i’m at another rest stop. i saw the dad with the son and the football and the hulk hogan shirt. really, what are the odds of that, that we would stop at the same rest stop again, this time an hour and a half or so down the road? i guess the odds aren’t that terrible. still, it’s sort of strange, you must admit, that it happened twice.

i’m not allowed to laugh at home, so i have to come out to rest stops across the great state of pennsylvania to laugh. and i’ll be the one making myself laugh. i haven’t let anyone else make me laugh yet. that has yet to happen. i haven’t talked to anyone long enough for them to make me laugh in the first place. but maybe this here, this place, will be the place. maybe. who knows. i don’t know.

i think...

well, i see an ant on the table. it’s got a pretty big head, all things considered, and it’s rapidly approaching the keyboard... now it’s on the keyboard with me.... ran across the keyboard in a few seconds flat... oh my god, does this thing only have one antenna? i’m not sure, but i think it might... i need to get a better look.... holy shit dude this thing only has one antenna.

the ant with one antenna.... this thing is extremely intriguing to me..... what are the implications of only having one antenna? it’s like being blind in one eye or something. perhaps even more consequential than that. or maybe it’s just like having one kidney. the ant seems to be finding a good enough way on its own without the other antenna... but then again, it is all alone, and aren’t these things social creatures? where is your colony, little buddy? are they anywhere to be found? are you having trouble finding them what with your solo antenna? i’m not sure what could be the implications of such a disability, or whether we ought to even consider it a disability. but again, the sort of erratic way it’s walking.....

oh. that’s not the same ant... this here is a different ant approaching me.... it even looks like.... not an ant at all.... perhaps a pseudo-ant.... doing some kind of dance…. it’s more arachnoid than ant-like..... it’s not insect... but it’s mimicking the ant’s appearance… i wonder if this is one of those spiders that mimics ants for some sinister purpose. but where did...

oh, there’s the ant with one antenna. there it comes, running back to me... here you are, bud... reminds me of those pigeons with one leg... always a sad sight, but maybe it doesn’t have to be sad after all. maybe it’s just fine. maybe it’s just like missing a kidney, and it can easily compensate. but the problem with having only one kidney is that if something should happen to your solitary kidney, you’re fucked. its’ the same thing with the double hit hypothesis. it’s okay to take one hit to a gene, because you have two alleles as a sort of failsafe, but once you get that second hit, you got cancer, my friend. at least in the case of oncogenes... right? or is it also the case for tumor suppressor genes? i’m not sure. i can’t see why it wouldn’t be both..... .. or i don’t see why it should be one over the other.

the ant is still pacing. back and forth... seems to be looking for something, and i’m not sure how to help it. i really don’t know how to help this little guy, or if my help is even something it would take if it knew it was being offered. does it need to find its colony? is that it?

let me do some experimenting with offering branches and letting it travel to the ground.

and now the ant is crawling around in the grass. a better place for ants in my opinion. let me transport myself to the shade to write this net part.

just because my shit was starting to overheat.... the keyboard specifically.

anyway, i offered up this little stick to the ant three times. the first two times, it got on and then right back off onto the picnic table. the third time i took matters into my own hands and provided some directive counseling: you will go on the ground. so i brought it to the ground and let it walk onto the pavement. the ant then very quickly found its way to the grass, where it started exploring. i watched it for a minute or two after that, and then i thought of samuel beckett.

rest in peace samuel beckett. i’m sure you loved watching ants. because they do nothing all the time. nothing happens each time you watch the ants... and that’s beautiful.

the ant with one antenna, watching it, it was beautiful, and i wouldn’t have traded it. nothing happened, multiple times, and even when the ant was brought from the picnic table to the ground, to perhaps more evolutionarily familiar territory, grass, nothing continued to happen.

but then, nothing is such a minimizing word. like yeah, you can call that nothing if you want. but then what would something even look like in the antworld?

we have been trained to think of “something” as requiring excitement or amazement, with life-altering consequences, life and death..... people being pushed to brinks and stuff, near death experiences. but what about all the other times in life? what about the fact that the ant had only one antenna? that was pretty good, huh? and the discussion about whether it’s more like losing an eye or a kidney? the two hit hypothesis?

my main thing that i want to discuss is the idea of presenting things with more lifelike circumstances. even if the ant is to die as soon as it’s made it into the grass... if it is to fall prey to some kind of thing that likes munching on ants, i should think it has had a better shot at transcendence and a better shot at whittling away some of its negative karma in those circumstances, in the natural, world, than it did on that picnic table, in such an unnatural environment, where the only behavior it could think of was to pace.

i wish that i had some guardian angel like that, who would lift me up out of the concrete jungles of the world and deposit me closer to the grassy terrain. i wish, i wish. but i’m the guardian angle. i have enough complexity in my nervous system to allow me to find that i am the person who can take me into those environments.

right now, for example.... i’m in a grassy field... looking at trees, feeling the sun on my skin. isn’t that agreeable? isn’t that what it’s all about?

and then... as for living in the city.... i don’t need to do it anymore. i need to let myself be my own guardian angel. think of all the times spent outdoors and how those were much more agreeable than being in my apartment on the fourth floor pacing around until who knows what happened. much more agreeable to be outside where you can be struck by the wind and the sun, and where you can observe life happening around you, like the leaves on trees bouncing around in their own kind of dance, much like that spider dressed as an ant was doing.

then i look back to the parking lot where my car is parked, and i see a huge semi-truck carrying no less than one two three four five six seven eight nine cars on top of itself. i never really could understand how they do that. but then ants carry things nine times their weight all the time. more, even, right? i’m not sure about that fact. that one never interested me as much. it’s usually the first thing people tell me when i tell them i like ants. they’re like, “oh yeah it’s cool how they can lift so many times their body weight.” and i just nod, like, “yeah it is cool.” but i don’t know. i’ve never been impressed by acts of physical prowess like that. maybe i should be. i think it’s impressive, sure.

i think any kind of control over one’s local physics is sort of impressive and sort of “what it’s all about.” that’s one of my enduring theses from the past year is that local physics control is really important to humans, and it’s true right down to a biochemical, microbiological level. gradients of potassium and sodium being the basis for action potential firing, and action potential firings being the basis for our own internal guardian angels to come out. inhibitions and excitations, all based on a tightly controlled physical gradient of literal numerable ions across fields. this is physics at the level of the cell, and this is how life is maintained: through minute control over hyperlocal physics!!!!

so then, yes, i suppose i am impressed by acts of physical prowess, and i suppose it is impressive that a semi truck could carry nine cars, and i suppose it is impressive that an ant could carry however many times its body weight... someone fact check that please. jamie pull that up. shoutout barndoors. funny ass guy.

there’s a new ant on my new picnic table. this one has two antennae. should i escort this one down to the ground as well?

heart strings i deeply sigh, knowing that i can’t do this for everyone. i can’t be everyone’s guardian angel. and you’d think an ant with two antennae would already be blessed enough and shouldn’t need a guardian angel... and then there’s that thing i learned about how interventionism is actually something that rips away at my heart strings, because i see the destruction it can cause, and i see that sometimes it’s better to just sit there and know not what you do. each little twist of my foot on the ground could be killing an ant that happens to be standing in that one spot, that exact spot right there, and i suppose it’s enough to know that i’m already doing enough harm without knowing it. better not to add any new harm to the equation.

inertia but in terms of the karma, i really do believe that some of these places are more karmically inert than others. the fish tank which housed all those goldfish in the petco in oneonta...... karmically inert.... at least more so than, say, a riverbed.... and this picnic table in who-knows-where, pennsylvania... more karmically inert than the muddy patch of grass right next to it. i think nature is more karmically.... what’s the opposite of inert?

we’re not dealing in opposites, though. i don’t believe in opposites. allopathy is dead. dualism is dead. dualism is a scourge on this nation, a blight that ought to be trimmed away from our tree. but unfortunately it’s gotten integrated with the trunk. it’s even down there in the roots. it would take a lot to remove the dualism from our tree of society. you would have to cut the whole tree down. unfortunately, dualism is very load-bearing. to remove it would be to crumble the whole society.

and that’s sort of what i’m after, i guess. i think i would be okay with the society crumbling... i think. i mean, i would have to be if i choose to be so opposed to dualism in this lifetime... but opposites... i’m....... not in the business of them... so then... to oppose dualism... am i becoming.... the thing that i hate? am i becoming the very thing that i am so strongly against, opposed to?

i don’t know man. but i do know that dualism is a disease, and it’s plaguing us, and until it’s removed, we will be on a slow decline...

i think it’s possible to do medicine on the dualism. we can do chemo and radiation on it. we can fight it using more psychic means. we can fight it with the pen instead of the sword, for example. we can tell people that dualism sucks and rene descartes was a fucking poseur and a loser boy and a fucking baby who had no idea, nothing about philosophy or anything, who has had a really deleterious effect on our world… and we can slowly beam up the blight of dualism on our tree of society with the radiation of loving kindness and the chemotherapy of nondualism, and hope to see that the tree can begin to grow around the dualism, to wall it off as a scar, to allow it to continue propping up the tree, because we know that to eliminate it in one fell swoop, in some surgical operation, would mean collapsing the tree, leaving us no chance, no nothing, and who wants that? but if we just beam it up every now and then... if we start some psyops against dualism… if we can convince the masses that living their lives in these oppositions and thinking of things in terms of good and evil.... if we can convince them that this is slowly killing us all, maybe we can shrink the dualism blight on our tree of society. who’s with me?!

now it’s time to get back on the road. you can always tell when you've had your vision. shoutout virginia woolf. to the lighthouse.