OK, I'm back but I don't know for how long.

The post below is a voyage into thoughts of a different nature. Those who come here for remembrances of my life or discussions of worldly philosophies will have to let me ramble through this one. It's a clearing of my mind and may have no value to anyone else but me. If even that.

Memories, remembrances, opinions, dreams, impressions, attitudes, philosophies. What do these words have in common? Is there a method to the madness of life? What creates the world around us, our world? How can it appear to be different for each of us? Where do our differences come from?

Questions most people don't ask. Questions that only occur to me today because of my experiences up until now. Our experiences shape us, and, more truthfully, our perception of our experiences causes the effect. For some strange reason I'm trying to tie together the movie I watched this morning with all the other events of my life. I'll let you figure out what the movie was. Consider it a test of YOUR observational skills.

What ties our lives together and makes each of us different? Well, experiences, as I've said, and memories of those events and our perception of those events and memories, both in the past and the present. But memory and perception, what they become, depends on our mind. And that's the rub, you see, because the mind is subject to an infinite variety of modes of operation.

This entry is one of those varieties, an attempt by me to tie up some of my fragmented personality parts into a neater package, one with fewer loose ends, less chaos.

I have Menniere's Syndrome. It's a problem in the inner ear, an improper mixing of chemical, which stimulates the hairs there and sends signals to the brain that are interpreted incorrectly. The worst results of this misinterpretation are extreme vertigo, nausea, and incapacity. But, for today's discussion, a minor effect is important, that of sound distortion.

One of the effects is the distortion of sounds in the lower register. Bass is much more bass, and I mean much more. Sometimes it can be painful. And because of the distortion in part of the sound spectrum things sometimes sound like I'm hearing them through a busted speaker.

I bring this up because it's my brain that does this misinterpretation, and since the brain is simply the physical receptacle of the mind, I'm going to say that it's the mind which "hears" this different interpretation. My mind has "created" a "world" different from what others experience.

Sometimes, when my kids remember some event of their childhood, they remember it wrong. Sometimes their memory is just wrong, sometimes they mix up the cast. Their minds have transposed people, places, things, events; their past has been transformed by their mind into something it never was. Or is that true? I have only my own memory to judge theirs by, a memory I think better. But...

Several times here I've tried to express some of the philosophical "truths" that I feel I've discovered in my life. Where did they come from? And why are they so "fuzzy," sometimes downright incoherent? Why does the glue that holds them together seem to dissolve at times? The mind. The mind takes a diverse set of events and images and tries to build a coherent set of beliefs, but it's never complete, can't be complete, so some of the details' sharp edges show, stop the coherence from completing.

And, given this incompleteness, at times I feel that these "truths" may be completely wrong, simply parts of the world which I hold tightly onto to give myself a solid base from which to operate. I think they've served me better than others I might have developed, but other sets may work better for other people. Within their mind they have found other ways in which the world can operate, and believe just as strongly that they've discovered the "truth" as I do.

I find that I cannot remember much from my early childhood, mostly just silent snapshots of individual times and events. And, who know, they well may be false, planted by my mind to give a small reassurance that I haven't completely lost all those years. Integrating this, I realize that, although I don't suffer blackouts, there ARE holes in my life.

It seems the mind can sometimes just not absorb life experiences. Maybe they're too mundane, maybe they're not important, maybe they hurt too much, but the traces are too light to be impressed into us. They say that all memories ARE recorded in our subconscious and may seriously affect us without our knowledge. Maybe so, but that just makes our mind more spooky, less controllable, less understandable.

What if you could change the past? Go back and correct the wrongs you did? Would you? Should you? None of us could tell what the results would be, how the whole world around us would be affected. For good? Or not? Is this any different from the way our memories operate? Maybe we can't go back and change the world, but we can change our perception of what has happened. And, for us, there's no difference.

Remember, it is your mind, perhaps misremembering the events, which assigns a "right" or "wrong" connotation to those events you might want to change. Wrong in what way? Right for whom?

Madness, from whence does it come? Those who reside in that world have found a different reality, a reality built in their mind. Is their reality any less real than ours? Any less valid? Maybe less to us, but not to them. Are all of us touched by just a trace of it? At some times in my life I have gotten extremely angry and my actions were not me. Was I temporarily in that netherworld of madness? Did my mind distort my reality to allow me to become another me?

You know, in all the years of my life I've tried to build a consistency to it, hating the illogical (in my mind) parts of the world. What I've finally come to realize is that I will never be successful. The world isn't here to fit my version of reality and I've had to accept some limitations on my abilities to influence it. But lately I've been changing my goals. I've come to value peace for my mind over creating a world built on my precepts.

World problems. I've realized that I'm never going to be able to solve them. I've tried for a lot of years and my words and actions have not changed a thing. As a matter of fact, nobody is going to be able to solve these problems. And it's not likely they'll get much better, or worse. Our minds can envision all kinds of solutions and problems, but there are so many minds, imagining so many futures, that we actually get a muddy middle-of-the-road eventuality.

Headline today: 244 die, trampled to death at Hajj. How does that compute with 500 of our troops killed in Iraq? Half the casualties for one side in a war killed because of lack of crowd control? Logic? How does one fit these two figures into a sense of logic? All the thought and care taken about the war, trying to keep casualties down. Maybe we should have been trying to make crowd control better instead. We might in the long run have fewer deaths.

Actually, what I've decided about Iraq is that it has been in existence for thousands of years, has suffered through dictators, kings, monarchs, famines, empires, conquests, etc. We fought a war with the leaders of that country, but that war could have been between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, or Iran, or Turkey. In some realities it might have been with a band of left-handed midgets from Thailand. And I've gotten to the point where I don't really care what happened, why it happened, or what's going to happen next. World problems are just going to have to happen without my worry.

Terrorism? Well, if I'm ever in a position to be affected by it, then I'll have to handle what comes, in whatever way I can. But, until then, I'm not going to worry about it. Avoid tall buildings? Why? Because there's a one-in-a-billion chance that a plane is going to fly into it? Better I should avoid the freeway. I have other things to worry about.

Philosophies, why bother to express them? They may be "wrong." Some people will agree, some won't, nobody will entirely. My mind isn't capable of expressing my philosophies adequately because so much of them are based on emotions and impressions of past events which never occurred to other people, so they can't relate. I'll let other people argue about it.

Politics and politicians? I have political beliefs. Most of them have been proven right AND wrong many times, so I find it hard to defend whatever they may be now. I'm a conservative and a Republican. I have a President that I defend against all liberals but I find I can't support him in many of his decisions. So where does that leave me? In some way his mind has built a different world even though we would both say we were conservative. OK, doesn't much matter anyway. I'm going to vote Republican so I don't need to think or argue about it.

Well, I don't know if I've said anything here that will help me to reconcile all the different aspects of my life. It certainly helps me more than anyone else, I am sure. As I attempt to wrap my mind around the concept of my mind, circling endlessly, my wife brings me back to my primary reality. She comes in and asks whether I think we'll be able to get to church.

My mind hadn't noticed that it was snowing.