Diaries

I was going to talk about the phenomenon of "reality fatigue" and how it washes over me occasionally, usually after a media-saturated event like the recent tsunami or the Jeff Gannon thing or whatever, when suddenly I realized that I spend my entire life either experiencing reality fatigue or escaping it via sleep, music or digital heroin.

In contrast to my compadre Pete (I've decided not to link to his personal website, as he has not done so here,) my take on "real" moments is that they are omnipresent and terribly boring. I seek out the rare moment of sublime surreality, where shit becomes so fucking ridiculous on so many different levels simultaneously that I achieve a fleeting microsecond of giddy rapture. Well, okay, that's a fib. I don't seek anything out. Seeking = effort.

It's probably an experience akin to the sudden lucidity that's been known to strike people after long periods of sleep deprivation; like that experience, the fallout from a surreal moment is a crash/burn onto the arid plain of the real. Nothing kills the buzz of fucking-ridiculous-shit-overload faster than having to deal with the consequences of shit being all fucked up and ridiculous.

Well, I am 2 for 2 when it comes to conjuring up exceedingly improbable thunderstorms for running events. I ran the Green Mountain Turkey Trot 5K with my folks this Thanksgiving morning. The weather at 6:30am was bright, sunny and 60 degrees. By 8:30am, rain had moved in. As we were walking out to the starting line of the race around 10:45am, we saw lightning in the distance. Temp -- 55. While this thunderstorm was not as...exhilarating as the one before the MDI Marathon, it didn't clear before the race began and so the entire race was in the pouring rain (at least a 5K is a short run). There's also nothing like a good nearby lightning strike to get you to kick in the afterburners. Oh, and by 4:00pm it was 30 degrees and snowing.

It's possible that I'm becoming humorless. The only reason I don't find this amusing:

President Bush has spared the life of the nation's Thanksgiving turkey after an election to name the bird which he reports was "neck and neck."
...
Bush reports it was a nasty campaign, with attack ads from a group called "Barnyard Animals for Truth" and what he says was a scurrilous film called "Fahrenheit 375 Degrees at Ten Minutes Per Pound."

Is because Bush said it. Even though I know someone else wrote it first. I think I may be suffering from outrage fatigue.

And I've had the music from Bubble Bobble (NES) stuck in my head all day. It even serenaded me on my evening run.

The next time I write here, I will have already attempted the MDI Marathon. Wish me luck.

The concept of probability is a useful delusion fostered by limited understanding. Take, for example, the quintessential case study in probability: the coin toss. There is absolutely no probability involved in a coin toss. If we could, with 100% accuracy, measure all of the forces that act on a coin from flipping until it came to rest, we could predict with 100% accuracy whether it would come up heads or tails. Furthermore, if we could exactly reproduce the conditions of any particular toss, we would invariably get the same result. Time after time.

Saying that there is a 50% chance that the coin will come up heads and a 50% chance that the coin will come up tails is just shorthand for "there's a 100% chance that there are two possibilities and we don't know what will happen because we're too lazy, too stupid or too simple to do the math." It's another way of saying "even our most educated guesses fall pathetically short of being accurate predictors."