2014-05-21 - 10:36 a.m.
The amygdala isan almond shaped structure lodged deep w/i the brain. Autistic kids have small amygdalas. Autistic kids generally like to be left alone. Smaller the amygdala, the more attractive the screen. Less time spent and paid for by interacting with people, the more that amygdala shrinks. It's causal. It's a regression. Sir Francis Galton, that 0.50 decimal point cousin of Charles "Chucky" Darwin was able to finally see causality and regression as two sides of the same coin, and so with the vicious circle of screen world or V.L (virtual life) at the expense of R.L. (real life) having been entered into the amygdala shrinks and R.L begins to stinks. I mean it's not exactly like "try to swim parallel to the shore in order to escape the rip tide of your mind" and it would be nice to live in the figurative, a world twice removed, just enough distance from the unpleasant details of the gritty, boring, "ah it's so much work this thing", enough distance to turn it into an amusement park. V.L. is more fun like the figurative and feels like an endless rollercoaster..at first. And so we eagerly got on it. Riding up and down on thousands of rides. But all the rides are getting shorter. Vine and the seven second video. And I'm starting to feel sick to my stomach. Breathless spectacle after breathless spectacle. Time divided up so much makes it all seem a little more exciting. With the starting and the stopping and the waiting in line. The excitement. Oh yes the ANTICIPATION! But then there's the morning after, when for whatever reason the squirts of dopamine you've been recieving shuts off. And so I was thrust back into porches, endless days, long, uninterrupted even-keeled the future can actually be predicted from the stability of the past and the present because of a gluten-like connecting narrative theme. The flat, good, screenless world of Cartesian Coordinates. If there is a change, let it be neatly represented by the slope: f(x)= mx+ b. What symmetry. No fuss. No muss. The emotional pallete having a similar color arrary to the pallete used at age 16? How could the paint have been preserved? To gauge the change use four quadrants of abstract emotions, plot out the points. A parabala expressing the issuing bliss: slope = mx +b.
And in the atmosphere is the 78.1% Nitrogen and the 20.9% oxygen. So let amusement be thy nitrogen. Let the deep breaths of oxygen be thy sleep. The lights spent most of their time off. That is how they got on. The percentages are not neat. They are not perfect. If you ask a group to divide up the percentages to see who did what level of work, it will always be more than 100% And that just is not possible. With the atmosphere, getting back to that, it's not yet at 100% Oh yes, carbon dioxide, for that has been in the news lately. Nobody says "thanks CO2, 3 parts of 1000 of you in the atmosphere is keeping me from freezing my balls off, thank you for giving me existence CO2." No instead CO2 is quickly becoming the devil and the devil we made. That 1/3 of 1% of the bad stuff is what I owe my life to. So you've seen the Keeling Curve, concern that in the winter the levels of CO2 are above 400 ppm's before the green leaves of spring and summer suck out the CO2 and use it for energy, dropping the levels by at least 40 ppms so that summer now was worse than winter back then. I'm not going to say I'm unconcerned. But what can I do? Plant strawberries? Bike the 30 miles to work? I don't have iron thighs. All that biking would just cause me to eat more cheese. That would speed up (by an admittedly infinitesimal amount) the cheese truck trips from Wisconsin needed to fill by depleted thighs with cheese. In the end not much carbon would be saved. And so I follow Occam's razor. Aka: laziness. System 2. It's just easier and peazier. So, getting back to the drupe of this essay, we have left R.L, �i.e. real life, we are on the cusp of entering the V.L (virtual life) and I see the attraction of the V.L. because, as an avid reader, I have been living the fig life (figurative life) for some time. And I see the attractions. You get some distance. Get some space. As you exhort people to "pay attention" there's no real anger there, there's no hatred. Just a lot of amusement and wonder at how the financial sector has carried out such a successful junta on how we understand outselves, down to describing our own concentration abilities. Attention is a limited budget. "Be careful, don't want to be overdrawn." It's like visiting another country. It's so much fun because to be "just passing through" is a lot better than to be "stuck there." Living the fig life like living a life online is like travelling to a new nation. "Just passing through." Put that on the avatar of a gravestone in Minecraft. So if the virtual changes the way we see R.L does not the fig life change the way we see R.L too?
So if CO2 is the bad thing, let it represent hate and let the hate give the entire atmosphere a sense of urgency, an alterable emergency, without forgetting the reality of the composition of the gasses. A CO2 quote was stumbled across recently that said "reality comes from the inside." The source of aforementioned quote was the sage of sages, the wise safely middle class guru David "no relation" Brooks. David "no relation" Brooks said that, "choosing an occupation is like a high school cafeteria: you want to be a Jock, a nerd, a band geek, it's your choice, it's your call." Well Mr. Guru Brooks, I guess the filed worker who picked your uvas was dying to pick your fruit. It has never occured to David "no relation" Brooks that his opinions say more about him and his insulated life than they do about real people living in R.L. And so the speaker of half-truths, the oft quoted sage in pre-data fig land has been usurped. The pure light of data will cut through the half-truths of fig lang. All metaphors are instantly suspicious, little furbies of stupidity, amusing at best, perhaps a reason to laugh, or a good read with a sip of tea and biscuit, but nothing to be taken seriously.
