Mental Ramblings

Who am I? Or, maybe the better question might be, what am I? It's a question (in its various forms) I have asked myself most of my life. It is both philosophical and practical in nature, that question.

Currently, I am 63. But that is my chronological age, based upon the knowledge of the year of my birth. Somewhere in my psyche, I am only 19. Alice Cooper said it this way...

Lines form on my face and hands
Lines form from the ups and downs
I'm in the middle without any plans
I'm a boy and I'm a man

The song didn't come out until I was 24 or 25, though. But it hit me then. I was 19 when I entered the Navy. Emotionally, I stopped aging at that point. I hung onto 19 somewhere deep inside my brain. I don't think I was alone in doing that because I saw a number of people leave the military and try to return to the same point in their lives that existed when they entered. They eventually moved on, I think, or at least appeared to.

I tried. I got married, I had a son, I stuck with a job. I tried to build a man's identity. But I was never really comfortable with it. Like Peter Pan, I never wanted to grow up. So I have resisted it all my life.

Over time, I have become convinced that each of us is several "people." These "people" are important points in our lives. When around my father, I never felt more than 10 years old, sometimes only 5. It was difficult for me when I had to become almost his guardian, to look after his finances, make decisions for him (and my mother) when he became unable to.

My father was a tall man, 6'4", and he had towered over me until I was 16 and started to grow rapidly. Even then, I only reached 5'11" so he was still significantly taller. But in my mind, all my life, he towered over me as he did when I was 5 when he was more than twice my height.

With my mother I was "older", late teens maybe, protective of her. That stayed with me. It helped me when we, Faye and I, became her primary caregivers as her Alzheimer's advanced. But I still wasn't quite grown up, still not yet a Man.

I appear to be having a philosophical week...

A Brief Moment in Time

I muse about time now and then (I almost wrote "from time to time"). What is it? Does it even exist? Do we move through it or is it like a current in which we are swept along?

Some say, and I agree, that we live in a 4 dimensional universe. The 1st dimension being time. Because, without time, can anything exist?

I also muse that things do not happen as we perceive them. They happen because we recall them. What we call the present doesn't actually exist. It is the future and then it is the past. There is no now.

There is a puzzle, an enigma, which is expressed as a question:

Where is the man when he jumps from the window?

If you answer "on the ledge" then you are wrong because that is before he jumped.
If you answer "in the air" then you are wrong because that is after he jumped.

An event happens outside of time. We know it happened or that it is about to happen but that is all. The now, the present, must exist between these two but it cannot be observed. In the time it takes to record it in our brains, it has become the past. If it cannot be observed, does it exist?

Or is it that only the present exists and that past and future are illusions? Mere memories and suppositions.

Pssst! Did you hear about...

Whenever I am at a loss for ideas (which, sadly, is all too often), I start perusing headlines. In other words, I look at someone else's ideas about what is important.

Now, we all know about Tiger's self-inflicted marital woes. We love gossip, don't we? Especially about the rich and famous. And doubly especially when it involves sex. Why else would there be scandal sheets and talk shows? There are even whole cable channels dedicated to this stuff. Sure, they claim to be about entertainment or music but that stuff is just background noise for the Real Stuff. Gossip... the juicier, the better.

Locally, the news is all ho-hum. I live in a small city, very small. I rarely find peole who have heard of it, much less know where it is. Nothing much happens here. nothing of world shaking importance, that is. Just average ordinary lives lived that quiet desperation we've all heard of. I am sure there is scandal, infidelity, corruption, and all the other unsavory human endeavors that flesh is heir to. It's just so unimportant to the rest of the world. And, maybe, on such a mundane level that no one would care.

Excitement around here is a high speed chase down US 27. This is something that has happened... let's see... once in the last 10 years, I believe. I have not heard of one sex scandal. Even political scandal is nothing to get excited about since it never rises to the levels we see in the big cities or in D.C. It basically involves someone's cousin or a brother-in-law getting a contract with the city or county.

It's kind of nice.

Let's Pretend

Let's pretend I have a talent for writing. I don't really. I just like to think I do. When I was in school, I used to get assigned essays, as did we all. Most of my friends and fellow students hated essays and essay questions. I loved them.

I loved them not because I was clever and remarkably knowledgeable in the various subjects but because I felt I was very good at dishing out bovine excrement. All you really needed was little knowledge and a decent vocabulary and you could greatly impress the average teacher. That's a little sad when you think about it.

In fact, the only place that talent was of no use was in math courses. Those teachers wanted real answers. And, too often, they wanted proof you didn't simply copy it off that cute (but brainy) chick sitting next to you. That was annoying at times. Not because I cheated from that cute chick's paper (if I did look over at her, it was to try to sneak a peek inside her blouse) but because I could sometimes do the problems in my head and didn't care to write them down on paper.

The best classes for creative use of writing were History, Social Studies, Civics (do they teach that anymore?), and English. History was the easiest since all you had to do was toss in a few dates and names along with meaningless prattle about an era or historical event. Social Studies and Civics were next but you might have to know how something functioned in order to know the right kind of prattle.

English was the toughest. I mean, after all, spelling, grammar, and knowing when to start a new paragraph all counted. My spelling was never an issue but the other two? I hadn't a clue. Do you know I never once parsed a sentence? No teacher I had ever asked me to. So, to this day, I cannot do it. I struggle with commas and am lost when it comes to semi-colons. I start paragraphs randomly.

But I managed to impress teachers with my prose. I think that says more about the abilities of the average student of my day than it does about me. A similar thing happened during my alleged career in telecommunications. I would get outstanding evaluations. This was always a mystery to me. As far as I could tell, I wasn't putting out any real effort at all. I coasted most of the time.

A boss once explained to me that I was a "big fish in a small pond." I think he was right. I wasn't a great tech or employee, I was just better than my so called peers.

And now? Now my peers are much better. There is so much talent here in the Blogosphere that I am overwhelmed. Still, I feel so much better after ranting and/or raving about something that I will continue. If not to entertain you then to work off the stress of unbridled retirement.

May I Have a Word With You?

Criticism is only words about words, and of what use are words about such words as these? [G.K. Chesterton]


Words are fascinating things. When I was young, quite young, and learning to read, I was taught to "sound out" new words while reading. That is, break them down into "chunks" of sounds in order to get an idea of how to pronounce them

You know, "th" and "ph" and short "i's" versus long ones and so on. The problem was that this didn't help me learn anything other than that there were some odd combinations of letters that didn't make a lot of sense. And that words, repeated over and over, eventually made no sense either.

You can take any word, repeat it many times, and you will lose the connection to the meaning. Ok, maybe you can't but I can. A word is simply a jumble of sounds that are accepted by the people who use that particular language to mean something. And even that something can fluctuate within a language.

Think about it. Why do we say "tree" for something which is live, has leaves (well, most of the time), roots in the ground, and may (or may not) bear fruit? Linguists will point to root words and adaptations from older languages and such but they have the same problem. Somewhere, way back in time, some humans decided some sounds best described an object or an action. They agreed on this and language was born.

The problem I have is that words don't always make sense to me.

There is a famous one about "disgruntled employee". "Disgruntled" means "unhappy", "peevish", "grouchy", "sullen", "complaining." So, "grunt" may have something to do with it. Except wouldn't "gruntled" make more sense if that was the case? Except "Gruntle" means "To grunt; to grunt repeatedly." And "dis" is a prefix that has a reversing affect...

a Latin prefix meaning “apart,” “asunder,” “away,” “utterly,” or having a privative, negative, or reversing force (see de-, un- 2 ); used freely, esp. with these latter senses, as an English formative: disability; disaffirm; disbar; disbelief; discontent; dishearten; dislike; disown.

So wouldn't "disgruntled" mean something like "having grunts removed"?
I get so confused by these things. And I worry about them. And me.