Last spring I was in the process of forming a new band and the guy that I had playing guitar for me, like a stupid idiot, thought he would try injecting heroin. Dumb dumb idea, he ended up with a tube sticking down his throat and spending some hospital time without health insurance. He and his girlfriend had to move back to New Jersey, the Garbage State. Personally I have always been afraid of needles and very afraid of Heroin after I watched someone die from an OD in an old warehouse in North Denver when I was a teenager. I have watched heroin addicts pull their dying friends out in the alley and call an ambulance for fear of being busted. I have known many people who graduated to the great pyschic painkiller over the years and it is not a pretty sight. Not for me and anybody who thinks they have to try the stuff to be a Rock and Roller has their head up there ass-enough said….
Well, todays blog isn’t about opiates, it’s about a deck of fortune telling cards that my stupid ass guitar player’s girlfriend gave to me just before she left for New Jersey. It is called the Gypsy Witch Fortune telling deck and it is like a deck of cards but has symbols and fortunes on each card. Similar to a Tarot deck in a way but you don’t have to have much esoteric knowledge to tell your fortune. There is no Kabbala and no arcana-you just clear your mind, meditate on a question and simply pull a card. Today I pulled the 4 of spades-card no. 49-”the Eye.” The card was upside down and thus my fortune is as follows-”the eye when near denotes great interest taken by friends;when distant-signifies suspicion.” Since the card was upside down that means that, I guess, my friends are suspicious of me.
As far as fortune telling goes, I am not heavily superstitious but at the same time I adhere to a philosophy that is inline with the Quantum physics view of reality. That underneath it all, Newtonian laws of physics aren’t valid at the atomic level and there are only probabilities that a certain electron could be at a certain position within its shell. In order to describe the physical nature of an electron it is necessary, from a mathematical perspective, to use coordinate systems that have more than 4 dimensions. Thus from a philosophical perspective, the reality that we see around us is moving all the time through different dimensions our senses can’t comprehend. From the physical standpoint, we have only three dimensions accesible to our five senses and time could represent the fourth dimension. From a quantum physics standpoint, there is only a certain probability that the physical matter we observe is in our “dimension” at any given time. All of matter and life is constantly oscillating in space, kind of like a sine wave and through tensor mathematics and probability and stats we can make a model of the physical universe that shows that when we see an object, there is only a certain probability that the electrons that form the object at a molecular level are at any one place at any given time. This can be extrapolated into a philosophical system for describing reality in terms of probabilities. Every choice we make in life changes the world around us. We are constantly changing reality in our own lives, and as a species on a meta level through seemingly random actions. There could be a paralell universe where I overslept yesterday, lost my job, got drunk, and than got run over by the bus. Everyday, our reality is defined and framed by our seemingly random actions.
Now I can’t claim to be a quantum physics guy. I am not building an electron trap or working with a super accelerator trying to break down the time space continuum. I am simply trying to make some sense of the world that seems random. That’s the reason I like things like the Gypsy Witch deck and the Tarot. You randomly pick a card but at the same time maybe it isn’t so random. Time is an illusion based on the existential dilemna we all face. We are trapped in the time space continuum. Our five senses are like a pair of sunglasses we can never take off. This is what the great German philospher Kant called the transcendental problem of existentialism. We can only describe the universe in terms of our sensory apparatus but we can never transcend what could be a complete illusion. Time marches on and sometimes random events change our lives. We make choices, often times without knowing or thinking deeply about them, and our lives are changed.
Back to the Gypsy deck and today’s card-the Eye. Why would my friends be suspicious of me? I don’t take these things seriously but I use the deck as an exercise in trying to Quantize my life. I don’t really like to keep a large circle of friends. Though I can be an extrovert, I am a very introverted person-more interested in the workings of my own mind than trying to know others. I am not really a people person. For the most part I don’t relate to most people. A long time ago I stepped off the train so to speak and started living in an iconoclastic fashion. I rejected what society had to offer and decided, like Zarathustra, to leave the villagers (the frightened herd) behind and go up on the proverbial mountain and argue with God or whatever the dogmatic truth is. Maybe the reason my friends are suspicious of me is that they can’t relate to me.
My life-I have shitty manual labor job, a book business, an IQ of over 140 and a lot of failed potential according to most societal norms. Like a human transformed into a giant insect in some Kafka story, I feel alienated by the human condition. I just can’t relate to most people. I can’t really find my own people either. I keep most people at arms length because I can only relate-about 25% percent, to the things in life they care about. Half my friends are either alcoholics or drug addicts and the other so called straight people are usually inebriated by religion or some thought prison they live in. As for myself, I am always dancing on the fringes. I smoke a little weed, drink a few beers, but at the same time I am a lot more straight laced and healthy than my D&A friends. My straight friends see me as somehow messed up and feel that I need to go over to the lord or some other dogma to be saved. I live in half worlds, kind of like an electron jumping from orbit to orbit in the molecular model. A sometimes 13 axis coordiante system is necessary to form a model of what we perceive in our Cartesian coordinate system lives.
Regardless of anybody’s suspicion, I am going to walk my own pathway through life. Though recent times have been tough, I feel like my life is still on course. I worship the philosopher king, someone who goes outside the lousy day to day drama of life to find the answers. A never ending search, a grail like quest. Never finding the answers, the questions are always circular. Especially in the quantum universe where reality itself is transcendent and life driven by randomness and chaos. One thing I do know is that I have to let a lot of the younger folks go know and get out of this stupid neighborhood and quit trying to hang on to my youth. I have been living in a world where I keep trying to turn back the clock and I have a hard time accepting the fact that I am getting too old for the hedonistic lifestyle of my youth. It’s time to give up the waste-oid thing and move along and try to find other peers who like music, philosophy, literature, and writing. Other seekers for the cosmic answers. I am trapped on a gerbil wheel when I go back to the hedonism of my youth. I am aging and can’t keep thinking about being the barfly. The only quantum universe that creates is someone dying from alcoholism. That isn’t me, I still love my beers and my occasional smoke but its time to rise above-the Future is Vanishing as I sit here this Saturday morn and write. One’s and zeros are streaming out into cyber-land and maybe someone in Outer Mongolia is reading this blog-if so I hope you are my friend but don’t regard me with suspicion. Well, from Loony tune land-that’s all folks……..
