Message in the Wind

Confusion everywhere. So many questions, so few absolutes. Dylan tries to help, “The answer my friend is blowing in the wind, the answer is blowing in the wind.”

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It’s a typical early morning. I pace around silently, waiting impatiently for Mr. Coffee, our low-budget butler, to provide wake-up assistance. He seems unusually slow this morning, though he’s always predictable, more so than most of life.

Sooner or later the caffeine will jump-start things. While this marvelous chemical reaction activates brain cells, I doodle. A sample of this morning’s achievements yields no conclusive message.

Avoid attempts to comprehend mental flushes. There’s no Rosetta Stone to decipher the musings of sleep-deprived madmen. It taxes sanity and overloads cognitive settings.

Today’s flashes seem existentialistic, a convoluted collage of last night’s dreams, or the consequence of the yesterday’s chili. Such mish-mash gives credence to the theory that Eris, the goddess of Entropy, is pushing the boundaries of confusion.

Existentialism started with an espresso-induced epiphany of Jean-Paul Sartre, the Sorbonne sage, a fellow short in stature but long in sagacity. He obviously recognized that Risk is Fortune’s shadow. Testing the direction the wind’s blowing is advisable to identify pitfalls. Wind’s aberrant gene is prone to erratic and unpredictable behavior, more dangerous than a hot teenage romance.

Whether by Providential design or human manipulation, the iconoclastic winds of change are goads that prick the idol of bloated human ego. Many shudder to think that a golden “T” could soon appear on the White House or an avowed Socialist could collapse the gains of capitalism. Yet, time and chance still happen to all, like it or not.

How do we test the unseen? Simple. Lick your index finger, thrust it into the air. Unscientific? Yes, but reliable. It’s better than expensive polls, and besides, looking downcast accomplishes nothing.

Today’s newspapers lie scattered on our table. Take a random glance at any headline: seditious acts, investigations, manipulations, murder, mayhem, conspiracy and lately the absurd ‘white’ Oscars. Such diurnal rubbish is an ill wind that blows a chill in our hearts and is an insult to human intelligence.

Speedy computers can plot the breeze, but they can’t yet synthesize the news into anything cogent, except providing evidence that randomness remains more than a hair-brained theory. Are you still shocked to comprehend that you are not in control of anything?

Figuratively speaking, there are many forms of wind, much of which is self-generated. My mama expressed her distaste for some things with the idiom, “I’m fed up.” Wonder what she’d say about today’s politics?

Candidates utter preposterous promises behind podiums on garish stage-sets. Their lofty pontifications resemble a clanging cacophony of discordant wind chimes, “full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” Hot breath turns cold when cash leaves the Party.

Wall Street’s windmill of windfall speculation is the proximate cause for the blow-hard breeze stirring from the land of the resurgent Left. The evil drum-beat of income inequity roars louder. Revolution is in the air.

Bernie’s boning up on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation techniques, attempting to blow life into the dried bones of Marx and roll his granite stone away. Exhumed Socialist failure will be a stinky experiment.

Speculation is a fact of life. High-stake horse bets with long odds coupled with a sufficient quantity of mint juleps will eradicate ennui and explode euphoria. We bet on the future daily. Nothing like the high from slapping down cash on a black jack table. We know it’s a rigged, zero-sum wager of winner-take-all. Still, it’s highly intoxicating, if not addictive.

But now speculation is an expletive. The deck is stacked, they say. The cards are marked. The game is rigged. Computers run it. Significant taxing will slay the beast. The entitlement crowd is giddy with anticipation.

But face it, most things are rigged. Taxing speculation will only drive it underground, into back-street bazaars where black-market cash vacations offshore. But alas, there’s no stopping the march of jack boots towards redistribution, the unveiled euphemism for ‘confiscation.’

Face it, all life is speculation, a gamble with incredible odds. If it were a bet, you wouldn’t take it. Now there’s a philosophy you can chew on.

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The caffeine high finally hits and my doodles spring to life and speak:

“Go outside, lick your finger and look up. After all, that’s still where all the answers come from anyway.” Amen?


Bud Hearn
February 5, 2016