Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thessalonians 5:21 KJV)
As a beginning post for Entropy Inc., I figured it would be good to give an overview of all the pies I have my thumbs in, everything I'm doing or planning on doing. Well, not everything, per se. I won't cover the riveting details of brushing my teeth or the fascinating drama of what I had for lunch. What I will be covering is musings about life and writing, physics and philosophy, reason and religion. Mathematics, Art, Music, etc.... With an emphasis on the etcetera.
First a bit about me just to set the stage. I'm 37 years young, happily married, and unhappily employed. I have two marvelous children, a girl and a boy, around whom the entire universe revolves. My wife is the most wonderful person in my life. She's my other half. I am incomplete without her.
I believe in God and he believes in me. Although I am not a very bright child from his perspective, constantly missing the mark, sometimes by a very wide margin, I know that he still loves me. I'm working on my aim.
I've been called lazy and a daydreamer more times than I can count. Classic under-achiever. As it turns out, I have a decent excuse for this: I'm bi-polar.
I cycle up and down with every gust of wind or random spoken word. Not very high or low, mind you, just enough to make achieving my dreams harder than it should be. Recently, I've gotten some chemical assistance for this issue. It seems to be working. I hope it is working.
My purpose in life has been a topic floating around in my head with no direction or conclusion for the last X years. X in this case is the difference between my current age and the age at which I "woke up". Around age 10 or so.
Emotional cycling began later, sometime in my teens. In my mind, I was simultaneously more alive then (Mania) and less (Depression). I wrote poetry. Piles of it. Sadly, most of it has been swallowed by time. I have a few left, islands that the flood waters couldn't quite cover, windows into the past. Memory is so much like time travel in a sense. Paradox abounds.
I am not breaking the bounds of truth when I state that I am intelligent. Very intelligent. Scary smart in a sense. I catch on to things at an alarming rate, oftentimes several steps ahead of any multi-branched conversation. I like puzzles and word tricks, double, triple, even quadruple-entendres.
I find connections in everything, from the way a tree branches to the way the universe evolved. Speaking of the big E, I believe in it. Lock, stock and barrel. The Big Bang too. Being a Christian does not mean that I get to deny reality. The whole debate is moot anyway. Neither side is speaking the same language.
In the past, on a manic upswing, I would research like mad. Drinking in information like it was air. I'd start so many "projects" that I'd loose track. The dregs of lost endeavors litter my past like a graveyard of ships. Most of them sailed, at least a little ways. Many of them sank.
I've tackled problems in physics, mathematics, programming, and philosophy. I've travelled the paths of history and sociology, plumbed the depths of psychology and economics, dreamed of worlds that never existed and never will. You don't want to try to match me at Trivial Pursuit.
Through it all, given my cyclic nature, a curious dichotomy developed. My focus would fall on the land of reason, with all of its rules of inference and axioms of choice, and quick as one can flip a page, I'd be off on a flight of fancy. Tales of magic and poetry, art and music. Indeed, I have found pages dense with equations on one side and full of prose or drawings on the other. The archeology of my childhood is something I spend quite a bit of time on.
Since I have settled a bit, my sine wave losing some amplitude to medically imposed maxima and minima, I've began to think that I should start making something out of this mess. But what does one do with two and a half decades of mental chaos?
I remembered the pages that I had written, two sides of one world. I never got very far in my explorations of any one side, because the wind would blow and the page would flip. Finally, in the last couple of months, I seem to have obtained a paperweight.
So again, what does one do with volumes of random knowledge and an imagination with no apparent bounds? The answer hit me like a bolt from the sky. It very likely was one now that I think about it.
I shall write.
I shall harness the heat of my mind, built up over time from the incessant polarity reversal. I shall pull the pokers from the fire and brand the world. I shall start this engine of creation and outrun the acceleration of spacetime.
Here's ample warning: prepare yourself. I'm preparing myself. The journey will be long and the paths will be varied. There will be no sleep for the weary. I don't plan on taking any prisoners. My war has begun, to make my mark.
Wish me luck.
