What the Philosophers say about reality is often as deceptive as when you see a sign in a second-hand store that reads: Pressing Done Here. If you went in with your clothes to have them pressed you would be fooled; the sign is for sale.
— Søren Kierkegaard, “Diapsalmata” from Either/Or.
If I were a groundhog, I wouldn't have bothered to come out of the hole to see/not see the shadow this morning.
What's the point in being a burrowing animal if you can't actually hibernate all winter? Gosh!
[goes back to daydreaming about sleeping in]
It turns out that, if you're patient, APC will indeed back up their Equipment Protection Policy with cold, hard cash.
By patient, though, I do mean patient. I submitted my claim mid-October. I just received the waiver in the mail today, wherin I relinquish any and all possible future claims against APC in return for a sum of money that should roughly cover the expense of a new Mainboard/CPU/Ram.
Preface
This is something I started writing this morning, after not-quite-enough sleep and a-little-too-much coffee&Dostoevsky. A few people who know me might find it interesting, so I thought I'd publish it publicly rather that anonymously like most of the trash I put up on the web. More chapters might follow, if the world is really as brutal and unfair as the cynics say it is.
1.
Take the man--and damned is his name. What is man, but a beast that has opposable thumbs and is ungrateful for them? What is man, but the most miserable creature ever to rise out of the sea and gain dominance over he rest of his world?
Take the man, and ask: “what is it about man, moreso this man, that drives him?” He sits in a coffee-shop—a café, if you will—and he ponders the many misfortunes--or at the least missed opportunities--of his life. He makes misery his primary mode of relaxation! Despair seems his most valuable pursuit. “If only I had made different decisions back in High School...” he thinks to himself. “Why did I marry so young? I could have had five more years of living the good life” he thinks to himself. “But it was worth it, I suppose...” he thinks—then “but I shouldn't have stuck with the first job for so long. I should have gone into my brother's business venture. With the two of us, we could have made a real killing. We could have been millionaires—maybe even billionaires. I could have been...” And then he laughs to himself and takes another sip of his soy latte. (His wife says that dairy isn't good for his colon, and he wants to keep the proctologist out of the picture for as long as he can...)
I posit that man is a being driven by the miserable desire for self-definition. He is a child who has subsumed childishness into an ideology of “responsible productivity.” And he is miserable every moment of his life. Give him a Christmas bonus, and he resents the fact that he will squander it on frivolous trinkets, or—much worse—the plodding and diabolical accumulation of “5% interest guaranteed.” What is five percent interest on a bonus of a few thousand? Even fifty thousand (we all laugh, “a man with a fifty-thousand-dollar bonus has no right to be ungrateful,” but I beg your indulgence as I prove my point) in five-percent looks like a pittance when compared to the drudgery that is required to earn it, and when compared to the enormous profit of the behemoth-corporation that provides it. “What I really wish” says this man, without fail, “is that I had spent more time last year with my family. Maybe then they wouldn't all think I'm such a dork. Maybe my wife would still think I'm exciting if I were more spontaneous.” Or perhaps: “...that I had taken that trip to New York with my brother instead of working on the MacPherson account, which we lost anyway.” Or further to the point: I wish that I had stood up to Greg when he passed me over for promotion. I was the right man to take over as vice-president, not John.”
Notice that all of these examples involve a man who, against all reason, wishes to define himself as something he is not, in spite of the reality that has crashed down upon the proverbial “house of cards.”
...
And that's as far as I got, folks, before I realized that I wasn't actually writing my version of Notes from the Underground, but simply re-writing Dostoevsky's voice with different words (and perhaps failing, though I'm confident that I'm quite capable of writing in “brooding existential.”
It stays as it is, though, to prove the point: even as someone well aware of the concept, I am a slave to this impulse of irrational self-definition. Even as a man who imagines a desire to write something truly new, my irrational urge to assume an established persona rears its head and shows me what's really going on.
I went with a few friends last night to see The Book of Eli, and I've got to say that I was pleasantly surprised.
To be sure, this isn't a deep movie--even compared to something as pop-philosophy oriented as the Matrix. The comparisons with that film would really only cover the post-pockyclypse setting and stylized fight scenes (Both of which Book pulls off just as well as Matrix did, though without as much of the wirework and kung-fu, focusing on blade combat instead. Those whose tastes in celluloid violence differ from mine might not be so impressed.)
Instead, I'd compare this film--the first three quarters of it, anyway--to a Flannery O'Connor story. American Gothic at its finest, with a hint of "post-nuclear gunslinger" for good measure. Details are everywhere: things like economies and social structures. (Though I must say that for a desert world without chapstick everyone seems to have well-moisturized lips. Is cat oil really all he says it is?)
The writing isn't exactly top-drawer, certainly the ending was a bit of a cop-out (Much moreso that Stephen King's Dark Tower, which I finished last week), but then this is the first time one of Gary Whitta's scripts has actually been picked up by Hollywood. I remember when he was editor-in-chief of "PC Gamer" magazine, and it's good to see one of his ideas finally make it to the screen. (His Tomb Raider would have been far better than the one Paramount made.) What's good about the writing is very good. Solid dialog (for an action movie) and a depopulated world that just hangs on to vestigial humanity.
The acting is top notch (for a genre film... [cough cough]) Gary Oldman once again fooled me for a good five minutes--I never recognize him immediately; I always think to myself in a disconnected way "oh, this character actor is good, I wonder what else he's been in?" and simultaneously "isn't Gary Oldman supposed to be in this movie?" Denzel Washington plays, of course, Denzel-Washington-with-a-gun, but it works. Michael Gambon and Frances de la Tour have a brilliant cameo, though they're upstaged by Tom Waits.
In short, if you like post-apocalyptic stories about gunslingers who walk the wastes, this is an excellent film to go see, speak-truth-thankee-sai. If you like spaghetti westerns, it's a must-see. If you like stories about faith and humanity and the danger of setting out on "a mission from God"... well, there's something here to chew on. Like O'Connor's stories, it's hard to say that there's a point to the story; mostly this is an interesting world to live in for a few hours, with some very scary and some very interesting people to meet.
The creosote burns black and thick
while snow it sizzles atop the beam
Each member once held something grand
a shed for hay, but grand all the same
Wind-blown summer brought it down
beams and pillars, structural collapse
So it came, the end of shed
no more to keep the hay
The lumber burns in cherry red
as calm breeze blows the orange tongues higher
All I can think to do is watch
and remember the summers long past.
Today I had a "word moment of the first kind." That's a term coined by The Tensor for what happens when you see or hear a word repeatedly in a loose enough context to divorce it from it's symbolic power.
When the word isn't tied directly to a subject or object, it can take on a bit of glamour--in English, we like to do this with French words. "Educated" people will do such things with words from all sorts of languages, usually whatever their favourite teacher or academic idol had as a first language. This is how you get philosophers talking about "Différance" seriously, when anyone not so enthralled by the eloquent lunacy of the words inventor would probably dismiss it as meaningless...
When we go past that initial moment of exhilaration, though, we sometimes find ourselves at a further level of abstraction--a word moment of the first kind. The cereal is eaten, the package has arrived, the beanie is out of the box, and the batteries were not included. Excessive repetition removes all shelter and companionship from the world of the word, leaving it a naked bundle of letters, alone and quite embarrassed.
Mostly we ignore this aspect of words; it doesn't make much sense to invoke a word moment on purpose. That would be a bit like shaving your cats. The cats are quite happy to retain their fur, and you don't really need the headache of sweeping it all up. But, on occasion, it might happen that a cat loses its fur, and we might occasionally laugh at such a circumstance. Word moments are like that, except that we don't feel so much pity for the words as we do the cats.
[To prove my point, here is a video of a shaved cat.]
"So, what," you might ask, "was the word you shaved today?"
Squeak.
Squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak.
squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak squeak
A fire broke out backstage in a theatre. The Clown came out to warn the public; they thought it was a joke and applauded. He repeated it; the acclaim was even greater. I think that's just how the world will come to an end: to general applause from wits who believe it's a joke.
--Søren Kierkegaard, “Diapsalmata” from Either/Or.
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