and i survived the rapture

To rapturous dismay to some nothing happened and to others with happiness and still to others laughter and then there are those who did not even know.

How insignificant we are as humans, and thought, in a flash we are here and soon will be gone. Well if all goes according to the way we are throwing this planet away, eventually like a bowl of bacteria in a petri-dish we will use up all the resources and will either escape the confines of our dish of life or it will all end, a rather uns acrimonious (yes to those lexophiles, maybe not a real word, but it portrays my thought).

And where does this take me? No where actually, the rap-ture is just a side thought to our existence.

I must admit the mornings are no longer so Christian now that the Christians no longer pray at the station, every morning I peer around the corner and they are gone. One wonders how fickle life is, especially my perception fo them. They are most probably sitting in the McDonalds drinking hot chocolate and huddling around the table. It is only I who is in the belief that true enlightenment comes through personal self flagellation, well I suppose that is being catholic for you ;-). No seriously I always imagined that through hardship and self imposed struggle comes a form of enlightenment. But I am most probably wrong with regards all of this. It is true, this is a strange land and without a grain of doubt a complete stranger. This does not in any way denigrate the experience, but it is a strange place. Yet at this juncture I stand facing the distinct possibility of an imminent spora (one wonders what the singular of a word like diaspora is?) that our family could face if either my medical or the Pumkie's Medical is not acceptable to the immigration authorities. So where does that leave us? Not happy in any way, even though I am in the strange land, note not the promised land, I stand and await the future with baited breath.

So I sat wondering a day or so ago how to best describe our lives and the paths they take. It is somewhat of a case like trying to juggle glass balls, it looks absolutely amazing, the light reflecting and casting amazing colours all over the place, yet if a ball falls down it crashes and makes a huge sound and splinters into a thousand pieces, but all we do it sweep it up and toss it in the bin and start again.. Strange thought that.

I saw an interesting short movie a week or so back, It was called the butterfly circus. It is a preview for a movie. This movie was a winner of a number of short movie festivals. It is worthwhile watching, albeit schmultzy it is heartwarming, but the key to me is that the visual quality is just great.  So you decide for yourself ;-)

On third and fourth thoughts after I have progressed a little further through the Black swan book, I must admit it is losing a little of its shine, not because it is bad or because the writing is specifically bad, but because he does not really get to a point, somewhat like a Blog a number of you may read on the odd occasion. What is the most striking about it at this stage is how he highlights our general  lack of understanding of statistics and the impacts it has and does not have on our lives.  Strangely we do live our lives not always on the direct impacts of stats or probability, but more often on the perceived impacts and outcomes. Nasem goes into a lot detail about gambling and luck and probability and why you cannot win because it is not only about probability, but also about the casino's which monitor trends against trends and you pop up as an outlier if you deviate from the current trends. He also goes through a whole lot of other really confusing statements, which i have resulted in me saying once again that I will have to reread this book a number of times, which do not give us specific answers rather more questions.  He falls back on a very familiar, to me, argument of not actually committing all that much and falling back on the randomness of it all. In some sentences he flouts that it is better to be an outlier, because if you are not an outlier you will not win, but in the same breath he says being an outlier also gives you a greater chance of failure, which when stated like that sounds a lot more obvious, but this is done through a milieu of arguments and paragraphs that rapidly bleed into one argument and back to the original. So at this point i am not convinced, but I am not unconvinced.

Not being unconvinced, could that be any less commital ;-)

So another day, more clouds and rain ..  and at this point I am not convinced if it is as bad as it is or not? It rains, it winds, it suns, it tains, the wind blows, first from the North then the South...

the view from my soggy standing point on the train this morning, oh how i hate soggy socks.. I am sure dr Zeuss could have done something with that...

when faced with one own mortality

Yes this is stereotyped, but is not a treatise to having a MLC...

I got a thinking sometime back, it could have been days, minutes or hours ago, but it recurs. We often make statements like, if i was going to, if that happened, and many others (*&* and the comma makes sense here ). But the point being we tend to live our lives based on riders and axioms about conditional activities, granted it does make sense in most cases. But you have to question if the world is not divided into those who take the pictures of the amazing things and the others who live their lives vicariously through the images transposed through either the printed or electronic media. Yes there is a grey or is that gray, could never figure that one out, view on all of this? Yes there is and is not, and there is a distinct randomness about a lot of this, to which we have no answer to.

To get off that point and onto another, Btw an Awesome book to read (NOTE: I have taken this out of the Bibliothecke.. and will never finish it in the mandatory 3 renewals, it is a book that needs to be bought and ruminated over), but I must warn is in the same vane as Malcom gladwell's books, but requires a whole lot more commitment and rumination as it is in my mind the thinking mans version of MG's books. Oh yes the book, I mentioned it before, is the black swans by Naseem N Taleb.

.....wikilink to Taleb's book.


As a phrase "Pictures from the end of the world." could mean so much, could it mean the literal end of life as we know it, does it mean the end of society as we know it, does it mean the figurative ends of the earth?


But what do we do when we get faced with our mortality? I don't know as I am not there, in the real short term? Well in a way we are, we have to redo our medicals for our damned PR. But there are others who have more concrete implications, but we do live our lives in a perpetual hedge. We always have a predefined event window of living. We don't seem to be able to escape the continual re-evaluation and hedging of life against the external constraints that in most cases we put there, but sometimes are put there by situation.

But to get the actual point of my thought process, well there are two, the first being; we are now faced with the distinct, albeit slim, possibility that we could be forced to return to the Z of A,  which in a way is very confusing, in some senses it is the familiar, in other senses it is scary. The second being the way we do not live our lives. We spend an inordinate amount of effort and bind our selves to the way we live our lives and not nearly as much to how we do not live our lives. We ponder and ponder but often, granted there are those who do, but don't. This at best sounds entirely ambivalent, at worst it is a reality, the event window of reality is pure ambivalence. So where does that leave us?

What can we be clear about, in general there is not a lot that we can be sure of, especially in the light of Black Swan events. Somehow according to Taleb they are outside of our current frame of reference and thinking. So what do we do in these cases, die, survive, live, rebuild, rise like a phoenix. Soemthing we cannot be sure of is what is next, we stand on the brink of a rapture,  a swarm of earthquakes where there should be none, a massive earthquake where there should be one, all we can be sure of is change and at a magnitude that we cannot be prepared for. But Naseem does remind us that being aware of random events does not mean we must eb afraid of them, i am paraphrasing significantly here ...

So where does this take us or put is in the light of swarms of great black swans which currently circle this small insignificant 3rd stone from the Star we call SuN.  I must admit that we have to continue on as best as possible within reason one would assume...

But I do suppose we cannot really change who we are and how we live without the fear of being ridiculous, but it does seem like a good idea to at least challenge some of the levee's we have put in place around our lives. I suspect keeping levees around us is not a bad thing, the question being when is the fear of the black swan realistic and when is it paranoia and is there value in protecting against the cygnet or not?

On a different note it has come to my attention that the Christians have once again deserted me in my morning solace, the rain and cold has limited if not totally removed their presence from the position of their prayers. Like the seasons causes the leaves to fall off the trees the people no longer gather in the bus shelters to do their early morning prayers, but rather they have been blown away, it may not be the wet, the cold or the wind... It could just be the dark.


But All I say ToDay is go forth, gather the sand bags but not to protect you lively hood, but rather the boat you are storing to go forth and explore the unknown ...

nostalgia and the things we love

seems like this did not save it self...??? bizarre here it is reposted

I got a thinking the other day. That is sounding a little contrived, it seems like i think to much ..
And I wonder if random thoughts going through my consciousness actually count as thinking ;)

But to indulge myself I will continue, that is what this is all about, self indulgence and expression of the nothing between one ear and the other.  To get to the point I was wondering about why we look at square images and immediately fill with nostalgia and admiration for retroviews on the current. When did Kitch become cool, when is it still Kitch! Why is lomographics cooler than realism and HDR, which both to an extent bleed into the unreal, is lomographics the edge of the new impressionism? Or has that been covered a few times, I am sure it has?

I was walking ...

just to interrupt, I watched something on youtube, then something else and another and another, slowly moving myself into a spiral of nostalgia and melancholy, as i view our lives as shadows on a wall, the translation cannot compare. The specific version by van Coke Kartel drives home like a huge wooden stake through my AfriKan heart.  Rapidly spiraling me into deep nostalgia about times long past and memories flashing past like an 8 mm film reel, holding back the tears as the soundtrack of my life plays quietly in the background.  It makes me think of things unrelated, Tretchikoff paintings hanging in the wind under the African sky, dust, rain, the smell of pipe tobacco and standing ankle deep in powder dust.

It is not a bad thing to capture this all in a square image on screen alone on an island a far way away from everything that I remember and have notions to have called my home. Like a gypsy the wheels on my bicycle carry me from day to day. I question if I have returned to my root or am I on the route to discovery? Yes a silly rhyme, but it holds true. As I mentioned in one of my previous posts is it the phylogenetic or social intertia or meme that drives us forward, is it the present, the past we know or the past we are unaware of that drives us along the dream  tracks in the sands of time.. Bla bla bla, But I sit here isolated with thsi question inside my brain?

Dust stained faces track the tears as I remember a past, yet knowing full well It was I who went looking down the rabbit hole.As I mentioned before I was deliberating what effect it has on us when we look at square format image and how that relates to the inner kitch we all have. "the other day I had a genuine illumination" .. A very cool line from a preview of a move that is not out yet. I go on, one day after the other waiting for the flash of inspiration, tempting inspiration all day long, exposing my mind and eyes to all that I can in the time that is available, yet I stand and glance into the emptiness at times, other times I stare down a psychedelic rabbit hole of insanity, at other times the pastels and hues flow like the patterns in carefully poured coffee. Where does it start where does it end, why the resistance against social crutches I ask myself daily? Each step is a step closer, other days it feels like every step is in the wrong direction.

Kitch neo-african art is not the word or phrase that i thought it might be, based on the cover of a book that I saw in the borders closing down sale. Then again neither is neo-kitch african art either? Is aw a book cover on sociology that showed the most amazing picture. words would destroy what i saw and the images and thoughts it put forward into my grey space. It illicited a thousand ships, many little sub images and conflicting thoughts burrowing through my brain all searching for an answer? The question it raised, not answered as one of the millions of side shoots was; why do i get more hits on my Flickr profile when I post photo's taken on my mobile phone than when I put my better pictures on there? Is it all perspective? Do i have the wrong perspective is it skewed?  Where else did this flight of fantasy take me, it took me to the singularity that we will face as a human race within the next 20 years. Sometimes I am amazed at how far technology has gone and is going, flexible paper mobile phones, a burgeoning and ever present sentience surrounding us in the cloud of computers, do we harness them or are they harnessing us? Is this the Terminator effect? Is this skynet.. who knows?


More or less later we will know, what we will know, only we will know. A line gets drawn in the mud, my finger caked with sticky brown earth. I have traded the dust bowls of afriKa for the wet and mud.

Enough self indulgence for the moment.