Human Nature

Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle is a cornerstone, capstone, keystone of understanding the universe as it is. The position and the velocity of an electron, say, cannot both be known. To measure one is to change the other. Observation is active, not passive. It is not only a participant, but a key player. Einstein loathed this idea, and made numerous attempts to disprove it. Eventually he devised a thought experiment whereby it could be shown that even though the two attributes, of position and velocity, could not both be known, they did both exist. The import being that the wave aspect of an electron was an artifact of an incomplete theory, quantum mechanics, rather than a manifestation of actual reality.

The pragmatic response to this was, per Wolfgang Pauli, “One should no more rack one’s brain about the problem of whether something one cannot know anything about exists all the same, than about the ancient question of how many angels are able to sit on the point of a needle.” Very pragmatic. Einstein’s response was that reality is what it is, regardless of what observation can determine at any given moment. Reality is innate. A falling tree makes a noise, whether or not anyone hears it. As opposed to the idea that, not only is there no noise, if unobserved, but there is no tree, or forest, or sustaining continent. Observation manifests the universe.

So, two intellectually antagonistic worldviews. My response is that nothing can ever be unobserved. The universe is just a set of dimensions in which sundry behaviors occur, like a movie on a screen -- playing out not for the attention of the players, but for an audience not on the screen. Call it what you will -- I would call it God.

If so, then quantum mechanics is certainly incomplete. It fails to factor in the idea that it is not observation, but second-level observation, that limits certainty. That first-level observation, divine, is what calls into being, and sustains, the universe. Truly, what is unobserved would not exist. It’s just that there is no such thing as something that is unobserved.

Not helpful, though, my quibble, unless it answers the dilemma in the controversy under discussion. We cannot after all argue the mind of God. Falling trees and dancing angels take us only so far. But to exclude the question, to suppose that because we cannot measure something, therefore we should not trouble our minds about it, is, if nothing else, deeply unscientific. To suppose we can never find the answer is to say we should not look. Sounds like church doctors, refusing to look through Galileo’s telescope because they already know the answer. Thus, Einstein is the more noble in his approach.

It seems, though, that to transcend the uncertainty of this universe, we have to view it from outside. Rather a supernatural requirement. Needing physics to become metaphysics is too great a demand to put on a physicist, though. Physics, requiring measurement, observation, reproducibility -- scientific method -- cannot evolve into something else and yet remain what it is.

So. The universe plays out its drama upon the stage, the screen, of a stretchable, relativistic space. The ultimate … Ultimate Watcher sees it all, position and velocity -- proscenium arch and painted sets and scene changes and the artifice of the entertainment. The players see none of this -- perceiving only the action and emotion of the drama of which they are a part. They may focus, as a character, upon the action, and remove themselves from the emotion -- cold and analytical, that fellow. They may focus on the emotion rather than the objective -- we all know people like that. Thus, position or velocity, but not both completely. You cannot fully participate and observe.

Both views are correct, relativity and quantum. It’s not just that they have a different focus, macro and micro. For all that the maths of one become irrational when applied to the other, the contradiction is one of misapplied tools -- a radio telescope for an electron microscope. Yes, of course there’s more to it than this. But everything is metaphors.

A few weeks ago some friends held a sort of intervention for me. I say it jokingly, and it’s quite witty, but truth be told. I spent a good while in discussion with my son, who is one of the few people to whom I will listen, and one of the few who dares challenge me. Long story short, after some probing and self-examination I came to the question of how is it possible for someone to change. And of course the application to myself. The answer I got was … well I can’t find a brief way to say it. Disturbing, and sad. Posit a question about the nature of life itself, abundant and joyful. I have two responding questions: does it matter, and am I worth it. Apathy and self-loathing. That’s what made me sad -- to see how defeated I am, in my soul.

The quandary of every drug addict. Wanting to change. In love with the poison. Well, first, it’s hard to do these things alone. But actions come from ideas, but ideas change through actions. Whether you want to or not, and regardless of belief, do what is right. If we are players on a stage, we will act out the drama. We don’t know the script. We only know our character. In this dialectal universe, uncertain, velocity or position, emotion or action, loathing or love, free will or predestination, the free choices we make must count as destiny.

It’s odd how the idealists are pragmatic, and the realists are idealists. The quantum mechanics school supposed that there is no electron, it’s just a Platonic potentiality, until it is measured, so let’s not worry about it -- dancing angels. Einstein maintained that there is a concrete reality regardless of observation, and this matters regardless of our being able to know it. The universe seems to be more quantum than relativistic, deep down, deepest down. So it seems, to us. But unobserved electrons exist, regardless. There is always an observer. What shall we trouble our heads with? I’ve offered many paired-opposites here. What is the opposite of apathy and self-loathing?

I had hoped to come to a practical answer, a distinction and application of the limited observer, a quantum observer, that would rationalize the paradox. We see electrons as waves until we actually see them, but by turning an electron into a point we get position, a snapshot, and not a movie. The blur of motion is lost in the fast-shutter of a clear still image. But this is just more metaphor, certainly not original; the thesis and antithesis resolve in a synthesis, surely, here, of God. In other words, the answer is metaphysical. That is, unanswerable. As with all things, uncertainty is answered only, always, and ultimately by faith.

 Most unsatisfying.


 J

Hump

Is there something I wanted to say? Some attempt to convey a meaning, some thought or feeling otherwise utterly covered by impassive flesh in stoic visage? Perhaps the celebration, acknowledgment of an anniversary? Solemn and sacred event of lifeshaking import. So often though conception goes unobserved, and we enjoy the fruition much later without concern regarding causation. Perhaps the onset of my undoing lies deep in the past, physical, psychical or spiritual. Who can say. I have to resign myself now, though, to the seemingly obdurate fact that I am ruined, physically.

 Have you had the amusing experience of observing me in motion? It’s quite comical. I hobble. A little hop, or a slow prance, high stepping and careful footfall. Put it to music and add witty commentary and it would be classic. I’m a clown.

Truth be told, I am ashamed. I mask it, bury it, subdue it with anger or humor or stoicism, but I do not feel, no longer feel like a complete man. I got a hint of something equally deep, or moreso, when I was looking into painkillers. I have refused for a lifetime to drug myself, but I’m getting past that. One must after all function. And in my reading I see that nsaids have a number of side effects. Well I knew that. One of the problems is possible erectile dysfunction. Potential loss of potency? As remote a concern to me as spontaneous breast-development. But when I read it, I thought, oh, I don’t want that. Is this what people, men, have to be concerned about? Gut fat and impotence and balding and visible decay before its time? Well now I am crippled, and so I must learn empathy from my own vulnerability, rather than from a tender heart.

It is an unarguable fact that God is incompetent. Just can’t get done what needs doing. Only capable of one thing, administering his own will to the exclusion of any other. Sort of a monomania. We hear, persistently, of his goodness. Also unarguable. From whom all goodness flows. But not all that flows is goodness. There are other wellsprings. In the world, we drink where we may and are inevitably polluted. God in the by and by will set all things right, but that includes the separating of sheep from goats. Oh well. Ho hum. Lost sheep are found, and speckled sheep are in the same fold as white. If I have to wait until I’m dead to walk without five or six different limps, I shall bide my time in rejoicing and good works.

If the blackness of pain stretches out like the shadow of the moon in front of the sun, ‘tis but a thorn in the side, to humble the flesh and its pride. Life? Life is that thing we hold on to even when we no longer know why. Ashes are sweetness. Morning brings renewal. You will not hear my actual voice raging, you will not see me break things or throw things or commit violence. I rage, I admit, in solitude, but I don’t break things. Hardly ever. Years and decades might pass, between such occurrences. I do not pretend, I don’t paste a false smile upon my lips, because I think pretense is dishonest. It would be more thoroughly honest of course to communicate, confide, seek counsel and comfort in fair fellowship, but you must know by now that it isn’t only my lower extremities that are crippled.

It will not be an insult to those I care about, if I say there is no person I feel comfortable confiding in, to reveal not just circumstances, physical details, but the actual degree of my despair. I know in fact I’m incapable of it. I am certain that only sobs and gasping are available to me. So I keep my communication confined to the level of words only, that which is expressible. For me to trust anyone deeply enough to reveal how crippled I really am, it would feel like death. I’d rather be dying, than actually die.

Well, not utterly ruined. I have a few plans. Swimming, cold and hot, would no doubt help. I wish I weren’t so crazy. The doctor I went to mentioned chemotherapy. Before that, if I can manage it, ice baths. A shock to the system severe enough to reset the immune system? Just a theory, but that’s what I’m good at. Nothing else I’ve tried, and it’s a lot, has made an appreciable improvement. And I expect I’ll have to go on a long, quite long juice fast. If that doesn’t work, I suppose I might fast outright. My thinking is to so stress the body that the immune system stops attacking me and gets its act together. I did a total ten day fast many years ago, and it’s not so very hard. But I don’t want to lose a lot of weight. One of the times I lost one of my boys, I accidentally stopped eating, out of grief, and got into the 150s. Pounds. I’m 6 4. So I know how to not eat. What’s that? You think my priorities are confused? Well that’s your opinion.

Every morning I wake up, unrefreshed, but somehow, stupidly, hopeful. I test my limbs, my hips, knees, toes, somehow expecting the problem to be gone. It’s not unreasonable. I’m doing this to myself. It’s my immune system. My disappointment amuses me. What a fool. God and his refining fire. It’s my heart’s one desire. Burn now, or burn later. Such great expectations he must have of me, to be so patient and so unrelenting.

I just wish he weren’t silent, or rather so general in his communication with me. Unreasonable to expect visions, and the purpose of these trials requires that they include no comfort. The eloquence of wretchedness. God isn’t a moron, but you’d think he’d be able to find some other tool.

I am honest, but I’m not completely honest. I do know what is demanded of me. I just don’t want to do it. God speaks, with complete clarity, through conscience. I hate that.

I am ashamed of myself, my body, my health. I don’t want people to see me like this. Most members of my family have not seen me for, well, a couple of years. I’m supposed to be healthy.

---------

Huh. I wrote that yesterday. Today is another day, and as God is my witness I’ll never be angry again, for a little while. I wasn’t going to put this previous up. I write this way more than on anything else, now. Complain complain complain. I know God is bored with me, and you’d be too, if you had to endure a fuller presentation of my bitterness. But I’m bitter. Why, oh why can’t I make you see that. There are other facets to my semi-preciousness. Just recently in fact I got done celebrating one. My intellectual arrogance. Here, let me educate you on the matter.

More than two decades ago I lured some Jehovah’s Witness to my home to argue theology with them. I was like that in those days. Later the internet came along, and I posted this: Cross or Stake. No need to read it; it’s highly specific and on a frankly incidental topic -- was the Cross a cross, or a stake. JWs, you know, have some odd passions. Well, so do I. I am pleased to suppose that my discernment leads me to reality. Be that as it may, searches and surfers do find their way to that blog and that post, and today for the first time someone left a comment. “You are in serious error.” Etc.

And I responded, and he, and I, and he, and so on. Comments.  It’s irksome, the discourtesy, when people just leave comments spouting their own view without addressing the actual evidence I’ve laid out. They do that. Like with my chronology of Easter week -- read the dang thing, and try to understand it, before you try to make your own case. Standard debate procedure. Please, follow the rules. Arguing is about your own side; discussing is about your side, and the other. If you want to argue, go find your girlfriend. These guys who leave a link to their own voluminous writings, expecting me to go and believe. If I go, I’ll either skim lightly, or deeply review the whole thing, and write a long analysis. Too much work. Like reading books by atheists about atheism. Why bother.

But now I feel guilty. You know, that intellectual arrogance thing. Because I wasn’t striving to annihilate him, but I was condescending. I didn’t want to get all verbose -- the issue is minor -- but my tone was so superior, and the brevity of my response, so elliptical, giving only the conclusion of a rebuttal rather than the formulaic proofs that would lead him to follow the reasoning. I allude to commonly-known rules of logic that I don’t spell out, and the guy seems clearly to not know the rules. That sort of thing. It’s snidely discourteous, or can seem so. And I reference Asbergers. Problem is, I’d bet money that it’s a factor in his life. Obsessive energy and encyclopedic attention to fringe topics. And the conspiracy, the secret-knowledge, the gnostic, puritanical demand for pseudo authenticity. It’s great to be authentic. I strive for it. But affectation is impure. Otherwise, it’s robes and sandals, and the Taliban is right in spirit if not practice.

Almost everything is a compromise, and communication is always a judgment call. You can just see that Kenneth has all his ideas front loaded, and wasn’t looking to interact, just to, uh, be admired for his erudition and his purity. Like me. Difference is, I respond -- I make a diligent effort to react to what is actually before me, rather than overawe someone with a Niagara of predigested information. Going into archaic alphabets is my kind of thing -- but it’s pretty autistic to think anyone else wants a data dump out of the blue on the matter.

Nevertheless, I feel a bit guilty. Maybe Kenneth is not sensitive, and has dusted off his sandals. But what if I’ve done some harm, even if only slight?

You see a man beating his wife. You rise up in righteous wrath and grab him by the neck and slap him with a humiliating open hand across the face, again and again, until he weeps and quivers and soils himself, begging for mercy. You tower over him and point down and warn him with ferocious indignation that he will never again hurt a woman for the rest of his days, or else, for no helpless woman will be abused in your presence while breath remains in you. And some time later, hours or weeks, the rage of his humiliation burns in him until he bludgeons the woman to death with a broken table leg. The heroism, the righteous clarity, what you meant for good has returned only as evil, and no trembling lip or nostril of regret will undo the harm.

How are we to know? Subtler minds than my own have urged for gentleness. We touch each other in countless ways, like sunlight on skin, for any human purpose an infinitude of photons acting as if randomness had meaning. It’s all too much to deal with. I’ve used my intuition and perceptiveness indelicately. I feel guilty. Too late though. (Well, actually not.  He left 11 more comments.  I'm over it.)

Last night my foot, the one that’s about twice as thick as the other, was almost normal, and I felt my spirit yearn for a chance to be humbled by the mercy of God. But this morning it was thick again. I will not be tricked by false mercy. I don’t need a normal foot when I’m in bed. I need it when I’m trying to walk. Don’t toy with me, God. The way I can be arrogant, because I have greater gifts? -- God should be better than that.


J

A Long Letter Home

I wasted a few hours mildly observing a very silly tv program, America Unearthed. It is, theoretically, exactly my sort of thing. I have the notes and research done for a book on the subject, Pre-Columbian Old World contact with the New. Very cool. But I did that work in the mid 90s, and it’s unlikely I’ll ever put it together. Point is, this little tv show (taking an hour to present 7 minutes of material) is exactly, or rather precisely, worthless.

 I’ve seen episodes before. Something about a super-secret Illuminati megacomplex under the Denver Airport; also the Georgia Guidestones. Something about the Masons building and controlling Washington DC. A giant buried rockwall in Texas built by giants.  Conspiracy crap. Oh, I love a real conspiracy. I love them for their rarity. This episode was about an ancient Egyptian presence in Oklahoma; and Celtic. And then one about a medieval Englishman buried in Arizona. Indeed, these things could be true. I’m entirely open to it. I believe there is some very reasonable evidence to support this sort of thing. I like anomalous data.

 But the Egyptian evidence, so called, is a flat 500 pound sandstone rock carved very clearly with an Egyptian style Apis bull.

 I am rusty on this topic, but I used to be pretty confident -- ancient history was the focus of my undergraduate interests. It is clear, in any case, that the Apis carving is certainly meant to be taken as authentic. Is it?

 I googled this particular example and found a nice little skeptical blog addressing the tv show. The bull is dismissed primarily on the grounds that the head is too small -- considered to be a basic error of fraudsters and beginning art students, who do not first chalk out their subject, and thus must artificially squash up the image to make it fit their miscalculated space. (I’m so inept at graphic representations that it’s actually funny -- but doesn’t it seem more likely that an artist would start drawing at the head?  And it seems like a right handed person would start carving, hammer and chisel, from the right.  I'm just saying.) (They left the front-left leg unfinished.)  In any case, of course the carver was an amateur, perhaps gifted, whether ancient Egyptian or modern fraudster -- what, an expedition into the wilds of an unknown continent traveled with a vast retinue of specialized craftsmen?

The blog writer is a scholar of petroglyphs, but certainly not an Egyptologist. His criticism is convincing until one actually looks at authentic Apis bulls. They are characteristic in their small-seeming heads. I remembered this, and checked it again on what you people call the internet (man, it makes superficial research so easy -- which is why we can expect an increasing surfeit of hoaxes). The bull is certainly a fraud, but not because the head is too small.

 The stone was supposedly found by a couple of young men out looking for fossils or somesuch in the Oklahoma River. Oklahoma has a river? Hey dude, check this out! Bitchin! An ancient Egyptian Apis bull carved into this flat boulder in the shallow river! Farout! Let’s pull it out and call up some tv guy! And I looked at the two young men, and as they spoke I posited three options: truthful, lying, or I can’t tell. I could tell. Lies lies lies. One of them couldn’t wipe a sneaky little smirk off his face.

 Perhaps it’s just that he’s not an actor and the camera evokes this behavior? And the other could not help but shake his head, no, constantly, with every word he uttered.

 Perhaps it was him indicating dismay at the amazing thing that truly happened? No. Lies lies lies. (Here’s how to determine if someone is lying: be still, listen and observe.)

More telling, to my formerly somewhat trained eye, was the erosion pattern of the inscription. Insignificant. After supposedly 3000 years. Much of that time spent in a riverbed? -- certainly in the wind. Consider: an inscription, inscribed, carved into the stone; exposed to sustained weather patterns -- a current of water, or prevailing direction of wind. What must happen is that one side, leeward, of an inscribed line would be more eroded than the other. What would not happen, in an exposed inscription, is uniform wear. Which is what was in evidence.

Sure, the lines were somewhat rounded, as if someone had made a desultory attempt to simulate age. But really, totally, completely unconvincing, to the point of obvious deceit. Like a little smirk or a constant head-shake negation.

 Well, it’s fine as a puzzle: is this genuine? Like an Encyclopedia Brown mystery. But this is deliberate fraud, which is precisely analogous to counterfeiting. Isaac Newton was Master of the Royal Mint, and looming large among his duties was to oversee the execution of counterfeiters -- if memory serves, by partial hanging, then drawing and quartering. Trust must not be debased. To vandalize truth is profoundly corrupt, if such a quaint conceit can have meaning in Obamerica. These punks need to be caned. The tv guy is just making a living, soft-selling with deliberate naiveté and faux enthusiasm what he must know is not genuine. We expect scholarship from scholars, and entertainment from entertainers.

 The other episode? The medieval Englishman memorialized in a bodiless Arizona cave? His name, according to the runic inscription just outside the cave opening, transliterates as Rough Hurech (HRK?). And indeed, record of a 12th century Peter Hurech is to be found in England, the last of his line. This is where the voiceover guy starts asking the Could it be… questions. These shows are all about open-ended questions that never get answered. Could it be that space aliens built this 43,064 year old megalithic undersea structure? (No.)

 As for Rough Hurech, it is indeed runic script. In “English”, reportedly. No meaningful erosion, and undocumented and unobserved as of a 1984 report by state museum officials on the cave’s genuine Indian petroglyphs … but maybe since then the stone was uncovered and for some reason moved outside and left exposed by, uh, souvenir hunters? What is absolutely a problem is, if memory serves, that runic was a completely archaic form of writing, even 200 years prior to the supposed time in question; it was a first millennium alphabet. Anyone who knew runic, later, would know Latin, and my expectation was that the vulgar tongue would not be used, and that person also would not inscribe in runic. I don’t think there are any examples of authentic High Middle Ages runic inscriptions, by which to see what convention would dictate: it was not a practice, to have a convention.

 In my family are preserved old hymnals and prayer books, brought over from the old counties, Denmark and Norway -- they are printed in that hard-to-read Gothic font. Well, 140 years is a long time. It is completely unreasonable to expect to find such a usage in any contemporary communication, except that which strives deliberately to be obscure. My point is obvious. Rough Hureck may have come to America, and may have been buried in an Arizona cave, but this would be entirely by astronomical and infinitesimal coincidence, and we surely do not have his gravestone.

 As worthless, but not moreso, are the Alien Hunter shows. Any large stone piled onto any other is evidence of space aliens. It’s comical. Likewise the Bigfoot Hunter shows, and the Ghost Hunter shows. I haven’t actually watched one, but, well, I haven’t seen animal pornography either. I’m sure it has its interests. They are all of a piece, Honey Booboo by another name, silly and uncouth behavior for its own sake, or disguised as investigative adventure. There used to be really bad sitcom tv, Three’s Company and Married with Children. Now there is unscripted amateur bad acting of obvious vignettes concocted by producers who are not gifted storytellers. Every cohort has its own expression of lowbrow culture.

 So, in this, I do not despair. It is not the continuing corruption of popular culture that distresses. Yes, it is coarser, by orders of magnitude, but youth become desensitized to the same degree. Rather, I am unspeakably distressed in this: I believe the American spirit has been, finally, ruined. Gay “marriage”, mandatory government-dictated “insurance”, unpoliced “immigration”. Consider our wars. Our military wins them, and our politicians then lose them -- we must say, spurred on by popular opinion. I care not for platitudes; it is results that speak truth. Pols do only what they are allowed to do. Look at what we have allowed, confirmed. Now, in my extremity, when for the first time I am in need of medical doctoring, the American medical establishment is being ruined. Ah well, how ironic. The tragedy lies in the abandonment of, shall we call it Americanism. I won’t belabor it. It is the loss of freedom, as an ideal, that unhinges me. More government, less freedom. It is a self-evident logical formulation.

I believe a number of frankly weird things. I don’t have a problem with conspiracies. I require however evidence sufficient to sustain a claim. Extraordinary beliefs need extraordinary support. Thus I believe in God rather than in randomness. My life is random, as is, now, my health -- as if a lifetime of care did not earn benefit. Ah well. No justice. But the alternative is that randomness produces complexity, and that is impossible. God allows injustice, but physics does not allow the merely mechanical abnegation of entropy. Life does not come from non-life; I have faith insufficient to sustain such a belief. Ergo, God.

 I spend a fair bit of time, at night, in bed, attempting to manipulate my chi. Directing it to the sundry points of virulent inflammation that are crippling me (you can walk without a knee, or hips, but how can you walk without the bottoms of your feet?). It’s just a way of trying to reset my immune system. Any paradigm might do it -- prayer or visualization or hypnotism or meditation or aura work or chakra activation. Whatever. Is it working? Not in the least. My working hypothesis is that God won’t allow me even to trust my good practices. All that lifelong focus on fitness and health? No smoking or drinking or drugs or dead things in my diet? A reed I have leaned upon, that has broken and pierced my hand. On what then might I lean? Wherein shall I place my trust? In the God who allowed my family, my two other sons, to be taken from me? -- lost as far as I knew into a void as black as the abyss? Somewhere I must have misplaced my faith, for him to countenance such a thing. But God is a fanatic, an all or nothing sort of triune personage. We are allowed it seems to love only, only, only God, and nothing else, or he will take it from us. What do we value? Our children? Our health, our self-control, our diligent observation of hygienic practice? For nothing. From the four quarters of the earth Job will lose his cattle and his sons and his health, and the only comfort he will get comes as blame, until God comes in a whirlwind or a peeping voice and informs him unanswerably that all his blamelessness counts for nothing but an invitation to agony. And still must we trust him.

 I defy you, urge you, beg you to prove me wrong. Prove with, you know, evidence, like you’re disproving a ridiculous but prevalent conspiracy theory. I am of course taunting you with futility, asking the impossible, because the only answer does not come in the form of reason. No one can out-reason me, in this. My argument is not in interpretation, but in the evidence itself. Look at what has happened. It speaks for itself. There is only one appropriate answer, to discouragement. I do not know how one might communicate encouragement, through silence. Well, yes, I suppose I do. Because I have done it. Words don’t do it. It’s the conveying of empathy. I know this because I’ve done it, and it works. It’s how you comfort a child. Shut the hell up with the yammering words and hug him. There’s hardly anything in the universe sufficient to convince us we’re not completely alone. We find courage through empathy.

Well, it is true that Job got replacement sons. So never mind then. Do over.

 I have not suffered enough yet, though. It is my belief that God really is trying to break me. There is worse in store for me, until I yield. I am fully capable of never yielding. I’m crazy. So it’s an adventure. Who can hold out the longer. God, with his fiery hailstones and plagues and slaughtered loved ones, or me and my capacity to accommodate increasing debilitude.

 Here’s the deal, God: when I’m swallowed by a great sea creature and spewed up onto an eastward shore, I’ll stop fleeing to the west. Either that, or peep a little more clearly -- I’m not thoroughly convinced of the sincerity of your empathy.


 J

Starting My First Novel

From, like, 6 years ago -- just cuz it's so good:

---


It was a dark and stormy night.

[No.]

The night was dark, so very dark, and quite stormy. ... It -- by which is meant the night -- was stormy and dark. ... The darkness of the night was so dark, and the storminess made the darkness seem that much darker and more nightlike.

[Yikes. It's just getting worse.]

Dark and stormy, the night screamed like a ravished virgin. ... The dark, stormy night ranted madly in a barometric tantrum.

[Ugh.]

It was an ebonic nocturnal tempest. ... The stygian typhoon of eventide...

[No, no, no.] 

Prosopopeic fuliginous Nyx, enceinte as it were with lachrymal lamia farouche as Hecate, disbosomed upon her terrene demiorb an empyreal borasque.

[Huh?]

Dark storm roiled through the night, stirring up ghosts untroubled since pagan times.

[Pagans?! At least it isn't pirates.]

Dark the night was, and stormy -- aye.

[Dang.]

O Thou, Night of Dark Storm, whither goest? -- whence cometh thine exudations of witching Strife?

[Unbe-freakin-lievable.]

It all started on a dark night that was stormy.

[Um ... no.]

I never would, or could, have dreamed, or believed, that anything like it could ever have had happened, to somebody, anybody at all, really, such as myself, but, man, oh, man, believe you me, it really, truly, did happen, and not too very long ago, either, and, not only that, but, also, what’s more, it happened to me, too, one dark, and stormy, night!

[Ack!!]

"Take me! Take me now, you big man!" moaned Stormie Knight darkly as she threw herself panting and naked onto the hot wet sand.

[Hmm. I'll deal with this later.]

The night swayed into my office on dark clouds like your mother never wanted you to see. A lacy froth of storm just barely held back the thrusting silky light of the soft, full moon. Brother, could I feel the wind rising, and how.

[How ... noir.]

Dark, stormy night rolled madding over the wuthering moor, heedless of the heather blooms.

[Yeah, great -- and here’s Heathcliff wending soulfully through the tuffets.]

Darkness muffled the stormy night, damping dreams as well as earth.

[...and breeding lilacs out of the dead land.]

It was the best of dark and stormy nights, it was the worst of dark and stormy nights.

Once upon a dark and stormy night dreary, while I pondered weak...

To be a dark and stormy night, or not to be a dark...

Let us go then, you and I, when the dark and stormy night is spread out against the sky... 

Call me a dark and stormy night.

Mother died today, or maybe last dark and stormy night -- I can't be sure. 

These are the dark and stormy nights that try men’s souls. 

In the beginning, it was a dark and stormy night.

~~~~~

It hadn’t rained for months, and the hard bright sunlight streaming all day through the window was harsh enough finally to kill the fat angry fly that clattered around in the dry air like a broken shopping cart. But now the sun had fallen, and night with it. Somewhere out of the Pacific, storm clouds crept through the darkness and laid hold of the sky. 

Rain was falling. 

It was almost comical, slopping down in a deliberate drench. I could picture the dark fairies hidden just above the backdrop of the clouds, giggling and snorting to each other, gleeful with malice, scooping out great wooden bucketfulls from the waters of the firmament. You just don’t expect government workers to try so hard. A light mist, a drizzle, maybe even a few scattered showers. The minimum, just to meet the quota. Certainly nothing as exuberant as this. 

I smiled. Odd, how we smile outloud. Even when a man's so sick of himself he can barely breathe, he still acts out his little pantomimes. No one’s there, no one watching, no audience. Yet he talks to himself, smiles when he's alone. His inner life spills out, overflows, too much to be contained. Witness me, O Creation! I’m so interesting! 

No one’s watching. No flies, no peeping toms, no fairies or angels or demons or ghosts. I didn’t see any. Well, maybe ghosts. 

And still the rain falls. 

I was in my office. I’d just wrapped up the Svenson case, and for the past few days I found myself with nothing to do. I was out of whiskey. I lit another cigarette. It was a dark and stormy night. 

A knock sounded at the door. Goodness, who can it be at this late hour? ...



J

Gilead

I hate God the way I hate my father. Their failings stem from different strictures in their natures, but the damage they have done is analogous. Words are insufficient of course to communicate my meaning. God, and father, are easy, but hate is a tough word. Hate the sin not the sinner. But the agent of failure is accountable. Can we judge God, then? Language is insufficient.  We can't even argue with him.  Because he doesn't argue back.

God cares about only one thing. Righteousness. That’s the only thing God cares about. Nothing else. Only that. Love, and mercy, and justice, and grace -- it all falls under this broadest description. His character. Of righteousness. The world stands or falls on that. Well, it falls. And then, because of his righteousness, he provides a way of grace. And to demonstrate his holiness he puts himself, as his son, through infinite torment. There is no consideration that will cause me to believe that if he will do that to himself, to his son, he would hesitate for an infinitesimal moment to judge and condemn us. There’s a way out -- take it or don’t, and be damned. Does he suffer in his heart because of this? Sure he does. But more important to him than even his own suffering, is his righteousness.

Thus, there is no forgiveness, for the unrepentant. Didn’t take your chance? Too bad for you. There is no deal, no bargain, we can make with God. I’m sure he doesn’t laugh at us, in his heart or before his assembled angels at our rabbinical attempts to pursued him. We do not mock our children. But whereas no human father is righteous, God is, and he cannot compromise, when it comes to the greater good. What after all do we have to bargain with? I’ll be good from now on if you give me such and such? No, be good for the sake of righteousness. I’ll put away this sin, that vice, for a time or forever, if you give me some particular blessing? Thus was Sodom destroyed. The meteors were already blazing towards a set intercept point, latitude and longitude, minute and second. It was foreordained that there should be a Dead Sea. We converse with God, in our prayers. But prayer is where we listen, and God does not. He knows what he wants, and he cannot deviate from righteousness.

God cannot conceive that he might need to be forgiven. He is so very righteous after all. Part of it is that we have only language, human language, and God isn’t human.  Human speech is not his native tongue. He needs a mediator.  So when we formulate our anguish and dismay and despair into words, something is lost in the interpretation, and in any case words are mere approximations. We can’t out-argue him, and we can’t articulate our emotions, and we just have to depend on his seeing our hearts, brokenness and pain. Well, yes, he sees. But what can he do? Only what righteousness allows.

So we suffer in a fallen world, for our sins, for the sins of others, for happenstance, for reasons and for no reason at all. And God watches, utterly, completely, unyieldingly implacable. Does he wish to comfort us? How? Through the beauty of the world? Grief robs the world of its beauty. Through the revelation of scripture? Words are what we use to tell lies with -- at best they are reflections, and too often ambiguous, confusing, comforting only in the way that soothing noises to a child might be. Where else are we do find comfort? Sympathetic humans -- family, friend, community, fellowship -- surely here, but this is to say nothing at all, given that sometimes our hearts are too broken even to allow eye contact. There is no comfort where there is no trust.

So yes, I trust God. I trust him to do as he pleases. I trust him to send even more pain, even more harsh and bitter lessons, to hector and beat and pound at us until we are ground to dust, nothing left of our will save that which conforms to his. Well, it’s a good thing to agree with truth. And it is good that all necessary energy should be expended, to teach lessons that must be learned. If I am stiff-necked, as I am, it is only fitting that I should have my neck broken. This is the chastening that a father reserves for his son.

We are commanded to love God. I do not. I hate him. I would rather never have been conceived, than live in this world. I hate this world. I know I’m doing it wrong, the way I live my life. I know I’m trapped. I know there is a madness in my soul that poisons every moment of self-reflection. I know that when I say hate, I mean resentment and unforgiveness and unrepentance and dishonesty and self-righteousness. I realize that I am withholding my trust as a bargaining tactic, and I know that when I surrender everything I have, that will have to include everything that I want. I want to be happy. I want to feel well. I want to be loved. It may be, that when I finally succumb to the pain and give in to God’s demands, it will be at the final moment of my life, and I will have lived a meaningless life, utterly solitary, needlessly defiant, futile and a waste. As one through fire.

Before that, then, I would hope, if hope can mean something other than trust, that God takes pity on me, and places his hand on my shoulder, and draws me to his breast, and consoles my broken spirit. Because I’m too unsociable for human company, and the revelation of nature and of scripture seem to be insufficient. It’s just a little fantasy I have, though. God appears only to prophets.


J

Etc

I went on and on just now, the way I do, about pain and unforgiveness and injustice. And the need for eternal torture and the inadequate performance of God, and the impossibility for me of peace. There were some good lines and some gripping images, and it was touching in the revelation of my deeply flawed humanity. But it’s been said before, and goes nowhere.

 I have however come up hard against something that seems worth saying. I do want comfort, you know, I want to be soothed, strengthened. Because my soul has been poisoned by resentment, and my body, which had always been reliable, now pains me. It’s not a betrayal; it is a wounded animal, and I mourn for its distress. Point is, where shall I find encouragement?

 There is that part of us, the small child, that wants to be rescued, picked up in our tears and held and reassured that we are loved -- which is the true cure for that sort of childish pain. That sort of rough-and-tumble fall-down pain is never the real problem; it’s the idea that we suffer alone, in the presence of indifference. A child who bumps himself while actually alone doesn’t cry. That says it all.

 There’s that part of me that wants God to just intervene, have mercy or compassion on me, manifest his angel as a solid presence of healing. Indeed, there is that desire in me. So I asked myself, why doesn’t God just do that? He does it for some people. Why not me? And the answer, as happens, really, always, when I ask this sort of question, comes with the clarity of a voice from across a table. God is holy, and he is disinclined to manifest himself within a heart filled with rage.

 We say God. Jesus, Holy Spirit -- it’s this last who does most or all of the comforting. I just don’t think the Holy Spirit dives headlong into a cesspool. That’s not very holy. Holy means separated apart, reserved for cleanliness and respect -- the idea of sacred. There has to be a clean spot, for God to slip through. I think of the way a cat picks its way through mud.

 One has to make room, for God. Clear a space, a little altar in your heart, where madness and filth don’t quite reach. Seems like a small enough thing to ask.

 For all I know, my life as an athletic person is ending. Maybe this affliction will pass. If not, what will I have left? Rage and pain fill me. There’s only one domain left, my intellect. Will this be attacked too? Body, soul and mind? I did not fully appreciate my health, although I protected it. And I did nothing to clarify my soul, filling it instead with resentment and other low things. And my intelligence is no small thing, but it is almost totally wasted, or completely, given the insignificance of this blog and of the few other interactions I have whereby I share ideas. Transient, superficial, insignificant. The fact that you, you might find some amusement in what I do -- it’s nice, to amuse for a moment. It hardly leaves a mark, a pebble into the water. The meaning of life must surely be more than to make remarks that are forgotten.

 I had some blood tests done, just standard stuff, inflammation (which I can spy with my little eye) and bloodwork, whatever that is -- but it’s phone tag with the doctor. So now I have the luxury of imagining something fatal has been found, and there is a thrill in the idea, like I can finally give up and just be done with this, and it won’t be my fault, I can’t be blamed. A little self-dramatizing, comforting. I can’t be blamed. Well, yes, I could be, as has happened in the past, falsely, but there I am, dead, and finally I’ll get justice from God. He can apologize to me, and reward me for my patience, self-restraint and excellence.

 Yeah.


J

OFTEN

     
Someday you will leave.
I’m sure that in this
it will not be your purpose
to cause pain.

     And here I’ll say something philosophical
     about the nature of change
     and the wisdom of letting go.
     Then a rhythmic image of nature,
     naked branches, twigs
     scraping at a window.
     Then I allude to something visceral
     and violent, like dripping blood,
     drip drip, but not so obvious--
     thrumming in your ears.
     Then something innocuous again,
     like a breeze and slow breathing,
     then I close with--
     either ‘And’ or ‘But’--

often I discover my left index finger
tapping, fast as if with anxiety.


J

TG

If anyone deserved good health, it was me. You deserve what you earn. Then again, you own only what you can keep. It is self evident that God acts upon humanity only in a general way. There simply are no specific miracles. Oh, sure, of course there are, but so rarely, profoundly exotic, sui generis. Two-headed calves are not miracles. Spontaneous remission is not a miracle. The midnight reprieve of the condemned is not a miracle. These are just things that happen.

 Prayer does not move God. So very rarely does he, as it were, repent himself. Shadows moving backward on the sundial; human depravity that brings forth a Flood. Offhand I can’t think of any other example. Earthquakes and brimstone from the skies – these are phenomena of nature, acts of God, as we say, but traceable to the current nature, rather than any initial created perfect condition, of the universe. Prayer, then, is what we do when we want to change our own minds.

Rarely do we get special warnings. Usually it is conscience that warns us: gee, maybe that wouldn't be such a good thing to do?  But if the thing seems to be mere change, a left turn instead of a right? -- well, you should have driven more carefully, slowly, looked both ways, been more mindful of intersections and headlong traffic. Or you eat out, give yourself a special treat or just pick up a bite, and a bacteria colony comes along with it. What warning was there? Prepare your own food? -- meditate before every meal and await a highsign? If there were such a thing as the urim and thummim any longer, I doubt if it would function. God acts in the universe only upon quarks and upon conscience. He sustains the universe, and he seeks for our salvation. All the rest of it is happenstance.

The wicked prosper, the virtuous suffer, and justice might as well be counted as a miracle, more rare than two-headed serpents. What then is the purpose? Here it is, Thanksgiving. Indeed, we must be thankful. It can always get worse. You had better cling with utmost desperation to what you have, cherish and treasure and spray out thanks like a pulsar pervading infinite space. God has demanded of us a thankful spirit, and commanded us to rejoice, always. Through suffering? Oh, sweet child, to think you know anything of suffering. Whatever we are put through could be so very much worse. The burn victim must be thankful that he can walk; the paralytic must be grateful that he can speak. And at the end of an ungrateful life is an eternity of pain. Indeed, it can be so much infinitely worse. Thanksgiving, then.

The meaning of life is the curse and necessity of free will, and what we do with it. Should I have said blessing, as well? Find them where you may. We stand on the shore of a vast cesspool of cruelty and indifference. We stand on a small floating island in that pool. Most of humanity is nearly submerged, deprived of the blessing even of a place to stand.

 For my part, I have poisoned my spirit with unforgiveness, virtually mad by now with the need to avoid those persons and situations that have given me, well, past anguish. How is this wrong? When we reach an intersection we must remember the rules of the road, look both ways and avoid catastrophe. The people in our lives who have ignored the rules of, well, humanity -- aren’t there rules that must guide us? No. Apparently there are not. We must forgive. Forgive the oncoming truck.  Which seems so stupid and insane a thing to do that I cannot. Christ can be Christlike. It seems a contradiction that we must be, also. It isn’t, of course -- forgiveness doesn’t mean trust. My problem, one of them, is that I’d like to see justice. All I can do, to approximate that, is hold a grudge. Poor substitute.

 We learn our first lessons about God through the character of our fathers. Very very grim. Very bad plan, God. You fucked up. That must be the first step on election: God puts us in a toxic crippling family and then lets us fend for ourselves -- those who are elected will thrive, find support and stability and sanity where we may. It can happen. And late late later, maybe we get some friends, or find a mate, or carve out a place for ourselves in the world. We find meaning. And perhaps the wasted years that have been consumed as by locusts are returned to us and we achieve or approach our potential. Perhaps it is this way. The meaning of hope is that tomorrow might be better than today. Perhaps our pain will be less. Perhaps our solitude will be broken. Perhaps our spirit will lay down its burden, seen to be so completely unnecessary. Perhaps God will smile on us, and we feel that smile as peace and love and fellowship.

 I have been silent in these pages for some weeks now. Sometimes I write, but I don’t think of myself as a complainer, so I keep it to myself. These pages are for saying what I feel like saying, but not everything is fit for print. I have friends, but there’s no one I would lay my burdens on. Seems discourteous, that level of intimacy, when I’m so superficial a persona. I know I’m wrong in this. Count it as another of my sins.

 I will isolate myself for Thanksgiving, and Friday, emerge briefly on Saturday and disappear again on Sunday. The world, and moving through it, is painful. I should have been more grateful, when I felt well. As it is, I will be thankful that I am not paralyzed, physically.


 J

Wave

It is self evident that I am brilliant, but I’m unaccomplished and undisciplined. So my philosophical speculations are likely to be astute, and accurate as far as I have my facts straight, and original in that I came up with them -- which is not to say they are original. Perhaps my new ideas are clichés, to initiates of the arcana.

I was thinking about light, photons, having wavelike properties. Then I thought about what a wave actually is. It is the transfer of energy, momentum, through a medium, from one molecule to another, in a bumping sort of movement. Water molecule A pushes against water molecule B, losing energy as it transmits it. Water rises outward in wave formation as energy moves out, losing it in the trough, transferring it to the crest. Same with sound: air molecules push against molecules further out. Or a guitar string, or a whip, or the ground during an earthquake. It requires the outward transfer of energy.

 Given this concrete definition, how can light be a wave? Is a photon pushing against another, which in turn pushes against another? No -- no more than a bullet pushes against another bullet, and so on. So I thought, the term wave must be an analogy, and I wonder if this thought has been thought before. We get caught up in the word wavelike, which leads us down false paths.

 Then I thought about how a photon is timeless, eternal. An object traveling at the speed of light would be frozen in time -- an astronaut traveling for 20 years at light speed would return to earth after 20 years, virtually no time having passes for him. And an object going faster than light would move backwards in time -- impossible of course, but that’s what would happen if it could. So what is the universe like, to a photon? Frozen, the way a reel of film is frozen (without a projector’s movement and light to give it life). All laid out, contiguous but static. The astronaut would observe 20 years of an earthling’s life as if it were a person-shaped line of extruded toothpaste -- not a point moving through time but a completed line. That’s why they say things stretch at near light speed … perhaps it’s not so much a stretch as an infinitude of multiplicities -- every moment abutting the next as a physical object. Thus would an object gain infinite mass. Yet, again, the universe would not be so much frozen as imperceptible -- moving faster and faster, to the vanishing point; even the most distant stars would move their given distance, instantly, which is to say, undetected. To a photon, the universe is black and empty.

 Then I thought about what a photon is like to itself. It is a line, a streak, originating at the source whence it emanates, ending at an eyeball or a black surface or whatnot. It is not a particle or a wave, to itself. It is a string, timeless. And that gave me the idea about how it can be a wave. A photon manifests, intrudes, in time, the universe, as the movement of a single oscillation along its length. If it travels/extends 186,000 times 10 miles -- so it lasts 10 seconds -- the wave along its length shows up as a photon each second every 186.000 miles (and all the relevant fractions). A photon experiences the universe the way a monkey slides down a vine; the vine is always there, and there is no jungle. That’s how a particle can be a wave: the same way a vibration moves along a violin string. You may very well call a piece of a vibration, a particle. It’s not a bullet traveling down a barrel, it’s a shotgun load.

 Then I thought about how everything is in motion at 186,000 miles per second. For us, as objects at “rest”, almost all of that motion is spent moving through time; for an object moving through space at near light speed, there is hardly any motion left for movement through time, so time slows for it. Something is going to be slower, the object or its time. It’s an inverse function, always ends up as 1. Movement through time and movement through space sum up to lightspeed. This is basic relativity

 But what I was really thinking was, that explains, oh, say, angels. Our mundane world, plodding innert materialism, is almost all time and almost no speed. Matter is slow, racing through time; light is fast, and massless and timeless. What of consciousness that was all speed and no time? -- like light? Innately massless, that is, nonmaterial, immaterial, incorporeal -- but if it does slow down, entering time, it gains mass, becomes physical (as an object which increases in speed gains mass) (“objects” then of both types, material and, um, radiant, gain mass when they change speed to a relativistic degree). It is a different set of laws that must govern such a plane. The idea that we express as 186,000 “miles” per “second” (space and time) must find its expression some other way.

Ours is a universe of (slow) mass-particles racing through time. Another would be of timeless massless-particles, its entities comprised of such “molecules” and aware in time at the wave-point, pervading the entire universe, as a mass-particle would take on the mass of the universe if it could attain light-speed.  And I’m just ignoring gravity.  But

I could drive myself to distraction, following up the implications.

 I have no desire to start a cult, however, and I’m too bad at selling things to write a book about it. I’m like the Unibomber -- alone in his shack, spewing out ideas, with no reality check, no other strong intellect to challenge or correct or encourage. I don’t get a lot of feedback. Mostly I’m not understood. I may be wrong, but I’m not crazy-wrong. And even with old, simple and obvious ideas, it’s hard to be understood.

 Pain, pain, go away. Come again some other day. I got old suddenly, and too soon.  A certain symptom has manifested, that informs me that my now long-term issue is not bursitis or what have you.  Unsettling.  But depression is close enough to despair that I have cause to fear for my life, if my life is imperiled.  I'm sure I'll go to a doctor, though.  After all, it would be crazy not to.  And what an artist the world would lose, in me.


 J

Slight Fellow

Looks like Obama's taking his cues from Putin -- they know who their enemy is.  Republicans routed, chickens without heads.  Please, boys, chose your battles?  You're not hired to take a stand.  Your hired to further the agenda.

One thing the Boboma Debacle perfectly illustrates is that it's better to have a fat president than a skinny one.

Hold on, son, the wind is picking up.  A man should be big enough for his clothes.  Doesn't this guy have a tailor?  He just keeps getting smaller, per speech -- blow out some more hot air, get smaller.  Soon he'll be shopping in the Lil' Mister department at Nordstroms. Not that he ever was big, or that he's losing size quickly.  He must have been very very full indeed though, because he surely does love to speechify.  

Yes, ad hominim.  It's my civic duty.  People who set themselves up as puppetkings of the world need to be attacked.  And since he is the leader of the Fraud World, it is only appropriate that I follow his lead.  Attack the man.  He's evil.  Grrr.

Speaking of death, I give you: America.  This is a dead parrot.  Sucked dry by a vampire.  Started probably with Social Secuity, and sunk its teeth to the bone with income tax.  Yes, I understand the chronological order is reversed.  But the universally instituted system of government supporting its citizens is antiamerican.  And it is impossible to work in this country without a government issued license, the SS#.  And the IRS has a SWAT team -- well, so does the Dept of Agriculture.  Automatic withholding -- so you don't even realize how much they're taking from you.  Yes, they.  Congressional redistricting makes office a sinecure.  Gay marriage is a fait accompli, soon to be universal.  I don't care about gay, or marriage, but for judges to drag us through the lookinglass is, well, a governmental encroachment upon conscience.   No, this is not America.  

I'm sure the government algorithms have flagged my little blog.  I'm harmless.  What else could a man without a country be?  

J

In Which I Correct Newton and Mach

Newton arrived eventually at the idea of Absolute Space, the idea that space was a thing independent of matter. It was a needful idea in order to explain why, say, a bucket full of water, suspended from a rope and set to spinning, would transfer the spin from rope to bucket to water – yet when the bucket stopped spinning in one direction (the rope having rewound itself taut to the other extreme), the water would continue its whirlpool spin even as the bucket moved in the opposite direction. Trust me, it’s a problem, answered by Newton: motion must be relative to some greater context, and by extension, to the universe itself.

Leibnitz had argued that there was no space without matter, any more than there can be no alphabet without letters – it must be occupied to exist at all; an empty set is not a set at all: a null set is a mathematical conceit, having no actual reality. The spinning bucket with its concave water befuddles this conception. Ernst Mach came along two and a half centuries later and said that spin, which is what the discussion is all about, is dependent on how much matter there is in the universe. If you spin like an ice-skater you feel your arms pulled outward – not as a function of vision or of balance, but as a centrifugal quality inherent in matter. Mach said that if there were less matter in the universe, your arms would be flung out less. If there were no other matter in the universe, a “null” set universe, your arms would not move out at all.

I’m simplifying, of course.

 Well. We know this spin is not a function of local gravity, because whether as an ice-skater on earth or as an astronaut in zero gravity, if you are set to spinning, your arms are flung out. Centrifugal force manifests universally -- or at least under all testable circumstances.  Mach’s idea would have it that an astronaut set to spinning in our universe would have more centrifugal force than a similar astronaut in a universe in which there was only a single star. Which is to say, the mass of the universe, the amount of overall (not merely local) gravity, determines the perception or manifestation of spin. I see this as wrong on the face of it -- how much mass there is in the universe should have no bearing on the result from how much energy is put into a system to make it spin. X amount of energy would manifest as X amount of centrifugal response. No? I’m no mathematician, but this reasoning seems more to do with logic. Confounded of course by the fact that we are dealing with impossibilities -- there is no universe with only one star, so how can we decide upon an equivalence of X input energies? Would Joules or ergs be absolute, or proportional, relative to another cosmos? Maybe it’s an imponderable, or maybe there’s the math for it. I don’t know. But such maths would be based on suppositions. So I believe.

Newton said that even in an empty universe of absolute space, there would be a distinction between you stationary and you spinning. Mach said there would be no difference. This is all very fine and well. Where I must interject, object & correct is here: in an empty universe containing only you, how could you start spinning in the first place? From a static state, some other agent is required to provide the acceleration force – whether a passing alien or a springboard rock or a handheld rocket gun.

The term spin never got defined up front. Putting aside all considerations of torque and angular momentum and relative motion, spin requires the input and transfer of energy. Newton wound up the rope, which spun the bucket, which got the water moving. Spin requires a relationship between, uh, entities … energy, matter, space, what you will. Since matter and energy are equivalents, we should be able to say that matter requires other matter/energy in order to start spinning. As for what the ultimate reference point of spin would be, well, gravity is a universal field, as is the virtual foam of quantum mechanics. There is no need of an empty absolute space, because there is no such thing as emptiness. Newton of course anticipated Einstein, re relativity.

Of course all these thoughts have been thought before, and questions answered.  I'm surely traveling old ground. But discovery is relative.  Delight, Dear Reader, in my joy.


J

Insane Hell Roll

It would have been around 1975 that I read Harlen Ellison’s Deathbird Stories. Is his name an anagram? (Hellion learns. Hell's neon liar.  On leaner hills.)  I’ve remembered the book all these years, as superb. Some time ago I got a copy, and I’ve been reading it again. It’s not that I’m disappointed. But I can see Ellison in the writing, I can see the writing, and it is distracting. Like a brilliant adolescent wrote it. Which worked brilliantly, when I was an adolescent. The man is in love with words. Images, impression, impact. He knows his craft. He wrote some of the best original Star Trek episodes. I don’t know what it is, what’s lacking. I can’t say there’s a monotony of tone, but it has something to do with depth. He digs only in one direction?

 Modern Family, the sitcom, is in reruns. I’d never seen it. It had been mentioned as something like Arrested Development, which is stellar. But MF is second rate. I used that term a while back in a text. I think it comes off as harsher than I mean. First rate is, oh, say, Shakespeare, and Chandler, and Arrested Development. Second rate is skilled, and professional, but not worth looking at a second time. There are after all five ratings, so second rate is a B. Pretty good. The MF writing is funny. Rigidly formulaic but I laugh a few times in each of the episodes I’ve seen. That’s rare. And I suppose I have to admit that Ed O’Neil redeems himself with this -- I hadn’t thought it possible, given MWC -- I will not even say the name. The hot Columbian wife is really gifted -- it would be so easy to get that part wrong. The fat son is pretty awful -- good for the Disney Channel, but he telegraphs and uses his hands amateurishly and isn’t smart enough to play the smart kid he’s playing. It’s distracting. The kids are just stickfigures, manufactured by the “created by” guys -- a dim-bulb slut, a wisecracking egghead, and a crazy and formless little brother -- we’ve seen them in a hundred previous iterations. The gays are not bad, but watered down for middle America -- no hint at all of sex, between them.  The parents have lots of sex.  The gays have a few pecking kisses of vanilla affection. FYI: gays like sodomy and sucking each other’s dicks. Now, the dick-sucking I can understand, although it is an idea that takes some getting used to. That’s the point though, of the MF gays. Get us used to it. But without any gay sex at all, it’s just a sell-out. Superficial. The universe is full of wormholes; until you look closely, a thing can seem first-rate.

I have discussions every now and again about writing. I’m always urging for authenticity -- how people really talk. Obviously there is art involved, we eliminate the ums and ahs, and try to be worth hearing, but fake is not funny.

George Bernard Shaw wrote a letter to Tolstoy -- the difference between their genius is demonstrated by the fact that Shaw needs to be identified the more completely -- in which he says, “To me God does not yet exist…” and he blathers on about how Evolution is trying to create such a thing. “The current theory that God already exists in perfection involves the belief that God deliberately created something lower than Himself when He might just as easily have created something equally perfect. That is a horrible belief...” Indeed. It’s also a fictitious belief. At no time has this been “the current theory.” God cannot create himself. No serious theologian of a Western faith has proposed such a thing. How could Shaw be so wrong? Because he got caught up in his own ideas and words, and because he was so used to impressing people and being complimented that he failed to develop a capacity for self-examination. It’s a form of insanity. Self confidence is better than self doubt, when it comes to producing commercial entertainments. But comedians should stick to trying to be funny.

 For almost a year now I’ve had constant pain. Sometimes literally crippling. It’s not a disc, and certainly not plantar fasciitis. Not sports medicine, not a general practitioner, not a chiropractor. It’s a disease -- debilitating pain at but not in various joints. Not arthritis or the like -- tendons or bursa or something. I’ve taken excellent care of myself, my whole life, for exactly this reason. I’ve always known that if I ever got a big problem, I wouldn’t be responsible about it. It really digs deeply into my crazy place. I could very well just give up. So I’m worried about myself. I am profoundly self destructive.

It's irksome.  So many bad choices, and their accrued consequences.  I needed a wife, to ground and motive and encourage me.  Instead I read.  What a waste.


J

Pop

Camus’s Myth of Sisyphus boils down to the idea that it’s not the experience, with its inevitable suffering and apparent lack of meaning -- the futility -- but rather the fact of existence that makes it worthwhile, or, bearable. Simply being, an agent of free will, is meaning enough. The logic is flawed of course, as any philosophical paradigm must be, by the need for axioms. As with Descartes, I think therefore I am: why thinking? -- why not feeling? -- or some other arbitrary basepoint? I am, therefore I will endure.

 It isn’t a matter of whether or not I am. Clearly I exist, as Dr. Johnson so succinctly demonstrated by proving the reality of a rock by kicking it: so much for Berkeley. Demonstrable truths hardly need to be demonstrated … ah, the convolutions glib minds require for themselves. Convulsions, really.

 Sisyphus, then, eternally pushing at the rock, undone daily. It compels our attention. Futility. Meaning. Meaninglessness. The problem, as with all paradoxes, is that it starts with an incorrect axiom. Here’s my point: as much to complain about suffering, as about the fact that we live in an atmosphere of nitrogen and oxygen. Yes, we do -- now get on with life. Press your cheek and your shoulder against the rough cold or hot boulder and push, and live your life. It’s not about pushing a rock. It’s about waking up every morning alive.

 On a whim I’m reading again about cosmology and quantum mechanics -- favorite subjects, but hard to read because it gets my mind racing and it’s frustrating not having a meaningful way or reason to express myself. So I was thinking about Time’s Arrow, how it’s supposed to be a puzzlement that time runs only one way. And then I thought about how we think of time and space as separate things, as we must, but there’s a flaw in it. We think of space as three dimensions, and of time as one. We could say time was three, past and present and future, but in this there’s no real analogy with depth and breadth and height.  Time after all is really just a point, with an irrecoverable past and an unpromised future. We can conceptualize it, as a salient stone in a tumbling stream, or as the burning spark of a long fuse, or as the tip of a scalpel slicing through flesh.  Who knows where it will cut? -- but we can see the wound.

 Then I thought, that’s what space is, as well -- not really three dimensions, but just one, a point, as time’s present is a point, but which is perceived as having three axial dimensions. Then I thought that space, as a point, as our experience of time is a point, must then have two other aspects, analogues of past and future. So the mystery isn’t Time’s Arrow, but rather, what is the nature of the unperceived and unconceived aspects -- we can hardly call them dimensions -- of space. Well, perhaps we have names for them -- heaven and hell: kaballistically speaking, qliphoth and whatnot, but that analogy doesn’t really correspond.

 Then I thought about how we pay so much attention to time and to space in our lives, and rightly so, but how gravity is a third partner, and more than an equal.  I’ve always seen the need for aether -- and quantum foam, and gravity, and “dark energy” seem to address that need. But that brings us back to the idea that space is a single point, as is time. We never got out of the singularity of the big bang. The universe is a pebble in God’s pocket.

 Well. The idea of a universe is absurd on the face of it. An expanding universe? Into what is it expanding? The laws of physics do not apply to metaphysics; time and space do not exist outside the universe -- thus, time must be separated from consciousness; and the very idea of “outside” is nonsensical, if there is no space. An exploding singularity? Obviously wrong -- the correct analogy would be of an egg -- all the transformations occur within the shell -- there is no expanding -- it doesn’t explode itself into a chicken -- in the end it is a chicken, a chick, inside the shell. That’s what the universe is, a becoming, a chick even, but not yet what it will be. (And so we’ve answered that puzzle: the egg came first; there is no chicken.) But, again, this is not a new idea -- consult the book of Revelation -- wherein we read of the sky rolled back, of a new Heaven and a new Earth. Mysterious terms, like a need to think of space as just a point on a line.

 You see what I’m reduced to. I have to talk to myself.


J

* Bozorg

YT

A little more drama in the news this week, about some shopping center in some African country.  Details hardly matter.  More crap.  Islamist terrorists ... but I repeat myself ... took over a Macy's or something.  Let the moslems go, kept and killed a bunch of Westerners or whatever.  Hardly matters.  Wasn't there something like that here, the week before?  Someone with a gun?  I don't remember.  Probably.  And Obama made it political at a funeral or something.  Of course he did.  What he doesn't understand, it's not guns that kill, it's bullets.  Or do I mean gunpowder.  Well, not guns, anyway.  Insufficiently bulletproof skin kills people.

Move along.  Nothing to see here.

Just the human comedy.

But wait.  No, it seems I'm wrong.  Something unusual did indeed happen.  During that African time of evil and dull terror, one of the monsters shot a woman, English woman.  In front of the eyes of her six year old daughter, and four year old son.  Well, that's nothing unusual.  What's unusual is what followed.  The little boy stepped in front of his fallen mother and his sister, and faced the gun-toting islamist terrorist, and said, “You’re a bad man! Let us leave!”

This, in itself, makes my heart swell with pain and with love.  And the moslem islamist terrorist must have seen the child before him for a moment.  The terrorist follower of Mohammad then said to the little English boy, “Please forgive me.  We are not monsters.”  It follows that the islamist terrorist gave the child a Mars bar, and allowed the family, wounded mother too, to get away from their hostage-taking terrorist murdering moslem captors.  The moslem terrorist instructed the mother that she must convert to Islam, said by the American media to be the religion of peace.

What lessons shall we learn, from this.  Well, there seems to be no human heart so totally depraved that it cannot respond humanly to a child's purity.  I expect it hardly ever happens, that monsters act human -- it is permissible and therefore common in the moslem east to sodomize children, per the islamist Ayatollah Khomeini.  But it happened here, a faint stirring of humanity in the corrupt heart of a moslem monster.

We must be deeply thankful for such a thing.  It is so rich in meaning.

Here's a picture of the little boy, and his sister, and

the Mars bar, I think.

Yes, Mars bar.  Two, in fact.  Windfall.  One for the sister?  How thoughtful.

I wonder if they will ever be eaten.  Sell them on Ebay?  Give them to the Smithsonian, or the UN?  Probably eaten, kids being kids.  I wonder if a Mars bar has enough tensile strength to pull an islamist moslem terrorist out of the Lake of Fire in hell. The media did not report that it was two, TWO Mars bars. This is an FP exclusive!  Typical Western Anti-islam bias at work, no doubt.  Oh, I'm forgetting, how careless of me, that anonymous dead body in the center of the frame, perhaps, what, 5 feet away from the children?  My bad.  Is that blood on the little boy's shirt?  I love New York too.

The Ayatollah famously said the United States was Shaytân-e Bozorg, the Great Satan.  Israel was the Little.  Huh.  It is not Satans, big nor small, that we have to concern ourselves with. It's not guns either.  It's individual people -- nowadays, disproportionately, moslem islamist terrorists.  People, I say, because the only monsters that there are, are people.

There's a lot of talk that these islamist moslem monsters are Americans. Somali-Minnesotans,  American born, teenagers, radicalized somehow and given airfare.  Maybe they saved up, from their paper route money, or their drug-dealer money, or by selling their food stamps for under the counter cash.  Who can say.  I have to wonder if anyone who needs to think of themselves as Hyphenated-American is any kind of American at all.  Here's a new thing for you to admire from me: Constitutional-American.  You may quote me.  As contrasted to the Satan-American teens who've been acting out in African malls, shoplifting Mars bars and littering and whatnot.

It's all too stupid for words.  We're in a concentration camp.  We find a daisy in a dunghill, and find the hope to continue on for a while longer. For a moment, a monster was not a monster.  Shall we think of it as Evolution?  What about the moments that follow?  Life is not a daisy chain.  No one can say what life is.  It's too stupid for words.

Yesterday I thought I was healed.  Today I feel bad.  I have a disease.  I'll just waste my time until I die.  Then I'll see what happens next.


J

*Book of Job, Chapter Nine

YT

I’m reading Job again. Intently. There are parts where my heart quickens. Was it David who was a man after God’s own heart? David does not speak to me. It was not a king, as Saul, who afflicted Job -- it was Satan, and it was God. Seems like a bigger deal. Perhaps there was some drama in the heavenlies of which we are not informed, where David too is handed over to Satan. Well, we know God plays favorites. For all that Job was, eventually, blessed, David was chosen.

 The book isn’t easy to follow, all the arguments and poetry. It would have been written long after the events, with much license. Job’s friends, his comforters, are bores, and boring. Job is riveting. “What is man, that You should magnify him, set Your heart on him, visit him every morning and test him every moment? How long? Will You not look away from me and let me alone till I swallow my saliva? Have I sinned? What have I done to You, O Watcher of Men? Why have You set me as Your target, so that I am a burden to myself? Why then do you not pardon my transgression and take away my iniquity? For now I will lie down in the dust, and You will seek me diligently, but I will no longer be.” 

 It is enough. Too much. Job is doubled over on his knees, soundless, strings of drool undoing a lifetime of dignity. Promises that we are not given burdens greater than we can bear do not ring true. Promises that God will comfort us sound like noises from the other side of a door. There’s something inconsistent, about being both a savior and a judge. “Though I were righteous, I could not answer God. If I called and He answered me I would not believe that He was listening to my voice -- for He crushes me with a tempest and multiplies my wounds, without cause. He will not allow me to catch my breath.” Job’s children were crushed in a tempest; Job’s body was infected with wounds; of course he can’t breathe.

 There’s righteous and there’s righteous. We try, and that has to be enough. That’s the deal. We try, and fail, and get forgiven -- then through the Law, now through the Cross. Always, through blood. But there is too much evidence to the contrary, to suppose we’re not pieces on a game board. God may at any time chose to turn our lives into object lessons.

 “God destroys the blameless, and the wicked. If the scourge slays suddenly, God laughs at the plight of the innocent. The earth is given into the hands of the wicked. God covers the faces of its righteous judges. If it is not God, who else could it be?” 

 We were told right up front that God gave permission, for some untold reason, to Satan, to torment Job. If it’s not God’s doing, whose? It must be that suffering doesn’t really matter. Sure feels like hell though, don’t it? But we’re also given the answer, pretty clearly. “God is not a man, as I am, that I may answer Him and go to court together. Nor is there any Mediator between us, who may lay his hand on us both.” Mediator, Reconciler, Councilor. God without Jesus might as well be Satan. A Judge who can only condemn doesn’t need an Accuser.

 If it is not God, who else could it be? It’s a complex situation. God uses the wicked as well as the good, and both the weak and the strong. God optimizes, and everyone suffers, and evil doers have happiness perhaps as much as the righteous, right up to the end. Clearly our understanding of justice cannot be accommodating all the variables. It’s nuanced. God cannot tolerate imperfection, yet we’re counted as good enough. That’s why quantum mechanics is necessary -- because particles are waves.

 Job, blameless Job in the bitterness of his pain said true things that are not true. God laughs at our pain. But it’s not so much laughter as a chuckle with a shake of the head, as at a crying child who is overly distressed by some small thing. Small, and not small.

 The pain of life is like fetish pornography. It’s not at all interesting, unless that’s your thing. Otherwise you have to just shake your head, and chuckle, if it’s not too gross. Poor, foolish, wretched creatures. Just get on with what’s important. 


J

Microstick

If the President stands before the assembled Press and reports to them the very most important, sensitive, vital secrets, the revelation of which places the nation in dire peril, the Press has a duty,  a deepest, most sacred duty to NOT report that news.  Of course there will be traitors in the press to match the treachery of the politician.  But what does one man's betrayal have to do with another's patriotism?

We live in a culture where someone's profession is more important than his country.  Or, in the case of the Occupant, where his vanity is more important.  I cannot be bothered to inform myself of the specifics, but it seems the entire former plan to punish Assad has been leaked.  Didn't Chelsea Manning go to jail for less than this?

We cannot speak plainly.  It would be too painful to hear.  To be bloody, bold and resolute, to understand and embrace the fact that the nature of things is red in tooth and claw -- we must be both prudent and honest about reality.  The monstrous dictator?  Kill him.  If he hides behind his children, nevertheless, kill him.  If he hides behind the innocent, delay until he can be more prudently killed.  We, as moral beings, concern ourselves with the innocent.  We need not take care of the children of monsters.  That is the job of the monster.

Is what I'm saying inhuman?  It is pragmatic.  Reality and the natural order of things matter.  Life is not a zero-sum game, for all that the innocent will suffer.  Our Constitution does not allow for the corruption of blood -- but nature does: children suffer for the incompetence of their parents.  Too bad.  What we do not do is tell the monster the duration and intensity of our attack against him.

We have a most deeply incompetent Occupant of the White House.  We have a degenerating culture and the well-earned contempt of emboldened enemies.  They are energized by our decadence -- abortion and gay marriage and sexualized children (it's all  about sex, isn't it) -- and they will deserve the success of their conquest.  Success is earned, after all.  Nature is not moral, it is mechanistic; cause and effect.

The conscience of a weakling is worse than useless, as a moral guide.  It is questionable if such a thing even exists.  There currently occupies the Oval Office an occupant who feels his gravitas is magnified when he utters the phrase, "...and I mean it!"  He thinks he'll be taken more seriously, or seriously, when he chillingly warns, "...and I don't bluff!"  Generally?  Here.  Specifically, at second 21.  Brr.  One's blood runs cold.  This is a man who will, no lie, knock your mailbox over.

I have an occasional correspondence with a young former reader -- who now, it is clear, occasionally skims FP.  He has evolved over the years, and seems currently to be leaning a bit more left than right.  Never met him, don't know him, but I respect his sincerity.  It should be met with tenderness. He wondered how gay marriage affected me, that I should have such a clear and negative opinion on the subject.  I responded that the rightness of a thing does not depend on how it affects me. Because he was raised right, he understood the validity of that.

But he also observed that he'd never known anyone who talks as much as I do, about how big my dick is.  This is why I say he skims, rather than reads.  This misunderstanding, through his carelessness -- I won't say it disturbs me, not troubles, not disappoints or saddens -- it gives me an unease.

I am certain I've never explored the matter.  My actual dick is nobody's business; more importantly, I don't think dick-size is in itself funny. I think the mentality that thinks about dick-size is funny.  I know I've bragged about how much weight my dick can deadlift, and I may have mentioned my gigantic scrotum, and I've talked about my huge pubic bone.  I recall I've mentioned hardness, tumescence, semi's, and the like, but this is common to almost all men, regardless of what some are pleased to call "endowment." 

I appear to be obsessed with my abs and my blondness and all such callow vanities -- but, really, please.  You have no business not being in on the joke. I certainly over-reference my intelligence, with allusions to my high IQ.  But this is obvious, where, although I am tall, there's no necessary inference re my dick size.   Specifics, re mine?  Never.  Maybe with the adjective enormous, from the very on-the-nose parodic performance-art character, a monster of ego and delusion, that I sometimes allow to perform in these pages.  

Likewise he said I talk about how small Obama's dick is, and I'm equally sure I've never said it was small -- I said his IQ was bright average, and I suggested at a later date we'd delve into his dick-size.  My point?  Obama's dick is whatever it is, unremarkable, long and thin or fat, short and fat or thin, exotically curved, purple and piebald  -- it's a matter of indifference.

Obama speaks loudly, however, and carries, publicly, a very small stick -- which he has made our business, and which is worse than embarrassing.  While Obama was hastily backing away from some "red line" people kept inconveniently talking about, he tripped himself into a whip-it-out contest with Putin.  Because O is what he is, it is America that must lose.  Obama's tiny little microstick is just a pathetic double-take point-and-laugh shame.

No.  Wait.  I'm sorry.  I'm talking about balls.


J

Red Stain

What should we do?  Be heroes?  This is The Non-Heroic Age.  What else could a war possibly be, where there are "no American boots on the ground".  Where there is no danger, there is no virtue.  It's not a good thing, in itself, to risk life and limb.  But it is necessary, for heroism.  What a bother.  Fine.  We don't need no heroes.  In the safe nannycam world currently being constructed for us, we need only consume, be silent and die.  No, wait, that's a cynical lefty observation upon 1970s Corporate America.  Needs to be amended.  Recycle, conform, and be a hypocrite.  Mankind without chests.  Bosoms only, here, please, male and female, if I may indulge in such archaic vernacular.

Let us concern ourselves with dictators and their anarchy.  Before we turn to the odd-man-out Assyrian of the Sarin gas (supplied complements of the former Saddam Hussain), might we call to mind the fact of chattel slavery, throughout Africa and the Arab world?  Where Christian women, and children, herd goats from dawn to dusk, hunger and thirst and sweat and flies, and then get to be beaten, and raped as often as the Moslim master and his favorites can manage to achieve an erection.  So what.  It's not in the news, before our eyes, occupying for the nonce our minute attention spans.  Ethnic little girl slaves raped daily in the Arab desert?  Ho hum.  A dictator used poison gas!  Now that's news!

Nations should act in their national interest.  Governments are not benevolent associations.  We've covered this ground already, in our American slippers.  So what is it to us if The Assyrian gases HIS OWN PEOPLE?  (Don't you just love how that's always emphasized?  I just don't see how that makes it worse.  Governments have the power and right to apply a police action, as much as to defend or extend their borders.  Duh.  Easy cheesy.)  The US has no pressing national interest in the internal affairs of Syria. I won't defend the statement -- I expect you to see the point.  Sadly, there is another necessity that demands our action.

The Idiot drew a line in the sand -- "Um, I'm warning you, uh, I, er, you'd better not cross th-this um line, and I uh mean it!"  And The Dicpotato crossed the line.  The Idiot said, "Er, uh, you'd better not knock uh this uh chip uh off my sh-shoulder, or else!"  And The Dicpotato knocked the chip off The Idiot's shoulder.  And The Idiot said, "Ooo, uh, now there is definitely going to be a very uh limited uh narrow uh action of some various uh sort, that I have the right to do, but only if the uh bad Republicans let me, but I will anyway, uh but not over the holiday weekend, uh."

It's not The Idiot who is a laughing stock.  It's the Presidency, and America, and the stupid stupid stupid American public.  America deserves the judgment that is coming upon it.  The cup of God's wrath is full, as proven by our abandonment of sanity, and his abandonment of us.  Whatever great archangel it was, who presided over and battled in the heavenlies for the United States, as Michael did or does for Israel, its energy and vitality is expended, now as vitiated as our own spirit.  Indignant protestations as to the remaining vigor and potential of this land to the contrary, there are spiritual laws, as there are laws of physics:  the trajectory of a missile can be calculated as far as the variables are known.  There is a hand at work, determining our direction, and the will behind it is malevolent.  

How dire.  Are you praying, for a Great Awakening? -- for a Revival? -- a rebirth and renewal and revolution and return to self control and independence and personal responsibility?  Maybe God listens, still.  We're told of his hardened heart, and of his awakened compassion.  I see it as arbitrary, so outside of our understanding it is.

Put not your faith in America.  America has a tramp stamp and a piercing in her labia.   America gave herself ducklips so she can give blowjobs to strangers and post the video anonymously on social media.  Yes.  America has made a sex tape.  You betraying bitch.

We have to act in Syria, then, not because poison gas has been used.  Poison gas is always being used, and we do nothing.  We have to act not because hundreds upon hundreds of children have been casually slain.  The math is too hard for me right now, but how many abortions are enjoyed every minute, in America?  Assad is a saint, if we look at the matter statistically, as a ratio of killed children, America:Syria.  We have to act because The Idiot said we would, and we are liars, but we must not be seen to be liars, and we are hypocrites, but we must not be seen to be hypocrites, and we are cowards, and betrayers, and just plain stupid, but we must not be seen to be so.

The counterpart of a vagina is not a penis.  The counterpart of a vagina is an empty scrotum.


J