Dark Rooms are My Favorite

This book I am reading on where good ideas come from is really enlightening me to how important it is to have smart people around you to generate these ideas. As a man that has lived in complete social isolation for many years it saddens me to know that I have wasted a lot of my creative juices locked away in my dark rooms.  The truths behind the ideas the books present are insanely simple but at the same time not that simple, if you take the basic premise from chapter one. The idea of ‘adjacent possible’ and apply it to the way we have grown in technologically advanced society. New ideas don’t flourish in places like Iowa or any other parts of the country where rednecks still vote republicans and they call themselves a tea party. We will leave that subject for a different blog but for now let’s focus on where people go when they want to join the intelligent community. New York, Boston, Seattle, and of course the jewel of technical development Silicon Valley where the internet and high tech hardware goes to be born. I have always believed in the power of think tanks used by the government to solve complex problems but never understood how a bunch of introverted geniuses could get along well enough together to make something happen. And today I read about something called a ‘tiger team’ and was fascinated with possibility to use them in all sorts of areas but first the definition provided by Wikipedia.org

“A tiger team is a group of experts assigned to investigate and/or solve technical or systemic problems. The term may have originated in aerospace design but is also used in other settings, including information technology and emergency management.”

At the grocery store when I met the teen genius he did not see me as person worthy of speaking to because he was surrounded by idiots. He took the approach of gaining the hearts and minds of the local population and using idiocy as his camouflage and let that big brain of his rest. About two months ago we started talking on a much deeper scale about certain topics that most people don’t even know exist. We talked global warfare, nano technology, and economic issues.  I even bet him 10 dollars that Obama would not get a second term based on how radical the ‘right’ has become. Its not about putting a black man into the white house, its about how badly the GOP wants him out. This is a sentiment that blacks across America are sending to the republicans by polling at 0 percent in favor of Mitt. Anyhow, once the teenager and I started having these very intellectual conversations in front of customers and co-workers a lot of people took noticed. The older lady cashiers bow down to us and wonder how two people who are so smart could be working in a grocery store together of all things. Poverty usually only affects the very old and the very young because they are not desired candidates for better paying jobs. The only problem now is a global recession and watching those ‘thinking’ jobs that would otherwise be filled by the 25 million under employed go to foreign countries. The jobs just don’t disappear they have to be sent elsewhere because we still need people making our clothes and our cheap plastic goods.  The teenager and I hash out ideas on certain issues and I have often thought how many other people are having this ‘fluid’ exchange of ideas with good points on both sides of the argument. The word fluid is introduced in the book in chapter two to describe how ideas can take on the easy movements of free thought.

1.      Ideas trapped in a gas would be to chaotic to be sustainable

2.      Ideas stuck in a solid would not be able to adjust to new situations

3.      But ideas in fluid movement where they can stay connected well enough but adjust as things change would be the best way to create the next good ideas

The need to stop thinking inside of a box is something that can be dangerous of course to corporations who use this box mentality to keep the general populous blind to the fact that they are using us to enrich the very few at the cost of the best interests of society. The best example of this would be how closed minded the oil companies have been about letting us be free of its products. You don’t think that in 100 years we would not be able to find a better route to powering our little pods? We managed to build a super computer but we cannot find a way out of foreign oil dependency? We have not been able to generate the ideas to solve all our economic issues, that socialist ideas would not be demonized by capitalism hungry corporations. When you think about all the things that have been forced upon us as a society, especially the home land security acts which literally took away our right to privacy, it amazes me that the intelligent community has not gathered round to fight these injustices. Yes, I liked the idea of ‘Occupy’ New York but they were not going about it in the right way. How can we respect a group of people living in a park and most of which already lived there because they were homeless. What we needed was a solid group of respectable folks like Paul Krugman or Thomas Friedman (both columnist from the New York Times) to lead a rebellion against social injustice on a biblical scale. The fat cats on Wall Street don’t fear the common man because the common man cannot decide whether or not the right or the left is trying to take away their Medicare. Ordinary people don’t understand nearly all the laws that government imposes on them because they are designed that way, to be cryptic and long winded. The voter id requirement is just another example of GOP states wanting to keep ‘unthinking’ peoples out of the voter booths. The more they can control the political arenas the easier it is to keep the epsilons out of their hair. It is strange thing the way society has evolved into. The book described the merger of chemistry and physics as the gateway to biology. Once we got all the CT and AG together to form this complex form of life, we continued the process even further by exploiting the weakest among us for the benefit of the very rich.

……..

11:03am

I had some pretty interesting dreams this morning after I woke up and went back to bed. One was so detailed that I could see the tiny outline of prints on tiny toes. The other part of that same dream was extremely dirty with a dark haired, eyed, and skinned girl. Her skin glowed like it was on fire and her red outfit made the whole scene obscene.

Anyhow, when I looked at the clock I thought oh shit, not again, because I thought it said 1:03pm and I had things to do today. When I got closer to the cable box I was pleasantly surprised to see that it was indeed much earlier. I have been known to get up very late especially if I am practicing my ‘dream control’ to create better stories than I can if I just sit at the computer trying to come up with them. The dreams open a whole new level of creativity inside my head and it amazes me to the places I can go and the things I can experience. My dream life is by far more important to me than my ordinary life in which I have been single for 6 years and never dated before that. I had not really thought about it much since it is depressing but I have only dated for one year in my whole life and it was a mess. I will say it again but I don’t think I even believe myself but I would rather be alone all the time.

After rolling out of bed I went to the kitchen to see what else I had torn up in the middle of the night. My stomach was full which meant that I had made something at 3am but I cold not remember what. I peeked into the kitchen hoping not to find a filthy place but it was ok, a little salsa on the counter but nothing major. I did not even bother my chicken meat I bought on my way home last night.

WOD

Flat bench press max @ 225 pounds superset biceps curls

Bench Flye superset reverse curls

Flat bench dumbbell chest press isometric hold at top superset hammer curls

Triceps extensions and standing calf raises

After I was done working out I started lunch and did triceps extensions between stirring my chicken. I think it is pointless to stand in the kitchen without a dumbbell in your otherwise empty hand. I have learned that all time can be filled with fitness if you let it. Like tonight while I played computer games during the pauses I did crunches. I also did 50 push-ups between rounds of team death match. The people that are in really good shape around us do work very hard to look the way they do and that is why people envy them. If you asked the average person to spend as much time as I do working out or reading they would probably tell you they will do it tomorrow.

1pm

I finished eating and got in the shower right on time and left the house as scheduled. I had to go ask the student loan department how much longer this was going to take! Its been four months now since I put in my information and I still want to go to school! Its so unfair that I paid the fees but now I cannot enroll because the cash is not there. This is ridiculously stupid that someone like me is pushing grocery carts at a fucking corporate grocery store. a fact that I let them know today but as simple minded people often do that have been trained in ‘customer service’ they told me the same thing. “The forms you put in take 3-5 business days to process.”

1:30pm

I went to the psychology department to ask professors if it was too late to enroll for this semester and most of them said yes. The few that said no were extremely against my starting a week late. “You are going to have to catch up to the rest of the class, do you think you will be able to do that because you are going to have twice as much work till then?”  I don’t know if I can handle the course load falling behind like this and if I do, it may ruin my GPA for the semester.

2pm

I sat down at the library to read and by 6pm it was time to go home. I could see the clouds gathering to the north as I walked in and it makes me nervous to carry around my laptop when things look like that.

Fin