headaches, so I've just been copying down stuff lately; more from Spitwad Sutras -
      "He claimed that technology has cut us off from experience. Geometry once linked numbers to shapes. Algebra was a move into abstraction. Calculus abstracted the abstractions. Until now we think in the abbreviated language of technological mnemonics, ICBMs and EIRs. The psychological effect of this move into abstraction has been profound, leading us to seek the displaced concrete in a variety of substitute realities - television, fantasy, magic, and psychosis. What's left of reality now resides in what people call 'bullshit,' dreams, small talk, side issues, private perceptions - literature."

      "The left side of the class decided to create the Octopian Civilization, an undersea world populated in the year A.D. 3333 by a crashed spaceship from the planet Hardon.
      The right side of the class was going to create the Artesian Civilization, a primitive, ethnically mixed culuture located near San Jose in the year 1000 B.C. The inhabitants of this lost civilization wore disco clothes, rode in vehicles resembling '57 Chevys, and were destroyed in the year 700 B.C., when a race riot at a local dance set off an underground neutron bomb placed there by a group of time-traveling Ku Klux Klan members from Turlock, California.
      It became clear to me that my students saw their world surrealistically. Civilization to them was a hodgepodge of images and entertainments arbitrarily organized around the most fantastic premises....This project was teaching them a lot about the way my students sorted through culture. What they noticed, what they neglected. How they saw parts but missed the whole. How their lives were littered with cultural fragments and semiotic smudges that have value primarily as consumer items and status symbols. It was as if they saw every instant as a cinematic moment; every fact, a quiz show answer; and every past deed, an old movie."
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"...the impious man is not he who denies the gods of the many, but he who attaches to the gods the beliefs of the many." - Epicurus, Death Is Nothing to Us