Paragraphical preface

The thirty or so recent posts in here were written as a paragraph-a-day writing exercise in September 2019. Sometimes, there were more paragraphs than one in a day!

Thanks to Prof. Teresa Senft! http://www.terrisenft.net/119-2/

Miami

I recently read a listicle article about best places to retire, and the top choice was Miami and Florida in general. This article seems to ignore the fact that Miami and Florida in general is going to be one of the hardest places to live in coming years. Its not just that it's in the direct path of more frequent, slow moving hurricanes, but these storms don't even have to make landfall to cause tremendous damage, damage that will not be able to be repaired before the next hurricane. The earth itself is porous, and higher amounts of water, both from the ocean and the rains, work to undermine the strength of these ground itself. Similar, earlier disasters in the Caribbean will force emigration to Florida as the logical place to go for those displaced people. 

Social services will be strained. Retirees expecting a comfortable,  improving economy will instead find an exasperated municipality dealing with infrastructure failure and social upheaval.

Foam

A bubble is a visualization of the tension of the difference between the air pressure inside it and the air pressure outside it. It's in an uneasy balance. The wobble and shimmer of a bubble  demonstrates the equalization of the forces. The bubble skin thins out unequally as well, making ephemeral lenses that bend light into swaths of color.  After some time, the bubble stabilizes. Heating it slightly will make the bubble float, as the density of the air inside it is less than that outside it. And so the bubble floats off. The action of movement disrupts the equilibrium, sending ripples of air currents internal to the bubble which need to be stabilized again. The skin defines the bubble, but also visualizes the struggle of forces both internal and external. When two or bubbles collide, the equation changes, and a flat surface appears between them as they merge, which is bent toward the bubble with the lower internal pressure. The act of merging sets off another chain of wobbly motion. Clusters of conjoined bubbles form a foam, which as a byproduct of the forces previously mentioned, and builds a highly resilient structure where all the forces strive toward balance. It is said that the structure of the universe, the placement of galaxies, is that of a foam. This would be the side effect of simultaneous gravitational forces acting as air pressure does. 

Building a school

It's the day before the first day of school, so it's a good thing I closed on the property yesterday. I walked out this morning at 5:30 and started building it. Digging the foundation took until 9:00. I poured concrete and framed the first floor by 10:00. Next I set the central rafter and roughed out the roof. I took a half-hour break at noon for lunch. Then, feeling rain in the air, I finished up the roof. Back on the ground at 2:30, I wrapped the sides and brought in the window casements. With a little bit of protection, I went in and installed the plumbing and electrical wiring. By 4:00, I was done with the doors and and had almost finished the shingle siding. At 5:00, I started paving the driveway so the truck with the desks and books could get in at 5:15. I power washed the whole place and  was done at 6:30. Students and teachers should start coming tomorrow at 8:30.

How to force laughter

I remember learning how to force a laugh. 

The first part of that lesson is to determine when a forced laugh is appropriate. It's something you can actually practice by yourself. If you see something during your day that seems a little funny, but not really, you can vocalize an exasperated nose snort into a nasalized "hmpf."  Start doing this often. Soon, you'll be opening your mouth a little, and trilling your vocal chords, working up the a cautious laugh, the progenitor of the fake laugh. 

With this technique firmly established, you now need to take it into the public sphere. The best place is away from friends, because strangers often need to be laughed with.  You will note that many of these strangers will themselves be fake laughing around what is known in social media as "an influencer".  An influencer can laugh about anything, usually, animals' or other peoples' misfortunes. They especially enjoy a laugh when they are the witting cause of this misfortune. 

So as you can see, a fake laugh is easy to practice as a complement to an evil laugh. As you express your fake assent for the miserable state of the world, you can at least enjoy a drink or two for a few hours. I know I did.

Where is my food?

Every once in a while, I undergo a ritual I name "Voyage to the Bottom of the Fridge". This cooled pantry device is nearly unorganizable, and having a vague memory of an item placed therein turns into a treasure hunt. Last month, I knew there was a leftover eggplant that I had put in there the week before. After my unsuccessful search, and the purging of other foods way past their sell-by dates -  now food for microbes -  I gave up in my search, and subsequent to doing so, I bonked my head on the freezer door, which I had left open in an ancillary search operation. Blood was drawn, pain incurred. I hied to the emergency room, and after only a few hours of waiting, had the wound repaired with some dissolving stitches.  And that's where my story truly begins.

The stitches did their job well enough, and after about a week, they stopped itching. The area around them was still tender, which is what I expected.  Soft, like an inflatable pool toy. I thought little of it, but a week later, the stitches were as tight as ever, while the area near them was much softer, and flexible like a fontanelle. The plates of my skull were softening and separating. It was getting hard to keep my eyes open, and the skin started getting smooth and saggy. Still, with a hat on, I could go through the actions of the day. This morning, though, I had crossed a threshold. The hat now squeezed my head into something of a peanut shape, and it was clear it was not the stitches that were dissolving, but my skull. It's a little grotesque. I hope my face still matches my driver's license. 

Hermas

As a kid, I grew up in a small city sacred to the god Hermes. 

The major industries there were tourism, messaging, health care, sports equipment, and a suitcase factory. Scattered around town were a number of hermas, which were just part of our landscape. Once in a while, we'd remember to place a sacrifice by them, usually something simple like fresh cut wild flowers or some baseball cards, or a plastic, candy filled caduceus from a nearby bodega.  

Each herma was sculpted by a different artist, and they were erected and maintained over a series of hundreds of years. We got familiar with them, assigning each an epithet, like "Hermes, speedy trickster", "Hermes the Border Guard", "Hermes,  3 and 2 in the 7th inning", and so on, based on the style and facial expression each displayed. 

Over time, many of their erect phalluses had been broken off, and sometimes there was an offering of dildos at their bases. Their noses also suffered, especially during Christian administrations, so some were given nose jobs with pug noses. 

The hermas are still there today, protected in tiny local historic districts, so, for instance, when the Mall was built, some of them were emasculated and incorporated into its walls as atlantes. 

Having so many iconic phalluses in daily consciousness made our town a little more "dress casual" or "dress optional" than neighboring towns. Since we were a seaside resort as well, this helped immensely with tourism. Hermas figure prominently in local industry branding, and every fourth day of the month, we'd have a little fest where we'd dress up as Hermes or a herma and hang out in the town square gazebo. 

There are a few other towns this devoted to their patron god or goddess (Apollo in Delphi comes to mind), but none quite so charming as ours.

Reweaving

Yesterday's clothing typically gets unwoven at night, cleaned, and rewoven by morning. This is because modern clothing is created out of a few continuous carbon fibers. Carbon fibers are immensely strong, light, and flexible. The fabric created by weaving it can have different properties of lightness, stiffness, air and water permeability, continuously variable within the same garment. Coloring it can be done by manipulating nano scale microgrooves, the same way butterfly wings are colored. Some clothing companies have agreed to international standards, allowing interoperability between home reweaving machines optimized for particular garments from different manufacturers. This technology allows for perfectly fitting clothing for different purposes: layered, quilted clothing for the winter, loose and light clothing for the summer. People's bodies change every day and freshly woven clothes insure a perfect fit every time. Design elements not previously possible, for instance, feather-like textures, micro pleating, air-filled pockets for cushioning, are new kinds of fashion vocabulary that can now be exploited.  

Leather

I like leathercraft. You prepare the piece of skin and lightly sketch in the design. With specialized knives, you carve the skin into calligraphic lines and geometric shapes. You can then color it with dyes and further accessorize it with grommets and brads. You can join pieces of leather with strong thread or long laces of leather itself. Skin is surprisingly strong and flexible. It's naturally stiff after the host animal has died. Inuit women spend days chewing on reindeer and seal skins to soften them enough to be used for clothing, shoes,  and kayaks. It's something that we do by machine now: giant steel jaws equipped with salivary glands emitting tanning fluids massage the skins of recently living ungulates. Some of these machines are integrated in the slaughterhouses directly: Cattle in this end, hamburger, gelatin, horn products and leather out the other end. 

Alarmed

I'm just going to sit here and find out how long I can listen to the phone buzz and ring without looking at it. Message alarms are now filling my life. A single text rings on four devices in my proximity, and were It set up, it would flash the lights and vibrate my chair. One of my phones is now dedicated to receiving calls from script reading agents in a call center, so that one is definitely not getting answered. The phone's message center is filled with expired one-time codes. 

My doorbell is idle. I hear the insistent buzz and bump of a wasp at the window, perplexed by the glass preventing her from escaping the room. And on the stove, a tea kettle has reached whistling temperature. The smoke detector is more of a toast detector, and thank goodness, I've not heard from the geiger counter lately. My radio regularly burps a tattoo representing an emergency signal. Outside, whoops of an EMS truck shift in accordance to the Doppler effect. And beneath it all, the cicadas, in synch and out of synch in the August night air. 

What is probability?

This morning, when I did my coin flipping, I got 49 heads and one edge. While this is not impossible, it's very improbable. 

There's always a struggle to interpret the fall of the coins accurately. So many decisions. The edge flip was particularly disturbing, in that it rolled for quite a while before stopping, neither falling to the head or to the tail. 

Usually, in unusual situations like this, the explanation is simple: obviously the coin isn't fair, or something is amiss with the surface it's being flipped onto, or the flipping process itself is biased, like a pitcher choosing what kind of fastball to throw. 

Moreover, there's an implicit trust in the laws of probability - is there a way they could have been suspended? Can we be sure the head and tail side of the coin remained so between the flip and the fall? Was I misreading the side it fell on when I recorded the state of the flip, adding a consciousness of Heisenbergian uncertainty in the measuring process? 

49  heads - what if I had kept going ? Would tails have come up or were they impossible? Or were they replaced with another head - magic shops sell two-headed coins after all. This isn't one of them, I checked. I'll check again. 

Charm

A goldfinch just flew by, followed closely by another goldfinch. Following those goldfinches are three more goldfinches. They fly swiftly, and seem to bounce off the field grasses like flying fish. They are headed for a small tree, where they  evidently are nesting. From the eastern corner of the field, eight more goldfinches are approaching. I would say there's enough collected in that tree now to call them a "charm." Wherever a charm congregates, there is sure to be a lot of chattering and flashes of gold. Their late-hatching fledgelings just add to the charm. They perch and circle, making a living mist. In the neighboring trees, other charms are now gathering. Approaching the equinox, the birds are stocking up on seeds, building strength, and training for their migration south. 

The Story of the Earth

All our concerns disappear just a few hundred feet below the surface of the earth. The variety of life, the interactions of wind, earth, and water, glorious rainforests, continents of ice, burned desert soil, all are confined to a tiny skin atop the 4000 mile deep depth of the earth. Today, we venture below the surface, deeper than the wells and experimental Mohorovičić discontinuity explorations, to get to the mantle, where the Earth is molten. In the unimaginably deep sea of liquid rock, the petty concerns of nations, rainforests, and glaciers  burn off and are dispersed in to the underlying flow. There they push against the surface, breaking though rarely, but pushing the continents around like the skin on boiled milk. The surface, even the atmosphere, complex as it is,  is not the story of the Earth. 

Tree climbing class

Today's tree climb is going to be exceptionally difficult. We've covered basic aspects or arboreal assessment and hugging techniques, but this particular assignment has an unique twist. In my hand is a maple seed. Today we are going to plant that seed and wait for the tree to grow to its full height before scaling it. This way, we'll be able to experience the progression of its life, see its context in the soil and companion plants, fungi, and animals that  contribute to that growth. Today's lesson is patience. We'll do the best we can, as we're only assigned an 80-year slot for this class, but there is a lot to learn and see. Three essays will account for 75% of your grade, and a successful ascent and descent at the end of the term will count as the final quarter. 

Change of Seasons

 I turned on the tap this morning and was greeted with a coughing stream of brown and rust specked water. "Ahh!" I thought "Fall is approaching!" It's that exciting time of the year when change overtakes the environment. Grasses burst and brown, leaves take on color and drop with the first cold night. And it's also the time when my pipes shed their summer linings and prepare for the winter. It may take a few hours for the water to run clear again, but it brings to mind the season of hibernation and rebirth. Swarms of ladybugs will appear soon, replacing the cicadas of summer. All leading to the day when winter will truly begin, the first spurts of air from my bleeding radiator. 

Shoe boiling

Do you boil your shoes every morning to get the bugs out? You probably shouldn't! This is an old wives' tale from 17th century Italy. Shoes back then were much more edible, unlike the steel and plastic shoes of today. Boiling them made them softer in the morning, and helped them break in. Unlike today, when people change shoes every hour, those unfortunates had to wear them all day. Imaging wearing your 11 o'clock shoes at tea time! Boiling your shoes is an unnecessary time waster in today's world. Besides, many of us have figured out that a microwave does the job faster. 

Life documents

Nobody's life had ever been so completely documented: A sheaf of legal documents and contracts at the fertility clinic, receipts from the day of insemination and follow up visits, video leading up to and upon the day of birth, a vial containing the umbilical stump and some vernix, a lock of natal hair, blood, colostrum-laced sputum, the birth certificate with its footprint, the hospital-issued striped baby blanket, videos and diaries of a few days of recovery, continuous monitoring during breast feeding and diaper changing, sleep monitors recordings, notes from doctors and followup midwife visits. One week, so far. So much time to go!

Molar

I'm here to complain about my dentist. 

Last week I had a little twinge in the back of my mouth, so I thought I'd better take care of it. I booked an emergency visit to Dr. Frost, who is usually really hard to get an appointment with, so I was surprised to find there was one open right that afternoon. 

I went in on Tuesday, and he saw me right away and told me I had to get a molar out. "Fine," I thought. So he went into the next room and came back with two hygienists as assistance.

"Hey where's Ruth?" I asked. 

"Ruth left in May," he said. 

"I'm Sally Ann" said the one on the right. 

The one on the left didn't introduce herself. She didn't even have a name pin on.  

All this time, I was wondering where the other patients were. 

He gave me a shot and talked about golf for about five minutes because, as you know, last week was the PGA. He got out his tools and the unnamed hygienist held me down as he grabbed onto something inside my mouth. He pulled. It was not forthcoming. Ruth grabbed onto my head and held it back while Dr. Frost yanked away. I felt a loosening. He pulled some more and I saw the pliers come out of my mouth, but in its jaws was a small, beating bloody blob. 

It looked like a tadpole. It squirmed and wriggled and wrapped itself around the jaw of the pliers. Dr. Frost handed the pliers to the unnamed hygienist who actually had a jar ready for it. He took out a sprayer and rinsed out my mouth. 

"All done," he said.

"What about my molar?" I asked. 

"It's fine. This little guy", he shook the glass jar, "ate it."  

So, I'm wondering if this is legal, and what's going on in that office. Also, if this is covered by my dental insurance.

ESP test

First, make sure there is plenty of room available, then tie a string to a beam or pipe up near the ceiling. About six inches from the floor, tie a weight, like a coffee mug, to the string and cut it off so it just hangs there. The mug should not be moving at all. Concentrate on the mug. The nature of a pendulum is that small movements will phase correlate and work to increase the amplitude of the swing. If there's anything to this "telekinesis", this simple device will pick it up. Just keep concentrating, observing closely. Is that a little movement? Does it work better when you get closer? What about if you think of different ways for it to move, like twisting? Have you compensated for crosswinds, the shaking of the building from passing trucks,  and other environmental sources of movement? Is it swinging now? How about now? Nothing? Maybe reading this paragraph is keeping it from working.

The Thing with Feathering

Let's go for a paddle in a canoe. The canoe is placed in the water, and you pick up the paddle, and steady yourself as you sit down. A canoe in the water weighs less than the water it displaces, and a canoe with a person in it still weighs less than the water it displaces. Nevertheless, it's a good idea not to stand in a canoe. Once comfortably settled into the canoe, perhaps sitting on a rush woven seat, you can push off from the shore with the paddle. This will send you forward in an uncertain direction. This is the time to start paddling.

 A paddle is an excellent piece of technology. It's designed to cut into the water easily in two directions, but be more or less stagnant in the other orientation. It actually is negotiating two liquids: water and air. The alteration between the ease of its movement and the stability used to add energy is the same in air and water. But paddling in air - which is what wings do, is not as effective as paddling in water. Furthermore, the air provides not a little resistance to the strokes in it as one seeks to reposition the paddle for another pull in the water. Therefore, on exiting the water, a paddle is quickly turned, a move called feathering, so that it may glide unencumbered through the air and then be turned as it enters the water again. It's much more efficient to turn the paddle than it is to overcome the air resistance.

Feathering as a philosophy is something you can apply to life: resisting in situations where you need the power and gliding transparently where you need to pass through it in order to get back into the powered mode. 

Sea Vegetable Fantasy

Sea Vegetable Fuels have just enough energy to power a small car for medium ranges. Typically, processed Sea Vegetable Fuels are delivered dried and whole and pulverized at the filling station. Sea Vegetable Fuels then use a system of hydration to keep them in a near liquid state. Although its's a plentiful and sustainable source of energy, it does tend to cost more further from where its harvested, because wildcat operations can undercut the retail price, set by the S. V. Fuel Board.  People's main complaints are that it's fragile and gooey, and dries out too quickly, making it hard to clean in a spill.  When the hydrator runs out of water, you can wait for rain or you can illegally siphon some from neighboring cars. 

The good thing is that people can grow their own fuel, if they are coastal. The bad thing is that the coast is moving. Rising coastlines are changing the ecosystem for these important fuels, creating new sets of "winners" and "losers" among Sea Vegetable harvesting and processing companies. Experts predict that without consolidation, by 1986, the Sea Vegetable Fuels industry will be in disarray, with consequent chaos on the Stock Market. 

Automatic writing about ideas about artificial thought

Human thought is carried out by associating elements of reality to corresponding parts of narratives. When people, things and actions are plugged in, the narrative provides a predictive model that asserts its premises as certainly as a syllogism. 

This is an act of faith: the binding of elements of reality to a story with a definite arc. There is no reason for that narrative to be grounded in reality or to be provable by logic, although many are. The selection of a narrative itself is result of more basic identifications to more abstract narratives. The establishment of a core set of narratives to identify with provides the core of personality, that is, how an intelligence frames reality that results in behaviors. Thought proceeds via metaphor.

Steering from one framing narrative to another is the point of influence and education. Narrative choices can easily complement or oppose each other, and be reevaluated while acting on them. Professing loyalty to a certain group of narratives allows others to predict your behavioral choices. 

Scientific narratives can be verified by independent measurement narratives which have implicit context. They get refined as that context is recognized. The same is true of more fragile, faith based narratives. 

There is an active ecosystem of competing ideas that are applied to  frame reality. Like any evolutionary system, the ideas complement and fit with other ideas, they mate and prey upon each other, and while they rely on external components of reality, surviving with random associative elements is also a possibility. 

Gummed

Chewing gum was originally a local treat made from chicle. It sated the oral fixations of indigenous Central American workers for centuries. It was adopted and adapted by North American candy makers, augmenting it with more sugar and flavorings, and occasional collectable cards, comics, and trinkets. 

Chewing gum play an important part in the American consciousness. But chicle ejecta coats American walkways and desk undersides. It's a hazard for sandal wearers, an eyesore and cleaning problem for maintenance staff, and the tales of fixing complicated mechanical problems with the substance are unsubstantiated. 

In theory, it could be dissolved and returned safely to the Earth, but there's no money in that technology. Although it resembles one-celled fauna, it does not hold a place on any creature's food chain, so importing a natural predator is not an option. In fact, for a substance originally so natural - the sap of trees - it's remarkably artificial, and a hallmark of modern civilization. 

Frenetic

Why is it that when I take a book off the shelf, other books want to follow it and be read as well? Not only the proximal tomes, but there are visible rustlings all along the shelf. Quartos are especially eager. Bits of labels and notes flutter down, their adhesive tape long since degraded. The shelf is unstable. There is only one book that refuses to move - the Laws of Zoning and Planning. I go to see what's holding it in. Pulling on it trips a switch, and a hidden door opens to a room full of clichés. 

Microtransactions

The acceptance of micropayments could be a revolutionary  cultural shift. I live in an apartment with a month to month lease. These months have added up to nearly 6 years at this point. Month to month leases are part of the gig economy, and I expect that along with "compensation" that is "minutely" instead of hourly, per-meter taxi ride metering, and restaurant meals charged by weight, culture will also be conducted and compensated in microtransactions. A good example is this paragraph. 

An AI using word vector analysis can come up with a metric that corresponds to how closely the ideas in a paragraph correlate. A highly cogent paragraph could carry a higher price than one that doesn't hang together so much. Then a micropayment could be automatically charged when the paragraph is accessed.  Of course, the system would get gamed for those who want to get their ideas out more cheaply. Leather is easy to tool, but first you have to soak it overnight. Why else do dice come in pairs?

 

Good Ball Boy

It's tennis match season, and it's my job to watch a fuzzy 2.57" ball as it volleys from one side of the court to the other. From the perspective of the ball, it's a percussive smack, and then a free deceleration to another percussive smack. The rhythm is rarely regular, and the contrast between what the brain expects rhythmically and the games actual rhythm is a constant source of cognitive irritation. Occasionally - and to the winner's benefit - the ball breaks free of the rhythm and finds its way to the court surface. That's when I leap into action and scoop it up in my mouth. 

Knottedness

It's not hard to come upon a knot that created itself. Knots come about not from the end snaking its way around the main extent of the fiber, but when loops twist themselves into existence in the middle part of the string and interlock into self tying clusters. To remove the clusters, you can certainly work from the ends, undoing as you go, but the process of tracing and untangling paradoxically may make them tighter. If you can somehow lay the string out  and  untwist the intertwined loops as if they were the end points, this process of continuous simplification will undo that natural entanglement process.  Patience, and a board with pins to keep them from twisting again, are the tools for undoing and understanding the knot. Understanding this process is also a way to understand philosophical knots: find the twists and  pin them out to see the structures they create and obscure. 

Peach tree

When I walked by the peach tree yesterday, all the peaches were gone. They were still up last Tuesday. The house is for sale again, someone had apparently mowed the lawn and picked the tree. The peaches are small, their texture is compliant, and they are juicy. The tree is still good looking, even without its fruit. There should be more fruit trees in an urban setting. This little tree produces about 300 peaches. I know this tree well because I planted it and took care of it with stakes and netting for about 7 years. A piece of my son's placenta was buried at the roots, and I was actually walking to meet him when I passed by the tree.  

Tooth Fairies

I spent many years transcribing messages from the tooth fairies, and so I'd like to  tell you about them, and how their role is misunderstood. Tooth fairies are hard to perceive, and are very small, roughly on the scale of the bacteria that live in the mouth anyway. They do not write notes - they are far too small - but they can dictate them indirectly, just as oral bacteria can also change one's behavior. Nor do they have a store of cash to dole out as a kind of dental insurance for lost teeth. That's clearly done by custodial guardians, for reasons of establishing the idea of insurance! 

Tooth fairies also do not move on once all the primary teeth have been lost, they make their presence known later in life. This is due to a fundamental misunderstanding about tooth fairies: they are not there to remove the lost teeth and compensate for them, they are in fact nourishers and gardeners of the erupting adult teeth. They interact with the stem cells in the jaw and cause the new teeth to grow and push out the previous set. They are there for wisdom teeth, long after the primaries have been replaced. These fairies continue their work through the movement of teeth throughout one's life, encouraging and guiding dental growth and mourning enamel loss.

In my family's case, tooth fairies communicated as three personalities: Norman, Fancy, and Flossie.  Norman was kind of playful, if dull witted, but enjoyed salvaging lost baby teeth to use as furniture. Fancy was often concerned about how the new teeth would grow and arrange themselves as they grew. Flossie was an advocate for active dental hygiene. The three of them would take turns dictating letters to me, which I wrote down on torn, fan-folded strips of paper, in ink using a flat nibbed pen. When the children noted the messages were in my handwriting, I rightly claimed the fairies were much too small and illiterate to write, but I could transcribe their thoughts and conversations. At the bottom, as encouragement, I'd attach a coin from tooth fairyland, which naturally was one "fare", formerly used by the NYC subway system. When these ran out, I'd use the tiny coins of Denmark or small denominations from defunct Eastern European countries. The notes were secreted in the usual way, and sometimes not found for a day or so. 

Historical Present

One of the many hats I wear is the figurative topper of the president of the Century House Historical Society. I'm no historian, but now I'm dealing with historical issues many times a week. Faulkner once wrote "the past is not dead. It is not even past," and my particular version of this is "History does not stop." Thinking this way allows me to adaptively reuse an abandoned cement mine as a fundraising music venue. However, this realization about history has grammatical consequences, since it results in one of my bugbears, the historical present, that is, treating ancient, completed events as if they were still in progress. This practice calls into question the very existence of a past tense, which consequently calls into question all verbal tenses. The struggle between past and future comes to an end in an uneasy truce. Sequential action is reconceived as simultaneity. With such a perspective, "causality" is either the misinterpretation of a predetermined lockstep of a fatalistic gelled reality or exposed as the capricious Brownian motion of events careening into each other with no long term consequence, just an inevitable journey toward heat death. 

I can fall, I know it

I can fall, I know it. I can just lean forward a little to make it happen. 

Falling is simple, anyone can do it. 

I can see where I'd be falling. 

The ground looks soft, except for a few pebbles, which I don't think I'll hit. In fact, I bet I could twist so I don't hit those pebbles. 

I did it once, I know, although it is hard to remember. The wind is calm, a good time to fall. I just have to put my mind to it. 

My left foot is a bit more forward than my right, and that means, if I start to lean a little to the right, I can get a little rocking going. Then if I rock a little more, in time with my movement, I should be able to build up some momentum and it can go into a kind of positive feedback loop, where all the work will be done for me. When the time comes, I can use that asymmetry to go into a twist and miss the pebbles. 

The plan is solid. It only takes the will to do it.