Sunday, August 06, 2006

if only it were one-in-ten.

There’s never anything to show for it. Whichever event ‘it’ happens to be. Of course, in the most superficial sense, anything makes a showing. I mean, one’s participation in any activity presupposes a registration in the relevant – if not spatial, then at least temporal – frame in which said activity’s being performed. Unless of course you’re evaluating instantaneous or concurrent events. Examples of instantaneous events are few and far between, but aren’t really difficult to pinpoint, such as Chuck Norris’s roundhouse kicks and Chuck Norris’s sidekicks. Other examples include Chuck Norris’s front kick and Chuck Norris’s left jab. The examples, of course, stand in the midst of bitter debates; skeptics question the temporal dimensions of punches. It is ridiculous, they argue, that the time taken for Chuck Norris’s fist to leave his side to come into contact with one’s jaw can actually be zero. This is a preposterous suggestion! Because one’s arms must be faster than one’s feet, Chuck Norris’s punch should actually register a negative value on the temporal scale. These selfsame skeptics, of late, seem to be gaining new ground following testimonies from his previous punch-ees that they actually feel the pain before Chuck Norris has even decided to punch them.

Concurrent events, however, seem to be really problematic. This is because any event can be seen to be concurrent with any other, and there is no evidence to really show that one’s in session overlapping the other at the same time. For example, if you’re stuck on a highway rush hour jam, and you see an adult male digging his nose in his static car, you’ll think that, on top of his digging his nose, he’s actually… doing absolutely nothing else! He’s just digging his nose! Cos we all know that when men dig their noses it’s a full time commitment, unlike pffft-y jobbies such as mechanical engineering, sociology, humanitarian outreaches, and marriage (pffft). But the point here is that we could imagine the impossible and construct imagined paradoxes in the vein of existing square circles, and propose that this adult male is actually, as he’s engaged in nasal sewerage maintenance; locked in a fatal crossing of psychological swords concerning the intricacies of the metaphysical conundrums and repercussions of Bertrand Russell’s struggle with denoting phrases, with regards to application in the field of whipped-cream-atop-blackforest-sponge-cake manoeuvres, or possibly perhaps just in relation to the exciting and intricate art of nose digging itself.

Seriously though, I’m not talking about this sort of events, nor indeed of such a myopic use of the term ‘to show for it’ itself. And so went yet another, but with nothing changed to the ontology of real life as will reveal itself come the start of the grind anew. Sometimes I suppose one may get optimistic once in a while, for no reason at all, and actually go to work on something, only to realize (that one has been realizing all along as well, but this is not the important or featured realization; concurrent, maybe? Hah probably lucid) that change is impossible a la Parmenides.

And also - so, here’s to you, Lucas, to echo Padme: so this is how liberty dies... with thunderous applause. From the what, 5 of us? And I will be that one sipping coffee at the tables which seat, only hypothetically, in this current case of course; fours.

It's been 3 months. To a good measure of 'thereabouts', anyway.