Wine (Part VIII)

Is a world of streaks and speckles supposed to be magical? Childhood cartoons certainly suggest it. Certiainly it makes the whole approach/avoidance gradiant experience easier to bear. Tonight: the shouting of aspiring stand-up comics and the plesiomorphic din of our drunken posse, managing to heckle and rebut, and me in the corner wondering how it is done. I had no idea what to say when the stand-up guy started talking and poking fun at my lush-ness. I hadn't actually started drinking at 9 a.m. but I led him to believe it. Why not? Why shouldn't we transofrm the familiar landscapes and bend them under the weight of history? Today I found out that they had replaced the jukebox I was reared on. How's that for pathos?

I am tired. I can't take the richness of the experience. I have no local conversational optima to attain. Anecdotes have been mined and I've wandered up and down the bar for the last time tonight. It is a time to settle with the homebodies and the friends and hope to get somewhere in the future world of potentialities. I realize tonight that my only gift was in couching obvious ideas in new and almost-indecipherable terms. That is the gift and the curse, and people will not get enough of it. I cannot talk about the streetcar wires again, even though they are as beautiful and filled with life as ever.

To you who waits and lurks in the world of unrealized opportunity: the search space is vast and the optimum small, but at least you're aware it exists! With that step you take the intractable Abyss of a problem and turn it into something we can handle by more-or-less brute computation.

Consider: "Men make their own history, but they do not make it just as they please; they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves, but under circumstances directly encountered, given and transmitted from the past."