Eight-Track Consciousness

I've been thinking about life and all its peculiarities and particularities. That there's a certain trajectory to life, going, it appears, from one moment to the next. This of course seems self-evident to us in the West, just guessing, but there have been those (are those?) who have seen it as more cyclical, or, maybe even in some more inscrutable way, like cyclical/linear/quarkish all at the same time. I suppose you could call our linearity similar to a phonograph record, the cyclical people's similar to a CD, and that last bunch similar to an 8-track tape.

If you think of each one as preserving something, yet having its own little world (ethos), this makes an apt illustration of my point. What the phonograph record and CD suggest is pretty obvious. But the 8-track tape is a real adventure, if you remember them, a wild, easily disordered affair, a mushy, undependable interface point, planned and unplanned program jumping, sometimes unexpected repetitions, bleeding tracks, continued songs, space-age wavering, slowing down, speeding up; they really could be used in consciousness experiments, if not transcedence / transconsciousness triggers. The artist intended the music of this world, the delivery gave a door beyond.

And to think I used to see them along the road, broken, run-over, the tape unspooling, flapping about in the wind, being tangled in weeds and pecked at by red-winged blackbirds. I should have collected them and pieced them together. Who knows what I might have discovered, say, if I would've run them upside down, backwards, through, say, two players simultaneously, or whatever? It might've been an eye-opener!


Original article ["Feeling Sorry for Myself"] fragments, now abandoned:

Anyway, as I said at the outset, I've been thinking of life, in particular, my pathetic life here. Grandma Slump in the other room snoring. She's a real survivor. She survived another day of life, as did I. Why do I say "pathetic?" Not for any big huge monstrous reason, really, but I guess I'm tired, and just feeling sorry for myself. I'm sitting here, aging right along, definitely linear (it's obvious), and I know other guys my age are out there, partying with wives, having martinis with business associates, helping their kids get through college, driving big Hummers, the works.

But the way it was for me -- the peculiarities and particularities coming out of my choices -- was that I stayed with Grandma. Taking care of her, I can chalk that up to my credit. And I do help out around here. I guess I should be a little proud. My clothes aren't your expensive brands. But, hey...

Yet, looking at these four walls everyday of my life, sleeping on the same bed I slept on when I was 12, and watching time tick on toward the time when I join Grandma in Heaven. There's something less than satisfying about that.