Category: Personal Reflections and Diary

( It just occurred to me that I learned how to do basic operational encryption in second grade. And I learned how to program (taught myself from very simple books) before I learned algebra, and that this ‘operational’ framing was what troubled me when I got into mathematics, because it seemed like I was just guessing all the time, and I felt that was intuitively ‘wrong’. And that it’s that intuition,along with my intuition against induction, that my little autistic subconscious seized upon. … It’s fascinating to look back at the causes of one’s psychology. I mean. How much of my life was framed by reading a book on ‘secret messages’ in second grade? How much more was framed by the fact that I saw complex mazes, and then drew 18×24″ mazes in painful detail? How much more by learning to draw in perspective, then imagining and drawing the timber-structures – drawing the skeletons of victorian homes? How much by soldering together a primitive digital computer when I was 13? How much by my recognition that something was wrong with physics when i learned the light-slit experiment. How much by the classes in electronic engineering … and the ridiculous simplicity of it as reducible to ohms law – and that everything interesting was in the materials science of conductors and insulators, or programming the software, but not in the engineering itself? …. I’m perfect aware that my reading of encyclopedias informed by later study of the history of art, and later history of economics, and recent interest in the history of thought, and current history of western man’s ‘unique difference’: sovereignty. )

People are such weaklings today. I mean, what about breaking Freddy’s ribs by kicking him while he was down, breaking David’s nose that bled like hell. Fights at the bus stop with unbeatable, future stalker-murderers. Other fights where the best you can hope for is getting a hold until the other guy gives up. Running away from fights you can’t possibly win. Getting lost in corn fields. Rolling smoke bombs in class. Throwing snowballs at the older guys and running away from them laughing and then spending the next two weeks avoiding them. Pranking teachers a hundred ways with chalk dust. Setting field-fires that spread so fast you can’t outrun them, and melting your sneakers and losing your eyelashes and eyebrows. Snowballs at cars. Pouring gas on the road and lighting it on fire. Moving orange traffic cones into dead ends or nonsensical directions. Prank phone calls. Snow Forts. Blowing stuff up with gunpowder from discarded shells and leftover fireworks. Model rockets with explosive payloads. Threatening and infrequently shooting the bigger guys with a bow and arrow. Motorcycle and mini-bike races where we broke bones. Driving around rural towns pranking people by switching all the political signs in a neighborhood between the parties. Playing trashcan bowling and making a hell of a mess. Running from the police at 3:00am because you’ve been climbing telephone poles. Running from the police because you’ve been shooting out street lights with your wrist-rockets. Pinching girl’s backsides to see which one’s would laugh – and getting dates that way (really). Selling by the pound to pay for your party habit. Racing with other guys down back roads late at night trying to start a fight – or more realistically – preserving the thrill of the possibility without bringing it into fruition. “Parking” in the woods and enjoying every minute of it. Stealing the other team’s mascott. Hanging a mannequin on the flagpole of Mcdonald’s. Doing purple microdot and then going sledding and realizing the ten second lag between action and perception. Unsuccessful Panty raids in the dorms. Borrowing money you don’t have, and acquiring small companies and flipping them. Turning in your boss for criminal activity. Doing a hostile takeover of a company, and later being the subject of a hostile takeover. Writing propaganda against a political order that can’t tell the difference between mischief that prepares us for war and harm.

The only people worthy of respect are the adrenaline junkies in extreme sports. And no wonder we need them. We leave oppressively tedious lives.