| Do you ever get the feeling like you're living history? That question didn't make much sense. I mean, does the present ever feel to you like something that's already happened? I'm not talking about deja vu. It's more like all of this is part of some remembrance, like the future is singular and someone is looking back at you. It feels like I imagine one feels when one has decided there is no free will. Or like one is a computer program. I like that description. The program has one objective, and you are an element of the universal computer running the computer to it's end. I have two thoughts on this at once. The first is that it sounds like a Charlie Chaplin, cog in a machine feeling. That's not what I mean. The second is the more interesting question of whether we are nothing more than a bioelectrical, self-sustaining computer that has no more choice in what becomes of it than the computer at which I type. We have a feeling of choice, but below even our unconscious, somewhere in our genetic makeup, we are programmed to make every choice we ever make, and each response of each machine is know to the creator of the massive computational system. But that's not quite the feeling, either. Because that is a feeling of being in the present, but moving toward an objective. My feeling is more like something is looking back through time at me, examining how each choice was made, each action taken. Like, we've heard people say that when you die, your life flashes before your eyes. I feel almost as though a dying me in the future is observing me now at this moment, and I am but a memory. I don't know why this feeling strikes me, but it's hit me a lot lately, and I'd like to know that other people are experiencing it. Again, two thoughts strike me at once. The first is speculative, that maybe I am being contacted unconsciously by a future self to let me know that a critical choice is approaching, and I should be wary. That sounds silly as I write it, I know, but sometimes one just can't shake a feeling. The other idea is that this feeling may be the product of where I have kept myself mentally for the past couple of years. You may recall a few months back when I wrote of a mental and spiritual dilemma I felt I was facing, at which point it struck me that this physical world is no more real than the spiritual one about which some debate the very existence. I came to the conclusion that the physical world is real only because we choose to believe that our sensory perceptions are real. Similarly, we have spiritual perceptions. And that reality exists to us only because we choose to belive in it. That is certainly not to say that it exists because we do. Rather, the opposite. We exist through our perceptions, and we exist physically because we choose to accept our physical perceptions. Similarly, we can exist spiritually if we choose to accept our spiritual perceptions. It was at this time that I also came to believe that I would cease o exist physically if I could let go of the physical world, but, just as the athiest or agnostic is constantly dogged by questions of spirituality despite their efforts to ignore it, so to do I find the physical world to be one to which I am habitually accustomed. The idea at which I am driving at through all of this, which undoubtedly seems nonsensical to you, is that I may be finding myself at least in part disconnected from the physical world, looking upon the physical self somehow without entirely being present in it. There's an episode of NextGen called Transfigurations (Season 3, Episode 25) in which a creature dubbed John Doe is undergoing an evolution, unbeknownst to him, into a being of pure energy. That may be where this little fantasy of mine comes from. It also seems like such a fantasy may be misplaced. Perhaps the true goals should not be to shed the physical, but rather to unite it with the mental and spiritual parts of ourselves. A great deal of my own self-dissatisfaction seems to come not from an inability to exist spiritually, mentally, or physically, but rather from a discordance between the three. In my focusing on one or another, the others get neglected, and I become a creature who, as we have been discussing, is not fully present. Now, I certainly don't mean someone focused exclusively on the present; my previous posts from years back surely express my disgust with improvidence and imprudence. Rather, I mean than I am unfocused. While my body is in one place, my mind may be somewhere completely different, and, as those of us daydreamers know, this leads to gaps of hours on end in which nothing significant is ever really accomplished. I am here led to a question of whether one can exist exclusively as a spiritual being. I have always put the spirit as the facet of oneself that belongs on a pedestal. Like I said, I imagined an evolved state of humanity where we shed our physical selves and become universal. But, that may have been a hasty or easy answer to a more complex question. Or it may be that, as I have no means of separating the spirit from the body, the unity of the parts that I do have may be a more effective may of becoming an effective person than attemping any separation. I'm not sure I have an answer, but that is becoming an increasingly more constant state of being for me, so I'll just promise here to ponder it further in time.
Anyway, enough of that. I have fifteen minutes before dinner time, and I feel like talking at you. It's been a good long while since I've ranted. I should think it was last summer since I went on this long about nothing at all. I guess that's what summer does to a person? Tomorrow is the first of June. Let me tell you a story about the crazy things we've put up with at my house. So, we're renting from this guy who is so negligent in his landlording skills that a house of his burned down and killed a few people a couple of years back. Nevertheless, we're renting from him. Actually, I didn't find the house, Annie did, and I didn't know he was the guy we would be renting from until after we signed the lease. But, we made the best of it, and actually, despite some very obvious structural problems and the fact that the laundry machines were coin operated in a private residence, the place turned out to be livable, though I don't know if I can give it any more credit than that. Anyway, we're living there, and one day we get a call or a letter or some means of informing us that some building inspectors from the city of Minneapolis are coming by to make sure the place checks out. I'm assuming this is standard procedure from rental property, though I don't know that for sure. Anyway, they come out, and we find out that the two bedrooms in the basement are illegal. The landlord built them, but never got either permitted, and one of the rooms is so bad that he couldn't have gotten it permitted even if he had wanted to. So, there we are, five people living in the house, and by June 1, it is legally a three bedroom property, in which only three people are allowed to reside. So, anyway, the inspector told us to contact the University's legal service and get out of the lease. So we contacted them and they agreed that we are no longer bound by our lease, because it was for a five bedroom house, and we have been renting a three bedroom house. So, my roommate and the U lawyers draw up this letter of constructive eviction, in which we basically say, dear landlord, you broke our lease, so we are going to go find someplace where it is not illegal to live. But, the landlord, rather than admitting he's done anything wrong, seems to think we should just keep paying him as though it's now a three bedroom house, as though we had signed a lease for that instead of a five bedroom house. Anyway, we're not sure what to do. For a first rental experience, this is not what I had hoped. But, I suppose nothing is easy where money is involved. I don't know what to do. I never thought I'd say this, but I just want my lawyer to figure it out.
Ugh, that just feels dirty. Nothing against the U's lawyers. From everything my roommate tells me, she's been completely awesome to work with. It's just the situation that's getting to me. I don't like having to be put in a situation like this.
Anyway, it's dinnertime. Have yourself a good day. |
