Exactly, Scientifically, Right Now.

this was the first thing i saw on the 'ol Interweb today: ye old daily horrorscope.

For Scorpio, 18 December 2007:
Anxiety surfaces when you realize how important your current actions are. You intuitively know that what you do now could have long-term consequences and you want to take your time and get it right. Discomfort arises, however, when you realize that you might lose an opportunity if you wait. Take a middle-of-the-road approach by balancing your current needs with a sensible plan to achieve stability.

i wish the people who author these would get out of my head.

meanwhile, on the physical plane, here in my beautifully perfect 'water off of a stone' now, i feel washed out. a nicely coated layer of frost today. yesterday, D's xmasquanzaasolstice gift made it all the way from Africa, via New York City, to Corvallis before it was misdelivered or stolen. My exquisite outrage at this delicious cosmic ass-slap only fueled further barely-under-the-surface discontent.

you know, i find the whole live-in-the-now concept to be a giant pain in my ass. Seemingly, it's less of a self-help toolbox and more of a belief system. I got a taste of it twenty years ago, with a William S. Burroughs audio sample in one of my favorite songs. maybe it's supposed to be, maybe the paradigm shift required to think this way is a wonderful, beautiful, perfectly shaped and constructed grindstone that i keep moving my forehead towards, inch by delicious inch.

intuition. i view it as an evolutionary gift that the science of today's world hasn't quite erased yet. if you can't garner input knowledge from anything you see or hear around you, i imagined that i could always trust my gut instinct. educated guesses. disregard it if you're thinking and living in the now.

patterns, as viewed from experience. as in, "if this has happened 3.14169 times in a row, with the same outcome each time, chances are probably pretty good that the 22/7 happening will occur with the same statistic probability. always a valuable tool in MY toolbox. i now am asked to disregard this entire model, as it is toxic and can only implant unrealistic preconceptions of the future, and thusly impede whichever future you're building. uh huh.

hope. it's not compatible with the now, as i understand it. you're creating a false, idealized impression of the future, which doesn't actually exist. But if Stephen Hawking is right and there IS such a thing as tomorrow, you'd be tainting it with inherently destructive expectations.

dreams, and the ideas they fertilize. see above. useless, unless you like Neil Gaiman and Morpheus. which i do.

i'm so very, very frustrated. if this is the part of the lake that i'm choosing to view, it's a real shithole today. and it's not even MY garbage that litters the beach, causing me to trip over it and question my own ability to walk without falling. We can acknowledge that yes, there IS some garbage on the beach, but it is Never To Be Discussed. I want to clean it up, irregardless. but why? it isn't mine, so i'll clinically view in a detached manner. isn't the oil slick beautiful and perfect exactly where it is supposed to be, right here, now? i quell the suddenly loud urge to run, not walk.

...walking away is no longer an option. I love the lake. i'm committed to living here. i'm building a house on it. a nice log A-Frame, with a stone foundation and hearth, up and away from the beach a bit. You'll forgive me, dear reader, if i indulge in a moment of ignoring the present while i wreck the future, yes? There IS garbage on the beach, and i DO trip on it when i walk in the sand. and i'll take a stinkin' rake and garbage can to the beach and clean it up when the garbage can is exactly where the oil slick needs to be. i just hope the garbage doesn't rot and stink out the entire lake while it ignores itself and hopes it takes itself away.

and now, in my now, i'll listen to the proper zenmaster i know, someone i just recently had the pleasure of meeting. For me, She distilled the tail-chasing ethereal to two concise, accurate sentences. which i cannot remember. so, i'll paraphrase the idea into two crude sentences of my own, dear reader.

"Forget about the now, as it's confusingly circular, and you'll just get lost. All of these concepts have to wrap to fit around YOU, not the other way around."

*here's where the argument within falls to the side; as it's the only thing I've heard recently that makes any sense*

I hope whoever found D's xmaskwanzaasolstice gift enjoys it. Really!