DIARY OF A PRISONER...TRAVELS UPON THE WATERS OF TIME

Greetings, Footsore and Cranky Travelers!

AKA

(If Today is Tuesday, This Must Be Rome!)

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There exists within the human invention of time, a great expanse of river. The headwaters of this stream are born in the high and distant reaches of this invention's formless conceit of measurement.

These waters, issuing forth, are the murky waters that form the sum and substance of all human history.

It is a treacherous and uncertain stream. It carries upon it's stormy back, the sails of an ever evolving shape and shift of illusion, a phantom ship, the product of human necessity seeking the perception of refuge in a frail and battered craft.

Here, on a precarious and tempest tossed deck, dwell the current ship's roster of passengers. Resigned to the fulfillment of the inevitable inheritance that was the legacy of their fathers, they are travelers and pilgrims, one and all.

And....

As must all those indentured, whose chains of heritage shackle them to the bondage of 3d mortality, they stoically endure their ancient sentence of endless transportation into a new and unknown world.

We are these voyagers. Our world is this craft and it is to this tiny deck that we afix ourselves in a community against the unknown insecurity of unfathomable waters all around.

Yet, from without the self imposed limits we inflict upon ourselves, we remain frighteningly able to perceive in our acknowledgment of this mighty stream, the singular form of reference from which we may quench the innate human thirst to define ourselves and all that exists around us.

And so, drinking deeply, we draw forth and merge in its universal sustenance.

Thus, since time immemorial, this has been the elixir that flows both within us and "without" us. It's essence, once and forever, is the eternal lifeblood that hallmark's individual, as well as communal, human identity.

To draw from this river of curious liquid is to imagine that we become enabled and empowered. And indeed, in this continuum, we do. For though we fear our creation, it is fated to be our springboard to freedom.

In it's potions we come to know the "value" of knowing, and through it, we chart the successful negotiation of past pools and rapids where once sailed those who's bequeathment is the testament of their posterity here in our present.

The path of our future, to where the waters that carry us someday will meet the sea, can only be known with certainty as being within the dominion of future generations.

We are presently blinded at the point where our chart reaches the edge of our known world. What lies beyond remains forever inscrutable. Only a distant rumble may now and then signal the ominous rage of a torrent whose fury is occasioned by what cataracts lie ahead.

As a result, those wishing to divine the emergence of the potentiality of events that may determine the time traveler's future, are reduced to pay homage to the labor of tortured waters, and to solace themselves with the insecure wage paid so poorly by conjecture.

Nonetheless, by understanding the nature of the medium others have already sailed over, and by knowing how it's flow has led us to where it is that we currently find ourselves, a certain confidence can be gained. This understanding is a gift and not a right, yet it is one that enables us to reasonably sound the opaque potentiality of waters we have yet to reach.

The fate of those in the past who have been stricken from the vessel's roster and who's worlds have perished with them, serve as stark notice that sailing upon waters plumbed in the present as "mark Twain" is no guarantee of the potentiality of the sudden and unforeseen wrench and tear that signals the emergence, from out of blackest of depths, of a future "tom sawyer."

In both the physical and metaphysical world, these occurrences are often difficult to anticipate. They are usually best seen from the vantage point of hindsight. They are denizens of the realm of lurking and submerged potentialities; events who's physical emergence are but a worldly embodiment of the ethereal forms assumed by the metaphysical torpedoes of seemingly random chance.

They exist in perception of caprice, and, (in our particular 3d continuum) as a function of numbers so vast as to reduce to a complete impotence the power of humanity over the calculation of it's own destiny,

These forces have usually already surfaced to wreak the changes that will eventually be wrought on subsequent human history before being noticed.

This is often accomplished via the aegis of events of insignificant inexactitude, inflicted at moments that warrant little or no attention.

In this way is divine notice served upon mortal hubris. Eternal 3d limits are placed, as well, upon overweening arrogance rooted in the belief of our unlimited ability to manipulate our environment and exercise ultimate control over our own destiny as a people, a nation, or a species.

We are then sent, scrambling pell mell, back to the beginning of the text book, to begin working all over again, upon an equation who's already established subtotals no longer add up.

In other cases, history is changed by events who's genesis has sprung forth from the forehead of the unanticipated numbers that chaos is predicated upon.

They then simply grow ever greater as a dynamic, to eventually become a self evident determinant to all future generations.

Thus is the pride of man brought low from the unexpected or unrecognized occurrence of random potentialities. As with the best laid plans of mice and men, so it is that these "events" are the true determinants that drive the flow of history and thereby, so often dictate the future form and disposition of the waters our ship will someday sail upon.

-CliffMickelson