Pilot's Log

Sagittarius Horoscope for week of June 27, 2013

"The only thing that we learn from history," said the German philosopher Georg Hegel, "is that we never learn anything from history." I'm urging you to refute that statement in the coming weeks, Sagittarius. I'm pleading with you to search your memory for every possible clue that might help you be brilliant in dealing with your immediate future. What have you done in the past that you shouldn't do now? What haven't you done in the past that you should do now?

I was going to restart taking multivitamin tablets after I'd given them up for a while (since I forget how long it was it must have been a long time)...but they've gotten expensive lately. I have to be careful now because I can't swallow big honkin' horsepills like I did when I was younger.

Yes, I dreamt...like I usually do.

And yes, finding meaning in my sleeping apparitions as they relate to my current life is pretty darned HARD.

I'm beginning to think that somebody is going to introduce William Gibson's APPARENT SENSORY PERCEPTION or "Simstim"_TM technology soon. (See also the movie Brainstorm.) Because bits and pieces of my dream experiences seem far to fictitious to make sense as actual life-going-on. What is truly bizarre is that after an initial use of "sense actors" in the roles of character/"camera", the art moves to 100% artificial realities/machine generated content.

I recognize in some of these threads of consciousness in the dreams that I'm not myself...either I'm in character as somebody else, filling somebody else's vision of life...or I'm in a completely different "incarnation", with nothing that matches my own operational systems.

And again, I have this urgent need to wonder what it means. Am I a maker, or an addict? Do I redefine my life using the coming technology and media? Is using the media the way I survive what is to come? Am I too rooted in reality, or not enough?

I can't stay here forever. Hmmph.

FP

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As if you really have a choice in the matter. 1) Truly "bad" memories never let go, even through the best of efforts; all you can do is mitigate the damage. 2) OTHER PEOPLE are happy to remember for you stuff you want forgotten, for their own motives. That stinks. 3) Time is not kind to past happinesses. I don't think I ought to get into details.

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NO--Thank goodness! World War Two only happened the one time, of course.

I really could have stayed another week in Florida, but I got enough of the things on my list done and all the people who matter most to me. Darn it, if America had actual passenger trains running I'd shuttle between here and there all the time.

* "And I'm Never Going Back To My Old School..." As said earlier, on St. Patrick's Day a high school classmate had invited me and my brother to a party at an Irish/Sports bar. Going was a necessary mistake. The music was way too loud to carry on conversations. We found our "party" but beyond two or three people we didn't "mingle" and while I thought I recognized one woman--I didn't want to talk to her. The truth came to me that if I really wanted to socialize with my classmates in school, I would have. These days there is no meaning attaching me to this crowd. All of a sudden I feel okay with having been shunned and flunked. I just didn't fit in.

* Too many of the people I know are now attached to oxygen apparati. If you smoke, quit. If you don't smoke, don't start.

* I will never again go in a Disney store. Mike dragged me in one so he could look at Princess figures. They'd never hire me, but I bet working there would drive a lot of people insane.

* I will probably swear off eating more than one meal a day at a restaurant. Not so much the expense, or necessarily the food...just the stress is enough.

* Q-105 is back. The Tampa station is now Sixties/Seventies/Eighties oldies rather than baseline Top 40, but they haven't lost the style that made us fans for so long.

* I decided to not be the Lipinski Proxy this time. Dana's fantasy baseball league is down to five participants so their draft today will probably run a lot quicker even without my assistance.

* Atlanta's highways are bedlam. Both ways we had trouble with crowds and volume slowdowns. Dunno what route I'll take next time tho'.

( Another Back-Of-The-Mind Memory... )

...But the search for it also brought me to THIS.

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Getting speared in my left flank by my father when he was pinning on a diaper. I think that is still the foundation of my relationship with him, even though I don't think I've ever mentioned it to him in the many years since.

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Getting lost over urban Pinellas County on the way back to my "home" airport.

I still qualified as a "dumbjohn" then.

FP

Hey.

Today, at the Scale Model Show our club put on, I was given the task of speaking into the microphone to test the Public Address system of the ballroom that is our venue.

I didn't think to rattle off some poem or song lyric or stage play soliloquy. I just did phonetic alphabet and numbers, and perhaps some echo of my days as a student pilot. Six Niner Lima calling Knoxville Control, come in...

I guess the problem is that as I never was serious enough as an actor to actually attempt a role in a play, or anything like that in my youth, I never memorized anything so useful to that particular cause. I have RL friends who have memorized sidebars from articles in White Dwarf, or dialogue from 8-Bit Theater, but I think that's a little extreme in terms of how somebody uses their mind.

I've abused my memory a great deal in the past. But these days I don't like to keep too much IN my mind for fear of having too much ON my mind.

FP