Category Archives: Philosophy

June 3, 2019

I’ve fallen in love with your spirit

By Anony Mole

Let it be known that I’ve fallen in love with your spirit.

Not you specifically. You could be the proverbial “no one knows you’re a dog on the internet.” (Not that you’re ugly or that you lick your privates, or beg for treats at inopportune times.)

No, it’s not you, per se, for how can anyone truly know who you *are* on the net?

But rather, it’s you — that adventurous soul who dares to strike out, to pick up and move when the mood or necessity strikes you. It’s you and your familiar predilections and inferences that seem like memories. It’s you, whose universe circulates thirty degrees in front (or behind) my own. It’s you whose scant mention of the trivialities of life have made me think, yeah, that’s exactly how I’d interpret that.

The online world condemns and empowers us to love from afar. There are those folks who you’ve met online, have read about, dreamt about, or envisioned meeting, sipping coffee together as the sun crawls over the snow topped mountain. They’ve expressed themselves in such a way that you feel their yearning, their doubts and their failures. We ache that we can’t be there to comfort them, console them. And we, at times, fantasize about such spirits entering our own lives, consoling and pampering our forlorn selves.

Let it be known this love letter goes out to you. If you’ve ever hoped that your sentiment has found its niche on some relic strew shelf, nestled next to mine, know that the sharing of such moments are not phantasms of fallacy. For who is to say that connections made through the ether of net cannot transcend into the ether of cosmic connection.

I entered into this whimsical meandering with a singular contact in mind. Yet, as I explored the concept, it occurred to me that we all, most likely, have fallen in love (or perhaps love’s veneer, infatuation) with those whom we’ve encountered here in the mind’s most fertile playground.

I thought to question it. Coat my daydreams with remorse or shame. But why? Our lives are so narrow these days; mere pockets of duty and obligation peppered with the scant spice of spontaneous serendipity. If I’ve loved you in my mind’s eye, who’s to deny me my jubilation?

Only me.

Embrace your dreams, for tomorrow you may be dead.

12 Comments   |  tags: | posted in Philosophy, Psychology, Society, Writing

May 25, 2019

Built in obsolescence

By Anony Mole

DNA and the mechanisms of aging have been selectively engineered to maximize population growth and the saturation of an ecosystem by any and all species.

We are born, grow, procreate, raise offspring and die.

DNA depends on this cycle. If there were no natural selection of dominant (maximum ecosystem exploitation) species, then at some point, such a non-optimized species would most likely experience a calamitous shock, unable to adapt, move or cope, the result would be extinction.

Natural selection expects you to die. In fact, extending our age well past the viable range of procreation and raising offspring is counter-productive — as far as DNA is concerned. Old, you’re just a waste of resources.

We were designed (not really, but the end result might be thought of in this way) to die by age 50. By twenty-five, you would have produced offspring and would now be in the throes of raising them. By fifty, your done. In most cultures, by fifty, you’re already a grandparent having already passed on any wisdom to your children and potentially your grandchildren.

It’s like Logan’s Run but Carousel happens at 50. Your little red jewel glows until 49.364 and then — wink — out it goes. DNA is pretty much Logan’s run, but without the big bang at the end marking your “Ascension.”

Oh, sure, some will argue that elders impart existential experience and advocacy for the species. But this is just bollocks. The fact remains that throughout human existence this fifty-year maximum (on average) was pretty much the standard. Only in the last few hundred years have we breached this lifespan threshold.

And sure, there have been long-lived sages of old who wrote stuff down on tablets, scrolls, papyrus and whatnot. Information that has been tumbling along, building like a snowball to provide us the incredible advances we enjoy today.

But DNA does care about that stuff. It’s Eat-Pray-Love, but for all organisms.

Eat. Grow. Fuck. Die. That’s DNA for ya.

 

 

2 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Climate change, Nature, Philosophy, Psychology, Society

May 16, 2019

Memory = Imagination

By Anony Mole

Here’s an interesting thought:

In order to remember anything, you must imagine it.

Visualize this: a black-with-white-spots bowling ball, spinning on the tip of a pool cue held on the nose of a pink poodle, wearing Elton John garb and glasses, while peddling a stainless steel tricycle.

Do you see it?

Now, recall the inside of your refrigerator.

One is a fabrication while the other is a memory. Yet both are constructed from the same mental processes – imagination. We must imagine memories to remember them. Your first car. Your first house. Your favorite coffee cup. All memories, all recreated as imagined visions.

Now, who’s to say that your memories are not fabricated from nothing — everything you “think” you experienced in the past is just a planted “imagination” — like that pink poodle and its glam antics — they never happened. You only think they did because of memories — which are…

 

18 Comments   |  tags: , , , | posted in Philosophy, Psychology

May 5, 2019

Are games sports?

By Anony Mole

Over on Frank Solanki’s poetry blog:

May The Test Match Win

he used the word “sport” to describe games being played between rival teams.

Now, the world over conflates the word “sport” with a game played with equipment (sticks, balls, gloves, etc.) on a field or court, constrained by rules and governed by referees.

In a jocular mood I penned, as a comment, the following limerick:

The players declared this was sport.
The team owners together claimed tort!
If there are rules and a ball,
And lined fields to fall,
It’s a game, the judged cried with a snort.

In my mind, games are NOT sports.

fishingbaseball

“There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games.” – Ernest Hemingway

Hemingway was an avid hunter and fisherman and no doubt would include those activities as sports.

But games? Maybe if you got rid of all the rules, put nails and barbwire on the bats and balls and PAID to play in fights to the death — then I might consider those sports.

Your thoughts?

 

19 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , | posted in Doomsday, Entertainment, Philosophy, Society

April 3, 2019

Sex.Food.Rush.Chill

By Anony Mole

Sex.Food.Rush.Chill.

What else is there? Really?

Epicurus — that devil-dog from 300BCE — would have stepped back from such a statement. He would have shaken his head like a dog, olive oil and bits of sardine flying, his wang hanging out of his toga and said with authority — let’s party!

Sex: If you’re not driven by your hormones to procreate — then why are you even here? (Even it no progeny could ever come of your libidinous acts.)

Food: There are so many flavors, textures, and culinary sensations that obesity should be a badge of honor, not a shroud of shame. Oh, and Al-Ko-Hall – straight up!

Rush: The need for speed, death defying feats, an adrenaline high and risk — it’s all about the risk baby.

Chill: You need time, we all need time to pontificate. Sit back, puff a doobie, gaze at the sunset, the stars, or each other and just contemplate all of it — or none of it.

Sex.Food.Rush.Chill

 

 

8 Comments   |  tags: , , , , | posted in Culinary, Philosophy, Psychology, Society

March 29, 2019

How was your day?

By Anony Mole

In as few words possible describe your day. Don’t mistreat it. Don’t embellish. Extract its essence and stream it into our minds.

~~~

Go.

~~~

Our world spun its circular return. I blinked and woke up here, barely moved. Is this today or tomorrow? The rain would know. Soon drops will drown the dry tracks of my children’s tears. Or are they my own?

Food and drink slurped as sustenance, its colorful countenance belying its eventual fate, ooze of an odiferous sort — like the stink of diesel, or the burning of tires along the highway.

I went, I wavered beneath florescent lights. I found the keys and tapped them murderously. To no avail — they remarked en masse that my words together failed to shift the opinions on all office topics lovingly pinned to the break-room wall.

The sun arced without my permission. When I dared look at its progress, glares from cubemates bent my neck back to my flickering screen. A screen that aches for silken sheets and glistening bodies but must suffice with sheets of tables and dull characters spelling out quarterlies and bottom lines.

My day is done. The dollar slotted, the handle pulled, the rollers flashed cherries and jokers and spades, it twirled and slowed, the last wheel clicked empty. I jangle my change, a few dollars more it seems.

9 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , | posted in Philosophy, Society, Writing

March 28, 2019

Emailing the dead

By Anony Mole

Dear Janice,

Why haven’t you returned my emails? You don’t text me, nor twitter. What’s up?

Hello? Janice?

Google will never delete your account. It will continue to accumulate email long after you die. Consider all the accounts you will leave gathering correspondence years after your fingers have ceased to digitally transmit. The Archive of the Dead. Talk about a Dead Letter Queue.

Think of all the millions of accounts that, right now, continue to collect their penis enlargement, their Nigerian prince, their Russian wife emails. And consider all the languishing friends and ancient lovers seeking to reconnect. The forgotten business associates, the friends of friends who read your book, saw your paintings, wondered about your clever children — their communiques swallowed by the pit of an abandoned account.

Dear Mole,

I’m slumbering here, terra-incognita, considering your inquires as I softly chuckle at the thought of sharing your subterranean abode. Why the urgency? Do you sense the closing of doors? The drawing of curtains? Will our letters find each other in the Ether-space once you surrender your daily toils? Or will the silicon memory that embodies our digital personas petrify, become crystal quartz again as the eons enfold us?

4 Comments   |  tags: , , , , , , , | posted in Philosophy, Society, Technology