Grown-Up-CAS in Da House

Folks, it's been a crazy three weeks since that last post... I found a house, made an offer, and applied for financing, if you can believe that. So my responsible side has taken over, and I've never been all that well acquainted with her. Not that I don't like her much, she just isn't very fun. But she does get things done. So we'll have this mutual tolerance thing for a while, at least until the loan goes through (yay or nay) and so forth. Closing date should be 10th of April, if all goes well... I refuse to be optimistic, that's usually a bad idea in my life. It usually leads to disappointment. (Thus the lack of house photos here for now; I will post them if things turn out right.) Meanwhile, I thought I owed y'all an explanation as to my disappearance of late.

My friends are, I'm sure, sick of hearing me talk about it. But it's a pretty big thing in life. Or at least, it feels like it when you're 36 years old and doing this for the first time. I've learned about a lot of things over the past few weeks, things I never wanted to care about like credit ratings and closing costs and so forth. Bleah.

And the world has gone right along as if (GASP!) it didn't even notice or care... Our country's debt limit has been raised to accommodate the borrow-and-spend Bush administration's manic hemorrhaging of money. 'Cuz the people benefitting from the war can't be expected to PAY for it, after all -- You know the ones, those whose kids aren't enlisted in the military to waste their lives in the desert. Yeah, them.

Ah yeah, and my all-time favorite graphic novel "V for Vendetta" by Alan Moore has been turned into a pretty darn good movie that's currently doing all right in the theaters. I'm shocked, actually, 'cuz I figured it was too British for American audiences to "get" y'know? Like, what average Iowa citizen knows who Guy Fawkes was? Or how important a symbol he is? And your typical comic-book movie this ain't. In fact, the usual superhuman comic booky things are entirely incidental to the story. How pleasantly surprising, I gotta' say. I just hope people -- at least some of them -- are getting the point. Guess that one remains to be seen...

Sorry, but it looks like I don't have much of a rant in me today. Maybe later. Till then...

--CAS

PS: Please send some good mojo our way for our dog, Sasha -- She has an ugly sore on her foot that could be skin cancer. Which might mean losing a toe. Or death. Or not. But a little good mojo can't hurt. Thanx!

My Hero

Wow, check this out, y'all:

http://www.inthesetimes.com/site/main/article/cold_turkey

Kurt Vonnegut kicks ass. I wonder if I have any of his books around?
He speaks many things, e.g. in the above-linked column, that I think.
I'm almost... allllmmmosssstt... inspired. Ideas, yes. Words/stories, no.

I have a business trip to southern Cali, leaving tomorrow morning.
I'll be back in about a week. Will the change of scenery help?

--CAS
(whose credit, BTW, is not quite as bad as she thought)

Another Kind of Award Show

My goodness. I watched the BAFTA awards this evening -- the British film academy awards -- it was only 2 hours long and immensely more worthwhile than that Grammy fiasco. Interesting to see it now -- more evidence that the Universe does what it does with purpose. If you look for meaning in the world you will find it.

The five movies up for best film were Brokeback Mtn (which won), Capote, The Constant Gardener, Good Night and Good Luck, and Crash. I can vouch for Crash, at least, which was brilliant. And nary a fart joke or a giant computer-generated ape in any of the list... So I got to thinking about the movie industry and how I just might have given it short shift in my "art is irrelevant" post last night. The famous producer of Chariots of Fire and The Killing Fields and Memphis Belle was on the BAFTAs and talked about how he retired from the film industry 8 years ago thinking there was no place for him and his kind of film anymore. And he pointed out these five nominees for 2005 and said how grateful he was to those who'd made them -- thus proving him wrong.

Gee. The medium that gave us Memento... The Sixth Sense... American Beauty... LA Confidential... Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon... The Motorcycle Diaries... Run Lola Run... Dark City... I mean, wow. They don't all disappear, do they? Gawd, I watched Citizen Kane the other day. Like 60 years old, and there I was marveling at this black-and-white thing. The ability of film (that is, images plus music plus story) to convey and create emotion...

And my friend Jen made a darn good point, too, about music. Even when I'm totally uninspired, as I have been recently, music inspires me. it's not all American Idol and Kanye West, is it? The entertainment industry may be blockbuster-obsessed, but that's not to say art itself is made irrelevant by the slimy, talentless leeches who made a business out of it. It's the concept of art as industry that's totally frelled, ain't it boys and girls? Just because The Wedding Crashers makes more money than Serenity did, doesn't make it better art, of course. Just because something has a larger audience doesn't make it the only thing that's out there.

Kinda' like politics, now that I think of it. The system we have is the one that majority-rule gave us, right?

Hmm.... If only some of these many hundreds of seemingly important ideas floating around in my head would distill somehow into a formattable story-type thing, I might just get inspired again. But right now, nothing I've got started and/or waiting to be started seems to interest me. And I figure, if I can't be interested enough to write the damn things, then I sure as hell cannot expect their eventual/potential readers to give a crap.

It's a strange kind of writer's block, the sort I haven't had since... gee, I don't know really. Maybe never. I'm 36. Is this the bleak Frodo-and-Sam-on-the-hill-overlooking-Mordor vision of an oncoming midlife crisis? Or what?

--CAS
confused, bleary,
entirely too deep into house-buying financials,
and questioning every damn thing

Eye-ronic Ain't It?

So I followed the link on Shane's blog right after writing the previous post... It's this website that somehow assigns a meaning to your name. Ready for this?

Cheryl -- [noun]: An immortal 'How will you be defined in the dictionary?' at QuizGalaxy.com

Now that, friends, is what they call IRONY. I should call up Alanis.

--CAS
(giggling)

E-relevant

I'm a writer -- er, not just a blogger, but I like write stories and sometimes poems or attempted plays things sometimes. I know what you're saying: "So the feck what, CAS? You're a writer. Big deal. What's that mean in 2006?"

Yeah, it pretty much means I'm irrelevant. My fiction produces no revenue for anyone. Periodically my nonfiction does; I can slam out a pretty good article on some basic science or technology from time to time. But that's not me. I sit around mooning about people who don't exist, and periodically I get into this warped little trance where I have to perch over the keyboard and tell the Ether about it. This is, I'm convinced, a barely controlled form of obsessive-compulsive disorder -- the kind that's channeled into a harmless behavior that doesn't interfere all that much with your ability to function as a semicontributing member of society. These numerous strings of alphanumeric characters that result, what happens to them?

Well, they become bits & bytes, of course, stored on my hard drive. And as such, they are just slightly more real than when they were floating around in my head. If I'm really super lucky, some friend of mine or member of the family will take pity and scan a few lines. They'll say nice things, maybe offer a little constructive criticism, and that's about it. I might make a few changes as a result, and then what? Well, not much.

Don't tell me to "send it out." I have. Various things have gone and come back again from time to time. Sometimes with kind or encouraging words, sometimes with a Xeroxed formletter, sometimes nothing at all. But here's the point, folks: Why even bother? What would happen if the answer was "Gee, thanx for sending that! We love it! We'd like to turn it into a product!" OK, so now you've got ink on paper -- or maybe just more bits & bytes intended to glow on someone's screen. And for me, what? A hundred bucks, maybe? Periodic royalties measured in cents rather than dollars? Yippee. Let's celebrate. I could make more on an assembly line.

'Cuz nice little stories, my friends, ain't worth $hit in 2006. Nor are not-nice big ones. This is the day and age of reality television (cut out the writing staff, more credit and profit for the producers!), manufactured pop music, and movies like "Date Movie" and "The Wedding Crashers." In other words, ladies and gents, crap. The world doesn't want your little story, it doesn't care what you think or have to say; it only cares what you look like, how much money you have, and who you're sleeping with. Especially if you'll go on TV and tell all the juicy details. Or better yet -- set up a webcam in your bedroom and invite all of Big Brother's little brothers and sisters into your home!

Admittedly oversimplified. After all, the occasional worthwhile piece of art does catch the attention of the masses. For, what? A week? A month at best? It's just a product. There are new ones coming out all the time. That's the deal, see? Even if your nice little or not-nice big story becomes a huge freakin' hit -- a phenomenon even -- it hasn't done a damn thing. Two years later they'll be saying the latest steaming pile of crap to come oozing out of 50-Cent's ass is so very much better. Remember "The Matrix," folks? Do ya'? What kind of references do people make about it now?

Irrelevant, see? All of it. Your painting, my novel, Jimmy's short story, Kelly's little song, Freddy's blog, and even Mikey's latest film... None of it changes anything -- the days of artists affecting the hearts and minds of the public are long gone. At its best, at the pinnacle of its success, art is nothing but a product. Why don't we just make shoe trees or grow plums? This is what I'm wondering today. Why don't I trash the lot of it and just take up gardening?

But maybe that's just the writers' block talking.

--CAS
(looking for a house in Lane County)

3.5 Hours I'll Never Get Back

I sat through the whole periodically excruciating Grammy Awards last night, and for those who didn't I thought you could use a report from someone who was actually paying attention.

Rock music is pretty much shat upon by the Grammy powers that be these days, that we know. Bruce Springsteen and Neil Young both did really great folk (at most, folk-rock) CDs in 2005, both of them were nominated for Rock categories, and Bruce won one. This ain't so bad 'cuz... well, deserving and all... but jeeze it goes back to Jethro Tull winning the metal category y'know? Where was Audioslave? Where was Franz Ferdinand?

For that matter, where were the Latin categories? Has no one noticed that Hispanics are the largest minority in the USA? How come deSol or Kinky weren't playing? And speaking of folk-rock (as I was a minute ago), what about Jason Mraz, Jack Johnson, Ben Lee, and Lucinda Williams? Guess they don't get a category -- so it's like they don't even exist?

Anyway, the two major rock awards (best metal and best hard-rock performance) happened get this OFF THE AIR. Apparently Slipknot and System of a Down (the winners, respectively) are not ready for pime time. But JZ or whatever he is, well he's just fine. What kinda' crap is that? Heck they couldn't even give us the White Stripes and their alt-rock award, for chrissakes...

Remember years ago when rap was new and all the rap guys bitched about getting no respect as musicians, etc.? OK, yeah, so they got their own category (of course, hard rock and metal had been trying since Led Zeppelin's day, and they finally got a category each in the late 80s, but I guess we won't get into that). And that's fine, good, even if what they do is a lot more performance art than it is music. But just a few years go by, then I turn around and not only do they have like six categories or something but they have the most performances on the show -- to the point where they and their R&B pals are horning in on other people's performances. Linkin Park can't play unless JZ is up there with 'em? What the hell was he talking about? I have no idea... but excuse me? Metal gets one single category, the award is given away safely off stage, but Kanye West and Kelly Clarkson get to thank their freakin' PUBLICISTS for fucksake?!? I say anyone who thanks their publicist should be barred from all future awards.

I'm all for this cool smash-up idea where people from radically different music "categories" get together and do some cool collaborations. But that shouldn't only equal some rapper talking about his money and how cool he is over the top of a watered-down version of a Linkin Park song. Here's a crazy idea: Why not Coldplay meets the Chemical Brothers? (CBs also got an award last night, two of 'em in fact, though you'd hardly know it if you watched the show.) Or Norah Jones meets Foo Fighters (oops, yeah, Dave Grohl made that happen, didn't he?). Or Angelique Kidjo meets Tom Morello.

The closest things to a rock performance in the show were Coldplay (w/more energy than you've ever seen 'em, I was truly surprised), and U2 (though of course we couldn't have a simple rock and roll song, some R&B chick had to come out and show off her vocal range for half of it, but Bono was nice enough to do very nice backup singing for her), and believe it or not Paul McCartney's kick-ass version of "Helter Skelter" rocked harder than anything else. He was cool, totally relaxed ("...my first time on the Grammys, I'm glad I finally passed the audition."). Later, Chester from Linkin Park was doing an admirable attempt at Paul's "Yesterday," (while JZ was doing his best to massacre the song) and Paul just moseyed out there to help. The only thing cool about JZ was his John Lennon teeshirt. Why Linkin Park's resident pianist/rapper was relegated to the back of the stage, I have no idea, since he's better at it than any of those guys with the jewelry and attitude...

A tribute to New Orleans was planned for the end but the show ran overtime (as usual) mainly because of look-at-me antics and ego-stroking speeches by Kelly Clarkson and the block of rappers/R&B people who'd pretty much taken over the whole show. So the second main reason I was watching got rushed at the end... and please note that none of those self-important jerks were on the stage to help out Katrina victims (except for WillIAM from BlackEyed Peas, the classiest of the rap bunch). Anyone care about their musical roots at all? Jeeze.

The other main reason I watched was the Gorrilaz thing at the beginning, which was pretty impressive. They really seemed 3-D, and Madonna actually walked all the way around one of them, which was pretty cool. The animation wasn't bad, the characters were hilarious (guitar-gorilla in his tighty whities and singer-gorilla almost bored to be there, while drummer gorilla looked like King Kong on vacation). What a great song is that "Feel Good Inc."

The surprisingly good moments of the night: Bruce Springsteen alone on a totally dark stage singing "Devils and Dust," with a quiet "Bring 'em home," statement at the end. John Legend sounding like a modern-day Sammy Davis Jr. And Bono's emotion when talking about his father. Oh yeah and all the people doing the Sly/Stone songs. Might've been better if the lame-ass sound guys would hold off on the pot-smoking till AFTER the show. I never saw 3 hours with more sound-engineered gaffs in my life. During one country-music performance, you could actually hear the sound guys talking to each other about their fuckup. Great work, guys. Really.

The pointless ego-fests that pass as "music performances" these days never cease to amaze me. Mariah Carey gets a good review 'cuz she screeched out some inhuman high note? So the feck what? So now sadism passes as musical talent? Did anyone happen to notice Christina Aguilara standing perfectly still leaning against Herbie Hancock's piano? Now that was a performance! The girl's growing up -- she used to be the sleazy Britney Spears, and now from what I can tell Britney Spears is the sleazy Britney Spears...

And forget all those rap guys, who are so in love with the camera and the money it represents that they now have to do their poser-schtick during other people's performances too. I was hoping to hear Jamie Foxx sing (he really can, y'know) but all he got to do was prance around like a high school moron with that other guy. Sigh. That audience of people who actually thank their publicists in acceptance speeches couldn't even remember the freakin' words to "Higher Ground" when Stevie Wonder and Alicia Keyes asked them to sing it with them in honor of Rosa Parks at the beginning, and thus a potentially beautiful moment was lost. Cripes. They're probably all "Rosa who?"

OK, the rant's winding down now. I'd started to feel a little optimistic about the Grammys for a couple years there when the performances were good and etc. Lauryn Hill gave you hope for hip-hop, and Alicia Keyes and Usher for R&B. Maroon 5 and Los Lonely Boys made you think pop might be good again. And remember Simon & Garfunkel together again? Great moments. But last night proved that it's back to its money-grabbing tradition -- I guess we shouldn't be surprised when it's entertainment industry related at all. But the recording industry has pretty much proved that it's completely lost by this point. They shove aside whole genres of music so the rap crowd can have their night. Fine. When do the rock people (never mind blues, jazz, world, etc.) get theirs?

--CAS
(a gen-X-er who's starting to feel a little bit like an old fogie)

PS: Yay, Green Day! Winning best rock performance with a song that was technically released in 2003! And yay Billy Joe Armstrong for pointing out the glaring absence of rock n' roll in these final days of the great Roman Empire. A culture that stagnates (read: wallows in its own decadence and ignores the danger signs) will fall. Katrina was just the beginning.

Kudos also to David Bowie, who didn't bother to go even though he was "awarded" a lifetime achievement thingie. That amounted to someone talking for all of 20 seconds about how cool he was and a bored audience politely clapping whilst checking their voicemail. An embarrassment. Hey... when's the R&R Hall of Fame show? Or have the manufactured pop stars and crappy slam-poets with gold teeth taken that over too?

State of the You-nyun

Hello friends and family, long time no see... er, write... rant, whatever. Tonight our Fearless Leader spoke his words unto us, and for the fifth or sixth year in a row (I'm losing track, it's all a blur, War on Drugs, War on Terror, what's the diff?) I did not watch or listen. I am a bad, bad American. Unpatriotic and apathetic and etc. I guess... Well, if politics is a spectator sport, it's just no fun when there's no legitimate opposition.

I am a registered Democrat. Why? I have no idea. Because I had a brief moment of optimism back around the turn of the millennium, when I actually thought that if more intelligent people would get involved in "the party," we could actually make a difference. Yeah, right. And some people still think voting matters, too.

Gawd, it's like that old "better to have loved and lost..." bullshit. Remember the glorious swelling of happiness and belief in Humanity we all felt that night? The big New Year's celebration, 1999 into 2000 (not the real Millennium a year later, although that was a pretty memorable party in itself), when the whole world held hands and sang Kumbaya for 24 hours... None of our dire predictions came true, no world-ending apocalypse or computer meltdown or even crazy mad bombers ruining the party. (How many truly great parties can say that?) I got choked up and shed happy tears, and for a few precious hours I loved Everybody.

But now I look back on that One Great Shining Moment with bitterness and a little heartache. I remember getting choked up, feeling like my species was all right after all, looking forward to what the future would bring. And now it just turns my stomach. Better to have loved and lost, my ass...

State of the Union, 2006: Exxon reports largest corporate profits in human history. Take a look at this chart to see what the past six years have been like for them (and very likely, every other oil company and country). How many of us expected something exactly like this five years ago? Any Exxon employees out there? Just wondering whether your wages have tripled like the company's profits have...



In other news, our leaders are defending freedom out one side of their mouths and torture out the other side... calling suicide bombers terrorism but phosphorescent rounds in civilian poppulations collateral damage... the toxic waste of our digital society is shipped to third-world dumps under the guise of "recycling"... for the first time since 1816, the US gov't is withholding names of its employees (about 900,000 of them), with no explanation as to why, although I'm sure the word terrorism came up... federal budgets cut meager amounts spent on making deadbeat dads pay their child support and more substantial disaster preparedness while borrowing billions from countries like China to pay for an Orwellian perpetual "war" that conveniently provides our leaders with carte blanche to do whatever they like without accounting to anyone... the Pentagon is tracking peace protestors in case they might be terrorists... Treasury Secretary John Snow asks Congress raises the government's borrowing authority from its previous $8.18 trillion cap (who are we borrowing from, you ask? Who cares, they answer, if they demand repayment we can always drop some of the bombs on 'em that they paid for!)... People are putting digital ID chips in their pets and children... and in the wake of Katrina et al, some people are still arguing that global warming hasn't yet proven to be a real threat... and the Fearless Leader believes the solution to our healthcare situation is for people to pay MORE out of their pockets because somehow choice will magically make costs go down and quality of services go up (he's forgetting, of course, that only those who can AFFORD to buy luxuries like insulin and physical therapy, further widening the gap between rich and everybody else)...

Ain't it great to be alive, American, and free in the 21st century?

--CAS--
(waving at the Watchers,
who aren't watched by anybody)

Long View

Last nght I came home from a typical day of working on the thrice-bedamned Windows PC at the office to a book Chris picked up for me at his work: Terry Pratchett's "Only You Can Save Mankind." It's pretty much a kid's book, but here's the thing about Pratchett. If you pick up a TP book, Discworld or not, and dare to read... say... the first sentence, well, it's all over from there. You will be finishing it that night. Terry's nice enough to write short ones that we can do that with. Heck, even back when I was barely reading anything at all, I couldn't put down a TP book.

So anyway I finished it, it was funny and sweet and made me smile, but... Well, by the end of it I gotta' say my eyes were totally fecked. And I got to thinking, because my vision was going and I had a nasty headache, about how Anne at work was telling me one day that you're supposed to look off into the distance like 5-10 minutes out of every hour you spend at the 'puter. This is why offices with windows are so important. And I try to do it, but y'know...

It's winter. Here in Oregon, that means it is pitch dark at 5pm. And the sloppy weather keeps you inside. We got the seasonal affective thing going big time, of course. I got a grow light next to my bed just so's I can regain consciousness in the so-called morning. Anyway, here's the thing that occurred to me:

We humans evolved on the African plains, yes? So the wide open spaces and grand vistas, they are our natural environment. We especially like to climb up high and look around. That's why all the most expensive houses in your town are up on the hills. It's why we have those pullouts along the highway that say "Scenic Overlook, 1/4 mile." It's why you get that charge from standing up on the edge of Crater Lake and looking around, and it's one of the reasons (I contend) that we so love to stand around on the beach and just stare at the ocean. The long view, man, we're hardwired for it.

But our city life, and in particular our modern city life of the 21st century, is all about things that are up close and personal. The 'puter, the TV, the nearest cars in traffic... Heck, probably the farthest away we have to focus our eyes is maybe 30 feet or so. Privacy fencing in the backyard means even when we go outside we're agoraphobic about it. Winter just exacerbatees the problem, keeping us from getting out into the world unless we're crazy enough to enjoy strapping our feet to sticks rubbed slick and jumping down an ice-covered hill or something.

Well, I got this theory that it's not just bad for the eyes, all this concentration and straining to focus on stuff that's really close up to us. It's also bad for our psyches. Makes us all close-in and self-absorbed, like the whole Universe revolves around us alone... with no idea of the big picture y'know? So we can't think, pardon my descent into biz jargon here, out of the box. Can't see the big picture, how can we keep it in mind? Wish I could do a study, compare the incidence of big-picture thinking with how often people go to the beach or up in the mountains, out to the desert etc.

Anyway, it's got me convinced that I need to do just that. I know how much better it always makes me feel, and I got the New Year Blues setting in right about now. Even if it means going out in the freakin' rain this weekend, looks like I just gotta' do it. I bet it even correlates with the seasonal depression thing -- yes, I know that's mainly due to a lack of light and associated brain chemicals, but gee... Hey, you go outside and look up at the stars, really look at 'em, let your gaze stretch out (maybe go somewhere up high if you have to), and tell me how it makes you feel.

Works for me!

Taking the Field

So let's see, we've done religion... What else are you not supposed to talk about in mixed company? Sex and politics right? Well, let's avoid the inevitable magic pop-ups that occur whenever the "S" word is tossed around lightly online, shall we? And move right on to the biggie. It's one of my favorites.

Politics, you see, is a hell of a spectator sport. We all love to watch it and talk about it and complain when our guys lose and make nasty comments about the winner, but... when it comes down to it, very few of us have the guts to get out on the field. Never mind that the field is protected by numerous layers of financial and bureaucratic gatekeepers like the security guards who stop morons from wandering onto the field at an MLB game. And granted, said gatekeepers seem to be much better at keeping intelligence out of the picture than stopping the idiots from thinking they can play.

OK, let's face it. Talent is not what gets you into this game. Nor is a knowledge of the rules. It's luck, money, and charm. OK, and lies. Tell the people what they wanna' hear, etc. But how can we complain? This is the system we've got because this is the system we made. Democracy, y'know? What the people want -- even the stupid, ignorant, or uninformed ones.

In a way, it's just like the movies. We all bitch about the dearth of originality and meaning in the sludge that Hollywood spews at us these days. But when something meaningful and original does show up, do we support it? Apparently not, if you look at the numbers for "Serenity" vs. say... "Doom," which was released a week or so after it.

We say we want to focus on the issues, talk about what's best for the country or the state or the city or what-have-you, but what do we pay attention to on the TV? Who watches the debate on TV? For that matter, who goes downtown when the local one isn't televised? Jeeze. Even so, what are we talking about in line for the microwave at work the next day? The ideas or the hairstyle? The substance or the bullshit?

US politics have gotten this bad because we let it happen. They learned from Hollywood to give the people what they want. Something similar happened in ancient Rome -- and we all know how that turned out. Complacency is the first sign of a declining civilization, my friends, and we're sitting on top of a great big cushy pile of it. Enjoy it for what it is 'cuz this is the pleasant view at the top of the hill, and there's only one way to go from here.

Down.

If you're lucky, you're old enough that you'll be dead before it all falls apart. I feel like I should be apologizing to every teenager I meet these days -- only like every generation before us, Gen X feels that we're not responsible for the mess. Yeah, we didn't make it. But what have we done about cleaning it up?

Hymnation, Dammitt!

Every religion has its cheesy songs, and some even have cool chants... Among the many things Wholists don't have, right up there with impressive meeting places and heavy books to throw at other people, we ain't got no hymns. So I'm on the hunt for some now. Let me know if you've got any suggestions.

I made a CD for my pal recently, a means of trying to get across something I think he needs to consider. It has to do with not assuming you can second-guess the intentions of the Whole... But anyway, I thought I would share the playlist here... Next time, it's back to the general ranting of a frustrated writer/editor, I promise. (And aren't you all pleased?)

1.) “Keep on Driving” by Sara Craig
 This one sets the quest before you...

2.) “Change” by Tracy Chapman
 And this one warns you that it ain’t easy...

3.) “Wonderful Disguise” by Mike Scott
 This one makes a good point...

4.) “Albert Einstein Dreams” by Naked to the World
 And this one should be strangely flattering...

5.) “Bounce” by Art Garfunkel
 He’s got it figured out, pretty much...

6.) “Shine Like It Does” by INXS
 And so did they, way back on their 2nd album...

7.) “It’s a Beautiful Day” by U2
 As cheesy as it seems, it can really work...

8.) “Central Reservation” by Beth Orton
 Took me several listens to get the point of this one...

9.) “Demons” by Fatboy Slim w/Macy Gray
 But this one’s pretty obvious...

10.) “Never an Easy Way” by Morcheeba
 Here’s a warning from a very cool UK band...

11.) “It’s Love” by King’s X
 And a reminder from one of the best 80s prog-rockers...

12.) “Best I Can” by Queensryche
 Sounds so simple when this dude sings it...

13.) “Someday I Suppose” by Mighty Mighty Bosstones
 But they know it ain’t no way easy...

14.) “Float On” by Modest Mouse
 Unless you make it that way, of course...

15.) “Iona Song” by Mike Scott
 But there’s always that nagging feeling...

16.) “We May Never Pass This Way Again” by Seals & Croft
 Let the Bahai boys show you the way...

17.) “What Do You Want Me to Do?” by Mike Scott
 When Mike says “Lord” it ain’t all that specific...

18.) “We’re All in This Together” by Ben Lee
 And here’s my answer, put more succinctly than I could!

Thumbprint of God

So we went to the beach yesterday and talked more about philosophy... and then this morning on OPB I watched an interesting little program on fractal geometry and it all came together. Yay, I finally have an answer when asked what my religion is. I so hate being lumped in along with that namby-pamby "new age" bullshit. It's all about the whole, right? So what's wrong with "Wholism" and being "Wholistic?" (Not "holistic," like medicine or whatever; I dont know why they decided to drop the W)

Here's "our" symbol:

That's the Mandelbrot set, which is (get this) a geometric construction of infinite complexity. How it works: based on a feedback equation, this thing can be "zoomed into" and "out from" an infinite number of times, each zoom revealing yet another level of detail. Which goes right along with something I was contemplating at the beach yesterday.

Aaahhhh, complexity. My favorite part of the show was when Arthur C. Clarke asks Stephen Hawking whether the "actual" universe is infinitely reducible, or does it have a limit of smallness? (Implying, I guess, that the M. Set could actually be MORE complex than the Universe itself?) Hawking talked about the Planck Length, which is the theoretical lower limit of size for things in our universe. It's very small, like a millionth of a milliionth of a millionth of a millionth of a centimeter or something like that.

And then they moved on to the next bit in the program. Meanwhile I'm thinking, hey guys... Um, this M.Set exists as a part of the Universe itself, yes? So does it not therefore represent better than anything else can (even a sideways figure-8 or a Mobius strip) the true complexity of the Whole? Is it not contained by the whole? Duh. Jeeze.

So I was obviously meant to see that little program on public TV, and I was obviously meant to see it after the beach yesterday and my recent philosophical noodling. Now I can move on. I am a Wholist, and the M.Set is the perfect symbol of my faith. Everyone's gotta' have one, right? How nice to be able to symbolize such (heh) complicated ideas in such a (heh-heh) small space?

Wholists rock. I wonder how many of us there are? ;-)

We now return you to your regularly scheduled blog.

Coffee, Tea, Philosophy?

So my mom and I have been going back and forth over some philosophical things — this is a particular danger when one or both of us partakes of red wine, for some reason. Anyway, she is a woman of deep faith — deeper, really, than I ever had any idea about while I was growing up. It pervades every aspect of her being, and it is so strong (what you gamers out there know of as “true faith”) because when she was growing up, she questioned everything about the religion that was presented to her, read the Bible on her own, and found true peace within herself as a Christian. It is something to be admired, and I did much the same sort of soul-searching myself, although for me it was easier because I didn’t have Southern Baptist doctrine being thrown at me like the proverbial stones they used to chuck at heathens in the way-back days. Nor did I, it turns out, wind up coming to the same sorts of conclusions she did. This presents her with a constant, nagging vexation, as though somehow she failed in her duty to God (not, you understand, to any church but to the almighty himself) in loosing upon the world a child who does not share her faith. When that faith is true, you see, it is Truth in your eyes. Really. Understand what that means? Having a kid who rejects it is like having raised some nutcase who walks around not believing in the Holocaust or something — only much worse because in your heart you also believe that said lack of belief pretty much means this soul who is pretty dang important to you may well end up being taken to task for it in the afterlife. That’s gotta’ be rough.

But I gotta’ go with my own conscience, of course, just like anyone else, and this she well knows and respects. These conversations of ours are not preaching sessions for her; they are periodic exchanges of ideas. And so it goes. We talk about such things, and she asks a lot of questions that force me to try and explain my own thoughts about theology, philosophy, and suchlike. It’s not a bad thing, either. In fact, it’s a very good thing for me (and I hope for her) because it forces me to clarify said ideas in my own brain. Recently, in doing so, I got one of those powerful notions that hit you sometime... You know, a “Eureka!” moment. I love those. They are like a sudden instant-message direct from God, or whatever short-hand name you like to use when referring to The Divine. If you’re at all interested in it, read the rest of this very long post. Or you can ignore my theology and move on. I ain’t one for preaching — don’t do it, don’t like people who do — but this is just so dang neato an idea I figured it was worth sharing in a philosophical treatise sorta’ way...

Here’s the thing: I don’t believe in God as some separate entity that goes around creating things and making rules and playing dice with the Universe or what have you. This is where our fundamental difference lies, we discovered in talking the other night. Because she really does believe in it that way (only without the dice, I’m pretty sure). That’s the basic Christian thing, and in fact it is basic to a lot of religions. There’s God (or gods) over there, mixing up chemicals and things and making planets and people and life and time and stuff. And here we are, all the things what it made (for whatever reason) and supposed to follow its rules according to how they’ve been passed down to us by people who ought to know — ‘cuz they were divinely inspired, or whatever.

But divine inspiration, apparently, doesn’t happen anymore. My ideas cannot have come direct from the Source because... well, I guess ‘cuz I ain’t as special as all those dudes with the Biblical names and such. OK. That’s the other side of the argument, and I’m not going to get into it here because you’ve seen it a million times in a million different ways. What I can talk about is what’s been going on in my brain lately.

Science and religion are separate paths toward the same goal: that being an understanding of the Universe we live in, how it works and why, etc. These two paths are parallel at best — meaning they go in the same direction but shall never intersect. This is why you cannot teach religious ideas in science class. It’s like asking a math instructor to pause during discussion of the Pythagorean theorum to mention some interesting details about democracy’s origins in ancient Greece. It’s like discussing color theory in choir or the US government’s failure to abide by its treaties with various native American tribes in computer science class. These things are out of place.

Think I’m full of it? Just ask a purveyor of the so-called “Intelligent Design theory” what he thinks about forcing churches to add scientific explanations of planetology and the origins of life into their sermons. You know, give them equal time and serious consideration without snickering or allowing the congregation to plug their ears and go “la-la-la” while you do it. It’ll never happen. Why? Because they know these things are different, but they don’t care. They’re just afraid of questions. They’re afraid of answering the questions of a kid who comes home from school and says, “Hey, dad, do you think God’s pushing the buttons when less adaptable species go extinct?”

That’s because the basis of religion is faith, and the basis of science is skepticism. These are two mutually opposable concepts. Faith says, “I believe in the unprovable because I feel it to be true.” (False faith, by the way, says, “I believe in the unprovable because I read it in this book, which someone who claims to know such things told me is the word of god.”)
Skepticism (otherwise known as the scientific method) says, “That’s an interesting phenomenon I am observing over there! Y’know, I think what’s causing that is so-and-so. Hmm, an intriguing hypothesis. Before I suggest it to the world, I better do everything I can think of to disprove it — before everyone else can do so and make me look like an idiot! So I’ll think of every way I can that I might be wrong, or that this thing won’t work. Test, test, test... Gee, they all failed. I believe my hypothesis is now a theory worthy of sharing!” followed by a bunch of learned people who have devoted their lives to the very subject you’re addressing looking at your theory and saying, “Ah, baloney! You didn’t think of blah-de-blah, now, did you?” and testing it for themselves just to show you up. After enough of them have done so, and lots of evidence piles up in your favor, your theory is treated as factual. But that’s not the end. See, down the road other people may learn stuff that proves you wrong. And suddenly you’re Ptolemy and they’re Copernicus, and things move on.

Meanwhile, of course, the faithful are saying something along the lines of, “You’re all full of it, for my religion teaches such-and-such and that is the end of the question.” or “See, I knew it all long!” or if they’re really clever, “By this metaphorical route, I can fit your facts into the metaphor of my belief without betraying my faith.” In faith, there’s not a lot of room for revision as things go along. Thus have people been taken to task, excommunicated, and worse for suggesting theories that contradict established church doctrine (you name the church, they’ve probably got a beef with something). Over the long term, of course, religions do revise their positions, but only when top guys who claim to have a direct line to god say it’s OK. The pope, for example, or some Islamic cleric.

See how these things are mutually exclusive? What most often masquerades as faith does not allow questioning. True faith, however, does; its answers simply cannot be proved or disproved. They are a personal matter. Science/skepticism not only allows questioning, it makes it a requirement. And it eschews all that cannot be proved/disproved by empirical means — even if those be simply mathematical models. Math doesn’t lie. And we have to trust all analytical methods at our disposal until they are proven untrustworthy. Just to be sure, most often, we test things by more than one method.

For example, when someone says, “Evolution is just a theory; it hasn’t been proven,” they’re simply showing off their ignorance of what science is. Natural selection is an accepted theory because in the century or so since Darwin first put it forth, no one has managed to disprove it. Until someone can point out, not some exceptional case where a less well-adapted species has managed to beat out a more fit one, but a better way to explain the overall descent of species taking everything into account that’s been learned since then, we gotta’ go with Chuck. You don’t discount the overall theory because, for example, one study got screwy results. That’s called human error. We have the vast amounts of data supporting evolution as an explanation for why species come and go to outweigh and thus cancel out any single experiment’s mistake.

Can a thousand monkeys be wrong? Of course they can. But if they’re long-lived monkeys that read, reason, go to college, apply themselves, ask questions, experiment, do math, communicate and learn from each other, and build upon the work of monkeys decades and centuries before them... well, the chances of their being wrong about some observable phenomenon are a lot less than if you just asked one or two of them what they thought about it.

That’s where religious ideas come from, of course. Ultimately, if you go back far enough, one guy was sitting there contemplating his navel and thought, “All of this has got to mean something, our living and dying I mean, and I just got a pretty cool idea what that might be.” This is true whether you think the guy just made shit up or was somehow inspired by the finger of God thumping him upside the head. No matter whether the voice in his head is his alone, some schizophrenic braincramp, or divine inspiration, the fact is someone sat down and wrote these things out... or went out in his village and told other people, who liked what he had to say... or picked up a stick and started dancing around the fire in such an entertaining and mystical manner that his tribemates decided he must be a truly special guy indeed.

Maybe early on, those folks sat around talking about stuff and changed their ideas through collaboration. In fact, I’ll bet they did. Genesis was only committed to papyrus after it had been the subject of oral history for quite some time. People told stories. They had to be both entertaining and easy to understand if you wanted people to not only listen to you and believe but also remember and pass them along. I won’t get much deeper into this. If you want to, go read Joseph Campbell. Eventually, what happens is that one dude’s idea became doctrine, and a bunch of other people hooked their wagons to it, and eventually it became so important to so many people that it was set in stone. Very often, what followed was increasing power, which inevitably led to corruption, such that if the original guy were to come back later on he might well be appalled at what it had become.

So now we return to my own “Eureka!” moment. Remember how I said that science and religion are parallel roads that never cross? Well, my own version of the religious road happens to run very nearby to the science road. It’s about one leap of faith away from it, I’d say. And here’s what that leap of faith is:

The Universe, see, wasn’t created by a god, but rather it is God, or that which we would recognize as such. Where did it come from? It created itself. “Er... come again?” you say. “Ain’t that answer just a little too convenient?” Not at all, says I. Check this out. What we imagine to be the end of the Universe (big crunch, cold fizzle, whatever you like) will in fact be the moment of its creation. That is, ultimately, its purpose: to reach the point where it can, indeed, create itself.

If you want this to make sense, you have to understand, really understand, the true meaning of the word Universe as I’m using it here. Carl Sagan’s “Cosmos” is just as accurate; I just happen to prefer the Roman version over the Greek. (It’s entirely an aesthetic thing.) It means, as he said, “all that is, all that ever was, and all that ever will be.” Check this out: I’m including time itself there. And I’m not limiting God to the same defined, linear reality we mere mortals must be content with. If you want to think of your deity as all-powerful, why should time be anything but a force it can manipulate? Ultimately, see, the Universe will reach a state of ultimate consciousness and true understanding of itself that it can quite easily reach back in time and cause its own beginning. This is a certainty because it has already happened. It’s only a matter of working toward the goal that you know for sure you can attain.

That wasn’t my “Eureka!” moment. I already had that bubbling around in my head all along. My first such moment in life, in fact, occurred about 10 years ago. My husband was fighting cancer at the time, so I was consumed by the spiritual battle that entailed on my side as well as struggling with the concept of true mortality. Vicariously, you could say, I looked Death in the eye. And lying in bed one night, trying to clear my head enough to go to sleep, I got the mental/emotional equivalent of the clouds parting and sunlight shining through upon me. Suddenly I knew the meaning of life. I wasn’t looking for it at the time, though it had been a subject of interest or many years. But there it was, as clear as if the words were written in shiny gold letters scrolling through the air over my head: “The purpose of life is to experience it.” Wow. Almost immediately thereafter I was struck with the realization that knowing the meaning was only halfway there: understanding and living it was something else.

Here I am, 10 years later, and I now know why. Because “experiencing life” is a way simplified term for what it really means. And if you take it the wrong direction, you could really end up in a bad place. Does it mean go out there and try to experience every activity and sensation you can dream up, good or bad, no matter the consequences? Of course not. Like any religious talk, you can’t just take it literally and you can’t take it out of context and interpret it any way you see fit. You gotta’ question, see? And find out what it really means. Like that eastern philosophy stuff.

I’ve spent 10 years figuring out the context of that revelation. And I think I’ve got it. We’re here, I mean we’re self-aware and intelligent and spiritual beings inhabiting physical bodies in this particular place and time, as part of Universe... part of God, you see? In fact, we’re pretty clever so that makes us teeny little pieces of the mind of God. The consciousness of the Universe fragmented into a zillion pieces, all spread throughout it to experience it up-close and personal, to look and feel and smell and taste and hear it all toward that ultimate purpose of true understanding.

By we, I don’t mean people who believe like me (‘cuz as far as I know, there’s only the one of me) and I don’t mean Americans or women or anything so provincial... I don’t simply mean humans, and I don’t even mean all Earthlings. I mean all beings, anywhere in the vast Universe that is and was and will be, with minds to contemplate such things as themselves. Possibly even all creatures with sensory apparati, for that matter. That’s the mark of the soul, yes? Spirits like to inhabit bodies that can really experience their surroundings, not just respond to them: things with eyes and suchlike.

One characteristic of Life, probably a major defining characteristic in fact, is its tendency to assemble itself into more and more complex forms. This may well derive from its basis on carbon, the divine element, which so readily forms chemical bonds with other atoms to make up more and more complex molecules. So the legacy of carbon-based life (and I argue that all life will be carbon-based) is this weird entropic tendency toward change and complication. If the purpose of life was simply to multiply and metabolize, then it could well have been happy to stop evolving at the archaeic or bacterial level. But no. Single-celled organisms found safety (and other things) in numbers and ganged together, creating so-called eukaryotic lifeforms such as slime molds and blue-green algae. They went all over the place photosynthesizing and building weird structures on the seashore, and that was something to be proud of. But it wasn’t enough. Responding to stimuli and changing environmental conditions over billions of years took Life in amazing directions, some of them long and involved and others cut short. Complexity increased: from single- to multicelluar organisms, from algae to plants, asexual to sexual reproduction, mullosks to crustaceans to insects, fish to amphibians to reptiles to mammals and birds... Up to this point, our own species is arguably the most complex yet. We may not have the most chromosomes, but we very clearly have the most fabulous neurosystems in the history of planet Earth. And that’s nothing to sneeze at.

But wait. Recently some scientists have coined and applied a new word for an entirely new form of life that’s right here in our midst: the superorganism, which I contend could be the next logical step in complexity for life on Earth. Check this out: certain insects (e.g., ants and bees) live in large groups, without which any given individual cannot survive for long. It has been hypothesized (and is now, of course, the object of a growing number of studies) that these groups thus fall under the definition of organisms in and of themselves, as much so as any multicellular lifeform can be. These are third-level organisms, whereas heretofore we have only been aware of one- and two-level lifeforms. You could say they are multi-multicellular.

Take your average beehive. The queen and her drones make up its reproductive system. The soldiers who stand guard at the hive entrances to battle intruders are pretty clearly the hive’s immune system. And the workers represent its digestive tract and all other supporting functions. Individual members of a given caste do possess a certain amount of autonomy separate from the others. But they act together in performing a given function. They communicate with each other, too. We’ve all seen that cute little dance the scouts do, shaking their butts and so forth to indicate upon their return to the hive exactly how far and in which direction others can fly to find a particular patch of clover.

Did you know your cells are communicating with each other all the time, too? Instead of a dance, they use molecules (usually proteins) as messages. Changes in their environment make some release particular “signaling” factors, which float around like emails on the Internet until they are taken up and bound by receptors on the surface of other cells. That’s kind of like broadcasting a message to the airwaves — eventually your transmittor’s signal is likely to be picked up by someone else’s reciever, and voila. Communication. Cells respond to messages in ways that are often much more complex than bees responding to each other’s body language. They make necessary proteins (e.g., antibodies) or step up their metabolism or a bunch of other things, any one of which involves a surprisingly complicated (there’s that word again) chain of molecular events.

Now take all that complexity and wrap it up in an exoskeleton, and you’ve got... say... an ant. You wanna’ make it more complicated? Make that ant just as dependent on a bunch of other ants as its own individual cells are on each other. Now they can build an ant-hill, farm aphids, all kinds of neat things. Superorganisms can do much cooler and more difficult things than single organisms can manage on their own. Look at the fun those carbon atoms are having now!

So it occurred to me, as I thought about superorganisms in bed the other night (What is it about lying perfectly still in a dark and quiet room that allows you to come up with these things? I bet your average Indian guru could explain that one. Just ask him about “meditation.”) that the very same criteria are probably met when you examine the characteristics of cities. Or indeed, any human communities: from tribal units to villages, cities to states to nations... Is Denver really nothing more than a giant ant-hill? Or, gosh, maybe each larger community is really a collection of superorganisms doing even more amazing things than the smaller ones that make them up...

I know, for some of you that seems somehow demeaning — perhaps somehow taking away from your own personal individuality in favor of the State as some socialistic beast — or maybe even oversimplifying the concept of community in and of itself. But it isn’t either of those. On the contrary, it merely attempts to describe the jaw-droppingly fabulous complexity of such things in terms of what they really are. Your individuality is undeniable: you are a discrete entity set off from the outside world by the boundary of your skin, just as an ant is defined by the boundary of its exoskeleton. If we accept that a single human being is at the very least one of the most complex creatures ever evolved on our world, then we get out our old SAT tests and analogize...

Ant is to Ant-Hill as I am to the City of Eugene

Wow, gee, how cool is that? This City of Eugene thing must be utterly amazing! And there’s a higher superorganism (called USA) that makes it look like an ant. Dang...

Look, I’m getting somewhere with this, OK? We’re talking about complexity, and we’re doing analogies for a reason. Just ride it like a trail horse. Sit back and relax. Try to enjoy the view. And stay with the guide. It was certainly worth it for me; it’s gotta’ be worth it for someone else...

Let’s stop here for a moment and revisit something. Like a scientist working on a hypothesis, I’m imagining you saying, “You can’t compare a city to an ant-hill. You just... can’t. I mean, they’re ants. They don’t have movie theaters or history museums or libraries or email accounts. They don’t think.” See me pointing my finger rather meaningfully at that last sentence? Point, point. Precisely, says I. They don’t think. And we do. So does not our city-superorganism differ from their ant-hill superorganism merely in its amount of complexity, that being based on the fact that its constituents are way more complex to begin with? If you think of it that way, really, the only difference is a matter of degree. Yes, it’s a huge degree. Exponential, even.

And thus do we arrive at our first major stop on my particular journey to enlightenment. In examining the miraculous chemical phenomenon known as life, we have arrived at a level of unbelievable complexity. Zillions of molecules zipping around doing zillions of things, spiritual entities (there’s my leap of faith again) inhabiting discrete collections of them by which to see hear smell touch taste the results, and linear time allowing for cause and effect and history and planning to make the whole thing really take off. This is really something. And our Earth is home to millions of superorganisms. So when I say the next thing, we should be better equipped to comprehend its full meaning.

Earth is to the Universe as an atom is to Earth

The word “complexity” does not begin to describe the exponent we’ve reached by this point. Hundreds of Earths could fit inside Jupiter; hundreds of Jupiters could fit inside our Sun; hundreds of Suns could fit inside the star Betelgeuse; hundreds of Betelgeuses could fit inside the Horsehead Nebula... There are thousands of such nebulae fitting in between the 100,000 or so stars that make up our galaxy. Some of those stars may well have planets with lifeforms and histories of their own.
There are millions of galaxies that we can see from our vantage point in the Universe. Even if each one has only one Earth in it, there are millions of them out there, each playing host to millions of complex superorganisms just like City of Eugene. The apparently empty space we all inhabit is, for all intents and purposes, infinite. Within it exist the largest and most complex structures we can possibly attempt to wrap our minds around: filaments made of thousands of galaxies, all loosely grouped in irregular numbers. If you map these filaments on a computer, the resulting picture looks disturbingly like the structures we know of as neural networks.

This is just the stuff we can detect with our telescopes that “see” in infrared, visible light, radio waves, gamma rays, and so forth. Certain mathematical models (pretty simple ones, in fact, based on the apparent mass of the Universe and the speed at which things seem to be flying apart) suggest that some 90% of what’s out there may be as yet undetectable. Add that into the mix of complexity that started with a few carbon atoms (which, of course, are not the simplest of atoms by any means, nor are atoms themselves the simplest structures yet elucidated), and you begin to understand what is truly meant by the word Universe.

When we look outward, time in a sense behaves oddly. The further away something is, the longer ago it is. We see a galaxy a million lightyears away how it looked a million years ago, not now. We cannot see it as it looks now — unless we wait another million years. Something even weirder happens when we look inward. Forget time. You start trying to figure out what’s going on inside an atom, then reality itself goes on the blink. The word complexity ceases to even apply, things have become so ridiculously complicated that we can only express them in esoteric mathematical terms full of bizarre symbols and variables and constants with lengthy histories of their own. Some of our fellow humans — for fun, let’s call them the physics caste — are trying really hard to figure this stuff out. But even those who devote their entire lives to the task can only elucidate little bits of sense about it.

Now, that’s God. To speak of such a thing as a mere father, holy trinity, collection of magical beings living on a mountain, or giant space-swimming turtle is (from my point of view) an insult. I think most of the religions of our world short-shift The Divine in a big way. To even suggest that we could possibly understand the desires and motivations of such a being, have a conversation with it, or be its chosen people... Well, it’s hard for me to express how ridiculous that seems when I take into consideration all that it is. It’s like one of my liver cells trying to contemplate the reason I might need to pour myself a scotch-and-soda on Friday night — only exponentially more impossible.

So when I say that, get ready for it, as infinitessimal parts of the Universe we are all of us at most the equivalent of neurons in the mind of God, I am neither elevating nor diminishing our importance. We are essential, we perform a vital function, and we are all in it together. We are also equal in our humble nature. And we don’t need to be told what our function is; like our own cells, we perform it because it is the only thing we can do. This is not a lack of free will or a total submission to Fate. Free will is part of our function. (What you are doing is what you are supposed to be doing, no matter what. Any consequences that follow are just as necessary. We’ll get into this later.)

Certain rather annoying NewAgers have made an utterly stupid leap of faulty logic that goes like this: “I am part of God, we are all God, therefore I am God.” I can’t for the life of me understand what kind of arrogant sophomoric mind can possibly reach that conclusion. It’s like saying, “My gallbladder is part of me, therefore it is me and I am my gallbladder.” Your first week of logic class, if anyone bothered to study such a thing anymore, would teach you how stupid this is.

(Yes, a devoted biochemist might just be able to make an exact copy of you from one of your skin cells. But it is the rare clonee, I think, who would then accept the pronouncement that said copy is as much him as he is himself. Thus would it be entitled to write checks on the man’s bank account, sleep with his wife, and quit his job for him all in legally binding ways. Not gonna’ happen. Why? Because we instinctively understand our own selfhood. Heck, your dog understands it, so should you!)

The NewAgers then use that drivel to justify wandering around the world doing whatever they feel like doing without a thought for consequence or anything else. They call it “freeing.” I call it intellectualization of a childish existence. Oh yeah, and bullshit. This is my treatise, so I get to be in charge here and kick them all out. You only get to stay by admitting how stupid the pseudo-conclusion is.

Those of you who are still here may consider yourselves congratulated. Remember when I was talking about superorganisms? OK, well, the Universe is obviously the ultimate one. If we’re each a single cell in that vast and divine being, then groups of us would clearly form the equivalent of organs. (Note: Yes, I realize the metaphor does not strictly apply. If you mapped all this to scale, even the Earth itself is not big enough to be considered a cell, nor our Solar System an organ as simple as a lymph node. But I think I’ve already made it clear enough that the Universe is no more a slave to time and space than you are a slave to the set of religious doctrine first presented to you as a child.)

Collectives, then, are capable of doing cooler and more complicated things than are individuals. Thus do Nobel Prize winners “stand on the shoulders of giants,” and thus did it take the committment of an entire nation and the dedicated work of many of its citizens to put the first men on the Moon. As amazing as are the atomic bomb and the pyramids of Egypt, just imagine how amazing is the complex spiritual conceptualization formed by the combined searching and interactions of the entire human race since the first of us stood upright in Africa a million years ago. All of that maybe just the equivalent of God deciding what to have for breakfast.

Yes, it seems like a Mobius strip of words to say that the Universe (i.e., God) created (i.e., will create) itself. But we’re not talking about some easily conceived notion of a kindly father spirit who makes things with his hands and in all of Creation chose to tell the truth only to a few ragtag shepherds hanging out in the deserts between Europe and Asia a few thousand years ago. We’re talking about God: omnipotent, omniscient, omnipresent. The people who first used those words to describe what they conceived of as God had no idea what they were really getting themselves into.

And no, we haven’t gotten to my “Eureka!” moment yet. But here it comes. You see, when I got into this in talking with my mom, in the midst of being offended by my apparent insinuation that her own deeply held beliefs must be nothing more than quaintly silly superstitions, she asked me a very important and pretty complicated question: “But what about Evil? and consequences for your actions? If you have no rules to follow, then aren’t you simply justifying a way you can do whatever your like with no remorse?”

First, I found her notion of insult somewhat amusing, by the way, since it completely ignores the direct implication of her own faith that everything I’m saying on this subject amounts to the ravings of a deluded and self-important egomaniac. Not to mention that the millions of believers of Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, etc. all across the Earth also must be poor misguided superstitious fools. The only way we of different faiths can coexist without violence, it seems, is to agree to disagree. And, if we are easily offended, avoid talking about religion at all on the off chance that someone you otherwise like might imply that they are quite certain you either are going to hell or can expect to come back in the next life as a wart-hog. If you dwell on it, it can really color your dealings with that person, I guess. In that respect, I would contend that my own faith is at least one of the most tolerant ever devised, for I think whatever you believe is what you are supposed to believe in order to serve your purpose, whatever it is since it cannot be devined by creatures such as us.

And that brings us back to Evil. What is it? As my mom put it, do I then respect the follower of Satanism who believes he must commit an infant to bloody sacrifice under the full moon as simply fulfilling his purpose and thus undeserving of punishment?

Well, to be honest, I hadn’t put a lot of thought into the concept of Evil at that point. And my gut instinct was to go back to the collective/organ thing: i.e., whatever is bad for the community is bad and thus can be punished by the community as an entity. Thus we have laws and so forth.

But she’s clever (where do you think I got it? heh). And she says, “What if the laws of a particular community happen to allow for something evil? Does that make it OK?” I consider the Aztecs and their blood sacrifices. And I frown. I don’t like the idea of some opposing force of Evil that seeks to counteract God’s will. It’s far too simple, too much like us and our own experience to apply to the Universe as a whole. The “War Between Good and Evil” is too easy of an answer. And in my gut I do not believe that there is one main bad guy out there who’s just as powerful as or more powerful than God but somehow confined by rules that make him work through us, or whatever. It just doesn’t make sense to me. And I go by Einstein’s credo that “Truth is elegant.”

The right answer will feel right every time. That’s evidence of our connection to something bigger and better than ourselves.
And that’s when it hits me. If the Universe is the ultimate superorganism, then that organism may well be capable of illness. Evil. Is. A. Sickness. That’s why we instinctively know it when we see it — because, like our own cells, we are programmed to recognize illness and reject it. Some of us become ill — like the white blood cells in a leukemia patient — and may or may not recognize it for what it is. But the rest of us, those who are still healthy, we can see it. And we can stop it one way or another. Especially if we work together.

Which takes me back to that night in 1995, lying next to a man who was battling for his life against a thing the size of a three-egg omelet, which had wrapped itself around his trachea and superior vena cava in an apparently concerted effort to strangle him to death. For Chris, defeating it was a task to be accomplished just like any job — which suggests, perhaps, that he’s more naturally in tune with our nature as functioning parts of God than I am. For me, it was Evil that must be destroyed. I did everything I could for Chris himself, meanwhile directing all the spiritual energy of my hatred and ill-will against that thing as hard and as constantly as I could. That was the best I could do. Together, with the help of some amazing doctors, we killed it before it could kill him.

See, I don’t think hatred is any more intrinsically evil than guns are. Both are weapons, both have their uses. But both are more often misused than not. Those who do evil deserve to be hated. This includes those who point their hatred — or their guns — in the wrong direction. How do you know what’s the right direction? Listen, and the Universe will tell you. These are things you cannot read in a book, cannot be taught by anyone — especially those who claim to be wise teachers. I will not attempt to tell you anything but the simplest Truth: If you tune in, then your intrinsic connection to The Divine will be apparent.

This is what makes you feel bad when you think or do something wrong, and it’s what makes you feel good when you do the right thing. It’s as natural as breathing. You will be happiest when you are doing what you should be doing — whatever is your purpose as part of the Whole. That’s kinda’ how you can figure out what that purpose is. But, you might ask (as certain people have already), what about people who are mean or lazy or suchlike? Are they fulfilling their purpose? Well, maybe. We’re about as equipped to understand the true needs of the Universe as my dog is to understand the current War in Iraq — only less so by a quadrillionfold. Some people may be accomplishing something we cannot perceive, maybe even something of which they are unaware themselves. Many of them may be ill — in the “evil” sense of the word, that is. I don’t mean mentally ill so just give them a pill. I mean spiritually ill. And seldom can such illnesses be cured by the actions of another person. Persons, however...

Well, back to that whole complexity issue. Check this out: If we think of our communities (whatever form they may take, from nation and city-state to fan club and family unit) as the spiritual equivalent of tissues/organs in the entity that is Divine, then they are by nature imbued with certain powers that individuals do not possess. A termite alone cannot build a termite mound; it takes thousands of them. A single person is incapable of curing the ill that is represented by, for example, a serial killer. It takes a community of people to find the bastard and catch him and bring him to justice. Make him pay. “Vengeance is mine,” sayeth the Collective. If we left it up to the Lord, after all, we wouldn’t have to take any responsibility... and the entire justice system would be a pointless waste of time/money/lives/etc.

Sometimes a person may become the instrument of that cure: e.g., executioners and that guy who murdered Jeffrey Dahmer in prison. (Obviously, they may not necessarily be perfectly good people, either. How many stories have we heard of “bad cops” and police brutality?) This most often happens on the slighter scale, though. A guy goes around breaking hearts and falls in love, only to get cheated on. A self-important rich man who really believes that “He who dies with the most toys wins.” ends up alone and heartbroken. Or someone on a self-destructive downward spiral meets just the right someone else and recognizes him/her for what he/she can mean, thus finding a way out and a reason to go on to something better. Or circumstances alone may lead to justice. These things do happen — the Wiccans call it the Rule of Three (whatever bad you do will come back to you threefold). And the Hindus call it karma. But of course, there are some people who, to all appearances, manage to get away with being rat-bastards all their lives with seemingly no consequences. It may well be their purpose — a purpose we cannot hope to understand — or their illness may be uncurable.

Your cells have a built-in suicidal mechanism called apoptosis. If one of several types of things goes wrong, it will initiate a signaling cascade of messenger molecules that cause things to happen leading to the eventual death of the cell. Genetic mutation is a common trigger, it happens more easily and more often than most people realize. Senescence is a similar mechanism by which cells kick the bucket when they are no longer needed alive (e.g., the dead skin cells that mark the physical boundary of what makes you an individual) or they’ve been cut off from what they need to survive. What we know of as the worst sicknesses — e.g., cancer, autoimmune disorders — are cases where, for whatever reasons, natural disease-fighting mechanisms — apoptosis and the immune system, respectively — don’t function correctly. In most cases, we’re still not sure what the reasons are.

This leads me to another spiritual analogy, which should finally explain why this whole second bit of enlightenment has had nearly as big an impact as the first one did. In your body, things can go wrong. These are things that have nothing to do with your free will. Chris made no conscious choice that said, “I’d like to build myself a whole new organ in my chest, one whose sole purpose is to kill me. Yeah, that sounds pretty cool.” Nor can you toss off a “Well, some unconscious choices he made led to the cancer.” No. His body is imperfect, and it screwed up. Something went wrong.

That can happen to any life-form. You could even say it happens to inorganic systems, which do give away their simplicity by being much more predictable. Illness is, in a way, imperfection. Evil is when things are out of whack. And here comes the ultimate heresy... The Universe is imperfect. Knowing what you know at this point about my beliefs, you realize that I’m about to type some words that in times past (who knows, maybe even in the near future) would have gotten me hauled away: God is, therefore, imperfect. Omniscient, probably. Omnipotent, verly likely. Omnipresent, most certainly. But perfect, nope. My theology as I’ve laid it out does not allow for Divine perfection.

“But wait! Isn’t that part of the whole definition of what we mean by God?”

It’s what Christians and Muslims and Hebrews mean when they say God or Allah or Yahweh. Perfection is as inherent to their concept of god as is “goodness.” But for many other peoples in the history of our world, gods were far from perfect. The Greeks, Romans, and Norse believed in very human gods who just had some nifty magic tricks up their sleeves. Followers of Shinto believe their own ancestors somehow become divine (I’m a little rusty on that one, it’s been a while since I read anything about it). Certainly the Japanese tradition imbues their emperor with a divine nature similar to the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. Hinduism fragments god into a bunch of pieces, none of which is as great as the whole — but I'm not sure even they include perfection in that. And Buddhists don’t really have a god, as far as I know.

So I’m not really as “out there” as it may at first seem. How could the Universe be perfect if it’s made up of imperfect things, after all? You are a small part of it, yourself, and you are not perfect. So even if your own imperfections were all that there were, they’d still be there. And as you know our own human society, such as it has become on planet Earth by now, is absolutely rife with imperfection. I’ll guarantee you that when we come across other ones out there, they’ll be messed up too. Even the ones who have been around longer than we have (evolved past petty border disputes perhaps or gotten rid of their appendices entirely) will be far from perfect. And as fellow parts of the Whole, they’ll be contributing their own brands of spiritual illness to the mix.

Evil seems to be as inevitable as goodness. And maybe goodness is merely another word for proper functionality. Ick, that sounds terrible. But I mean, what is best for the Whole is what’s right. Just like when someone gets severe frostbite and has to get some toes chopped off. (A fun question to ask is how much of yourself could you cut off before you weren’t you anymore... This is especially fun when you’re talking to one of those people who insists that by saying we are part of the Whole we automatically mean we are the Whole. Throw a cushion from your couch across the room; if in being part of the couch it is the couch, are there now two couches in the room? Or has the one become larger because it covers more area? Whee, I just love logic.)

Now, don’t think that I’m saying anyone has the right to say what’s good for the whole, and thus implement it. This philosophy cannot empower any tyrant to tell us he’s got a direct line to the Divine and can thus tell us all people with blond hair must die for the good of us all. Lots of us will feel the wrongness of such action. The details and reasoning of this overall goodness I speak of are known only to the Universe itself, as it figures itself out over the eons. Its decisions are final, and we haven’t a hope of contradicting them. In that sense, the Universe (that is, God, right?) knows best. It ain’t perfect, but its largeness does outweigh those imperfections. Evil is, in the end, but a spiritual parasite of the Divine. It cannot win.
(How cool is that?)

It is quite possible, however, that we ourselves will not be around to see where this is all going. Our species may be a gangrenous toe. Or we may yet heal ourselves and move on, contributing to the Universe’s knowledge of itself, understanding more and more our own bits of it as time goes on, evolving and growing and changing as we see and experience more of this great Vastness we’re part of... and everything will be right in the end.

But then, it’ll all be right with or without us. Because it already has been. The loop is eternal, extending beyond the concepts of time and space themselves, and we are privileged to be part of it. If we play our cards right, maybe we’ll end up being a big part of it. We weren’t created to be God’s super-special creatures destined for dominion over all we survey. We have to earn that.

And thus the struggle. Each of us tries to do the right thing, it’ll reflect on up the chain to the collectives we form, make them function correctly for the good of all, make everyone happy and contribute to the Universe’s understanding of itself, and there you go. Every time we fail, we drag everyone else down just a little bit, so we keep on trying. Because if you’re capable of imagining a better world, then you’re obliged to work toward it. If you can conceive of a better you, then you’re obliged to try and become that. If you remember a dream and wonder what it meant, it meant something. If you see a great blue heron fly over you on a walk in the wetlands, and you sense meaning in its appearance, then the truth is there to be revealed to you. These things are part of our purpose in life, part of our meaning for existence as spiritual beings in physical bodies. We wouldn’t have them if we weren’t meant to use them.

I’m not asking you to be good and strive for more because you’ll go to heaven or come back as a rich man. I’m not asking you because you’ll otherwise go to hell or come back as a dung beetle. I’m not asking you because it’ll make you happier in life; this is no cure-all for sadness or magic pathway to avoid trouble in your life. It’s because the Universe needs you. You’re as important as anyone else — otherwise you wouldn’t be here. Without you, without whatever it is you can conceive of for yourself, the Whole is diminished. You can either be part of the something great, the greatest thing ever in the history of time and space, or you can be a symptom that must be cured.

Evil is a sickness. It can be overcome. It will be overcome. Just how that happens in the end is up to all of us.

Singapore Pix

Here are some photos to give you a feeling of what it was like in the Far East...

First, here are two symbols of Singapore:

the purple orchid



and the "mer-lion."






Next, something like the view out my hotel room window every night...


I watched several of these out my window -- it was the rainy season. My last night I watched a great storm while eating dinner on the open-air balcony of a 24th-story restaurant.




Could be Joss Whedon's 'Verse, hey? Or maybe an Asian Mardi Gras... Chinatown was yummy... and also icky... depends on which booth you go to.


And last but not least...

The koi pond was like a living lava lamp... Most tranquil.

City of Many Aromas

I've been back from Singapore for a few days now -- have had a nasty bout of traveler's flu. No, not the Asian Bird Flu thingie; I'd probably be dead by now if it was that. No just the usual crud you pick up by spending an entire day's worth of hours in airports and planes when you travel internationally...

What can I say about Singapore? If you're as big a "Firefly" fan as I am, you've seen what the big cities in Joss Whedon's future 'Verse look like. Asian/AngloSaxon influences and hightech/lowtech living side by side. Well, that's Singapore. You arrive at the spiffiest airport on Earth (there's a traveler's "lounge" where you can pay 20 bucks and take a 3-hour nap in a quiet dark little cubicle, how civilized is that?!?) and take a super-clean cab through streets lined with coconut palms -- and yes, your cabbie is driving on the left side of the street, which makes some of us a little nervous, it feels like he's playing "chicken" with the world -- against a backdrop of skyscrapers that seem to go on forever... I stayed in the Shangri-La Hotel, which is hands-down the most jawdroppingly luxurious place I've ever been. They have a PILLOW menu, for chrissakes. A tub AND a shower stall in your bathroom. Nice big towels. Huge bay windows in my 14th floor room looking out at the city. A multilevel koi pond and not one but FIVE restaurants on premises. Flowers fall from the sky at night there, and a little old Chinese man sweeps them up in the morning and hands you handfuls to take back to your room. I am not kidding.

But you gotta' get out of the hotel sometime, right? Walk the streets of Chinatown and munch on cheap dim-sum... that's where the City of Many Aromas becomes clear. Singapore is a crossroads, has always been a crossroads, was founded by some British entrepreneur called Raffles just a couple/few centuries ago specifically to be his own personal crossroads. Biggest container-ship port in the world. Basically, we're talking the closest thing Earth has to a "Babylon 5" space station, here. Aliens of every shape and size speaking a dozen languages all around you, etc. etc. And every step you take smells different: "Mmm, seafood!" "Ew, someone peed." "Is that patchouli?" "Barbecue!" "Wet dog." You get the idea. More so than anyplace I've ever been -- and that's taking in a lot of places, friends: NYC, Frisco, Paris, New Orleans, Barcelona, Zurich, Geneva... Wait. Out of all those, believe it or not Geneva comes closest. It had even more varied TV channels. Mostly what you get in Singapore is Chinese, Indian, japanese, Malaysian, BBC World, CNN, and a couple of US cable channels with Chinese subtitles. Sorry, Fox News, apparently no one in Asia cares what Bill O'Reilly thinks. Isn't that comforting?

"So what," says Bill. "Their opinions don't matter." Oh yeah, sorry, they're just something like half the planet's population, right? Or more? Right, who cares what they think... Remember, this is a guy who thinks "Uhmaricuns" when you say the word "we." He can't imagine that some of us say "we" and think "Humans."

Malaysia is very tempting. I was 2 degrees north of the Equator in November, OK, and it was 85-95 degrees every day. Humid. No, I mean REALLY humid. Like swimming through the air. Walk out of your air-conditioned room into the air-conditioned hall, take the air-conditioned elevator down to the air-conditioned lobby of your luxury hotel, and there's already a river running down your spine. That kind of humid. But beautiful. Like all those jungle-animal exhibits you see at the zoo, only, like, it just keeps on going forever. For real. A million kinds of flower. And gorgeous jewel-tone color prints on everything. Weird food. Weird. Some of it good. Some of it... well... awful. Dragonfruit good. Durian baaaaaad.

Someday I want to take the Orient Express -- it's now got an extra line from Bangkok down to Singapore, and from what I can tell that would be awesome. Singapore is its own country, and only about 10 x 20 miles or something like that. You've probably heard how strict their laws are. Well... gee... it's a very clean and civilized place. Maybe strict is what works for cities, I don't know. But this "Asia with training wheels" taste of the Orient definitely gave me a few more ideas for what to do when I get rich and famous.

Heh. Right. Next time we'll talk about why that's never gonna' happen...

--CAS
(home and trying not to hork up a lung)

How Bout a Little Manic w/Yer Depression?

Jeeze, CAS, why not broadcast your own personal neuroses to the world? There's a good use for bandwidth...

Ah, well. Forge ahead. I'm coming out of that oh-so-pleasant mood of the past couple/few weeks and inching toward the barrel of monkeys that is its flipside. Just like day and night, hot and cold, movies and videogames, ya' can't have one without the other. "Y'know," say people who apparently believe they were put on this Earth for the express purpose of telling other people how to live, "there are drugs that will even you out. Why don't you...?" "Yeah," sez me, "too bad there ain't any drugs on the market that'll stop you from being a self-righteous busybody who can't keep her nose outta' other people's business!" Don't worry, I'm sure someone somewhere will think of a psycobabble diagnosis for that, too, and then just watch the pharmaceutical industry jump on it with both feet!

See, apparently, there aren't enough REAL diseases, conditions, and other forms of human misery out there to make these people a good enough living. So they gotta' make shit up and convince a public filled with Baby Boomers (who, let's remember, began their lives with "Better Living Through Chemistry" and went on to Timothy Leary and the Summer of Love, followed by the Swingin' 70s and Reaganomics, so they got no problem at all thinking a pill can solve their problems) that they can't sleep without Ambien, can't fuck without Viagra, and can't function in the workplace without Prozac. Or whatever's the latest personality adjustment in a bottle. These folks go hand-in-hand with the plastic surgery industry, which as far as I'm concerned should be just as illegal as con games and credit cards. Oh, right, that whole credit card / credit bureau scam is still going on, isn't it?

Let's be honest. It's not that there aren't enough real problems for people to invest their time and money into solving. It's that, y'see, being real problems and all, they're like HARD to solve. Like, really hard, man. You can't fake solving something like malaria or starving children. Not like you can fake the shyness pill. "Here, Becky, take this pill and you'll be fine." "But, um, I'm still unemployed and up to my ears in debt, and my husband's still over in Iraq..." "But now you won't CARE! So you can just get on with your life." "Gee, thanx, that sounds great!" "It is. Grab some of those nose-job brochures on your way out."

And hey, I gotta' tell you. I'm not sure I'd want to live without my manic side. My in-between self is BORING as hell, she's the one who just goes to work and comes home, cooks dinner, maybe cleans my room or something. Sure, depressive me is a pain in the neck. She complains, eats too much, and sits around watching too much TV. But without her, who would I blame for being 40 pounds overweight? Besides, she's the price I pay for manic me -- the idea generator, the midnight-road-trip party animal, the up-all-night-with-a-project psycho artist who wrote Racing History for chrissakes. I need her. I love her. She's a blast. I can't wait till she gets here...

And besides, I got this radical idea that if you're truly unhappy with your life, you probably oughta' change it somehow. 'Cuz if we've built a society where growing numbers of the citizenry must voluntarily drug themselves into submission simply to function without going postal, committing suicide, or ortherwise falling apart, well... Blame it on my too-early exposure to Nostrodamus and all that crap, but gee, I'd say you're looking at the beginning of the end there ain't ya? Hey, today's movie recommendation (I got one for all occasions) is something called "Equilibrium," which you may believe is an action-skiffy-flick, but like "The Matrix" all the flash and dash is there to keep dumb people awake while the smart people get to play with some very interesting ideas. Rent it.

Maybe next time we'll talk about George Orwell and the War on Terrorism.

--CAS

PS: Love and kisses to all my buds. Thanx for the emails!

Pie in the Sky

So I watched this 3-hour special on The History Channel called "Failure Is Not an Option" today... about the mission control folks at NASA... covering the whole history from Mercury through Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Shuttle, and speculation about beyond... Really cool stuff. Very emotional for me, as I've always been a NASA groupie.

I was born three months after the first moon landing. (My mom says I was there when she watched it on TV, but she could not tell whether I was interested or not.) And the first movie I ever saw in the theater was Star Wars. So I am truly a child of the space age. Carl Sagan was my hero. I read Harlan Ellison when I was in the 6th grade. And I finished writing my first sci-fi novel at 18 (yes, it sucked, but that's not the point).

But it was the Challenger explosion in 1986 that changed my future. Because that was when our country lost faith in the value of space exploration. Let's face it, the general public lost interest in the early 70s. But they were cool with it happening anyway even if they weren't looking. They got computers and velcro and microwave ovens and other cool stuff out of the deal, after all. Then BOOM.

By the time I was finishing high school, the hiring freeze was about all I knew about NASA. So I didn't bother dreaming about any kind of career that could have anything to do with it. I toyed with the idea of planetary science (my hero Sagan was in the dept at Cornell, after all) before I realized there were probably a dozen jobs to be had with the degree and what chance did a B student have? Right.

So off to journalism school. Communications, especially the written kind, that was easy for me. I toook the easy way out. I saw the movie "Contact" and cried like a baby. That could've been me. If only I hadn't been so...

Now I've seen all kinds of criticisms of NASA over the years -- more of that than anything else, really. As a child of the space age, I grew up being told that none of that mattered anymore, that the glory days are long gone, that we have enough problems here on Earth and blah blah blah. None of the great successes matter either -- people only talk about the failures. And they talk about somehow making space travel "safe," as though that were possible. We can't even make driving on the highway safe. We can't even make food and drugs safe. And we're supposed to make exploring the most inhospitable environment to life somehow safe?

Look. If you said, "We can afford to send some folks to the Moon, but we can't afford to bring them home. So they'll have to just stay there till they run out of supplies and then that's it." Certain death. How many people do you think would volunteer for the mission? A couple dozen? A hundred? A thousand? Easily. These are the same crazies in ancient Africa who said, "I wonder what's around that nearly impassable cape down shore from here." And then they went, and no one ever saw them again. Some died. But some of them set up camp and lived down here, made a village, brought up kids. And some of those kids wondered what was beyond the next horizon. And humans populated the Earth.

We can do it. Exploration is in our blood, in our souls. I'm tired of this culture of paranoia, anyway, everyone always talking about safety and security. That's what stagnating societies care about. You stop taking risks, you stop progressing, you shrivel up and die in your comfy little coccoon. Screw that. Screw safe.

Bring me danger. Bring me excitement. Extreme sports guys will risk their lives on some stupid hillside just for a few precious seconds of rush. Screw that too. We live vicariously through them, through video games and movies, content to pretend at adventure. Fuggitall.

It's time we not only accepted risk, but EMBRACED it. Make risk your lover. Understand that you are not as special and unique a snowflake as you think you are, that if you do something crazy and get your ass melted the world has not lost one nano-fraction the amount of beauty and wonder it loses every day by your not having tried. Neil Armstrong stood on the freakin MOON 35 years ago because a whole fuggin lotta people risked everything to make it happen. That's why he said what he said. He and Aldrin were THIS CLOSE to crashing that flimsy little go-cart of theirs, and they said no aborting man, not when we're this close. We're not putting our own asses ahead of the advancement of our fuggin species. And the risk paid off. The original 7 astronauts were TEST PILOTS, for fuck sake! They'd risked more than that just to prove whether some company's new guidance system might work. So don't think for a minute they would've pulled out of the space thing in the culture we have now.

And there's a bunch of people who haven't, who are still committed, who still feel the crazy pull of the unknown and most go forth to meet it. Whether that is intellectually, technologically, or physically. I wanna' be one of them. I took the safe and easy path 20 years ago, and guess where it's gotten me. Into a nice safe little day job where the only thing I can really accomplish is generating a little revenue for some stock-holder's pocket change. Screw that too. It's time to do something. To mean something. To risk something.

Anything. Because I can't stomach the idea, the ugly thought that's been rattling around in my brain for decades now, that I'm living at the beginning of the end for my people. Not just the US of A (we'll rant about that some other day), but my freakin species. Maybe Homo sapiens sapiens ain't so wise after all, if this is as far as we could go. If I wanna' keep going at all, myself, keep living and bothering to get out of bed in the morning, I gotta' think there's more to us than this.

Any HR people at NASA out there? I'm available. My resume's on the USAjobs site now. A more passionate cheerleader for the PR front you will never find, I guarantee. Heck, I'd even clean up the swearing for you guys. Really. Hell yeah.

Love --CAS