# The spork, and how do I know? %% #fiction/publish | #on/uncertainty | #on/knowledge | #on/liminal %% From the Snowpeak website: "Designed in Japan using a historic manufacturing process, the Snowpeak Titanium Spork has been an icon since its launch. Durable, lightweight, and versatile, use the spork anywhere, whether you’re eating at home or outside. The Titanium Spork is available in blue, purple, and green anodized titanium. Pair the Titanium Spork with a [Titanium Trek Bowl](https://www.snowpeak.com/products/trek-titanium-bowl-stw-003t "Trek Titanium Bowl") or [Ti-Double 450 Mug](https://www.snowpeak.com/products/titanium-double-450-mug?_pos=18&_sid=0a685878c&_ss=r "Ti-Double 450 Mug") $10.95" I found the spork walking on the beach in Clearwater on Tuesday at about noon. I used to have one, a splurge after a bigger than expected bonus, when I worked for a company I co-owned making more than I felt I deserved serving patients in our local emergency department. Could this be the same spork? I had lost it, sometime, somewhere. I had been to Clearwater beach in about, 2015. Was that before or after I lost the spork? There are four ways of knowing, says John Veranke, a philosopher from Canada. - [Propositional Knowing](app://obsidian.md/Propositional%20Knowing):Knowing knowledge, facts beliefs, thinking knowing, knowing _about_ - [Procedural knowing](app://obsidian.md/Procedural%20knowing): _knowing how_, which gives us power in the world - [Perspectival knowing](app://obsidian.md/Perspectival%20knowing): knowing how to see the world, how to take it all in, what tools to use in what circumstances, how to sense what is needed - [Participatory knowing](app://obsidian.md/Participatory%20knowing): knowing how to relate to our world. Knowing our place, being in [flow](app://obsidian.md/flow) with what's around us, how we handle complexity What I was wondering, and uncertain about, unknowning about, is this, well there were three things really. Thing one: would I be able to take this spork through security at Tampa International Airport tomorrow at 4 pm when we tried to board our flight back? How will I know? Propositional - does a spork conform to the rules for TSA? Will that TSA agent know it is a spork? Procedural - do I know how to talk to a TSA agent concerned about my spork? Perspectival - how will that agent see the world? How will I see the agent? How does a spork made of titanium show up on a scan of my carry-on luggage? Participatory - does it matter that I'm pre-checked? Does it matter that I'm white? And, thing two: discontinuity vs continuity. The transition from not knowing to knowing is fascinating. Like if you loose the same amount of hair every day, why is it you wake up one day to realize you are bald. And thing three: knowing and liminality, how that space of not knowing what is? Was the scan my dad just had going to show that his glioblastoma was back when we found out in a few hours? And if so, what will I say, how will I hold him? How will I know? Can a tumor that always comes back ever be gone? Was it there all along? Is it, inexorably, a part of him, or separate from him? Was it formed when he was a child, playing in the beams of an x-ray machine they had in the shoe store, designed to sell properly fitting shoes to my Grandma Edna? Was it formed in 2012 when a benzene molecule was belched in the exhaust plume of a bus in Athens on a family vacation? That particle migrated over the decade through generations of macrophages through his now ragged circulatory system and landed in his right frontal lobe, eventually transforming the DNA of a glial cell from good to bad? Would we have gone if we had known? What does it mean to sit thumb-scrolling autonomously through the email that both distracts me and gives my life meaning, while I wait to hear if this version of Schroedinger's cat is alive, or not? What way of knowing, of being, is this? Lon Setnik 2023-12-20