I ended up not taking my Donut Walk™ yesterday. For the first time in a while, I made a conscious, stay-in-my-PJs day. For so long that was the norm the fact that now it’s a deliberate choice is a good thing, it felt like a luxury. I’m going out today for a house concert at First Acoustics; the last one before Coco and Bruce move upstate. I’m going to hug friends and hear live music; that’s enough stimulation for two day.
I got ahead on Gord’s Gold by preparing this week’s promo; I still need to record it. I even started programming next week’s show. I love that being on the radio still excites me. Being excited that things make me excited is totally on brand for me. Terry Pratchett resonates with me as much as any author because he understood things like that. He wrote about second thoughts, thoughts on thoughts, and third thoughts, thought on second thoughts. That is my internal experience. Perhaps everyone feels that way but so few write about it; I love James Branch Cabell for the same reason. Their characters experience the world the way that I do.
As I was home all day I made sure to cook a proper dinner, roasted chicken. It was one of the dishes my mother made most often but I never liked the way she prepared it when I was growing up. I still don’t know the seasoning that she used that bothered me. At one point I thought it was garlic. I since learned that I love garlic and use it on everything. I thought it was paprika but now I often use it, albeit mixed with cayenne. I prepare it different ways, but I not only always love it, but I also always love loving it. Last night was so simple, I just used garlic salt, black pepper, and off the shelf poultry seasoning. It was wonderful. The one key, that my mother did get right, is to not overcook the chicken; most people do, and it comes out dry. That and a baked potato made me happy.
I didn’t have my daily exercise, but I had my RDA of social contact, a long phone call with a friend. I listened to the Met game, but that did not go so well, they were blown out 12-5. Still, it’s baseball and that’s a good thing. Willie Mays said “Baseball is simple; you pitch the ball and I hit it. You hit the ball and I catch it.” That’s both a great oversimplification and a great truth. Sometimes you have to pan out and not look at the trees but the forest. That’s where this entry is taking me; it’s not where I planned on going. While I love diving into the fractal nature of reality, diving into my second, third, and fourth thoughts; sometimes it’s good to see the simplicity. I originally was going to write about the scientific worldview. I’ll save that for another time, but part of it fits in with today’s thoughts. The world seems endlessly complex, with everything being a special case, science discovered that the universe is guided by relatively simple laws. Before Galileo and Newton people came up with incredibly byzantine theories of how an arrow can fly through the air. None of them went everywhere and didn’t make predictions. Newton discovered that everything follows simple natural laws. The simple notion that “A body in motion tends to remain in motion and an object at rest tends to remain a rest, cut through the Gordian knot. We no longer had to come up with Rube Goldberg devices to explain what keeps pushing the arrow in flight. To explain its exact motion is complex because the arrow is interacting countless molecules of air. But what they do is alter the simple motion it would have in a vacuum. Things are not complex because everything is a special case, but because there is so much in the universe all interacting with each other. The laws that guide things are simple. The same goes with happiness, the human mind is far more complex than an arrow traveling in the air, but there’s still truth in the Rubaiyat.
“A Book of Verses underneath the Bough,
A jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread—and Thou
Beside me singing in the Wilderness—
O, Wilderness were Paradise enow!”
Did you know that Omar Khayyam was not just a poet but also a mathematician and astronomer? He came up with the quadratic formula. He saw the truth in the chaos.
Wise Madness 