Everything is everything

debs/ February 11, 2020

The light you see at the end of the tunnel is the front of an oncoming train” – David Lee Roth

I am a ball of contradictions floating around in existential limbo. Of course, this is nothing new.

I think a category of contradictions I hold is the juxtaposition between being groomed to think modernly, yet desiring to think postmodernly.

My general impression is that postmodern thinking is characterized by a tendency to consider relationships between entities more interesting than entities themselves, edges more interesting than nodes, waves more interesting that particles. It follows that postmodern thinking tends to resist labeling the entities, resist defining the nodes, and, heck, particles are even expressed as a superposition of waves. Postmodernity is in vogue and it’s—gasp—a bandwagon I actually want to jump on (without having to adopt the “post-modernist” label, of course).

However, my mind prefers to deal with precise separation between categories, 1-1 analogies, deterministic simulations–it thinks “modernly”. As much as I desire to embrace the loosey-goosy indeterminacy of postmodernity, I know that if I completely let go of absolutes, this is this kind of trip you’ll find in the ol’ noggin:

“‘There is a reason for everything’, ‘everything came from nothing’. Nothing is everything. Everything is everything. ‘Nothing’ is a possible reason for everything.”

– Real thoughts I am capable of having

On a bad day, it’s like dividing by zero. On a good day, it’s like this video.

All this is to say, if I made mud pies out of wilderness, would you pity me enough to buy them on Etsy?


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