Issue XXIX
This is our first free Tuesday since May. No baseball, no school functions, no anything . . . except a handful of children who sense that Dad has some free time. Eric Scheske sedated them with some wine to gain a few minutes to write this. He'll then edit it later, when they're too hung over to play.
Things are proceeding well at TDE. Visitors went flat a few weeks ago, so flat that we suspect our site hardware malfunctioned (truth be known, we experienced our first downturn in visitors since February). Visits are back to normal now, and, in fact, we have a decent shot at topping 300 visitors today. Forward the URL to others. We've passed that mark only once in our short history.
Stoic's Porch
“How can a thing possibly govern others when it cannot be governed itself?” Seneca
More Anonymous Existential Ramblings
“There is only one really serious philosophical problem, that of suicide. To judge that life is or is not worth the trouble of being lived, this is to reply to the fundamental question of philosophy.” In these words, Albert Camus expressed the crisis of human existence: Man's hopes and desires line up against the indifference of the world. A man lives a good life, and a natural calamity wipes out his family. A bad man thrives in every way, nothing stopping his rapacious ways. A man prays and prays, but receives no cognizable response from above.
Man wants and the universe stands mute, like an abandoned baby crying to an oak tree for milk.
It's absurd. “The absurd arises from this confrontation between man's appeal and the irrational silence of the world.” It's absurd to the point of suicide because the absurd, the pointlessness of it all, sits everywhere, like grinning gargoyles that appear every time we look over our shoulder. Absurdity sits under society's crust, and we intuitively–existentially–do everything we can to ignore it. Our activity propels us across the landscape of existence, bumping over outcroppings of the absurd like a car hitting a squirrel. Like the driver, we may briefly wonder what we hit and may even reflect on it in the rearview mirror for a moment, but then we motor on, not expecting any more bumps but not particularly surprised when we hit them either.
Strays
"A question, even of the simplest kind, is not and can never be unbiased. . . [T]he structure of any question is as devoid of neutrality as it is of content." Neil Postman (discussing polling)
"[I]t is not possible to contain the effects of a new technology to a limited sphere of human activity." Neil Postman
"[E]mbedded in every tool is an ideological bias, a predisposition to construct the world as one thing rather than another, to value one thing over another, to amplify one sense or skill or attitude more loudly than another." Neil Postman
The Last Word
Aquabib: A water drinker. "After last Saturday's hangover, I'm thinking about becoming an aquabib."
