Why all this craziness, this seemingly purposeful obsfucation? Call it a reflection, a work of fiction in progress, emulating a paradoxical model of a seemingly unified reality. Normally I try to be fairly direct. I'm an Occam's Razor guy all the way. But I keep a circumspect eye on the reality of Mencken's assertion that every complex problem has an answer that is simple, direct, and wrong.
Nevertheless, learning to cultivate a tendency to look for the simple answer is not a bad skill in a world of many lies. Consider the oft reported mythology that eating the worm at the bottom of a bottle of tequila will result in some sort of super intoxication or possible visionary experience. Now, the agave is a weird plant, and I'm always open to possibilities. But I have to say, doesn't it seem likely that this legend has a lot of roots in the fact that eating the tequila worm is an activity that invariably follows killing a bottle of tequila? Now, if someone were to fish ou the worm, and in a sober setting of unimpaired reality devour it solo, and send back a report on the effects... But no one I've ever talked to has done that. They always finish the tequila first. These are not reliable witnesses.
I'm still hearing people argue over whether The Blair Witch Project is "real." I think the profusion of spoiler reviews, interviews with the performers and other creators, and media internet buzz would dispell this idea. But the point is, I didn't need to go searching for an answer when I first came across one of those annoying query-response textfiles of some electronic discussion site, containing an argument between half a dozen people regarding the veracity of that particular bit of indy cinema. We're talking about three students, all with noted personal and family ties, dissapearing in the woods with a witchcraft connection, and live film footage being recovered a year later... Good God, wake up. That's not just news, it's prime news. If something like that really happened in America it would have been making headlines for months, and a whole new spate when the tape was found.
Flashback: Fargo, Moorhead, July of 1999. I'm staying in a hotel, prepatory to seeing my friend Jack safely into nuptial bliss. I get up one morning and the hotel lounge teevee is tuned to CNN. JFK Jr. is missing. No one knows where he is. He took off in his little plane and just didn't show up at his stated destination. With three minutes of news I made the following deduction: John-John was dead and so was everyone with him. As the pilot, Junior was most likely drowned to death and still lodged in the cockpit. Am I a genius? Well, yes, but in this case Genius had little to do with the deduction. I'm just smart enough to realize that while being famous means many things in this society, it doesn't provide any protection from falling prey to the simplest explanation for an amateur pilot not making it to land in a small plane: crashing into the sea.
God knows there are enough mysteries in this life that genuinely defy explanation. Try not to be stupid about things that are this obvious.
klik if you demand tedious explanations of every little thing.
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