Prologue Trans-Siberian Express

Tuesday 21st April
Oxford, Bristol, Riga

...It has been a hectic week trying to wrap up my life yet again without quite finishing anything. We've been running around with the composure of a desperados as we try to get ready to leave the country. Our passports are bulging with pre-arranged - full page - visas for Russia, China, and Mongolia. My end of year tax returns are still outstanding. Our train is booked for 12:27pm. That's ok though, because it is now 11:58am and I still haven't packed. M is developing a nervous tic...

Human motivation has a razor-sharp focus, somewhat like a spotlight. We work best with iterations. Some of the greatest inventions in history have been dubious at best. Fire, yes-yes-yes. That was more of a discovery, moreover a description. So was triganometory, geometory, biology, chemistry. Granted, the wheel was a fine piece of engineering; so was the toaster. What our species tends to feel more at home with though is expanding on initial ideas and refining them. The cutting implement, ceramics, plastics, farming, the motor-car, the tent, the watch, the computer, the plane, you-tube... ok Facebook is maybe an exception to the rule. We focus and we grip tightly and we never let go. That is maybe what defines reality for us. These rules keep the nuts 'n' bolts of things firmly riveted down so they don't start coming loose and leave us mowing our neighbour's lawn with our pants on our heads at 3am. It is normal when you are young to want poke the constraints of our reality with a stick, but why would we want to do so when we grow older? Why would you take some pale lancet and start to make incisions in what appears as normal? Things are fragile enough for goodness sakes. How do we define what makes sense to us? Maybe using some kind of scientific rigour, or religion, or drugs. It is still a grudgingly acknowledgable fact that most of the time it could be said we are making things up as we go along. The hardest of sciences continue to deal with hypotheses that constantly fail leaving the eminent experts in the field introducing concepts to fit the gap in methodologies that doesn't make sense. We might as well be modelling Langston's ant in terms of the perspective we can summon. Mmmm... 'well you see people we know that this ant will turn this way for n number of moves because we understand the rule structure and then... wtf! Why did the little arse buggerer just do that? he's only got two rules!!'

The truth is we don't really understand very much, we just have spent a long time refining rules that explain things up until a certain point. After that, it's pants on the head and gunning the two-stroke engine.

Deconstructing normal behaviour is, for a human animal, not taking the long view. It encompasses no small amount of upheaveal. In wildlife studies animals that cannot factor what they consider reality go insane. Parrots are prone to pulling their feathers out. Monkeys have been known to de-fur themselves, and cover themselves their own faeces. Me.. I've decided to quit working once again and travel to China through Siberia. I might even rub excrement on myself to gain some impetus. We'll see how the next 48 hours work out. Whatever happens though, it's going to be fun.