Things are never so bad that they still can't get worse
Various gremlins over the weekend have resulted in
errors on the category pages which apparently crept in while I tried to fix a
problem with comments. Then Direcway’s servers and satellite had problems,
interrupting a reset on the site, so tonight I’m going to do a complete
rebuild and take a minute to cross my fingers, close my eyes, and plug my ears
with pumpkin pies. I’ll crack my toes and lick my lips and pick my nose
and make a wish, and everything will be just hunky-dory, peachy keen, and though
it’s zany and crazy, it just might work!
In the meantime, let me catch up on some Ligian
mythology, which I’d call autobiography if I had any confidence in my
ability to distinguish fact from fancy, and no sooner have I written this than I
am reminded of one of Einstein’s admonitions about insanity.
“Insanity, dear Ezra,” he told my grandpa, “is repeating the same action continually and expecting different results.”
My grandpa said: “Hey, listen, Al, are you talking to me? You better not be talking to me, you hairy fuck, because I can’t be blamed for all this damned disorder.”
And that was the last time I ever thought about that exchange until I went into retox to escape a life of unmanageable sobriety. By then, I had begun to doubt that there was any difference between insanity and progress which, after all, meant everybody pushing in the same doomed direction, and I had also come to the conclusion that if I did not resume a life of drug abuse and drunken excess, I would live forever. Therefore I would be forced to witness insanity in progress until my voice had turned into a tiny chirp, like Tithonus, a husk of humanity.
When my father came back from the dead, I went to help my mother get the hospital to acknowledge his living will in which it stipulated that no extraordinary measures be taken to prolong his otherwise ordinary life. My mother’s sister, Myrtle, and her husband, Justice, were also there, and one night Justice found me using Rain-X on the windshield of the rental car in preparation for another 3 hour round trip from Waterview to the hospital in Norfolk where my father kept trying to pull the tubes out of himself and get on with the next phase of his existence.
Justice called me a fool for spending five bucks on a product when I could have gotten the same benefit by rubbing the windshield with the Sunday funnies. “I heared that fum Alex Calder back ere in Paducah. Said he’d been using em funny papers ever since them lovebirds keelt over back in sixty and seven and they worked just fine fer im. Wouldn't have it no other way. He sure wouldn’t pay no four ninety nine for none of that ere stuff, not even at Wally world,” Justice told me.
Of course, Justice had never got the Sunday funnies to work keeping his windshield clean himself, but he was sure that was just because he wasn’t doing it right. Over thirty years of following instructions that were probably based on a prank to begin with, and Justice never once wavered in his core belief that the premise, however outrageous and unlikely, was essentially correct. After all, that is the basis of all common sense, the belief that repetition and practice make perfect, despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary.
Uncommon sense, on the other hand, recognizes all this damned disorder for what it is: the natural cycle of life, the universe, and everything, as Doug Adams used to write before getting on with the rest of his existence.
So as I type this, the cat is snick-snacking out the window at the early bats, and I'm waiting only to see whether my latest tweaks will solve the small problem I have chosen to deal with this evening. All of my problems are small, and the only advice I have for anyone is to consider this simple truth: if you're an optimist, you're obviously not looking at the whole picture. And I wouldn't bother looking at it, if I were you.
“Insanity, dear Ezra,” he told my grandpa, “is repeating the same action continually and expecting different results.”
My grandpa said: “Hey, listen, Al, are you talking to me? You better not be talking to me, you hairy fuck, because I can’t be blamed for all this damned disorder.”
And that was the last time I ever thought about that exchange until I went into retox to escape a life of unmanageable sobriety. By then, I had begun to doubt that there was any difference between insanity and progress which, after all, meant everybody pushing in the same doomed direction, and I had also come to the conclusion that if I did not resume a life of drug abuse and drunken excess, I would live forever. Therefore I would be forced to witness insanity in progress until my voice had turned into a tiny chirp, like Tithonus, a husk of humanity.
When my father came back from the dead, I went to help my mother get the hospital to acknowledge his living will in which it stipulated that no extraordinary measures be taken to prolong his otherwise ordinary life. My mother’s sister, Myrtle, and her husband, Justice, were also there, and one night Justice found me using Rain-X on the windshield of the rental car in preparation for another 3 hour round trip from Waterview to the hospital in Norfolk where my father kept trying to pull the tubes out of himself and get on with the next phase of his existence.
Justice called me a fool for spending five bucks on a product when I could have gotten the same benefit by rubbing the windshield with the Sunday funnies. “I heared that fum Alex Calder back ere in Paducah. Said he’d been using em funny papers ever since them lovebirds keelt over back in sixty and seven and they worked just fine fer im. Wouldn't have it no other way. He sure wouldn’t pay no four ninety nine for none of that ere stuff, not even at Wally world,” Justice told me.
Of course, Justice had never got the Sunday funnies to work keeping his windshield clean himself, but he was sure that was just because he wasn’t doing it right. Over thirty years of following instructions that were probably based on a prank to begin with, and Justice never once wavered in his core belief that the premise, however outrageous and unlikely, was essentially correct. After all, that is the basis of all common sense, the belief that repetition and practice make perfect, despite thousands of years of evidence to the contrary.
Uncommon sense, on the other hand, recognizes all this damned disorder for what it is: the natural cycle of life, the universe, and everything, as Doug Adams used to write before getting on with the rest of his existence.
So as I type this, the cat is snick-snacking out the window at the early bats, and I'm waiting only to see whether my latest tweaks will solve the small problem I have chosen to deal with this evening. All of my problems are small, and the only advice I have for anyone is to consider this simple truth: if you're an optimist, you're obviously not looking at the whole picture. And I wouldn't bother looking at it, if I were you.
Posted: Mon - June 21, 2004 at 09:01 PM
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