Random Observations

So this time, I made the train!! I was determined not to sit there and watch my train leave right in front of me again and gave myself plenty of time to make sure that I would be able to catch it. When I arrived at Centraal Station that day, there was still something like two hours before my train was scheduled to depart so I found a seat on platform 11A all the way down at the end. I was actually sitting outside of the building and was sure to see the train as it arrived. I sat down to wait for the train’s arrival, ate one of the boxes of shrooms I had purchased and just started observing my surroundings.

My train arrived on schedule and I grabbed a seat in the Bistro car. This is actually a good justification for my habit of arriving early to scheduled events – if you’re traveling on a train in Europe, an early arrival should pretty much guarantee that you can grab one of the available seats on the Bistro car. Of course the fact that this was actually the origination for this train also helped as nobody from previous stops were able to claim the seats before me; but I’m sticking with my belief that showing up early is still a good thing. Whatever the case, I was able to grab a seat at a small table in the Bistro car…

This was most definitely the exact same train that I was on during my trip to Amsterdam the day before. It’s not too surprising as this train actually makes a round trip from Berlin to Amsterdam on a daily basis. That’s an awful lot of miles (or, as they say here in Europe, kilometers…) that this train is constantly accumulating so I guess I can understand why these trains aren’t always in completely operable condition. They seem to be able to keep the train running – which is most important – but little things are often not quite functioning completely … the Bistro appeared to still be having “technical difficulties” and wasn’t even serving anything on this trip. That’s cool – I was a bit hungry but could easily wait the four or five hours and maybe grab something to eat on the train from Hanover to Braunschweig. I was going to sit here and take some notes – maybe I’ll come up with something interesting to write about…?

Shortly after the train departed Centraal Station this younger guy came into the Bistro car and grabbed a seat at my little table. He was traveling with his grandmother and brother. Where he was going I’m not sure, but he was apparently wanting to get some food at the Bistro; but – since the Bistro wasn’t serving – would be unable to accomplish this. While we were talking he mentioned that he liked the ICE trains because they had places where babies could be changed (well, the diapers could be changed on the babies – babies weren’t being traded…) and this struck me as an interesting statement from such a young kid. He appeared to be a teenager and I asked him how old he was. Turns out that he was 18 – soon to be 19 – and his brother was 2 years old. He was traveling, as I have mentioned, with his grandmother and taking care of his 2 year old brother. I’m sure he probably had an interesting story to tell about his life but, due to his young age as well as a bit of a language barrier, I wasn’t able to get much of it. After he waited for a bit and came to the conclusion that the Bistro would not be opening, he left the Bistro car and returned back to his family. Meeting people like this reminds me of how lucky I have been in my own life. I mean here’s this kid – 18 years old – and he may have been responsible for bringing up his brother. Yeah, it’s possible that he was just on a trip with his grandmother and brother and was actually returning home to his parents; but his statement about liking the ICE trains makes me think otherwise. More power to you, my young friend – I honestly believe that you will be rewarded for your sacrifices in the future…

So I’m sitting on the train contemplating life and jotting down some notes (7 pages worth…). I’m thinking about the girl in the baseball cap from the night before (well, to be more precise, from earlier that morning…). Perhaps it’s my upbringing in the states, but there’s just something about girls wearing baseball caps that intrigues me. If a woman is looking for a way to look younger all she needs to do is don a baseball cap. There’s this whole cosmetics industry out there that is making tons of money by selling miracle, age-defying creams to women all the time when all that needs to be done to remove about 5 years from a woman’s appearance is for her to put on a baseball cap. Maybe it’s just me, but I believe that tons of money could be saved by these women if they just went out and got themselves a few baseball caps. Are women aware of this…?

I then begin to contemplate my theory of writing. Here I am taking notes on a train heading from Amsterdam back to my current home in Braunschweig. Why am I doing this? I guess I have a desire to write. More precisely, I discovered that I actually enjoy writing … who’d a thought? I believe I’ve mentioned in an earlier posting that this desire to write has been with me for some time now – but I was considering writing fiction. It never really occurred to me that I should document my life stories … I mean I am just an average “nobody from nowhere” and figured that my life was so mundane and regular that nobody would want to read about it. Since moving to Germany, however, I have discovered that everybody has stories to write and that they are all interesting in their own ways. Reality is just so much more interesting than fiction. In fact, I am of the opinion that there really is no such thing as pure fiction. All stories are created based on the experience of the writer. It’s impossible to not reference these experiences when writing a story. Although many stories are written in fictional places with fictional characters, all stories are based on real experiences. I’m going to tell my stories and – thanks to the wonders of the Internet – instantly publish them. From the feedback that I have received I do believe that people are actually interested in reading them. That’s cool… Besides, writing these stories is like a game for me. The object of this game is to use nothing more than words (well a few pictures here and there as well) to take my experiences and share them with others. It’s easy to write a story and tell the reader what happened – the challenge comes in being able to write the stories in a way that the reader actually gets to share the experience. I hope that I am able to accomplish this…

In fact I’ve come to figure out that that was what I was talking to myself about yesterday when I couldn’t sleep. Yeah, I was on shrooms; but I now know who I was talking to – you. I was discussing the wonders of life with life itself. Sure, nobody was there to hear what I was saying but I was actually talking to life. I spent 36 years living my life but never actually realized what it really was until recently. Life is a being of its own and one needs to learn that this being can be interacted with. The thing is that everybody has their own version of this being and it is up to the individual on exactly how they choose to interact with their life. A large majority of people basically ignore this being and just travel through time in its company and never even bother to take notice of it. They do what they believe needs to be done for survival and their life becomes no more than a routine of routines. You have to avoid getting stuck in this trap. Take some time now and again to become friends with your life being. You can actually learn quite a bit from it…

Okay, so that’s just a bunch of philosophical reasoning – but you need to remember that I was on shrooms when I was taking these notes. I apologize if this posting seems to be jumping subjects rather haphazardly; but it appears that I have quite a bit that I want to say and I am going to say it…

For instance, it occurred to me that I may have figured out exactly what life is. Well, perhaps not your life, but I think I understand mine quite a bit better… You see, life is a quest. Is it a quest to somehow make it to a magical land where happiness is ever-present? I don’t think so. There have been thousands of religions that man has created that seem to all want to claim that this is actually what life is – a temporary trip on a quest to make it to some promised land. To me this is so silly that it’s laughable… I mean, come on, why should we limit our experiences in this life just to assure that we might be able to get invited to some mystical wonderland after we die? That’s insane! No, I believe that the quest that life is is really no more than a quest for information. Everything that a person does in life is done to acquire some information. To ask yourself why this is only solidifies the point. What we do with this acquired information dictates how our lives are. Every piece of information gathered is added to the wisdom of the gatherer…

The game of life is actually very easily explained. Life is the present, the now. If you spend your time worrying about the past too much you risk getting caught in the worry and no longer living your life. At every point in time a person is confronted with a multitude of decisions that need to be made. The key to the game is to make the correct decisions so that future decisions become easier to make. This is, after all, exactly what everybody is constantly trying to do. Use the current information that you are receiving right now through all of your five senses and try to make the next information obtained easier to deal with. If one can master this play then his (or her, let’s not be sexist here) life steadily becomes easier and easier. I believe that is the key to happiness.

So, anyway, I’ve mainly spent my life being an observer. I have never been the guy that “gets the ball rolling” but have spent a lot of my life hiding in the shadows and observing others living their lives. What this has given me is a whole lot of time to think – and I’ve collected (what I believe, at least, to be) some rather interesting observations. I think I’ll take the time now to share some of these with you…

People that bug me

Anybody that, once hearing a story from somebody else, immediately attacks the storyteller without even considering the possibility of maybe explaining his/her counter-viewpoint in a rational manner. You know the person I’m referring to – the guy/gal that immediately points out exactly how stupid the storyteller is as soon as the story is complete (or, often times, even before the storyteller is finished). This bugs the shit out of me in that I believe this behavior to be both arrogant and selfish. The thing is that a person behaving in this manner is not helping the situation in any way, whatsoever. All that is being accomplished is that the storyteller is made to feel bad (and often times embarrassed if others are around) and the person attacking gets to brew up a big batch of completely unjustified superiority. The reason that I say it is unjustified is because whatever flaw the storyteller unwittingly made known in his/her story is usually (in my opinion) far less severe than the flaw that the attacker is now clearly displaying. I am of the opinion that people like this need to be avoided…

The diary concept

Since I’ve been writing this blog I feel that I now understand the reasoning behind writing diaries or journals. I never really understood the point of writing stories that you already lived but it all makes so much sense to me now. For one thing, writing is an excellent memory aid. You get so much more out of an experience if you take the time to analyze it and try to explain it in words to somebody else. After all, the best way to learn something is to teach it to others. Why not use this practice on your life experiences? Besides, I believe that in order for a story to be interesting it really does not need to have been written by somebody else. Heck, I’ve re-read many of the stories that I have written on my blog and actually enjoyed myself. After all, people usually find stories interesting if they somehow can relate to the story. I relate to the stories I’ve written better than anybody – it is, after all, my life…

Emotions

What exactly are emotions? It seems to me that feelings (emotions) are actually nothing more than unconscious reactions to various pieces of information obtained through the five senses (well, I believe that this should be updated to six senses where the sixth is your sense of thought – this, of course, is used to decide what to do with the information coming in on your other five senses). There is no super-natural power that creates these feelings – it all basically comes down to chemicals reacting the only way they can in the current situation. I have this friend back in Colorado named Jim. Jim once asked me to ponder the amazement of a flower blooming and I just didn’t see it the same way he did. To him, the fact that a flower blooms is proof of the existence of a god. To me, a flower blooming is really nothing more than a flower blooming. What would be more amazing would be if this flower didn’t bloom. The thing is that this flower blooming is just a small part of our ecosystem and there are many many other events that both cause the flower to bloom as well as rely on the flower blooming. I mean yeah, it’s a beautiful process, but it is just that – a process. Emotions, in my opinion are very much the same thing. I’m sure many of you disagree with me on this and that’s just fine. A lot of people think that believing that life is no more than chemicals reacting cheapens the concept of life. I think not. Believing this in no way changes anything about how you interact with life, it just clears your mind from worrying about why things are happening. The only reasoning behind things happening is because they exist. Now there’s a concept…

Make sense?

What exactly is sense? You hear people say things like, “That doesn’t make sense.” What is it that isn’t being made here? It seems to me that all sense is is the transformation of the information being received by your 5 physical senses into an acceptable and rational entry into your 6th sense of thought. If something actually makes sense, this nugget of information then gets stored in your brain to be used as another source of reference for the next time you need to make sense out of some more information that you acquire later. The result of this is that the more nuggets of information you acquire in your brain, the easier it becomes to understand future information received. This, of course, is what is commonly referred to as wisdom. The more wisdom you have, the better you are at dealing with information obtained. Everybody understands the advantages obtained by exercising the body – you feel better, you look better, etc… I think the world could be a much better place if more people put as much effort in exercising their minds!

Believe

Living your life based on somebody else’s opinions of how you should live it is stupid. It is, after all, “your” life, not theirs. I think that everybody needs to decide their own opinions on things and not just fall in line with what they are being told to think. Religions, in my opinion, are the worst at this. Now I realize that there are millions upon millions of people that disagree with me here; but religions are nothing more than a way of getting larger groups of individuals to conform to a pre-defined set of rules. They’re nothing more than the earliest forms of government. Pretty much every one of them exists in a pure state of denial to what they actually are though. They rely on making completely absurd claims about their rules being divined down by some omnipotent, all powerful being and that, if these rules aren’t followed, you will spend eternity in pain and anguish. I mean, come on… Give me a break. People need to discover their own opinions and just try to live this life the best that they can. Heck, there may not even be an afterlife (I’m definitely of the opinion that there isn’t…) so you might as well make the most out of this one, right? I’m not asking you to believe what I believe; I’m just asking you to believe.

Seeing eye-to-eye

What exactly is it that makes eye-to-eye contact with another so powerful? What is being exchanged that makes this so much more personal? As most of you already know, this is a much used technique for telling whether or not somebody is telling the truth. It is much harder to lie to somebody when you are standing there looking directly into that person’s eyes. Why is this? I suppose it’s the closest you can actually get to looking at another person’s soul… The thing is that this personal feeling extends over quite some distance in the eye-to-eye contact. As an example, let me tell you about one of my weaknesses. Now, as I am sure you are aware if you’ve been reading my blog, I am very fond of women. Unfortunately, due primarily to my self-esteem issue, I’m not very good when it comes to these relations. Meeting a woman that I am not paying to be with me (and I’m not just talking sex here…) seems almost like an impossible task to me. As a for instance situation, if I am looking at a woman that I find attractive and she looks back at me, my knee-jerk reaction is to quickly look away. If I think about this it seems pretty stupid to me – she decided to look at me so why don’t I let her? I think the answer is that I am afraid of being labeled a creep for staring at her. She is the only one that has the power to decide on whether or not I am a creep – that is just so unfair! Now I know that I am not a creep and I actually consider myself to be a rather nice guy; but why am I so scared that I am going to be labeled a creep by the woman I was looking at? I really need to change this knee-jerk reaction that I have and turn it into something that might be more productive – I don’t know, perhaps a smile…?

Well, I think I’ve written enough for this posting. If you are actually still reading these words I have to admit that I am amazed. This posting really didn’t end up how I was expecting it to but I guess that’s just what happens when you’re trying to write a story based on notes written by a man on shrooms – I mean the notes end up being just random thoughts about various random things and there is no common storyline that can easily transition between the various subjects. What you end up with is pretty much what you have read. I personally don’t think it’s as entertaining as my postings that are actual stories, but I don’t know … maybe somebody will find my random observations interesting…?

I'm just trying to make that next piece of information obtained easier to deal with … aren’t we all?

bis spatter,

Coriolis