Post Fender Bender Fight or Flight Scatterbrain

Yesterday, when stopped behind a car stopped in front of me, a mini-van rammed into my car. The moment itself is a vivid layer cake of different sensory experiences and emotional reactions, with a couple different coherent thoughts inside of it.

The minivan drove hard enough into me to completely depress one of the wheel wells of my car, enough that it couldn't be driven. It was therefore also hard enough that, for one skipped heartbeat, I watched my thermos cup float from my lap, with coffee rising from it. I watched my car seem to inch the three feet into the car in front of me--the thought I had first: "I thought I stopped...I guess I could have stopped a little more effectively." My second thought was realizing that the car behind me had not stopped. A sense of utter despair that I had so misjudged my actions as to cause such a movement quickly gave place to a bewilderment and bemusement that it would be happening at all. I remember that it also seemed physically much more gentle upon my person than the force of it warranted.

The whole experience struck me so sideways that I remained in my car, in a surreal daze and feeling uninjured, until after both the person in the car ahead of me and the car behind me had got into the street and asked if I was all right. I realized that perhaps I was behaving all injuredly, so I got out to assess the damage with them.

Of the three cars involved, mine was the only one unable to drive more than ten feet to get off the street. I suppose that is what happens when a minivan and a Ford Escort make a Toyota Camry sandwich. Le sigh. The only thing I really thought about right after is how my phone had strangely completely disappeared during the moment of everything moving all ways. I spent ten minutes looking for it.

Fortunately, the crashy-wash happened a block from school, which is where I'd been headed. After waiting the hour and fifty minutes till all the police reports had been filed and all the insurance peoples contacted and all the towing companies coordinated with, I got to class a half hour late, and missed the duct tape project...whatever that was...I wanted to know. Le sigh again. Missing the duct tape project feels most tragic looking back. That and the distress the whole thing caused the mother of two in the Escort in front of me and the seeming-pleasant woman who had a lapse in intelligence and caused the whole thing. They were both way more shook up emotionally than I, though I think potentially I'm more physically shook. My car softened the impact to the car in front, and the lady behind seemed okay. I don't know. We'll see.

Anyway, that was yesterday's adventure. Since then, I've been in this sort of low-energy, hyper-aware, low-thought stage. I believe it's the tiniest of hints at a taste of shock and of what would, in a real life situation, be called PTSD. I feel like abstract thought is a bad idea, so my imagination is forcing itself outside my head. Things are in sharper detail than usual, and I have fewer trains of thought looping around my head. I believe that it's an extended fight or flight state, and also a coping mechanism for trauma. The memory is stressful, and abstract thought is where the memory is, therefore my brain is avoiding abstract thought.

It is most interesting.

I'm okay, by the way. Insurance people keep calling me. They're polite when you're the dude who got bumped.

Found my phone too.

Book Review: The Name of the Wind by Patrick Rothfuss

Writers of the Future Award winner Patrick Rothfuss' debut novel is a sailing example of how very detailed a character study can be. The Name of the Wind is the name of the novel. It's the story of the magician/warrior/hero/antihero Kvothe raising himself from a favored son of a traveling minstrel troupe in the beginning of the book to a shining example of mysterious innkeeper with a more mysterious past, also at the beginning of the book. It makes a sort of sense when you read it. The novel is constructed Frankenstein-wise in storytelling format, where the bulk of the tale is bookended by oldish Kvothe sharing his history. And goodness gracious but Mister Rothfuss is devoted to this character's history. Plot is suspended for some five hundred pages in the middle of the book to allow all the nuances of Master Kvothe's character to be thoroughly explored. Admittedly, Master Kvothe is an engaging character to follow, both witty and driven. He's an ideal tragic hero, quite built up with spectacular advantages above his peers, but his amazing amazingness never manages to annoy one because one finds oneself too bloody irritated by Kvothe's incredible failings which more than counterbalance his remarkable genius. The book is layers of Kvothe's victories carried up by the blunders he causes himself to need to repair. The cycle is amazing. Kvothe does something to set you in awe, and you are in awe for a page or two until he makes you smack your forehead with the book because he's gone on tripped something terrible. Then you're interested for the next fifty pages because you want to find out whether he fixes it again. Then he does...then he trips again, but worse. Bang on the litso, flash in the glazzies.

The cycle is exhausting. It is also fortuitous because the book lacks for enormous stretches one aspect which this critic would consider essential: plot. I mean...it's interesting, because I think that perhaps M. Rothfuss had been watching a lot of very good TV while writing The Name of the Wind. The book is constructed quite episodically. There are many small plot arches, driving the story forward in hops. But except for infrequent brushes with the initial conflict introduced inside the first hundred pages, M. Rothfuss he suspends for the next four hundred fifty pages. The book is seven hundred thirty pages long. Way more than half of the book has zero plot. Four hundred fifty pages are pure character development. It's entertaining and beautifully described character development, but every twenty pages or so it makes you say, "maybe the story starts on the next page..."... then it doesn't.... Shit, dude. Long time to sit around and wait. Then, ooh ooh, then the reigition of the plot comes upon what I would term a tenuous note at best. By damn, I'll take a tenuous note after reading for five hundred fifty pages.

Grrgle.... You may ask, why would I read through it that far? The fact of the matter, my fair compatriots, is M. Rothfuss has a way with words. He has a gift for description and a knack for characters. His every character is both familiar and original, maintaining a comfy level of, "oh, yeah, I know that guy," without lapsing into cliche. The characters are peopled upon a backdrop with a similar level of comfortable nearness just quirked to the left enough to feel original. Kvothe and his fellow spirits are not actors and their world is not the movie set that fantasy is often set upon. Kvothe is alive in a world, touchable and present, and you could almost walk through the book into the streets with him.

Almost. I extend this as high praise. And, therefore, I do recommend this book. I do not recommend it to everyone. I do not recommend this book to people who value plot and intrigue, nor to those frustrated by zig-zags in story and floating conflict and suspended promises. My recommendation for The Name of the Wind goes to those kids who love winding descriptions, love the opportunity to really get their fingers twisted in the dirt and really get to be on first name terms with the story's ghosts, and especially to those kids who need a long book to fill the time between things. The Name of the Wind's every page is a window into another world. It's a good, long, meandering trek into a poetic place. Them that like that, and are okay without much story, will love this book.

Enjoys.

Why Kids Are Rude, the 21st Century by the Chili Peppers

I believe that it's a defensible statement to say that kids these days--meaning me especially--are more rude than kids ever have been. We conduct ourselves with the confidence of a people who live in an unshakable world. We might screw up our own lives, we seem to think, but that won't affect too much, so why worry about it? As a result we treat our elders with less awe than we ever have. Our elders are as they have always been better educated, more experienced, possessing greater qualifications. As in all ages before, the generations that precede the youth built the world as it is, its badness and all its greatness. As ever, our parents, teachers, grandparents, bosses, and all those old folks deserve our respect. Unlike ever before my generation acts per capita with less decorum than any other period. Refinement is falling away. We are rude kids.

It's a truth I think, if taken objectively. We are rude kids. As with many behaviors, something motivates our lack of refinement. There is a reason for how we seem to be so awfully ungrateful and inconsiderate. It's different, I have discovered from my research, than the motivation behind what they called the "Me" generation during the '70s. Hippies had a pretense of rebuilding what they saw as a broken system. It is the wont of every generation to rebuild the world as they see fit. Accepting this sociological fact simplifies things. In the '70s there was a mood of pacific revolution--all you knucking need is cucking love, let it be and all that jazz. The difference here between my generation and the flower power kiddos has everything to do with attitude. Gone seems to be all sense of amorphous "we need to do something!" Do what? we ask. "I don't know. Something!" That's gone.

Don't be growing some sense of hope that my generation has any idea what we're doing either. We have no idea. Almost less, maybe, because we're a bunch of coffee addicted sillies living a cushy life. We have a different idiom, though. The paradigm of amorphous passivity has been superceded by many different frames of thought and it has now taken a frame of situational skepticism. We are not a generation of doubters and we are not a generation of vaguely shifting take-what-we're-fed either. We've found some strange balance between the two. If given a proposition we almost always trust it and question it at the same time based on different circumstances, for instance what authority feeds us the information, what priod knowledge we have, our mood and the weather, if we're hungry and other physical factors, our upbringing. We might be a rude generation but in some ways we are more respectful than ever because we have actually learned from the past. We don't doubt everything, we don't hate everything, nor do we accept or love it all. Things, people, must prove themselves to us. Usually we will approach new situations without strong disposition. Maybe we'll be a little wary of things we think may go wrong or excited about things we've experienced that have gone right in the past. In general, though, we arrive and observe and wait for the situation to prove itself to us. That goes double for people. Sure we come across as rude. We're often neutral, waiting for newly met elders to invent themselves to us one way or the other. If you win our dismay then we will not feel it necessary to hide it. But if you win our respect we can be more loyal than the rising stars.

There are a lot of contributing factors to this and I think I'll write about them in a few days.

Tah.

"Only" by Nine Inch Nails Helps Me Appreciate Music

I've decided to try to be more conscious of what intention musicians seem to have. I'll try to listen to poetry and pay attention to lyrics and to the visuals musicians choose to include with the music they're making. There's more intention and meaning than I used to think, and I used to have a lot of respect for rock stars. It's all very interesting.

Yeah.

"Smells Like Teen Spirit" by Nirvana for Class

Just finished taking Cultural History of Rock and Roll at school. College is cool like that. We finished the class with a discussion of Seattle grunge and especially Nirvana. My teacher decided to end there because it's kind of the most recent big deal in rock and roll, the whole slacker scene and the celebration of depression and impotence and being able to get a kick out of life without any big ideas. It was profound. The last question posed in class was what's happened in the rock scene since the nineties? The class inspired two thoughts.

The first thought I'm thinking is an answer to what's happening in rock and roll since the nineties. It's a fair question. The easy answer is quite a lot. Bands are always appearing on the scene and ripping up the stage, feeding us the next new and hip thing, and sticking it to whichever man they've decided to lampoon. After the hardcore scene during the eighties, however, and the college rock grew from rock and rollers who weren't as angry--R.E.M. and such--and Seattle spawned grunge in the eighties, pretty much all boundaries broke. Nothing is sacred anymore and everything is fair game. Everything is in equal amounts shocking to someone, which makes everything, really, equally tame. Whatever your taste is, there is that kind of rock and roll somewhere. All you have to do is wade through everything else till you find it. One answer to "what's happening with rock and roll?": everything. Everything that was happening is now happening. Now, different than ever, it's all allowed. Kind of strange but true.

A nuance on this idea that everything goes is everything goes everywhere. Rock and roll, always a global thing, has mostly been produced in America. Britain tended to absorb and speed up and push the envelope for any new movement that arose--the spirit of fun in the early boogie rockers like Berry and Little Richard got tightened by the Beatles and the Stones, the punk of the Ramones and Patti Smith assumed the really active directed anger it always needed at the hands of the Sex Pistols and the Clash. As a result, we talked in class almost exclusively about the U.S. and England and only ever mentioned other countries as they related to the Americans and Brits who went there, except on very rare occasions--like when we talked about Bob Marley and Santana. Everyone in the world makes rock and roll, though. We never talked about J-rock, a whole scene that has done some of the best punk/glam meld of anyone, or the folk metal groups that are howling at the world from northern Europe, directly pulling from libraries of mythology and folklore creating strangely primordial hard metal. These are nuances on a theme and not really anything new. But they're good, and will be worth noting in the Cultural History of Rock and Roll class I will teach in twenty years.

The other thought that occurs to me is how strange it is to think about an album--Nevermind--released in 1992 as a piece of history. Twenty years ago. Holy sheet.

Enjoy.

"Float on" by Modest Mouse Helps Explain Rock and Roll to Aliens

I have to think of ten songs that I'd give to an alien to answer the question, "What is rock and roll?" I think I'll start with some Human Abstract.

Review: Pinocchio: Vampire Slayer, by Van Jensen

This is a comic book, and one of those titles you pick up just because it makes you giggle. Pinocchio, naive little wooden puppet, a vampire slayer? Surely you kid, world. Even while tittering at the title, I looked at the decidedly gruesome, if cartoonish, cover art with a feeling of apprehension. Dusty Higgins--the artist--implies with his frontispiece a story grim and dour. The paradox fascinated me.

The book starts with a quick summary of the Pinocchio story. It's the old, familiar tale, told in stick figure cartoons. However, it's presented with emphasis on details that make the title believable by the end of the summary. Then it launches into the dark, black and white world of Pinocchio, Vampire Slayer, with a slaying right off the bat, and it becomes clear that Pinocchio is the ideal vampire slayer. He tells a lie, and he's got a stake for himself right there. Works out perfectly.

The irony and paradox in the story is constant, and forever hilarious. It's a quick little read, and I recommend it.

Review: Swamp Thing: The Saga of the Swamp Thing, by Alan Moore

In 1983, DC decided to assign the title Swamp Thing, a then old title, to now-known-to-be-insane writer, Alan Moore. What Alan Moore produced revolutionized comics as a format for horror. My dad tells this story about the Batman movie that Tim Burton made: Batman, he says, was the first movie to "take the comic book genre seriously." Before Batman there were comic book movies. But they were told as melodramatic sob stories, that could as easily have had no superheroes in them. Batman, he says, gave a superhero doing superhero stuff.

As I understand it, Alan Moore's Swamp Thing did a similar thing for comic books. Alan Moore's Swamp Thing was the first comic book, I am told, to allow comic books to be considered in the literary genre--especially the literary genre of horror, in Swamp Thing's case. Prior to it, comics were one thing, and literature was another. Alan Moore helped with Swamp Thing to blur the lines.

Good for him.

If you like a cunningly written story that makes you think in puzzling terms, pick up this one. It's peculiar and interesting, each issue is well structured. It fails in terms of long-term impetus, I think. The largest questions about the character of Swamp Thing himself are answered reasonably quickly, it seems, so conflicts have to come to Swamp Thing. Swamp Thing himself produces little to no conflict. In that way it falls short. I liked reading this volume--the first volume in the run of anthologies of Alan Moore's retelling of Swamp Thing. It left me content, though. The ending of the anthology satisfied me, leaving no mysteries unsolved, no conflict unresolved. The world was at balance.

I view Swamp Thing as a piece of history, beautifully constructed. A museum piece, if you will, if an enjoyable one. It's a good thing to read and understand...but there's better entertainment out there. I feel bad saying that, since it is Alan Moore, and his story-telling never fails in Swamp Thing. Still, he's written more gripping things.

His intent may have been different in Swamp Thing, however. That's something to consider.

Comic Book Review: Spawn

I read volume one of the Spawn anthologies. I've been meaning to read the Spawn books ever since the movie killed my soul. I have a history with the character Spawn, going way back before I read him or saw him or anything.

The movie came out when I was thirteen, and one of my buddies became immediately obsessed with the character. I liked this kid, and I've always had a bit of a follower psychology, so I decided to be obsessed with this movie as well, even though I knew nothing about it. Somehow I found a poster or saw a preview for it after that, though, and thusly saw the look, felt the attitude, of the character Hellspawn. That masked face and impossible cape and green eyes lodged in my head, like the shading of a really good ghost story. It impacted my imaginings and my creativity, and much of my writing secretly had a few drops of an idealized Hellspawn in it, because I never saw the movie when it was released, and never knew it was a comic book.

Years passed, and Spawn lurched around the back of my head, till finally I was driven to wikipedia. I read about Spawn, and the Violator, and the world Todd McFarlane invented. The art impressed me, the stories intrigued me, and the fact that the whole thing was a comic book first totally took me by surprise. I got the movie and watched it, and it did, in fact, shatter some of my childhood dreams. Completely obnoxious.

It discouraged me. Thus I failed to speedily procure the comic book.

Several years passed. I had many adventures, and eventually found my lady love. Among her many charms is a picky love of comic books. She loves Todd McFarlane, especially, and I trust her taste, except in liking me. Spawn's been reintroduced to me as a literary pursuit to consider.

The other day, I saw volumes one, three, and four of Spawn anthologies at the library. On an impulse, I grabbed volume one and checked it out. I read it fast, and these are my impressions:

The characters are great, the world is great, the situations are provocative, the art is as pretty a comic book art as you'd want. It's a good book for the reading. It ought to have movied up something gorgeous. Stupid, careless movie mongers, mutilizing it.

I found the overall plot of the anthology irritatingly vague and diffuse, and the story from issue to issue moves more slowly than I'd like. Each issue has fewer revelations than I'd write into them, which is one reason why it ought to have movied up gorgeously. What ought to have happened is a streamlining of the story, so the important bits were emphasized, and the world was made more smelly, and the repetition was repeated less. The movie ought to have been good. I'm frustrated with the hosers who messed up Spawn the movie.

Overall, I like Spawn. I'll read the next anthology. I want more of this world. Todd McFarlane wins.

Five Act Short Story: Lesson One

In my previous blog, I explained the Five Act formula for structuring plots that William Shakespeare used for every play he ever wrote. Now I'm going to use it to outline a short story that I wrote. Thing is, though, that this short story is a story that I know well, but that I wrote badly. In outlining it, I hope I can improve it. This, being only an outline of the story, will read vaguely. Tell me how it reads to you, and if you like it.

Act I: Introduce Main Plot/Characters/Conflicts

• Main characters of this story: Trick and Moxy
• Trick: a good looking and talented boy with an overdeveloped sense of justice
• Moxy: a good looking and quiet girl who likes to think and be alive and just get along with things
• Main plot: Trick is introduced as a person who is usually kind and generous, but he has recently been controlling. That seems to Moxy to be out of character.
• Main Conflict: Trick has decided that it's his mission to rescue a boy named Hugo who gets picked on a lot. Moxy disapproves of this plan.
  

Act II: Introduce Secondary Plot/Characters/Conflicts

• Moxy likes trick, and she is suppressing it. She has a boyfriend, and she doesn't want to think of Trick that way, and he's never encouraged her to do so.
• Trick is comitted to give a speech at a club meeting tomorrow.
• Moxy's friend, Elizabeth, is introduced: she's abrasive and honest.
  

Act III: Plots Are Complicated

• Moxy refuses to talk to Trick about casual things (invitation to a party). Elizabeth calls her out on this and forces Moxy to really consider how she feels about Trick.
• Trick bails on the speech he'd comitted to give, going further against his character as Moxy understands him.
• Moxy confronts him, and becomes angry.
• Trick behaves resolutely chauvinistic.
  

Act IV: Resolution Suggested, and Described as Both Impossible and Inevitable

• Elizabeth says Trick needs to be taken down a peg.
• Seems impossible: Trick is too awesome, in the eyes of our perspective character.
• It would solve all the problems: A Trick with a lesson in humility would be a Trick restored to equilibrium.
• Maybe this would help Moxy, too.

Act V: Climax and Conclusion

• Trick gets into fight with the people who were harassing Hugo.
• And loses. Moxy genuinely fears for him.
• He realizes that he doesn't have to control everything.
• Moxy begins to actually see him for who he is.

Right. There's the story. Outlining it like this has helped me. Does it make any sense?

Next lesson: um...something good. It's a surprise!

Lesson 0: The Five Act Plot

Shakespeare was, among other things, a failure as a fashionista. I mean to say, that lacey collar thing really sucked. Not going to lie. However, we remember him for his writing, and so shall be left aside his fashion sense.

He called himself "The Poet", as did his contemporaries, and everyone else. It's a fitting title for him, because his originality came from his turn of phrase more than anything. Through his turn of phrase, his characters and their stories were made compelling, to put it mildly. Through the prettiness of his language, normal people were laid bare in such a way as to be seen beautifully. That was his genius: to set forth a reality so real that we believe it as we believe our lives. And his forum of choice was the five act play. As I understand it, the term "five act play" wasn't one used by him or anyone else. However, the formula of the five act play is the formula that he followed for every single play he wrote. And it's a winning formula. So effective is it that almost every movie we watch now sticks to the same formula. And here is the formula, presented with a famous story as an example:

Act 1: In the first act, the main characters are introduced, as are their conflicts and back grounds. The purpose of Act 1 is to describe the main plot. In Star Wars: A New Hope, the first act begins just after the text scrawl ends--that's technically a prologue. The first act of Star Wars explains that Leia needs Obi-Wan Kenobi's help.

Act 2: In the second act, secondary plots, characters, and conflicts are introduced. Act 2 of Star Wars is where Luke Skywalker comes in, all set to start his hero's journey, where he begins to learn the ways of the Force and become a Jedi. (For an analysis of the hero's journey/adventure, wait till I've written it.)

Act 3: In the third act, everything is thrown topsy-turvy and made difficult. This is where messes happen. In Star Wars, this is where Obi-Wan and Luke team up with Han Solo to get off Tatooine, and where Luke starts his Jedi training with the little training remote on the Falcon, and where they head toward Alderaan. The division between acts 3 and 4, here, is a little fuzzy, because of the reasons I'll explain in the next paragraph.

Act 4: In the fourth act, some way of concluding the plots and conflicts is suggested. However, the messes in the last act are made messier, so that the conclusion of plots and conflicts, while seeming inevitable, also seems impossible. In Star Wars, this is where the Death Star is explained as a doomsday device. They start doing this as soon as the Falcon is caught in the Death Star's tractor beam, as a demonstration of the Death Star's power. Then they have that scene where their battle plan is outlined from the Death Star plans they got from R2. This is also the scene in which the battle around the Death Star starts, but does not finish. This act ends about when Red Leader gets killed, and Luke has to start his attack run.

Act 5: Then it's climax time. In the fifth act, everything is fixed. In Star Wars, this act begins when Luke stars his attack run, and everything thereafter is the remainder of the fifth act. You have your climax, and your conclusion, and your feel-good moment of emotional relief in this act.

So that's Shakespeare's winning formula. The thing works, it's undeniable. Dial in a story, make your characters and situations work well, and this is a sure-fire entertainment.

My question, then, is: can the formula work with a short story? I plan to find out. I have a short story that I wrote for a class, and my teacher wrote on it that it was a "genuine pleasure to read." And I agree. I have written few things that I enjoy reading--I almost never reread these blogs, even. That story was a genuine pleasure, though. However, I showed it to another writer friend of mine. She's a super smart lady, who got her masters in creative writing and all, and she wrote on it, "ever heard of plot? Look into it." And that was a legitimate comment, too, because at that point I hadn't ever heard of plot. Now that I'm analyzing Shakespearean plot structure, I'm going to revisit that story and see if I can plug it into this winning formula and make something pretty of it. I understand the story I wanted to tell, and I did it pretty close to well, so it should work. I'll document my progress here, so keep an eye out for a repeat of the five act diagram above, but with the characters Trick and Moxy and their adventures, instead of Luke and Star Wars stuff.

Sound like a plan? Good.

Senza Zuggaro

When in Rome, the only souvenirs I bought for myself were seven or eight packs of gum. Whenever we left a gift shop or a supermarket, and there was a display of gum there next to the check-out counter, I'd get one. These packs of gum had no very special qualities. Some of the brands, even, were the same as in the U.S., just with labels in Italian, and often the same flavors. With a few exceptions, of course. There was a pack of Tic-Tacs I found that are black cherry flavored. Black cherry Tic-Tacs seem to exist only over there. These packs of gum have only the distinction of having been bought in Italy. Even though they are probably all made and packaged in some obscure town in the continental midwest or Belgium or something, it still makes me think of Rome when I chew a piece of the gum.

I went to Rome in May of 2010. And today has the distinction of being the day upon which I finished one of those packs of gum. I think it's the first--though it might be the second--of the packs of Italian gum that I've finished. I don't chew gum too frequently, and I'm always buying new packs of gum, and losing packs of gum in jackets I don't wear too often, packs that'll turn up a while later. As a result of this gum shuffling, I don't finish a pack of gum frequently. And as a result of one pack of gum lasting me a few months, I can sometimes keep track of time with a pack of gum.

Finishing a pack of Italian gum means that my trip to Italy ended long enough ago that I finished a pack of gum. Soon, probably, I shall open another pack of the Italian gum, thus beginning another epoch of time that will make my trip to Italy that much more distant into the past. As I see it, this means I can either become depressed that my trip to Italy is only getting further away from me, or I can see each new pack of gum as a metaphor for the incitement of a period of my life yet untouched by adventure. The former is an attractive option. After all, I shall probably be unable to go to Italy again soon. As I chew this minty gum and remember the particular shop where I bought it--and the smells and the difficulties of ordering a sandwich from a deli manned by a person who's probably inept enough at communicating in his own language to be getting on with, thank you very much--I miss my time in Italy. I miss how the sun shone more gently and the marble-paved streets hurt my feet even through my boots, how the Classical Era ruins littered the cities like dumpsters litter Denver and how the clovers are, unexpectedly, just the same as they are at home. I'm inclined to hoarde the gum away, hide it and save it, as the last of Italy that I still have with me. If I don't protect it, from wind and tempest, will it not slip away to nothing? Lost forever. Perhaps. I don't know.

Of course, if I don't chew the gum, I will never know how tasty it is. If left unchewed, the gum will be useless, lifeless. Better to go find another of the packs of gum from Italy and sample them. Better to treat them like the packs of gum they are, and enjoy them. Or, even better than that, enjoy them and share them, and, perhaps, share stories of where from they come while the gum is chewed.

I think this gum metaphor has extended from what I originally intended. How it has expanded is obscure to me, just now. I think I'll go share a pack of gum with a stranger in a tea shop, though, and see what stories I can buy with it.

Definitions: Metaphysics, Epistemology, Anthropology

Before I continue in te blogosphere, I need to define three terms. I'm going to use these terms a lot. These definitions aren't mine. As a check/balance thingy to help my consistency, I'm paraphrasing the definitions commonly used for these terms by philosophers through the ages. Not because I'm much of a philosopher, mind. These definitions just seem the most useful, and they're the definitions that I use for these terms. So here they are:

Metaphysics: From Greek, "meta" is above, and "physics" is physics. Therefore, the physics above physics. That is to say, those most universal rules that govern reality.

Epistemology: From Greek, "episteme" is knowledge, and "logos" is words, or way, or science. Epistemology is the science of knowing. How things are known, what is known, how knowing relates to being, is epistemology.

Anthropology: From Greek, "anthropos" is man, and "logos" is words, or way, or science. Anthropology is the science of man. It tries to answer questions like, "What is man? How does he tick? What are his modes and motions and motives?"

I need to define these terms. Probably, they'll get scattered all over my blogging. And since metaphysics and anthropology especially have other definitions that a lot of people know, and I mean them in these philosophical senses, then I want to be clear.

Thanks. Bye.