September 2023 – If there is something

Looking at the thing you assume to be there

Scrolling through some old notes, I stumbled across one that really stuck out to me. A man, who is not a guru and whose name I wish I’d written down, was explaining how we perceive and engage with our surroundings and with one another. He was saying we create in our minds sufficiently useful low representations of the world. The thing you see in front of you, or the person with whom you are speaking, is almost always a representation that is a consequence of your memory. Instead of looking at the thing itself, you look at the thing you assume to be there. The thing you see in front of you is almost always much richer than your apprehension of it. There’s always more there than meets the eye, and God only knows how much more there is.

The preceding is my insufficient representation of the thing he actually said. The point he was making goes much deeper, but my memory seems only capable of apprehending this much. On one level, what he is saying is obviously true. We are constantly bombarded by stimuli. We can’t take the time to fully appreciate each thing, each moment we experience. We rely on our memory to apprehend and put the moment in context, and then we move on to the next. But, of course, in doing so, we could be skipping past so much.

The thing you see in front of you is almost always much richer than your apprehension of it. Sometimes, as we’re stuffing mundane moments into sufficiently useful low representation boxes, a glimpse of the richness slips through. Here’s another note I made: Sometimes, the thing you thought you were conversing with is not the thing you thought, and that manifests itself in error, and that’s where you get the transcendent.

Clearly, my notes were insufficiently useful to bring that last point into clarity. But I guess what he was saying is that sometimes, either purposely or by chance, we experience the depth of a thing, or something novel about it breaks our cartoonish memory of the thing, and the resulting experience is transcendent.

I feel like I didn’t nail down that last part. But one thing that seems clear is that if we stopped relying so heavily on our memory of things to make sense of the world, and started letting the richness emerge, it would literally feel like a transcendent experience. How often do we put people and experiences in boxes and write them off as purely one dimensional representations that we’ve encountered many times before? Not to mention, what are we doing to ourselves when we look at the thing we assume to be there instead of trying to apprehend it more fully? There’s always more than meets the eye, and God only knows how much more there is.

Bidenomics promotes Bidenergy policy as key feature of Bidenvironmental push

America’s low-energy president wants to bring some of that low-voltage leadership to the nation’s environmental policy. A key part of the president’s Bidenomics policy is to push a Bidenergy plan that reduces the nation’s dependency on fossil fuels. To that end, the administration dispatched Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on an EV road trip to promote a plan for half of new car sales to be electric by 2030. Granholm’s office reportedly organized the trip to “draw attention to the billions of dollars the White House is pouring into green energy and clean cars.”

The EV road trip originated in North Carolina and planned to arrive in Tennessee four days later. “We wanted to make the trip as low-energy as possible. Hence the four-day set aside to cover the 600 miles from Charlotte to Memphis. We figured, what better way to promote electric vehicles than to spend 96 hours on a 10 hour drive,” a Granholm spokesperson said.

However, the Granholm road trip was not without its snags. Accompanying the EV was a fully gas-powered vehicle that transported some of Granholm’s staffers. In Grovetown, Georgia, the gas vehicle parked in front of an EV charging station to reserve it for the Granholm EV that lagged behind. Needless to say, motorists waiting in line to charge their vehicles were not thrilled about the gas vehicle blocking the charger and called the police. A police officer was dispatched to the scene but no arrests were made and no report was filed.

Camila Domonoske, an NPR correspondent traveling with the Granholm team, reported, “I drive an electric vehicle myself, and I’ve test-driven many more as NPR’s auto reporter. I know how easy it can be to charge when everything goes well and how annoying it can be when things go poorly. Riding along with Granholm, I came away with a major takeaway: EVs that aren’t Teslas have a road trip problem, and the White House knows it’s urgent to solve this issue.”

A spokesperson for Granholm said, “Other than the duration of the trip, the 911 call and the lackluster NPR coverage, we feel like the road-trip was a resounding success and highlighted the need to slam the Bidenergy policy into high gear…which is about 25 miles per hour.”

In an unrelated incident, President Biden unexpectedly powered down while visiting an ice cream shop in Wilmington, Delaware. The photo op was abruptly cut short and the president was quickly whisked away to a presidential charging station.

Bystander performs daring kegstand rescue in party bike mishap

A quick-thinking good samaritan is recovering today after participating in a dramatic rescue of patrons trapped beneath an overturned party bike. Robert Drake and two of his companions were watching college football at a local tavern when they heard cries for ‘help’ coming from the street outside. They immediately ran to the scene where they discovered a number of individuals trapped beneath the overturned party bike.

“A bunch of people were trying to lift the wagon, but it was too heavy due to the full kegs of beer onboard,” recounted Drake. “The tap was wedged against the street so my buddies held me upside down by the legs while I managed to get the tap in my mouth. I was battling physics and the laws of gravity, but I managed to drain enough beer from the kegs that we were able to set the vehicle upright.”

Rescue personnel on the scene were in disbelief over the heroic efforts of Mr. Drake and his friends. “Nothing in our training prepares us for an accident of this nature. The gentlemen and his companions are to be commended for their bravery and ingenuity,” one rescuer commented.

Humbled by the attention, Drake admitted that he just did what anyone else in his position would have done.

“Although I flunked out of college, I actually had a fair amount of experience performing that particular maneuver. My buddies probably struggled more than I did being that I’m about 75 pounds heavier than I was back in the day,” Drake said. “Anyway, I don’t think I did anything that special. I guess it’s just a situation where my instincts took over. I feel like if it had been me trapped under that party wagon, then someone else would have performed a lifesaving keg stand. Needless to say, I yacked pretty hard once I was back on my feet again.”

Shot callin’ Pickleballin’

Pickleball has found itself in something of a pickle. Its two biggest professional leagues have declared all-out war on one another, leaving fans wondering if the sport can survive this division within its ranks. Players are being forced to take sides and millions of dollars are at stake. Not since the East Coast-West Coast hip hop feud of the 90’s has a rivalry loomed so large in the public consciousness.

“I’m not saying this to be conceited, but usually when I call someone in pickleball they call me back,” Connor Pardoe, one of Pickleball’s biggest ballers, told Yahoo Sports. He’s the founder of the Professional Pickleballers Association. The gentleman not returning his calls would be Major League Pickleballs owner and billionaire Steve Kuhn.

We had a truce, but you was only stallin’

Since last November, an uneasy truce has reigned in the world of professional pickleball with players allowed to compete in both leagues. All that ended when Kuhn started recruiting pickleball’s top talent and offering million dollar contracts to the game’s biggest stars, household names like Tyson McGuffin.

It’s all a game until the bodies start fallin’

Both sides agree, a pickleball war isn’t good for anybody. But when so much money and power is on the line, the temptation to assert who has the biggest pickle gets in the way of peace and prosperity for all. Pardoe still holds onto hope, “We gave clarity to TV networks. We gave clarity to sponsors. We were able to put the Wild Wild West to bed. We had a tour where the best players played.…If I could bring that back, I’d do it in a heartbeat.”