Ramble Back

Hopefully these line up. But they might even be better if they don't. 

In one particular order:

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70. From what I gather she is quite accomplished.

45. Taking this a step further, I was curious about the etymology. Here's what Vocabulary.com has to say:

Manipulative comes from the Latin word manus for "hand," and originally the English words that sprang from it like manipulate and manipulation referred to skill in physically handling objects by hand. The psychological sense we now associate with manipulative came much later on, but as anyone who has been successfully manipulated well knows, it often feels like you've been brilliantly manhandled.

38. Point taken.

15. Society definitely lost something with the passing of public executions. Some may argue we've become a more cultured, civilized people since then— but there is much that can be said for the power of deterrence and public shame, reserved for the most despicable and malignant of our population. A televised human boiling could surely make at least some child sex offenders think twice.

54. The best part is, you never get your own back. You only ever get someone else's, when they have time to give it.

17. Some words just have an inherent negative quality to them. Yet in some instances it would still seem appropriate to co-opt them into a positive. I've been diseased with joy, once. Maybe twice.

18. Yeah, you definitely seem like the sort.

30. The key wording here is, "good and angry," a very different kind of angry than just good old fashioned "angry," which can be just as motivating but oftentimes not as productive. "Good and angry," has been undersold, lately.

3. I haven't seen evidence that this is the case.

58. #itisuntilitisnt

66. It could work in the proper context. Don't mind me, though, I'm the patron saint of devil's advocates.

34. Feels like this goes hand-in-hand with 38. One usually follows the other, though individual mileage may vary.

69. "Not supposed to," doesn't necessarily mean "Don't". Same with marriage.

57. To this, I would just say: remember Ch. XXXIII of Don Quixote — the story of Anselmo and Lothario.

23. This works on multiple levels.

51. 

Step 1. Puncture softest eye with dull knife.
Step 2. Drain liquid. Save, if desired.
Step 3. Pry open carefully, enjoy meat inside.

(Sticker with instructions for opening a coconut)

12. "Curiosity killed the cat, but for a while I was a suspect." – Steven Wright

22. "How am I not myself?" "How am I not myself?" "How am I not myself?" "How am I not myself?" "How am I not myself?" —I ❤️ Huckabees

75. This might happen. Allegedly, experts predict there will be over one billion service robots within the decade. 

If that's correct, there will be one little god damn engine kicking at least billion human asses by 2035.

72. Looks good on paper, but you run the risk of conversation being ruined for you forever afterwards. I hate to be mitigatory, but maybe it would be better to have a conversation that brings you to the brink of soaking your brain in ethanol, lighting it on fire, ripping out your uterus and frying it for dinner— just so you can peer into that abyss and get a taste of what such rhetoric might be like, but always turning back from the brink, living to converse another day. That way, you'll always have something to look forward to with each next conversation you have. I'll bet the more often you get to that point, the easier it'll get to return there.

13. Plato warned his generation against the dangers of literacy:

"If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls; they will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks. What you have discovered is a recipe not for memory, but for reminder. And it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only its semblance, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much, while for the most part they know nothing, and as men filled, not with wisdom, but with the conceit of wisdom, they will be a burden to their fellows."

The problem with exposing our children to technology goes farther back than screens. That said, yes— it is a problem, but it's a problem that has adapted from a problem that preceded it, and it will evolve again into still another problem in the future. 

48. "Do not infest your mind with beating on the strangeness of this business." The Tempest, Act 5, Scene 1, lines 297-309.

76. Unfortunately, I've found this to be the case. School might've gone much better for me if I could put effort towards things that did not interest me.

55. California is both the cause and the cure of midlife crises. 

28. Okay, this seems to check out. It begs the question: how many romance films are actually horror stories?

64. 

52. "What was Right, what was Wrong? What distinguished Doing from Not Doing? If I were to have my time again, the old King thought, I would bury myself in a monastery for fear of a Doing which might lead to woe." —T.H. White, The Once and Future King

9. "'Always remember, child' her first teacher had impressed on her, 'that to think bad thoughts is really the easiest thing in the world. If you leave your mind to itself it will spiral you down into ever-increasing unhappiness. To think good thoughts, however, requires effort. This is one of the things that need discipline. So train your mind to dwell on sweet perfumes, the touch of this silk, tender raindrops against the shoji, the curve of the flower arrangement, the tranquility of dawn. Then, at length, you won't have to make such a great effort and you will be of value to yourself.'" —James Clavell, Shogun

26. Apathy is it's own reward.

46. This is helpful. I'll need to remember this when writing my long-planned kung-fu novel.

60. B.T., M.T., S.T.I.A.S.

Also: Potato: A History of the Propitious Esculent.

I'm not usually one to recommend books I haven't read myself (which is why it isn't listed in #67), but this is an exception thanks to the authority of a friend who suggested that this is the authoritative book on potatoes. 

He probably never even read it.

56. What would be the "third eye" equivalent to an optometrist check-up? The little chart. The stuff they drop into your enlightened vision. The machine that puffs air against your ajna chakra (my least favorite part. I always ask them to skip it, and so far they have— which makes me wonder if it's really necessary or if eye doctors just like puffing air against your eye.)

49. Sadly, the people who most need to hear this, are just waiting for their turn to talk.

7. Oh shit, how did I not know before now that "No Exit" was written by Sartre? 

53. That's fair.

39. The horses also don't suspect what would happen to them if they were to break their legs and fall during the race. If they did, you'd see some mighty careful trotting down the end of the track.

41. This is meant figuratively?

6. 

31. When in the Pancake Kingdom, do as the Pancakeans do.

65. "The Gray Lady" isn't news. It's a thick stack of elitist opinion articles. "Triumph of the subjective."

33. "Why is this thus and what is the reason for this thusness?"

68. Gandhi said, "You must be the change you wish to see in the world," which I take to mean: if you want a Tank Girl/Master Chief lovechild, you have to make it happen. No one else will.

10. My father said as much when he was teaching me how to drive aggressively when I was sixteen.

36. You know the solution though. See your #20.

14. There's always a reason why we don't take good advice. It's the mind's natural bend toward entropy.

11. "More than okay," is a suspect phrase that is often prelude to mistakes (for good or ill).

62. Beguile. 

2. This could even go a step further.

67.

Skinny Legs and All, Tom Robbins

Sombrero Fallout, Richard Brautigan

The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, Andy Warhol

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig

 

50. I'll be on the lookout.

42. How about DMT at the DMV?

63. See: Pray. Prey. Pray.

24. 

KING HENRY

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once

more,

Or close the wall up with our English dead!

In peace there’s nothing so becomes a man

As modest stillness and humility,

But when the blast of war blows in our ears,

Then imitate the action of the tiger:

Stiffen the sinews, summon up the blood,

Disguise fair nature with hard-favored rage,

Then lend the eye a terrible aspect,

Let it pry through the portage of the head

Like the brass cannon, let the brow o’erwhelm it

As fearfully as doth a gallèd rock

O’erhang and jutty his confounded base

Swilled with the wild and wasteful ocean.

Now set the teeth, and stretch the nostril wide,

Hold hard the breath, and bend up every spirit

To his full height.

29. 

19. It doesn't end there.

73. Not if J-Roc was there, ya know what I'm sayin'?

8. I'm pretty sure this is exactly what Brad Pitt's character in Once Upon A Time in Hollywood, and arguably that entire movie, was all about.

1. This is one of those things I always heard about but never understood what it was supposed to mean. Thanks for helping me get to the bottom of this.

4. What do you think this is all for?

43. Sometimes it's better not asking. The answers we come up with in our own imagination overwhelm whatever the real truth may be.

27. Lobster roll, cole slaw and a side of onion rings.

71. Monet had cataracts near the end. He destroyed a lot of paintings.

25. "You'd look great with a melting candle on your forehead."

32. 

There was a little girl, 

Who had a little curl,

Right in the middle of her forehead.

When she was good,

She was very good indeed,

But when she was bad she was horrid.

20. This has helped me live without an unreasonable amount of regret. (I.e.: not "no regret.")

77. "Not my chair, not my problem."

5. This is irrefutable. I dare someone to even argue against this.

21. "Bring a thimble, and I'll pour my thoughts out." -Paul Westerberg

47. "'It's the quiet ones you gotta watch.' This sounds to me like a very dangerous assumption. I will bet you anything that while you're watching a quiet one, a noisy one will fucking kill you!" -George Carlin

35. I nearly didn't do this Ramble Back at all, but this one felt like a challenge, perhaps not aimed at me— but nonetheless, here we are.

74. "The youth gets together his materials to build a bridge to the moon, or, perchance, a palace or temple on the earth, and, at length, the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them." —Henry David Thoreau

59. "So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth." Revelation, 3:16

16. Religion got us from Mesopotamia to Nietzsche. Secularism got us everything else.

37. There can be both a noble and ignoble reason for this. But, to be fair, the two aren't mutually exclusive.

44. In the proper hand, any action can be magic.

40. Those who know do not talk.

61. The theme is also insanely simple to play on the trombone. It's the reason I have a trombone (and it's the only song I know how to play.)

---------------B . O . N . U . S .---------------R . O . U . N . D .-------------------------------------

a. Fingers crossed that the first form of alien life discovered in space ends up being a tiger.

b. I switched things up recently. I've been using baby shampoo. No more tears.

c. Studio executive should just bite the bullet and fund a feature length commercial. Stop with the short films. Give audiences a 2 hour and 30 minute long commercial. It would probably be more redeeming than the short ones, and you'd probably make your money back on box office sales alone.

d. "I do not know the outcome or wisdom of this decision, but I have become a target and a target makes a poor impression."

e. You know what they say: "Two wrongs don't make a right," but "three lefts make a right," and "two evens don't make an odd." In fact, two odds don't even make an odd— they make an even. Actually, it takes an even and an odd to make an odd. Which to me seems definitionally odd. And while I don't have any data to support this, my gut sense is that there should be more evens than odds, but by all accounts it seems that odd and even are actually even, when you count them, which is odd. But if that is so odd, then maybe it evens out in the end.

f. Someone— I think Oscar Wilde— reportedly made a joke on his deathbed: "Either that wallpaper goes, or I do." 

g. "From a distance, it looked like a bit of light trash floating in the breeze. Upon a closer look, it was a pigeon, walking, following a crumb it kept pecking at and missing." 

h. Those who know nothing know much about things that those who know something know nothing about.

i. They should put fortune cookie fortunes inside of pill bottles.

j. Maybe, after we die, we go where all our life's lost sneezes go.

k. The Avant-Garde Aardvark Guard

OK that's enough. Nobody asked for it, nobody cares— I get that— but I did it anyway. (Story of my life).