I deny ritual outright. I see positive and negative consequences. Firstly, most ritual denies spontaneity. The compulsion even to have that morning cup of coffee before anything else after dragging oneself out of a comfy bed deletes anything residual from dreams. They fade quickly.
I need again create a dream diary. In the past, it has spawned stories and poems - even sometimes music. I’ve arranged lines of code in unfamiliar fashions because of dream piques.
I’ve returned to a ritual, as I always do when I am with my parents in Seminole. Today is time to delete it. I mustn’t set specific schedules. If I feel like writing when I awaken, I can deny myself that first cup of coffee for even hours as I work on November. Sometimes musical flourishes arrive in dreams. They can be captured upon awakening with Lilypond easily.
I do walk in the arid park every day. These walks are never at a specific time, however, and are geared towards Spanish vocabulary. This semi-routine was ridden with more creativity in past lives here. I’d pause at random benches (there are fourteen, methinks) and scribble small epithets about a certain position of the atmosphere. I, even now, use those as jumping off points for weirdness.
I am most concerned when a ritual becomes a habit. Habit implies to me something done in a similar manner repeatedly but without much thought. Rituals, though repetative, can be carefully planned each time, though a template is always the starting point. I’ve written elsewhere that habits frighten me. The more ingrained they become, the more one is a slave to unconscious processes.
Beyond ritual and habit comes stagnation. When I was a child, I was fascinated by small programs which created virtual robots on the screen of my Tandy Radio Shack Hovnisimo Shittypie that learned. Initally, the robot was placed in the center of the play area - a bounded arena containing various obstacles. It set off in a random direction. Each time it collided with an obstacle, it’d remember its velocity and angle of impact. Then, it bounced off at a random slant. Again and again it gathered data until it found the easiest circuit within the arena. The path of least resistance! It no loger had to gather data because it’d be ensconsed in a routine. A ritual. A habit.
My parents are like those virtual robots. They have, over years and years living in my ex-grandmother’s house in Seminole, found their path of least resistance. Being a bit more complex than a virtual robot, however, their habits deviate occasionally, but are mostly set in ahem (red ((sand))) stone. Even though their jobs are in the dim past, weekends are reserved for cleaning the house. This example strikes me as bizarre - scary.
Mealtimes are also set. I believe they would be even if my mother did not suffer from cukrovka.
Modifying the details of rituals may give them more life, more intellectual stimulation. I’ve noted before that even tiny variation in lifestyle invigorates me. John once told me that I gravitate towards change. That was in 1995. Yeah, I still do. Ritual is fatty between dendrite and axon. Habit is akin to death (muscle memory not included). Shave a different species every morning. Don’t just stick with goats.
