Ten Things You Should Always Buy In Bulk

I have decided to experiment with self-indulgent composition. I had not intended to write anything today but got left home alone (!). I am all grown up so it doesn't bother me much. I have a routine for dealing with it but after whimpering at the window a while and chewing a hole in the couch I had pretty much exhausted it. Sawed firewood yesterday and did errands this morning. Turned on computer. Looked at blog. Nobody else looked at blog. Hence experiment.

Checked most viewed post, "Ὅμηρος", and it had a grandson picture, the kid that points at everything. Found a recent one of him sitting on a rustic chair, one carved by an arborist who took down a eucalyptus that misbehaved here. I'll use that.

Among essays I had most fun with is one I wrote years ago called "Presque Vu". Presque vu is a French term for having a word or name on the tip of your tongue but being unable to remember it. Nobody commented on that essay. Beyond the fact that presque vu is not mentioned in its text, I figure the title is faulty and untrendy. So I looked at what Yahoo News is getting traffic on and decided to repost the essay under that. Presque Vu is now "Ten Things You Should Always Buy In Bulk". Now to retrieve the text:

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Deja Vu and Jamais Vu are words brought to us originally by cultural anthropologists who ventured into into places like darkest England to study temporal lore of tribes frequenting Ley Lines and menhirs like Stonehenge, then, for reasons unknown but on the tips of their tongues, report back exclusively in French. Their data is then seized by psychologists, who are seized in turn by physicists and astronomers, drugged, danced to exhaustion and a new tribe is formed.

Between the Big Bang and Big Crunch the universe goes thru cycles of expansion and contraction. During expansion, we remember a real past attending a variable and unseeable future. In contraction, because time is reversed, we remember a virtual past which, contrary to the entropic arrow of time, hasn't really happened yet. We perceive it as a normal, causal unfolding but accompanied by a crunchy noise and it just looks crinkly.

We don't remember the future in this direction either --backward from its beginning at the end of universal expansion-- for two reasons. Light is traveling backwards, out of our eyes and assembling all observables. Second reason is nobody liked the future very much and forgot it.

Because universe doesn't expand or contract quite evenly --less like a star-studded balloon than other stuff I shouldn't have machine-washed-- Bang and Crunch can coincide. Neither is time uniform --uniforms are dry-clean only. Time can constrict on an expanding field, which is how an acrylic sock can melt your turtleneck head hole shut in the dryer--creating an irreducible singularity. Thus do time and anti-time collide in brains and make deja vu.

Because the cycles throw us together from opposing ends of time, we get glimpses of ourselves coming back. Effect is more or less pronounced by what cycle predominates locally. My last planetarium visit suggests we are on spin. This also accounts for the disorienting experience of Jamais Vu.

Jamais Vu is the opposite of Deja Vu and consists of waking up in your pajamas --Jamais=French for jammies-- without knowing where or why. Sometimes Jamais Vu is inaccurately applied to waking up naked and painted jammy-like colors in the middle of a jungle with no clue where you are or how it happened. This is not Jamais Vu. It means you are a cultural anthropologist.

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Now let's see if this works or not. Either way, I've used my time well and refrained from scooting around on the rug. The real question here is whether or not I have devised a solution to the enigma of Presque Vu's public neglect. Have I arrived at a whole truth or cobbled two half-truths together into something that smells like one? Time will tell. But now I hear Norma and her luncheon ladies pulling into the driveway and ought to run out all frisky and make muddy paw prints on their knees. Excuse me.