God And That

 Thought i'd add this. My contribution to a long argument about God. On a football forum of all places. Which is absurd because we all know that that is Pele. Or maybe Maradona. Ok or Robbie Fowler. But that's all the contenders I'm allowing for now. And they all disseminate from the same ancient, bronze age book of FIFA anyway.

It is what it says on the tin, as you'll see - a tangent. Thoughts and long drawn out bickering on the matter welcomed.

(the other guy had said something that tried to use scientific statistics to prove a religious point... generally not a hot idea, i think it was that there was an alleged (according to the UNI of EAST ANGLIA) 0.01% in 4 billion chance of the earth and it's contents coming to fruition. Long odds indeed, but given infinity... not so long. GOLDILOCKS ZONE DUDE we are already ON THE NEEDLE IN THE HAYSTACK... WOOOAHH! So anyway...)

...it's a good job that to the best of our understanding the universe is infinite in both time and space then.

tangent alert: call me a hippy burn-out but i think the phenomenon of consciousness itself is the 'solution' to the problem of infinity, by the way. in it's uniqueness, it asks the question that without itself (consciousness) wouldn't be asked. if there were no consciousness and lets presume the planet existed without it, it would just be an animal cycle of action based on instinct with no property of reflection and self-awareness. in that sense, would it even exist? it is the tree falling in a forest question.

soooo.... you know how we can't quite imagine infinity? how we have no comprehension of it, really? because it is beyond vastness? when i try and think of space-infinity as a concept i come up to a sealing wall! what is beyond that then, in my mind? apart from frustration at not having a clear answer... well maybe terry pratchett's turtles and elephants... it's as good an answer as any other! 


but it is the conscious mind that asked that question - 'how' is infinity? what is the wall that may / kind of exists to seal it all in, the one that doesn't exist? the substitute for the answer, the best a brain can do if it tries to reach the edge of the universe?

it's consciousnesses only real (probably) confusion. what/how is infinity? ...cannot compute. wall. must be something inside wall, but also outside... argh more infinity, cannot compute...

and so the mind that asks a question in a moment of esoteric (for that is consciousnesses nature) speculation and self-reflection reaches an impasse that nothing but itself can resolve. it cannot resolve it and i'd give the final answer as though it were a remainder - at the edge of infinity there is a wall. there is inside and outside that wall. here is the remainder - the in-group and out-group schematic drives the nature and history of man and woman. you can apply it to most things you like (or not like)

'with, without... and who'll deny, it's what the fighting's all about?'


- pink floyd, us and them and junk
hippy burnout report end

Not like Diet Coke

Hello everyone!

New blog then. I've been wrestling with what theme or thing to talk about. Personal, social or political? Well don't be misled by the title, yet again my title is a red herring. It is the advert which was currently blazing it's subliminal (and liminal, I suppose) messages into my already wet, salubrious and silly brain. It's sly, is what it is. But not in this case -

I think the general message was that it would be cool to be a small but large-headed puppet with almost comically oversized features, and a spunky, feisty and silly personality. Who doesn't take life too seriously and although has a boss, this is irrelevant if I were to be a large headed puppet who likes drinking Diet Coke with my similarly designed colleagues.

So... I don't think I like diet coke. Or maybe I do. It doesn't seem like a bad world, the coke drinking world. Not particularly. Basically I'm unsure. That is, on the strength of the advertising. As far as memory tells, I don't generally drink coke anyway, though it's OK if I fancy it and best with whiskey.

When I say 'best', I mean worth drinking at all. Must be that sour note. Which seems odd on reflection, because historically I absolutely love sweet things. Just the other day I was standing in line at Tesco's imagining the conversation that would ensue if the cashier were to (rudely) question me on the items I was buying. I was going to say that the ice cream was for the girlfriend and the Coco Pops a nephew or other child relative who might be under my care. The Rennies, I would admit bravely, were for me.

So seeing as I am 28 with the sometime palette of a child, why not sweet, gooey flavoured drinks? I've just answered my own question there, I find them gooey and odd. A fan of water - good animal instinct, me. Strange child, it's all I drank for some time. I can't even really blame my dad for tricking me with a glass of lemonade (masquerading as the pure mountain stream or tappy type stuff) and subsequently enjoying with the family as I spat it out everywhere in shock, all over the dinner table, dinners, et al. The joke seemed on him in the end there, for the cheek, but as I say - can't say I blame him.

Whoops, turns out the title wasn't a red herring after all. It was a starting point. I wonder what I would like to produce if I thought about it first? This will be the next blog - a pre-planned thematic behemoth full of previously thought ideas and things. Definitely.

Um... so anyway. I was reading a 'better your blog' blog a few days ago, and it was talking about maximizing one's blogs worthiness, circulation, use and such... It said 'provide value'. Not sure what value you've got here. The advert analysis was pithy, right? But like shooting fish in a barrel perhaps. Everyone knows to be cynical about adverts.

But cynicism is boring. That's what I've learnt in life this far. Desperately boring. Toward the things, that advertisers try to insinuate, upon the sleeping side of our consciousness? No. Cynicism is an essential weapon, all the better to live life with.

But don't let it spill out all over the joy of life. This I'm learning too. It is terribly dull. Don't be a cynic!

So try new things, author, this is a note to you. Live a little.

On Missing Brighton

Seeing as I am promoting this blog only via facebook at the moment, I thought I'd write a few lines on missing my home town. This makes thematic sense, in case you were wondering, because as facebook-based chums, I'd like to reveal a little of myself to you. Also, I don't want to reveal too much. This is of course because you are facebook chums.

Missing somewhere a bit, as I am, conforms to the 'rules of the schoolyard'. I forget at which number on Homer's list it places... but there weren't too many in there anyway. This is not the Greek writer of Odysseys we are talking. You knew that obviously, but anyway it's this:

'Never say anything unless you are sure everyone else feels the same way first.'

Well, no-one is going to pour scorn on that sentiment, that's the point I'm making. It's not too revealing. I miss my hometown a bit and have been busy with a kind of cabin fever, living away from the fresh air and the blue sight of the sea. Even at University remember, there were always summers spent back home - long summers down by the sunny sea, having a beer and all that by the stones and beneath the seagulls. I feel pretty deprived. The visits I made during summer were of course extra wonderful and pleasant as they had the flavour of something rare and special, so it wasn't all bad. I hope I'm not just staying in Manchester to make the return home all the sweeter... though I am a bit like that, I confess.

But actually, I consider Manchester home by this point. I am enjoying it here. I am developing myself, my life and so on as one hopes to, and the company of Chris (landlord, poet, friend) is not half bad. He doesn't complain too much when I smoke in my bedroom, so he wins points there for starters. Not that I do it often... Respect.

So it's Ok, Manchester is a pretty cool city (with that BIG CITY feel... just about) and there is plenty to see and do - though you have to pay a bit more attention to do it than in Brighton, which is all pretty much conglomerated within a mile radius and don't try to pretend that it's not. This is part of it's utter big town / small city, seasidey, charm. Hence, I miss it, just a little bit.

It'll always be there for me, Brighton, unlike my hair - though that is holding on valiantly as my mid-twenties concede to the late ones. Well done hair. So here we are, law of the playground respected, a tiny little piece of me and blog for you to sup upon. Less sprawling than the last two as well. More Brighton this one, to their previous, unwieldy and large Manchester. Neat, huh!

And finally... the question remains. Why so cagey? What was all that about the law of the playground, we are all adults and anyway, why bring it up at all?! If you hadn't, we wouldn't be thinking about it anyway, idiot! Well that, is as may be - but it's part of the experience that I prune the appropriate flowering branches for display on the leafy bloggering table, and it seemed an interesting part of the enterprise to consider. And revealing oneself... well that dangerous sweetness is what it is all about, and for now, here we are.


Gavin H. Prior esq etc etc

Nicholas Cage and Unemployment

This is a tricky place to start. It's the part where I have to explain to you that rather than a grand thesis on how the subjects of the title intertwine in some glorious synthesis, well, it won't be. They don't and they never will. No matter how grand a thesis, it would only be vainly coaxed dishonesty. Nicholas Cage loves to work. Almost as much as Kerry Katona. One in often oddball Hollywood and Independent film numbers, one in television adverts and trash reality shows. But she does do a lot of them, especially when one can easily be considered too many.

I don't love to work. No wait, that's not true. I do. I also love to work, like Nicholas Cage, however I am currently unemployed. As such, unemployed and therefore with vast swathes of time to occupy (when not jobhunting... the walls have ears in these parts) I have a swelling bloggeristic urge to deconstruct the idea of what employment means and claim that I am somehow doing it.

Principally through blogging, would be the obvious candidate for this fantastical scenario - me working presently, thus confounding the DSS into not giving me money anymore. Super. If this were a world where the things I idly speculate were to somehow come true, that is what would happen. Thankfully it is not, and I'm not even going to do the thing I said I wasn't going to do, and then slightly did a bit. The deconstruction thing. Anymore. That'd be boring.

I'm writing today because I am a little detached from reality in my unemployed state. At least, a certain kind of reality. The one where you read the metro on the way to work, or a different and less tatty paper when you get there over a coffee when you should be grafting. The one where someone talks to you about what events have happened in the world today or more likely some gossip and prattle about who did what, when and how many with. I think I kind of miss it... But there are three kinds of topics to discuss, some more rewarding than others. About people, about events, about ideas. You'll be hard pressed to find the latter at work. Seriously. Me at home alone on a Tuesday? Nothing BUT the stuff.

I have filled the day learning about Nicholas Cage. Ok, I've been doing other stuff too. You know, eating breakfast, that kind of thing. All sorts. But my little occupations did keep me from leaving the house - a luxury not many have I guiltily confess - and it was left to me to fill the time. Productively or otherwise. Well I've already told you what happened. I swear there were ideas there.

I didn't want to watch the news, what possible pleasure would I find there? The toryish free paper on the morning bus functions as a rich distraction from half an hours ride to the 9-5, all pictures and words and stuff. Information too, that's ok. It's light as well, though you do find out of some important events, which help us place our present in context. But you wouldn't read it if you didn't have to. I didn't see the metro today, and the BBC is, ooh, gosh, too serious. News? Pass.

And that to me seems the most important thing I'm missing. Perhaps. Contextualizing the day in the present. Meh. Not leaving the telly off and getting lost in a world of dreams stretching down through the outposts of art and entertainment, easily located. Double meh. This stuff is alright. It's a bit rich to describe youtube as an outpost though, isn't it? But I do find new music, film, comic entertainment, and other, there. And for what takes my fancy as it turns out, it feels like an outpost. A nice one.

Like a mishmash of your thoughts and feelings, mirrored back from your chosen searches, it is ideas filling the time out of mind, without the daily drip-feed, the stream of chattel from the world. It localizes experience in a more eternal place. I swear! Preaching, yes but... um... You'll find comment and opinion and thought online too if you search for it, but you don't have to. Even if you do, you can find grass roots in the masses of vloggers, with no paymaster's agenda but the truth and how they see it. This stuff seems so much better, for some reason.

I'm not hiding from the world. I can handle the horrors the planet seems to enjoy perpetrating (make that the denizens of the world seem to enjoy... sadly) but I have spent a day thus unmoved to find out what they might be lately. This other stuff, the things we like, the things that prompt our emotions and salve our souls, that inspire us to achievement and further. Well it's much better isn't it? I must be a lucky boy, living this way.

The jobhunt will come, and yield fruit eventually, unless my today-indulged dreams yield it fresher and riper from the unwieldy metaphorical tree. Before and/or sooner. In that meantime, prior to this episode of blog which of course feels like achievement, I will enjoy watching Nicholas Cage Lose His Shit (a term I urge you to search on youtube) and then reading an interview with him explaining how and why he does it so well, and then watch one of his various excellent or not-so-excellent films. Nicholas Cage. The man of the day. Perhaps of tomorrow, who knows?

Perhaps I need a hero for the long day. That's it, take away all that worldly ugly for me, gimme a laugh and a friendly thought, his mega-acting will do till sundown. Though, I never much thought I dealt in them. Heros that is. Maybe I do, secretly. Heroines is maybe a different matter, and certainly one for another time. This is Employment and Nicholas Cage. Unemployment I mean. I don't know, I certainly feel kinda employed by this point. So the blog has served it's purpose.

If you lack closure, the blog was about Kerry Katona being poor fare and the fact I quite like being unemployed, and Nicholas Cage now. Sorry about that. I do feel the keen sting of 'unemployment's' shame though, if that is consolation. I need a little jobette, because life is quick to remind you of your stereotype. But it's dreaming big or bust for me. Or at least dreaming. (With Nicholas Cage.) And there is plenty of work to be done in that. Ideas are inspiration and it all plays its small part in keeping those dreams alive, in an otherwise tricksy world. (Nicholas Cage Losing His Shit) And again, don't watch trash TV, it's bollocks.

Here is the link for those too lazy to do the reccommended search: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xP1-oquwoL8
with many thanks to Dan for pointing me to it.

thanks,
TBDASOAJ or Gavin, if you prefer.

Today

Today, I am mostly under duress of information. But more on that later.

There is so much information in the world it is maddening. Every second, every moment we think, our mind is assailed by more and more, proliferating at tremendous speed in our brains, shooting off over the precipice into the... void. It is filed by a diligent clerk on his high-stool, ticker tape streaming away; 'unnecessary, unusuable, useless, to be forgotten'. But where does it all go? There is no void really and certainly no clerk! Unless you have two jobs, poor sap.

The modern life is a wicked partner in this overload, if you didn't realise already. I almost long for those imagined days of memory and yore; Victorian British streets, in sepia tone, with poster-bearing news-urchins; a 1950's gentleman tipping his hat to dear old Vera as she pops to the grocery store for rations and to catch up with that nice Mr Clark, the knowledgeable proprietor. Or even, I long just for the corner-shop a couple of decades ago, to simply go and buy the daily news - because way back then, it wasn't all at our fingertips the instant we awoke in the morning... And it didn't cascade electrically into our minds like so much Matrix plot-line. I suppose I could have some willpower and not turn the computer on, but when did you last make that choice?

But... are we even evolved enough for that much interest in the world, politics, society, sport... everything, nothing? The printed word of bygone-time simplicity, I mean! Was that too much even, for the mammalian brain, only so recently conscious, only so recently becoming it's own historian and suchlike? How far shall we cast our mental net, before we begin to miss the fish that are swimming around our toes, glinting in weak sunlight right in front of us? Maybe the gentleman and his hat have it most right.

It's not that long since all such media were a figment in only the most wild of madmen's imagination. And don't get me started on ipods and mobile phones. For the case I'm arguing... well they don't get much credit. Of course... I can't quite condemn the internet, much as I'm trying to... in part... the irony of the argument indeed begins to shine, but we persevere.

Information and we are in a constant ballet (or is that thrash metal number on rusted guitar strings?), forming our tender conscious self. If not from our waking observations over a cup of tea, transmission of that morning paper or the tweet of the radio, then from our past and memory that come to claim us as we wake.

These assail us from that moment (perhaps at a slow pace, sure, but they'll gather speed!) To cope we constantly place thoughts and ideas, old, new, personal, arcane, alien and many more (sex or... whatever you feel) underneath, or on top of that daily grind. They are there, buzzing about as we concentrate on the immediate. Ah, the immediate! Surely a blessing in disguise, is our work. I mean... a distraction.

But yet still - us. We are under the keys as we leave the house in the morning, swirling somewhere in an oversized vat of coffee, on top of the fridge-freezer when we fish out a tub of ice-cream or bottle of vokda in the evening. Image and thought and information everywhere, our own and everybody else's too. Useless or useful, it's overwhelming.

Or is it meditation? Do our minds crave it? I don't feel like mine does, overly... But ever, it is there, or here, or thereabouts. Even in boredom, our lives are information and meditation, from the boringly colorful drapes to the overspilling bookshelf to the black-and-white photographs of friends on the wall.

Information, or meditation? Well I rather found myself feeling under it's duress today, so a little of both is my oblique answer. Depends how you respond to the process as we experience it now (in our time, these days...) Was it simpler all the way back with the Cavemen? Probably, though no doubt as brutal and red as Tennyson's Tooth and Claw... though whether one would really prefer that or not is a different Blog. Probably quite a short one too. I say though that now, we need to be expert at letting it all run across our minds eye, not absorbing too much... just feel the light patter of it's drizzle as the clouds pass. But there is good information in there too, worse luck. Don't want to miss that...

Either way, if you ask me it is governed by feelings. Life, is the answer or solution to the question I didn't quite pose. That is, feelings, they are what stirred me to begin this blog in the first place, under that overloading prompt. I hope it bears fruit in meditation, rectitude and / or pleasure, and that you have enjoyed this first installment.

Because it is up to you, in the end, some part of you, be it instinct or conscious, super-conscious, demiurge, to direct it's importance - information - because it might just be sent back to the beating heart and mind from that little metaphorical clerk of yours, there valiantly existing after all - a little memo marked:

'Important, Urgent, Me'.

thanks,
TBDASOAJ