There used to be a town near where I live, called Sweetland. It's gone now and the town that remained, North San Juan, is right on HWY 49 where Sweetland road meets 49, a forked off dirt road of many potholes leads to my shack teetering on the edge of the old diggins, the knife edge of wilderness and civilization. When you live on the border of something, you get to choose more easily in which land you dwell. I can walk out the front of my house, and be in town within 5 minutes or I can walk out the back door and be in the wilds within 5 minutes.
Choice is a heady drug. You start imbibing, and you just want more. I can choose my environment, I can change my environment through choice. So I do. I choose to live in Sweetland, rather than North San Juan. This is the opposite of the Cleveland Harbor effect. In the Cleveland harbor effect, you want to know where you actually are and strain your sensory inputs to match what you think ought to be. With the Sweetland Bypass effect, you choose where you want to be and strain your sensory inputs through a filter which rejects those that don't match your choice of environment. I'd rather live in My Sweet Land than "North San Juan" - named so by militaristic miners with fond memories of kicking Spanish ass in the war and wresting Puerto Rico away - although the name is sorta apt in that we have a very nice mild climate matching their memories of San Juan, Puerto Rico. But I prefer Sweetland. So I choose it. Don Quixote chose to be a heroic fighter of giants rather than a passive observer of empirical windmills, and we make fun of him for choosing a reality different from the one we'd already agreed upon. But I say he was a genius. When somebody writes or comments pejoratively "tilting at windmills", I disagree with the denigration. Tilting at windmills is a lot smarter than taking on real giants. Real giants can kick your Spanish ass, whereas windmills go 'round and 'round and 'round predictably, smoothly. If your timing is off, you will end up on your ass, but you won't get stomped into the dirt. Moq_Discuss mailing list Listinfo, Unsubscribing etc. http://lists.moqtalk.org/listinfo.cgi/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org Archives: http://lists.moqtalk.org/pipermail/moq_discuss-moqtalk.org/ http://moq.org.uk/pipermail/moq_discuss_archive/
