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Psych Prof Farbstein once said that most inventions have correlates in nature, especially in the human body (pens are penises, hinges are joints, etc). Enrapturing idea. And then there are things that don’t fit. More basic things: there’s no such thing as a parallelogram in nature, as far as I can tell. Not immediately accessible to the senses anyway. It’s something that came forth spontaneously from humans, an invention of human abstraction.

Also: the first time I was old enough to notice these things and up in an airplane, the thing I found most shocking was all the squares everywhere: all that land squared, appropriated, made to serve a purpose, a purpose for whoever appropriated it. Just like the wonderful views outside Manhattan high-rises: other buildings, layers of square upon squares. It’s the human disease.

So--the older I get the more I think Nietzsche was right: I see power everywhere. Bureaucratic power over other humans is just an obvious form for obvious people. More profoundly, there is the power derived from power over nature, imposing oneself on it. Imposing one’s own order, one’s own laws on it (autonomy = self + law).

Then there is the flip side: destruction is *the* nightmare, penultimate only to nothing at all, which is luckily hard to think about. It comes in subtle forms, too: like how after a big rain, little rivers tend to carve themselves through the asphalt. Always the tendency towards entropy: the return to disorder from all that hard-wrought order. Terrifying. Order requires power and thus order is power, which doesn’t work out logically—but what’s that question? What do you believe even though you can not prove it? That'd be one answer, with the addendum that power, in turn, more than anything, is everything...