…   this is not a short story, poem or lyrics submission…   this is a rant, so block your eyes and ears!

When I was working on my nutty, unreadable, sci-fi novel, one of the sections of my book was titled “Abacus Theory.”    WTF does that even mean you may be wondering right about now…

Well, let’s start with “what is an Abacus?”   Before there were calculators and computers and…. lets go back even further…  before there were basic writing tools, people still had a need to perform math calculations.    Pebbles worked, because ten pebbles were always greater than 8 pebbles, and you could take away 2 more and always  be left with 6 pebbles, etc.

Math works 100% of the time, without fail, no matter what words or tokens people use to describe it with, or how they feel about the outcome.   Math has a physical presence and structure  in our lives whether we perceive it or not.

To continue my rant,  some really smart people created the Abacus, which is a small device you can hold in your hands and carry around with you, which has beads on several rails that you can slide left or right to help perform your daily math calculations.    It was one of the top inventions of a long-dead millenium, and people got really GOOD at using their Abaci and started doing crazy math with them…  like long division, multiplication, square roots and cube roots.      This was not a slow tool at all;  this was considered lightning-fast at the time and was a high-speed calculator that could crank out numbers quickly and accurately.

Where am I going with my rant, you may be wondering?

The reality is that an Abacus is just a place-marker which cannot perfom any math at all!!!   It is made of rocks and wood.   It has to manipulated by a thinking person who moves the beads.   The movement of the beads follows certain rules.   The people using an Abacus did not INVENT those rules, although they did have to DISCOVER them along the way.  That is an important distinction.    The Abacus itself is just a token and a place-holder so that we don’t lose track of our numbers.     My point here is that the rules for math already existed long before people ever perceived them.

The moral of my rant is that an abacus is just one more tool that we’ve invented on our path towards progress, like we later did with computers.   If you compare those two tools then the computer is obviously better than an abacus, but that misses the point.   Ask yourself why is it “obvious” that one tool should be better than another?     How do you define the word, “better?”    Comparing one tool to another is fair, and is a measurement of which tool works best…    I’m just stuck on the definitions of the words we say every day– “Good, Best & Better.”

There are laws of physics and nature which explain why the sky is blue and why gravity makes water flow downhill, yet people lived tens of thousands of years before anyone bothered to ask that question.   It turns out there was a set of rules  the entire time which explained the precise shade of blue skies and the exact force of gravity we feel.

All I’m asking with this rant is for you to consider the notion that “good” or “better” or “best” are not merely words, they are real concepts that we use every day in life.  I know that such concepts are our impressions which depend upon our perspective at the time, but there are also rules of physics which will vary depending upon the perspective of the viewer.   Physics is spooky, just like the rest of life!

If there is a rule of nature for obvious facts such as blue skies and gravity, then why not obvious facts like the goodness or badness of outcomes?

The abacus example I used is just a metaphor for who we are,  I think.   99% of what we do in life is to move our  place-markers left and right, to the appropriate spot,  so that other people can see what we were thinking.    We are focused on the tools of life, not on the underlying concepts.

All rants have to come to an end at some point…  mine ends right <here>

JPD-   have a good day or night being whomever you are!

Never in my wildest dreams
Did I imagine
This

Life of slow-motion pain
Unfolding like
Eternity

Goes the sparkle of my youth
My bewilder-stricken cry
And squelched hopes

Crushed by the pressure of time
Under the pull of daylight
In the fall of night

Kicking and squirming
From these tattered pages
Crumpled

And wrapped in bed sheets
Goes my long dead dream
Glimpsed only once

Of a bright and shining paradise
Where endless and simple joys
abound

She comes around again
Like creeping ivy, she spreads
My heart deluged by our ceaseless rain
Wet with expectation

Climbing over the stone walls
Over the fractured granite of my heart
Planting deep roots within my spine
And wet blossoms upon my eye

She comes to me
With cautious laughter
Sparkling with joy, and dappled
With dark subtleties

A feverish heart
Clutching at my very soul
Relinquishing me
Abandoning me when her moods strike

As I die
Able and eager and willing
To dance brightly amid her fickle raindrops

If only