A new theory of everything
If you take the yes and the no, and add to it the neither
and the both, you are almost there. With the addition of maybe, you’ve arrived.
Congratulations.
You now have all the Boolean search terms needed to explain
what’s going on in another person’s head; a sort of “Grand Unified Theory of
Interpersonal Relations.”
Using this simple and elegant group of tools, you can now
find answers to almost nothing, unless you consider the infinite series of new
questions that come from the one you asked to be a type of answer.
(Or, you can just fall back on the word-on-the-street
version of all that is true -- it depends, and I don’t know.)
(By the way, the real answer to everything turns out not to
be 42, as previously reported. It’s .422 --which shows both the perils of the incorrect
use of decimals, and the importance of carrying out your work to at least three
places.)
Example:
What was he thinking?
I just walked out of my bedroom into the living room and
started desperately searching for something. What I was looking for I did not
know at the time I started looking. I’ve found that usually the answer comes to
me in the middle of my searching – and that the initiating of the action is
enough to start a clock in me that forces me to really bare down and get into a
hyper-real game mode of focus – and this trick of the mind prevents me from
looking like a doddering fool, or pre-senile, in front of other people. When it
works.
It took a while, but I finally discovered that I was looking
for my pants. I had none on and was dangling uncomfortably, what with all my
rushing around.
I went back into the bedroom and put my pants on. I’m still
not sure how they got off me in the first place.
Answers:
- Yes,
he’s nutty, like a fruitcake from Georgia in the summer. It won’t be
too long before he drools at movies and washes
his cat in hydrogen peroxide for the sweet smell of clean.
- No, he
was just preoccupied with his thoughts, “Poets are working even when they
are looking out windows.” He might have dropped a metaphor and was worried
it might turn into an allusion if he left it alone for too long.
- Neither,
though he likes to be naked when he walks around, he was looking for his
car keys – just to make sure that he had not left them in his car -- or in
the front door lock. The pants thing was incidental -- a form of
serendipity.
- Both,
he is making creative excuses, and using jokes to cover both his disdain
for the wearing of pants and the loss of some of the screws he’s been
using to hold his brain in.
- Maybe,
he saw a new comet blazing across the sky outside his window and was looking
for a camera to get a photo to put on his blog, or, he had to pee badly.
He does not wear pants, they make him look fat.
(The answer is D)
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