inquiry

It seems my story is that unfinished work perennially. I do not have a place to get to in Can Tho so I sit with cold Saigon Beers and watch the evening set in. I’m spoiled. There’s nothing I don’t have that I want or need. I have some VND in my pocket. Some friends sometimes at arms length but well meaning and a life that has meanders from city to country to continent. Maybe a wanderer with no pot of gold. No one that asks or requires or mandates or tells me.

We'll let your next-of-kin know you wound up in The Good Place, all odds to the contrary notwithstanding. ;–)

But in the end I am a selfish , egotistical and narcissistic SOB and I know it. Those are my good qualities. I don’t provoke an answer. In fact I could give a fuck less.

Shhhh! Don't give the winged, haloed ones in charge reason to revoke your eternal reward!

Tonight it’s the cold Saigon beer that they bring to me. Cheers!

<nods in excruciating envy>

But there was a catch. Osborne did not realize that he was translating a translation. The lyric poem was Milton's Paradise Lost.

Henceforth known as “Translation Found”!

How many times do we translate a translation without realizing it?

Every time the cognitive wherewithal engages – even at less than warp speeds. (<winks in the direction of Hikaru Sulu>)

I cannot help but think of a scenario where a person, not knowing Paradise Lost or Milton, comes across Osborne's translation first. Sounds a bit like navigating the web.

And I can't help but think it doesn't matter at all except relative to a belief something going one way is necessarily better than it going another.

Just this past weekend (forgive me if I already bored y'all with this) the timing of a $100 video poker machine loss was soon enough followed by a “chance” intersection of my walking home with a (then merely) acquaintance pulling out of a parking lot. He rolled his window down, we chatted, and then I spent some three hours at his house (never been there before) drinking Heinekens and whiskey amidst an occasional smoke, and the conversation was astoundingly deep and personal.

Did my $100 loss cause my possibly having acquired a new really good friend? The loss certainly sucked at the time (especially for having been up $40 at one point). (The words “What a fucking idiot!” came to mind many more than a few times.) And yet it's easy to imagine the latter having never occurred were it not for the exquisite – yet hidden – timing of the former.

My (current) take is it's almost always rash to imagine the way something has gone is necessarily a lesser thing in the long haul. The potential of the fractalized wave interference of our interactions laughs to the point of teary-eyed breathlessness at dice outcomes.