I’ve had a couple of bad days. Don’t know why, and, actually, don’t much care, but I do want them to stop.

Work is not hard at the best of times, but it can be really busy, but right now it is slowing down and so the pace is a bit dream-like. Not a good dream, but dream-like.

So after work today I’d had enough for the nonce and thought “where can I go so I will feel better?” I flipped through my inner-file of places-that-I-like-to-go, waiting for the emotional hit that shoots up a big red finger pointing down from my metaphorical sky saying “THIS ONE.” It turned out to be a Chinese-Canadian restaurant (you know the kind that sells standard North American-style rice and noodle Chinese food along with grilled cheese and burger fare.

I took a booth (cracked Naugahyde), ordered tea, and opened my backpack.

As it turned out I had five books with me. Here they are: Proust and the Squid, Empire of Illusion, The Waves, a collected edition of Nazim Hikmet and Science and the Riddle of Consciousness. So I sat there waiting until the big red finger did its thing again and Lo! it chose Riddle.

Once I started to feel a bit better (took two pots of tea and about a quarter of my plate of food and about 10 Foss pages), I started to wonder what it is about this combination that has the power to do its thing on my grey-day mood.

I’m of lower-class origins. My father was a slum kid (East End London). My mother was of middle class parents that started as lower class people who made it through their small business. When stressed, I seem to return to those places where I feel more comfortable – Naugahyde seats being an exemplar of that kind of place. With respect to the reading, philosophy at its best is not about answers (of which I already have far too many) but about dispensing of the things one thinks one knows, and allowing some air back into the moldy old cognitive/emotional system. I also have a somewhat practical bent, that is, I don’t like Philosophy because of its puzzle-like nature, and I don’t like arguing about zombies and alternate-earths. (I will never make an analytic philosopher.) What I like about philosophy is that it helps me examine, discard and reinforce, various bits of my model of the universe so that it comes as close as is possible (given the state of my knowledge) to what actually exists in the world.

That is important to me: what actually exists in the world.

Assumptions I make: I assume the world is actually there. I assume I am really in it and I assume that when I apprehend it, I am actually apprehend something that is actually there. (Yeah, I know, the senses are easily tricked. But that doesn’t mean the world isn’t there, and it doesn’t mean the senses aren’t “reading” what is actually there.) I also assume that the “I” that I feel as being me is in reality a composite of evolution, body, environment, experience, and a whole whack of neurons busily bitzing away. In short, for me philosophy must be useful to hold my interest and I am most definitely a materialist.

So there I am in all my base principles and to those I return when I need shoring up. And I did feel better. The fact that I did, I find interesting. I wonder if I kept track of what I home on to when feel bad (i.e. where the big red finger points), whether it will follow the same pattern or whether there are links between particular sorts of bad days and particular sorts of comforting activities? I’ll have to think about that. So I gathered my stuff, sighed contentedly and drove home.

Then I got there and my internet was out. Meh.