Unstuck In A Moment

I'm sending this message in a bottle through time. I'm pressing the send button on 03/03/05 and sending it back to January 15, when the first draft of this message was written. A dozen typepad drafts separate this moment in time from that moment in time. If I leave enough breadcrumbs as I drift between moments, I believe I can eventually find my way back to the present. My hope is that I just need to block out an entire day "to do nothing but ketchup on my typepad"; the pessimistic Slim Shady inside of me believes I will fall further and further out of real-time. I wonder if I can ever fall behind enough that it will seem like I'm ahead?

me on January 4: "Why does having a blog mean feeling perpetually behind?"

Frank Paynter on January 10: "I think the answer is to let go of the immediacy compulsion."

Elayne Riggs in response: "I don't think it has anything to do with blogs. I think it's more a type of personality, as well as the greater and greater variety of entertainment choices coupled with less and less free time as we get older and take on more responsibilities (and interests!)."

Annette in response: "My list of post ideas keeps getting longer, and yet my posts are getting shorter... think there is some weird connection?"

Dr. R. James Steffen: "What you really want from life and work drives EVERY action, and... EVERY action takes you step by step to what you really want."

Xian on January 10: "For me the repeated lesson of blogging is to let go, stop worrying, and learn to love the drift. Trust your subconscious ability to do triage and spend your attention where your heart's priorities lie. The wheels will squeak when they need grease. Just stay in the moment and keep paying attention. It's not your job to document the entire cosmos let alone your entire flow of awareness."

Choke me in the shallow water before I get too deep. Even when I first drafted this post, I was five days later than Xian, who with the others had had an entire conversation without me. In the seven weeks since, they have all moved on, and I've somehow managed to find my way back to that moment, for a moment.

For some reason I'm reminded of a line by George Carlin in the very first Saturday Night Live back in 1975 which I believe I saw at the time when I was a young child, but got jogged into my memory recently during a re-broadcast of that show at 3am on Sunday, February 27:

Oh! There's a moment coming... there's a moment coming. It's not here yet. It's on the way... still in the future... Here. Here it is! Awww... It's gone, man. There's no present -- everything is the near future or the recent past. No wonder we can't get anything together -- we've got no time, man.

Ok, it's time to cork this bottle, it's 03/03 and time's a-wasting. Certainly the clarity of time puts March 3's problem into perspective as back to January we go. And when I'm in San Diego March 14-17 or in Arizona March 20-23 I wonder if that problem, too, will seem distant and evanescent. And when I look at this typepad post many years from now I wonder if it'll even matter that I was 47 days late in publishing it.

Maybe this is what Vonnegut meant when he said that Billy Pilgrim has come unstuck in time. I'm starting to wonder if time itself is an illusion created by one too many sips of the moron bowl. Whatever it is, I'm not afraid. As I get unstuck, I think of Bono, who said,

I'm not afraid
Of anything in this world
There's nothing you can throw at me
That I haven't already heard

I'm just trying to find
A decent melody
A song that I can sing
In my own company

I never thought you were a fool
But darling look at you
You gotta stand up straight
Carry your own weight
These tears are going nowhere baby

You've got to get yourself together...

I close my eyes, only for a moment, and the moment's gone... Dust. Wind. Dude. Hmmm...

Bill: Socrates; "The only true wisdom consists of knowing you know nothing".
Ted: That's us, dude.

...

[after arriving in the middle ages with Billy the Kid and Socrates]
Bill: Billy, you are dealing with the oddity of time travel with the greatest of ease.

Whoa.

Comments

[fp]

That So-crates... he's a winner. What would he have thought of sparticles and dark matter I wonder?

[Eric Anderson]

Relax, Adam, Everything is Deeply Intertwingled.

[Mark Shefsiek]

The only true wisdom consists of knowing you know nothing

Socrates had issues. True wisdom is knowing you know everything, when you directly experience it and that your conceptions about that experience are empty.

As I am drinking my coffee, I am experiencing a cylinder that is holding the liquid, if no one ever told me that was a cup and coffee I wouldn't be able to label it as such. It has no inheirent cupness or coffeeness. It also isn't really a cup, but a stainless coffee holder except when it is holding tea.

Concept comes when you are experiencing something and someone else, defines your experience for you. Most people never create their own label or language of their experience.

Time is no different. The experience is the sun comes up and goes down, seasons change, we change along with this process of rotation in the gravitational field. This is labeled as time but it is not time, only our conception. If you live in the quantum concept or direct experience moment by moment life there is no time.

Trance is defined as focused attention characterized by the loss of time, we buddhists call it samadhi.

The unstuckness is when you get out of the flow of other's experience, just because they don't know anything doesn't mean you can't.

[Marina]

What is a moron bowl? And where do you find them? The insatiably curious part of me wants to know!

Also, Hi!

[Adam]

A moron bowl is sixty ounces of moronic liquid pleasure.

I get mine at the Nola restaurant in Palo Alto, California...

[TSonic]

Doesn't the George Carlin line go:
"There's a moment coming... it's not here yet... it's still in the future... it's on it's way... wait... here it is! Awww shit, it's gone man! We jutt blew anothe one!"

Or was that a future perfomance of this line by GC?

[Adam]

That was a future performance; I've seen that one, too.

But I transcribed the Saturday Night Live monologue word for word.

Yes, I am that bored.