Minus Coffee

It starts at birth. You are born with a life. It is up to you what to do with it. After this, it becomes incomprehensible. I began this line of thought on the top floor of a parking garage overlooking downtown Austin. I could see people in a park and stuck in traffic and the idea sprang on me like a locomotive. They were down there, and from where I was positioned, it was easy to look at them as animals. Running around. Playing, practicing. Their clothes gave them some distinction beyond animals, but what are clothes besides straps of fabric on a continuum of time. Or rather, what meaning is bestowed on the particular fashion trends exhibited below when they changed in the past and I know that they will change again in the future. How were these clothes (the best visual referent from my perspective) supposed to set those people apart from the animals when I know that they are a functional, tactical piece of equipment adjusted across the scale of time. The vehicles I saw were even less convincing. A tool to help exert a desire. What animal wishes for anything less.

Here I was on a roof top under a perfectly clear day after a bad-weather-week. I felt like I was walking through a dream. Feeling like every instant I was realizing that I was looking at what I was looking around at and the realization was surprising as if I hadn't been looking at it the instant before. Except that I had my eyes open the whole time. It must have been a perpetual feeling--the feeling of being surprised with reality.

After that it was all surprises. Everything. This is what, I think, passes for epiphany most of the time: seeing an everyday event or occurrence free of all the emotions (signifiers) that you have attached to it, and beginning to construct new feelings and biases about that event based on this empty perspective.

I went to lunch with a friend. In all honesty I was a little bit nervous driving there--besides the fact that there were so many people driving crazy, breaking laws, valuing their time and effort higher than conventions, myself included--because I didn't know how to bring this, bring my state of mind to lunch.

Familiar routines are helpful that way. We talked and we didn't talk about anything new. Politics, city culture, future plans. And it was genuinely enjoyable. After lunch I was worried. A very mild anxiety descended. What are friends for if we didn't do anything new? If we didn't do anything at all. If we didn't build anything or really connect (because connection is sublime; human connection is the ideal above animalness) what did we do? Stroke our mutual desire to talk about ourselves, think fondly about the future, prove that we know something about the other. It didn't really seem to make a whole lot of sense. Or seem to have much point. Ahh, but this particular friend is a bar friend and we had never met for lunch before or at least not in a very long time and the social conventions of lunch are much more restricted than the par, particularly in respect to time where at lunch the time is restricted, though there is some variable freedom about how much time you get to spend at the table after all of the food is all gone, where at the bar the windows of time are unhinged and let free to expand until the bar man says that it is time to shut everything off and you have no other choice but to say good bye and hug and hopefully don't crash your car or somebody else's on your way home or the fast food place.

Here was where I started thinking about plans. On my way home. What were all of these other people in the other cars doing? What were they thinking? What were my friend and I doing and thinking? Were we acting according to some kind of plan? Was there a greater framework that we were a part of that we were agents within and crucial parts of? (According to physics, the new religion, yes). Was there any reason behind all of the things that we were doing? Individually, probably no. Impulse directs doing. Also, what we did yesterday is a good indicator of what we will do today. If you went to work yesterday, then you'll probably go to work today. If it's the weekend then you will stretch your imagination and do something in response to what you did last weekend. If you're the type, then maybe you made a plan. Maybe you're going to go to a park out of town. What's the reason behind that plan? Probably that you don't want to spend another weekend waiting around at home for the weekend to be over. Then what's the point of these plans? Why are we doing the things that we're doing? Is there any reason guiding it? Probably a lot has to do with the seemingly infinite number of days that we have ahead of us. If I was to count up the number of days in 80 years and tell you the number what would you do? If I put 80 years on a time line and marked the number of days gone by in your 80 years in red would you be horrified? I'm not going to do it to myself because seeing that would be too horrifying. Then what's the alternative to whiling away our days? Plans seem to be the answer. But our plans don't seem to mean anything other than ways to more elaborately while away our days. There are bigger plans out there with science and understanding and reasoning behind them. These are generally plans of the state, or the state's predecessor, corporations. There is some comfort in knowing that these massive plans involving each one of us have a bit of sense guiding them, but there is still uncertainty there. What is to determine if those plans are not in error? History has shown us that time and time again those plans are frequently wrong, or misguided, or horrible.

In a sense the kings of medieval Europe were more advanced than us. Their plans were backed by divine authority. There was no uncertainty. But an understanding of human psychology gives me new doubts. How many kings truly believed that they were under the authority of god, and not the ultimate authority themselves?

All of the ideas that I've heard about time are echoing faintly in my head. Who said that time was an illusion and that all we really know of is this one perpetual instant and that the past is a delusion or at least function of memory and the future is only imagination or an aspect of planning, or maybe he didn't say much more than that time was just an illusion. I'm imagining some kind of all devouring worm inching (or not moving at all?) through time (nothing) and destroying everything in front of it and rendering everything behind it null and thus with it's slow illusion of movement represents the abandonment of time and a false conception. And who else wondered what it would be like if we viewed time in reverse, knowing all that would happen in the future (our deaths, etc.) but edging towards a past which we were completely ignorant of, our past and history and what brought us to the present and tells us everything about ourselves. Whoever said that had something to do with the movie Momento. And Mark Twain quipped that we would be infinitely happier if only we were born at 80 and slowly inched our way towards 18.