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This one’s going out, so please bear with.

Often times in techno-thriller movies they have a scene where the Big Suit busybodies are watching a blurry videotape. The guy in the mustache always squints closer to the screen, pats the techy-geek kid in a Hawaiian shirt on the shoulder. He jams his finger at a point on the screen, maybe representing a handpurse or monkey or whatever, and demands in a gruff voice, “Enlarge this section! I wanna see the fleas on the handpurse and read the brand name on the monkey!”

Techy-geek kid in Hawaiian shirt dazzles his finger across they keyboard and an enlarged shot appears on the screen. A few more keystrokes sharpen the details, and voila. Fleas.

And a cross-branded Klondike-Pennzoil Bar monkey.

Impossible. The original tape is as focused as you are going to get. The ‘sharpened details’ are not encoded onto the video, or else they would be represented as such during regular playback. You can’t get more detail from a less-detailed starting point.

Does the mind work in a similar manner? How can we forget things and remember them later? Let’s say you have a recollection of a history… say, a camping trip. Without outside resources (other people’s accounts, photographs, etc…) your memory of the trip is as detailed as it can get. But then, how do we remember things at later dates that we haven’t remembered before? The smell of pine boughs can suddenly transport you back to the experience more vividly than simply recalling the memory. The smell can actually trigger the feeling of the trip, not just your stored images of it. If you haven’t consciously called up that feeling since the trip, how come you are able to with a little nudge from the nose?

It appears there’s something more to the mind than just storage. …or, if the mind is just storage, it appears to store more than we can know. If it were just a videotape I could play my mind back, and be satisfied that everything the camera was able to capture appears on the screen. If it’s not on the screen, the camera did not capture it. The mustache can hound techy-geek Hawaiian shirt boy all day, he can squash out three packs of cigarettes in an overflowing ashtray, but he’s never going to extract more information from the tape than the tape captured. The limits are clearly defined.

But the mind seems to have different levels of detail; I am able to zoom in on a specific part of a memory and dissect it. This suggests that the mind is drawing from a much larger reservoir than I am conscious of. The potential levels of detail are not accounted for in a gloss recall of the event, and at times it seems the mind is only limited by the inability to concentrate on a memory long enough to see it to its end. It feels like I have infinite straws drawing from every soda fountain in the universe.

How much information is really stored in there? Thanks to solipsism we can never know. We can only know the memories that we recall; if we don’t recall it, we can’t know whether it’s there or not. Fortunately it is additive; you can keep recalling more memories but you can’t unrecall a memory. …but you can never know the limit of how many memories you can recall. That darned monkey of the mind is always grinding away, awash in colorful thoughts of Genghis Kahn and Tang and Dresden and other proper names that require capitalization. So long as new ideas are always being created you cannot claim to know the limits. It’s like the universe. It keeps expanding and creating itself at the four-dimensional edge. What’s the edge look like? What’s on the other side of the edge? We don’t know. We can’t know.

I think I see now why most philosophers can’t write a book that makes any damn sense.

As Rickrobot would say, “It’s all good.”

Grilling season was here last week but I was unarmed. The weather was beautiful, and I was outfitted with bottles of savory juices but no meat. I had plenty of ammo but no guns. A pile of ordinance but no cannons. Lots of bomb belts but no eager teenagers dying to be martyrs.

So I bought a large sack of assorted chicken parts frozen in a solution of not less than 10% magnesium salts and frost. This was with the hope of eventually soaking the assorted parts in Caribbean Jerk marinade, which has the delightful tastes of fresh papaya and Jamaican oppression. I find it fitting that my favorite meat soaks are something called ‘jerk’, and I have started a fine collection of various jerk sauces in anticipation of a lovely charcoal spring.

Charcoal spring is gone. Grilling season is over. Cold is here, snow is now. Right now the giant vacuum could descend space and steal our atmosphere and no one would complain. Go ahead, take our foul weather! May it bring you a frosty death!

A well-rounded cocktail of drugs and orange juice has me almost on top of things again. Reality no longer grates like a power sander across my brain. Figured out how to keep Premiere from crashing (it seems that the prog freezes when it tries too hard to load and unload things from RAM at the same time… so I just run a memory manager called RAMBooster, optimize out 128 MB or so when it hangs and Premiere takes over from there… beautiful, really!)

It’s snowing, and it’s snowing hard. Tuning my mind away from the spring that seemed so near so recently, I put in Endtroducing by DJ Shadow. Two years ago on a December night a load of Woochers were crammed in the Tempo, shooting down a narrow winding road north of Ely. This CD epitomized the mood. The atmosphere was frigid, and Endtroducing chilled it further with it’s drawling, creepy melodies. We would turn the headlights off and follow the brakelights of the car in front of us. They would turn off their lights and we’d navigate by the moon. Sharp turns in the icy road would sneak up. Mixed in was a serious relationship that I knew was on its way out, but couldn’t figure out how to bring to conclusion.

Some music resonates so strongly in my soul that I need to store it under oil for a few months. I flip through my CDs and pause on an album, afraid to touch it because it’s so loaded with meaning. So wired into my emotions. Endtroducing. Yonder Mountain String Band. They are cached away for a time, and while I love the albums to death I won’t listen to them. The time is not right. To listen would dishonor the music. The memory.

Sometimes it’s the other way around. I can listen to a single album for days on end and never tire of it. God Shuffled His Feet by The Crash Test Dummies. Amnesiac by Radiohead. I’ve been totally digging these two CDs the last few weeks. There’s no specific event that I connect with the albums, but it just feels so right I keep listening to them. It will be interesting to see where they stand in a year. Will they ever mean anything more? Will they be hollow utterances? Self-indulgent nostalgia? A glimpse into the psyche?

Or maybe it’ll just be music, and that’s all that matters.