i have this feeling that just a few thoughts keep rattling around in my brain like a pinball machine.
turns out that is just the way it is with one exception. with the realization, each new repitition of a thought is like a clone of a virus, maybe a software virus, or a meme. excactly copied hundreds, maybe thousands of times, without variation, but with just one error or change in the copy, a new thought comes along.
do you know how rare and valuable a new thought is?
most folks i think have no appreciataion for that. some do, but on the one hand i don’t know if people either value it, or percieve how rare such a thing is.
so here it is: i’ve got all these files, as time goes on, my disk (*i said disk*) size just keeps increasing.
from the beginning i kept most stuff from the active pile, hundreds of little programs, journal fragments, ideas, todos, on the live list, with a lot of other crap on the backup media, at first floppies at home, and mag tapes at work, then zip disks, now cdrw disks, and little by little i’m just aggregating all the ancient shit into a big backup pile on the disks, with an optical backup…
and there’s copies, and copies of copies of some of these files in and among the various backups, and even in my live working directories, not even considering the stuff under version control…
and the nth generation version of one of these programs are like today’s children, running around doing stuff from time to time called to work, and the backups are like previous generations, gone but not forgotten,
and the programs are like viruses and viruses (biological and by metaphor software) are like thoughts, expressions of thought, but not only expressions, manifestations, but the thought itself, possibly replicating, or by mixing and matching with others, reproducing, given a fertile environment, maybe that’s one’s mind, and maybe a human being isn’t exactly necessary any more, given the right program and the right environment.
but its not the terrifying thought that you find expressed in terminator, or the matrix, its just this other thing, that may or may not be benign, but is just out there, you know, like squirrels, or deer, or even maybe the flu. what doesn’t kill us makes us stronger, they say.
so picture my mind, or your mind, for that matter, like a pinball machine, or like a pacman video game, with the little blobs of thought percolating around the mazes of the things which you assume as “must-be”. now from time to time, move, remove or replace a wall from the maze, and see if your view of the world doesn’t change correspondingly.