Random Compulsion to Think Out Loud

I call it thinking out loud if I write it here. It has a different feel than if I write it on paper or even in Word or Mac's version of that, Pages. Writing in the new post box has a different feel altogether.

One of the things I was thinking is that my favorite story from Mark Twain, of his work that I've read, is his short story, The Mysterious Stranger. It has to do with the variables in life which you can't see or predict.

Recently, I heard people discussing someone's suicide trying to think if they should have done something differently which might have changed the course of events. No one knew what he was up to, but in a morbid way some of those in the conversation seemed to think they could have changed it all. You don't know.

It may have been a chance event in his youth that resulted in all this. It may have been because he was forbidden from going to the movies with that cute girl, Gayle, when he was 12, and that led to another chance thing which landed him in bad comapny, and on and on. He was forced to cut the grass that day, didn't go the the movie, then went down the street and ran into Tony, who talked him into sniffing glue.

If he'd gone to the movies he'd be a physics professor at a large university in some great coastal city, have two intelligent well behaved kids, a wife who gets better looking every day, and he'd be happy as a clam, and alive.

Instead he led a troubled life, dropped out of college, flirted with various addictions, was a full blown alcoholic at an early age and his troubled brain and addled mind simply could not see life through the chaos.

All because his slave driving, nazi parents couldn't wait until later in the day that Saturday for him to mow the lawn. Or let it go until Sunday. Either they thought they were instilling a good work ethic, or else they were just dogmatic creeps who hated their children. Well, it could be that they had some obsession and/or compulsion related to length of grass or yardwork in general.

I don't remember the specific events in the story told by Mark Twain, but it was that sort of thing.

And if the guy above did NOT off himself, he would have entered the 10 items line at the grocery story behind Mary Smartypants, causing Barry Brilliant to choose another line, thereby preventing the chance meeting of Mary and Barry, who would have mated and produced the next Einstein, and also the next Joan of Arc. A very interesting brother and sister combination.

So, since things have gone as they have, all starting with the slave driving parents and the lawn, ending in the sad suicide, we can look forward to a brilliant scientist and one bad ass, freedom loving chick to enter the scene in a couple of decades.

See how it works? It is what we call the unknown factor which is everywhere in life. That covers many things in science, politics, etc. So ignore anyone who thinks there are only so many ways to skin a cat, or that skinning the cat won't lead to a different path than not skinning the cat. You just don't know.

That's why it sort of irks me when people go on about how could God let this or that happen. If you ever created an invention with moving parts and a control system you would understand. You build it, set it up and let it run.

If you are lucky, or the creation is lucky, when it breaks you can fix it. That's divine intervention. You didn't make it break. You just lovingly set your machine into operation, hoping for the best. So bad things happening neither proves nor disproves the God concept. I tend to think it is such a different deal than we traditionally think that it would be very mind blowing to actually know.

But in my own life, I swear it feels like something other dimensional saves my ass over and over, and occasionally sprinkles me with lucky dust. How that works, I haven't a clue. But, from the standpoint of building a working model, I don't really know how my own happy-parts work either. Glad for the good things, understood or not, and that's about all you need to know.