After writing this I feel the need to make a warning paragraph here. This post is of the type I used to write and is closer to stream of consciousness. I’ve made no effort to make any point or any sense. I’m only writing this warning because I have like 5 “followers” on this blog now, whatever “follower” means, and this isn’t much like my recent stuff. I’m gonna be doing more of these though.
How long has it been since I did one of these? When I first got this blog I would do a “Random Thoughts” post almost everyday. I mean, yeah, that only lasted for a few weeks or something but it was still alot different than what I do here now. Part of me wants to go back to just doing these “Random Thoughts” type posts more often but I think I could just do both. Actually, now that I think about it, I’ll just keep doing whatever I want to do with it.
So what am I gonna write about today? What am I thinking about? To be clear, I’m asking myself that question right now, not you, any possible reader.
This year has been kinda crazy for me. The key part of that sentence is “for me”. At the end of 2019 I was adamant that the 2020’s would be an incredible decade. What does incredible mean? I’m not 100% sure but it doesn’t mean the “happiest” or the “easiest”. I’m trying to figure out how to define “incredible” in a specific way that let’s me stand by the original prediction. Obviously, 2020 was not a “Happy” year and 2021 hasn’t been all that much better but “Happy” and “Good” are not the same thing.
Ok, I gotta cool it with the quotation marks. Honestly, my entire approach to punctuation is currently in a state of flux. Like I said in my post about nightmares my life has had a constant struggle, among other struggles, to reconcile what other people say and do with what makes sense to me. I keep finding that things I felt alot of apathy toward in my youth were things I simply didn’t see the importance of.
Wow. As I look at that last sentence I’m thinking, “Fucking duh.” Like, obviously apathy is just another way to suggest a lack of importance being placed on a thing. It’s crazy how often you realize something and then marvel at how you never realized that super obvious thing before. Is that made worse by bias? I mean, does the fact that I’m now cognizant of whatever that connection is actually trick me into thinking I should always have been cognizant? Does the word “Cognizant” have a Z in it? That seems wrong.
Anyway, English classes in grade school always tried to teach me how and when to use punctuation; where to use commas, what to capitalize, what a semi-colon meant. Even in college when I wrote a short story for a writing class I had points taken off my grade because I used commas in some wrong spots. What the heck is that!? My new policy, which I’ve realized has always been my policy, if unconsciously, is to not give a hoot when I use punctuation. A comma, to me, indicates a small pause in my speech patterns. It’s just a little separation, a change in enunciation to signal to the listener that these words I’m using now are separate in some small way from the previous words.
When listening to people talk they sometimes will start a new sentence or a new thought and I’ll not notice. So, my brain will be trying to attach these new words to whatever the old phrase was about and while normally my brain realizes its mistake quickly it is still an imperfection. I’m a big fan of imperfections in general so don’t think I need everything to be “perfect”. All’s I’m saying is that this particular issue is very easily solved. All you need do is add a change to provide a signal. You can use a change to anything; to tempo, tone, pitch, timbre, fortissimo, etc. Yeah, I know fortissimo doesn’t fit there but I thought it was funny. I’m not gonna explain why so just ignore it.
Point is, I might be a Modernist. Of course, the Modernist side of me that wants freedom from the oppression of any sociological, or even grammatical expectations, is recalcitrant to attach a defining title like “Modernist” to myself. God, that’s so Modernist of me. To be honest I only have a very vague understanding of what “Modernist” even means so don’t hold me to that. Philosophical schools like “Modernism” that appear, to my very poor knowledge, to be all about separation from the established order, of what to use and where to use it, for a more prominent focus on the free use of all options, somehow do end up falling into the classification of a “school”. I mean, as soon as you put this title on it, give it leaders like Eliot and Pound to study, and attach a system of rules around what it means, aren’t you kind of making sure that you aren’t actually in the same group as them? They count themselves as outside of groups. If you put them in a group, for whatever reason, you do so against their intentions.
It’s a currently big cultural issue in my thoughts. Religious figures make the best examples of what I’m talking about. Of course, the mere mention of any religious term, let alone a Key Name, often turns people’s brain from one base-line setting to another, less open minded setting. It’s like, in a regular, undefined and open conversation your brain is in a certain type of state. In this state you aren’t using any concrete self imposed limitations of connotation. The metaphor I see in my mind is of one of those little kids toys that you can look through and it has all these different color lenses that you can flip down. You can look through the toy with no lenses down and see things normally, then you would flip down blue, and a blue piece of plastic would come down and give everything you see a blue hue. You then flip down yellow and everything turns green and your little kid brain is like, “Woah! What just happened?”
Anyway, that toy, and it’s effect, are what I’m reminded of when I think of the way people sometimes react to hearing a religious term. I know that the connections between those two things may be hard to see but it works in my head so whatever. The point I’m trying to make is that alot of people have these kinds of “trigger” topics, and whenever their brain senses one of these topics being approached it unconsciously and reflexively throws down a corresponding lens over their mind and the entire conversation that follows is now defined by this false hue that their brain is seeing things in.
I still feel like I’m not being 100% clear so I’ll give an example. That’s all the work I’m willing to do on this; I gotta get back to whatever the hell I was talking about before. Imagine you have a friend who’s parents were murdered by a toaster oven. Yeah, I bet you were expecting more clarity from me but nah bro. Anyway, this friend obviously has a very complex and negative relationship with the idea of toaster ovens; he attends group meeting with other people biggoted against toaster ovens and everything. Now, you are having a conversation with him about a date you went on. Your friend isn’t thinking about toaster ovens and, at the moment, his eyesight is clear: there are no lenses for you to have to work around.
You tell him that you took your date to the county fair. You talk about going on the Ferris wheel and being in that little room together way up there. You talk about playing those little games at the booths to try to win a prize. After many failed attempts you had to sheepishly give up; you didn’t manage to win any prizes for your girl. You friend calls you a sucker for trying to win those obviously rigged games. You laugh and start to talk about the food booths. Your friend reminisces about the last time he had funnel cake. You tell him about how amazing the Teriyaki Chicken Pineapple Boats were (or any of the other inane foods that could only be considered ethical to create at a fair) and how you wanted to try and make your own at home. You were nervous since the recipe seems complicated but your Girlfriend’s toaster oven worked better than you could have hoped and your Hot Pineapple Boat piece of nonsense food turned out pretty good.
Obviously, things change for your friend. He’s used to this type of thing so it’s not a big deal but he now has a red lens in front of his eyes. You aren’t thinking about the ethics of toaster ovens but, as you give praise to your Girlfriend’s oven because it heats things up like it’s supposed to, you and your friend are operating with very different mentalities. Yours is relatively clear, only tinted lightly with shades of hunger and nostalgia, but your friend’s is straight-up-red and while the conversation might go on as it normally would the separation of the two people is clearly a potential source of miscommunication. Now whenever your friend hears about Teriyaki Chicken Pineapple Boats the image he sees in his head will be a little more red than everyone else’s .
What the fuck am I talking about? Uh… let me scroll up real quick. Ah yes, religion. Wait, no, that’s not right. I was gonna use religion as an example to explain the harmful effects of time on “schools of thought”. Actually, I was trying to explain why having to follow a set of rules thought of as “Modernism” to be a “modernist” is funny to me because it seems antithetical.
I’m just gonna pretend I never got sidetracked.
Every big idea Humanity has tried to spread has suffered by the passage of time, from the “sources” of the ideas into the future. New communication inventions like grammar, tools of thought, sets of rules, ethics, ideologies, philosophies, and everything else immaterial, but important, passes from one generation to the next like an unimaginable game of telephone. Simple passage through only 10 children, sitting right next to each other, can turn any phrase into something unrecognizable. Religions and “schools of thought” sail for millennia as the Ship of Theseus through the impossibly turbulent waters of human thought and come out on the other side always more complicated, more restrictive, and more nonsensical.
To heck with your idea of a what a comma should do. I’m just gonna take the Ship we have now and ignore the idea that Theseus ever existed. It’s a boat. That’s the only thing it ever has been. It actually didn’t change at all. It sails from one place to another. I’ll use it how I want.
The Mind of Joshypoo 