Pa-chunk! Pa-chunk! Pa-chunk! … Pa-chunk! Pa-chunk! Pa-chunk! By our office a residential building is shooting up. We can hear the clear, pneumatic report of a nail gun. The sound, has madeleined thoughts quite different from the intention of securing boards and beams — stirrings of a long distant job, a muggy summer spent assisting a very kind but particularly melancholic contractor (he killed himself a few years later). Because the onset was so strong, random and independent of the source (we weren’t building anything, just sitting at a desk) the sequence got us thinking about randomness and causality, generally.

All of us, and all things generate and are generated by unquantifiable and innumerable effects in all directions at all times (immediately and over time) — but this condition, isn’t generally discussed or even acknowledged. We of course survive by focus and filtering/blocking unwanted details, but this doesn’t mean the countless partials we randomly catalyze don’t exist. Though confidence in the manufacture of a center of attention is a magical and necessary feat — it is also nevertheless a callously vicious equivocation.