Exploring Possibilities

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The weather reports say it's gonna get considerably warmer in the next few days. That's nice. For me. Here. But, there? Specifically UP there. Up north. More specifically the northeast... they got it bad. More snow. If they would get considerably warmer it might feel good temporarily, but it sure will be mucky.

It's interesting to be able to see the satellite reports and have experts interpreting the information to see if they get it right. The reason I find it interesting is that I literally remember old men who were respected for their ability to read the signs and omens to predict the weather. No more.

That's a hard blow for the elderly. The boomers will get no more satisfaction from their life experiences and be able to kick back with the young generation's respect for what they've accomplished. There is a TEDtalk given by a woman who designs computer games that is interesting:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lang/eng/jane_mcgonigal_gaming_can_make_a_better_world.html

She claims that playing computer games rewards people for their accomplishments in the game, and that getting rewarded for digital gameplay is better than getting no rewards at all in a mundane work-a-day world.

Ms. McGonigal asserts that gamers learn to do something really, really well, but nobody seems real sure what that is yet. She implies, at least to me, that the skills gamers have honed and perfected might be required in order to survive in a world yet to come.

Watching her TEDtalk the second time was even odder than the first time I watched it. My first viewing happened just after it was posted for viewing. I play computer games. Age appropriate computer games. Single player card games like Hearts and the MineSweeper games.

My chief and earliest game playing was and is solving crossword puzzles. I've been at it for sixty years. I play at the expert level, but I'm not quick enough to compete in the various contests set up for these sort of games. I do everything in ink without any reference books, and it can take days for me to finish some puzzles via intuition.

I might have gotten into the internet-wide role-playing games if I'd had fast enough gear to compete at the beginning level after I bought my first computer. I suspect that's just an excuse. A cop-out to my pre-digital mind set. It would have had to happen from the time I was a kid.

There weren't even any TVs around when I was a kid. Much less video games. Mechanical pin-ball machines with flashing lights. All the pull handles on the slots at Vegas actually worked, and were required to work or it couldn't happen.

There is another reason I don't really fit in with the digital generation. I was in my late twenties and early thirties when the hippies blossomed into being. My generation of rebels had no cause like the boomers did.

They were called the Beat Generation and were exemplified by movies written by adults to attract the young crowd. The "rebels without a cause" celebrated being footloose and fancy free, but they had to wait for their inspiration for the next beach movie to be filmed and distributed out into the boondocks.

The only social movement I actually reached for was Tim Leary's "Tune in, turn on, and drop out." I didn't understand the Beatniks while they were getting their fifteen minutes of fame, and I wasn't a flower child or hippie because I was too old even then, but I did like the drugs and the free love.

"Tuning in" was an accident for me. I literally heard about LSD-25 over the radio, and almost immediately afterward I read an article about it in the local newspaper.

My intense curiosity and aggressive search methods yielded a local group of people who brought me under their wing for a while, but I was too much of a wild and crazy guy for that middle-aged group, and eventually I made arrangements on my own.

Making arrangements on my own required me to fulfill the second part of the mantrum. That of "turning on". That took a couple of years. When the group that was gonna help me get the acid and follow Leary's method of guiding newbies through a safe process dumped me for being too schizoid for their tastes, I got other psychedelic drugs on my own.

The first time I got off on acid the music I chose for background was my favorite LP recording of the 1812 Overture with real cannons shooting off at the appropriate times. I was extremely moved.

The second time I tripped it the music had changed to Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band, and that was about as close as I came to being a hippie by indoctrination to a cause that was after my time for that sort of thing. I reached for the third part of the dogma, "drop out."

Dropping out for me was probably different and maybe a little easier than for many folks. I had dropped out several times before for different reasons, but walking away from everything that made life stable was not anything new for me.

Tuning in, turning on, and dropping out for me was intended from the gitgo to be a spiritual quest. My inspiration for doing it came from what I heard about LSD over the radio that day. The announcer described how 17 religious seminary students had all taken LSD and the large majority of them claimed to have had a personal conversation with God.

I wanted that more than anything else in the world. What was becoming human for if not that? I knew in that moment that I would gladly surrender my physical body, if that's what it took, to have a fifteen minute conversation with God to satisfy my curiosity.

Abandoning my first wife and our child seemed frivolous beside that possibility, yet that was what I had to do in order to "drop out". Dropping out was one of the most difficult feats I've ever accomplished. Even to the day I'm not sure promises were kept. Knowing something means the end of gnosis.

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