May woe be gone from our minds . . .
In Odin's mailbox as March in Okieland turns toward the lambing season . . .
Yesterday, the 29th, was the birthday of the author of “A Walk on the Wild Side,” Nelson Algren . Born Nelson Algren Abraham to working-class parents in 1909 Detroit, he grew up in Chicago's immigrant neighborhoods. According to Garrison Keillor, in “Walk” Algren gives his three rules for life: "Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom's. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own." The novel is, in many ways, about the contempt of a nation for its dispossessed, and in it he wrote: "When we get more houses than we can live in, more cars than we can ride in, more food than we can eat ourselves, the only way of getting richer is by cutting off those who don't have enough." His novel The Man with the Golden Arm won the the first National Book Award (1949).
Speaking of Keillor: The man with uncanny insight into the people of Lake Wobegon, Minnesota, was featured on CBS Sunday Morning this week.
A well-known problem with general relativity is that in the theory one cannot always unambiguously define gravitational energy in a way that applies to the universe as a whole. Thus, the total energy of the universe is neither conserved nor lost—it is just undefinable. – Tamara M. Davis
I take that to mean that the first law of thermodynamics is a law because it is dependent upon measurment. Since infinity by definition is beyond measurement, so would be any application of the law to any speculation regarding the nature of reality beyond living forms, e.g. after death. Energy in that speculation would be more like breathing: created and destroyed continually, just like the cells in our body, the photon exchanges in our brains, where consciousness ceases to be a noun and becomes, instead, a verb. Of course, I could be wrong.
Going Cheerfully Out of Our Minds
Hypotheses:
Periodically, we benefit from going cheerfully and enthusiastically out of our minds. It's healthy if one part of us remains forever untamed, uncategorizable, and unsubjugated by routine.
We express compassion for ourselves by staying intimately connected to all that's inexplicable and mysterious about our lives. – Rob Brezsney
While a certain decorum is required as we attempt to maintain something that looks like discipline to the hurly-burley, it might do us well to remember that chaos has an order and harmony all its own.