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Packages show up on the lawn it is astonishing how they appear. They are astonishing surprises. It’s what I ordered the cat food the espresso machine the two
by karatestomp 7y ago
Packages show up on the lawn it is astonishing how they appear.
They are astonishing surprises.
It’s what I ordered the cat food the espresso machine the two new tables.
Ordering things and how they appear basically I am a small-scale sorcerer.
On the road I press the button and the music goes.
Air conditioning gas pedal restaurant take-out etc.
It is my will being perpetually sated.
Pretend we are writing a fable in which a sorcerer always gets what he wants.
Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants.
— Emily Bludworth de Barios, from the preview page for issue #31 of Forklift, Ohio (and, indeed, the issue itself, if you have it):
http://www.forkliftohio.com/index.php?page=freight-31 http://www.forkliftohio.com/index.php?page=freight-31
- brosinante 7y agoSure but also, is this what we "want"? (for wildly varying definitions of the word want.) Takeaway available with the press of a button is certainly not what my soul wants.
- Udik 7y agoSure we do. These are our small-scale desires. Then you might think that on a larger scale this is not really what you want- but try to deny the right of people to desire ordering food from home, or buying online, or going where they want as fast as it's possible, or being cured from pneumonia or cancer.
- solotronics 7y agoReally curious why you are being downvoted. The pyramid of needs is at work here, when your basic needs are satisfied it becomes easier to work on higher level issues. Is one a better philosopher when they are starving? I don't know. I would rather be a well fed philosopher than a starving one.
- vbsteven 7y agoThe stoics for example have a practice where they deliberately deprive themselves of basic things like food and warmth in order to appreciate those things more when they do have them.
- karatestomp 7y agoIn Seneca's case, at least, he advocated similar things (playing at being a destitute beggar every now and then) to remove fear of bad circumstances, not exactly to increase appreciation of good circumstances.
- uoaei 7y agoRight, this is the point of negative visualization. But the two go hand in hand just like anything else that can be framed as "yin-yang".
- beat 7y agoSomething I say constantly, especially to others trying to make a decision to act, is "What's the worst thing that could possibly happen?" The thing is, you probably can't even imagine the worst thing that can possibly happen from any given decision. But by saying it out loud, you try, at least briefly. And in doing so, you often realize that "the worst thing that could possibly happen" really isn't all that bad. I wanna ask this person on a date. What's the worst thing that could possibly happen? They say no and I feel embarrassed. It's a lot easier to do scary things if you actually think about the consequences of failure, rather than letting animal fear control you. This, I learned from the Stoics.
- curuinor 7y agoLots of things that look like hierarchies are more like stuff distributed ~ power law. Certainly wealth, but I think actual needs are pretty distributed ~ power law. Breathing looks hierarchically more important than self-actualization but it's just that a material portion of your entire ensemble of needs is just breathing - completely not optional. Given that, you can futz w/ stuff and see if the levy-stable structure of this sort of thing will allow you to fold over different stuff
- inopinatus 7y agoOur monkey brains are not evolved to deal with the satisfaction barrage of met expectations, or the microdosed dopamine of incremental reputation tallies. We've weaponised the apparatus of retail and communication against our own limbic systems.
- vnorilo 7y agoI found a single origin espresso that I really like. One time I bought a bag of beans it occurred to me that requiring coffee beans from a specific farm in Rhuanda sounds like something a king might do. Even my bog standard middle class luxury feels wildly excessive sometimes.
- leesec 7y agoI'm with ya. I'm pretty solidly middle - maybe upper middle class, but even the fact that I have opinions about Malbec over Pinot Noir makes me feel gross with opulence, not sure why.
- K0SM0S 7y agoI've a different take, more symmetric in time. How prodigious is it that so many of us know so many intricacies and details about so much stuff, from the aesthetic to the mechanic. We don't know if our point in the universe is to spread life or morality or simply to make it pretty, it's probably pointless to wonder beyond our very own life, but there's no denying that we are growing. We are becoming. Only by getting there can we know what it is. But it sure is one-of-a-kind. All the cynicism and pessimism in the world falls short in the face of our past achievements, let alone the future potential of this Earth (I like to consider all life here to be part of the journey, we didn't exactly "win" in isolation, and "we" is more like the system to me, however large that is).
- kortex 7y ago> We are becoming. Only by getting there can we know what it is. But it sure is one-of-a-kind. I have been having a bit of a rough month, one of those obdectively good on the outside view but subjectively on the inside full of self-doubt and existential angst. This just yanked me out of that headspace, for a few moments at least. Thank you :)
- K0SM0S 7y agoMuch obliged :)
- squeaky-clean 7y agoI could be getting it wrong, but I thought this was part of the wordplay of the poem. It's not necessarily what your soul wants, it's what the small sorcerer inside you wants. The one that when you get hungry says "You know you can just stay in and have someone deliver it", or when you see an interesting book mentioned in conversation goes "We can have that on our shelf in less than 2 days!".
- inopinatus 7y agoA few weeks ago, in support of a customer's new facilities, I tasked a satellite imaging platform to take a photograph of Dubbo, Australia, using an app on my iPhone. Placing the instruction took less than two minutes, the longest part of which was downloading the app. The processed image was downloaded to my device before close of business that same day. Against a glowing surface, my hand describes a complex sigil, and orbital mechanisms leap into action on my whim. Next up: pulling together the components for Karsus's Avatar
- ISL 7y agoIn some ways, this has happened for decades with satellite telecom relays. Still super cool though! :)!
- LeifCarrotson 7y agoAfter reading your comment, I was curious what your photograph might have looked like and where Dubbo was. A moment later, I had selected, searched for, and been presented with images of and articles about Dubbo. I gave them a brief, bored glance and moved on.
- inopinatus 7y agoThis age of mundane wonders.
- photojosh 7y agoDon't worry, that happens when you drive through there as well. Although doing the overnight camping option at the zoo there was a great experience.
- taurath 7y agoOut of curiosity, what platform is that?
- wcoenen 7y agoPossibly the spymesat app. If you create an account and log in, apparently you can select satellites and task it to take images for anywhere between $500 to $3300.
- csense 7y agoWhat in the world is forkliftohio.com? It's a very insane website. I don't get it.
- dannygarcia 7y agoCurious if you're being facetious or genuinely flummoxed but it looks like a poetry periodical published in the format of industrial freight.
- karatestomp 7y agoJust like it says on the tin: "A Journal of Poetry, Cooking, & Light Industrial Safety" It's a semi-obscure but-well-regarded-in-certain-circles poetry/literary journal that's been around since the mid-90s, that uses the aesthetics of blue-collar industrial & commercial publications, drawing on them for illustrations, section title inspiration, occasional excerpts of advice or instructions, that sort of thing. The poetry itself isn't tied down by that theme, though, and ranges as widely as any poetry journal might. Also each issue usually includes at least one recipe. (the "cooking" part). The journals themselves tend to include some kind of physical gimmick. IIRC one early one was a bunch of loose sheets with a hole through the middle, "bound" with a bolt, nut, and washers. One came in an actual, sealed evidence bag. Issue #31's spine (the one quoted) has been dipped in wax. One's cover is sandpaper and spine covered in duct tape, another's textured with brick dust. One's got a cork driven through it and came with a corkscrew to get it out. I like it because 1) they don't seem to take themselves too seriously, 2) their sense of whimsy is tuned to about the exact level that I find fun and enjoyable, rather than trying-too-hard and obnoxious, and 3) their taste in selecting poetry seems to place a lot of weight on whether the words and ideas stick with you, rather than sheer poetic excellence or stereotypical MFA inside-baseball wanking—I can get those things in effectively-unlimited quantities elsewhere, so I appreciate their (apparently) somewhat different editorial priorities.
- csense 7y agoI never understood why people bother writing, or enjoy reading, poems that don't have strong rhythm and rhyme. If you did the actual work of solving the constraint satisfaction problem of making syllable counts, stress, and rhyming words line up, in a way that simultaneously tells an engaging story -- well, that's a lot of work, and anyone can appreciate the achievement. And it tickles readers' neurons in a unique way. It's a respectable and unique form of literature. If you don't want to bother with that, it seems like you can slap down any old vague, mystic-sounding words. And because you call it a poem, miraculously any nonsense becomes some inscrutable profundity. I don't "get" it. And I have a sneaking suspicion that maybe nobody "gets" it. But a lot of people pretend to, because they don't want to seem like some anti-artistic philistine.
- madisfun 7y ago> Consider what happens to a soul which always gets what it wants. The soul craves for what's not easily attainable. Commercial transactions are all the same. Feasibility is sweet but one-dimensional. There're things you can buy, and things you cannot. You cannot buy a different self. Politics, volunteering, social games, arts and sports are the new frontier. And we act to define what we are.
- spectramax 7y agoI ordered food, but that's cheating so I decided to go to the restaurant and order it. But that's cheating, so I decided to cook a meal. But that's cheating, because I didn't make the pasta myself. 3 hours later and a bunch of mess in the kitchen, I made pasta. It ain't pretty shaped but it'd do. No, wait! That's cheating because I didn't make the knife, pot, cutting board, fork, stove from scratch! Consider what happens to a soul which always cheats!