Reality as a Five-Dollar Knock-off of a Rolex Watch

For a time, between your early teens and twenties, you struggled to read the works of philosophers, convinced they might lead you somewhere necessary to growth you considered necessary supplements toward your emergence as a writer. 

During those years, although you thought you had destinations of significance in mind and purpose, you were largely arriving at pool halls, jazz joints, and used book stores, often at the expense of classes at the university.

Some of the philosophers you read left impressions on you, one notable one being you could not take the same shower twice, which you were at pains to prove, and another, relating the ability to think having a direct result of being. You had several leaps of faith, although you doubted then (as you do now) that these attempts at faith were of a religious nature.

Of the many Germanic philosophers you visited, Neitszche said something that got you to thinking and a degree of awareness where you found a vision, if not a philosophy, that has informed much of your activity, inactivity, dithering, impulsiveness, impatience, and such awareness of humor as you now possess.  Neitszche spoke of a cold, impersonal universe. 

You begged--and still beg--to differ. In your view of the universe, particularly after the extended times of your visit within it, is of an entity too busy with the details happening on its watch to give a fuck.

If a vision or philosophy is to come as a result of being in a setting,the burden for framing the vision falls upon you. Thus you begin by seeing the Universe as a vast bureaucracy, beset by conservatives who wish to reduce governing principles to a few self-serving homilies and/or bromides, all in the service of maintaining their vision as the only acceptable one. 

On the other hand, you view the universe of reality as a vast, overprogrammed runaway, a sorcerer's apprentice, if you will, that has pulled too many levers for the sorcerer to be able to contain with a one-spell-fits-all remedy.

All other universes of Reality are created by writers, dramatists, musicians, artists, photographers, actors, each presenting a simulacrum, in effect the five-dollar knock-off of a Rolex watch, offered you variously on the streets around Times Square in New York, downtown Los Angeles, and while waiting in the lines to reenter the United States from Mexico.

Try as you may to accommodate your responses and behavior to this resounding clusterfuck, you still overstep the boundaries of patience, prudence, and intervention, mindful of Reality's concerns, your major fears that you will do something to harm another and in the process harm yourself.

 The door to humor is thrust open wide before you when you see individuals, including your own self, thinking to take charge, devise a plan, then set forth to show Reality how it should be running itself.

Your visions include the wisdom inherent in the statement, Things aren't what they seem, followed quickly with the observation, Nothing is what it appears to be. Humor begins with the expectation that an individual, you, for instance, can control outcome in a scientific manner, which is to say that, using a tested approach to performance, outcome can be predicted and, indeed duplicated.

Humor continues along its merry path of development with the presumption that Reality can be tamed, bent to conformity, controlled. You've needed well over half a century to get any sort of bridle around the mouth of your temper; how could you possibly then expect to rein it in with any consistency?

A major theme in certain middle-class soap opera drama demonstrates the inevitable tug of career on romantic and family relationships. One mate, possibly even both, find the need to focus on career more urgent and draining than coping with the vicissitudes of romantic relationships and, thus, the broader avenues of humor.

It becomes of particular humor when we are too caught in the large nets of intrigue thrown by the fraught nature of career as well as the apparent need of many to see career as the psychic glue holding the ego together.