Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

A few days ago my trusty Dremel 400XPR did what I’ve now read is quite common for that flawed model — burst into a dramatic but short-lived fireball (thankfully I use a flex shaft and don’t hold the engine in hand) and then life-ending puff of smoke. So I headed up to the hardware store to get a replacement, and afterwards headed over to Canadian Tire to get a hotdog from the vendor out front. I figured I’d be able to park near the store since it was a mini-blizzard today and I hoped that the old folks that hang out at Canadian Tire and always fill up the handicapped spots would stay home. But instead when I got there I got to see an old fool backing out of a spot and then apparently smash on the gas instead of the brake… He went flying across the lot and smashed into a couple parked cars, destroying each of them as he pushed them into the next spot over. The old guy was about to turn it into a hit and run and started to flee when the hot dog vendor ran out and wrote down his license plate. Seeing this common sense caught up with him and he decided not to become a fugitive over the asinine behavior that is all-too-common for his generation.

“Never a dull day at the hot dog stand,” swore the chef.

There has been a lot of debate over the years about re-testing senior citizens, and then counter claims of ageism. I think when you hit a certain age you have to get your eyes retested, but that’s it. It got me thinking that what we really need at an absolute minimum — for all ages, and as a part of regular license renewal — is reflex testing. I’d like to see every granny (and every stoner dimwit that’s not also compensating with video games) lose their license when they can’t react to stimuli within a reasonable timeframe. Hell, with how realistic the physics of driving games/simulators are these days, I don’t see why we don’t do virtual driving tests. Right now we basically just make people take a glorified drive around the block and make sure they understand the basic rules of the road. This is not why accidents happen. There’s no reason why we couldn’t use virtual testing to actually test people in evasive driving and the sort of real life situations that often lead to accidents. But barring that, reflex tests. I’m sure it has the potential to eliminate a third of the accidents if we take the morons and the decrepit off the road.

Other than that I’m watching Inception for the first time since seeing it in the theatre and enjoying it a great deal. As you know dreams have been on my mind lately, and always have been. Repeating myself, when I was a kid, I had only a very small handful of dreams that repeated over and over and over until now, in my adulthood, they coalesced into a single large dreamworld that exists in parallel to my waking life. I don’t know if it’s brain damage from oxygen deprivation resulting from my condition, or if it’s just stress, but I feel like the dream world and the real world are combining, blending and blurring into each other. I find myself walking down the street and I recognize someone and I wonder, where do I know them from, and I realize that they are characters from the dream world. I’m sure the psychiatric explanation as to how I could meet someone that I previously dreamed about is somewhat akin to the neurological basis for deja vu (which is quite interesting), but understanding that logically does not make it any less disquieting.

So I have been drawing it and painting it.

I know that Occam’s Razor says it’s just a silly story, and most of the time I do believe that, but sometimes I am convinced that these are the side effects of living in a simulation. I am quite solidly atheist, but my love of science fiction makes me very vulnerable to the proofs that this is one of a trillion virtual worlds. Perhaps having my mortality so pushed in my face lately I’m even more vulnerable to the hope that one day I will wake up and get to “play again”. It seems more possible when I read about the fact that time an matter are quantized or “pixellated” and all the other weirdness of quantum science, but I feel like quantum science is like the Bible — if you don’t really understand it, you can use it to prove just about any crazy idea. And that we are living in a dream is definitely a crazy idea!

Of course it would explain why I can remember very little beyond the past twelve hours…