Vas is das?
Let's see.
Knife Net, if you were into mnemonics and the peg system.
Or 4, if you were into numerological reductionism.
Or 25%, if you were to look at it as intended, which was an exercise in amusement that ended up, as always, leading my train of thought to deconstructing things to such an extent that the resultant pieces probably had more psychic weight than the original thought structure. To wit:
Driving for a doctor's appointment, through 45 minutes of drizzled traffic. Three quarters of the way there, late as I always am, I started thinking about those lollipop nightmares that can help or hinder a trip so effectively - you know, traffic lights. More specifically, I started thinking how much of perception is projection. The lights don't give a hairy rat's ass whether I'm late or not, and they certainly don't have feelings, thoughts, or the ability to take a willful engagement in my thoroughfare.
And yet, the natural reaction when approaching the x+nth light, [where the value of n inversely proportional to my rising level of frustration] is to squeal a mighty fuck you to the light.
...oh man, this is unbelievable. Every f*ing light that I hit is red. FUUUUCK
The intimation, of course, is that it is unfair. The intimation of the intimation is that they are stacked against me. They being the lights.
Across the firing of synapses, electrical activity becoming chemical and sorting itself off through god's own organic decision tree, I have very, VERY quickly gone from starting and stopping in a Pavlovian haze at every light, to anthropomporhizing the hapless bastards and making them little arch enemies of my traipse across town.
Even now looking at it on epaper, it sounds absurd. But thoughts are. And a car commuter's thoughts even more so.
Anyways, I chewed this over for a bit and decided to start keeping track, to see what the score actually was. On the mental left, ladies and gentlemen, the green light winner circle, and on the right, the red light winners circle. Simply stated, every green light I hit would be 'tallied' on my left hand. Being this was a mental process, it was an imaginary left. Why the left for green? I don't know, maybe something to research later out of curiousity, but for me green red left right seem to 'feel' more correct than vice versa.
So probability cloud wafted into my perception, and collapsed as I hit each stoplight. What was interesting, though, was how this simple act could become so awesomely complicated with very little effort. To wit, I had to decide:
-What constitued a 'true' vs. 'non-true' green or red? Simplest case, pulling up to the light, no cars ahead of me, and the light turns as I approach. Trickier case - pulling up to the light and being stuck behind one person making a left hand turn. The light was green when I got there, but I could not proceed...Does it count as green or not green? What about coming up to a long line of cars where there was no obstruction per se, but it took a while for me to get to the crossing point and then the light changed. Green or not green?What if I arrived at the light behind cars and it was red, but turned green after I had only just tapped the brakes on?
Which led me to think what my motivation was.
And on and on.
I settled for some simple rules, clear cuts were clear cuts, any marginals would lean one way or the other based on the flow. Did I ultimately get held up at the light or get to proceed based on the light's status?
The take-away friends? Several thoughts:
- Ultimately, even though it SEEMED I had a shitload of lights to wait through, 25% MORE of the lights that I went through in total were enablers (green) as opposed to hindrances (red).
- At times during the trip, it was pretty much balanced. My guess is the longer the trip, the more normalizing the curve would be.
- That modelling something even this simplistic needs to rely on lots of variable and interdependencies - some external, some internal
- That I could easily decision-tree out from there to the universe and beyond without much skull-duggery:
- 28-21 today. Thought experiment. Let's take all the lights that I hit in a day, and use them as a marker as to how the probability cloud 'favoured' or didn't 'favour' me today. Let's add all those up for a month and see if it's been a good bad / month. Let's keep going - year, years, life. Now let's add similar markers from across my life - how many elevators are waiting for me, crosswalks with a walk sign when I approach, change rooms at the pool there for my taking no waiting, on and on and on. Let's graph them all and slice them and dice them and numerologically reduce them and chart them and look at my life through a shimmering blanket of scatter points that fold in and amongst themselves then explode in a glorious unending cacophony of light. yes, Cacophony of light.
- Now, lets take all those numbers and add them to every number-reduced word and number I have ever had associated with me. Let's reduce them all and see what number I am.
36/9?
