What to Write About?

15 Votes

If you live to be 80 years old and vote in every presidential election, you would only be voting 15 times for president over a lifetime.

Room to Room

Living in the civilized world our lives are defined by the rooms we occupy. Outside being just a means of getting from one room to another.

The Movement of Time

Having recently gotten a year older, the aging process is becoming more noticeable. Not outwardly, I'm still the same charming fellow I've always been but I can tell my perception of time is changing. Old people like to talk about how quickly time passes as if this is some new phenomenon. The simple fact is a year is the same length as it was when we were five years old but our perception of it in relationship to our life has changed. A year to a five year old is 1/5th their life, to a fifty year old a year is only 1/50th of their life and thereby a much smaller portion of the whole. It's as if we were on a train that's always accelerating.

Accounting for Taste

"There's no  accounting for taste" or so goes the old saying. Yet billions are spent annually to do just that. Marketing, advertising, public relation budgets easily stretch into the billions. But the question is always are they fulling a need or merely creating one. We've seen the George Harrison/Susan Campey scene in A Hard Days Night. Little has changed since then.

SIMON
And that pose is out too, Sunny Jim. The new
thing is to care passionately, and be right
wing. Anyway, you won't meet Susan if you don't
cooperate.

GEORGE
And who's this Susan when she's at home?

SIMON
(playing his ace)
Only Susan Campey, our resident teenager.
You'll have to love her. She's your symbol.

GEORGE
Oh, you mean that posh bird who gets
everything wrong?

SIMON
I beg your pardon?

GEORGE
Oh, yes, the lads frequently gather round the
T.V. set to watch her for a giggle. Once we
even all sat down and wrote these letters
saying how gear she was and all that rubbish.

SIMON
She's a trend setter. It's her profession!

GEORGE
She's a drag. A well-known drag. We turn the
sound down on her and say rude things.

SIMON
Get him out of here !!

Well it doesn't work well with George but it does work with enough people that it's worthwhile doing.

One of the criteria Marcel Duchamp used in the selection of his ready mades was to try and select objects without taste, without good taste or bad. Esthetically neutral objects. That would be very hard if not impossible today because everything is so heavily branded. You are not buying an object, you are fulfilling a need, a desire, creating a personal mythology. The world becomes skewed into serving your needs instead of you serving the world.

Germany Faces the Death Spiral

Germany the country with the lowest birthrate in Europe, proposes cutting pensions for citizens without children. Yeah...that'll fix it.

Adopt a Puppy

Met these little guys last weekend,
both need good homes.

Sorting Through Stuff

In any advanced economy the problem is not the procurement of stuff but what to do with it once you have it. If you can't find what you have what good is having it at all? I don't think anyone would argue keeping track of what you have is important. Witness the rise of Google. Their whole mission is to help people find what they are looking for.

I spend a great deal of my free time sorting through stuff. Making small piles of orphaned things, mostly papers that don't have a home. I often wish there was someone who would tell me if I should keep a particular piece of paper. If I was an evangelical through whom God would speak directly, that would be very helpful. "Oh sweet Jesus, will I have any use for this 20% off coupon for Bed Bath and Beyond before it expires." Yet God remains silent to me on such things.

A result of procurement without editing is the garbage house. This has always been a fear of mine. One pile begets another. Say there is a small pile in the corner you haven't gotten to in a while, a week goes by and it's still there. Sooner or later one will become acclimated to its presence and as time passes another pile starts next to the first. As you can see it's a slippery slope before firefighters in breathing apparatus have to break down your door.

It need not be paper–in some cases it's clothes. A guilty pleasure of mine is watching the television program Cops. When the cops enter a suspect's trailer home there are piles of clothes everywhere, yet the suspect is usually shirtless and bleeding from the nose.

A C. Gardner of Washington D.C. relates in his review of Martian Heidegger’s Being and Time "we are entangled in a world which has two possibilities: the "ready-at-hand" and the "present-to-hand".
The former state involves our mode of "taking-care-of-things" when we are in the flow of normal everyday activities; the "thingness" of beings is covered up, because we are absorbed in what we are doing.
The latter state is disclosed when a disruption in the flow occurs: we notice the thingness of things in the world; in this state, the background significance of our activities (the projection) recedes."
I personally have come to believe old Martian realized this while looking for a missing sock.