Scott’s gaze to me is exceedingly curious, as if he is expecting me at any moment to be pummelled. I wonder what Melanie’s words were preceeding the snapping of this photograph. I look very much as if it was not expected. That is, there is no poise or silliness in my demenor, a facet of my personality that manifests itself when some human being who is psychologically associated with me begins to aim the camera (and I am noticing their actions, of course).

The drink I quaff (not in the photograph, but surely within the immediate vacinity of the time at which it was taken) is (I assume) Dr. Pepper, as is Melanie’s. Scott’s is not to be seen. The props of the scene belong to Kerby Lane North and I’d like to think this was my reunion night with Scott.

The exact date escapes me, but I am sure I can dredge it up in my expansive archive of emails – mayhap I shall tomorrow evening.

The next day, our trio applied at MCI for telemarketing positions. Scott and I were hired and melanie spurned (it was good for her). My mind refuses to recall any other details of the evening, sadly, but Kerby Lane itself has a rich and varied history with me beginning in the summer (June?) of 1990 when I was introduced to the Kerby Lane Kerby Lane one by Neil and a few other humans I do not remember. I have not seen Neil in eight years. The only detail of my first Kerby Lane experience I can recall is Neil (or was it his brother?) letting me and everyone else taste his food as he raved madly about how magnificent it was. I believe the pick of the evening was enchiladas - mayhap California Enchiladas, one of my preferred foodstuffs.

So quicklyy I divert from the original subject in my shallow, daft, bland, superficial recount of a mostly forgotten evening. So I stop.

I now notice the age in my face. The smooth visage of youth is becoming creased by time’s unbridled clip. Experience, like the sand of a desert storm, weathers and erodes my skin. Every moment of my life has somehow left a stain on me. It is as if my sort putty-like youth has slowly hardened into the complex and moulded cast of a man, the slow but sure hands of time, my shaper.

Who is 0603323917???

Time is relentless. It will never stop, not even after my molecules are again in thedust of a nebula. The lines show clearly, standing out poignantly on Kevin Tritt’s forehead.

I wonder now if he has ever fixed the ducttaped window or if the rustle of Alaska’s autumn leaves still seeps through those imperfectly sealed cracks and into the kitchen where kevin stands. I think I purchased the teapot sitting on the stove ready to warm in its innards a tasty beverage for the inhabitants of that house on Lois Drive in Spenard.

I remember the night Theo, Brian and I sat on the counter the stove graces speaking of subsersive ways to destroy the pulp mill near Ketchikan. Bohužel, these things never came to any real fruition. Or is the whole fecundity of the event in the amusement of those involved at the moment? It drifts, like all others, into a haze, a blurring dust storm, just stinging sand which erodes the skin, withers the senses, eventually kills. And, of course, these moments are most likely not the ones others would pen into leatherbound books, but only for me.

A strange sensation has flooded into my consciousness, is slowly receding again. This is a reason to have children, after all. Magdalena! I take it back! I want beautiful children with you! They and possibly they alone would sit in wonder as they perused these pages. My concerned reader, perhaps you are not in solitude, after all. Everyone has made pretty radically horrific mistakes in life, surely, but I doubt many as bad as my choice to have a vasectomy. Now the complications involved in getting it reversed are immense, indeed.

I am trying to imagine Magdalena’s thoughts if she ever read this – especially concerning the reversal of my feelings involving so many things – most notibly children. Do you, my avid reader, think it would satisfy me? Or would it wear my mind into a malaise of stagnation like so many other things? I DO know that cutting this rope of peregrine that binds me is an appealing thought at the moment, the problem being that I also cut away, foolishly, the relationship that made me the most satisfied. Her. Magdalena. Damn you, Bob.

Isn’t this journal a facility I employ to further understand myself? Indeed. So I should heed my own advice instead of fogetting the many plaintive moments I spend talking to myself in a searing frenzy of loss and isolation. The familiarity that I crave spawns in the filling well of my mind, a spring of creativity and productiveness. Sadly, this recalls the song Back Door by Kansas wherein Steve Walsh describes succinctly the desire to share a number of beautiful things in life, events, thoughts, words, future – and then, in contrast, closes each verse with the line But are you leaving? Leaving by my back door? This terrifying sense of loss stabs another sabre of pain through my chest. The Back Door signifies to me escape, surreptitious disappearance. This you Steve talks about is dissing his dream of a beautiful life just about as much as humanly (or godly) possible. And guess what, my spellbound reader? I feel the exact same way about the situation with Magdalena. Sigh – repeated history. The lesson? Never fall in love? Have a hemispherectomy? Blah.

Black is in my head, annoying my restless neurons with how it relates to my situation. The craziness of last night haunts me like a receeding dream at which I try to clutch but recall only snatches that blur even further into grew forgetfulness. Another person with whom I was very close is gone and no amount of insolent kicking of my legs or wailing like a forsaken ghoul into the night will make her come back.

Two weeks ago today I told her goodbye and two days prior to now she said she cannot return to me. My tears have been in vain. All of the thoughts and words and smiles will fade into obscurity. Like with Melanie, Marcie or Kierstinn. The pain is fantastically intense like the cracking of my aorta that steals my life.

She cried for Pavla and Jeníček last night as I nearly choaked to death in our bed. She held me tight and kissed me again and again on my forehead and neck, much like a mother to a deleriously feverish child. We slept as close as we had when we were first in love, on fire with unquenchable passion. The fading flame that killed our love. That prompted me to foolishly kill our love. And now my mind cannot see my rationale, my list of reasons for departing because my emotional energy floods cross my corpus collosum, drowning all logic in its way indiscriminately.

It is much too terrifying to think of what I am losing, of the history that will atrophy, from the smiles she shown that at the moments they appeared, seemed like they could never die or pass inconsiderately into time.

Messages…

Where are you? Talk to me or I will evaporate. I am going to make pancakes tonight and have them with Univers Zero. -Hela.

Why am I not savoring my moments with her instead of pining over things already eroding? I am so caught up and fascinated with loss and the ensuing despair that I forget the moment and later regret the times I wasted. A very good example of this is Spring of 1996, my pain and emptiness wrought from Melanie’s absence, and the ridiculous events I drug myself and my friends through because I could not let go. So must I let go of Magdalena? If I do not, I shall drive her away for good, but I wonder what is the difference when she is now pursuing a life perpendicular to everything our relationship concerned.

This fact is the knife that twists in my heart.

It is scarily similar to Melanie’s actions (though certainly not as extremist): to discard all that related to our relationship. Gladly, Magdalena will not go to thisextreme end since much of what she has now in her life was the both of ours and she gladly still receives gifts from me with a genuine smile.

More messages from Hela…

Vesele Vanoce … Love, peace and poison for all.

Let me lick your fishy LAP TOP.

The greatest tragedy concerning Magdalena is the fact she is pushing deliberately her feelings for me away – that or supressing them with active (refusing to kiss me on the lips) and passive (not spending much time in our flat) actions.

I feel last night was the final one I shall spend in her arms. It is time for grieving and ultimately catharsis. In a way, these words are my catharsis whilst hers may be discarding her feelings for me or submerging herself in other people to help her forget. Diametrically opposite, baby. I am looking up at the surface of the water knowing I have not breath or the strength to make it there.

It has always been my method of dealing.

I have not changed. So, I must leave her alone or watch her be gone for good. What a silly paradox it is. Fuck. My fire in her eye has flickered and died. Soon another wil rekindle that flame. I want not to write of the ills we suffered as a couple. Here is where I clean my memories. No longer do I with THE HIGH VOLTAGE POWER SUPPLY. Trains encourage me to pen my ideas. I am saddened that I missed the train to Magdalena’s home. Now I may never see it.

Messages to Jeníček from me, now…

Letna, crying, thinking, writing and healing. Where are you?

Thank you, my friend, but I think I should be alone because of my pain :/

I am writing about Magda, of course.

I am writing words to a song for her. It will be the second song for her.

They are mostly the truth. Soon, I’ll be sitting in a café drinking tequila sunrises - a drink that will one day be nostalgic of yet another woman. Yet another, indeed.

My backslide into the relentless sycophant-like behaviour will ultimately alienate Magdalena. I must nip it in the buttock so to preserve and chance for reconcilliation. The sad truth, however, is that I am not sure I can unless I disappear for a while. The emotional flood overwhelms any sort of logical decision maing ability I have in this atrophying brain of mine.

My goal is to visit Katrin on my way to seeing Peter Hammill in Strasbourg 15 May. It is not far away, is it, silly penstroke? There is no reason to call my leg shaven if each pitiful pore exudes a thin strand of useles protein that captures small globules of dirt and sweat to stink up the interior of each of my three pairs of jeans. Extrapolating, I recall Magdalena telling me last night that she would go with me for new jeans today, but, when I spoke to her on the telephone, her resounding NO in reply to my dinner suggestion shows the hallmark of logic over emotions. Sure, the yesterday evening was tumultuous to an extreme degree for her, and the backlash is retreat into her cavern of non-bobitude, dismissing all thoughts of a tentative rendezvous even though in contradistinction, she is obviously in a state of bliss when we banter whilst strolling about Prague.

So what, my dear reader may ask, was the purpose of tagging that bit of prattle with extrapolating? Well, my resulting extrapolation from her actions is this: she will drift further and further until she is over me and it is safe to give me her time again. But then what would be the point since we are not again in passionate thrall? You see, it will depressingly just become what mine and Draža’s relationship is: two people living separate lives who see each other mayhap every two weeks for a cup of java and semi-interesting conversation. There seems to me, then, three sets of friendship or relationship types.

• Committed, which involves this capricious beast called love. In this sort, two people see each other constantly, share time and experiences.
• Folk with whom you go out for a beer every few evenings, to a cabin or camping on the weekends, etc. I always blurred quite convincingly the boundary between this and the first type.
• Friends who are considered (suprisingly) good, but who are only seen mayhap once in two weeks or less often. It is the most dismal of the trio, methinks. I want to run from it.

Fuck this.

Sunday night, Draža said something of great interest to me. I mentioned to her that I hope she and I can still be going on our cynical, scurrilous shindigs even after 30 more years! She replied that we can talk about our problems concerning whomever we happen to be with, about children, job, etc, and why we had never been to gether. Obviously, it was this last bit that hit me not quite unlike a rubber mallet to the testicles.

Poignant.

Not really even thinking about my initial attraction to her back in October, I plaintively overviewed the sad irony of such a future situation. Resigned to age and commitment, I wonder if we would have the nerve to simply run away with each other if our lives were both in a sad state of disrepair. Would it be a possibility to touch once again the spontaneous, impulsive irrationality of youth and tap its vein regardless of consequence? It is the story of my life, is it not? The second tequila sunrise is being slurped affectionately into my tum-tum here in the café that haunts none of my thoughts or dreams (yet).

It is time for Chapter “Bared Dogma” to come to a close before my chest cracks open from the pain in my heart, both physical and emotional. Oouh!

Left without a clever word to say. There is nothing but čekat now for Sweet Entropy to decide the fate of Magdalena and me. The putrescent past bubbles like bile up the esophogas of my mind and I recll my must too spotless (excepting for the smashed and well placed ZZ Top tape destroyed after Brandi left me) bedroom in Fort Stockton, Texas.

That song Endings comes to mind ruthlessly and, as always, I recall Sharon Weber’s visage along with the lyric endings are only places where all things begin. Ironic, because I really never had any beginning that was not imagined with Sharon Weber. Now it pertains in a much more telling capacity.

I left Magdalena.

Now I am hating paying the consequences of my act. Never before have I actually broken something off with a female without being extremist (cf. Marcie). I need another tequila. As Jeníček would say: It’s good for you. I am about as poetic as a moose in heat these days.

Find your muse, Bob! Find your muse! Where the fuck is that pesky muse, anyhow? Where the fuck, indeed.

Now I shall attempt to gleefully continue my work on James’s project, hopefully in a successful manner. Hawkwind spills out of the speakers and I am reminded of the particularly lengthy day during which I completed most all of the tournament management tool and left an imprint of the event in this elaborative mishmash of words. My mind is also on Magdalena, with whom I spent the majority of yesterday. I wonder if she will keep her resolve to leave Daryl. I hope. Why? Well, because I want her to be happy. Watching her play pool last night with that curious, bright smile and her shuffling feet made me laugh with pleasure despite myself.

It is time to actually perform the task I laid out for myself in the last entry, the construction of the whole page. Stay tuned, my ardent reader.

Well, quite a bit has changed since the last entry of “elaborations”. I shall probably fortunately not go into details, however. Morrissey croons above my head and struggles to raise my eyelids from their half-closed position, mostly unsuccessfully. My fingers are having quite a bit of trouble efficiently hitting the correct keys to form these tenuous words. No explanations necessary, I suppose. Mother I can feel the soil falling over my head. I must work on the software for James, the lines of broken perl code that he entrusted me to create. Responsibility is like a bane on my life right now and it is only because of my dreaded personality, the biting off of more than my rotten teeth can chew without dislodging themselves from my bleeding gums. So what must I do to finish these myriad of scripts for James? A list, I propose? First entry:

• Determine what has been done and what needs to be done.

The main fullview page consists of a backdrop and three floating frames. These frames are thus: the main navigation bar, which controls which major type of database “collection” becomes displayed in the content frame which lies below this navigation frame. to the right of the content frame is another navigation frame. its purpose is to switch between records in a certain database “collection”, to print a record, and perform a sundry of other record-specific duties. So my list becomes thus:

• Complete the layout and functionality of the main navigation frame.
• Complete the layout and functionality of the content frame.
• Complete the layout and functionality of the record navigation frame.

I shall now inspect the code I have written for the former, a script dubbed “menu.cgi”. And now I have inspected and, to the best of my abilities, made it work in a reasonable fashion. Now it is on to the second entry in my list, the content frame. For some bloody reason, this step seems like it shall be complex and annoying. My motivation is at the level of a squished slug baking in the noontime sun on one of the prestine sidewalks leading from building to building amid the Red West Microsoft campus. Oh, but is life not different now?

The content frame is in reletively good working order, though I have encountered a potential problem. James must change the pseudo-entries of the html created by the script to actual values taken cheerily from his database. So, I may have to modify this script to actually just write to a file, or have the navigation frame actually call a buttock which creates a file containing the html which would be directly interpolated into the content frame. Hmmmm… or something like that, surely. So, on to the record navigation thurk.

Nifty, the mechanism which writes to a file in /tmp when one clicks on one of the record navigation thurks is not working. You see, my dear and special reader, James must poll this file so as to know what the user wishes to do. When this file changes, a change to the content frame must be made. How the hell this will work I specifically know not, but I forsee nothing but complications and mayhap even failure. Damn bitchin’, honeybunch.

An aside. A new employee, Eva, is chatting with Kathy behind me. My desperate craziness is occluding my thoughts, coupled with a strangeness arising from sleep deprivation. I want to meet this new person, get to know her, show her the bizarre and beauteous world in which I live. I must restrain myself, however, because of the potential alienation factor. Actually, I should just take Chris’s potential advice and become obsessed with her. I’ve never been obsessed with someone named “Eva” before. Oh, wait.

Okay, now I must construct the whole of the page. ie, I must now add floating frames to the base page. It has just occured to me, though, that using real frames and complex tables may well be the best way to go, though redoing all of the html would be a pain the spleen and cause me to most likely whack the first person I see with a cubic light year of rubber cement. I shall attempt the floating frames option initially.

Actually, I am going to put this on pause for a bit of time whilst I thurk the Investor Insight rep file thinghie. Know, my thoughtful reader, that this is the best decision for the present.

What an amusing thing that i am doing at this moment! I am making a tape for Julie VanLoh, whom I have not seen nor heard from since October of 1996. I was the one who did not keep up the contact, however, and I am quite regretful of that. The one day we spent together meandering about Anchorage trying to find a church to attend stamped some sort of indelible impression on my mind. It keeps recurring in my dreams. Strange. What does her eidolon mean to me? “Tea for One” pours into my wax-laden ear sockets to bathe me with some semblance of a nostalgia which is mostly conjured from the neurotic tendencies in my bedraggled brain. It should have been “The Beating of the Bedraggled Brain”. Screw the heart. It’s just a workhorse with no more mind than Jeff’s ubiquitous pumpjack.

“A past that lives if only for the present,” croons Peter Hammill. Why am I so rife with nostalgia? What is that fleeting yet perpetual feeling which permeates my being when I am in contentment? Or is it this which is actually the source of contentment? Without it shall I be lost in a terrifying maze of meaninglessness? A tenet of mine has always been the search for meaning in my life, in others’ lives, in everything around me, to connect and construct from the scattered debris of sensory input a well woven tapestry, beautiful to the eye, satisfying to the mind. Mayhap nostalgia is my way of weaving the past into the present, gathering up all of the loose strings which hiss & strike at me like vipers. If that is who I am, then I believe, at this point in my life, I have chosen to live with it; moreover, I have encouraged it to flourish. Good for me. I finally accept at least a part of who I am. Is it true? I cannot escape from my personality any more than I can flee from my skin.

I merely watch Alan Alda on the TV as Brynn brushes her teeth - I will come to bed … “Bob”. “Yeah”. “I love you”. “I love you, too, nut” - I am not a very good writer. Brynn is so scared. The last episode of Mash - forensics - Kevin Costner & sadness. The little covers grope for my hand as I clutch desperately for my lill fish who is in need whilst I sit plaintively on this bed and wish I could show all the world what pernicious angst I have broiling inside.

But hey - the curls on the head of my littlest fiwsh dominate all which may try to intrude on their beauty. I love you, Brynn. These words, though scratched incoherently - prove, by seminal means that turly there is a power who guides us purposely together. Sad … those who love are sad.

Brynn: It’s a sad (illegible) … so sad I want (illegible). I (illegible) in the (illegible) - wary(?) I (illegible…) To incohere (?) it. I am naked in your bedclothes (illegible). Eyes salty (?) and labia ready. You’re drunk, too - (illegible) does it matter? We’re all weak.

You are correct. We’re all weak!

WEAK

I am the storm!

The nose is the same width as the eye. It rests from the eyes to the mouth -

There is no inspiration in frustration.

I seem to be making a habit of writing when I traverse to the buzzing silence of the Microsoft cafeteria - if you can call two days in a row a habit, that is. I have a terrible and curious dilemma which haunts me. It is etched in yesterday’s entry and emoted in this day’s. Heh. I hate my job. I become increasingly disillusioned with it day by day by day by day as I sit listless before a wealth of information which gnaws at me like enplagued rats from the surface of my CRT. There is no escape because I have to persist - persist until Brynn and I have the monetary ability to depart from this hellish locale (Seattle) forever. I want to leave now, however - at least from Microsoft. I wish for music to sate my life with its nescient yet transfixing gleam. Heh. Linguistics also grips me with a supurb fascination. Mayhap a job in the Czech Republic teaching to youngsters the tongue of my heritage will be a rewarding (yet challenging) experience. Now all that surrounds me is a haze of stagnation, though - hours spent drowning in a sea of syntactic semicolons which bound statements in a Java-esque mundanity. The computer industry is a joke. The computer gaming industry is the epitome of that joke - a silly hoax to cloy the curious public with idle anonymity. What a fucking farce!

At one point in my life it seemed I had grandiose schemes which could ensnare the universe with their captivating, creative rigor. Now I am flaccid and live in a routine which leaves my back aching in the forlorn morning if it is not (to a “T”) followed. What has snuffed the spark of brilliance which guided me from cavern to cavern? Now I am funbling in the darkness, almost ready to resign myself to an uncomfortable outcropping on which I may eternally rest. Oh woe is me. Heh. ’sgitabeer!

At this second I am proud that I have again begun to pour my tenuous (not turgid) thoughts onto paper. A life unrecorded is one discarded (cf. “The Ballad of the American Dreamer”). I miss Lee and his extremist brilliance. He simply could not compromise - budge - let his sharpened spires be blunted to gently rolling hills. I envy him for that. I, too, should not lose my extremist nature. For it is this portion of the psychotic human psyche that gives the alluring brilliance, to the drive to create, the will to bring into being what was once not even limpid energy. Still - one may drive oneself insane in the process. Again, take Lee as an example, eh? It is the price to be paid. I do not want to lose the craziness, the piercing edges of caustic will. They wil not succumb to the voices of “so called reason”. No fucking way, man.

I really ought to use the writings in my journals as the raw materials for prose / poetry / lyrics. That is a direct isomorphism from the way King Crimson is using its ProjeKcts to research possibilities for new static material.

I am beginning to have serious ethical problems with working for this giant omnivorous corporation: Microsoft. What a fucking ironic name! In my meeting this very morning, Scott laughingly placed “The Zone” in an extremist competative position with cyber-active feet poised to smash flat its peers who lurk incautiously underneath. Ostensibly, we have a competitor dubbed “Heat” (about which I know absolutely nothing other than the just stated) who has a great deal of “momentum” and a peak user base of 300+. Funny - The Zone has a peak of 4000+ users. It never, actually even drops below one thousand at any given time. Still, Scott chuckles (his potbelly wiggles grotesquely in tandem) and jokes of smashing Heat completely out of existence. Is this imagination-spawning competition or war Is the end a greater knowledge base with a diverse and colourful offering of choice or the annihilation of all but one - the winner? Metaphors drawn - parallels with mayhap Nazi Germany can easily be seen. Why must things be so extreme and potentially deadly? The very game in which I am now intensely interested has the ultimate goal of the obliteration or assimilation of all but one or into one, respectively. That is an interesting full circle! It is a case of the scaly snake swallowing its twitching tail, eh?

Assimilation might be the peaceful take over Microsoft performs to company after company, homoganizing - maybe creating an easy usability standard but at the same time washing out the colours with its harsh, bleaching, all consuming light, leaving a sad, palling grew. So, so - sad, eh? Yes.

Assimilation might also be the end of diversification by the countries of the EU merging and living in peace, eventually blurring the bounds of community and world culture. The internet is a good extensive metaphor of this. Let everyone touch and interfere with everyone else and the sharp corners of culture and communication are finally dulled so that confusion is cancelled. But the beauty of a heterogeneous world is also destroyed. It saddens me to think that the human race may reach this “goal”. Unity, peace and harmony recalls the equilibrium of a stagnant pond, or of a universe consisting of only uniform energy. I, for one, do not want to sing only Eb for the remainder of my lifetime, or for even 45 minutes (as Brynn claimed that Kenny G did - albiet on his saxophone).

At the other end of the spectrum, and oddly at the same position, is annihilation of all save one. This seems, with its surreptitious and even bullying tactics, the stand that this grand corporation for which I work seems to be taking. Wipe out Heat and let The Zone rule the gaming world, period. Microsoft does not want competition. It wants supremacy with all other decimated or in a state of servitude. Here am I, on the periphery, in the thick? Hell, homogenity will be the end if either path is trodden. There must be a way to perpetuate diversification, the beauty of pockets of isolated culture, untouched by the outside except for their brief blinks of dreaming cities of existential passion. The human race has created a spectrum of intense beauty, of colour - all who see this rainbow as a bland strip of white light is are missing … missing … a soul?

“Decewmbewr Sevow, 1997”

John Lennon croons in my ears ironically whilst little pictures play about the video screen: the starting strains of “The Lost World.” That is all I have to say right now.

Brynn: Well, I HAVE something to say DAMMIT! RORWR! “The Lost World” is an abysmal horrible stupid movie, & Jeff Goldblum’s sardonic self-depreciation is its sole merit. I frown.

Brynn only likes artly moves, so there!

Brynn: Yeah, like “Desperately Seeking Susan.”

Yeah! Squish the little bastard until it is juicy and emits little squeaks!

Brynn: I draw hands not. Bob needs to be drunk again.

The “I want Tea” Page.

Brynn:

What, oh _what_, is my greater wish?
A hot cup o' tea, or a littlest squish?
Scones and jam!
Crumpets!
And sandwiches small!
A glass for our wine and a good time for all!
Bob chews his nails in a trés hungry tic
I plot for a prance to the bathroom, quite quick!

Lumpy, soft and does smell like spice
Milky, sweet but won't repel lice
No biscuits, gravy
Or McGreasy ick
For me to slurp and gargle and lick
My nails are bloody and stink of pus
So give me my tea so I will not fuss

Poetry sucks. Poets should be cut into small pieces and fed to little starving children who prefer oreos. One could even spread cream filling between their skin and their puny, feeble bones and crunch, crunch, crunch away. It is too easy to be trapped into introspection and creating overwrought soliloquies of unrhymed emotive dribble. There is that line which is difficult to discover, the Rubicon for the brave. This is why the “poetry” that graces the stupid metro busses in Seattle strikes me as very fake, pretentious and annoying. I like either silly, smiley light hearted verse as above or well thought out phrases which aren’t written to impress, but to address. I bitch and moan. Loyal would call me negative and say that he didn’t want to be around it - that he didn’t need it. He is a poor, closed minded fool in this respect. My opinion, of course.

Brynn: Um, I still want tea … tea like the widow’s love-wrought tears as she whispers, WHISPERS, against the tumultuous surface of the lover’s green ocean. Ohhhh.

I love my nut because she is so sarcastic. :) Oh, nut.

Brynn: Oh NUT! No, nut!

The morning after seeing ProjeKct One, London, England.

It is damn fine to own a new, justifiably beautiful journal - an anti-inhibitor of writing, a motivational force. I am pulled by the magnetism of hundreds of beckoning blank pages whose pull is only slightly sated by each cursory penstroke. The leather is aesthetic but cloying in a sense, telling me that surface beauty has an attraction all its own. Mayhap it is a means to an end, a doorway - a portal and that is all - a jolting telephone jangle which is the misty melancholy of life’s maudlin moments. Or something like that. Yup. Now I shall shower.

Brynn: I write about my overwrought, embarrassing emotions, coupled with the idiotic presence of those around me… & Bob scribes of … leather. Sometimes I believe that you love me, muffin. :)

The Principle of Sufficient Reason states (quite matter of factly) that there must be an explanation for:

• the existence of any being.
• any positive fact.

A very spiffy point that Melanie made in her philosophy paper that I have just received via the ubiquitous postal service is that this principle is silly in that the first part generalizes out to the second. That is, the actual existence of a ‘being’ is, in fact (no pun intended), a ‘positive fact’. Perhaps they (it’s those ‘they’ again), when idea-fying this principle, had in mind to separate ‘beings’ from ‘ideas’. The first part of the principle would encapsule organic things, or, put better, things that are tangible. The second part speaks of ideas and/or theories created by sentient beings which are agreed on as ‘facts’. I suppose the first part would include things such as ‘cats’ and ‘dirt’ and the second, things such as ‘the theory of gravitation’ and ‘the recipe for broccoli-cheese quiche’. Personally, I prefer abstracting things out the way Melanie did and including the whole shabang in one big wallop… ie, making ‘beings’ part of the whole ‘positive fact’ clique.

The purpose of Melanie’s paper was to discuss and give her opinions and reasons for agreeing or disagreeing with the ‘cosmological argument for the existence of that God guy (or gal since I decided this last weekend that Jenn was quite a worthy God).’ The title of her paper is ‘The Failure of the Cosmological Argument through the Misapplication of the Principle of Sufficient Reason.’ I believe that from the title it is pointedly obvious which side she takes in relation to supporting or disparaging the argument.

The un-fun part of technical writing is upon me and, since it is a precursor to the fun part, I am only nigh-hesitant to plunge in. Strangely (well, okay, not ‘strangely’ at all, but I’ll just choose to call that word an expletive since I really do not wish to replace it with a large, black scribble), I want to skip this part and delve into my little nuances I scheme surronding the existence of dependent beings (just because it festers, frolicks, pushes its way to the forefront of my mind like a spoiled kid in the lunch line on the first day of kindergarden). BUT - I am meandering.

The cosmological argument consists of two premises and a very pretentious conclusion.

Premise Uno: Every being that exists or ever did exist is either a dependent being or a self-existent being.

Premise Zwei: Not every being can be a dependent being.

Therefore: There exists a self-existent being.

Okay… I’m really not here to re-elaborate the failing argument or to defend any particular point of view, but, instead, as always, to skip aside onto a path of my own and record the interesting tales my mind spun during and after perusing Melanie’s paper. The cosmological argument, in short, was garroted and drowned in its own blood by Melanie’s paper. She traipsed through a well constructed destruction of the argument then forged ahead on her own by redefining the principle of sufficient reason and then re-supporting the first premise of the argument. Basically, the argument is bullshit because it doesn’t consider a very important point of view. Or, it is not if you redefine the word ‘being’. Taking it for granted that the principle of sufficient reason is true (the new, happy, altered one Melanie came up with), we have this very large tree of things: the buds, highest branches, and leaves are the most current ‘positive facts’ or ‘beings’, all spawned in some way from the branches below them. The trunk that supports these myriad of facts is this ‘God’ that the cosmological argument deduces (self-existent being… same thing). Back to the important point of view that the argument discards… (actually, I have no way of knowing if this point of view was overlooked, discarded or whatnot since I do not know when the cosmological argument was created. If it was formulated before Darwin came along, then this elision may be understandable). Instead of a God, the trunk of this very large tree of beings [positive facts] could be, simply, the unknown beginning of the universe (I use ‘beginning’ loosely here since the current theories speculate on an endless cycle of previous universes which expand and contract over and over; so, I’ll specify to the inception of the universe in which I exist at this particular moment and hope there is no argument over semantics). Furthermore, the first branches could represent the swirling gasses that formed galaxies, then, splitting more and more into solar systems, planets, inorganic compounds that finally, by some act of chemical oddity, became organic, etc, etc. Amoeba to hydra to barnacle to mollusk … … to reptile to mammal to primate to human.

Everything that ‘is’ is dependent on something that has existed. By no means does this imply a supreme being, as Melanie states in her paper and I imply above. She concluded with some nice comments about humans and their ability to concoct scenarios that are almost always time and distance sensitive (well, she didn’t actually say that, but that is what I concocted from her statements of humans’ limited understanding and frightened flights from endlessness). Her last sentence rings very true and meshed nicely with much that I have written in this already yellowing journal. When understanding is paused and the wall is too high to breach, it is easier to create an explanation from nothing, no matter how silly or fanciful, than to admit, “wow, you know guys, I don’t think we have the ability, technology, or prowess to grasp this!” Okay… now it’s the right brain’s turn to belittle the left! Nah - maybe tomorrow.