It's snowing for you too? How surprising!

This time of year, when lake-effect snow is being visited upon us like butter-cream frosting upon a wedding cake, there are two predominant types of Facebook statuses. As far as I can tell, the formula for generating these statuses are:

A) There's so much snow, _________ happened
B) [expletive deleted] snow

To convert the formulae above to Twitter statuses, just insert "#snow" or "@snow" or some bullshit.  I don't know how Twitter works.

If you value originality as much as I do, you gag a little bit, because repetitive statuses confirm the suspicion that despite their superficial differences, most people are the same on the inside.  Like flakes of shredded coconut.

So when you're hanging upside-down from your seatbelt in a ditch after a sudden snowdrift, and you feel the urge to post a status or tweet about the snow and how it affects you on physical and emotional levels, you might instead select from the following list of alternative formulae.  These will take your mind off the snow, and provide the rest of use with light entertainment.

A) These damn __________s are too large for my wood-chipper.
B) Did you see what [any given celebrity] did?  I was like, shiiiiit.
C) [expletive deleted] the economy.
D) I'm trapped in a well.  Send help ASAP.
E) I am on fire.

I hope this helps you maintain your originality in these trying times.  When everyone is posting variations on the same theme, these will inject Facebook and Twitter with some much-needed flavor, like Bavarian cream in an otherwise empty pastry.

Peace.

*skids off road*

The Semicolon; A Poem

I knew a man
Who never spoke
In complete sentences.
He would often;
Since he was unable
To form complete thoughts;
Pause and start over;
Thinking falsely;
That he could have said it
More clearly;
If he rearranged the words
And started over;
Well, not completely over;
But mid-sentence;
Substituting clauses;
Dangling his modifiers;
Splitting his infinitives;
Gerunding;
Until one day he had difficulty
Explaining to his doctor
A problem he'd been having with digestion;
Leading to a mis-diagnosis of Crohn's disease;
Which led the doctor to elect a bowel resection;
Leaving the man who used
Too many semicolons
With a semi-colon all his own.

Absolute Freedom

Today I seek to determine whether it is possible for a human being to experience absolute freedom.  This is tremendously important for me, as I find myself drawn to the idea of freedom, but I do not yet know if that path can yield a perceptible result. To answer this question may be linguistically challenging.  It is my aim to use plain language as much as possible.

As for method, I hope to establish first a definition for the word freedom.  Next I will attempt to flesh out experience of freedom and divorce it from its verbal definition, which acts as an anchor on the experience.  Finally I will attempt to determine whether the experience that remains may be experienced.

The freedom at which I am pointing is not specifically political freedom, though perhaps political freedom falls under the absolute freedom with which I am concerned.  Political freedom is primarily freedom from coercion by a governing body, which is somewhat narrower.

The first hurdle we encounter is that freedom is a speech act.  The freedom that is familiar to us is a shared definition, according to the tastes of our culture and period, which changes over time.  In early human history, agriculture gave people relative freedom from the need to hunt and gather.  Modern medicine offers, to an extent, freedom from some debilitating conditions.  In these examples, we find consistency in that freedom is a relative term.  Relative implies a comparison of two situations, separate in space or in time.  One can have more freedom now than one had before, or have less freedom now than one might have, given a different scenario.

It is further apparent that freedom can only exist for a mind that has the ability to draw comparisons.  As we have ascertained, freedom is a relative phenomenon.  In order to set today’s freedom beside yesterday’s freedom, I must first be able to integrate the concepts of today and yesterday.

Also implicit in freedom is the duality between myself and everything else.  I seek freedom from an external entity or situation.  It is important to be careful at on this point.  Duality versus unity is a disputed zone in philosophy.  For our purposes, we must let that be for the moment.  Freedom ceases to be meaningful if duality is not the state of affairs in which we live, so we must found our inquiry on the premise that duality exists.  Within the context of duality, the final piece of our definition is a describable as a kind of inertia or momentum that is independent of external forces.  Freedom is not quite the state of being insulated from the effects of the external world, but rather a non-connection to them.  External influences cannot enact force upon one with absolute freedom.  When truly free, coercion is impossible.

To review, we have arrived at the working definition.  Freedom is a state in which a mind is beyond influence from the apparent duality of the world in which the mind finds itself. Now we can begin to strip it away, laying bare the experience of freedom itself.

Sorting out the phenomenology of freedom is difficult.  We must set ourselves upon finding out what feelings, at the interface of self and other, constitute the experience of freedom.  First of all is imperturbability.  The free person is beyond the influence of such an interface.  Whatever the external world is doing, the free person is unmoved.  The will alone gives rise to motion.  That which is not willed by the free person does not occur.

In this state, freedom is the convergence of absolute acceptance an absolute rebellion.  The free person is unmoved by the forces exerted by the world, thanks to the faculty of being able to accept those forces without hesitation.  It is the fighting spirit applied to one’s refusal to fight.  Although absolute acceptance is an empowering idea, it may involve costs that the inexperienced freedom-seekers  are unwilling to bear.  In order to experience absolute freedom, one must be willing to lose everything.  When a guillotine blade is dropping, the free person is relaxed and confident that all is well, even at the final instant.

The necessity of giving up everything is perhaps why we have not yet experienced freedom.  We cling to that which we value.  For this reason we dare not leap into freedom’s embrace, as we must leave everything else behind.

We have only one question left.  Can absolute freedom be experienced by a human mind?  Can the world crash down, murdering our loved ones, crippling our bodies, snuffing out the light of human consciousness without disturbing us in the least?  This is a very difficult question.  Such imperturbability must be extremely rare.

The answer may hinge upon whether freedom is a spectrum or a binary phenomenon.  Is becoming free a gradual act, as in a growth from tyranny to its opposite, or is it binary?  Can a human simply decide that whatever occurs, I shall not be moved?  History gives rare examples.  Joan of Arc comes to mind.  A condemned prisoner (that recurring favorite of Albert Camus) who has accepted his sentence also arises.  If freedom is to be found, it certainly seems to be among the condemned.

Yet all of us are condemned by our very mortality.  For this reason alone, it would seem that absolute freedom is in store for all of us.  The folly would be waiting for the final moments to experience it.  We must all eventually surrender, therefore it may be beneficial to surrender now.  Do not wait to embrace your absolute freedom.

Come what may, you are already free if you can let it all go.


Cogito ergo dumb

René Descartes is arguably our most prized philosopher.  His phrase "Cogito ergo sum (I think, therefore I am)" is a compelling thesis statement.  By virtue of his methods of doubt and analysis, his position is highly defensible.

But Descartes is wrong.  He built a mighty verbal fortress to defend the "I."  For all his efforts to place "I" on a solid foundation of the presence of thought, he failed to define thought in the first place.  As philosophy is primarily a game of representing experience symbolically, through words, he has tacitly omitted a definition of thought.  He has built a fortress around a phantom.

But, you argue, "Thought is clear and distinct.  Aha, I've got you, Karl!"

Nice try.  You have offered me a symbol for a feeling; you've put "thought" on a platter.  But your symbol is only that, not a concrete thing or event.  It is just as weak as any other verbal symbol, such as love, bitterness, blue, or hot.  What is hot for you is hot for you alone.

At this point no person, philosopher or otherwise, has properly thumb-tacked thought to a cork board for thorough analysis.  Nobody knows how we do it or what we're doing.  We feel like it's happening, but we haven't defined it.  We can't point to it and say "eureka!"

Thought is a universal con act.  Notice that in order to identify any "thing," you must first identify a "non-thing" against which to contrast the "thing."  Thought is a devilishly clever phantom in this regard.  To point to thinking, you must first identify non-thinking.  As thinking is a first-person subjective event, you cannot verify its presence without crawling inside another being and linking up to that being's experiences.  You may guess that a rock does not think, but you must become a rock to verify the notion.

A rock...

...not to be confused with rock music

I feel it is my responsibility as Karl to propose the following. Until we find an acceptable definition of thought, we must set aside René Descartes' "Cogito ergo sum," and instead use the working thesis "Cogito ergo dumb."  The latter phrase will suffice in the interim, and it is just as philosophically useful as any other item in the philosophical canon.

Not cannon, dumbass. Canon. Sigh.

High School Never Ends

"High school never ends." - Everybody

I'm wondering why this axiom seems to resurface consistently.  High school never ends.  I've heard people apply it to work, family reunions, and even grocery shopping.  I intend to dig out what this means exactly, this zombie phrase, so that we may exhume it's undead corpse in the light of day and ensure it is thoroughly killed before we bury it for good.

You might ask why I seek to dig for meaning in this phrase only to destroy it.  This phrase is simply annoying.  It has a backward-looking feel, and reeks of whining.  Oh woe, woe is me, for high school, it never ends.  Get over it.  We are at your shack, whining, and our pitchforks and torches ache to root you out.

No more whining!  No more whining!  No more whining!

I assume "High school never ends" roughly means "In my observation people are selfish; they hold grudges, work hard to avoid working, and pry into one-another's affairs."  Probably all true.  But the zombie has a weakness here.  Notice the context.  You are saying the phrase.  You are asserting all of the above.

YOU are casting judgment on others, holding grudges, prying, et cetera et cetera et cetera.  You're starting to sound zombie-ish.  If you are sharpening your shank to hunt down the high-schooler, perhaps it is you who need a good shanking.

How much energy are you wasting by being preoccupied with how others comport themselves?  If you think about this question for more than one second, you are likely wasting too much time.

It is enough to let it drop.  Get on with your life.  Don't waste time lamenting, "High school never ends."  Instead, try the phrase, "Why haven't I graduated to real life?"  Looks like you'll have to pitchfork yourself.  Look to your left, now to your right.  At the end of this essay, both of those people need to grow up.

The end.

Megalomania Oscillations

On a grand scale, I find myself alternating between one of two energy states.  For those of you who appreciate chemistry, you might call these my orbitals.

When I'm at my best, my energy state is fairly energetic (read: unstable).  It usually follows a night of staring at the ceiling thinking, "There's got to be more to my life than this.  I was meant to do something great during my time on Earth."  I peak somewhere in the f-orbital, when my mind is excited.

f-orbital. Eff yeah.

As you chemists know, high-energy states are when chemical bonds are easier to form.  At this point, I forge new relationships, accumulate new knowledge or skills, and start new projects.  This is megalomania.  I believe I can do anything.  I pick a project and throw my entire being into that endeavor.  I forget to eat.  I stop grooming myself.

But like any high-energy state, it cannot last.  Soon I encounter a difficulty I hadn't anticipated, I simply run out of energy, or I get stuck in traffic.  This is when I abandon my f-orbital, and crash into inertia.  I become an inert gas.

Helium - The Loser Molecule

Being an inert gas is depression, a.k.a. the opposite of megalomania.  I disregard potential projects.  I let people float by without making any effort to connect.  I stare out of windows looking bored.  This is the point at which I think, "This world is garbage.  I don't have a snowball-in-hell's chance of changing a single thing."

Here's where I need to step back and think, "What would Karl do?"

You see, Karl is never an inert gas, and never a megalomaniac.  Karl just is.  Karl follows what Buddha called "the middle way."  No striving.  No clinging.

Nothing to cling to.  No one to cling.

As has been established, Karl is grooving on the Universe as it is, without the impulse to change a single goddamn thing.  Karl is too busy enjoying the dance to think about whether he likes the song.  So next time you think, "I really ought to do something," take a moment to reflect.  Is this what Karl would do?

What it means to be Karl

Good question, front-row student.  For those of you who missed it, the question was, "What's a Karl?"

I could take the easy road and answer that Karl is me.  But friends, Karl is so much more.  Karl is a method.  Karl is a path.  Karl is a way of engaging with the Universe.  To be Karl is to be hip the groovy jazz going down inside you and all around you, and to add your own melody to the mix.  To be Karl is to move the mountain by feeling viscerally the impermanence of all causes.  To be Karl is to flash some sweet, sweet love to the whole bleeding show.

So that's me.  Karl.  Come here, Universe.  I got some groovy love for you.

Oh, and it's my middle name, by the way.  That's the short version, if you were interested.