Moonies for the Misbegotten+

Flavors of Indian and Indonesian food urge me to change who I am and where I go. They invite me to crawl through the soft dominions of time and distance, seeking communion with moments too powerful to ignore, but too timid to claim as my own. I taste cinnamon, turmeric, cloves, ginger, paprika, garlic, corriander, funugreek, jeera, cardamom, and more. Assertively sweet, bitter, sour, and abstract—they insist on brandishing weapons as emphatic as they are dangerous. Their colors, aromas, promises, and piquancy arouse my senses with heat, love, and the intolerance of welcome frigidity. Everything about them is sensual, lascivious, lecherous, lewd, libidinous, licentious, and lustful. Yet they exude levels of unmatched purity. I need to experience combinations of lamb, garbanzos, tomatoes, cilantro, lemon juice, salt, aloo Manchurian, conquest, surrender, and certainty. Only when those experiences are bundled—with guidance from expert consolidators—can consumers hope for infinite truth that will overcome scalding contention. We can learn by embedding artificial intelligence (AI) into our thought processes; we must brave the hazards of derivative thought. Only through our willingness to recognize the infallibility of artifice can we ever hope to experience the intensities we seek. If we can write like an AI clone, we can think like an electropsychobiological mutant. And that’s what we’re after, isn’t it? Who among us can legitimately insist we belong to a level of classification that is below kingdom and above class? Food transcends that which we know, but not what we don’t.

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I may be wrong about damn near everything. My beliefs may be based on misunderstandings, lies, stupidity, arrogance, and an extraordinary level of hubris that merits the bleakest assessment of my ridiculously low level of intelligence. Would it matter? No, of course not. Intelligence is just a badly broken algorithm. That notwithstanding, though, we ought to acknowledge how flawed our beliefs have been and how much worse they are destined to become. Neither science nor religion  nor any other magical nor “knowledge-based” approach to understanding has any value in the search for truth. Truth is a card-catalog system that attempts to explain the inexplicable through the use of bullshit offered as evidence. Rational thinking has never existed, nor will it ever exist. Everything we claim to be foundationally rational has as much validity as “evidence” that colors have tastes and aromas—despite overwhelming evidence that colors are simply physical reactions to beings’ perceptions of illusory context. It’s not that hard to understand, except when it is impossible to misunderstand. How much clearer could it be?

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The time is approaching 7:45 a.m. in some places. But only because we claim time is an expression of reality…as if we had a clue what might constitute reality. Everything is artificial, including the things we acknowledge as imaginary. We willingly dismiss our disbelief, replacing it with delusions, illusions, and rock-hard ribbons of cotton-soft fibre. I really do wonder what makes any of us think we live in anything representing the “real world.” The “real world” is based on what the real world might be if we had the capacity to differentiate between what is real and what is impossible—although nothing is impossible. Fear and valor both occupy the undersides of valor and fear…at the same time (assuming time actually exists, which it does not). How do we know this? How do we NOT know this?I continue to think I have spent many of the previous 73 years (or thereabout) in the throes of a bizarre fantasy in which I think my perception is identical to reality, or at least similar to it.

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I realize, of course, my words on this page probably seem like the ravings of a mad man. If that’s how you want them to see, I am perfectly comfortable with your frame of mind. But comfort and reality do not necessarily live in the same place, nor in the same time nor the same dimension.

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