Fate, Karma and/or the hand of God

I was driving to work yesterday morning, which is not an unusual thing. The route I take involves making a left turn onto a side street, also not an unusual thing. This particular morning, I had come to the intersection and was ready to make a left. This was a four-way intersection, in this case with an oncoming car, a white SUV. Coming up to the intersection, I looked and saw that I had plenty of time to go through the intersection before the SUV came too close to make the turn safe. The kind of thing most of us do a thousand times and don't give it a second thought. So I went through the intersection, and nothing happened. The SUV continued towards the intersection, and I headed down the side street towards the parking lot I use. However, there was a car behind me, a tan Honda coupe of some type. By the time I had made the turn, the SUV was far too close for a car to cross in front of it. Yet the Honda behind me went anyway. I found this out first by the screech, horns and crunching sound behind me. Oh crap, I thought, a car crash. The Honda had pretty much the entire front end torn off. The SUV had hit it at an angle and apparently slid off sideways- the result was that it rolled over and was now lying on the roof. None of this happened to me- I was completely unaffected by the accident, but stopped and called the police. Luckily, a fire truck was only a block or so away. I know I didn't cause that accident; I could not possibly have made the driver of that Honda try to get through the intersection. But still, if I had left for work earlier or later that morning, things would have been different. One event led to everything that happened afterwards. But then, logically, everything else that anyone else did or did not do that morning also affected the outcome. It's the Butterfly Effect- a butterfly flaps its wings in Peking and the result is a hurricane in Florida. The butterfly could not have known all the consequences of its actions. And for every butterfly that did flap its wings, there might just as easily have been a butterfly that did not. No one event, I think, determines an outcome, but that same one event can tip the outcome one way or the other. I found there is really no such thing as pure chaos, but rather a web of complexity. However, this web is so dense and interrelated, no man or machine has the sheer calculating power to sort it out beyond a few moments in time in any real-world application.

The Salesman, Part 1

Born to be a

god among salesman

working the skinny tie

Got to

drag myself back to Now

Door to door

the world unreal in neutrality,

endless green Dodge on

the freeways of 1950's midwest-

Nationwide he rolls, five AM

over black ribbon shining,

How far until the

next city, next gas station, the

Next Big Score? The

Space Age lurches forward