So what’s all this about then? What new trip is this guy on again?,…sigh, when are we going to be rid of this rambler and all his theories and nonsensical explorations… ah well, might as well read on and see what this is all about

Hey, straight up I have to declare; it’s not like I spend all my time thinking of different types of abstract cr*p, what happens is I get these bursts of creative mumbo jumbo and somehow, I end up throwing all sorts of plots and thoughts into the pot - then serving out a mish mash of hodge podge. I offer no apologies for the quality (or lack of it…) of my ‘meals’, hey, I’m just ‘freeing my mind here’! Lol.

But on to more serious matters. So what exactly can we call an ‘irrational but logical act’? Is this mix even possible in the first place; does it make sense to use the words ‘logical’ and ‘irrational’ in the same line? I claim; history (fact and fiction; ‘though I don’t really see the difference ‘tween the two ) has always provided us with the phenomenon of ‘the mismatched pair’, ‘the star-crossed lovers’, ‘the sworn enemies’…etc etc. Look through the books and we see such famous pairs like Caesar and Brutus, Romeo and Juliet, Bush and the ‘world of terrorists/dictators’, Britain and Zimbabwe/Mugabe, Fela and Obasanjo, Batman and the Joker (?!), Tupac and the Notorious B.I.G.; I could go on forever . So what is this mystic bond that binds all these groups of people together? I mean, if you read up on these guys they all have a history of performing extremely irrational acts towards each other, but those acts have also borne some kind of twisted logic…’method to madness’ you could say.

One thing seems to stand out; these pairs/groups have all had some sort of common origins, they have all had partnerships/friendships/joint ventures at some time or the other. In most cases we have the classic situation of a ‘friendship gone sour’, leading to all sorts of acrimonious disputes, with telling consequences for generations!

I guess we all have our ‘friendships gone sour’, our ‘thin lines…’ that have been crossed. Some people just seem to have had their fingers in many more pies than others. Yes, Mugabe is a tired old man, but I think I can understand his seemingly ‘irrational’ actions, look to the past, his rise to power, the people that supported him and maybe the reasons for his actions might not be so illogical after all.

That’s what it’s all about isn’t it? You know what I’m talking about…, ‘life’. On the treadmill from the date of birth, just another product with a shelf-life (three-score  and ten  in the good book, isn’t it?). An extremely pessimistic outlook I know, but isn’t this the plain reality of things as they are?

“in my race against time/can’t stop/running through the red lights…”. The song is actually cr*p, like most of Ja Rule’s sh*t, it’s the hook that makes the tune work.

This has always, and will always be a touchy issue. When is it ethical or moral to keep a ’spare’? In the words of Ray Parker Jnr from back in the day; “you should have kept a spare/a backup love affair…”.

Using a simple analogy, let me represent a standard relationship with a car, a motor-vehicle. I look at two main components here; the vehicle and the tyres on which it runs. Taking one side of the partnership as the vehicle and the other as the tyre(s) let us examine typical journeys as against a very important journey, possibly the trip of your life.

For day to day journeys, it would be logical to assume that any careful driver would make sure that apart from having all his mounted tyres in mint condition, there would also be a reliable spare in the boot (trunk?). Well… in the high speed world of Formula 1 the pace is too fast for spares to stay on board, rather tyres are used and discarded with impunity - a high rolling life … I digress as usual. Anyway coming back to the regular journey idea one would assume that the presence of the spare serves as a reassurance for the driver but is not something that would be in the foreground during any such journey. More like some fact that sticks somewhere in the periphery of your consciousness.

Now we come to the very important trip. Obviously for a critical journey the assumption is that all systems would be checked and rechecked, all spares and whatnot would be kept in pristine condition, after all; one can hardly afford surprises due to shoddy preparation on such critical journeys.

In plain english, this seems to suggest that for casual trips, a spare is useful but not essential whilst for critical trips the spare is an irreplacable part of the itenary. Hmmm…. Paradox?

Make what you will of this analogy. On the flipside I wonder, what kind of ‘tyre’ do you think you are? Personally I’ve always felt I’d be great in the trunk, best used sparingly and only in emergencies . Talk about ‘eating your cake and having it’. Heh heh.

Well, the number one feature of Chess for me is it’s duality as an individual game and a team sport. The team sport takes away the persistent shadows of ‘isolation‘ and ’weirdness‘ or ‘different nature’ that hang over Chess players. One only has to look at the World Chess Olympiad (hey!!, the olympiad is coming up in Dresden in just a few months time! yippee!) to see the gregarious outgoing nature of Chess players. On the other hand, the individual game gives the opportunity to engage in the most basic and primeval of contest formats; mano y mano, one on one. After all, how else can you truly measure yourself against another human being, if not in a game of Chess - against artificial intelligence also, I might add. 

Chess, and indeed, the Chess player need not be viewed with trepidation, apprehension and all such similar emotions. Instead regard the concept of Chess as simply a test of logic. Logic in all its rationally bounded forms.

I rest my case.

In pure scientific terms (or otherwise actually) the term ‘forever‘ is definitely a gross misnomer. Infinity is a much more preferrable (and aesthetically correct, if I might add!) choice. See, infinity provides a much needed open ended space which can be utilised to such wonderfully creative purposes as; making quantum leaps to arrive at conclusions, terminating unwanted debates (most common use) and introducing a veritable plethora of related (quite a few unrelated concepts also) ideas to link up with your original views.

Let’s look at this in practice; why say something lasts forever? Diamond, in pure technical terms lasts a pretty long time - some ridiculously large number of years - but the fact remains that all things decompose/disintegrate in the end. It’s the relatively long amount of time (compared to the paltry life-span of basic organic items, of which man is the most prominent) that gives rise to the idea of ‘permanence‘ or everlasting nature of certain minerals, diamonds included.

Anyway, before I digress too much, this post is kinda related to one of my earlier rambles where I was talking about “laughing too/and no one would suspect/…“. The part of that talk that has me going off now is the idea of politicians in particular becoming so caught up in spin that self-delusion becomes a ‘clear and present danger’, the norm rather than the exception.

NOTHING lasts forever.

But…, of course, people forget this daily. I’ve been listening to some music and I’d like to share a few lines with y’all. First off, Lauryn Hill: “you can get the money/you can get the power/’keep your mind on/the final hour…“, the other view is from reggae music, Chezidek: ”on your way up/make sure you find a way how/on your way down/there will be no helping hands around…/climb up to the skies/but you can’t stay up the air/don’t care how you bad boy/ cannot walk inna thin air/must come backa earth/’say you haffi touch ground again/…“ 

For all those leaders out there who feel they will last forever; the world existed before us, it will be here after us, no matter the attempts of guys like Mr Bu**sh*t out there to take the whole place into a hole with him. Nuff said.

And that’s the way my main man put it. 2Pac. Makaveli. Whatever name you decide to remember him by. The line comes from the ‘Don Kiluminati’ album, track 13 actually; against all odds.

Now isn’t that just absolutely the best way to leave this lovely world behind? I’m not talking about the violence (perceived or otherwise) that surrounded this poet’s troubled 25 yr existence; I’m talking about his lyrics, his music that still lives on today. Whatever anyone says about Tupac Shakur’s life, I think there is a majority consensus that he was ‘the realest’.

I guess this kind of addresses the previous post. For some people, the rewards of short term satisfaction are insufficient to compensate for the overall fulfilment derivable from being a true citizen of the world. ‘True Citizens’ here being interpreted to mean people who say things as they see them. Fela Kuti. Tupac Shakur. Bob Marley. The list is endless. 

Ask yourself; are you a true citizen? When push comes to shove, will you speak up and call things the way you really see them? Food for thought.

As the ’silicon monster’ (Fritz) sings: “I was laughing too/and no one would suspect/I’m a fraud!”

The backbencher mentality. The chimera people, or like someone said of the mythological god Janus: “two faces, and neither one of them true”. You know, it’s easy to get into this kind of frame of mind but somehow I think the people that do get sucked into this sort of ‘fraudulent personae’ find it just about impossible to accept the truth of their predicament. Try talking to a person who is immersed in politics about the dangers of presenting ‘truth the way it is required for the moment’ on their long term ability to differentiate reality from ’spin’. A brick wall every time. 

The other day I wandered into a dj affair in some place somewhere. Now, I went into the room with a clear picture of what I was looking for; a few drinks, some atmosphere and essentially to admire any of the ‘beautiful people’ that might be on show. As I chilled out in a corner (my standard location in party, pub, class, etc ), sipping my drink and observing the scene, I started to feel out of place. Everybody was into the ‘rave’ feeling; the dj was banging out some massive tunes and people were just flowing to the beat, moving to the rhythm. So, I decided to adopt the ‘tried and tested’ si fueris romae vivito romano more and accordingly moved out of my corner to join in the revelry. After a few minutes I had to ask myself; was I getting caught up? Yes, “I was laughing too…” but  was I laughing too hard?

At the end of the day I guess there are always very thin/fine lines between the edges of reason in the various actions and forays we undertake in our daily existence. The difficulty is in being able to carry out an objective personal assessment as to which side of reason we are on at any particular time.

Interesting. 

Sorry Mr Banks (the guy from G-Unit that looks like Craig David ) but the title of your quite respectable debut album doesn’t seem to have held true for your rap career since then. ‘The hunger for more’. What is this ‘more‘ about anyway and if we do get it, will we be satisfied or will interest just simply peter away and die? Picture the classic scenario; ‘Oliver Twist stretches out his basin and spoon and asks his master for more… eliciting a positively violent response for having the temerity to ask for more!…’  I guess it’s worth looking at the other side of the coin; if the master had acceded to this simple request from his boy (blasphemous at the time, yes; but a quite logical request), would that classic piece of Dickensian literature have achieved some sort of immortality? When the ‘hunger‘, the ‘want‘ is satisfied; what is there to look forward or even aspire to?

This idea can easily be looked at from an infinite range of features from our daily existence but I’ll try and stick to music, after all, that’s where this conversation started from. From Sinatra’s self satisfied eulogy ‘my way’ to Dr Dre’s classic ‘been there, done that’ it is easy to pick out themes of people who are giving out the message; ‘I asked for more, got it and now there’s nothing left’. Bittersweet. Sad. For some, asking for and receiving more has led to frustration and some sense of derailment, a lack of purpose in life now that the ‘hard’ questions have been answered. I view DMX this way. I mean, just listen to his first two major albums; ‘it’s dark and hell is hot’ and ‘flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood’, absorb the power from songs like ’slippin’…’, ‘coming from…’, ’stop being greedy…’, ‘let me fly…’ and many others. Every song is asking; where is the way in? Give me more! Lyrics like: “you say you hunger for knowledge?/here it is/eat it!…”. Compare this with later efforts where I feel he’s simply asking; “Lord give me a sign”, where do I go now I’ve ’eaten and digested’ more? 

I guess that interesting saying comes across here; “be careful what you ask for, you might get it…”.

Or, as the ‘Joker’ (Jack Nicholson) complained moments before uttering these words in the original ‘Batman’ movie; “why didn’t someone tell me he had one of those things?!”. The scene from the film is the one in which: as the evil villain releases poisonous gas-oozing balloons into the air, trying to wipe out the entire population of Gotham City (!); Batman swoops down from somewhere in the stratosphere (yeah, yeah, comic book movies ) in his ‘Batcraft’ and with a pair garden shears attached to the front of the craft ( ), nips the balloons and safely carries them off to outer space or something. Apologies to all you true blue Batman buffs for my cannibalization of your great movie.

Anyway, the line, and how it was delivered by a very visibly upset and jealous Joker stuck to my grey matter (as so many millions of other irrelevant things have also, over the years…). “got to get me one of those!”

Obviously, the context in which this trip down memory lane is relevant should be self explanatory, how many times have you been walking down the street, observing the finer things of nature on two legs and thinking to yourself; “d**n, got to get me…..”

“the hearts of men; who knows what evil lurks within them?”