My grandfather is the greatest man I will ever know. Perhaps this assertion puzzles you. What makes a man great? Frankly, I'm sure it would look silly on paper. It's more of a feeling or an understanding. Furthermore, this isn't a collective agreement amongst people. He is the greatest man I will ever know.

Nobody is perfect, and my grandfather is no exception. He's boring and dull. He was an accountant and likes to talk about money. He's close-minded and certainly not free from prejudice. But he has astounding qualities I believe I will find in no other person. His virtues are patience, acceptance, humility, and honesty. He is forcefully headstrong, and unearthly down to earth. What makes him the greatest, however, is the candid, disinterested approach he takes to everything. If he has thought something appropriate or worthwhile, he has done it. If he has thought something distracting or pernicious, he has abstained. He lives solely for justice, seeing life through a polarizing lens of two colors -right and wrong. His life is a manifestation of a rule. He is unaware that he himself exists.

He's also the only person I know who was born on the 27th of any month (this one). High five grandpa.

If allergies were a guy I would sue his ass. If they were a girl I would sue her ass as well. I would sue for ten years of red, watery, itchy eyes, nasal congestion, fatigue, malaise, running hindrances, detriment to my boyish good looks, and the loss of a life without these insurmountable hurdles. I would sue for a modest $50 million (acknowledging that the value between my current life and an allergies-free life is widely agreed upon to exceed double that). I would sue for negligence, the bastard having no reason whatsoever to be such a jackass. The judge would rule in my favor and I would be rich. I would travel the world giving inspirational speeches to people from all walks of life. My motto would be "Don't let life pass you by....sue that jackass guy."

I was just driving by the high school and noticed runners, flags, tents, screaming....Home CC meet! I'd arrived just in time for the guys race. Tracked down Timo (Coach Sheard), said hey, then stationed myself for primetime. Twas a slaughterfest. Our #1 runner, Parker, who recently broke Tim's 2 mile high school record (in 9:09) came through the first mile of the 5k in 4:41; most of the guys ran together and the #7 runner was through in 5:05. Now in my time our team was damn good, but this team would manhandle many intercollegiate teams. The neon polyester Tees and striped jerseys, a stark contrast to what we wore, were pretty fucking intimidating. They finished in places 3,5,7,10,11,12, and 13 - our #7 guy was ahead of most team's #1, and ahead of all team's #2 save one. Nuts!

How awesome is GoogleMaps? Very awesome is the answer.

Anybody else think the federal government is super sketchy? I hope the economy tanks so deep that somehow all my debt vanishes. Or maybe if I feign bankruptcy the feds will just bail me out? Sounds good to me.

Ordered some books. Darwin's Dangerous Idea: Evolution and the Meanings of Life, by Daniel Dennett and The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, by Sam Harris. Richard Dawkins, author of the famous The God Delusion, Dennett, Harris, and the hilariously amusing, witty, snobby, over zealously intellectual Christopher Hitchens combined forces to produce The Four Horsemen (and surely also to promote their books) a taped discussion of religious faith, its influences, and the vulnerable state of open-minded reason in America today. I've watched some of it on YouTube, as well as some of Hitchens' and Dawkins' debates with intellectual priests and rabbis.

What's frustrating is the dearth of analytical books that propose a positive overall value of faith and religion today, and thus a balance to the message above. What does exist either collapses under the same simple, convincing arguments or is thoroughly unscientific or thin with little compelling evidence. So I'm reading multiple translations of the New Testament, striving to maintain an analytical eye, yet cannot get through more than a couple pages at a time without laughing out loud.

I'm about to finish The Elegant Universe, on superstring theory by Brian Greene (awesome), and Capitalism and Freedom, by Milton Friedman, not that I'm particularly interested but it's a classic. Up ahead is Cosmos, by Carl Sagan, and The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, by Nassim Nicholas Taleb, who, interestingly, is a professor of Sciences of Uncertainty.

What do you get when you combine friends and camping and beer and driving a lot and liquor and family and listening to shitty (great?) music and cigarettes and friends and ping pong and swimming late at night illegally in a community pool? Sound sleep. Good solid REM-packed don't remember whether some of my thoughts were while awake or asleep sleep. It's nice. I don't know what happened to the one/night policy but it is needed again for sure. Nicotine sucks.

The bottle of Johnnie Walker is pleasingly juxtaposed.

Have you ever thought that other worlds exist within the same confines of spacetime that ours does? Prolly not, but Alea alluded to such a possibility last night. It results from disparate thoughts, but nonetheless may be possible.

First, superstring theory portends that all matter can be broken down into units of energy, and the differences in matter only arise due to the varying vibrations of those units, like musical notes. Just as certain organisms are only tuned in to a specific auditory range, we humans in our natural state may be tuned in to only some range or type of these vibrations. Perhaps there are types of matter that we are utterly unaware of, and further, cannot know.

Second, there are incredible advances almost daily in subatomic physics and indeed there are particles that exist that we would not encounter humanly, per se, discovered only through clever experiments and manipulation, such as neutrinos and muons, and their corresponding antiparticles. In fact, as you read this, billions of neutrinos are passing through your body, ejected from the sun and en route to some unknown destination.

Third, there are common threads of experience reported by individuals who take certain mind-altering drugs. For example, many people on LSD report the sightings of small, elf-like creatures that in description largely conform to the reports of others.

Is it possible that drugs affect the mind, tampering with the harmonics of matter and energy, in such a way that clue one in to different notes of life? Are these individuals varying their spectrum of human experience that allows them to sense matter that doesn't just exist in their mind, but exists in reality, in fact, right before them, while not being sensible without the induction. Physicists are now contending that there are some eleven dimensions in the universe. How high will that figure eventually rise to? How many unknown frequencies and types of matter surround us? I'm inclined to think that the presence of other worlds swirling around us is not only possible, but probable.