Hell is a Real Place (p1)

Deep in the darkest of nights, John stumbled about looking for his way. He was slightly inebriated and much to his dismay, this was causing him no small amount of trouble finding his car. He was fairly certain that he had parked it here on Third Street, but in his haze, even he admitted that all the streets looked the same. Finally deciding even while drunk that not being able to find one's car was a disqualification for driving it, he decided to walk home and potentially save the lives of himself and anyone between here and his apartment.

Unfortunately for John, the distance between these locations was greater than travel by foot would easily accommodate. Again, John's current level of cognition allowed to reason that driving was not a good idea but not that walking the double digit number of miles back to his place was not a good idea. Luckily for John's feet and unluckily for he himself, John got lost in a side alley about one block into his journey. He had thought that he had seen a cat wander down the alley and so naturally decided to follow. This was a perfectly reasonable course of action.

He entered the alleyway gazing upwards like a child in amazement at all the new sights to see in a world just being discovered. This was John's favorite part of being drunk, ranking well above hangovers. To John, being drunk was to rediscover the wonders of the world. The way the light shone down in a certain way, or the rhythmic shadow cast by a ceiling fan, or the smell of an open field on a warm spring day could all arrest John's sense of normalcy and fascinate him to no end. What this fascination began brought contentment, at least for a time. John looked down from a flickering neon light. "Why didI come down this way?" he said aloud. "Oh right, the kitty cat." He centered his head with each hand to its matching temple and continued down the alley, determinedly.

He couldn't seem to find the cat at this juncture and became weary for all his travels. He sat down between two small garbage cans just outside the rear entrance to a Chinese takeout and lolled his head back, jarring it slightly on the brick wall behind.

This was a small inconvenience and not one to take notice of. When John came to, it was not morning as would be expected. He also was still not entirely sober. He heard a noise from further down the alley and peered around the can to discover its origin. Slinking through the shadows, John thought he glimpsed the shadowy form of a small cat meandering warily, much like a cat would. However, and John wasn't sure if this was the alcohol speaking to him, it seemed that the cat was slightly different than the average cat. It did not appear to have any fur.

John arose and crept slowly and deliberately to close in on the creature. As he got close enough to make out further details he also noticed that this thing was slightly different than your average mammal in that it had no flesh. John blinked. John rubbed his eyes. It still had no flesh. It looked back at him and with glowing eyes, hissed a ferocious growling threat that seemed to speak in words to John that said, "Don't follow."

Always willing to heed good advice when drunk, John waited for almost three seconds before following the creature into where only after entering its veil did John see a great brilliant portal of flame standing innocently in the middle of a downtown alleyway. This was not the sort of thing John was used to seeing in alleyways, but he was also not used to drunkenly wandering through alleys in the middle of the night. Curious beyond measure, John reached out a finger towards the portal. It felt warm, but its blazing appearance lied of its apparent heat. John, feeling the bravery of alcohol, leaned in closer and gingerly poked his head through the portal for a peek of what absolutely cannot be described in words. What follows is a description in words of what he saw.

--
To be continued...
Constructive criticism welcome

Don't Worry...

...be happy.

And that's an order.

Saying Things

I should say more things. For now, check out the .stuff sidebar over there. It dynamically loads links to blog items I share in Google Reader. What this means is that when I see an interesting link in a blog I am reading I can and might share it and it will automatically update over there. So at least something on this blog might update regularly. While I'm here, Google Reader is the most useful application I've used in some time.

A Will to Alter, p1

Objectively, there is no purpose, no reason, no truth. Reality and its playground, the universe, are harsh, cold, and unforgiving. There is no true meaning and there is no way to truly understand the objective, literal universe. Of course, it is possibly quite incorrect to attribute such descriptors to these concepts as they are in themselves somewhat self-contradictory. If something is utterly unknowable, then how do you know that it is unknowable?

Subjectively, the perceiver can bring forth purpose, reason, and truth, becoming a creator of reality - of a subjective reality. Our reality is what we make it by way of our perceptions. Our perceptions are mostly deterministic, leaving us no say in their operations. We do not decide the circumstances we are born with, nor do we choose our physical makeup. Our cognizance then is built even before we form our identity. Thus, our reality is set and as rigid as objective reality. Yet under certain circumstances, we are able to exert our will over our senses and our processing of reality such that we alter our internal perception of our external stimuli and create a new subjective reality. It is rare to do this and is sometimes in extreme cases referred to under the names of transcendence or actualization or by the states of nirvana or heaven.

Under normal circumstances we are mere patterns expressing ourselves mechanically. we are very complex patterns, such that it appears to be non-mechanical, yet we are each a random pattern drawn from the hat of God. When we die, our pattern ceases in its process of expression, no longer creating our subjective reality for the audience of our minds. This is not to say that the pattern will never be drawn again. Patterns have a method for reexpression. Even differing patterns will manifest extreme similarities in many cases, only minutely differing in their effects. This is why so many people have the same thoughts and feelings - they are simply an expression of a predetermined pattern.

As we die and our pattern stops its expression and subjective reality generation, a universe dies as well. The universe of our soul - the reality of our mind - vanishes without our patterns to filter and our senses to perceive. If we can destroy universes, does that not make us powerful indeed? Yet to perform such an act takes our own life. If we can destroy a universe, then we have likewise already created one. However, we did so unconsciously and without willing it. Indeed, most are unlikely to even realize that this has happened. Yet, the true power of creation comes in this realization followed by a will to alter our own pattern, to reprogram our subjective reality.

...

I look in the mirror
and ask the person I see there,
"who are you?
...that killed me yesterday?

You look familiar, but
I do not know you.

I saw you once before
in a dream
but then
you were transcendent.
Now you are disappointing.

For all that you are not
you are more than I was
For this I am sad
For that I am
Happy"

In other news...

09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0

Oh, yeah...

...I have a blog. Well, it's been a little while, but who cares? For now, I only have some laundry to air out. Not the kind of metaphorical laundry where I expose all sorts of dark and personal secrets, but rather more like the laundry that has bugs crawling in it because you didn't put it away soon enough.

Speaking of laundry, I was drying off from a shower this week when a dead wasp-like bee of some sort fell out of my towel and landed on my arm. Scared the hell out of me, that. I'm not sure where it came from: if it crawled into the dirty laundry and got washed and dried, or if in crawled into the clean laundry later, or even if it ended up there shortly before very closely forcing me to promptly take another shower.

In other news, Jesus Christ came back, and you missed it.

Also, this video of an ultra hard Super Mario Brothers level is very funny. Mostly for the commentary and swearing.

Finally, I forgot one interesting quote from Dr. Barrett for the quote post a couple of posts ago. It was directed squarely at me during a Masters Degree project presentation/defense. And it went like this, "Who is that mooing?"

Flagrance or Ignorance?

Why the hell is it that no one can tell the difference between "then" and "than"?

It makes me want to strangle people when I see this malapropism in the writing of otherwise intelligent people. I must however admit that the other day while revising something of mine, I noticed that I had carelessly used "no" instead of "know". Not wanting to be a hypocrite, I almost didn't survive strangling myself.

Barrettisms

Speaking of college in that last post, a professor of mine was very quotable:

On Software Testing

• Pretend you're stupid. [ed. note: the implication here was that we wouldn't have to try very hard]
• Error: Stuff may be happening.
• Users are exponentially stupid, but programmers are only linearly smart.
• Ha ha, I found your error, you dope.

Communication

• I need an editor when I talk.
• I hate talking to people.
• Honesty is usually the best policy.

Derision

• They'll write all kinds of code for you; it just happens to be a bunch of crap.
• VB [Visual Basic] is for wimps.
• I'm making a mockery of you. You should be offended.

Wisdom

• Nobody uses interpreted languages unless they're trying to get away with something.
• If you can go through life without making any decisions, then that's a good thing.
• Education is the only service profession where people complain about getting more for their money.

How Computers really Work

• These bits are traveling across these magic wires.

Watch Out for the Dead Ends

Long about the time that I was a hardened and grisled collegiate of nearly half a semester, I was in the student center checking my mailbox between classes. This was a very important activity because I sure as hell didn't want to miss the coupons for pizza or the offers for free money. No sir. Having just gotten the knack of opening my university PO box and figuring out what it meant to turn the dial to 46.5, I checked my mail hastily, dumped the junk, and headed to my next class. I should probably mention at this point that I was burdened with my bookbag at the time, this being my heaviest day of class both in credit-hours and poundage of books.

I headed out of the post office area, past the computer lab, and into the common area where several dozen students were lounging and milling about during their down time. The architecture in this particular building is quite unique, having been built in the 1970's by, I think, Frank Lloyd Wrong. There was this weird oblong oval ramp that led from the main floor (not counting the sub floor I was now heading towards) to the third floor. It took nine zig-zag-zigs of this ramp to get from the bottom to the top. All of this, of course, is irrelevant at the moment except to illustrate the curiosities of the building I was currently meandering through. Not quite having gotten the hang of navigation in the said student center, I took a wrong turn near another ramp heading down to that sub floor I just mentioned.

The ramp led to the nearest exit and straight to the building where my next class was located. I thought I had planned my course aptly, but realized after peering around a thick brick column that I had come out on the wrong side of the divider between the common area and the ramp leading down. "No problem," I thought. "I can make it over that divider."

So, not wanting to make a fool of myself for having had to turn around in front of everyone in the student center and making obvious my lack of college building geography, I decided to simply hop over the five foot tall, one foot thick concrete barrier. This may sound like trouble brewing, but I actually could and can make it over a barrier that size without much difficulty.

So, I gathered a bit of speed in the few precious feet I had before the wall and vaulted over it by placing my left hand on the top of the wall and lifting my feet perpendicularly to my body away from my supporting hand. I had performed similar gymnastics before in a like manner, but I had made one minor miscalculation. Or rather, I had left out one crucial variable in my calculations. I usually didn't do this with a bag strapped to my back that weighed somewhere in the vicinity of fifty pounds. Myself, I actually cleared the barrier, but my bookbag hung low as I passed over the wall in parallel with it like a pole vaulter in a successful vault. My bag caught the wall, and impeded my landing slightly.

I turned in midair - while horizontal I remind you - rolled on my way down, to the ramp which was probably another two feet lower than the other side from which I launched. I actually managed to land on my ass with my bookbag soon joining me, still strapped to my back. I jumped up quickly, hoping no one had noticed my less than deft aerial maneuvers. As soon as I made it to my feet, I was staring directly up into the face of a young woman who looked stricken with worry about this idiot who tried to jump over a concrete barrier. When she asked if I was all right, I told her, "Of course," in that way that ego-bruised men do, as if everything had gone according to plan, and besides I'm tough and don't get hurt. So, I ran off to my next class without looking anywhere but straight ahead. I know everyone in the commons areas saw my stunt and it was some time before I had the courage to head back that way.

I'm glad I did that so that I wasn't embarrassed about having to turn around in front of everyone. Oh, and my ass hurt for about three days afterward. Go me.