Fifty Shades of Deviancy

It is three and one-half minutes past four in the morning. I was having trouble sleeping ( possibly due to an evening repast of Wolf Brand Chili followed immediately by a generous helping of Blue Bell's Buttered Pecan ice cream) and so decided to give it up and take Max for a walk on the front lawn. As I am standing on my front lawn in my skivvies, Max is taking advantage of a convenient elm tree. Or perhaps, in his mind, he is making certain that the elm has enough moisture to grow another foot in height before dawn.

At any rate, it crossed my mind that my Williamson County neighbors might consider this to be some sort of deviant behavior. So I came inside and sat before my computer (which is probably even more deviant than roaming the front lawn in my skivvies!). In truth, given the random thoughts that had been rotating around in my skull just before I decided to get up and go outside, "deviant" may be a mild term to describe my early morning thought processes.

Shortly before turning off the light and pulling the counterpaine around my shoulders, I had noticed a Facebook post by an acquaintance. The post triggered thoughts of George Orwell's "doublethink" and at the same time musings on Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whiteheads's fundamental axiom, "The negation of the conjunction of P with not P".

Of course, Russell and Whitehead said it much more elegantly! The old proverb, "You can't keep your cake and eat it too", is another way of saying the same thing. In fact, the preface to the mystical Book of Miracles states "No thing can both be and not be", which is yet another way of saying the same thing.

Taken at face value, the truth of the axiom seems undeniable (Duh - isn't that why they call it an "axiom"?). But since when have I been bothered by logical infallibility? As soon as I read George Orwell's, Nineteen Eighty-Four, I immediately embraced "doublethink" as a plausible solution to the many facts of life that troubled my adolescent soul. To this day, whenever I find myself dabbling in some inconsistency of thought or action, I say to myself, "Doublethink can be a good thing", and go merrily along my way. 

While I had been in the chile/ice cream induced half-sleep, all of these thoughts were banging about inside my skull. Suddenly, there was a mental segue to thoughts about music and, in particular, the problem I sometimes have of keeping a steady tempo while playing the clarinet. Then the magical question, "What If" popped up in full Wagnerian force. It was as though the host of Valkyries burst through the door of my brain along with all eight Clydesdale horses pulling a Budweiser wagon filled with mead!

"What if" is the magical question because it is the question that frees the brain and allows it roam unfettered. At least that is what I thought until this morning. This mornings magical "What if" was "What if time does not exist at all?". "What if time is just a trick that my body imposes upon my mind?"

Well that did it!  Immediately, still in my half-sleep from the Chile/ice-cream, I was bouncing around in a timeless universe. I would be here, then there, with no restraints what-so-ever. Then I noticed a slight problem.

The problem was that, although I could easily bounce from one time spot to another, and in no order what-so-ever, once I landed in a spot, immediately time began again in the new spot.  It seems that my concept of timelessness is only derived from my ability to conceive that time may have an opposite! I can conceive of no-time, but I cannot seem to experience it even in a dream. What a bummer!

Of course my true deviancy is that, everything I have written here makes perfect sense to me! That must be incontestable proof that I am a deviant of the lowest and most vile form.  I might as well take Max back outside to the front lawn and join him in watering the elm trees....