Call again, stranger? A long time ago, in another lifetime, when I was a fair-haired smiling young man in my twenties shortly before becoming a sysop of a BBS. Here in Australia, there appeared a stranger. He posted, mocking others pretensions in that "community", loose as it was. He slighted those with a university education and tried to point out their shortcomings - a lack of life experience and an inability to think laterally.

These days I would add to that, formulaic driven thinking, a tendency to respect social rules, a reluctance to wait and trust in the power of serendipidty, nor, to utilise sagacity, to embark upon the time-honoured path of considered dissent. 

For whom do we act ultimately? For others, for ourselves alone? For nothing, for no-one? Where lies the best guarantee of integrity?

Once I sat at Burger King (here we call it Hungry Jack's) and watched a woman eat a hamburger. She was embarrassed as the condiments dribbled down her chin. To which I drew her attention and later pointed out the lines in her face, her incipient crows feet. She started to become furious in an amused way. Oh the menace of time, the transience of beauty, the brevity of love. Because I loved her. I still do, she's still here. Known as she is known.

That stranger is not, he vanished and took with him whatever he was supposed to contribute. He was like Shane or Kwai Chang Caine. Quiet men, some with power, who walk a solitary and dusty road of life. Interjecting where need be, vanishing the next morning. Nothing of the romance in it. But one puts away the mirror and answers this post. What is "beta", is it the precusor to alpha? If yes, why? Why not the best? Then why should we care? Additionally why not gamma, why not all the way down to omega for what may transpire? Does one mean to connect, express or discuss? Why not invent? Must there be meaning? Whose? You said that.

Who cares what others think? Is that lack of caring not essential for individual and ultimately global discovery? Do saints, like emperors, wear clothes? Surely most did not. Those that do are suspect, no?

Why isn't THINQon more like the sanitarium in Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. Where we all recognise and await an unknown fate. Where all is covered including science. Where mockery (self and otherwise) serves the cause of progress and enlightenment. Not a pious humility nor the kudos for friends (don't send me a kudo - I stick to my own twisty path). Where we dig into the snow that tries to blanket and obscure all? Even though it makes everything look beautiful and some love to play in it. Not on a whim of time. 

[Say, do I see the depths of an American winter from the heights of an Australian summer?]

Ought we insist on a perfectability of humanity? In his preface to the Joads, Steinbeck did so. If not, what be the point.

There is value in depressive realism. You can come back. Looking at you.