thinking about patterns.

i’ve been thinking about the ways things come together after many years spent traversing the outer limits. friends who were long lost have since come back into the fold. ideas that had been frozen out in siberia, have since made the long journey back to intellectual currency.

it’s been an interesting week. i bid for a cd on ebay. i enjoy the ebb and flow of bids on the auction system. i’ll know in an hour if i won. tomorrow i’m being scrutinized. they’re coming to observe me teach. should be interesting. at least i’m much familiar with the person doing the observing. have you seen that recent film “pi”? it’s quite good. kind of paranoid, kind of brilliant, kind of david lynch in a way. it’s a good flick about a mathematician gone abstract.

speaking of mathematics, i finished the other week, the book “a beautiful mind.” a fabulous book. i really enjoyed it. it did a wonderful job of capturing the intellectual environments of the day. this movie “pi” seems to be a fictionialization of some of the trends noticed in the book — taking math to extremes, numerology and such.

did you read the article in the new york times last week about the six investment bankers who spent $62,000 at one dinner in london not too long ago. pretty brazen stuff. i’ve been thinking about all of these articles i see in the wall street journal about how so many industries are conglomerating. competition is being extincted. huge multinationals are taking over the scene. it all comes down to a simple point folks: too much power is being held in the hands of too few.

it’s a simple law of nature. human nature — no matter how high-powered the individual — can only handle so much power. with the international conglomerates, unfortunately, people who cannot handle the responsibility are also in on the game. perhaps enron is just the beginning. but in another sense, it is the end of an era. we shall see what the next ten years bring. the protests at global capital summits are no mistake. the general population is becoming more frustrated with the state of corporate america. the number of mergers has shot off the charts in recent months. what next?

just some of the questions i’m pondering this weekend. at any rate, the skies were clear, but the air was cold. we had a blast of winter this weekend. fortunately we missed some of the winter snow that other places nearby received. now that i have a garage, i’m pleased to say that my car heats up quickly. i knew some folk that had a wood cabin. what a wonderous thing! they had some acres of forest land and plenty of room to walk and roam. what a better tonic for the soul i do not know. there is something about the quiet sound of a forest in the morning that has a brilliance about it. something that will never be replaced by the city.

as much as i yearn for the future, i harken back to days of time spent in the woods.