Wee, sleeket, cowran, tim’rous beastie,
O, what panic’s in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty,
Wi’ bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee,
Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
An’ justifies that ill opinion,
Which makes thee startle,
At me, thy poor, earth-born companion,
An’ fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen-icker in a thrave ‘S a sma’ request:
I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave,
An’ never miss’t!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It’s silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!
An’ naething, now, to big a new ane,
O’ foggage green!
An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin,
Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ wast,
An’ weary Winter comin fast,
An’ cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble,
But house or hald.
To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble,
An’ cranreuch cauld!

But Mousie, thou are no thy-lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o’ Mice an’ Men,
Gang aft agley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy!

Still, thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!

- To a Mouse by Robert Burns [1785]

I reflect upon my life at times and worry I’ve fallen short of my potential.

I then reflect upon the state of the world and am full of pride.

Perhaps I have reached my potential for hubris.

Cognition is futile but I don’t believe in nihilism.

Understanding is a restriction of experience and it is by a reflexive framework of understanding that the stenosis of thought we foolishly call reality precludes us from the freedom of plenipotentiary chaos.

Though this be madness, yet there is method in’t – without a locus in the autodidactic fallacies of selfhood we would cease to be ourselves and revert to observers observing the machinations of the unknowable, manifold expressions of energy and matter.

Summary: The human mind is ill-equipped to comprehend the electron positions in a grain of salt and the nature of the universe is likely more complex than a grain of salt – the most you can ask of yourself is to be forgiving of your fallibility, aware of the paradox in any declarative statement, and willing to embrace the ephemeral for all its transient glory – it’s all you’ve got.

Had a neighbor who stole my mail – unknown frequency, but the bastard stole both incoming and outgoing letters.

First month’s rent check never made it to the landlord.

One day he left a card – addressed to him, opened – in the mailbox.

Apparently he felt guilty about his felonious ways…

… me, I felt guilty returning a piece of opened mail. How the hell is that supposed to look? … and what was going to happen if I didn’t return it?

Of course, up to then I had no idea he had been stealing mail. I walked over to his home down the street and delivered the letter after returning home from work one day (just after sunset).

He didn’t open the door at the first knock, however, I knocked again because the lights were on (a sure sign that someone is home if it’s just after sunset – don’t know of anyone who leaves their lights on all day).

He came to the door but left the chain in the latch and pretended to be “holding the dog back” (his words, not mine).

I passed the letter through the four inch aperture.

He said something about “putting the dog away”, closed the door, and re-opened the door twenty seconds later to let me in.

He had a small stack of mail. “Postman has been delivering it to the wrong address…”

Right.

The oldest piece was postmarked a year prior.

I could almost swear he was the same man I’d met two years prior in another city, the man with the respirator tank who watched people walking down the street from the surveillance cameras in his bunker and had scurried out, tank in tow, to say hello when he saw me walking down the street – but somehow he was frailer, now.

Afraid but unwilling to be afraid alone – maybe pent-up and shy – with no place to mount his cameras.

The mind tends toward lumping the irrelevant things together – a series of similarly-coiffed leading men from bygone eras’ film become a single Übermensch actor, disagreeable odors and flavors churn together indistinguishably in some singular back-alley cesspot, and hoary shut-ins become The Archetypal Shut-in where one has the unfortunate occasion to make contact.

The mail thief and the bunker-dweller are doubtless different people, not that it would matter much – the common threads of their solipsistic stories must patch together some sorry, worn-out quilt of loneliness, TV dinners, and misery for each to cry himself to sleep with when the weather’s cold.

Here’s to hoping you die a certain kind of death, creepy old bastard – you interfered, got the postal service involved when all you had to do was knock, ask for a cup of sugar and acknowledgment of your pathetic existence.

… [T]here is always something taboo, something repressed, unadmitted, or just glimpsed quickly out of the corner of one’s eye because a direct look is too unsettling. Taboos lie within taboos, like the skins of an onion. What, then, would be The Book which fathers might slip to their sons and mothers to their daughters, without ever admitting it openly?

- The Book on The Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are
by Alan Watts

Perhaps that book is what I should be working on…

• Published (615) – This will be 616 and one full month from the last published “Insomnia” post
• Drafts (124) – Not catching up on the posts which have been on ice since … oldest dates to August of 2009

Not quite time to write this blog’s epitaph – most of my efforts have been directed toward other projects but I plan to devote the summer to travel and development of the Operator’s Manual.

Now with more somnambulism!

Ideas rattling around in my skull…

Hypothesis: Intestinal flora imbalances cultured with refined foods are a basis for systemic failure in the human body (there is already plenty of flim-flam out on the ‘net to this effect)

Project: Intricate wood-burning project involving ouroboros design, ceramic inlay, complicated system of gears which slowly changes the color of the snake’s scales and segments to indicate time (fun!)

Systems: Security profiling suite (rootkit, antivirus, user authentication and process profiling) to append to existing infrastructure, integrate with network hardware for covert channel detection (far too much work but it’d be fun nonetheless)

Recipe: Discovered a combination of black bean soup and canned soup which has the color, consistency, and (for the most part) taste of bacon gravy (MAD SCIENCE SUCCESS!)

Project: Should I be making T-shirts? If I were making T-shirts, what would I be making? Probably some really offensive designs… (yes, it’s always a good time to sell out)

In a candle-lighted chapel, each climbs into one of the austere wooden caskets laid side by side on the floor. Lying face up, their arms crossed over their chests, they close their eyes. And there they rest, for 10 excruciating minutes.

“It’s a way to let go of certain things,” says Jung, a former insurance company lecturer. “Afterward, you feel refreshed. You’re ready to start your life all over again, this time with a clean slate.”

- South Koreans experience what it’s like to die – and live again
by John M. Glionna for the LA Times
2010-01-04

via Dangerous Minds

Perhaps this is what I was talking about… the radio hits a patch of silence and the chatter becomes appreciable; the gears grind to a halt and the stark beauty of chaos on the assembly line momentarily appears; time enough to catch a breath before the mad dash through the forest resumes.

I’ve yet to take a real break from the incessant blogging – whether here and at the new outlet dedicated to “case files” (hopefully there is a noticeable lack of organization there … the goal is to reserve coherent thoughts for this outlet) – there is simply too much new information to overlook.

This message brought to you by Myer’s Dark Rum and Coca-Cola.

Conspicuously empty… nevermind.

A thousand years ago it was rutted streets brimming with sewage and waste… not much has changed, now, has it?

Kept awake at night by the sound of the ghetto bird and sirens and shouting. There’s enough light in the sky to throw shadows but I’ll be damned if I can see a single star.

A truck emblazoned with the words “Graffiti Busters” ambles along, slowly filling each alley with the city’s idea of a message – “Everything is the same shit-brown. Everything is the same raincloud-grey.” – over “This is my name!”, “This is what I have to say!”, and “This is what I can do!” scrawl. Not one voice is spared the over-speak whitewash.

You have to step quickly to avoid the garbage… its tentacles would wrap around your ankle and pull you into a storm drain if you didn’t jump that puddle.

Everyone looks tired; perhaps they were kept awake by the sounds of the helicopter and sirens, perhaps they were the fugitives.

The price of living increases every year and there has to be some reciprocal to that… but dying isn’t getting any cheaper, either.

… and they quit selling my favorite brand of fortified wine.

Addendum:

Apparently the deranged rapist who shot and killed four cops the other day was suspected of being in the ‘hood. (and here I thought the flight of the ghetto bird was a nightly amusement)

But does this explain the commotion upstairs?

Note to self: In the future, lock the front door before retiring for the night.