Here is a mid-50’s vintage Mercury in excellent shape.  It was parked in front of a neighbors house, haven’t seen it before.

     Yesterday I took ibuprofen for my gout induced foot pain.  Usually when I have a mild flare-up, a little cranberry juice and within a day I’m good.  Yesterday the pain was sufficiently intense that I wasn’t willing to wait a day.  Had to get groceries which meant having to be on my feet and my toes and toe-box area was creating stabbing pain when I put any weight on it.  So I took ibuprofen.

     I hate doing this because with me there is always a nasty rebound effect.  That is to say when ibuprofen wears off, I feel pain all over and this morning when I first got up that was most definitely the case.  Fortunately that effect has subsided mostly now and the cranberry juice has done it’s thing and my feet are better.

     I’ve read about other people having a rebound effect if they’ve taken ibuprofen long term, but it happens to me even with a single dose, and same for other pain killers, aspirin will do the same thing to a lesser extent.  It did not do this when I was younger.  I guess just punishment for not dying sooner.

     Gout flare-up both feet today, gout sucks.

     The problem with reductionist explanations of consciousness which invariably attempt to define consciousness as an emergent phenomena of the brain is that invariable it fails to explain the subjective experience.

     It is easy to say when this particular photo-receptor gets activated, it activates this nerve, and eventually this neuron in our brain and we perceive red.

     What isn’t easy to say is WHY red looks red to us and not green or some entirely different sensation.

     The man inside the man is not explained by reductionism, nor do I believe can it be.  Some of these attempts at explaining consciousness have lead me to wonder if some people lack the subjective experience because I can’t think of any other way that scientists could invent some of these theories unless they themselves lack this experience.

     I have had experiences that are non-local in terms of space and time and thus defy reductionist explanations.

     For example, when I was younger, I used to frequently have lucid dream experiences and occasional waking out of body experiences where I could go anywhere and anytime I wanted just by thinking about it.

     One time I wanted to find out if there were any reality to these or if these were just a willed dream of sorts.  So I devised a simple experiment.  I would go some place that I haven’t been to but yet was close enough that I could drive to it, and upon returning to my body immediately write down what I had seen there.  Then I’d drive there and see if it matched what I saw.  It did, exactly.

     I’ve also had a number of times I’ve got into the future and when that time came it played out just as I’ve seen it.  I haven’t had these for several decades but back at the time they drove the direction of my business in as much as I saw it in a dream and then created it in reality.

     Still tired today, not as bad as yesterday but I think it is the broken sleep I had last night.  My circadian rhythm is probably totally messed, between digestive problems making sleep difficult and my wife’s new work hours.

     Last night I rebounded in the opposite direction, got super-drowsy around 6PM, took a three hour nap.  Slept better last night but not anything close to good.  Woke up out of nightmares of one sort or another half a dozen times.

     The nightmares weren’t like really bad apocalyptic nightmares, just mundane things like a friend abandoning me at another friends five miles from my home with no way to get back except walk, or watching a movie on a 16mm projector where I work and an idiot co-worker didn’t know how to re-wind the film and put it back in the canister so ended up with a big pile of tangled film which I had to hand untangle and put back on the reel.

     I would be less bothered by it all if I’d been doing drugs or something to explain my mental state, but other than a tad of caffeine yesterday, nada, and caffeine wasn’t even in my usual excess amount.

     I knew earlier when I was listening to music I was feeling a little too good.  Not drug enhanced, just a natural kind of high and I new a low would follow.

     Now, everything is aching and I’ve got random stabbing pains all over and I feel wound too tight to sleep but too tired to function.  I felt fine until I ate a late dinner, then I started feeling kind of queasy, then gassy and constipated, then everything went to hell.

     Sometimes I think this is why I don’t have money because if I did I’d hire a couple of hookers just to rub everything that hurts and eat vicodins like House.

     I wonder if this is what Pam on Archer felt like after eating two pounds of cocaine.

     Instead I’ve got corndog and mac-n-cheese induced something. I don’t know what but my stomach is not happy after eating.

     I think I’m going to suffer a case of audio induced serotonin syndrome if I listen to music much longer.  This new sound card, $20 of ecstasy, sounds so good compared to the built-in.

     Listening to Prefab Sprout’s Faron Young, invokes a desire to be traveling down a lonely highway in the middle of nowhere in some ’60s over-powered American car at about 100 miles per hour, listening to Wolfman Jack on XERB fading in and out.

     My speakers definitely need a mid-range but cabinets not big enough to accommodate.  Now that I can drive the amp which in turn can make the woofers really travel, I get some pretty bad inter-modulation distortion.  They’ve got large magnets but apparently not large enough to remain linear throughout their entire throw.