A major path to insanity is solipsism. One of the best ways to acheive solipsism is to observe how your personal radar works.
Recently, the importance of cupholders hit my radar screen. Someone very important to me bought a car and one of the criteria on her list of must haves was a cupholder, because the one on her old car was broken.
Last night, the importance of cupholders was mentioned on a major network newscast, putting it ahead of wireless technology in designing a car.
Apparently, the importance of cupholders existed before it hit my radar. Looking at the internet, it appears that it made the scene as an issue in 2005.
However, solipsism admits of the possibility that the importance of cupholders was something I created myself, and since I also created the internet, (a concept once mistakenly attributed to solipsist Al Gore) my mind actively placed the references to cupholder importance into it.
Solipsism accounts for the fact that things approach my radar and then suddenly the whole world is talking about them. It is much simpler to posit solipsism than some Jungean theory of Universal Consciousness as accounting for my ability to hand pick the next big radar item.
The first phenomenon that I picked out was Billy Joel, in 1972, and then Stephen Sondheim back in 1975. Once I realized what was happening, it became a habit to search out unusual items to disprove solipsism. I've been mildly successful with Flim and the BB's , Erik Satie, and Wolf Kahn, but a total failure with the theory of dreams as deprogramming, the resurgence of figurative art, post-modernist art, Objectivism (who would have thought that Alan Greenspan would control the United States Economy for 30 years!), the universe being shaped like a fractal pinecone (instead of a simple ball), Google (I was using it as a homepage in 1996), Vermeer and his most famous model, Scarlett Johanssen, Seinfeld (my biggest failure), and Marvel Comics. I am currently testing Alex Wurman against the theory, as well as Booth Tarkington and hydrogen peroxide. Ultimately, I have a feeling that solipsism itself will become mainstream, which probably will coincide with the second coming of Christ.
You may wonder if I'm serious. Of coure I am, and I'm also completely cynical about it. This is my prerogative since I most likely invented Ayn Rand and Aristotle too, along with logic.
Does being a solipsist make me God? No, I don't think so. To me, God must be playing out some script or test with me, but my only recourse in this life is to believe in Him, because really, its either Him or Me.
If there really were people who would be reading this blog, and if there were some twenty year olds reading it (there won't be, either one, because I don't have room for them in the world) they would now be critiquing this post with Aristotle's good ol' logic and putting me off as a certified confused person.
That's just fine with me, as long as they don't discover Booth Tarkington, Ginastera, and the Bahamavention infomercial.
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