Fog-Leaping: My Anxious Pursuit
I've a love/hate relationship with drugs, both those that spontaneously "appear" like magic and, far more frequently, those prescribed to me. But it's turning to hate. I've discovered, much to my dismay, that being too sedated is possible. Fog-leaping leads one into a ditch, where I  read and sleep, read and sleep, a napified existence in which I may spend more time dreaming than living. That wouldn't be so bad, but my dreams no

Temporary Communism and What Comes Next
Today, I renewed consideration of my uncertain political views. It occurred to me that we merely require a temporary communism. That's essential if we're to eradicate the small percentage of corporate-psychopaths controlling most of the wealth, transporting them via coach flights to their new Lincoln Log cabins in the cult state of Utah. If disinclined to peaceful acceptance of their personal responsibility, then they asked for what c

The Village of Idiots and the Nothing Village
A novel with the title Nobody Nothing Never is bound to receive reviews with the easy first line from the following village-of-idiots Publishers Weekly: "Never has a title better summed up a book. This tedious novel about a couple of monotonous days in the lives of some very colorless characters..." That's precisely the point of the taleless tale Juan José Saer tells about a series of horse killings that seem to mean nothing, t

Why Must We Why?
For those subscribing to evolutionary theory, the ultimate riddle concerns the hows and whys of consciousness. Some claim consciousness occurred as an adaptation like any other, while others believe consciousness was an "accident." My guess is that consciousness was an "unintended" side effect of another adaptation. Some evidence exists for this view, but I've been unable to locate the source I stumbled across years ago. In any event, a final

Info-Infinity
For all the information we absorb, willingly or not, how much information affects our lives in any meaningful way? The Age of Information should not to be confused with an increase in knowledge. We may soon require info-landfills, where garbage bag after garbage bag of information once considered critical reaches critical mass, the stench of bleeding ink luring pigeons and vultures, which spin away into flying ones and zeroes.