You sit there in the rain and realize how beautiful it is.
You sit there in your seat and the world turns.
You sit there at your desk and life rolls at your feet.
You sit there in the moment and hear, first, the clock ticking, then a chicken clucking outside the window, then your stomach growls as gas bubbles through a valve.
You sit there in the moment and see the fresh green of new growth and hear the laughter of children playing in the school yard.
Nine times out of ten everything is okay. Ninety-nine out of a hundred. The odds are on our side and when things do go wrong they do it on a spectrum of from bad to worse, from irritation to horror.
It’s not always immediately horror, is what I’m saying.
In a world constructed such as this one is, one ought to have a lot of trust.
I jump into the deep water although I cannot swim, because you will save me.
Jump and a dragon will appear.
Imagine, however, a pervasive and omnipresent technology dedicated to skewing people’s perception of the probability of horror. Fear, for I am with you. In Japan, a boy brought his mother’s head (in a bag) to a police station (after spending a few hours in an internet cafe with it first) saying war and terrorism should stop and it didn’t matter who he killed. See how the technology feeds on itself?
It is said by some that there have been societies so afraid they worshipped evil. Perhaps there have been others so trusting they worshipped good. Neither seems to have been viable.
You sit on the terrace under the tent, or as it said on the box, the garden pavillion, with your father-in-law in a thunderstorm. The frame is heavy metal and not grounded. Neither one of you says much.
You sit under the tent at night with your wife, drinking tea and listening for hedgehogs in the bushes.
Interesting thoughts expressed here. Guess the probability of horror is more seated in our minds than we think. But we prefer not to discuss it. When you mentioned the steel poles, not grounded, I was surprised. Sis phoned yesterday from a continent away, and guess what I did? Something that even surprised me. I said, “Can’t talk right now, we are in the midst of a thunder storm.” Guess the probabilities are more real in my mind than I care to admit.
I used to think it was silly to turn off the PC when a storm came by, until lightning struck the telephone line and fried both my modem and whatever part of the PC it was that was communicated with it. So I wouldn’t deny the reality of certain possibilities; some things might be overemphasized, though. Maybe.
Listening for hedgehogs… how grounding in the end! BTW, what do the hedgehogs actually sound like?
rustle-rustle-rustle
My sister and I were just discussing yesterday how when one horror is averted, concern over that one is (at least with us) quickly replaced with concern over another; e.g., the plane lands safely in the thunderstorm but will the taxi driver be able to get us safely to our destination with the pouring rain and poor visibility? Yet we get into the taxi anyway. When the strange looking mole turns out to be benign we remember that we