Long flaxen hair
lifted from the boxes of christmas
past, each bundle put on the tree
the golden strands connecting
me to my past self,
like those telephones of cups
and string, practicing telepathy.
And I found out something of great
importance from my snot-nosed self:
you see Nana had a cyclops dog
with one creepy eye that would stare at you
like one of the fates,
gasping and growling with prescience
and asthma, and I was terrified
of this omen-bringer.
but one day I put my ear close to hear
what the ancient oracle had to say,
she whispered to me in rough iron words:
"Speckled adder and ebony crow
you will walk a path where none else go,
through skeletons wet with mourning dew,
you will become what you never wanted to."
Showing posts with label uncertainty. Show all posts
Showing posts with label uncertainty. Show all posts
Monday, November 15, 2010
Friday, October 29, 2010
Defining Poem
I have decided that I want to make a poem describing why I chose "Piercing the Madness" as the name of my Plog (poem blog).
"Do we really inhabit the same reality?"
I wonder with minds eye wandering through mists.
Peering through cold clouded glass,
fogged by my existence, and yours,
eyes searching the blizzard for more
than the walls of white
flakes viciously hurling themselves:
kamikazes with terrible purpose.
Yet the swirling day turns to the
frosted, teeming night,
The vigil of the virgins,
waiting for a sign, for a word, a glimpse.
Perhaps I can see someday,
perhaps I will pierce the madness.
theme song:
ps do not watch the video it is too silly and dumb
"Do we really inhabit the same reality?"
I wonder with minds eye wandering through mists.
Peering through cold clouded glass,
fogged by my existence, and yours,
eyes searching the blizzard for more
than the walls of white
flakes viciously hurling themselves:
kamikazes with terrible purpose.
Yet the swirling day turns to the
frosted, teeming night,
The vigil of the virgins,
waiting for a sign, for a word, a glimpse.
Perhaps I can see someday,
perhaps I will pierce the madness.
theme song:
ps do not watch the video it is too silly and dumb
Saturday, October 16, 2010
Blue Moons
Naked words you sent to me
late that night, fluttering
over the garden thorns:
roses, rocks, and the wind
gently tossed them through the
consuming silver ether.
And they landed, finally, at my feet.
Yet I had nowhere to put them,
insecurity and indecision always stalling,
futures lost and found, pasts tinted with knowledge.
But you are sitting there,
beginning to doubt reciprocation.
Maybe the words will come, someday.
I do not know about the video but the music is amazing, so listen
late that night, fluttering
over the garden thorns:
roses, rocks, and the wind
gently tossed them through the
consuming silver ether.
And they landed, finally, at my feet.
Yet I had nowhere to put them,
insecurity and indecision always stalling,
futures lost and found, pasts tinted with knowledge.
But you are sitting there,
beginning to doubt reciprocation.
Maybe the words will come, someday.
I do not know about the video but the music is amazing, so listen
Friday, September 3, 2010
The Problems of Inductive Reasoning
All science and knowledge of the world to this point has come from trust in inductive reasoning. If an apple falls in a forest does it make a sound? Well of course it does, it would have to violate many principles of physics not to, but where did these principles of physics come from? What is gravity? We know that it must be, but how and why does it work? Well we have documented gravity, does innumerable tests to verify that it indeed exists and how it relates to mass, but we really do not know what it is. It acts exactly like acceleration in every possible instance (which provides for interesting effects, but that is another rant), but it is tied to mass in some way.
Anyways it would not be so unusual (from a purely theoretical point of view) for gravity to reverse, to push instead of pull, and there would be no explanation for it. But from a human standpoint that would be unusual to say the least. Everything we have done, ever, has been with gravity acting a certain way, it would go against all expectations. Yet can we say that this instance will never happen? is it possible for it to happen? sure, it is possible, inexplicable but possible, so how can we make universal laws like gravity or conservation of matter (which is incorrect) from given input?
Our whole idea of how physics and the universe works has been smashed and rearranged several times over so how can we say with confidence that this is how the world works when we have thought that many times before and been wrong? Einstein destroyed Newtonian physics by introducing the idea that energy was proportional to mass, that energy had weight.
The traditional answer is that we perform many many accurate tests and make a rule of it if it passed every test, pretend that there is no way this rule could be broken, and if it was broken, then that just becomes part of the rule, an exception, or a redefinition of the rule. But the truth is that we do not "know" and we cannot "know" but we can estimate with certain amount of certainty.
Everything lies in probabilities, they can explain both why something happened and why it did not in a similar case. They allow for all circumstances, thus effectively telling nothing about what will happen in a given case, just because something is likely to happen does not mean it will.
What I am trying to say is that we can know nothing of what happens in the future, no matter how likely something is, it is no guarantee.
That is why I expect to find my bike has been stolen every time I look for it, why I expect to never see my friends and loved ones again when they leave for a while (or when I leave for a while). I dont expect for others to care about me or what I think. I am happy when I am wrong, but I still have this sinking feeling whenever I look for my bike, or I am about to see my family. Like it is too good to be true.
Monday, August 9, 2010
Fitting-in, Between the Cracks
Count the molecules on the floor
count the atoms in liquids
double that irrelevant number
that is the number of cracks
between which I fall,
why struggle for connection,
for interaction, when each step
is a realization of how weak these bonds are.
Yet I cannot cut them all,
though the thought of dissolution
to dust, can be so pleasant sometimes,
No mourners, just the world
silently doing what it always has.
count the atoms in liquids
double that irrelevant number
that is the number of cracks
between which I fall,
why struggle for connection,
for interaction, when each step
is a realization of how weak these bonds are.
Yet I cannot cut them all,
though the thought of dissolution
to dust, can be so pleasant sometimes,
No mourners, just the world
silently doing what it always has.
Friday, July 23, 2010
Sharp Puzzles poem and Uncertainty rant
Sharp Puzzles
Dice have razor edges,
every roulette game is russian.
The world is full of butterflies
and their fatal affects;
the sigh, the batting of the eye,
But the reaper whirlwind strips them of facade.
Yet we still sow,
mending the leftovers,
creating frankenstein futures
from fractured glass pasts,
only to realize we cannot find
the heart of the situation,
cannot find the purpose to shards,
but that is all we have left.
I want to be able to sing this to a woman some day...
Uncertainty and unpredictability are the most dangerous things in this world, yet they are inevitable as long as we are reliant on our senses and on outside information. The more unpredictable something is, the more dangerous. Things that seem harmless, like food, water, air can become deadly once unknown agents are introduced. The more variables that can go wrong, the more variables that will go wrong.
That is one thing that fascinates me about engineering, we say a car is a lemon if it needs a major repair 2 or 3 years after being "brand new" yet think about a car. How many parts does a car have that are absolutely necessary to functioning properly? hundreds? thousands? Most cars runs on EXPLOSIONS for gods sake! Controlled, but still one of the most seemingly unpredictable expressions of energy one can think of. The energy from those explosions are transferred to the wheels through gears and shafts and whatnot, each has to withstand various forces in various directions at various temperatures and fit to extremely tight tolerances. I find it amazing that a car can go hundreds of miles without wearing itself out, or spontaneously combusting, much more thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even 1 million miles http://autos.aol.com/article/million-mile-car-donated-to-museum/ (with luck and proper care)
so you can usually be certain that your car will work when you need it
Computers have billions of gates and parts that control it and work together to do extremely complicated tasks through logic and physics. It can calculate and store information using electrical charges for heavens sake. It can turn mere numbers into words and colors and movement and shading and physics. This is how I feel when I think about it too much: http://xkcd.com/676/ and the most amazing part is that they work, almost always, the number of defective computers is very low despite that they rely on both hardware and software to allow them to run. Now we even have software that learns, how amazing is that? Most of us are certain that our computer will turn on and work no matter what (that is if you have a mac lol).
Though my life is governed by the laws of physics (and chemistry, a subset of physics) it is not predictable at all. All is uncertainty, and frankly I dislike uncertainty, I have a tendency to paralyze myself until I am certain, I delay making decisions until I have sufficient information. But I do not have the time nor the information to see what is next, and I do not know when it will come. So what the hell do I do now?
Dice have razor edges,
every roulette game is russian.
The world is full of butterflies
and their fatal affects;
the sigh, the batting of the eye,
But the reaper whirlwind strips them of facade.
Yet we still sow,
mending the leftovers,
creating frankenstein futures
from fractured glass pasts,
only to realize we cannot find
the heart of the situation,
cannot find the purpose to shards,
but that is all we have left.
I want to be able to sing this to a woman some day...
Uncertainty and unpredictability are the most dangerous things in this world, yet they are inevitable as long as we are reliant on our senses and on outside information. The more unpredictable something is, the more dangerous. Things that seem harmless, like food, water, air can become deadly once unknown agents are introduced. The more variables that can go wrong, the more variables that will go wrong.
That is one thing that fascinates me about engineering, we say a car is a lemon if it needs a major repair 2 or 3 years after being "brand new" yet think about a car. How many parts does a car have that are absolutely necessary to functioning properly? hundreds? thousands? Most cars runs on EXPLOSIONS for gods sake! Controlled, but still one of the most seemingly unpredictable expressions of energy one can think of. The energy from those explosions are transferred to the wheels through gears and shafts and whatnot, each has to withstand various forces in various directions at various temperatures and fit to extremely tight tolerances. I find it amazing that a car can go hundreds of miles without wearing itself out, or spontaneously combusting, much more thousands, hundreds of thousands, and even 1 million miles http://autos.aol.com/article/million-mile-car-donated-to-museum/ (with luck and proper care)
so you can usually be certain that your car will work when you need it
Computers have billions of gates and parts that control it and work together to do extremely complicated tasks through logic and physics. It can calculate and store information using electrical charges for heavens sake. It can turn mere numbers into words and colors and movement and shading and physics. This is how I feel when I think about it too much: http://xkcd.com/676/ and the most amazing part is that they work, almost always, the number of defective computers is very low despite that they rely on both hardware and software to allow them to run. Now we even have software that learns, how amazing is that? Most of us are certain that our computer will turn on and work no matter what (that is if you have a mac lol).
Though my life is governed by the laws of physics (and chemistry, a subset of physics) it is not predictable at all. All is uncertainty, and frankly I dislike uncertainty, I have a tendency to paralyze myself until I am certain, I delay making decisions until I have sufficient information. But I do not have the time nor the information to see what is next, and I do not know when it will come. So what the hell do I do now?
Tuesday, July 20, 2010
First a Poem, then a rant explaining my thoughts while writing the poem
He has a crystal globe
with a texture like diamonds
light liquid across it's surface, alive
But when I see the hollow, translucent world,
I can only imagine it in freefall,
and shattering, the shards cutting us all.
but lets enjoy it now, shall we?
dance with me moon, around the glass
then around the cosmic light bulb,
here spin me more, let me go
let me fall where I may.
I like to think of myself as an optimistic pessimist, I was raised expecting the future to only be worse than the past, which is inevitable if one believes an epic apocalypse is coming soon and there is nothing you can do to delay it a single second. It kind of makes you feel helpless, just a little. To be honest, when I was in elementary school I did not expect to make it to high school before it came, much less college, much less 3 years into college.
Though once I got out of high school I had some hope (if that is what you could call it, disappointment was in there too) that I would make it to a good career before any of that happened, and now I am lost. Is this the stereotypical time to be lost? I thought it was always in the mid-life crisis- some decently well off 40 year old starts wondering when his life became so boring, so he fills it with stuff he bought using his kids college fund or something like that.
At my age you are either supposed to be a starry-eyed future professional or someone who doesnt give a @!#$. I care about my future, it wont work itself out, waiting will only allow me to sink deeper in this quicksand, but I dont know what direction to go, and frankly I am pissed at myself for not finding something I can see myself doing for any number of years. When I see those older than me, those who have gone through tougher times than I, I feel like a preteen fussing about unimportant crap.
Take my uncle for example, he is a lawyer working adoption cases (the best line of work as a lawyer I am sure). He has a fairly large victorian-style house on the hillside of El Cajon, it is not La Jolla, but it is pretty nice. He has a newish benz, my aunt has a nice BMW. He is not "rich" per se but he is not lacking, he does very well for himself and his family.
He never got through high school geometry. He just could not do math, he was decent at english and the writing related subjects, but not math. After high school did he go to USC or UCSD or USD or some other college, no, he went to community college for a while, he had a band (taught himself guitar, cannot read music notes) met the beatles (for real, he has a pic of him and the beatles). But he came to a point in his life where he wanted a family, and he wanted to be able to provide for his family, so he went to a dinky law school in SD (they let in anyone who could pay). He obviously went through it and passed the BAR and became an independent lawyer with a friend as his partner, and the rest is history.
There are so many alternate possibilities where it could have gone so much worse.
Or my dad, he did decent in high school, played football, didnt really sweat over his grades, B's and C's, went to college for film, bicycled alot. but he never got his diploma because he missed the last month of college to film the race across america (bicycle race). Answered an ad in the paper for a alarm company start up, just him and three other guys working from the bed of a truck, the company eventually took off, they made fortune 500 two years in a row, my dad was a partial owner. Sometime after that he out and out quit. He decided to go into ministry, went to the school of ministry. He ended up just having side jobs while going back through college and through the school of evangelism, the time spent in those schools was around 7 years, now he is a full time pastor in a very small church.
My point is, you never know where life will go, and sometimes it feels useless to plan, because your plans rarely work out. That saying, "failing to plan is planning to fail" is really trite yet really true, even if we have no idea what we are getting ourselves into, or what direction we are going, we have to go in SOME direction, but it may not be the right one.
in case you havent noticed, this rant has been the subject of MANY of my poems, that is why I like poems better, they are easier to swallow (that is what she said) than rants.
with a texture like diamonds
light liquid across it's surface, alive
But when I see the hollow, translucent world,
I can only imagine it in freefall,
and shattering, the shards cutting us all.
but lets enjoy it now, shall we?
dance with me moon, around the glass
then around the cosmic light bulb,
here spin me more, let me go
let me fall where I may.
I like to think of myself as an optimistic pessimist, I was raised expecting the future to only be worse than the past, which is inevitable if one believes an epic apocalypse is coming soon and there is nothing you can do to delay it a single second. It kind of makes you feel helpless, just a little. To be honest, when I was in elementary school I did not expect to make it to high school before it came, much less college, much less 3 years into college.
Though once I got out of high school I had some hope (if that is what you could call it, disappointment was in there too) that I would make it to a good career before any of that happened, and now I am lost. Is this the stereotypical time to be lost? I thought it was always in the mid-life crisis- some decently well off 40 year old starts wondering when his life became so boring, so he fills it with stuff he bought using his kids college fund or something like that.
At my age you are either supposed to be a starry-eyed future professional or someone who doesnt give a @!#$. I care about my future, it wont work itself out, waiting will only allow me to sink deeper in this quicksand, but I dont know what direction to go, and frankly I am pissed at myself for not finding something I can see myself doing for any number of years. When I see those older than me, those who have gone through tougher times than I, I feel like a preteen fussing about unimportant crap.
Take my uncle for example, he is a lawyer working adoption cases (the best line of work as a lawyer I am sure). He has a fairly large victorian-style house on the hillside of El Cajon, it is not La Jolla, but it is pretty nice. He has a newish benz, my aunt has a nice BMW. He is not "rich" per se but he is not lacking, he does very well for himself and his family.
He never got through high school geometry. He just could not do math, he was decent at english and the writing related subjects, but not math. After high school did he go to USC or UCSD or USD or some other college, no, he went to community college for a while, he had a band (taught himself guitar, cannot read music notes) met the beatles (for real, he has a pic of him and the beatles). But he came to a point in his life where he wanted a family, and he wanted to be able to provide for his family, so he went to a dinky law school in SD (they let in anyone who could pay). He obviously went through it and passed the BAR and became an independent lawyer with a friend as his partner, and the rest is history.
There are so many alternate possibilities where it could have gone so much worse.
Or my dad, he did decent in high school, played football, didnt really sweat over his grades, B's and C's, went to college for film, bicycled alot. but he never got his diploma because he missed the last month of college to film the race across america (bicycle race). Answered an ad in the paper for a alarm company start up, just him and three other guys working from the bed of a truck, the company eventually took off, they made fortune 500 two years in a row, my dad was a partial owner. Sometime after that he out and out quit. He decided to go into ministry, went to the school of ministry. He ended up just having side jobs while going back through college and through the school of evangelism, the time spent in those schools was around 7 years, now he is a full time pastor in a very small church.
My point is, you never know where life will go, and sometimes it feels useless to plan, because your plans rarely work out. That saying, "failing to plan is planning to fail" is really trite yet really true, even if we have no idea what we are getting ourselves into, or what direction we are going, we have to go in SOME direction, but it may not be the right one.
in case you havent noticed, this rant has been the subject of MANY of my poems, that is why I like poems better, they are easier to swallow (that is what she said) than rants.
Wednesday, July 7, 2010
Anatomy of a Wave
cutting through glass and slicing through liquid,
it pushes back and bobs, choppy as asphalt potholes,
silky as lonely bedsheets,
when everything comes crashing down,
the floor curls and throws you beneath itself
drowning, breathless, loveless you try to gain your bearing,
pushing to find the surface, hope abides in each stroke,
and disappointment in each step, so you open your eyes.
Feel the stinging truth, blind as the day you were born,
but somehow there is light, color, meaning in struggle,
so you follow your face, whatever way it is turned
gasp choke cramp air explodes into your mind,
the ominous sky appears, but futures are never assured,
only desired.
it pushes back and bobs, choppy as asphalt potholes,
silky as lonely bedsheets,
when everything comes crashing down,
the floor curls and throws you beneath itself
drowning, breathless, loveless you try to gain your bearing,
pushing to find the surface, hope abides in each stroke,
and disappointment in each step, so you open your eyes.
Feel the stinging truth, blind as the day you were born,
but somehow there is light, color, meaning in struggle,
so you follow your face, whatever way it is turned
gasp choke cramp air explodes into your mind,
the ominous sky appears, but futures are never assured,
only desired.
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