I am an integer

ian™Leave a comment

(please consider donating to iO: their week long Write a thon!)

https://www.mightycause.com/story/Hcvcdf

One. Three. Five. Seven. Eleven. My son is fascinated by number sequences, ever since we pointed out the fibonacci series (If you’ve forgotten, 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13 21…) He started with letters, and even as early as two I told him about how computers think in numbers and that ASCII is a subset of integers that map to letters. For some reason I always recall the number 65 is “A”. As a kid, I never really questioned or knew why until much later when I discovered that there was a whole range of number reserved for cpu operations.

Thirteen. Seventeen. Nineteen. Twenty Three.

I have never really gotten into the quantified self movement. Even though I have a smart watch and its motivated me to run every morning, I still don’t assign a ton of value into “making my numbers go up”. A faster pace. A greater distance. Make those integers increase and decrease. It makes for a better life, or so some say.

But I am not a computer, always crunching and thinking in numbers. THere’s more to life than that.

But I am an integer, whole and complete, just as you are, every day.

https://vss365today.com/view/2020-08-22

(If you’re wondering, my words spell out prime numbers.)

three

ian™Leave a comment

I write this week for iO:

https://www.mightycause.com/story/Hcvcdf

It’s been three years since you’ve been gone. That thought still derails my thoughts, decoupling them from their direction, remembering just how tentative everything really is. I wonder how much of this is just an illusion, a whisper thin mirror with a hairline waiting to shatter, showing us all what really is.

At times I feel like i have it in my grasp, things make sense. Words and voices glow, while others everything is as dislliusoning an empty cabinet that still reeks of vinegar.

I return to that texting thread, the one where you never answered, where I may as well been shouting into the ground. I don’t know if you ever even read my words, and yet I return to that thread still, still hoping you might hear me.

morphism

ian™Leave a comment

(please consider donating to iO: their week long Write a thon!)

https://www.mightycause.com/story/Hcvcdf

Consider yourself changed from yesterday; you may feel the same but you are not. You are irrevocably different from one moment to the next, though that change may be subtle. And it’s all those small morphisms, seemingly unfathomable functions by which you almost involuntarily aspire to become what you will be every day.

https://vss365today.com/view/2020-08-18

group

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https://vss365today.com/view/2020-08-17

Your ideas flow in ways that you can’t imagine until you let it manifest itself in some way. Your mind is swimming in a sea of thoughts, feelings, and sensations, acquired from your first moment of cognizance until the present moment. They group together, melding and mixing as you think and learn, tossed together into a thick soup as you sleep and dream. Take the time to let them flow out, like opening the pressure valve or gaps in a massive dam of water: let them be reabsorbed and recycled and remixed into something you couldn’t have possible conceived before.

#one

ian™Leave a comment

One way or another we find our way. At first we think there’s one way, the way we observe around us. Gradually we see there isn’t only one path, but it quickly become so divergent it intimidates. We find comfort in the on way we knew before because it was known, it was familiar. But like the sprawling branches of the tree beginning from one solid base stretching to the sky, we learn that its necessary to travel those other paths to find the flowers at the end. And then from that one path we can find another or jump to the next. In the end, it ends up being one path, but not the path we once considered, but more importantly, it is our path, the one that was main for us.

https://vss365today.com