Here are The Fears.
Physical assault and violence. Sickness and dying. Being alone. Rejection or pity. Perceived weakness. Sacrifice with no dividends (hard work and no pay, or not enough pay). Embarrassing, uncomfortable moments. Undefined, unrecognizable fear (or anxiety attacks and bad dreams).
Life could be a relentless cycle of returning episodes from sun up to sun down.
The last one - Undefined, unrecognizable fear - worries him the most, from what I can see. He’s been talking to me endlessly about all these moments in his life, his work, about family and friends, and even about strangers and random occasions and for unexplainable reasons. I might understand him to a level, but he worries me sometimes. On the whole, he might be headed in the wrong direction. He takes in the air so seriously, it could poison him by his own volition. Others, it may seem, breathe without candor, yet smilingly survive. How I can teach him to take those matters elsewhere into his cranium-septum-rectum, without bolding the spirit of a mad warrior, an adolescent anger seething within?
Doing the Math.
This Man In the City, muttering to himself. I’m watching curiously, and slowly regarding it a worthwhile endeavor, I crack a hole in his head and peek within. His mindset smacks a bit Shakespearean, Victorian, Buddhist, or even Confucian. If that makes sense. An echo inside reverberates, horribly difficult to translate, so I put it through software:
Nothing too spicy. Not a spy, see?
Or a hitherto superhero.
Only a drop of the egotistical practical purist, with a momentary sense of mission, purposefully but not dangerous.
Obsessed with some uninvited tea party already in history.
He seems Unclear about some moral objective in his story, which lacks puritanical or pure tyrannical perversion.
Or love. I can’t truthfully tell which.
Confused but struck by the enigma, I pull out a book on the subject of Convenient Thought. This essence might be defined by mathematics, if theories hold, although it must be simple enough as arithmetic in order to tell the story (in the partial differential version, many variables go to zero or are assumed to be unity, per my ye old professor of Dynamics and Fluid Theory):
Man = (public servant x (feigned) poet x (retired) martial artist ) x procrastination factor n-1/ (love * adventure + doom).
The denominator gets a little fuzzy, so we’re not sure about these operations yet.
So, yes, this is an estimate.
Without getting into fractals, the function can be drawn somewhat like this:
C = f(P, B, L)
where C = a civil servants dedication, however it is often confused with Service or Sense of Mission.
P = poetic attempts or purpose in prose, and nothing to do with Scale.
B = a descending logarithmic scale from his time as a Budoka, already >10 years.
L = his prowess as a lover, also decreasing, however L is also a function of Passion, which makes appearances and has predictable behavior over time that has not been deduced. So it is not deducted yet either, and therefore is still not accepted practice in Actuarial Science.
with PFn-1 approaching infinity as n = the number of new ideas that pass into his head when in motion (usually walking, rolling, running, swimming, flying or biking, but never in front of paper or a keyboard).
I have yet to find a panel that can acknowledge, accept or discredit these postulations.
