Ever seen something you don't know what it is? Like a crevice full of pulp in a tree, unexpected road garbage while driving, or one of those newly installed emergency lights? My obsessive nature is returning. Once every few minutes, while I'm not doing one of a very few things, like teaching, it comes back to me. Like a brushfire it sets in, runs its course, and lays its site to waste in a matter of seconds. I end up feeling like there's nothing I can do about it. But in retrospect I guess it's better than parched constancy. I wish I could figure out how to take it and extend its life, so as to turn it into something a little less ruinous, and mix it in with related emotions, or any other emotions at all, to such an extent that something's always happening there. Then it would be less like a brushfire and more like the glow of a summer day, along with beach balls and hawks and streamers and maybe a toolbox or a stolen neon sign. And for some reason, this hubbub of flux through the background would induce the opposite effect on that thing behind the background that currently spends most of its life trying to figure out what the hell keeps on gutting the background, namely, it could quiet down, and then I'd probably be able to focus on things (ideas, plans, puzzles) again. Not that I was ever that good at it. I just feel like there's a multitude of us around now who feel we've been denied the prospect of living a life not one hundred percent governed by a very limited set of specific bullshit ideas. Maybe the problem is that it's all a wash when you end up with six billion people able to communicate with each other in an instant: nothing can any longer be tried, experimented with, tested out without the whole freaking village knowing; nothing can be essentially different or unusual without the regular cabal of critics come to describe and consequently destroy it.

On another (related) note, it surprises me how many ideas are put on the back burner by scientists because they seem like they might be true but it's impossible to discover a medium for them. Like gaia theory; when's the last time you heard about that? I think it's a neat idea, but there are plenty more like it, about evolution, consciousness (empirical results of course), and language, to name a few. Aren't we a few millennia overdue for a new set of core sciences and areas of research? Of course, they have to be discovered and examined first. I just get the feeling that maybe it's never going to happen, not at all that we couldn't understand it but that our minds aren't capable of pursuing trains of thought that would result in its manifestation. I also feel like we lose something by centralizing the "historical" account of every investigation into our past. In the game of life, for instance, there are multiple possible pasts for most scenarios (all those scenarios that have a possible past, perhaps? Comment if you know!). A group of creatures in the game of life could devise a method of checking their surroundings and deducing past circumstances as a well-defined function (on a macroscopic scale, of course, the way we do), never knowing that there really is no past, only a future. This is clearly an analogy, not a defense, but it seems like the study of origins in terms of history is just as arbitrary. Wouldn't it be exciting to find out that those things we know for sure—for instance, like the fact that the first novel ever was written by a woman, or that there exist elephants—actually exist as data because they are incontrovertible properties of the makeup of any consciousness similar to ours? Okay, I feel a little better now.