Out of a sense of duty, I am compelled to “share” my personal reflections with you, dear jolly good reader, along a guided prompt I find not too favourable or fascinating. Alas, these are the cards I have been dealt and I shall do my best to provide some modicum of flair or entertainment while I go on about the profoundly exotic place in which I have chosen to write this so called piece which somehow makes a mockery of more objective academic writing (Do not get me started on whether one should really be able to say people boil down to several behaviours and can merely be explained by causal effects that can be observed; one could write a fascinating paper about that. Unfortunately, this is not to be, at least in this context; I shall undertake such a task on my own free time because on many levels I think an almost speculative faith in induction that the social sciences employ is an absurdity in and of themselves, but again, very much an involved task that would make a great deal of people uncomfortable. Therefore, for the sake of others and not myself, I will keep my mouth shut about this.) and yet somehow also does something similar to more free-form prosaic pieces. So, as a matter of speeding up this prompt because I know you want to hear some sort of descriptive effort from the tangential labyrinth my mind occupies, the location I believe a great deal of the so called autoethnography will occur in is the very location I have “chosen” to write this, the computer desk in my living room. Of course, it necessitates discussion of what such a fascinating place looks like, so let me do like Faulkner and dazzle with details about inane things like a splotch on the wall that has its figure arranged in such a way it gives off the same aura that the countryside landscape has on the very cusp of dawn, where the light begins to illuminate the midnight black sky, where the warmth renders a singular tear to trickle down one’s face over the sheer majesty of the sight and where singular stories about the breath and beauty of Americana are truly shown. In such instances, a splotch may be looked upon as a shining beacon of hope, a piece of beauty like the Siren’s song, or the beauty of Aphrodite, whose skin was lustrous from its reflective pallor, much like Lenin laid in state. Simultaneously, one also sees such value in the compositional genius of the chaos that created the hitherto unknown presence of the splotch. Thank God for these mindfulness exercises! Waxing lyrical about the aesthetic quality of the splotch and the chaos of papers strewn about the place like the land in Oklahoma! Such majestic insights gained from mindfulness exercises such as violating the structural integrity of a sweet and innocent raisin, who, I do not know if anyone else noticed this, but had a captivating colour, a sort of wine purple colour, which made it stand out enormously and heightened my focus on my feelings about the raisin and the pens, and papers, and the artistically inspired splotch on that wall. Oh that splotch! Such genius that makes me melt within myself because I know I can never attain the sort of genius that created such an oily imprint on the run of the gamut of shades of white from eggshell, to cream, to lacquer, from Benjamin Moore! It inspires me to continually improve my writing each and every day to live up to the mindful insight I gained from raisins, “Nature’s Candy”! Such an emphasis on truly feeling my emotions in a structured way as has seemingly been the proctor’s intention so as to encourage quantitative research to mix with personal experience to create a sort of Frankenstein’s monster of a composition, attempting to combine Romantic and Enlightenment much as one combines separate animals to create a sort of chimaera.

Of course, dear reader, you may find this blog post a bit too polemical. While one may get a whiff of that from such a conventional reading of this post, I can assure you, dear reader, that I have not had any sort of polemical intent behind this piece. I was merely following the instructions to elaborate on the aesthetic and, perhaps visual markers of this location that I have “chosen” to make as the location in which the compositional process of a so called autoethnography is to take place. If you, as the reader, do take this as a sort of polemic against you, or against the prompt, then perhaps it is. However, that was never the intent. Or was it? Perhaps one is being ironic. Or perhaps it is as a matter of fact a sincere composition, being misrepresented by interpretations of the tone? But ultimately, this moment may have caused something to stir within you. One may even recognise a sort of dialectical mix here. By the fact that I have reasonably said you the reader to be intelligent, is it fair to condemn this piece as a polemic? Have I made such a piece that insults you, dear reader, to such an extent that I have antagonised you? Perhaps one might glean something from where I myself am writing. After all, the environ is full of walls as white as members who play golf at a country club and stacked with enough books that I feel as if I have been transported back to Alexandria. There is an office chair, wiry and cushioned by the very clouds Zeus uses for this lightning bolts, a table with wooden chairs with markings that take one to a sort of log mill, with a cloth marked by indigenous patterns from the Andes, and such an assortment of plants one feels right at home in the Little Shop of Horrors. There are sofas around, coloured by a brown fuzziness, a TV, which is thin and has a sort of Black Mirror quality to it, and several other access points. Such a description, plus the addition of an assortment of blacks, browns, and greens about rounds out the description of the house. I do not much find the necessity of describing where I am composing to create a composition that might tentatively be called good; I find it secondary to what the subject matter is about after all and whether one can run with and develop the ideas in a satisfactory manner. But, simultaneously, the mindfulness did put me in the mindset of New Age crap and one sees the triangle carved into the smooth wooden desk as a symbol of the aged quality one feels when composing at this desk, one gets a sense of the mighty oak, one who imposes both loudly and subtly; in its grandeur, one notices the centre role both take in their environs. Oh what a happy day! I can hear the telly, I can see the sort of atmosphere one might fault Game of Thrones for having, for being brown on brown on brown. One might even add a tuba and we will round out the brown experience by having the 3D brown experience, but not the 4D brown experience; I will let you experience that for yourself on the loo. Of course, one may actually believe in the notion of mindfulness being helpful in this scenario, I mean the descriptions could very well have been pulled from such exercises, but I will let you ascertain whether or not I did such exercises or believe in their helpfulness. For all we know I could either be full of it, be being truthful, or both even, where I believe in the helpfulness of such behaviours/practices and I do not, creating a sort of passion I believe is present even here. It may well increase the use of imagery or personal anecdotes. That could well be the case. Or maybe it does not actually help and adds nothing new to the composition that would not be there if such mindfulness exercises were not done. In any case, I am not one to change hearts and minds; if anyone is to think such opinions on these concepts, I am not the interlocutor to look for; you will want just about anyone else here, especially as ultimately no one is looking to have their minds changed. Thus, one can conclude that the questions have been answered; it is just a matter of searching for the answer within you and to interpret this text as I am certain of myself in that I believe I have put the answers in these ruminations.

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