Getting all worked up about the new search engine is the kind of behavior that has been the bane of my existence. I signed up to get a news letter when they were going online, and I got nothing. I found out accidently they intended to go online at 8 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, and things got screwed up and it didn't happen like they hoped it would. I finally got to ask my first question, "What's what?" I didn't expect an answer. I was hoping to be surprised by getting any sort of answer, but instead it broke my browser, and I had to reboot it twice.
http://www.wolframalpha.com/
This morning when I got up the site was online and apparently working as designed. I asked five or six questions of it. I only got one answer. I asked it for the weather in my home town on the day that I was born in 1939, and sure enough, it came up with a definitive answer, and a bunch of charts and graphs to illustrate what was going on at the moment I was born down in Mississippi.
I guess I'm still excited about this project. I clicked my way to their employment page and looked at the kind of people they were seeking to hire. I'd say they're looking for a well-rounded group. They've posted the names of the subjects they might have better information on than others, and if they expand their database in these areas alone I'll be able to use it occasionally.
What really excites me about this is that it really can work as an oracle. When they get the database built up in enough areas of interest the only limitation will be asking the right question. It's the same problem with all oracles. The thing about a competent oracle is that it teaches you to ask the right question. Becoming an expert at asking the right question the first time is magical. Even if you don't get it right every time, just getting it right occasionally can change lives.
I'm curious about whether Google will get involved in this endeavor. I'm only thinking of Google contributing to the database for the good of the whole. The fact that this site will be available to any and all from anywhere in the world is very exciting. It really levels the playing ground across the entire spectrum of humanity for anybody, anywhere, to be able to get answers to their problems directly. It's my sense of things that Google and Yahoo search engines will open their huge databases to at least some degree.
I used the Wilhelm/Baynes translation of the I Ching as an oracle daily for over thirty years. One morning I woke up hearing a familiar authoritative voice telling me, "Stop using the I Ching." I knew immediately that I had to do it. I was heart-broken, but I knew I was totally obsessed, and that my stopping using the book as an oracle was kismet. It was my fate.
My habit of turning to the oracle to question it about what I should do about the most trivial matter had overshot the mark. Typical Mercury-in-Aries stunt. Any planet that occupies Aries will have it's assigned constructs pushed to the limit and then beyond even that to the point of being silly and foolish. True, that's the negative side of Mercury-in-Aries. How do you know how far you can go with something if you don't occasionally go too far?
When I stumbled across Albert Einstein's natal astrology chart one day I discovered that he was born with Mercury in Aries too. As a matter of fact, it was the same degree of Aries as mine. I began to lazily contemplate what Arian characteristics we might share because of this coincident. One day I realized that what we might have in common is that bit about taking things too far. In his case, he didn't stop digging when others seem satisfied. He overshot the mark and invented the laws of general relativity... and whatever.. right? Einstein didn't know what was good for him. If he had, he'd have accepted the status quo. Instead he ran the risk of being dismissed as impractical and worked at his day job until he croaked.
One of the difficulties that can be encountered when one has a tendency to overshoot the mark is that they find themselves with nobody to talk to that has gone far enough to hear anything other than prattle when you pour your heart out to what you hope will be a kindred spirit. That can hurt so painfully that it takes a long time to recuperate, and some never do. As I understand it, most never do. I may never recuperate fully, but you'd have to know about the bottom of the barrel to recognize just how far I've come so far.
I've been thinking about how people, including me, perhaps especially me, lose track of ti-me. I'm thinking specifically about how I lose track of time when I'm driving a long distance. Particularly out West where the landscape turns brown and up on those plateaus where everything levels out and gets kind of monotonous. It doesn't apparently affect my driving. I just arrive some place I literally started out to get to and I don't know how I got them. I don't remember passing any familiar landmarks that keep me informed as I go along. I have to have done a competent job of driving because here I am. Right where I started out to go. Precisely where I started out to go. I just don't remember how.
In any conversation where this topic comes up, whether I'm the one who brings it up or somebody else, I don't remember a single time that most everybody present didn't agree that the same thing had happened to them, and a round of stories about these events would be a source of interest for a good long time. I'm led to believe by the frequency of these types of conversations, and the fact that most everybody involved had their own story, that it's a pretty human thing to happen to just about anybody who drives fairly long distances on occasion.
Presently, I'm wondering if losing track of time in this manner is not the status quo rather than something that happens rarely. I suspect those moments when after we've driven a long way without remembering how we got where we started, and we sort of wake up to the fact that the trip is over, whether we remember how we got there or not, that revelation, is the "waking up" the Buddha urges his devotees to seek with great passion.
I sorta think I remember being in that "lost track of time" phase for months and perhaps years at a time. Only occasionally waking up and realizing that I'd already gotten where I intended to go. My most profound example of this was working a welding job for about three months. I became friends with another welder who also played the guitar. Between us we arranged to go to this one bar and played guitars and sang and passed the hat for beer money. We did this 2-3 nights a week for a couple of months.
A few months or years later my brother and I were fitting pipe in the fabrication area of some farm land we were turning into a pharmaceutical plant. There were six steel fabrication tables separated by fireproof curtains to protect one fabrication team from the welding glare of the next team of fitter and welder. Great job. No climbing 50-100 feet in the air hauling all your tools and materials.
My brother walks up to my booth with a big grin on his face with his arm around this little guy dressed out in denim as a pipewelder. He's got a big smile on his face too. My brother proudly says in a joking way, "You remember this ol' boy don't you Bro?"
I did not. I was genuinely confused by their impudence. I truly thought they were playing a joke on me. I got a little testy that they were trying to get over. All the smiles went away. They thought I was playing a joke on them. They got mad. It was, of course, Donald Hatch. The selfsame guy I'd worked and played music with regularly for a month or two back in the day on that other job.
The foreman put him to work welding in the next fabrication booth to the one I worked in, and he was never friendly with me again. i lost three months, and all the occupants of that phase of my life except my brother. I got it back, but it was a really painful experience to think I'd treat somebody like that, but I wasn't lying. He just wasn't there for me as any kind of memory, much less a fond one.
I've taken the abstract, theoretical construct of projection way past the point of no return. I constantly know I'm projecting without option. I constantly know the other is projecting without option. I only hear what I think I would be saying if I said the sa-me words the other speaks, and I know the other only hears what they would have meant if they used the same words I used.
More and more I understand without option that we can both ignore each other and get along just fine. Physically, I spend 95% of my time completely alone. My most frequent visitors are my brother's dogs, who wander in and out of my house if the door is open like they own it. My brother and his wife are gone most every day, and I'm the only one around the dogs can protect. They gotta be possessive about somebody when their masters are away.
I'm a little concerned over my developing a "No more Mister Nice Guy" attitude about becoming who other people need me to be in order to recognize me as somebody they are acquainted with. I don't seem to care much anymore whether I act like they need me to or not. I've usually moved on and be-co-me-d with some other interesting persona they never knew. I've become so dismissive of the other's need for my assurance that they're okay that my attitude (or lack of it) tests their patience. No blame.
I do not attempt to tell the God's own truth here because I don't know what the truth is or hardly ever. I try to capture the drifting thoughts that randomly appear in my imagination for reasons I may not understand. I don't know if the content I capture with these words is true or false. The Comments settings are turned off to prevent me from having to defend what amounts to little more than fanciful, sometime crude speculation. Great moments in our lives never return.
