after Mike Young... though I didn't know it when I was getting into it)

I tried today, a number of times.

There were many good things going on.

Winning isn't everything. (Thanks guys. You do cool stuff.)

You know, sometimes you are going to just plain fail. And I don't mean in the meme FAIL way or the near meme, "fail faster," way. I mean straight up, flat out fail. It's going to happen.

And when it does, if you look up the walkthrough online, you just won't feel so good when you start over.

But sometimes you are in it for the story, and that's cool, too. That's how I felt with Limbo. I just couldn't figure out those last few bits of gravity back and forth, but I didn't feel worst for it.

That might be the only time I didn't feel worse for a walkthrough.

Things are so different now.

I keep talking about how a Snickers bar used to have a little phone number on it for you to call if you weren't satisfied. And that was like it for normal people.

People like me, I mean.

You're going to lose your temper.
You're going to say things you regret.
You're going to do things you wish you hadn't done, large and small.
You're going to learn to swim, though, too.
You're going to break someone's heart.
You're heart's going to be broken.
You're going to grow up.
You're going to say that's the last time, but it won't be the last time.
You're going to look at yourself in the mirror and you're eyes are going to feel dark and you're going to be all, Really, Jamie? Really?
You're going to care for someone so deeply that you'll let go of things that you once thought defined you.
You are going to do some wild things.
You're going to have bad ideas along the way.
Please please please never stop having those bad ideas. I love them.
And I love you.
You're going to going to going to gone.
You're going to alternate between taking names first and kicking ass first, but not consistently and that might frustrate some people.
You're going to fail, remember that.
You're going to be afraid.
It's not whether you close your eyes or not, it's which direction you step in when you're eyes are closed.
You'll step to it.
It's not that you've found yourself on the floor again, it's that you're getting up.
I see you getting up.
Close your eyes.

You'll see.

Close your eyes.

95 Kingdoms

Kingdom of Heaven
Kingdom of Earth
Kingdom of the Sea
Kingdom of the Dead

Kingdom of Mirth
Kingdom of Power
Kingdom of Honesty
Kingdom of Truth

Crystal Kingdom
Kingdom of the Night
The True Kingdom
The Forgotten Kingdom

The Forlorn Kingdom
The Purloined Kingdom
The Scarlet Kingdom
Sanctuary

You want to say that you've seen the bottom, and it's a family having a birthday in the café at Ikea, but then you realize the one on the bottom is you looking at them and thinking that.

Thank god that was about 2 years ago, though, and now my life is filled with awesome like this. Believe.

The bottom gives you something solid to push up off.

But I don't think I'll ever go to Ikea alone again.

Write every day. Right every day. Wright every day.

And/or park like a devil. Seriously, I've had some ridiculous parking karma of late. Go Old Man Echo!

Tune in next month for, "Sleep every day. Sleep every day. Sleep every day."

Yesterday I spent time in Takoma Park (MD), Washington (DC), Trenton (NJ), Princeton (NJ), Newark (NJ), and finally ended my day in Boston (MA), but not before reading an article about quantum behaviors in the macroscopic world that included a note on space and time being secondary characteristics of reality -- basically side effects of some deeper "real stuff" that emerge through decoherence ("information leak"). From entanglement (my favorite) to synchronicity (my other favorite).

Here's the piece I was reading... Living In the Quantum World, Vlatko Vedral.

Dear Words, you are on notice. I'm gonna write the shit outta some of you real soon.