The Beginning

"What if we created a scenario in which, and here is the part I think you're really going to gravitate to."


Steven Millhauser from Dangerous Laughter
"As I train myself to cast off words, as I learn to erase word-thoughts, I begin to feel a new world rising up around me, The old world of houses, rooms, trees and streets shimmers, wavers and tears away, revealing another universe as startling as fire. We are shut off from the fullness of things. Words hide the world. They blur together elements that exist apart, or they break elements into pieces bind up the world, contract it into hard little pellets of perception. But the unbound world, the world behind the world – how fluid it is, how lovely and dangerous. At rare moments of clarity, I succeed in breaking through. Then I see. I see a place where nothing is known, because nothing is shaped in advance by words. There, nothing is hidden from me. There, every object presents itself entirely, with all its being. It's as if, looking at a house, you were able to see all four sides and both roof slopes. But then, there's no “house,” no “object,” no form that stops at a boundary, only a stream of manifold, precise, and nameless sensations, shifting into one another, pullulating, a fullness, a flow. Stripped of words, untamed, the universe pours in on me from every direction. I become what I see. I am earth, I am air. I am all. My eyes are suns. My hair streams among the galaxies."

The rain makes no patterns against the window. It just falls in the streets turning them a bit darker, pooling beneath trees, and generally just becomes annoying in the way that it can on a day that you wish you were outside, sitting on a raft in dappled sunlight while your children, my god, you have children, are catching beams of sunlight in nets intended for dragonflies. It was that sort of rain.

"The idea is about an accounting system. I know, you're already tuning out. Don't tune out."

I had a tendency to do a lot of things in those days that were not classed as normal by my peers, visiting the graveyard to read a novel, running from oncoming waves as if I were a child, throwing rocks at the windows of girls that I didn't even like all because I enjoyed symmetry and was perhaps too taken with Romeo and Juliet. But then again, says I, what is normal?

"The idea is this. Quite simple. You could write the thing yourself."

I found after a week or so of doing them that Tuesdays, usually mind you, were almost exponentially better than Mondays. The same did not hold true for Wednesday mornings but could almost, though not quite, be applied to Wednesday evenings. Thursdays were an entirely different story that required all sorts of spreadsheets and F5 type situations to really put the whole week into its proper context.

"The idea is this: you create an infinite system of checks for the accounting system. Every back up has a back up of its own. The world could be comprised entirely of middle manager types or perhaps some sort of sub-species that just keep checking things, no, one thing, eternally. I think you can see the potential legs this thing might have in the mind and fingertips of an artist like yourself."

Thursdays were somewhat more dependent, and fluctuated wildly due primarily to age and general energy levels, though they were also often contingent upon things like the weather or the look of the Friday calendar right before you left.

"Well hold it, how is that a story? It's just a bunch of people, or sub-species or whatever, and they're just doing one thing over and over. What's the hook? Is the thing supposed to be interesting?"

"No. You're missing the point. The point is not that they're doing the thing over and over again, it's that none of them have the balls to ask why they're doing it. They just keep doing it because their fathers, and here I'm imagining again the sub-species though it might be possible to draw some sort of correlation to the general practice of human enslavement in this thing the metaphorical possibilities are really off the charts here, had been doing it, the work, before them."

"So what you're saying is not that I'm to pay close attention to the thing that they're doing, but rather the process by which they are doing it? Higher order thinking and the like."

"That's the idea, I suppose."

"I've heard better. Lots of times to be honest. You know a guy like me gets people scribbling things on napkins all the time. Why just last week a waiter-

The spreadsheet shows the largest and almost always exponential, discounting certain teenage years and 21-25, rise when it comes to Fridays. The graph does not include respondents who work on Saturdays. A flaw which I hope to eliminate in the next iteration. You can never be sure about those folks, and perhaps it'd be interesting to make a separate study that tries to take into account those folks that have this ambivalent relationship with Friday and just to see how it correlates. Like, even now, I still think that summer should mean some sort of vacation. When does that go away? Does it ever?



Here is a picture of the Panda Bear