Ruminations

The coffee bean.  Have you ever stopped to marvel at its simple beauty?  The serene, uncomplicated way it smiles up at us when we open wide the mouth of its resting place, along with hundreds of its brothers and sisters?  Who can deny the gentle caress of euphoria  when it greets us with a tantalizing wave of its aroma? It makes no demand of us, it expects nothing of us, it is, push comes to shove, the ultimate friend.

But do not allow its rustic and laid back exterior fool you; for inside there resides a power like none other; the power to move, to shape the world around it.  Never will you encounter a thing so small that can affect the lives of not only those that take advantage of its power, but often times those lives that surround the one brave enough to harness it.  The bean is a conduit tapping into the same mystical ocean that lightning derives from.  And, just like lightning, that energy unleashed upon the unexpecting masses will certainly cause some uncomfortable shifting in one's seat, if not outright chaos and rebellion.

For the college student, however, the Bean is not something to be trifled with, or ignored.  Au contraire.  For them, it is not habit; it is a way of life.  It is your muse and your oracle; through it you discover enlightenment.  By wielding its power you find yourself writing term papers at the last minute, way into the wee hours of the morning on the day that the paper is due.  The Bean brings clarity to a cloudy topic; it is the Bean that reveals to you the path to higher education.  It is a time where you look upon coffee not by the cup, but by the pot; and it doesn't take long to discover that a three-pot paper is guaranteed to turn some heads.  It is brewed inspiration, ideas tumbling out of your mind and stirring into essay form just as the sugar rushes from the nineteen sugar packets you hold in your trembling fingers into your awaiting supergulp mug, vanishing into the inky blackness of common thought to enter the unseen world of caffeine riddled creativity.  And with a sly grin and a wink at the nonexistent people watching in horrified amazement at the spectacle before them, you tilt your head back, and as the concoction for the brain zooms through vein and vessel, the Bean slaps a button as it thunders through your system, a burst of nitrous charges into conscious thought, and with a burst of flames from your ears, a gleaming inferno in your eyes, and a unintelligible roar from your throat, you're off to the races once more.

When the student leaves college and enters the work force, the Bean’s influence grows, infiltrating every facet of their professional lives.  Colleagues greet one another in the morning bearing the juice of the Bean clutched tightly in their hands.  Long-winded and monotonous meetings are made tolerable by the participation of the Bean.  Uncomfortable conversations can be deflected by announcing that you are out of coffee, giving you the perfect excuse to shamble away to the nearest brewing pot, mug shaking in your hand, hoping beyond hope that you’re not being followed.  Late night programming tasks are fueled by the Bean’s mighty power.  Brainstorming sessions demand that homage be paid to the Bean, and in return it is the Bean that lends its insight into the creative world to those of us scratching out a living in concrete anthills. 

But, just like the Ring of Power, using the Bean is not without its consequences.  Just as becoming enslaved to the Rings of Power would turn the wielder into a Ringwraith, so will those that become enslaved to the Beans of Power turn into Beanwraiths; poor, unsuspecting souls who become so helplessly bent upon the harnessed power of the Bean, that it is not they who control the Bean, but it is the Bean that controls them. 

A Beanwraith is relatively easy to spot.  When separated from the Bean, their eyes will be hollow, lifeless, their faces somber, their movements slow and sluggish, their words meaningless, and they will appear to be sleeping, though their eyes are open.  However, when a Beanwraith comes into close proximity of the Bean, a drastic change to their demeanor will be observed.  They will become more excitable, more irritable, and they will do anything, absolutely anything, to gain control over a cup of pure Bean extract.  And heaven help you if they achieve their goal; whole civilizations have been lost for less.

One Bean to rule them all, One Bean to find them.  One Bean to bring them all, and in the grinder grind them.

(my apologies to Mr. Tolkein)

It’s interesting to me how the perception of a situation can be spun based on how it is described.  I would guess that having the ability to shroud unpleasant news under a glittering cloak of warm fuzzies is a prerequisite in any aspiring politician’s utility belt.  The stars could have fallen, the seas turned to blood and the horsemen could be pounding on their door, yet I have every confidence that a seasoned politician would not only find a way to inform their constituents that there was nothing to be concerned about, but that they were planning on sitting down with the spectral cavalrymen later that day for a cheerful cup of tea.

I was treated to a fine example of this marvelous feat this morning as I watched the news while chugging away on the elliptical machine.  President Obama has delivered his budget to Congress for approval, with the shining promise of eliminating one trillion (1,000,000,000,000) dollars from the national deficit over the next ten years.  One trillion dollars?  Well that sounds like a pretty good thing, doesn’t it?

Ah, but did you see the linguistic sleight of hand?  No?  Well then, let’s do some math.

For the sake of comprehension (because let’s be honest, how many of us can truly wrap our heads around one trillion?), let’s say that the US government spends $1100 a year beyond what it collects in taxes on all of its military and social projects.  We have already run up a loan amount of $14,000 for our past spending sprees, and every year we add another $1100.

Well this is terrible, right?  So I stand up and announce that I have formulated a plan that will save us $1000 over the next ten years.  Sounds good so far.

But think about it.  We spend $1100 a year.  I have ten years to save $1000, which means I need to knock down our annual spending by $100 a year.  $100 a year for ten years and TADA!  $1000 has been saved.

Quite right… so instead of going into the hole $1100 every year for the next ten years, we instead go $1000 into the hole every year.  At the end of ten years, we’ll have saved $1000, but we will now owe $24,000 to our creditors; $10,000 for the amount we spent that we couldn’t pay over the last ten years, plus the $14,000 we already owed.

Here’s the linguistic sleight of hand:  Obama is talking about reducing the DEFICIT, not the DEBT.  Our national DEFICIT last year was around $1.3 trillion dollars.  Our total national DEBT hit the $14 trillion mark at the end of the year last year.  His happy assertion that he will reduce the amount of DEFICIT incurred over the next ten years by 1 trillion dollars (or to say another way, reducing the annual DEFICIT by 100 billion dollars) is nice and all, but that still means that we’re adding 1.2 trillion dollars to the national DEBT every year.  So at the end of ten years, our national DEBT will be sitting at around (ready for this?) $26 trillion dollars.  I mean, I suppose that’s better than $27 trillion dollars, but really, when you start talking about numbers that large, what’s a trillion dollars among friends?

That’s assuming, of course, that our government curtails any new spending.  Here’s hoping that our next president is a steely-eyed, shrewd businessman.

So let me set the scene for you.  It was relatively early (think 6ish, not 4ish) one morning last week, and I found myself in the same place that I’d found myself the few mornings before; namely at the gym, on a treadmill.  Not running, I might add.  I have a hate/loathe relationship with running.  It awakens the wrath of some bone spurs in my ankles and wrecks havoc on a knee that has already spent more time in a brace than it properly should.  It’s been torn up twice, third time I’m guessing will send me off to a surgeon.  I’m not a big fan of surgeons.  Well… no, I take that back, surgeons are ok, it’s the surgery that I’m not a big fan of.  Except for the anesthesia.  There’s something frighteningly intriguing about being put under to me.  I’m figuring it’s as close to dying as a person can get without going over the line entirely, so I figure I’ve almost-died three times.  That doesn’t include all the times my folks were ready to throttle me when I was growing up. 

Where was I?  Ah.  The gym.  The local gym has those treadmills with the small LCD television screens attached to the top so those of us who are walking/running on them have their own little screen to watch, rather than staring up at the big screen on the wall, gazing out the window or (heaven forbid) speaking to each other.  Personally, I like to find a treadmill near one of the big TVs on the wall so if I get bored with one screen I have a second to fall back to (because, as I mentioned before, you’re not allowed to talk to anyone except maybe the guy at the front desk, and that’s just to say hello.  Briefly.).  Now, while the sound from the big screens on the wall can just barely be heard over the plodding feet upon the treadmills, generally the small LCD televisions on the machines have the volume turned down, and the broadcast is close captioned.  Which is fine; I also tend to wear headphones while I’m working out, so I can’t really hear the television(s) anyway. 

So I’m tromping along on my treadmill, watching the local news broadcast to the soothing tunes of the Black Crowes, when the broadcast shifts over to the morning traffic report.  Generally I would turn to the other television at this point; I work out of my house, so traffic reports mean very little to me.  I glance up at the big television and sigh; for some reason they’ve tuned it in to some sort of infomercial.  Infomercials by themselves I find to be a little odd.  Infomercials without sound is a bit like crossing an ancient rain dance with some Nazi rally footage from the 30s; you can tell that they’re all worked up about something, but the longer you watch the more you become convinced that someone’s going to get a little roughed up if someone doesn’t put a stop to it. 

With a mental shrug I turned my attention back to the traffic report, watching the words in the black boxes pop up magically on the screen.  Fender-bender on some on-ramp on I-65.  Trailer truck turned sideways on I-40, two lanes blocked.  And then this pops up:

“SO FAR, NO INTESTINES REPORTED THIS MORNING ON I-24.”

No… intestines?   “Well that’s a relief,” I murmured to myself.  Hate to see all those intestines on the road as you make your way to work… really sets a dark mood for the rest of the day.    

Languages are fascinating things.  Did you know that, even though we use a combination of consonants and vowels to build words that convey a thought, our brains still operate on the general principle of image recognition?  Our brains don’t see the individual letters of a word, it sees the “picture” the word forms and recalls its meaning.  This is why we have to pause when reading words like country and county, because the “picture” each word forms is so close that the brain can easily confuse one for the other.  It is also why we can typically understand the meaning behind something that has been misspelled; as long as it’s relatively close, our brain compensates for the missing letters.  Sometimes it does this without us even noticing. 

Which is why we all know that the closed captioning for the traffic report should have read “so far, no INCIDENTS reported this morning on I-24.” 

… then again, there is a certain punch to using the word INTESTINES in that sentence.  And if you think about it, it certainly gets the point across.

Either way, be safe out there.

I never noticed this before, but God didn't give humanity permission to eat animals until after Noah's high-sea adventure.  In the first chapter of Genesis, God gives humans as food "every seed bearing plant and every tree with seed-bearing fruit."  It's not until chapter 9 that humanity is given "every moving thing that lives" as food (I'm not sure why the "that lives" qualifier was necessary, how many dead things keep on moving?  Unless it was to keep us from turning into carrion eaters... bleah).

This in of itself is interesting, but then it also bears another question: if we weren't allowed to eat meat until after the time of Noah, then why was Abel bothering to raise sheep?  Just for the wool?  I guess after mom and dad got booted from the Garden the idea of simply wearing fig leaves fell out of fashion; so not GQ.  Or, looking the other direction, how does one go from being allowed to eat "every moving thing that lives" to the traditional Jewish notion of "you can't eat anything with split hooves or crustaceans"?  And could you make the argument that, since they're not plants and they clearly don't move, should eggs be on the no-no list?

And if anyone is still wondering if animals have souls or not, well, Genesis 1 also makes that pretty clear.  God gives as food every kind of green plant to “every wild animal, bird in the air and creature crawling on the earth, in which there is a living soul.”  So apparently at this point in time all your lions, tigers and bears were herbivores too (oh my).  This is a little intriguing to me, so let’s think about this. 

We obviously have a vast range of animals that are quite clearly carnivorous.  And unless I missed the reference somewhere, I don’t see a point in time where God says to the lion, “oh, never mind, go eat some wildebeest.”  Is this then a sign of corruption even within the souls of the animals, and is that the reason why God was cool with wiping out the majority of them in a flood?  Were the animals brought upon the ark then somehow less corrupted than their fellow creatures that perished?  Obviously some form of corruption must have remained, because the poor wildebeest is still very much under duress.  Or perhaps it was an unspoken understanding between God and the animals that if humans were allowed to eat them, they were allowed to eat back.

There’s also another interesting comment regarding animals in chapter 9: “I will certainly demand an accounting for the blood of your lives.  I will demand it from every animal and from every human being.”  I’m not exactly sure what to make of that.  Does this mean that there’s a process of judgment for animals as well as humans?  Or does this mean that, as the supposed caretakers of the earth, we will be held accountable for the manner in which we care for the living souls in the rest of creation?  Maybe the Native Americans have the right idea when they thank an animal for its life as they allow the blood to return to the earth (a practice, coincidentally, that could also be considered biblical, as chapter 9 also says not to eat the blood of the animal, presumably because the blood contains the life of the animal and the life belongs to God) . 

I know… nothing particularly revealing in terms of insight or enlightenment, but still something that makes you go huh... that's weird.

Let’s cut to the heart of the subject at hand.  Why do we even do this?  Not just the whole idea of blogging, mind you, but all of it; the daily hashing and rehashing of the same, tired, worn down thoughts that surely must be the cosmic equivalent of beating a dead horse.  And yet here I sit, allowing these mundane thoughts to paddle around in my mind like a dog in a wading pool only to come to a standstill, panting and dripping its smelly words through my keyboard and onto your screen.  Surely everything that is worth thinking about has already been thought of, so why not give the poor horse a rest and do something else?

Consider for a moment that you have no idea who I am.  Oh, you might know of me, and you may even know a few of the roles that I play: husband, brother, son, resident house magician of all things technical, occasional writer.  But these things are not me; they are merely small manifestations of the larger whole, tiny twigs of my life sticking out of the water as we’re all sent roiling through the foaming rapids we casually refer to as “life.”  We are changed by our journey down the river, now bits getting broken off, then parts getting fused onto us as we careen into uncharted waters.  In reminiscing with my wife about some things that happened to me far upstream in my journey she wondered, knowing who I am now, how I could have put up with the things that had happened.  “Because,” I said simply, “I was not the same person then.” 

Visitors to the Temple of Apollo at Delphi were greeted with the following phrase, etched into the entrance’s lintel: γνῶθι σεαυτόν. 

Know thyself. 

I ask myself the same questions that have been beaten to death because it reveals things about myself to myself.  I ask questions that are stupid because the answers may lead me to a place where I’ve not been before.  I ask questions that are heretical because they show me what I believe.  I ask questions that I already know the answer to because I sometimes find that I don’t know the answer at all.  Life keeps moving, we move with it, and so the process of “knowing thyself” is never completed.  The answer I gave to a question ten years ago may be different than the answer I’d give you today which may be different from the answer I’d give you ten years from now.  

What you find here you may think is stupid.  What you read here may be heretical.  The thoughts explored here may seem mundane. 

But remember this: the process of discovery starts with a question, not an answer.