Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Living on Half a Brain

Living on Half a Brain

Sometimes when I’m tired I do my best work. In my younger days my mind raced so far ahead of my pencil that I couldn’t keep up. Often I would quit in frustration and watch my imagination sprint off over the horizon knowing all the cool thoughts and ideas that had flitted through my mind were soon to be lost and forgotten.

As I get older the energy is no longer quite as intense as it once was and if you throw in a little exhaustion, then I find it easier to keep up with my thoughts and get them keyboarded down.

Last night I had a dream. In the dream I had a beautiful young relation, (say a cousin) who told me that she needed me to lie in her behalf. She was being called before some sort of tribunal. Then she gave me a text on lying, which explained how to do it with a straight face, remembering your lies and making sure they didn’t contradict one another. As the dream went on there was a long parade of my other relations walking about like in Mardigras attire, extolling the lies they planned to tell on her behalf. Towards the end I resolved to tell the truth when it came my turn to appear before the magistrates and it caused me no small amount of anguish. Don’t expect a moral to this dream….It is like so many I have…. Bizarre, irrational, and defying any remote form of interpretation. At least this one was not terrifying. As a matter of fact all the costumes were colorful and pleasing to the eye.

Today I cut wood with my chainsaw. I have ten piles in my yard and I have to get them blocked and split before winter gets here. As I was cutting Mark and Steve came by. These are my neighbors that helped clear the roads when we had the last storm. I was wearing my A.D.D T-shirt that says… Attention Defici…..wow! Is that a butterfly?” They chuckled to one another as they read it like it was an inside joke….I get animated at times and people around me get wide eyed like I arrived last week from Mars. I was talking about the importance of breaking in a diesel engine….Like that was something they were really interested in. Mark wants to borrow the splitter tomorrow. He has some big blocks to lift and mine has a hydraulic lift platform.

When I got my speedometer installed I had to calibrate it. The sensor was located on the end of the transmission and works by reading a mark that turns at a one to one ratio with the engine. To calibrate it you had to push a set button and drive two miles and then push the button again. I did this and the Speedo worked beautifully. It was all “Monkey See Monkey Do (MSMD)” This is to say that I followed the instructions and it worked. I don’t understand how it worked and the instructions did not elaborate on that. I’m sure there is a chip in the gage that can calculate your speed if it knows how many revolutions the drive shaft turns in two miles… don’t ask me how but it can… Must be like calculating the third side or angle to a right triangle if you know a side and an angle… or a power equation were if you know two of values you can calculate the third. Anyway I am better at MSMD than being able to conceptually rotate things in a spatial plane… The intelligence measuring questions like A is to B when B is greater than 4A but less than C… drive me bonkers… Negative logic does the same thing. It took me a year and three tries to make a “C” in trig. I remember telling myself the first day of class… “now pay attention. Don’t get behind because if you do you’ll never catch up.” Sure enough the professor drew a cross on the blackboard and said numbers up and to the right are plus and numbers to the left and bottom are negative….That was the last thing I understood for the rest of the semester.

Where is this leading I know you are asking….? It’s like that dream… Nowhere. Absolutely nowhere. Believe it or not I can actually program in C++. I love the language but if there is an algorithm of any complexity I have to get somebody good at that sort of thing to write it. I can identify the values that flow into the equation and the values I want to flow out but how they get mucked around to the right answer is beyond my pay grade. Isn’t that the darndest thing you ever heard tell of?