A Few Scattered Thoughts

If I were a troll or a fool I could keep moving down the list of things I hold polarizing opinions about, but I found out a year or so ago that airing all my passionate beliefs is usually only good to make a whole bunch of people mad at me for silly reasons.  So instead of that—actually, not instead, since I had no desire of doing that again in the first place.

Rather, I wanted to talk about sad things.  Maybe I'll save it for tomorrow or some other day that I have more time and energy to discuss it, but I want to talk about Jonathan Foreman's "Somebody's Baby," because I think it says something important about humans and our worth, a worth not squandered by our decisions.

And maybe, why that matters as a philosophical concept.

I wrote a poem this morning after returning from driving my wife to work.  The concept behind it was something like a person who wants to be a hero, but ends up screwing up in the worst way and pretty much literally ruining everything.

Insofar as the speaker in a poem can do anything "literally."

I think "literal" is a problematic concept to deal with using language, given how heavily dependent on symbolism language is.  Our cultural definition of the word "literal" and therefore "literally" emphasizes the connotation that an act or event that "literally" takes place is stripped of most if not all of its symbolic meaning.  The thing itself transpires.  But if I were to tell you, using this data-based pixel medium in an Anglicized Romantic script, that "I literally just punched a beach ball right now," there's sort of this issue where your "right now" doesn't sync with my "right now," and that the transmission of the information "I literally just punched a beach ball right now" does not include the thing itself transpiring, just the idea that that's what happened.  Semantic space is a weird bunch of necessary hogwash we deal with constantly so we can get along being better than beasts.

Just to spite myself and my example, I didn't actually punch the beach ball, even though it is sitting on the floor and I could get up and "literally just punch" it "right now."

A while back (as in last year) I tried writing a poem every day, then just adding lines to a poem every day, and eventually that blew over because I don't have that much poetry in me unless there's a poetry class where my grade relies on me producing lines of verse, whether free or incarcerated.  Every once in a while I have a poem just kind of spill out of me, like this morning, but I don't know whether they're good until I look at them later.  That is what it is.

I've expressed this sentiment before, but I wish I could just spend all my time working on the various stories I want to tell.  It's hard to practice when I'm too busy consuming stories.  Yeah, that's definitely a familiar line of thought.  That apparently still hasn't stopped being a thing I'm working on.

What you've just read is what comes of this blog without direction.  Maybe it was fun, or maybe it was annoying, or maybe you skipped to the end to see if I had any news about something interesting.

Spoilers, there's no news.  Well, actually, I guess there is up there closer to the top of the post.  I... guess you could read this blog post in a non-linear fashion?  Maybe you won't get too lost.

I will now let you go and refrain from ranting about how I feel concerning non-linear storytelling.

It's a complicated mess.

Ciao.