July 2001
One day Twitch and I were talking and he revealed to me the structure of my thinking. The explanation he gave made so much sense that I've often used it to explain my thinking to others.
I use logic. I like logic; it makes sense. It's fairly stable. You can view a lot of the world with logic - actions, axioms, suppositions about how things work often follow easily to conclusions that are fairly accurate at predicting outcomes and making good decisions. Supposition: the world has a limited supply of resources, conclusion: we should each do our part to conserve those resources, action item: when you drink a soda, put the aluminum can in the recycling bin. Easy, peasy, japanesey. Twitch, on the other hand, sees this flow of logic and says "But that's exactly what those militant tree-hugging fuckers that piss me off would have me do. I'm throwing my can in the trash just to piss them off." And I don't understand him one bit.
Similar situation - Supposition: material goods are expensive, and money is a limited resource, conclusion: we should treat our material goods with respect and take care to see that they are kept in repair and last as long as they can. Easy, straight forward, it makes sense. There are some people *cough* K *cough* though, who refuse to take the most basic precautions to see that common property is cared for. This upsets me greatly. I don't understand it. This is the main reason behind my spearheading the last pledge project to cover our Fraternity pool table - to help keep it in good repair.
And so I go about life in a fairly straight forward manner, making certain suppositions and drawing conclusions from them. Perhaps at times this is done in retrospect, and this is a danger of being human - that you will feel one way and then try to justify it later - but I honestly believe that most of my thoughts are directed by simple logic from the onset, and not so much post-mortem justification. There are some very useful and necessary axioms if one is to live within a logical explanation of life like this. One example being the Axiom of Like. The Axiom of Like simply states that a human needs no reason for liking something. You can twist yourself up in pointless knots trying to explain why someone likes something, and its all rather pointless. You could say "I like ice cream because it's sweet, and my genetics translate this into a nervous system response of pleasure and fulfillment". But this doesn't tell you anything more than you originally knew, really. You like ice cream. Period. This needs no further explanation.
Unfortunately thought - and this was the central and salient point that Twitch made - there are some things that refuse to fit within my logic. In my worldview, I try to make the number of these things as small as possible - something my father also strives for. I end up having a small box in the corner of my mind where I throw all of the things that don't make sense, that can't be logic-d out. One of those is love. Love gets thrown in there pretty immediately. I once tried to explain love as a mental illness somewhat connected to obsession. Didn't really help much. Well a little. But still, love, love - I'm convinced you can't well explain it. So it's just simpler to throw it into that box. Twitch says that by far I put too few things in this box.