I must return to the desert. I must.

A skeptic need not be skeptical of their own skepticism
A hypocrite need not be hypocritical of their own hypocricy
A religious man can do more harm to society than any of its criminals
One can live and not necessarily live or otherwise have a life
One can be alone in a crowded room
What’s apparent isn’t always obvious
Vague things are just that
Ambiguity is anything
A friend needn’t have any friends themself
A liar needn’t lie about the fact that they lie
An honest person can lie at times and still be an honest person
A self-refering statement need not be this one in particular
Anything may be possible but very few things are probable
Dreams never come truethey’re never false to begin with
I think therefore I think that I am (thinking)
And this poem need not justify its poetic value

I hate Easter. Everything’s closedI can’t go shopping, can’t go to the bank, almost nothing. It’s so very inconvenient. Why did they have to kill Jesus on a Friday?

I guess the subject of limbo would be irrelevant to any discussion, since it is neither here nor there.

Ladies and gentlemen, the nightmare is over.

I am happy now. Things are looking up. Still, I must be vigilant. This is what Murphy’s been waiting for. I won’t leave anything to chance this time.

I wish I wasn’t so dissociated. It’s just that it’s been so long. Hope is so alien to me. It screwed me over in the past. Why should I trust it now? A question for another day, perhaps. Back to bliss!

For a long time nowweeks, months, years, IdunnoI’ve wondered what it’s like to be in somebody else’s head. I mean, basically what it’s like to be them, from a first-person perspective, with their thoughts, memories, and perceptions. How does someone else’s thought processes go? Would their inner reality be anything like mine? Would I see the same colors?

I’m pretty sure that a lot of people have thought about that last question at one time or another, even if they never gave it all that much thought. But I think it kind of begs the question. It implicitly assumes that things have an inherent color to them. That can be argued, I guess, but as for the sensation (after all, isn’t that all it is?) of color itself, it’s completely in your head. The grass isn’t as green so much as it reflects electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency, i.e., light, which your eyes pick up and send to your brain where it is processed into a visual imprint on your immediate memory which you recognize as the color green.

But what if your range of vision is expanded so you can see ultraviolet light as well as infrared light. The grass wouldn’t necessarily be green anymore. It could be as yellow as a banana or teal or something. Hot, sweaty people would appear more red than people at normal temperature (infrared waves = heat radiation). Your preconceptions of what color is would be thrown out the window. The idea of experiencing colors through someone else’s eyes is, in a sense, meaningless. What you consider to be color is unique to your own self and what your brain does with the light that your eyes sense.

I’m not sure if what I said was a convincing argument that thinking about how other people see color is meaningless. It made perfect sense before writing this entry but I forgot exactly what about it I found to be a convincing argument.

Anyway, back to someone else’s head. What I’ve considered before, and what I’m reconsidering now is that the idea of being in someone else’s head is also meaningless. Just as there are no colors “out there”, there isn’t any real concrete you. Now, of course you can see colors (so they must be there) and you’re absolutely certain that you are in fact you, that you have a self, and you do exist. But it’s all in your head, just as everyone else’s ideas of what color is and who they are is in their heads. And that’s just what they areideas. All there is is the idea of what colors are and the idea of what a self is. You won’t find those things, that these ideas represent, anywhere. You can’t touch it, you can’t measure it (the subjective perception in the case of color), you can’t describe color to a blind person, or what a self is to an autistic. There really is no you. And if there’s no actual self, then there’s nothing that can go into someone else’s head. It’s not like there’s anyone there anyway.

I’m sure that some or all of this sounds wrong or very confusing to some people. I get confused, too, and I don’t always know that I’m right. But I’ve tried my damndest to imagine what it would be like to actually be someone else. This is my tentative conclusion. I can easily and correctly envision and describe four-dimensional space and relativitism, but this one baffles me.

It baffles a lot of people.

I think that when I say to people, “Don’t get me wrong???” that they still get me wrong anyway. That’s probably why I don’t use that phrase that often. That’s not to say that it’s a bad phrase, it’s just that???   ah, nevermind .

The preceding paragraph has too many that’s for my liking. Not that you care. But I do, damnit! This is my web site and I can say what I care about even if you never asked. I never asked you to read this, now did I? Hah! Or not.

What’s in a name? Identity.

The primary purpose of giving something a name is that, when it’s not around for you to point at, you can refer to it by name. The difference between giving a person one name or another may not matter, but it helps to give objects descriptive names. Even if you don’t know what a pencil sharpener looks like, you can still figure out what it is or does. Calling something that sharpens pencils something else, like nerelepinchasp, wouldn’t be as useful.

A rose by any other name may smell just as sweet, but using another name without roses in the vicinity won’t conjure any smells of sweetness. Tell someone that you were given a boquet of doodads and they’ll just go, “huh?”. Or not.