Action Figure Daniel

Blog

  • Wondering what a non-two-wheel bicycle is

    I went to the Library Saturday to get a book to read. Because I had no quarters to pay to park in the parkade I parked on the street a little ways past the library and enjoyed a nice sunny walk. From the place I parked to the Library I walked past City Hall and the following sign:

    My first thought was “oh, they don’t want anyone getting ran over, this makes sense.” Then I stopped and walked back to the sign to reread it. My second thought was “what kind of BIcycle has more than TWO-wheels?” If it has three wheels we call it a TRIcycle (tri meaning three) and if it has four it is fondly known as a ‘quad’ and is usually motorized. Further, it has just one wheel it is a unicycle and a bicycle with training wheels is exempt as it has four wheels.
    My third and last thought on this sign was “why, exactly, did they (meaning whomever had the sign made) clearly and precisely distinguish between BIcycles in general and TWO-wheel BIcycles?”
    As I was wondering this I got my camera and took a picutre.

  • The Lessons I Never Was Taught

    I was thinking the other day of all the things that my parents and the world they came. It was a very different world. A world that was a lot harder than the one that I grew up in. Not in the sense of the peer pressure and the bad things all around but in the sense of the personal tradegy and lessons that one goes through as a child. When I grew up it was towards the end on the time when a child could actual injure themselves on toys.

    As I have gotten older I have realized that my parents have given me a lot, they have also taught me a lot of extremely valuable life lessons. I am grateful for these.
    Perhaps equally importantly, I am grateful for the lessons they didn’t teach me. The lessons that hurt so much they clip your wings and make you not want to fly any more. The lessons that take an incredibly strong person, like my parents, to survive. My parents didn’t just survive, they carefully kept their child from having to go through the same painful experiences.
    This is not to say that I have led a sheltered life. It has been somewhat sheltered, enough to keep me safe but not to much that I can’t stand on my own. But the dark, bitter moments of life, the ones that are so easy to pass on, those haven’t been passed on. They were carefully hidden so that only as an adult, with my eyes opened to the world, can I even see hints of such moments from their lives.
    I am forever grateful for the lessons my parents taught me. I am also forever grateful for the lessons my parents didn’t teach me.

  • A Most Fortuitous Encounter

    I stopped by the Canary Compound to get some of the bottled water I left there, noting that I was found myself fortunate to have purchased it before the bottle deposit, because the stash in my trunk had been depleted. As I loaded the water into Elazar and couple of cars drove past and I thought to myself “how fortunate would it be if one of those car had the lady that bought the house next door?” In the time it took me to arrange things to make room for the water a lady exited one of the cars and came over. It was indeed the lady who had bought the house next door. We talked and swapped important information. It was indeed a most fortuitous encounter.

  • Beware the Monster within

    I was watching a rather good Batman: The Animated Series episode (“I am the Night”) where Batman paraphrases Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher who once said “Be careful when you fight the monsters, lest you become one.” I reflected back on a conversation I had had earlier in the day and realized that I had started to become a monster, the very kind of monster that I was fighting.

    Further I realized that the sane are the people are the ones who have to fight the hardest. Their fight is not hard because the insane are particularly strong but rather the sane people ones are trying maintain order and the insane are okay with letting it all fall apart. So the sane not only have to battle all the crazy things insane people do but they have to maintain the very ideals that they are fighting for. They can’t fight fire with fire without walking joining the insane. Sure they have some explanation or excuse, but so do the insane. We tag them as insane because their reasoning doesn’t make much sense and the sane people’s reasoning stops making sense too, then the sane have become insane themselves.

    These two thoughts together make me think about how easy it is in a war to become the very thing you are fighting to destroy.

    How easy it is how the monster within to tame to person without.

  • Comments, Please

    I am fascinated by the broad reach and depth present. From happy, bubbly overflowing joy to vast, barren empty sorrow, it is all here. With a sweep of a hand you could capture nearly the entire repertoire of human emotion. This is a rare collection to see all displayed at once. My favorite part was “the moment”. That one single instance where all that you are, your blank superficial face, your true feelings, your sorrows and pains, your hopes and dreams, your demons and monsters, even you Gethsemane, all of these, you realize, tell the wonderful story of where you have been, where you are going and most of all where you are now. This is my story, realized in the one moment. But even after that moment it is too easy to just go back to what I was before. No matter how much you pretend it didn’t happen, you know. You know in the back of your mind it did happen.

    We were talking about the airplane flight, right?