As noted by the 'trophe, The Ballad constitutes a continual attempt at authentically authentic authenticity. Hence the faux-dense philosophical* rantings juxtaposed with His Holiness Weird Al (and yes, CA got me hooked on that one, too). As such, I can't exactly pretend that my head is not currently brimming with C-based memories. So I will try to flush a few of the higher quality ones here. Forgive me a little gushy m'lane trip. In no particular order:
One fine Sunday spring afternoon in college, after an EPIC day of Ultimate in Austin, the Rice crew and I decided to stop by Freebird's, a staple burrito joint, on the way out of town. As was and is my post-Ultimate tournament habit, I stumbled along in a dehydrated daze as I approached the counter. And I look up from the bean selections to see: Chris! Awesome, unexpected happiness. But C-Being-C, an enthusiastic hello is not enough. He jumps the counter!!! My teammates: freaked out. Everyone in the restaurant, pretty much: freaked out. For me, a nice sort of stupor-and-friendship based mystical experience. Cool. Chris's manager: unpleased. He gives C something on the angrier end of the WTF spectrum. And Chris just says,"But it's Nyet." In the moment, this a completely rational explanation not just for the behavior, but as to why the behavior is appropriate, demanded. The manager does not see things this way. Dramatically hilarious.
This gives you an idea of how much C can inject into isolated moments. (Btw, just to deflect the coming man-crush accusations: sucks to your ass-mar. I subscribe to "such a holy place to be" classifications. See Bowie Comma David, or more accurately, Stardust Comma Ziggy). It's a melodramatic scale that deconstructs my deconstruct. Example, and hopefully not too personal of one: wait, requires backstory. I LOVED the Grateful Dead in high school. Blasting that, as opposed to Dre or f'ing Bush, just added to my personal globe cachet of holier than thou coolness. Which, incidentally, I have yet to outgrow. I had dead stickers on my car; I stuck out in Texas (San Antonio, anyways). So Chris got me a schwank plush Grateful Dead dancing bear stuffed animal for graduation. It's made all my life trips and is currently sitting on my bathroom counter. The animal = great, but I remember even better the card. The writing on the card, I mean; the hallmark card proper, whatever. The writing said, "All these years. No one stuck by, no one cared. Just you."
I mean, holy epic graduation commentary, right? It's patently over the top, not to mention inaccurate; as Chris mentioned, we were tangentially connected towards the end of high school, only reuniting for Talent Show gigs and miscellaneous parties. I was hardly "always there." Despite it's factual inaccuracy, though, it carries a sort of spiritual accuracy (with the normal "if such a thing exists" qualifier). This is undoubtedly going to fall into "you have to be one of us to get this" territory, but via mutual respect, unconditional support, etc., the lack of hanging out every Saturday night didn't really touch the deal. Chris suffered his share of "hero worship," meaning there was a whole lot of guffawing groupie-ism and seeming ideas of "we'll be able to say we knew him when" floating around the halls of CHS. He was our superlative "most-talented." He plaintively sings on one of the Suckapunch songs, "if I fall, will you follow me?", which I suppose is a typical fear-of-failure lyric. But I get what he's saying, and my answer would've been "Um, yeah, duh." So I think the deep-seated sense of knowing there's a someone with ye-olde unconditional support firmly indoctrinated (without the asterisk of familial obligation) provides a great anchor. So yeah, on one level I look at that the ridiculousness of the grad card and launch into the usual analytical mode, identifying an overly emotional distortion of the narrative. But the last level is always, "But, yeah, he's kinda right," and the vice versa of the sentiment is there, too.
So this is a whole lot of personal, eh? Sorry, but you can't *only* get in depth dismantlings of faux-philosophers here at the Ballad. Otherwise, we would start knowing what's happening here. And we categorically can't have that.
To draw things back a level, Chris and I also stood back and got on our musical critic high horses when we were in fourth grade. Some of the fifth grade girls were doing dance routines as an audition for our elementary school musical. They were permitted to choose their own music, and a lot of them went with some very un-Episcopalian choices. Chris and I derided the vast majority as "hella lame," or the equivalent label in the 1987 9 year old vernacular. But when one bunch of them gyrated to George Michael's "Faith," oh did our collective toes start a tapping. A nod of approval, and we definitely agreed: "*that" was a cool song. (Probably our subconscious acceptance of the greatness of the "Chuck Berry rhythm"). Of course, Mr. Michael has since (among other things) sold out and performed on an ABC sitcom. So NOW that song is uncool.
All right, I'm cutting myself off from the fount of memory. There are boatloads more, but I'll now get my ADHD on and switch angles. Until next time.
* - You want dense? READ ON, brave soul!
I'm currently reading Neuroscience and Philosophy, a great gift from the iPJ, review-pending. The current paragraph is trying to differentiate between the perception of an object, the qualitative experience of perceiving an object and the impossibility of linguistically distinguishing the two, and whether this constitutes a failure of language or an indication that perception of an object and experience of that perception are events with indistinguishable descriptions and therefore actually the same thing. The paragraph before that attempted to clarify that whereas behavioral attributes are necessary to ascribe psychological attributes to an entity, they are not necessary for those psychological attributes to exist (debatable, especially if posession of those attributes entails certain behavior). But density occurs when it is qualified this way on p. 179:
It is not that consciousness cannot be ascribed to brains because brains are incapable of exhibiting the appropriate behavior. Rather, the ascriptions in question, if they are to be meaningful in the root-sense of meaning, face the same criterial requirements faced by any predicate. Statements to the effect that Smith is tall, brains are wet, and Harriet is young are intelligible to the extent that "wet," "young," and "tall" are not drawn from the box labeled BEETLE and visible only to the one holding it. The sense in which Smith as an isolate could attach no meaning to his being called tall is the sense in which "pain," too, would be improperly ascribed even to himself. . . the conclusion is not that brains cannot be conscious but that utterances to that effect are incomprehensible as claims to the effect that brains are social democrats.(note that before this paragraph, "Smith" had been described as exhibiting no behavioral criteria associated with pain but only the neurological correlates. So the above states that in the absence of the normal criteria by which one can be judged to be in pain or not, "pain" is a meaningless label. I.e., being in pain means something essentially different from having the neural correlates associated with pain)
Ah! After re-reading this for the fifteenth time, I realize that the bold part means "visible only to the person holding the label," meaning "the person thus labeled," and not "holding the box." So damn you Daniel Robinson and your unclear antecedent. But beyond that, he's trying to give parallel examples of things that are neither true nor false but meaningless and indicating that these brain statements are meaningless in the same fashion. That talk of "tall" being meaningless means that you can't be tall without reference to an average height, nor is "tall" in the sense that a beetle would be tall a meaningful label for a human. So it's not brains "don't behave consciously therefore they are not conscious," it's "the word conscious means nothing when applied to things inherently capable of things involved in consciousness." I presume, then, you could not say that a rock is unconscious, but rather that consciousness has no meaning when applied to rocks.
All of this is to say that dense is relative. I try to avoid the type of befuddling writing (and SAT-level grammatical mistakes, damn!) quoted above. I recognize that philo-writing, because of its attempts at precision, is often necessarily this way. But I try to distinguish boxes from labels.
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