A Single World in Orbit

8:18pm: You Are Here
Hi there,

If you hadn't already guessed, this place has become the artifact of a bygone era and has been left to the weeds.

After a long hiatus, I've begun writing again. So that I have an outlet for the things I write, I've started a blog elsewhere.

Come visit me there sometime.

See you around,

'\0' . 5

3:51pm: Stone-Age Colorado; "Fuck You, Bazooka Joe!"; Psychoanalyst and the Psycho Analyst
The rain fell steadily. The cat slept at the doorstep.

I continue to weave steadily in and out of dreams and stories. Things have stabilized and fallen back into a natural rhythm. The drama isn't gone; it's just become invisible and formulaic; my life has become a genre of itself, full of copycats and derivatives, all with just enough changes to avoid charges of plagiarism. The more vivid and compelling my story becomes, the less desire to tell it, the shorter the explanations. "It's a long story." "It's a sad story." "It's neither here nor there."

And the dreams and the stories bristle up like weeds, no husbandry to cut them down at harvest time, no industry to work the tools that would sever their roots and their stalks, bundle and store them. My mind has become a complex biosphere of vigorous, strong, wild species bonded together by a fearsome, pure-intentioned struggle, each among the others: to live, to die, to grow.

Everything lies still and quiet like a vacant lot, overgrown. Everything sleeps at the doorstep.

I don't write for myself anymore, but I also never really wrote for others. Perhaps that explains why I haven't done it so much. I seldom permit myself to just sit and reflect; in general I only let myself talk if I have something well-formed and structure to say. And I do. But I usually say it just once to some or another person who doesn't quite follow, just for the sake of conversation, or I just say it to myself to keep myself entertained, and then I forget. I read. I think. I work. I wander about. "Some say that culture is nothing other than the struggle between the conscious and the unconscious, between instinct and reason. Our customs are rote and barbarous, projections of our inner minds." "Ordinal relationships are an essential concomitant of the distinction of objects -- this is vaguely hinted at by the equivalence of the Axiom of Choice and the Well-Ordering Principle. We see this principle at work in the scientific method, which tries to compare two attributes of complex phenomena by holding all else equal. I realized this while watching a television advertisement for a travel agency." "War is an instrument for effecting the bankrupcy of nations." "This is a test of our spiritual fitness as a species."

Someone asked me last night, "Where are your friends?"

"I don't know where they are. That's why I'm looking for them," I said.

"Don't you have any?" they said.

"I don't know who they are. I'm trying to find out."

I have a strange tendency to forget or substitute words as I type. I always have, but it's gotten more marked lately. For some reason, vision and sound have become painful. It's as if sense itself has been rubbed raw. I always believed that existence is painful, but this is too vivid a demonstration. It makes me wonder whether this experience somehow underlies my reasons for believing in pain, or whether it is just a convincing laboratory demonstration of a universal law. I never just assume that I'm right. These days, I psychoanalyze my own dreams and stories as they come. It's become a sport, an amusement, a challenge, a parlor game, a rote, barbarous projection of my inner mind, a blood-sport, a trivial amusement, a crushing challenge, a foolish parlor game.

I finally heard back from Fred Flintstone. According to this blog (thanks to chrisamaphone for originally posting the link), the postmaster of Bedrock, Colorado is so tired to getting mail for Fred Flintstone that he had made a custom stamp for all mail to the Flintstones (and the Rubbles): "RETURN TO SENDER: FICTITIOUS CARTOON CHARACTER". So I sent a letter to Fred Flintstone, and indeed, after a little less than a week, my letter returned, with a stamp that did indeed read "RETURN TO SENDER; FICTITIOUS CARTOON CHARACTER." The wonderful thing about the U.S. Postal Service is that they will always make an attempt to deliver your mail, no matter what. Sure, there is an endearing earnest and innocence in this, but there are also many interesting ramifications. One is that you can send mail to cartoon characters, and the post office will actually try to deliver it. Now, of course the postal employees all know that there is no Fred Flintstone, and perhaps are even irritated that you are wasting their time with fake mail. However, much as the U.S. justice system presupposes innocence, the U.S. Postal Service presupposes real intent to communicate. There is, in fact, no way for the postmaster of Bedrock, Colorado to prove that I wasn't really trying to contact Fred Flintstone, earnestly believing that he lived in Colorado, and having some important information to convey. Hence, instead of saying, "RETURN TO JACK-ASS: PRANK MAIL" the stamp says "RETURN TO SENDER: FICTITIOUS CARTOON CHARACTER." I love this. In the fact that I am not guilty of a federal crime for misusing the post office there is the assumption that, when I sent the letter, I was actually unaware that Fred Flintstone is not real and that he does not live in Colorado, implying then that the postmaster of Bedrock, Colorado, is really trying to explain to me that, no, no, I understand your intentions were good, but Fred Flintstone isn't actually real. I love the fact that explanations about what is real and what is fictional can be mediated through bureaucracy.

This immediately raises in my mind the possibility of moving to Bedrock, Colorado, and changing my name to "Fred Flintstone." I would be tempted to march into the post office and angrily proclaim, "My name is Fred Flintstone, and I was expecting some very important correspondence! It's come to my attention that you've failed to deliver it ... !" Perhaps I would start getting prank mail. Someone suggested to me that this could be my life's goal, to move to Bedrock, Colorado, and pretend to be Fred Flintstone. But who is Fred Flintstone? Is he a chauvinist middle-age stone-age boor created by William Hannah and Joseph Barberra about half a century ago? Is he whoever live in Bedrock, Colorado who can receive the mail? Is he some guy with a strange sense of humor? Is he a man who drives a crudely constructed stick-and-stone car with his feet and threatens to hit his wife, or is he just a man? Weirdly, all of our dreams for life seem vaguely like, "Move to Bedrock, Colorado and pretend to be Fred Flintstone." This goal is not so different from "Move to New York City and be high-power stockbroker" or "Move to Hollywood and be a famous actor." We're still just translating in space, changing names, pretending to be different people.

Metropolis, Illinois claims to be "Home of Superman[!]". Perhaps I will send a fan letter to Superman, next. Or better yet, maybe there is a Clark Kent that lives there.

I would also write a nasty letter to Bazooka Joe, but he may be harder to track down. The eye-patch suggests he is somewhat of a shady character. You may recall Bazooka Joe as the protagonist of a series of tiny comics that used to be packaged inside of Bazooka bubblegum and dependent upon one or more extremely poor puns. (Bazooka bubblegum is rarer these days, but still can be found at odd convenience stores). I happened to come into possession of a piece of Bazooka brand bubblegum. I unwraped it, expecting to find a comic, but instead was confronted by only a piece of very hard bubblegum. "Bazooka Joe you son of a bitch! You cheated me!" is what I hollered at no one in particular, or, if you are the U.S. Postal Service, at Bazooka Joe. "Fuck you Bazooka Joe!" The affront was worsened by the discovery of a very vague imprint of a comic inside the outer wrapper, proof that the comics still existed. Being jilted out of a comic was bad enough, but to be jilted out of such a bad one was a gesture of either extreme stinginess or extreme contempt.

Deep in my heart, I hope that Bazooka Joe Comic #1 is the story of how Bazooka Joe lost his eye. Probably, it involved a bazooka (which these days seems almost an antiquated term -- the kids these days would more likely call it a "rocket-propelled grenade (RPG)" even if those two are not exactly the same; to talk about a "bazooka" is a little bit like talking about a "rapier" or an "arquebus." Such is the great progress with which the military industrial complex has blessed us all.), and I'm hoping that it involves a play on the word "eye."

Bonus points for anyone who comes up with a viable realization of this comic. I'm dead serious. I will send you something cool in the mail, though I don't know what it is yet.

I have this macabre vision of a dark and terrible story behind Bazooka Joe's missing eye, which he attempts to forget through a frivolous life of facile word-plays and evanescent comic-character friendships. "Better to be addicted to bad jokes than to be an alcoholic."

What is the difference between conversing with fictional versus actual characters? Both are projections of our social protocols, our cultural biases, our minds. When I was a child, some kids liked the Transformers, but other kids liked the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles better. Some adults won't talk to white people, some adults won't talk to black people. Some adults won't talk to the homeless, the indigent, or the disable or insane. Some adults pretend to be someone else. Some even move to different cities and change their names.

Truly I don't know who my friends are, and truly I hope to find out. I hope that they are not mere fictions of ink and paper, animated by imagination or instinct. I hope that we do not find ourselves on opposite sides of the line between fiction and reality, with the differences dryly explained by bureaucrats, as if to children. I look and look -- we all do -- under the wrappers, over the envelopes, through the directories and databases, and we look because we cannot find ourselves.

The stars fall steadily. Our mail sleeps unopened on the doorstep.

1:34am: "It Scares the Hell Out of Me"
I am losing my mind. I know because this has happened to me before.

( It Would Scare You Too )
The tree crickets buzzing through the night sound more and more as if they chuckling, laughing at something. I feel a strange wish to laugh with them, except that I don't; I wouldn't know what we all are supposed to be laughing at.

2:14pm: Heat Dementia
Giant bugs and giant slugs and theories that no one understands; headaches and stomachaches, conversations that go nowhere; blurry vision, fuzzy colors, heat and heat waves, heat exhaustion, heat dementia, heat euphoria, heat death.

Evidently I still have the cardiovascular strength to run three miles without being winded, and the lung capacity to chant while I do it. I missed running at night, so I went and did it. This is strange, this atmosphere where all you can see ahead of you is unreachable darkness; everything is near, breathing, rhythmically moving. The air is heavy. We sink to the bottom of a hazy black ocean. The katydids and the tree crickets buzz and sing, coarse; we all live, we all hear, we all are here, doing what we do; everything is running along, running past, running its course; the gravel crunches, the darkness breathes, the trees hum and buzz, chorus. Only the brightest stars peer down through the watery haze. This is so different from running in the autumn or the winter, when the full and infinite constellation of stars looks down in forbidding expectation, when darkness is still and silent, clear and distant, bottomless and endless. That is something like a contemplation, a transcendence, a miraculous travel to another world. I can imagine summer night as something more closely akin to bodily death. The forms are near, vague, and shadowy, but gentle. Movement is invisible. Things are felt, but only intangibly. Emerging from the darkness, a vague sensation persists of the currents and movements and the prototypic forms hovering beneath light, but it evaporates in the languorous tides of the breathless air, the unceasing currents and vibrations of the heat. It could hardly be called a memory.

I was evidently the ninety-first voter to cast a ballot in my precinct today. "Ask me about the fact that I voted today!" I vote every chance I get. I'm feeling unusually civic-minded. Tonight or Thursday night I plan to go to the Columbia Police Department's Taser informational session. The issue of their use is by no means clear or cut and dried, and I am interested to hear what they police have to say.

My mind is capable of cultivation, after all. It is hardly infertile. It's just that the ecosystem of weeds overgrowing it is so dense robust that it seems almost perverse to break apart for the sake of some fragile domestications. Oh, but weeds persist; they're tough and ingenious, tougher than poison, more ingenious than invention.

Sometimes I'm just more fascinated at what springs from the earth by itself.

The constant struggle to discipline myself back into regular work habits and regular habits of mind persists too. I've let myself wander everywhere. My mind aches, and my heart aches. Sometimes the struggle to exist is not enough to keep my spirits up. I want so badly to tell my story, but the story is a sad one, and I don't like to complain.

"He sought it so desperately, but see how quickly he forgets?" There was a dog day cicada trying desperately to get into the Starbucks on South Ninth Street. It flailed its clumsy, bulbous body against the glass and beat its wings up-side-down against the ground. The dog day cicada (Tibicen spp.) makes a noise like a mechanical alarm -- really -- and loudly; it sounded the alarm when I picked it up. The girl removing the sun umbrellas to the inside expressed her reservations; fear of insects says something about a person. It says that you see first in a thing its properties of being alien and inhuman; it says that you do not readily perceive powerlessness or weakness, and feint at the smallest danger. Maybe I'm reading too much. Even so, with so many things in the world truly worthy of fear, I wonder at how people can fear a small, herbivorous arthropod you could crush with your thumb and forefinger. The poor creature just wants to sing its song, live and die, just like the rest of us.

The poor creature wildly chases its unknown desires, just like the rest of us, beating itself senseless.

I took it to a tree just across the street and placed it on the trunk. It immediately forgot about the light inside and began to steadily climb up into the branches. I've observed a lot of insects. This is what cicadas always do.

Human beings may not be quite so simple, but complexity is not the same as intelligence.

I need to go in to the office soon. Instead I find myself thrashing at the glass and beating my wings and beating myself senseless. "Everything is burning," and its easy to see in these days when images melt and quiver in the sun, when the light beats down on everything with furnace-intensity, when everything burns to the touch. Everything is burning, we cling to it, we scream, we thrash, we buzz. I find myself doing it, try to slow down, try to cool down, try to find my way out. But I am only an insect; my brain is small, my capacities are few, my shell is not that hard.

I am only human. Try as I may to go beyond, I am stuck with the difficult task of being patient, being kind, being compassionate to this flawed and feeble being.

"I guarantee, it would drive you insane. I guarantee, it would scare you shitless." Even though, in reality, there is nothing here to be afraid of.

Whenever I throw something away, lately, I find myself saying to it "See you on the other side." I don't know what I mean by this or why I say it. So I keep saying it, in an effort to understand what on earth I mean.

I feel loneliness. I feel despair. I feel tremendous alienation. It keeps me grimacing and thrashing through the days. Ahead is only the breathlessly breathing darkness, whose motions have no substance, whose forms can't be grasped, whose memory evaporates when brought to light.

"Run your course and be patient."

"Where are we going?"

"I don't know."

1:58pm: Data Mining Accident Death Toll Road Work
I've had a sporadic, distant interest in data mining for some time, specifically in how to beat data miners. Maybe it's just that I'm not crazy about machines reading everything that I write. Maybe it's that I'm vaguely offended that someone thinks machines can understand everything I write. I don't exactly have an exalted view of humanity's place in the Universe, nor do I believe that we're all that different from our machines. Still, I cannot for a moment believe that our clumsy, mechanistic, heuristic approaches to automated information processing are anything better than approximate.

Moreover, from a scientific viewpoint, beating the data miners gives us an interesting view into matters such as psycholinguistics; a data miner can figure out what products you buy, but it can't figure out what a poem or a story could mean. You, as a human being, can. The interesting scientific question here is, what is the difference between the poem and the shopping list, the human and the machine, the informational and the meaningful?

I would need to sit and do some reading before I could claim to understand common data mining strategies, but I feel I have a vague enough grasp to try a few experiments. So, the other day, after a mentally taxing day at work, I decided to blow off the excess mental energy by blasting out the most confusing and deliberately jumbled mass of English text that I could to see if I could confuse the Gmail ad generator. (If you have a Gmail account and you weren't already aware, Google has a small army of powerful machines that read all of your email and try to decipher the subject matter of its text; this is how Google targets ads.)

Here is the text I produced:

( Dear National Security Agency, )

Much to my surprise, this text generated no ads either when I viewed it in my sent mail folder or when I sent it to people in my address book. I would invite the reader who has a Gmail account of their own to try this out and confirm it.

We may not often consider it, but powerful organizations really are watching the Internet, and this is possible largely by the action of highly advanced information processing algorithms and powerful, state-of-the-art machines. Just because you're not paranoid doesn't mean they're not out to get you.

It would be interesting to figure out what, if anything, about this text confused the data-miner and, moreover, whether people could develop a method to easily communicate in a way that is machine unreadable.

1:42pm: At the Edge of the Hot Season, 2008
Everything sits perched at the edge of the profoundly burning days. The colors blaze out and fade to something short of white. The cicada noise comes shivering out from the trees, undulating with the frequency of the heat. The air boils. The light is too bright. There are no objects, only radiations and emanations. Things disappear, leaving behind only trembling images hung too close over the sun-scorched pavement.

Boundaries melt, and energies become unbound. This is awkward, because I feel bound to nothing particular at the moment; I fear that the sheer force of the pyro-turbulence arising from everything around me will lift me off my feet and throw me clean out of the world.

It occurred to me yesterday that I will laugh at subtle word-play, equations or clever musical satires, but I will laugh equally hard at curse-words and fart-jokes, but that if I had sit and listen to just one among these I would bore pretty quickly. I have the strange sense of traveling in reverse, seeing where I've been unfold onerously before my eyes while the future comes hurdling straight at my blind-spot at break-neck speed.

Oh, and it looks like I'm using a lot of hyphens again.

Heat you can see, and light you can't; giant unseen bugs buzzing loudly in the trees.

3:21pm: "Fine Specimen", or, "Freak of Nature"
I realized that transit-time is my free-time. I spend hours going, without really going anywhere. I wonder if this is an impulse to as smoothly rounded and centered as possible, like any other steadily revolving body trekking across the orbital plane. This probably explains why I am so frequently late and so seldom punctual; unconsciously, I draw out the time it takes me to go from place to place because that is, and has always been, the time when a lot of important things seem to happen. I draw out the time it take me to go from place to place because I'm not sure that there are such things as places. Space is a thing that only a few eminent minds have really, really considered, and even then they seem quietly perplexed and slightly bewildered, able only to critique our faulty ideas and propose new ones as unintelligible formalisms.

If you stay in one place too long, things start to pile up. Still, there is a regularity here.

On the other hand, if you stay in one place long enough, things start to pile up. This is the irregularity commonly recognized as expertise, success, or power.

I stood around in the hallway while TK sat on the floor and played with tiny molecular models. That was work. I slouched on the sofa with BH and friends while they laughed uncontrollably about a puerile word-play on the name of a certain automated theorem prover; "Join the 'Coq club mailing-list'? Just don't tell my wife!" That was class. W, the savant, sat down on the sofa with me and asked me repetitively about people I know in the math department for about an hour while I started reading The Origin and History of Consciousness, then tried to convince me to join SMS's fluid dynamics research group, which would bring the total number of projects I am doubtfully mixed up in to three. That was my Sunday afternoon. I walked through downtown with SK; he told me war stories that brought tears to both our eyes and I shuttled back and forth between the stoop on Locust street and the gas-less gas station buying beverages for people who were permanently banned from the premises. That was my night. M at the Starbucks keeps giving me free tea, even though I never patronize Starbucks and I say, "Oh, no that's not necessary," then invited me to sit with a group of people I had never met. I keep finding myself among these groups of people vastly different from me, trying to interact with them, trying to understand them, trying to be my honest and straightforward self without manifesting those innocently terrifying features that seem to be so distasteful. This feels oddly like the night where my only real conversation was with an unusually large slug eating vegetable matter off the sidewalk; the conversation consisted of me kneeling down and putting flower buds that had fallen from the trees overhead near the slug to see if it would be attracted to them. This is not to say that people are slugs, only that the best I can do to socialize is, in most cases, to apply what theories I do have and then to observe, document, and devise experiments that will better help me understand what is going on when people sit around and exchange information that appears to have no inherent meaning. People are like animals to me, but animals that I look upon with a respect and veneration that is almost religious; I know that in some sense my life depends upon them, and that some vital thread runs through us all. Perhaps I ought to build a totem pole with the faces of all the people that I know. See, each and every one of our actions has some vital motive; the vitality is stronger in some than in others, but it is always there. Animals are just creatures whose vital motives are somehow different than ours, or at the very least, unknown to us.

Lately I have come to understand that the right question is not "What should I do?" but "What can I do?"

A close corollary of this is "What do I want to do?" but this one is not simple; it is extremely dangerous to develop and articulate wants unless you know yourself extremely well. "Want" is not so simple as "whim" or "impulse", "wish" or "desire." "Want" is a judgment, and like any judgment, it need not be completely rational -- it need not be rational at all -- but it absolutely must be informed by all the facts.

I've been hard at work at a lazy summer, trying to answer these questions, trying to reconstruct or deconstruct or excavate myself. On one hand this is a luxury, on the other hand, this is necessity. When it comes to doing what I do, I do it as if it is a necessity upon which my very life depends; I suspect that it really does. There is a lesson in all of this, and I am carefully scrutinizing every word, every action, every model and diagram, everything I can put my hands on, trying to grasp the things that I just don't know. What do I do? I walk through town for hours on end and let the things in the world teach me about what they are. I stay up too late, I wake up too late, it's hard to nail down exactly what it is that I get done (with odd exceptions here and there), and yet I've come to realize that the answers I turn up have pertinence to very real and permanent questions; answers about where to work or who to spend my time with or what to do seem suddenly much less valuable, considering how quickly their subjects fade away, and how quickly their theories into obsolescence. We all grow up and out of things.

There are other things we never grow out of. Those, however, are the things we all can share.

There was that day that it suddenly dawned on me that 'identity' is actually characterized by a closed feed-back loop and nothing else, and that this looks strangely like a diagram of magnetic field lines. There was that night I wrote a paragraph on my hand. There was that afternoon where I felt my greatest importance going up and down the stairs, carrying books and facts and ideas between people like a bee across a patch of clover. There was that morning that I dreamt of a vast and boundless space that opened up beneath a rainbow; just gazing into it I felt a freedom unlike anything I've ever experienced.

"What makes you so special?"

Nothing, that's what. Nothing. Variation is not the same as significance. The more I reflect upon this, the more at peace I feel.

I find most people bafflingly different, and a few eerily alike, and the more I see, the more I recognize my little niche in the local geography as a home range to which the rigors of life have gently adapted me.

"You should understand, I really am a true freak of nature."

People still utter things behind my back -- literally. I am pleasantly amused that they believe that I can't hear them. Sometimes I idly fancy that if I were ever in a Village of the Damned - type situation that the things my mind can produce would scare those devil-alien children shitless. ("Brick wall" is the best you could do? Really?) Other times I think that I am one of those strange devil-alien children, and that the villagers really should be at my door with hymns and torches.

But again, variation is not significance. The less I apprehend my freakish qualities, the less compelled I feel to bottle myself in formaldehyde and live on a dusty shelf, out of the way of the real serious business of the struggle for existence. The less I apprehend, the more real, and the more joyful the struggle. We laugh, we fight, we weep, we love and hate, we live and die, but at the end all we really do is laugh. We laugh at a world of forms so strangely conceived, so tightly interwoven, so full, so empty.

1:01pm: Unwashed Hand of the Powerless God
Somehow, I remember these details: one or two days a year, walking over the grass on Peace Park will feel and sound like walking on bubble wrap, because that is when the lantern trees drop their seed pods; green june bugs have unusually wide and varying flight paths compared to most beetles, and like to burrow into the shallow substrata of mowed lawns; what a sudden change in air pressure feels like; fireflies congregate near water; light is always brighter on hot days; the wind only blows from the East when the weather is changing; where to go to get a clear view of the sky; where all the roads to nowhere are.

Especially that last one.

Out on the frontiers of concrete organization, where the pioneer weeds bristle up from the desolated red clay and the barren rocks, where the signs stand for no one to see and the lights shine to illuminate things that do not yet exist, where the traffic signals are dark and blinded under plastic, where streets having nothing on them but names, (spoken, like everything else, into being) where the earth is heaped up just to get it out of the way. These are places you can just go. These are places you can just stop. These are moments taken from a motion that is not continuous, that happens in fits and starts, on weekdays in the milder seasons of the year, and then only during normal working hours. These are places you can go because they're not yet moving, and these are places you can stop because, being in motion, no one can call you a loiterer or a trespasser.

That is where I ended up, sitting on the hood of the car, watching lightning explode in the towering clouds, so bright I could see it even when I shut my eyes.

Before that I went out to do nothing particular but deviated suddenly from course when I saw something ten miles high, weighing millions of tons and discharging hundreds of millions of volts of electrical potential every second, passing just to the North. It blistered with its own rage, fiery, then ghostly as the sun went down and its overreaching expanse overshadowed two or three counties. I couldn't contain my curiosity. I drove north, to a dead-end road that overlooks a good twenty or thirty miles and watched it come in. I went home. Gale torn shreds of cloud flew by, only a few hundred feet of the ground, ghostly in the city lights. The trees bent down and hid their faces. I went back out.

It was like every really terrifying dream I've ever had. I suppose that's why I couldn't resist. Into a wild, turbulent darkness, and beyond that, wild, turbulent darkness, inescapably deep, unimaginably vast, unspeakably powerful. It's difficult to appreciate how huge a thunderstorm is until its upon you, and only then if you are willing to look up into it. There's a reason that everything bends down in the wind to hide when things go black. The sky had erupted into unknowable violence; the warring forces had made their own electric light; the air shook and shuddered with the motions of thing too huge for any human field of vision, too monstrous for either simple light or simple darkness. And there was only the sound of the tractor trailers wailing out from beneath the night-blackened portent, and only the light of the fierce inequalities made and unmade in the relentless chaos overhead.

I stayed there until the rain came down so hard I couldn't see anymore. And then I stayed for a few minutes longer.

Somehow, I was completely dry by the time I got home.

Things happen lately and I hesitate to describe them, but I do it anyway. I watched a pigeon die. It flopped painfully about on the sidewalk, half-lifting off, half-falling back to earth, trailing blood on the pavement. It ended up at my feet. I just stood there and looked down at it for a minute or two. A man with a scraggly beard and a child stood there and looked at me looking at the pigeon. The man with the beard was half-talking to me and half to the child, trying to convince one or the other of us that the bird "had a concussion" or would "come to its senses" and how he had seen it come down when "some kids hit it with a metal pipe" because, he claimed, "they were scared" and this was all such transparent bullshit it was like I didn't even hear it. I just looked down at the poor painful thing shedding feathers on the ground. Then I picked the wounded pigeon carefully up and looked steadily at it for a minute more. It shuddered in my hands, and the blood ran down my fingers. "Well what are you going to do now?" the man with the beard said, but instead of waiting for a reply from me he just kept conversing with himself. "You could take it to the raptor rehabilitation program" (a real irony here; hawks eat pigeons) "but it's not a raptor; I guess you could try Second Chance [an animal shelter], or ... " The child stood by dumb and wide-eyed. I just held the pigeon up and looked at it. Then I looked at the man with the beard and the child and quietly said, "He's going to die." The man with the beard started saying something else. I gently said, "It happens to all of us. It's okay." Then I walked away with the pigeon into the alleyway. I sat with the pigeon for a while. It dragged itself languorously over the pavement, its face on the ground, its wings hunched tensely up and quivering. It flailed against the wall, slammed itself clumsily up against a small iron gate and beat its wings painfully against the ground. Then it stumbled up to me. It suddenly stood upright on its feet, took a few steps in a half-circle around me, then laid down, closed its eyes and stopped moving. It shuddered a little bit and then the body went stiff.

Then I went and washed my hands.

Life is like that; we have so much pain that we don't know what to do with it. Then one day we just stop moving, and there is nothing anyone can really say.

Much after the fact, I thought to myself, "Here I am, many times more massive than this little creature; I could crush it, I could break its neck, I could outsmart it with a trap, I could eat it alive, but if I wanted to save its life I would be utterly powerless."

A few days before I had tried to catch a sparrow trapped in a stairwell, so that I could put it outside. I could just barely reach the place where it was flailing itself against the huge exterior windows through the bars in the stair railing. In fact, the fit was so tight I had to use my left arm, which is apparently ever-so-slightly smaller around than my right, but only just enough to get me a centimeter or two more of reach. The little bird chirped and fluttered in terror and I kept thinking, "This is exactly the same thing I would be doing if I were trying to catch it to eat it." And as far as the bird was concerned, it was all the same.

I am strangely intrigued at how, initially, acts of kindness and compassion bear a very striking outward resemblance to acts of violence, cruelty or selfishness.

Much in the same way that, as is well known from embryology, the very early stages of growth in vertebrate embryos from even very different orders are virtually indistinguishable, i.e. a reptile embryo looks almost exactly like a mammal embryo. The world is full of interesting parallels.

Then I went and talked to Dr. K about how to succeed (if at all) in the science game. It felt like an eerie parallel to this time of year, when all the young birds come down from the nests to try their hand in life, and a great many of them end up stiff, broken bodies lying in the sun and covered with flies.

I have this strange sensation of cleaning a house that I didn't even know I lived in. It's furnished with sounds and colors and thoughts and everything imaginable, and as I come into contact with these things moment by moment, day by day, I pick them up, look them over and say, "No, I don't need this," or "Hey, this isn't mine," and then I quietly put it out somewhere away. I even feel weirdly untroubled by my own worries and my own petty human sorrows (because let's be honest -- humans are sad about things that are almost always inevitable). I still have them of course. And I don't feel outside myself. It's only that I look down on it, like some strange, massive wingless thing, or some boiling black conflict in the sky; I hover over myself, rest one great hand gently on it and, in my strange unintelligible language of English and thunder and lightning, say, "It's okay, it happens to all of us. It's okay."

3:46am: "The Forebearance of Birthlessness"
I feel I say so much but so little of consequence. I apologize. Lately, this is how I find my peace. This is the one thing I know I can do.

I find myself explaining years of contemplation I thought I would never put to use. Quietly. Evenly. Patiently. For even an hour at a time.

The way to get free is simple: treat everything attentively and respectfully. Always seek to understand.

Do not think about the truth; be the truth. Do not chase after the truth; bask in the truth. The truth is like a great light; it just shines. People suppose that you can grasp the truth, or obtain the truth, or arrive at the truth, but this impossible. Supposing this, people become like insects bouncing off a light bulb; they suppose that light is something they can draw near to, and they exhaust themselves at an impossible task. You cannot obtain light. You cannot arrive at light. You cannot grasp light or hold onto it. You cannot possess it. And yet, when light shines, you have it just by seeing. When light shines on you, you bask in its brilliance with no effort at all. Truth is like this. Open your eyes, and see.

Things are impermanent and always changing. Each and every one is bound up in pain and suffering. Don't cling to them; just let them be as they are. This is part of showing them respect. This is part of being aware.

We all hurt. This is a great truth that binds us together.

These truths are not my truths. They don't belong to me. They cannot belong to me, any more than the sun belongs to me because I see things by its light.

This is very humbling because all that I really have is what I know, and what I know truly is not mine.

And it is so strange to find myself, after all these years, repeating all the things I never thought I would have any occasion to. And it is so strange to have people ask me, "What do you think?" and to know in a flash what to say because I've asked all the questions before. It is as if people could see inside my chest cavity to the seat of my heart, and felt compelled to ask me how I make it beat.

The truth is so precious, and yet so small.

Someone gave me interesting information about a band playing in a living room somewhere in town and I went there and listened and mingled among all the vaguely familiar faces I do not know, and this is what I did there, quietly explain what I know to people who asked. I did not drink. I did not dance. I missed much of the music. I did not even speak to all that many people. I didn't even really know why I went; I only wanted to see something new, and to do something different, and somehow, by accident, this is how it unfolded, people came and asked me what I know, people came and asked why and how and what is, and I answered them on every point, plainly, simply completely, without ever having planned to, and that was all I did.

I feel incredibly fortunate even to have the opportunity to say a few true words. But life is not so black and white, I have slowly discovered. There are no angels to sing your praises when you do good. I am not a hero or a prophet. I do not work miracles or show signs. But I come to feel, more and more, that a normal life will be never mine. There won't be dancing or merriment or pleasantries. Sometimes, I admit, no matter how I treasure this truth, no matter how I cherish the good fortune to share it, I feel sad. I even loathe myself for being so. I hate my soft heart. I despise myself for having this, this as my one strength, as my one natural talent, as my born purpose, this and nothing of apparent use, so that I am only another person filling the world with noise, only another person who would have the audacity to say, "just value me for who I am" -- how self indulgent a thing to say, in this struggle for existence, in this world of laws, cause and effect -- when I have worked so hard to try to learn how to meet the world on its terms of use and value and hard-won existence. I hate myself for being so weak, just so that I could hold a light that seems to shine everywhere regardless. I feel a poignant and strange sadness. Something seems to constantly nudge me away from the world as it appears, "No, this is not for you," with no explanation as to why, so that I can believe all too often that it's too good for me, or that I am somehow not good enough for it.

And yet here I am. I have no choice but to love the person that I am. Sometimes I hate it for having to accept it as such, but there is no other way, and hate is a sad state to be in. I don't want divine consolation, banquets in heaven or angelic praises. But less do I really believe I can find happiness in any of the things that I miss out on, on the singing and dancing and drinking and chatting and revelry. But even less do I understand why this is so. I am only human. There are many things I simply do not know. This is one of them.

Somehow I become a vessel for the answers to all these useless questions to which people want answers. Whenever I try to fill the space with something else, the answers only start to creep back and push out whatever was there.

I suppose I should celebrate, feeling some sense of true purpose, but instead I hang my head and say "Why this? Why did it have to be this?" Something so useless. Something so ignominious. I suppose it would be heroic to rise up and seize destiny, but the heroes we imagine exist only in stories. People choose to feel pain or undergo hardship, but not for love of pain and hardship. Heroes are the ones we invent for the sake of argument, the ones who would at long last would hang the bell on the cat. People who do heroic things do them only because they have to, because something, whether inside or outside of their selves compels them. The reason we see so few heroes is that most often, when so confronted, people just turn aside.

This world is full of stories, told and retold, but when I am alone there are no more stories. I am only alone with myself.

And so I do what I can. There is no use in troubling myself with why I seem to be gently pushed from the world over and over again. There is no use feeling self-pity or self-hatred. And yet, like any pain, forebearance no remedy. But it is all that can be done.

You do what you can.

So I watch the world go by in strange parallel, full of lives unfolding in ways that are incredibly ordinary but unnervingly foreign, full of people so alike and so far away. But the wild-eyed and the uncertain will always seek me out. They will always know me as one of their own, approach, and ask, "What do you think?"

What do you think, what do you think, what do you think...

And all I can do is answer.

6:31pm: "Let's Go North, Yeah!"
Something odd came over me today. I remembered a conversation about nothing particular from long ago. Idle talk on an idle night, the old truck rolling down the aging highway.

"... they wrote a song about it. It was something about being on chemicals in South Dakota. So now there's that. There's a song about me, out there."

Maybe it's just that I feel I have no place or station in the world at present. Maybe it's that I'm telling myself my own story, trying to make one, fleshing out the characters of gods and devils and epic heros in overstated tones and impossible feats.

But I was sitting at the kitchen table this morning, dragging my feet about going to work, and suddenly I remembered that conversation, and that strange and distinctly unlikely fragment of a phrase, 'on chemicals in South Dakota', passed second-hand and weathered by the years but sharp as any exceptional signal, sharp to an unmistakable point.

I went on a short adventure.

My brother was especially adventurous when it came to stimulating his brain. When cigarettes weren't available, he experimented with pipe tobacco rolled in torn-out Bible pages, or household cleaners, or transparent tape and glue rolled up in copy paper, or whatever was handy. He did shrooms, LSD, sundry pharmaceuticals that fell into his possession, all in a blur of burning frustration with people, with the world, with the inside and the outside. In late 2002, my brother stole my parents' car and, for reasons that were never entirely clear to anyone, tried to drive to South Dakota, before falling asleep at the wheel and totaling the car. Amazingly, he survived almost unhurt, and my father had to drive to somewhere in the empty reaches of northern Iowa to retrieve him from the local sheriff. In 2003, a very small local label released an album by a band calling themselves, "The I Love You But I'm Not In Love With Yous"; there was a fairly popular song on that album titled "Wild on Chemicals in South Dakota." The band, like most local bands, broke up, and their music never circulated very much beyond whatever copies continued to float around the inhabitants of Columbia, Missouri. On December 11, 2004, my brother was killed in an accident. On today, July 22, 2008, I remembered an idle conversation we had late one night, something about a song written about the exploit, and the phrase 'on chemicals in South Dakota.'

And I realized that I had never actually heard that song.

This memory strangely compelled me. It was hard to say why. Only that it seemed unaccounted and stark. I blew off work for an hour and went looking for the album. It was a true cultural curiosity, a relic, difficult to find. I almost gave up, but that my memory retains so much information so fastly these days, I caught sight of an anthology of local bands in an odd bin at the last record store. On it was a single song by "The I Love You But I'm Not In Love With Yous." The song was "Wild on Chemicals in South Dakota."

I waited all day for everyone in the office to leave. Then, after I was finished working, I put away everything, stopped everything else I was doing, hunched over my computer and listened to the strange song that someone had written about my only brother and performed in a local dive somewhere half a decade ago.

And I wondered what other music might be left behind out there. I almost pulled up the search engine to start looking.

All information, by definition is a selection from among finitely many possible messages. It is nothing other than a permutation, a pattern, a recognizable signal plucked from a bin, poked in a hole, set up in neat rows.

But life does not line up in neat rows or linear spaces. Our paths are long and winding, with directions hardly ever discernible.

I found myself looking for my brother's wandering soul not through mediums or talismans or necromancy. I found myself searching for the dead in the Internet, in digital recordings, in fine-grained permutations blown by chance into some undisturbed corner of the Universe.

Trafficking with the spirits wandering through the informational ether, summoning ghosts from the singular space of near-simultaneity, mechanical best-effort, arid protocol and sleeplessly kept gates.

And I think, "Of course, and yet it's so strange." We go in search of ourselves, we go in search of our loved ones, but what we end up looking for is nothing more than a familiar pattern.

All we end up looking for is a familiar pattern.

How strange we humans are.

1:15am: "You Would Talk of Angels? Here?"
This world of antinomies, darkened electric light, litter-strewn vacancy, populated with all of us sundry creatures of the night alike only for being wholly unlike one another or anything else, clinging to the elemental fissures like weeds, sprouting up in the holes where no other life will take. "This is what lies beyond: things lost and discarded." I can't find normal life for the life of me, but occasionally I will come across a wise person, or a good person; someone whose understanding is solidly one-sided, spoken through gapped teeth or hoarse mumbles, someone whose story seems to go nowhere except on wandering through this moment, forcing the uncertainties of the future to recede. I can't find normal life for the life of me, but if I hum some familiar song as I walk through an empty place, or I utter the words of a verse I know or, so help me, I just pray to no one in particular, I find myself engaged in conversation were response meets response in seamless progression.

Strange as a tungsten-lit night, or a hardened flat surface thrust up and pushed down in heat fractures, stress fissures, pits and pot holes: this is a place where nothing hurts because everything hurts and everything belongs here because it all belongs nowhere else.

The Tao Te Ching says "great perfection seems chipped." The cracks are where life springs up. The bent and the flawed show the craft beyond technique, the artifice beyond the reach of control, intent or design. "Each thing is adapted to its station in the world." A chip or a crack is where that gave way which had to give way; this is how we do what needs to be done. This is what it means to say, "We all just do the best we can."

So I walk along the edges and hum to myself, look at what's left behind, watch my shadow and listen to these long nights given over to the tree crickets and the stifled desolation of the breathless air, the lights buzz, the haze settles, all the music of this carefully orchestrated network of human purposes sung acapella, voices echoed in the empty streets, in the otherwise-silence.

Everything is otherwise here. Everything is wise to what others there are, and what "other" really means. The shadows all break at five or six different angles. Each thing meets each other as they all go their separate ways.

I find myself always looking down at shadows breaking five or six ways, wearied of shadows and looking up for the lights that would be not two or three but only one.

I read something from a book today, and immediately I understood what it meant. It was a piece of dialogue from Don DeLillo's famous novel of 1985, White Noise:

"Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They know they are right not to believe but they know that belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools ..."

This place where angels smoke and curse, have bad teeth and ugly faces, where wise men get their facts wrong and heaven is a public utility, where even the best are only trying and the only perfection is a long-suffering persistence in spite of everything, this brightly lit place we all live in which darkness mingles so closely and the heavenly lights wash out with distance and the fickle conditions of the weather.

4:39pm: Everything Is Going Somewhere
Where do you think we go when we die? And how often have we all heard that question?

There had been a dead alligator snapping turtle on the road in front of my house, but today it was gone. The semi-flattened carcass had laid belly-up on the center line for several days, showing no signs of change or activity besides the frenetic comings and goings of carrion-loving flies. Today it simply vanished, leaving behind only a dramatic still-life explosion of blood and viscera painted to the pavement. And I asked myself, "Where did it go?", and realized that I really didn't know, and perhaps even had no way of finding out.

Was the dead turtle carried off by scavengers? Did some incidental force chance to move it out of the road? Did some wholly unknown natural process of spontaneous degeneration suddenly intervene and obliterate the carcass overnight? Is it possible that some person deliberately removed the turtle carcass and deposited it elsewhere, feeling that three days was simply too long for it to lie in the street?

But these are questions about a relatively mundane and ordinary object, and almost certainly they have very prosaic and straightforward answers, even if some of those answers might be genuinely strange or surprising. A coyote dragged the turtle away. A passing car finally knocked it out of the road. Some kids blew it up with fireworks. Someone picked up the turtle in the middle of the night and buried in a hole somewhere. Even if some of these possible explanations might seem unusual, perhaps even bizarre, they are not in and of themselves especially meaningful, and certainly not mysterious. It is unlikely that an answer to the question "What happened to the turtle?" would change the average person's view of life or the Universe. By contrast, if one were to answer the question "What happens to me when I die?" many people would say that an unequivocal answer would greatly change their perspective. When we ask about death -- ultimately, we ask about our own death -- we ask about something wholly beyond the scope of ordinary experience. When we ask about death, we ask about a basic and defining awareness of human experience. We ask about a truth that shadows every truth that we, as humans, understand. We ask not about mere locations or positions or data about the material world, but about what happens to this, our fundamental experience, when all of the things we attach to it are suddenly and completely removed, and when all of the lights by which we ordinarily view it are suddenly snuffed out. The particulars of circumstance may be interesting in a roundabout way, but only insofar as they pertain to this strange drama of morality played out in the human psyche; some people will fuss about how they die or where they will be buried or how their corpse will be disposed of, not because they find these facts interesting in and of themselves, but because they are trying to position themselves in some particular relation to what the human mind views as eternity.

The next time you ask yourself, "Where will I go when I die?", ask yourself "Where will I put my spare change when I take it out of my pocket?" or "Where will the moon be in the sky tonight at nine o'clock?" or "Where will I go during my day tomorrow?" and consider what these questions have in common. Consider that the human body is a physical object fundamentally like any other. Is its location in space at any particular time really a question of deep spiritual importance to you? Consider that if you think of yourself as some sort of transcendent soul or essence, then it should be truly transcendent and not bound up in notions of space and time. But if this is so, then why would you ask about your soul as if it travelled about through space, or mark for it stages and moments in time as you would for any other ordinary phenomenon? Why would a transcendent soul need to "move" about? In what sense would a soul be transcendent if things were true of it in the future or in the past that are not true of it right now? There may be metaphysicians who try to get around these difficulties by introducing different constructions of souls or essences or parallel spiritual spaces, but these all seem aimed more to preserve our vague notion of "soul" or "persistent ego" by introducing a great multiplicity of unfounded postulates about the world, than to actually come to a better understanding of the world of our experience.

For many centuries, humans have maintained, in one form or another, some vague notion that "self" is something more than just "body." It would be going too far afield to treat the cultural evidence here, but even the most mildly interested reader can easily find numerous examples among any wide sampling of the world's philosophical and religious thought. Even those who most vehemently deny the existence of any possible soul or afterlife still fret over what their contribution to the world will be or how they will be remembered, as if their self will persist into the future as a continuously unfolding sequence of causes and effects -- a sort of a shadow cast far across posterity. (Interestingly, it is possible to imagine exceptions even to this rule.) It cannot be denied that the human psyche experiences a profound dissatisfaction -- a true suffering -- with this world of constant change, impermanence and fading away; something deep in the heart cries out against death and wishes for nothing more than to escape its clutches. We find beauty and pleasure in this world, and yet this very same world is pleased to take away or utterly destroy the very things it gives us. We feel a strong attachment to this world and its forms, while at the same time living in terror and revulsion at its destructive potential and the essentially fragile and ephemeral nature of the things we treasure. It seems no coincidence that "soul", for all its attributed transcendence, is imagined so much like this body and this mind of ours, inhabiting a world alike in so many respects to this one, but simplified, idealized; "soul" is nothing more than "the other body" inhabiting "the other world." Thus, we ask "Where will I go when I die?" as if the other body will simply rise from its seat and walk on to some other spot in the great expanse of the other world. But as we make this "other world" so closely reminiscent of this world, what reason have we to believe we can escape the very same difficulties we find in the world as we now know it?

So many of our great questions are grossly malformed. Instead of asking about the world as it is, we ask about the world as we have imagined it. Instead of seeking to expand the frontiers of our understanding, we retreat within our biases and incomplete memories of experience and wall ourselves up behind the boundaries of an artificial unknown. We seek answers to great, overarching doubts -- doubts about things that are truly transcendent -- but we ask questions about objects that are very rigidly limited and mundane. We construct the metaphysical from the terms, parts, and pieces of the physical. We lose ourselves in endless speculation, contemplating constructs of our own minds that are inexhaustible and limitless in their complexity.

It has been wisely said time and time again that the way to knowledge and understanding is a sincere desire to learn. What we so often forget is that each thing and each moment is significant; there is no phenomenon, great or small, that does not tell us something about the Universe. There is nothing that you cannot learn from. All too often we limit our curiosity and closely restrict our inquisition, asking only the same old tired questions over and over. All too often, we rest so heavily upon our conceptions of the world that we are wholly unable to rise up and inspect the soundness of their foundations. People ask, "Where will I go when I die?" but few will ask, "What does it mean to die, and why am I asking this question?" Few will ask, "Where I am going right now?" Fewer will ask, "Who am I?" Even so, how can you possibly hope to find answers to questions about your own extinction if you don't even really understand what it is you think is being extinguished?

It is a tried and true rule of problem solving that when a question appears to be unanswerable you should reconsider your question.

There was a dead turtle on the road in front of my house. After a few days, it vanished. I don't know where it went. There might be a straightforward answer. It might be I can't find the answer at all. One could ask, "Where did it go?" but it would be worth first remembering that the world is full of many other things besides, and that every single one is in motion, going somewhere.

Everything is going somewhere.

2:02pm: Wars of Consilience
It occurred to me that, perhaps, the reason that I have such difficulty settling upon a proper scientific or intellectual interest is that I am effectively trying to force an attitude perhaps better described as 'wisdom' or 'contemplation' into the framework of 'science' and 'empirical discovery'. Unfortunately, the common understanding seems to be that these are, and should be different. On one hand, I have a bad habit of conflating classes, drawing misleading analogies, or perceiving connections that may or may no be. On the other hand, I am discovering that I am not wrong nearly as often as I thought I was.

Perhaps our sciences and our religions are simply too primitive to unite, and truly commune in the labor of illuminating the human mind.

If wisdom doesn't inform our science, what good is it? Without wisdom, our science is nothing more than an empty manipulation of a cold and lifeless world, mere puppetry.

Without science, what good is our art, or our life of the spirit? Without true rigor and genuine curiosity, we have nothing more than insubstantial visions, illusions and fantasies, mere self-indulgence.

What is the place for me? I still can't really say. Even so, it begins to look less and less like any of the commonly conceived places in the world can ever truly be mine, no matter how great my skill in emotional ascesis or self-contortion. No one can say that I haven't tried.

I am vaguely monstrous, even to myself.

1:54pm: Metaphysician, Heal Thyself
I saw a dead bag of potting soil in the street. This was noteworthy because I actually thought to myself, "Oh, it's a dead bag of potting soil," with all of the usual connotations of "dead," in spite of the widely held conventions with which modern biological science regards the notion.

What used to be a bag of potting soil had become just a ripped-up bag and some potting soil scattered over the pavement. We conceive of things as having souls, and yet these souls seem to leak out so easily.

Things as we understand them are little more than ideas; every idea is invariably full of holes.

3:25am: "So Many Years Passed Not Returning; He Forgot The Way He Had Come"

"To succeed in the world, it is not enough to be stupid; you must also be well-mannered."

(Voltaire)


"Fuck me? Fuck you!"

It seems I've been on informal vacation from everything.

What did I do?

I visited Lawrence, Kansas on putative academic business whose nature was never clear to me, before or after and there I wandered for miles through a town I'd never seen before, following my idiot compass here and there as it pleased me, until late into the night. I read Science and Method by Henri Poincare, I have now read the greater part of The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin. I healed my leg. I developed blisters on my feet. I developed a sugar habit. I developed a really serious attitude problem. I feel like a human in a Rudyard Kipling tale; a prone and feeble being before the ruthless struggles of nature, a strange and uncomfortably strong savage haunting the periphery of the society of men, straddling the boundary between the two without even a thought of boundaries, showing exactly one face to each side, and innumerable brilliant expressions to myself. "None begets one; one begets two; two beget an innumerable multitude" -- I was fascinated to discover this idea at the heart of Frege's arithmetic, "the number-concept pertaining to the class A not equal to A," antinomy, synthesis, an eternal struggle for existence as vital as Darwin's. I lifted all restrictions on my idiosyncrasies and now openly stare for minutes at a time into apparent nothingness, kneel in the middle of the sidewalk, sit, recline, lie down on whatever is handy, intone, inflect, express, use words that I know the audience has never heard or simply doesn't understand, catch insects in public places, stuff my pockets with whatever attracts my attention and generally behave as a crazy person does, because it's finally occurred to me that I'm not. I've finally lost my patience for special accommodations or unreasonably demands for reasoned explanations.

Variation is an essential force that sustains all life. My odd variation makes me strong. It's only my own resistance that has made me weak.

I don't know why it seems that no one will give me the time of day. I don't know why it is that people believe something is wrong. Every night that I've gone out, someone has shouted something at me in passing. "Take your medicine!" "Why do you walk like that?" Or there was the woman who actually stopped her car (but didn't get out) below the pedestrian bridge from which I was watching the traffic go by, and asked, "Are you going to jump?" Apparently she was not that concerned; all it took was for me to shake my head, and she drove on. I would stick out my tongue and thumb my nose, except that usually I am enjoying the evening too vividly to be troubled with other people's noise. Rejoinders are not on my mind, nor do I especially want them to be.

I frightened someone. I was slowly strolling along down an alleyway, and as I went, it appeared from the shadows and sounds at my back that someone had followed me directly in. By the noise of their footsteps, they seemed to be approaching me very quickly and at a tense cadence. Without stopping or turning around, I forcefully clenched and unclenched the fist on the side that I thought I might be approached by. I clenched and unclenched my fist, and my hand ready for what might come. The footsteps stopped. It was some guy hauling boxes out to the dumpster. He looked at me startled bewilderment and said, "Uh, what's up?" I smiled and waved. "Nothing. How are you?" He said, "Um, yeah. Okay." And then he took his boxes and his trash with him, turned around, and went quickly back out of the alleyway.

Of course, I wasn't just being polite. When I ask people, "How are you?" I really want to know.

"How?" is always an interesting question.

Where to go or what to do, I still do not know. But the answers exist. They even seem to be in reach.

Last night, something interesting happened to me. Matt Haimovitz, a highly celebrated (and somewhat unconventional) classical cellist appeared at the Missouri Theatre. By chance, I got free tickets to see his performance. Now, I am culturally and especially musically ignorant and illiterate; I have not even seeded the proper concepts to so much as think about music as I perceive it. Even so, music, like everything else, leaves a deep impression on me, even on my strangely savage soul. So, at this performance, that I was fortunate enough to just stumble upon, Mr. Haimovitz performed his rendition of Jimmi Hendrix's famous rendition of "The Star Spangled Banner", that is, the national anthem of the United States of America.

It is easily one of the most beautiful pieces of music I have ever heard. It brought tears to my eyes.

Oh, so many people like me grow old and just become total assholes. As I tried to explain to someone, assholes know that they are assholes, which fills them great disgust and self-loathing, hence leading to treat everybody else in the world kind of like an asshole. I have many causes to be self-piteous or angry or bitter or resentful, but none of them are good reasons. There is no such thing as a good reason. I know that I have tremendous potential to be an utterly awful person. But I don't want to be. I cannot think of anything in the world over which I can justify to myself feeling bitterness or jealousy or anger. No one is perfect, nor will anyone ever be, but I really don't want to be an asshole. I'm doing my damnest to make certain that I'm not. At the very least, it's something to do.

I want to be the best person I possibly can. I want to be kind, patient, forgiving, and loving. And yet, in this world there are always reasons not to be. That is one of the interesting things about being human: there is a constant tension between matters of fact and matters of heart.

But the world is also full of reasons to be kind, patient, forgiving, and loving. Now that is really, really interesting.

In a strange twist, I've discovered that I not only like but actually identify with hip-hop. On my way home, late at night, as the bars let out I cruised downtown with the car stereo turned up as loud as it would go, playing, "Nigga Like Me." Like who?

I'll see it when I believe it. But I want to believe.

I'm so weary of making apologies and accommodations. I don't think I'm going to do it for a while. And yet, I'm still the first person to step back when I've gone to far, to give up my place for someone else, to shoulder a burden that isn't mine.

Then why do I do it? That's how I do things. That's how I want to do things. I'm not going to explain it. If you really do want reasons, you'll go find them for yourself.

Please forgive this, the profound frustration of a solitary monstrosity. This much, I hope, will be understandable.

I ramble on, under the low bridges, over the ancient stones.

6:00pm: "No One County"
( One Last Thought: )

1:16pm: Sabbatical
I am taking a sabbatical from writing.

More appropriately, it looks like I already am on sabbatical. This makes it sound somewhat more important than it actually is, but I don't know what else to call the long interruption. I've realized that, for the time being, I just don't feel the impulse to write down my thoughts, no matter how voluminous or complex they seem to be.

What can I say? I've been adrift far away on this ocean's empty plane for too long, drinking salt-water and soaking up more sun than I could possibly need. My utterances have the character of hallucinatory ramblings or the loquaciously frail, last-ditch efforts of a psyche to preserve itself from collapse into total chaos and oblivion. I'm weary of myself. I simply don't see interest in anything I might have to say.

I'd rather just drift in silence for a while. Let the waves rise and fall.

My mind has receded into its brilliantly idiotic, child-like half, where every experience is shining, vivid, all encompassing and self-contained. I'm back to watching the summer insects outside try desperately to find their way through the glass and into the light, and the summer insects inside try hopelessly to find their way out again. I'm back to wondering at the very strong proclivity of small children to try to feed pebbles to the plastic bulldog in front of the ice cream parlor; the paint on his tongue is worn out from years of this. I'm back to listening to the same old recordings of "Bigger Than The Devil" and "The Rite of Spring", and wishing I had some sort of taste or sensibility. I'm back to wandering the same roads to nowhere, hoping to come upon a road to somewhere. So far, though, every road I've ever happened upon either returns itself in never-ending cycles, or terminates in a weedy dead-end.

This may be a wholly superfluous formality, since I don't know how many regular readers there are, or even if I have any. Even so, if I don't mark the occasion it will feel more like a neglectful absence than a deliberate pause. If you do wish to reach me, my [letter preceding 'h'] - mail address is exactly the same as this livejournal account, and I check it fairly reguarly. I would probably respond to an individual message, but for now I have no other reason to say much of anything.

Until we meet again,

'\0' . 5

12:57pm: Death of a Fastener
Today I found a rusty wood screw in the street. I suppose this is not odd in and of itself; the streets are littered with rusty, bent, displaced fasteners of all kinds. This is hardly the first one I've picked up. Everything has its story though. Here was this one, all alone, one of millions or billions or perhaps even trillions, all cast, machined, cut or worked in the same image, the same vision of use and necessity. Here was this one, shipped about the world in lots, stored in bins and boxes by category, size, use, in transit, in warehouse, on display, on the job, sitting straight and ready through electrically lit nights and roof-darkened days just waiting to be put to use, just waiting to be put in the place that would be its own. Here was this one that had been purposefully set in place, that for days or weeks or months or years had devoted its whole self to the stolid, faithful work of holding its little part of the world together. And here was this one that had finally been torn loose, pulled out and thrown away, after the things it held together no longer belonged, after the place it held up had outlived itself as a location of interest or meaning. And then here was this one, now trash, left to corrode in the street, left to dissolve in bitter red oxides, to harbor deadly microbes, to flatten car tires and noisily clatter underfoot, no place, no purpose, no use.

Here was this one, the embodiment of its own use, its own purpose, left to continue a work no longer wanted, left on the hard concrete only to fasten itself painfully to bare feet or inconveniently to rubber tires, imprisoned by its own shape, as destined for obsolescence as it had been for use.

Usually when I find rusty screws or nails, I take them with me until I find an isolated patch of bare ground, and then push them deep into the dirt, where hopefully they can stay until the last of their bodies oxidize and dissolve among the minerals in the soil. This is just one of my odd ways of paying respects to the things I encounter day by day. I like to see them put to rest.

Today, though, I carried the screw with me a short way, one hand working my clumsy, primitive wooden cyborg-leg, and one hand carrying my bag, and its teeth dug into my hand as I went. Finally, when I reached a trash receptacle, I just threw it away.

I don't know how I feel about this. It certainly has a long way still to travel.

11:03pm: No Access
Lately, there are no straight lines or shortest distances at all.

The blood vessels in my leg bloomed and erupted vivid necrotic shades of dark red and purple, vaguely hinting at the network of veins beneath but somehow losing it within the cloud of its own brilliant, swollen fury. I watched last weekend, bright and dry and clement, devolve and bubble over into brooding, twisted clouds and fitful curtains of distant rain, turning the sky faint green, jaundiced yellow, and flushed pink with the weird shadows of precipitations and recombinations unable to culminate or resolve. All channels are temporary, and fallible; chaos blooms in phantasmic shapes and vicious colors, and plucks its own flowers before they bear fruit.

The hospital helicopter, coming and going by all approaches at all hours of the night, swift lights in the sky, artificial turbulence buzzing over the horizon. The hulking yellow excavator, jealously hunching over the supports of the Brown School bridge, resting on its huge hydraulic troll-arm. The traffic backs up for a mile or so behind a poorly timed stoplight at an intersection robbed of its left-turn lane by the road work. I wait and I wait, and the car stumbles up in the hill in breathless fits and starts.

What story could I tell? What drama is there in my life? Everything seems a tempest of brilliantly dissoluble forms, making and unmaking one another in blind immersion.

I don't know what stories are told by others.

I still limp along on my bad leg, too hurt to walk right, too stubborn to expedite things. I call it 'willful adversity' when I'm alone; I don't let myself choose things on how they look or feel. Deep down, I have this peculiar faith that everything is important, and everything is truthful. It's not something that happened in the past, or something that will happen in the future; I won't by satisfied by answers that point to elsewhere, make claims no one can verify or promises that won't have to be kept. I only want honesty. Everything, everything is essential, whether it's a bad leg, or a slow light, or a long detour, or another lonely night in the lab.

"It swelled up to one and half times its normal size!" Which probably was true, and I caught myself regretting the fact that I did not actually measure, using my good leg as a control. I have this odd habit of taking unnecessary measurements of phenomena in my everyday life. The radio is always on in the office during the day, and I realized after some time that virtually every song played, with no more than one or two exceptions in a day, has love or relationships as its subject. Mind you, there seem to be many and varied perspectives, but it seems that nearly every pop song played on the radio is about love, or some variant of it, somehow or another. Realizing this, I began to keep count how many love-themed songs I heard, simply so that I could make the point unambiguously, if asked, that love songs really are all they play on the radio. I realize that people don't relate to one another using measurements, quantities, probabilities, or other numerical figures, but somehow I do this anyway, in the subconscious belief that at least hard data will make my point seem serious and respectable, even if people don't take me seriously. Of course, I also realize that such strange behavior as bookkeeping such facts is likely to induce people to take me even less seriously, since such behavior is markedly strange.

The funny thing is that no one who objected would do it based upon my measurement technique or experimental method, which would be an equally good way to shoot me down.

But they always say, "Just do what you can." So I do what I can.

I keep flirting with the idea of finding and administering to myself an IQ test. All I know, from a long and troubled experience, is that I am abnormally intelligent. This, though, is nothing worth bragging about, as I've yet to put it to any kind of good use. Calling me abnormally stupid instead would mean effectively the same thing. I don't take the test because it would just become another useless metric rattling around. As I feel this creeping sense of alienation, the paranoid and yet persistently supported hypothesis that people murmur things about me as I go by, that I'm beginning to be viewed as a sort of local curiosity on par with an autonomous mental case or a memorably crazed vagrant, it begins tempting to try to cling to some fact or number as an anchor, as a meaning. Ah, but how many times and how passionately has it been said, "I am not a number!" And just so. A century of scientific discoveries gone largely ignored has shown us that people, in their ordinary, personal capacities, do not take facts or numbers seriously. People tell stories; they don't give reports.

It's a shame that, lately, I just don't have the heart for storytelling.

10:20pm: "It Was A Day Like Any Other ... "
I am twenty-six years old today.

What about today? The sun rose, and the sun set.

I used to think that the truth was something you acquired, received, or possessed, but somehow, nothing was ever big enough to contain it or strong enough to hold it.

I used to think that the truth was something you did, made, or struggled for, but somehow the task was never complete, and no effort was ever enough.

The truth is a quiet, patient thing. It's always there. It always has been.

I limped uphill, in the last few minutes of twilight, to meet the moon rising over the trees.

Every day is someone's birthday. Every day, the sun rises and sets.

I've walked a long ways, but these days I struggle just to limp along. I've seen things far away, I watch what's close at hand or near underfoot. I am smaller, the world is bigger.

Still, my feet meet the ground, and my eyes reflect what's before them. I lack nothing.

4:17pm: Wise Like A Stone, Dumb Like A Rock
Maybe I feel too lighthearted to think seriously today. I can't really tell. It may just be that my brain has been steadily flooded with endorphins for the last 48 hours or so, resulting in a mild sensation of euphoria and disconnection, or it may be that it's just a nice day, or it may be that my mind feels suddenly, unexpectedly unburdened.

My left leg is a burden though. It is still largely inoperable. Somehow, though, that doesn't bother me. "We all have to accept our own mortality and physical fallibility eventually," I keep saying. Or, "getting hurt is just part of being human, and feeling pain is just part of life." This feels like breathing a tremendous sight of relief. Sometimes everything that is great seems to tower so ominously, invincibly overhead, and everything small seems to retreat alarmingly into the deep, inscrutable unknown. It's overwhelming. I look up at the stars and wonder how I coexist with things that produce trillions of kilowatts of power continuously through millions of years; I look down at the pebbles and the weeds and the dust and the insects crawling across the ground and wonder how it is that I'm entitled to walk all over them; I look into the tiny cuts and scratches and lines and creases in my own skin and wonder how it is I came to be in charge of such a tremendous multitude of tiny organisms, all working together for me. Sometimes it's just too much. "I'm too small. I'm too big. I'm too weak. I'm too strong. I'm too different."

I feel as if I've gone down to a different plane. I'm so accustomed to quick, fluid, easy movement. It's amazing how much difference one disabled limb makes. You would think that still having three of four major appendages working would mean very little diminution of physical ability, but it seems that's not the case. Suddenly, the basic operations of everyday life are completely reconfigured, and everything has to be rebuilt from scratch. What was easy is now hard, and what was hard is now out of reach. And this for only a minor injury.

"But I always wanted to practice being an old man, just to try it out." Here I was training to fight because I wanted to fight, because I wanted to feel capable, and here, in the process, I got hurt and became even less capable than before. It felt like a failure. Traffic was sluggish and the light was low and I had to take the long detour around the bridge that the road workers are methodically deconstructing, out past the manufactured home lot with the two fiberglass oxen out front, steadily pulling an empty covered wagon into motionless homestead-oblivion of rapidly fabricated suburban units, pioneer weeds and raw clay. I felt sour and resentful. Walking aimlessly about is one of my few pleasures, and I felt sorry to have it suddenly and unexpectedly taken away. Knowing that I felt sour, and not liking it, just made me feel more sour. At some point, dragging my painfully useless leg along after me, it suddenly occurred to me, "You can't make things part of yourself." Strength wanes. Health fades. Energy dissipates. The sun goes down on everyone, no matter how far west we go.

So I stopped being sour and resentful about it. At least I'm in good company.

The essential impermanence of everything is a universal principle in which I have the highest faith. Sometimes it makes me kind of a buzz-kill.

And still it was a strange sort of amusement. It became a new kind of physical challenge to get around with only one good leg. I love challenges. It's weirdly like the joy of being a kid again, of learning to walk, run, jump, swing, any of the innumerable interactions that take place between this mechanical being and this mechanical world. Maybe limping doesn't seem exciting, but it is when you've never had to do it before. I try to see how fast I can get up and down stairs without pain. I went out on the town carrying my staff as a makeshift walking-stick to bear the weight. The bright percussion of the hardwood meeting the concrete makes cheerful company, almost background music; pushing myself along this way feels strangely like rowing a boat. It's a curious kind of ad hoc wooden leg; it gives wholly new meaning to the old aphorism, "this isn't a weapon, it's an extension of your body." Besides, crutches are lame. (Does that mean that voice synthesizers are dumb?) I feel awkward and clumsy, but perfectly content. I know that I'm doing all that I can.

I feel dull lately. I've sat here in this empty field so long that I'm slowly starting to sink into the ground, and the dust is starting to cover my face once more. In one way, I don't object; stones have a strange sort of wisdom to them. There is something profound in such a quiet thing that knows its place so well and seems to need nothing. In another way, I do object; rocks are heavy and boring, they don't do anything. I've already lived among fossils and relics and buried secrets, and worked hard to dig myself out. I never thought such a windy, airy person as me would settle into the mud. But I also don't know what I might be when I emerge once again.

Going down into the dark, earthy strata of the deep below, everything looks different because everything looks the same.

8:39pm: Where's the Bacon?
Famous broadcaster Tim Russert died unexpectedly today. It was strange to see television anchormen, who are usually so stern and formal, delivering their broadcasts in tears, with an audible quiver in their voices.

It was even stranger to hear their quiet, heart-felt eulogies interspersed with commercial advertisements. There was a placid, grief-stricken bromide that "Tim has gone home", and Keith Olberman's tearful response, "But it was unheard of for Tim to leave work early". Then a simulated dog ran frantically around a generic domestic set searching for a product made of rendered hog fat and boiled-down slaughter byproducts, screaming repeatedly in a grating voice "WHERE'S THE BACON?!" as the camera whipped around at nauseating, break-neck speed.

And that's exactly the sort of thing that paid the bills, and made the television broadcasts of tearful eulogies, and arguably even made Mr. Russert's whole distinguished career possible.

Things are intertwined in such a funny way. The are no two things that don't touch, somehow.

1:05am: Limping Along
I am now walking with a limp.

I've always thought there is something fundamentally laborious and grotesque in witnessing in the mechanical, material processes of life. I first had this experience watching a worm inch its way among the blades of grass on stubby, immovable proto-legs. I feel strangely like that now.

At first it felt like nothing worse than another ordinary bump or bruise. But then the feeling never came back to the spot just below my knee joint. Sifu had to leave unexpectedly to make arrangements for the annual retreat and, with no one else available, left me to conduct class while he was away. My knee began to swell a little, but I paced around trying to keep things running. The rest of my leg started to swell, and the more it swelled, the less I felt. I didn't really pay it any mind. Over the next several hours it turned some interesting colors.

I walked on it for a while, but as time when on, it became difficult. I went and limped about town, and then limped back to the car and on home. Now I am compulsively swearing when I try to stand up.

Fuck me! Damn it!....

I don't know whether this is an expression of pain or a very strange way of cheering myself on.

Yesterday I found the claw of a crayfish on on the edge of the footbridge in the park. I wondered how it got all the way up there, from a creature that lives down in the mud and the water, and could never have climbed all that way on its own. A fly landed and walked over the claw, and tilted it just slightly to one side. It's somehow meaningful. Even something as miniscule as a fly carries enough weight to make things move.

Tomorrow will be very interesting. I don't know how much feeling will come back to my leg, or what I will feel.

12:28am: Fire At the Top of the Fire-Escape
That was a question I considered for somewhere between ten and fifteen minutes.

I find myself asking, so often, what's at the top. I think I'm not the only one.

There was melted ice cream slicked across the sidewalk. It tastes no different after falling to ground. It tastes no different after it liquifies. But no one eats it. It's not enough just to say "I like ice cream." You should probably say, "I like ice cream that comes in some kind of container."

So many ideas are just different packagings for ignorance, no matter how their various proponents argue.

What's my packaging, or what's inside, I do not know.

J. saw me going past and hollered from across the street. I stopped and he showed me around his castle. He was sleeping in the courtyard of huge church down the way. I knelt down on the grass and listened to him talk about it for a while. The place was immensely calm, and serene, in the embrace of massive stone walls on three sides. The ground was level, and the grass was soft, and thick, almost like a thin mattress. "What are you going to do after school?" he said. "I have some friends in the research business I've gotten mixed up in." "Can you do me a favor? Can you research a way to re-grow hair?" J. pointed to the balding spot on the top of his head. "I'm going to get a tattoo there of a little man with a lawn mower."

I'm strangely apprehensive when I say "research." I said the same thing to Dr. K. "For so long, I just wanted a regular job, like regular folks," I sighed, in the shadow of the stairs. Dr. K. quoted Joseph Campbell's famous line, "Follow your bliss," but added, "people take that to mean that everything along the way is going to be pleasant and easy. But that's not what it means. You're far too brilliant, B__." This made me feel oddly sick to my stomach. "It puts you only a few notches above 'freelance artist' which is only one or two notches above 'beggar,' and I have nothing against beggars, but I feel I am too much of one already," is what I said. "You can face it, or you can try to avoid it," Dr. K. said. I looked up the stairwell and sighed very deeply. "I know. But sometimes I stop and ask myself, 'Why did it have to be this?'"

I have been asked several times lately how old I am. What I usually say is, "too old to be doing most of the things I am doing." Which, I think, is a good answer because that is what my age means to me these days: "Too old for this." I am only just now scraping my life together. Really, I am only just now, in this recent time, getting myself together. The rest of life is still in disarray. I still have not finished my undergraduate degree. I still share a house with my parents, which is a source of constant shame and frustration to me, even as I work up figures and means to finally provide a modest place of my own. I still spend my time alone, with myself, even after a very long, and very difficult, and very heartfelt friendship and partnership and love affair and engagement went horribly wrong. It doesn't matter to me how far I've come. It doesn't matter to me that I've done battle with so many devils, climbed up from a hell of blindingly brilliant psychoses and morbidly obscure doubts, that I've done things I never thought I would do, that I never thought I would myself here, today, even if that place seems to close to where I was before. Something pushes me onward, grueling.

If you arouse practice as if climbing the steps of enlightenment, not even a speck of dust will support your feet; you will be as far from true practice as heaven is from earth.

(Eihei Dogen, in Guidelines for Studying the Way)

And I quietly tell myself, over and over, "It's easy. Don't strain. Just don't settle."

I give myself a lot of advice. I listen carefully, and follow all of it, as best I can.

"You know me. I'm a very peaceable, and mild-mannered person. The notion of competitive violence does not sound appealing." But then, also, "I know I've got some fight in me, and I want to see how much." I've got far more fight in me than I ever imagined. "But you are doing better," Sifu said. "But I want to keep doing better," I said.

I'm going to the sansho fights in Tulsa, Oklahoma at the end of June.

These are strange times. I enter competitive fights and admit to having holes in my heart. I'm demon-faced, dull and violent. I'm forlorn and teary-eyed and all touchy-feely. I'm sharp and square and efficient and bookish. I'm lax and idle and grinning and careless. I just assume that having holes in your heart is part of getting old. I never thought I would find myself having them, or admitting to it. You learn new things all the time.

"I'm going to get a tattoo of a little man pushing a lawnmower."

Old enough for the holes, but too old for the doubts, and the voids.

My bench in the park ticks like a clock with no regulation. The carpenter bees return to their holes at dark and keep burrowing through the night, clicking, ticking, chewing, drilling somewhere inside the planks, behind the small memorial plaque for one of the University's old groundskeepers.

What's at the top of the ladder? What's at the bottom of the hole? What do they do, inside the planks, beneath the ground, beyond the clouds?

I stood and looked up there, for a long time, up to the top of the ladder of the fire escape, but I couldn't see anything. There was a time in my life when I may have climbed up there to see what there was. Tonight I did not. What bothers me a little is that I don't know why, but for some reason I didn't wonder.

Perhaps I am just too old to know what's at the top.

I keep thinking of an unexpectedly moving account of the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire, which happens to be the second-worst industrial disaster in U.S. history. (The worst was the Texas City Disaster, in which a freighter loaded with ammonium nitrate exploded in the harbor, effectively destroying a large portion of the town.) I once read a haunting first-hand account of the fire, and sometimes I still go back over it.

( 'His was only a terrible chivalry.' )

I'm not much of a romantic. Sometimes it seems as if we all live our lives as if we were just plummeting from a window, trying to escape the flames. Maybe someone helps us, maybe we do it alone. But somehow, I'm not satisfied with just rhapsodizing tragedy, or with imagining that a few seconds of falling is the same as flying.

But it all ends with a quiet admonition to myself, "do your best."

Perhaps this is all far too candid for the Internet. But to be more candid still, I have no one to talk to. I think of this as if I was shouting into a deep well. At the very least, I don't think I've said anything that would hurt anyone's reputation, make me any enemies, or blemish my resume.

"... one blade of grass whispered to another, 'the king of Toga-Toga has two horns ...!'"

So I stood up on the concrete pillars and watched the storm blow in. I've never stood up on one of them before. I always looked down at the ramp, or down into the crevice that extends all the way to the ground level, and decided it was best to stay down. But tonight I stepped up and put my feet just about one meter higher than they've ever been and watched things come in, the brutish clouds brooding fast and angry beneath the base of the storm, cut quick and dark by the bolts of lightning. Powerful storms appear suddenly. Powerful storms make everything turn suddenly cold. Powerful storms are dark, too dark to see into.

"Don't look for the answer somewhere else!"

There's fire at the top of the fire-escape.

12:56am: Standard ML, Standard Poodle, Standard Time, Standard Issue
Tonight there was a man on the street with a sign that said, "Do you know where you'll be in 4 million years?"

I wanted to stop and ask either (1) "How long have you been standing here?" or (2) "Never mind where I'll be in 4 million years, do you know where you'll be in ten years?"

But I just didn't have the heart for either mischief or charity. Tonight, I barely have the heart even to just mind my own business.

Tonight I saw BH out on the town with his wife (whose name I simply don't know), wearing one of the loud shirts he lectures in, with the two of them walking a standard poodle down the street. This is odd because I had a lengthy conversation with BH today that ranged over many topics, among them, denotational semantics, algebraic closures, power-conscious compilation, the Carnot heat-engine, the information content of numbers, and intrinsic versus extrinsic names. There were also references to 2001: A Space Odyssey and an editorial on why category theory has become a sometimes inappropriate "fetish" in the computer science world. (I tend to attribute a fair amount of respect to any professional theoretician who recognizes and acknowledges when theoreticians have a break with reality.) It was, in fact, immensely exciting. I managed to say several things that made BH stop and reflect and say, "I had never thought of that," and BH managed to tell me a wealth of things that I had never heard of. It feels so seldom that I talk to people. When I do, it's cathartic to a degree that feels almost untoward or inappropriate. But that was business. Tonight I sat at the little outdoor table, not eating ice cream at the ice cream parlor, and quietly watched things go by, without saying, or appearing to do, much of anything at all, except "Holy cow!" when BH appeared, and, when the dog came over to me some time later, "This is a very peculiar dog. I've never seen one like this."

"It's a standard poodle," BH said. "I don't get around too much with dogs," I said.

I felt strangely uncool for not knowing what a standard poodle looks like.

"So then, what's the standard size for a standard poodle?"

Tonight I am not quite alright. For some reason, I feel very uncomfortably conspicuous for being alone. Which is a shame, because I'm so good at it.

This is oddly the way I felt about being bright and curious when I was a kid. Back then, I just dealt with it by not being that way anymore. It seemed to be the only way I could make friends, or get along with the people in charge. Why I wanted to make friends or get along with the people in charge wasn't immediately clear to me, beyond the fact that it seemed like I just had to do it.

Tonight I just about want to hang my head and cry. The trouble is, I don't yet understand why well enough to actually do it to any effect. Human beings are delicate systems, not just physically, but psychologically and emotionally. Small changes have great effects, and these can be quite destructive. Knowing this, I find myself regularly removed to the place of a disinterested observer, untangling my own system and trying to diagnose its disorders. This is an odd experience, like so many cliched near-death experiences one hears about on television, where a soul floats above a body and looks down on it, except this experience to me feels much more believable. I don't look down on anything. In fact, it becomes completely unclear whether I am the system or the observer or neither or both. The power goes out for some interval of time, and someone methodically pokes around among the wires. I suppose I could get angry at my system of wires and feelings for acting up and failing to function the way it's supposed to, but to me it's just another modern convenience. It's a wonderful thing, but don't take it too seriously.

I have spent most of the week at work trying to untangle a very eccentrically written computer program from five or ten years ago. Often it's fun and challenging to to understand someone else's thought process. But I am tired. I'm just not in the mood for empathizing any more eccentricities, no matter how badly it needs to be done.

I wish I knew what needed to be done first.

Tonight I stood up behind one of the concrete pillars and looked down on the parking lot, and I felt suddenly as if I was standing at a podium, looking down on an audience of nothing, delivering a silent lecture on nothing particular.

Say what you will about the moment you're in. There's not any other quite like it.