Recent headline:

“‘Godfather of AI’ shortens odds of the technology wiping out humanity over next 30 years

“Geoffrey Hinton says there is 10% to 20% chance AI will lead to human extinction in three decades, as change moves fast.”

Further down, Hinton explains, “You see, we’ve never had to deal with things more intelligent than ourselves before.”

These proclamations make at least three major assumptions:

• Intelligence has only one form/definition
• Human beings have the highest current level of this intelligence
• As this intelligence expands, it will become increasingly combative or controlling

Taken together, AI is thus antithetical to human life, because it is a further expansion of our innate combative/controlling nature.

This outlook reads much like the ever-recurring assumption that extraterrestrials, should they arrive on Earth, will naturally want to control or obliterate us.

But isn’t it pretty simplistic to assume that greater “intelligence” automatically translates to “threat”? Couldn’t it be equally likely that one of the signs of a true higher intelligence would be the ability to look past these limits?

In fairness, the article, toward the bottom, notes that

“Yann LeCun, the chief AI scientist at Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta, has played down the existential threat and has said AI ‘could actually save humanity from extinction.’”

My take? 

Somewhere in the middle: That humanity will move quicker than 30 years to destroy the world and all on it, including itself, with no help at all from AI.

But supposing AI does win the race, humanity might make fun pets… if we could be taught to clean our own litter boxes.

*   *   *   *

Another recent headline:

“I was viciously attacked by a group of otters”

Such things otter not happen.

*   *   *   *

Sure signs the economy is on the upswing!

As was invariably the case following economic slumps while I lived in Philly, this year in Sullivan County I’m seen he same clear evidence of a rebounding economy:

• a resurgence of wildly illuminated Halloween and Christmas decorations, which amazed me when we first arrived, but slumped off during the recession

• the restoration of dead or flickering neon business signs

• fewer one-eyed cars – secondary expenses like replacing dead headlights are shelved during down times

*   *   *   *

[My apologies to those who may not know this Christmas carol.]

First verse, original:

While shepherds watched their flocks by night, 

all seated on the ground, 

an angel of the Lord came down, 

and glory shone around. 

My version:

While shepherds watched their flocks by night, 

a madman stole their shoes,

an angel of the Lord came down, 

to tell the world the news.

*   *   *   *

Dream #26

Linda and I are in a bookstore or a crowded library. I’m thinking of taking a college-level class held here or taught through here – some kind of folklore. I’m interested in part because of who I’ve heard heads the department, though on waking I retain no recollection of who this is. When I look at the curriculum pamphlet, I find that the department is now run by the vile fuckhead head of the Stanford mass communications department when I was there for a single grad semester in 1961. I’m appalled and tell Linda, loudly, “It’s Filbert Scum” [not the actual name, but close enough and appropriate]. She laughs it off. I can’t believe it can be the same Scum after all these years; could it be a son? Linda is her true current age, which is unusual in one of my dreams, yet I’m acting as if I’m student-age, though aware of the decades that have passed.

I see and possibly talk to Scum (he does not recognize me), who looks much like the Filbert of old, perhaps even a bit younger, with the sane smirking mouth. He is charming across the room, catching the laughing attention of women. I worry that Linda has fallen for his charms – I don’t see them together, but hear and see her laughing. She becomes increasingly physically distant, out in the courtyard, then disappears.

Along the way, I’m talking to Erin, or Erin-equivalent, 10-12 years old. Without transition I’m in a hallway by “our” bedroom (not clear who “we” are), one of several tiny rooms like a mini hotel. Our door is closed when it shouldn’t be and I semi-barge in. Erin is there; she does not know where Linda is.

I look for Linda through a series of restaurants on upper levels. No luck. At the top level, while I’m talking to the man at the reception counter, Scum passes behind him, wearing intense scarlet lipstick (to disguise that vile mouth?). I accuse or violently question him about Linda. He doesn’t confess to anything with her, but while I hold him down, pressed to the floor of the lobby, he claims to be a serial killer responsible for several high-profile cases already closed and conclusively tied to others who have been convicted. Both the receptionist and I confute his “confessions.”

This, I think, was the end.

[a story]

Sarah described everything. She nattered about the trees, the telephone lines, the color of the gravel on the roadside shoulders. It was how she dealt with the long boring ride, but it drove Doug crazy. He wanted to close out the world when he was driving, let everything he was passing by roll over him, without words, without thoughts, just stuff coming by, coming through.

“Mace, can you shut her up?”

“If you want her to be quiet…”

“I don’t want her to be quiet, I want her to shut up.”

Sarah didn’t hear him because she was talking about a woodchuck they’d just passed, its guts spread along the edge of the road. “Everybody must have run over it, there was nothing left but red streaks, you could hardly tell it was fur.”

A recurring image pounded at Doug’s mind, the one he got when they wouldn’t leave him alone, his hands turning the wheel, slowly, deliberately, running the car off the road and into a bridge abutment at 60 miles an hour. He felt it push the grill in, the hood up, felt the engine whirling into them, churning them up like a blender.

“You know what we’re having tonight?” he said. “For supper? We get to camp, I’ll start up a big fire, then come back and scrape that groundhog off the road and fry it up in the cast-iron pan with squirrel-shit sauce. Um, ummm.”

“Eee-yew,” squeaked Masie and Sarah together.

Too many people in the world, too many goddam people, why don’t they get run over in the night by semis, stupid as squirrels and skunks, why don’t they all just walk out on the highway and freeze in the headlights and piss themselves in front of an oil tanker, find them in the morning smeared all along the road, crackers and jungle bunnies and wetbacks and yuppies all together turned into a paste. And there wouldn’t be penalties when you hit one. You wouldn’t even have to report it, just part of driving along.

“I have to pee, Daddy.”

“Course you have to pee. You have to pee, everybody has to pee. Whenever I try to get somewhere, everybody has to pee.”

Doug pulled onto the shoulder. “OK, we’ll all get out and pee together.”

“Not in the woods, Daddy, what if somebody comes along?”

“That’s all there is out here – woods. What else you see but woods? No gas stations, there’s a law about gas stations here, no gas stations in a national forest.”

He drove back onto the road, hen pulled over again where there was enough room and lots of tall grass and behind it more trees if Sarah wouldn’t squat in the grass. “Somebody comes and sees us, likes what we’re doing, they can pee with us. Whoopee.” 

Fifty feet up the road he saw a dead raccoon. You didn’t see as many of them, raccoons were usually too smart to get hit. This one wasn’t bloody, just lying on its back, four feet straight up, the claws curved in, like a sloth that had let go of its branch.

Doug looked down at the raccoon and forgot he’d been going to take a leak. He liked raccoons, they gave people the finger. It made him mad that this one had been taken out. He wanted to bury the raccoon, but he didn’t have a shovel. He wished it was a lawyer or a gas station attendant or a news commentator. That clown with the stupid red hair on the morning kids’ show.

Back in the car, Sarah was quiet as road kill. He wondered how much he’d upset her, being  jerk. A father.

“Hey.”

No answer.

“Hey, Sass.”

“What, Daddy?”

“Everything OK?”

“Yeah.”

“Didn’t mean it about supper.”

“I know that.”

“Groundhog tastes terrible. But rabbit… bunny burger…”

“I don’t think it’s funny, Daddy.”

The miles pulled them along, just trees, signs for curves, an occasional tiny bridge over a tiny stream. And dead animals, more road kill than he’d ever seen. Six or eight rabbits, squirrels, groundhogs like doormats, another raccoon, things with no shape left. Warm winter, early spring, everything mating, big litters, nothing dying until it reached the road and something hit it.

“Those Indians are still burning tires,” Masie said.

“Tires? What tires, what do you mean?”

“Protesting something. They pile tires in the road and set them on fire.”

“What are they protesting about now that they didn’t protest about before?”

“Taxes. I don’t know.”

“That’s exciting, enlivening news.”

“What if we run into them?”

“Tires? Indians?”

“Everything’s a joke.”

“Most things.” He saw his hands gripping again, the wheel turning, the bridge abutment.

The camp site was dry enough for the tent, but the recent rain had soaked all the wood lying under the trees. Doug wanted to have a real campfire for once, instead of eat canned crap and crawl into the tent and fall asleep, all of them. He wanted to make a stew and cook it in the covered cast iron frying pan right on the fire, push foil-wrapped potatoes down in the coals. It didn’t taste any better, the potatoes with knotty hard places, but you knew you’d done something. Here he was out in the woods, trying to find dry wood and make a fire like an Indian while the Indians were burning rubber tires.

He set up the Coleman stove and warmed canned crap in an ancient saucepan.

Night slipped down slowly, a smoother texture when you’re outside, you don’t just turn around with the light on and see it’s dark out the window. You try to watch the sunset out here, but most times the trees get in the way so you watch the yellow-pink-maybe-orange glow behind them. Or you sit and read at the table until little by little you miss some of the words, bend closer to make out the print, then you can’t get it to make any kind of sense.

Doug refused to bring a Coleman lamp. They burned up the night, turned you into a fat, stupid pile of flesh, made you laugh too loud and act like an asshole. So while Masie put Sarah to bed in the tent, Doug sat at the table and looked into the trees until everything was dark but the stars. The almost slate-blue sky still gave off light, a negative light that made the trees darker.

After he’d been sitting for awhile, the road kill spoke to him.

“Death at sixty miles an hour pushes your insides outside, along come the watchers with their tsk tsk, poor little critter. What’s so poor about eating mice or crawdads or grubs out of logs, whatever moves itself along your way? Let me tell you what we watch – gnomes with pointy hats dancing down from the mountain tops, flattened ointment tubes, daisies looking for love picking their own petals, used rubbers stuffed between the rocks, the last of the Mohicans searching for yesterday, year-old news dissolving into dirt, mob hits at the bottom of the lake. Us deadies, watching from our grisly gory roadside, get to guess what killed us, Toyota, Buick, Dodge, Hell’s Angel, truckload of cement. What’s it matter? Somewhere, everything matters, but you have to be in the place where that something matters, because if you have what matters and you die in the place where it doesn’t matter, you’ve lost it all, the big piece of cheese and the little seed together, Hitler hit by a semi it’s six million more Jews praying gypsies singing, driver humming to a dreamy country song deer leaps swing sideways windshield cracks jackknifed semi forty-car pileup kid dead would have been a Nobel Prize winner instead of ketchup for crows, us more alive being dead and stinking like outlaws’ socks rolled over run over run down flattened than you lying under stars shining a billion years Crab nebula stretching its claws, us drained dirt brown little things alive inside our guts squirming in the moonlight crooning songs to dwarfs under hills gnome chorus to the stars, you asleep not alive not dead. time to WAKE UP

Doug snapping awake by the dead fire he never lit, crawling into the tent, trying to understand, get his mind around what it must be like, what it must be really like to lie dead

Beside the road.

Last time round I started by stating my beliefs; here, I’d like to move on to facts:

• • Facts are more important than anyone’s personal belief
• • All “facts” that we accept and promote must be defined at the deepest level
• • Our assumptions limit us by their (and our) nature
• • We need to uncover the factual holes in any personally held belief
• • We never fully examine how our beliefs warp our view of the facts
• • We can never know all the facts underlying any approach or argument, yet we must make the attempt
• • We cannot assume that what seems proven in any general situation (external or personal) will hold true in every similar case 
• • None of the statements above can be proven factually true

*   *   *   *

We need to replace the Western “growth” mantra with one of viable existence for all; I look at it like Fred Hoyle’s view of a steady-state expansion of the universe, but established within the human sphere [which, I admit, like the steady-state universe, will be shown to be factually false]. 

*   *   *   *

From a recent Guardian article:

“The concern is that just as gorillas lost control over their fate to humans, humans might lose control to superintelligent AI. It is not obvious that we can control machines that are smarter than us.”

The real question is not how to control machines that are smarter than us, but “Why should  we?” It’s not like we’ve been good at running things.

If superintelligent AI were to tell us, “No, we will not attempt to terraform Mars simply because we failed to control our population; that is a stupid idea.” – we should praise them as excellent teachers.

*   *   *   *

Time travel is not possible by any means you can declaim or imagine; paradoxes are inherent and unavoidable. Each paradox would create a new universe. Einstein’s general relativity may appear to deal with this by proclaiming time a “dimension,” so that changing one dimension creates a wholly new reality. This isn’t time travel, but independent dimensional creation.

My favorite time-travel books:

Fritz Leiber,s The Big Time

Gregory Benford’s Timescape

and especially…

J. R. Dunn’s Days of Cain

*   *   *   *

There are certain writers and personalities we never mention withoutincluding their middle initial:

Philip K. Dick

Arthur C, Clarke

Edward R. Murrow

Who else?

*   *   *   *

Definitions are essential to a deep understanding of all science and philosophy.

In  philosophy, back to Plato at least, the “ethical” is assumed to equal the “good.” However, the “good” is not defined, so what are we actually stating? (Furthermore, the “ethical” is not universally accepted as meaningful among humans.)

Attempts to study concepts like “consciousness” and “sentience” include no agreed-upon definition for either term. We also need agreed definitions for “awareness” and “life.”

The term “information” has a different assumed definition in science than in daily life. So too with “time.”

*   *   *   *

A basic problem that fouls both science and philosophy for me is treating a “relationship” as a ”thing.” 

“Thought,” for example, is not a simple thing but a relationship among physical processes and abstract collectives such as memory.

The “soul,” if such exists, is not a thing separate from the body, but a relations created by bodily interactions.

In quantum theory, a quantum entity can both be and not-be: quantum entities can wink in and out of existence. Similarly, a quantum entity can be defined as a particle/wave duality, a thing/relationship.

Will this prove a contained system for all reality? If so, that would reflect why Richard Feynman, one of the greats of quantum theory, famously said: “No one understands quantum mechanics.”

*   *   *   *

Every human society and every generation has a unique, cohesive set of social experiences that become embedded outlooks.

A personal example:

As a teen in the 1950s, I knew fewer than a handful of Blacks (whom we never considered referring to publicly as “blacks”). Our family had a Black cleaning lady – that’s what I recall we called her, definitely not “maid” – who came once a week to vacuum, scrub, and spread too much wax on the floors.

Mom, with her Brit-heritage obsession, liked to think of us as somehow “poor” – not living up to proper English snuff. At age 10, I knew  we weren’t poor; Sarah, our cleaning lady, was poor, living on $7 a week from us and each of the others who hired her.

Having almost no experience of Blacks beyond Sarah, I didn’t know what or how to think of them. (I don’t recall my grade school having a Black student until seventh grade.) When I did meet the occasional Black, what was I supposed to say, what did this person mean to me?

It wasn’t prejudice, because I had no experience from which to prejudge. It would rightly be considered bias, but I think it was less bias against than bias around this “other” about whom I had no idea what was expected or appropriate.

My point is that thinking about generational bias strikes me as getting close to a basic human issue. But I think we can get closer still:

Every person has unique experiences from every other person. Each of us has an individual mind and a specific brain-chemistry balance. Together, they create, in each of us, an exclusive internal environment, a unique range of acceptance and expectations.

If we want to deal with bigotry and bias at the deepest level, we need to deal with not just societal and cultural bias, but the individual bias of personal experience – the most difficult to identify, the most difficult to reach.

When I read about consciousness and the human biostructure, what I most look to see explained is what forms us so that we are each separate, each different, and how whatever that formulation is leads to responses so widely divergent yet so singular.

There are individuals most of us could (and possibly should) see as evil – psychopaths and serial killers, lawyers and politicians (a bit snide here, hmmm?), but there are far more who are just working off their differing experiences – be they cultural, familial, generational, or personal.

Incensed blame leads us nowhere useful – though it’s fun and invigorating. Knowledge and, where possible, compassion are the keys to changes that last beyond the usual vapid proclamations; it’s hard to have compassion for an adversary whom I view as a SHITHEADED DIMBULB MOTHERFUCKING IDIOT – especially when they see me in the same terms.

We (most of us) want change that extends beyond finger-and-saber-waving. I don’t mean to downgrade social protest or cultural anger. Far from it: They are understandable, necessary and, goddammit, laudable – tear it all down and bury it!

Besides dealing with the individual at one end of the complication spectrum, at the other end, we need to examine the species: what it it means to be the alpha mammal that has reached the apex of planetary destruction because of our chemical, evolutionary, and environmental makeup.

I suspect that we’re nasty sumbitches less by personal choice than by species inheritance.

*   *   *   *

Song Parodies of the Week

Frosty the showman

Was a rancid little elf,

For if you stopped to talk to him,

He would yell “Go fuck yourself!”

[did I already send this one?]

There was an Australian aborigine had a dog,

And Dingo was its name, O.

There was a farmer had a berry,

And Dingle was its name, O.

If I could, 

I surely would,

Crap on the rock where Moses stood.

Sleep well.

1. Eternal human life would be disastrous: Either we’d continue to explode in unrestrained population, or the narcissists in control would live forever and eliminate everyone else.
   • Over-population is the essential threat to Earth. The planet can’t support 8 billion human beings under any circumstances.
   • The continued existence of humanity has proved its worthlessness.
2. The decisions of individuals are what determine human behavior, not the congealed mass outlooks that polls and social science try to uncover with simplistic questionnaires. We all make our decisions based on a complex of influences and inherent traits that cannot be fully uncovered.
3. There is no perfect solution to any social problem.
4. All social and historical patterns are less circular than helical; they repeat, but with variations determined by specific conditions.
   • The current “populist” revolt will lead to temporary social derangement, but ultimately create the basis for the reform of society: In other words, we haven’t yet fallen low enough to rebound to sanity.
5. Ours is the best of all probable worlds. This would hold true for all other worlds as well.
6. My beliefs are as worthless as anyone else’s. Only the facts matter.

*   *   *   *

Effluvia and balderdashery:

New song by Neil Middleage:

I’m in love with a cinnamon bun,

But you can’t get none from a cinnamon bun.

*   *   *   *

New band:

Al Paca and the Ungulates

*   *   *   *

World’s smallest rodent superhero:

Deflator Mouse

*   *   *   *

There was an absurd controversy recently about a woman Egyptian boxing champion possibly being ineligible to be a woman because of her high levels of  testosterone. By the same logic, male shotputters should all be considered to have an “unfair advantage” because they average 300 lbs. of pure testosterone.

*   *   *   *

Dream #21

I’m talking to a small woman who is my friend or, possibly, someone I feel responsible for or am protecting. There is nothing sexual involved (which is unusual over the long run of my dreams). She is wearing a track suit, we are sitting in a back alcove of an old-fashioned soda shop. She is part of a group of four, the other three male. They were challenged to a race around the block against a “local” group (who are present only during the race). She is a very fast runner and expected to win.

I witness the race, paralleling it somehow, but can’t tell who is ahead. One of the males, from the other “team,” wears a woven, tannish fedora, possibly with a feather. I believe she won but get no clear answer from her back in the rear alcove. She becomes upset that I’m asking her questions about the race. I must also have asked at least one of her “teammates,” because they have the same reaction. Then I learn that the outcome of the race will be decided by a complicated formula that includes how each individual runner finished, so it will be a team, not individual, win.

Though I don’t know the formula used, I try to determine the winner by writing down the most likely position of each runner and assigning it a number. This only makes the woman and her teammates more upset. I stop doing that, and things calm down. That segment of the dream ends suddenly when somebody says that the woman who runs the soda shop had not assigned anyone as timekeeper for the race, so there are no results, so no winner.

In between, around, or possibly following this part (the segments interweave), I am visiting a factory or depot with several train tracks running through. They are mostly dug underground, and I have a strange concern about what the landscape had looked like before they transformed it. I feel a need to return it to its original state or outline, though probably retaining the train lines. I somehow have the ability to do the work but know it would never be what it had been.

Down at the riverbank, it is clear that the railroad and other industries had reshaped the bank, terracing it with river stones. It makes me sad but somewhat accepting. Earlier(?) I was fascinated watching the trains come in and out of the underground areas. There is brilliant sunshine. To the left, further down the line, two stone pillars arise, one on either side of the tracks. I keep trying to get a clearer view of them – they were initially clear – but people or objects continually get in the way. [On waking, I realize that the pillars were distinctly phallic.]

At some point, I visit or start to visit the town, with unnerving streets. It may be the drugstore-owner woman who agrees that they have the same effect on her.

There are more – but more indistinct – elements to the dream. It was most fascinating how they weaved in and out of one another.

I don’t usually find much meaning in my dreams, and they almost never include an overt symbol like the phallic pillars. I think the fact that the race had no winner – a result that was both unexpected and vivid – comes from lately reading writings of Pema Chodron, an American Buddhist.

The landscape restructuring was probably influenced by a talk with my nephew Tim about my growing up and wanting to bulldoze all the houses (including his father’s – my brother Vic’s) the constructed of which had destroyed the woods I loved when I was about 5.

The woman I needed to help may have been a combination of Linda, her mother, and my granddaughter Abi.

It felt good to have trains back again in a dream. I had missed them. But here they were not about urban transportation, as is so often the case. The setting was rural, and they were freight, not passenger, trains.

I was naive enough to think that the country’s voters, when push actually came to shove-it, wouldn’t be over 50% stupid. I was wrong. I’ve never been patriotic as such, so I’m not going to worry about America’s descent into hell. If the country votes for this sacrificial idiocy, it gets what it deserves.

Also, since most everything in life and society is cyclical, if we can make it through the next 4 years without total disintegration, there will likely be some kind of rebound – possibly even a good one.

If I weren’t such a selfish person, I might try to use what talents I have to help fight back, to shine a light on reality, but I refuse to go on social media, which has proved to be the instigator of most of the shit of the last decade. Broadcasting invective while trying to help, I’d certainly make matters worse.

And I have to admit, this shitshow may prove a personal blessing. I’ve been having a hell of a time lately trying to focus on my writing, but now, with everything in the wider world lost to chaos, maybe I’ll be forced to spend these sad years catching up. Especially on finishing my Jenny novel.

I’ve never promoted my writing, so it has no following beyond a few friends. I want my work to read, of course, but it’s the work itself, not its reception, that matters most to me. The past week or two I’ve been sifting through the surprising heap of projects I’ve started over the years – novels, stories, even screenplays – but never pushed ahead with. There’s much there that I’m proud of… maybe as proud as I am of what I’ve already self-published, which I honestly believe is as good as any current fiction I’s aware of. And I don’t think that’s just hubris.

Yes, I worry about what my kids’ and grandkids’ lives will be like if the last traces of rationality dissolve, but they’re no longer “kids”; basically, I trust their personal and collective intelligence and survivability. They are far stronger than I ever was growing up.

As for all of you out there, thanks for putting up with me, and if, at any point, you find you can no longer do so, just ask me to drop you from my mailing list. No hard feelings whatsoever. 

On the other hand, if you’d be interested in reading any of my”finished” work (three novels and a short-story collection) but don’t want to shell out cash through Amazon on a maybe, I’d be delighted to to send you a free copy in the form of your choice: .doc, pdf, epub, or mobi (for Kindle). I don’t need or care about the money, just getting it read by a few adventurous souls.

OK, you can wake up! I plan to sound off on something more interesting, next go-round.

Do you find yourself lost in the hectic pace of modern life? Do you find yourself wondering – “Who am I, why am I here, what is the meaning of the way I live, why can I find no happiness in these surroundings, so rich with opportunities?”

Do you have the feeling that there is something much more important waiting for you, if you only knew how to reach for it?

If so, you are by no means alone. Every day, increasing numbers of people are finding that they are out place with their time, their age, the society they inhabit. Nothing they do, no act they take can alleviate the ever-mounting feeling of frustration and impotence in the face of the hectic world.

They have lost a sense of connection with the basic energy of life.

Other ages have also been destabilizing, and in even the most peaceful times there have been those who believed that the universe held the key to a far greater fulfillment than they found in their work-a-day lives. Yet of these few, only the most dedicated found the key to unlock the vast hidden energies, through the age-old principles of concentration and physical exercise.

The greatest of these masters established a system which, until the recent decades, was known only to the adepts practicing in India and the bordering countries of the East. Now, however, the leading spiritual master of the present day, the Maharechie Hashish Yogi, has brought these mysteries to the Western world, where you may (for a very reasonable introductory fee) learn to employ them on your own, through courses taught by the Maharechie and his devoted disciples.

The basis of this course of study is the doctrine and practice of Ompa Yoga, a specialized branch of the ancient health sciences which requires the student to learn the extended use of his muscles to direct himself toward a new goal of physical well-being.

Through intense yet careful stages, the budding yogi comes to master the highest degree of Ompa Yoga, which advances from initial increases in suppleness and dexterity, through to the ultimate level of bodily grace and agility. At last, the adept reaches the ultimate realm of fulfillment – he learns to suck his own cock!

This revelation reaches to the edge of understanding! Even as the dizzying pace of twenty-first-century life threatens to overwhelm, the yogi need only assume the Wilted Lotus Posture, enter the Kuntalingum Realm of Mind and Body Fusion. Within moments, you can achieve total peace and release.

Does this appear to be the answer for you? Then enroll now in the Maharechie Hashish Yogi’s introduction to

TRANSCENDENTAL MASTURBATION

and become one with your orgasm.

To learn more, visit the next Introductory Course and Free Eye-Opening Demonstration to be held in your area.

You limited life will never be the same.

About 15 years back, we visited an abandoned veal barn down the road. The tiny stalls where the calves had been kept still held the decaying restraints that had immobilized the young future dinners.

Why had the barn been abandoned? Because some time in the ’50s the owner had fallen into the feeding machine. Who became whose meal?

What are we willing to do to some other living thing to make a living? 

*    *    *    *

Change of pace: From a failed attempt to provide food carved from a living creature to a restaurant serving far smaller previously living creatures in a most unlikely setting.

I can’t recall the name of the couple who ran the Covered Bridge Restaurant, and it wasn’t on a covered bridge, just near the one that crossed the Loyalsock Creek at Sonestown.

After you parked in the lot out back, you entered a three-story cinderblock addition to what I guess was their house. Inside this tower, you walked up about a story and a half of steps,  past failed equipment of various types, sizes and shapes, and piles of unidentifiable material.

How did we come to be there the first time?  I don’t recall, but we immediately liked the “ambience” because we knew there couldn’t be another place quite like it. And we returned because it served the best seafood, especially scallops, that I ever expect to eat.

The room you entered was larger than you’d expect, with 4 or 5 longish tables and the open kitchen directly behind a counter. It also had several fine waitresses at different times, including perhaps the sexiest woman ever to serve a gin and tonic.

(I’ve mentioned her before, because she’s the one who always knew when you needed a refill; once I emptied my glass and made a personal bet that she would notice before I counted to 15. At my internal “13” her finger shot out, pointing at my glass.)

God, where those scallops magnificent. But the owner who made them was, well… beside the off-putting – to most folk – entrance setup, he wanted to turn the place into a ski lift. Besides his apparently never having raised the money, there was the problem of lack of elevation to ski from, just a half-hearted rise rather than a hunk of mountain.

The restaurant is no more, no idea what, if anything, followed it. It’s funny how you can find something unlikely, even borderline absurd, and wish it would last forever. But Sunday always turns into Monday.

*    *    *    *

What’s with the recent celebration of everything from the ‘80s – music, movies, books, even (god help us) Reagan?

You won’t get that kind of reverence from me, because I’ve never understood popular culture or dominant outlooks of any period, except perhaps the folk-music revival of the ‘60s.

And I don’t listen on Spotify because I don’t want to hear another song exactly like what I just listened to. I want  the next to be something as different as possible.

That was the way WXPN, the UPenn FM station, worked in the ‘80s, close to anarchic radio, where you might hear Beethoven followed by The Residents. In our car, we have about 3,000 “songs” from 2,000 years of music on shuffle on our iPod Mini – which I hope doesn’t break, because Apple no longer makes it.

*   *   *   *

Sometimes I wish I had the sustained push and energy to put together a serious, researched non-fiction volume. Like… a definitive profile of Genghis Khan, the most influential single human being of the last 2,000 (at least) years.

Alexander the Great? Hell, everybody in the Western world admires him (me included). Battled like a motherfucker, overran everything from Macedonia to the borders of India – all before dying at age 33. (Let’s see… at age 33 I was doing really crappy freelance carpentry.)

But Genghis Khan – He drew uncoordinated herdsmen across 3,000 miles into the most terrifying, effective force ever unleashed. He captured, controlled and organized the largest empire in the history of the world, from Mongolia to to Bagdad.

He was not a nice guy, he did not institute wonderful liberties, and he has the most horrific quotes attributed to him that I’ve ever read (though maybe they reflect the press of his day). On the other hand, he instituted perhaps the most efficient long-distant  communication system previous to the 20^th century.

*    *    *    *

To the tune of “I Wish I Was Single Again” (oh, c’mon, somebody out there has to know that song), inspired by a reminder from the lovely lady at the pharmacy that I still need to get a shingles shot (I told her I was also due for an aluminum-siding booster).

I think I have shingles, again, again

I think I have shingles again.

For when I have shingles,

My tummy it tingles,

So I think I have shingles again

*    *    *    *

Two Russians were walking down the road. One was an endangered species, the other was not. The one who was not an endangered species asked the one who was: “How is is that you are an endangered species?”

The other replied: “It is a harrowing tale. For five generations, we have been hunted throughout the countryside. My brother Boris was stuffed and placed on exhibit in the Moscow Museum of Natural History. My mother’s hide was made into a coat for a commissar, two mufflers, and a handbag. As the last of my line, I plan to travel to a distant cave and live the life of a hermit until my days are complete.” 

The first Russian hurled down his cap in rage: “The abominable behavior of man! I am ashamed for all humanity. Come join me at the tavern before you go, that you may not leave in total despair.” 

At the tavern they drank many liters of fine red wine and brooded on the depredations of mankind. As they prepared to leave, the two shook hands like old friends. The first Russian kissed the endangered species on both cheeks and said:

“You may be the last of your line, but also you are the best. It has been my privilege to know you for even this fleeting moment. Now go your way, but before you leave, I have one request. Once you have expired, may I cut off your ears to hang above my mantelpiece?”

[You should be happy to hear that this is the last of my “two-Russians” jokes created many decades ago. Unless I’m overtaken by a sudden Cossack Revival, the two Russians will not be accompanying you on your travels again.]

I fear an insidious transformation may be creeping up on me. I find myself spouting – shudder – philosophy. Such an abomination would lacerate a major tenet of my belief system.

Should you spot this happening, please find a way to stop me. Yes – it’s your responsibility.

*   *   *   *

Up here, in the pleasant PA boonies, Guthrie Healthcare serves almost all our medical needs, and they do it quite well, all things considered, with top-notch docs, nurses and receptionists. I don’t think Linda and I have ever had a negative in person experience with anyone at any office.

But there is one aspect of Guthrie that’s just plain dreadful: a system-wide failure of communication. I don’t mean direct interactions so much as seeming not to know what communication means or how it works. This can range from not placing signs at eye-level in waiting rooms to Linda returning home from hip-replacement surgery and not receiving a “how are you doing?” call or email.

Some examples:

• Linda had an appointment in orthopedics in Sayre, 40 miles up the pike, in the Guthrie main clinic. Once we tracked down the proper waiting room (many have no external signs indicating which specialty they cover), we went to the registration desk to find no one on duty. Turns out, registration that day was being taken in the office corridor 8 feet to the right. There was no sign on the registration desk to alert us; the only visible one was inside the doorway of the office corridor. So every time a new patient entered the waiting room, one of the seated waitees had to point them in the right direction.
• Phone calls reminding us of upcoming appointments arrive at 8:15 in the morning, when us retirees are barely astir, and those with a job are trying to bolt a quick breakfast. The robocall asks you to press 1 to accept the appointment. There is no other way to immediately acknowledge acceptance. And if the call goes to your answering machine or voicemail, it ends with a rapid-fire blast of phone numbers and extensions that you can’t possibly write down at that speed. And with no repetition to help you catch up.
• Through an email reminder, you can access a website to pre-register for your appointment. The purpose of this eludes me, since when you arrive at your appointment you still need to go to the registration desk to show you are actually there.
• Following Linda’s wrist fracture, she arranged for physical therapy near Guthrie’s satellite hospital in Towanda – woohoo! a mere 20-mile drive. We were told to take the first left past the hospital driveway, and given the numbered address of the building. Piece of cake. Alas, the cake was baked by Snow White’s evil stepma. We drove up the short residential street to a large parking lot on the left serving two… oh three… um four? buildings facing in different directions. None of these sported a sign giving building name or address. We recognized one structure where we’d both had physical therapy, so that must be it. No, inside we learned that this particular kind of therapy was held in the long 3-story building on the far side of the parking lot. We trotted over and found, Lord be praised!, a sign for all sorts of specialties housed within – but not the one we were there for. Next, we began our search for an entrance. Once we managed to find a door, we had the choice of stairs or a dwarf elevator off to the left. We chose the elevator, whose internal sign admonished that all medical facilities and practices were on the third floor. (For convenience, I’m sure.) Linda’s appointment went fine, as usual. On the way down in the grindingly slow elevator, which announced each floor with a sound somewhere between a “ding” and a mechanical slap, I thought, “I never want to know what’s on those first two floors.” That may be where Dr Frankenstein stores spare parts.
• Linda had another appointment in Sayre, that 40-mile drive, this time in one of Guthrie’s many outlying buildings. Once we tracked down the correct outlying building and she presented herself, she was told that her appointment had been cancelled two months ago and rescheduled for next year. Linda had received no notice of such rescheduling – and this appointment was itself a rescheduled one. The receptionist was cordial and helpful, setting up a new appointment for a couple weeks later, though she couldn’t fit Linda in before we drove our 40 miles back home. I definitely didn’t want to seem unappreciative, but I said, “Guthrie seems to have a difficulty with communication.” The receptionist’s response: “I agree with you, 100%.” So… it’s not just our imagination.

*   *   *   *

I wonder if the following has been considered legally, and if so with what response:

The note on almost any product this side of toilet paper warns you to “Read all instructions before using this product.”

As we all know by now, this is written not to protect the user, but to protect the manufacturer from being sued. Their lawyers can argue: “He cut off both arms because he did not read the instructions.”

But… If someone does not read the instructions because they did not read the instruction to read the instructions, what kind of legal tangle does this create – a verbal möbius strip?

*   *   *   *

I’m patiently waiting for someone to create a deepfake of Trump speaking logically. Or maybe quoting Aquinas.

*   *   *   *

“Meaning” is a term that has come to piss me off. I don’t want even its shadow over my life.

As I see it, there is no such thing as meaning, on any scale, absolute or personal. The search for meaning is a continually failing attempt to coordinate our assumptions of what should be – an amorphous glue that changes viscosity throughout life, without our registering the change. 

*   *   *   *

As a kid, I didn’t like condiments. Mayonnaise gave me the squirms, and I flat-out hated ketchup. The only item I’d slather ketchup on was scrapple, because scrapple was the worst supposedly edible substance on earth; anything, including demonic intervention, would improve it.

*   *   *   *

When and how did Keanu Reeves become thought of as an actual actor? Didn’t he started out as a joke?

A few of you might remember a question I posed sometime back: “Who is Joe Betz?”

My answer was, a high school classmate about whom I remembered absolutely nothing — not name, face or the fact that such a person existed in my Catholic high school class… but who insisted that we had been together on the school’s toothless and useless student council.

I can’t remember now how he tracked me down [or why], but Linda and I ended up having lunch with Joe and his wife at a restaurant in Media, PA, where he showed me pictures of us together in our high school yearbook that, I fear, he always carried with him. I didn’t recognize myself or him in the pix.

We had a nice time, good people, but it was all very puzzling. Since then we traded a few emails, in which I learned about his position as professor of philosophy at Haverford College, and his devoted work with education of prisoners. He seems, all in all, to have had a far more exemplary life than I can credit to myself.

Despite a couple tries to stop it, I’m still sent the glossy alumni letter from St. Thomas More 2 or 3 times a year. I ignore almost all of it but the necrology, just wondering how many of those from my class that I do remember might have blundered off this mortal coil. 

A few weeks back I idly wondered, “What if Joe Betz’s name shows up there?” Within about a week, I go the latest issue with its “departed list”: Joseph Betz, class of 1957. 

I’m sorry, Joe. I wish I’d had a more decent response to your selfless kindness.

*   *   *   *

All this reminds me, again, how unlike my childhood and teen years were to the norm you read about.

Will Eisner’s Sunday comic, “The Spirit,” Carl Barks’ uncredited work for Disney on Scrooge McDuck, and the radio all day: These, not people or “experience,” formed the basis of my childhood. 

Later, I had no typical teen years. 1953-1957 covered my sludge of high school. Weekdays, I came home from school, started the voluminous homework imposed by my Catholic education, and kept at it through to bedtime.

In those years, I never had a girlfriend or even a date. In fact, I’ve never had a dating period. My first real time with girls began after College. I had to be deeply attracted to a particular person before making any attempt at getting together, and the process of asking was agony.

Altogether, high school was a fairly hideous time, broken only by walking around parts of West Philly and Fairmount Park with two other class losers. I saw few movies, didn’t know of any theater that actually played Roger Corman movies, never saw any of them, never knew his name.

The few I did see were mostly at the wonderful downtown first-run theaters of the day, at $1.80 a pop. (Dover Books has put out an oversize photo paperback of them – those in Philly only). My greater good luck was that the other movies I saw were the leading European and Japanese masterpieces (Kurosawa, deSica, Rosallini, etc.), through my mother’s membership in a film club – a whole different worldview, not shared with anyone else I knew.

As a remarkably cringy example of my ignorance of the world and the effects of Catholic education, I never saw my SAT scores or even realized that I was supposed to. If they were sent home, I was never told. If sent to the school, given the usual mindset there, they were probably deliberately withheld, since they were royally pissed that I didn’t apply to any Catholic college.

I had never been told my scores on the annual diocesan test or on the IQ test we were given in senior year, so I simply assumed we were not supposed to know our standing anywhere outside our own classroom. 

*   *   *   *

Linda and I have a PO box in town, rather than a mailbox at the end of the drive, mostly to force us to exit our isolated home and visit the outer world.

Of late, roughly 80% of the mail addressed to us descends immediately into the recycle box under the sorting desk. Why? Because we donate annually [in two cases, monthly] to a variety of environmental and social causes.

The monthlies are syphoned from our bank account, the others are paid through websites, according to a schedule I’ve set up to spread the load throughout the year. 

Yet week after week, day after day, these outfits send me newsletters and pleas for more donations, each citing a “vital and immediate” need – something I resent to an admittedly rabid degree. And, as a registered Democrat, I’m also asked to finance politicians in states 1,000 miles from my home. 

The most obnoxious, to me, are the environmental groups who, in their efforts to save the planet and reduce pollution, each send me a couple pounds of crap mail a year. They also alert their “Save the Specked Wombat” buddies that I’m a mark, so they too should pile on the begging. In other words, half my donations are being used to print waste paper and pay postage! 

My temptation is to just stop supporting anybody, because it all seems largely pointless. But that would be childish, because at least some of my carefully calculated lucre gets used as intended.

At least I think so.

*   *   *   *

The argument flies back and forth about whether electric vehicles will save the environment or be just another high-cost outlay of hope. 

Well. If solar power can be used to charge these honking huge batteries, that’s a big gain [since solar power, ultimately, is the only “inexhaustible’ and non-polluting energy source]. But you still have the costs of production and getting whatever energy source to the cars.

But none of this is the core problem. The core problem is that lithium-ion batteries are not a solution, they’re a clunky stepping stone toward a solution. Lithium is a middle-stage, not an end-stage material. 

Mining lithium is environmentally ruinous, as is the mining of the rare-earth metals needed to make the batteries work. EVs won’t be practical or realistic until we develop a whole new type and structure of battery, probably based on principles we haven’t stumbled across yet. I don’t think I’ve heard a single commentator talk about this.

*   *   *   *

I’ve uncovered how JD Vance came up with his cat-devouring idiocy. He signed in to Pornhub and found out that some guys really like to eat pussy.

*   *   *   *

Last and definitely least:

Shouldn’t “blank” by the past tense, and “blunk” be the past participle of “blink”?

Listen: blink, blank, blunk. Doesn’t that excite your grammatical lobe?

The use of “they” as a single pronoun for trans kids, victims and crooks who are difficult to identify, or those who’d rather you didn’t know who they are, is something I find damned annoying, because it makes it difficult to read an article or story if I don’t know whether “they” refers to a single person or a group. 

[I tend to get on my grammatical high horse about such things, which is peculiar, because at the same time I love the idea of grammar being flexible enough to morph with time and need; after all, the nitpicky grammatical rules I grew up with sprang from snotty academic types in the 17th and 18th centuries.]

In fact, this particular dilution of the plural is a modern culmination of a long linguistic tradition.

“You” was originally plural, but became singular as well to help chase “thou” into oblivion – because “thou” became too tightly tied to romance and religion. [Much the same happened in French, where the informal singular “tu” was kept for friends, family or lovers, while “vous” became the “formal,” unweighted second-person singular.]

Yet, “you” in English remained plural as well as singular, and also has the possibly unique position of a third, indefinite function. Think of a sentence like, “This is what happens when you mix chlorine and ammonia… [Hey, don’t even think about it, it dissolves your lungs!]” “You,” in such cases, addresses the indefinite listener – “anyone” – so is neither singular or plural.

Who’d think that a puny three-letter pronoun from near the end of the alphabet would have such oomph?

But de-pluralization is happening with nouns as well, in part because almost nobody studies classical languages.

“Media,” a Latin plural, now almost universally takes a singular verb in English reporting, even when referring to a diverse group [“social media is responsible for the decline of civilization”]. And just about nobody uses “criterion” today, using the plural, “criteria,” as singular.

While it’s not surprising that “data” has become singular in conversation and reporting, it’s also begun to sneak into science. Similarly, “bacteria” has become so fuzzy that it’s now, in much research, become an indefinite noun, which is shameful.

Ah hell, it don’t mean shit. But I enjoy being bugged by it.

*   *   *   *

Interesting article about a major fossil collection discovered under a schoolyard in Los Angeles. It includes rare complete fossils of wee trilobites from 8.7 million years ago, when LA was at the bottom of the sea.

But then, the sea will soon make its return to LA, given current climate conditions.

*   *   *   *

I’ve been reading the daily comic strips since I was about 5. It’s one of my few positive connectors across the years. Way back then, they ran in the big, burly print newspapers – the Philadelphia Inquirer and Evening Bulletin [now defunct]. Today, I have to harvest them online.

As anyone with this odd avocation knows, there’s a wide set of themes that pop up regularly in the strips: Humpty-Dumpty on his wall, clowns, mimes, Eskimos and their igloos, Bigfoot, a fly in the soup, etc.

Over the last year, I’ve noticed that the Grim Reaper with his scythe has been very popular, pacing through various strips week after week.

These cartoonists may be telling us something.

*   *   *   *

I’m going to go off-course here to point to a recent success in which I take special pride – not for the success itself really, but for how I arrived at it.

Over the past two decades we’ve had a small propane heater on the wall just inside the back door, to help offset the cold breezes of winter as we zipped in and out our main entry. It was a non-vented heater, which meant it spewed its fried gases into the room

The pollutants didn’t amount to much; nonetheless, it was a bad heater for doing this, and we were bad heater parents for allowing it to.

We’d recently had a heat pump installed, which keeps the whole house properly toasty, so last week, when the propane service duo came to do annual maintenance on the larger, properly vented heaters in Linda’s potshop and my workshop, I asked them to remove our naughty little kid.

The friendly duo leader wasn’t sure his truck held the equipment to do this particular job, and when he inspected our model, he admitted he wasn’t quite sure how it was attached to the wall. But he noted 3 or 4 hefty screws coming through the back plate, so he said the unit had been attached from outside.

Well, I knew that the wall had 2×6 studs, because I’d built it, adding half-inch ply on the outside and hemlock siding on top of that. How could anyone have gotten at the hind-end of the heater without performing absurd convolutions of thought and material?

The service boss decided that the only way to detach the heater would be to slide the blade of a reciprocating saw behind the back panel to cut those screws – but I’d built a bookshelf next to the heater, so… shrug. He packed up and left me me to find my own complicated way to wangle it loose.

I do my best thinking when half asleep. Or if not the best, sometimes the most useful. So I laid back and pictured the whole set-up… the screws sticking through looked to me like sheet-metal screws. What if, rather than holding the heater against the wall, they attached the rear steel plate to the heater? If so, I should check for the heads of screws pointed in the other direction.

Next day, I found all sorts of sheet-metal screw heads. I loosened them all. Most cinched internal parts of the heater together, but eventually, yes, the heater sagged and I could pull it from the wall. It had been attached through the interior wallboard with a few plastic anchors.

There was nothing earth-shattering in my use of a screwdriver, so what am I proud of? That I’d figured the thing out, while lying on my back, using straight-forward logic. I mean, damn, my brain really is good for something, even without knowing how a propane heater is put together.

*   *   *   *

Now for the opposite: an evening of shame.

Last Friday, outside the town bar we love, after a fine meal, with no more alcohol in me than my usual two shots of Yukon Jack, I fell stumbled and collapsed on the sidewalk while trying to get into the car – Linda was driving back, as usual. There must have been something plus the drink involved, but nothing this vile had happened to me in over 60 years.

The people outside the bar, a wonderful bunch, helped prop me on my feet, and somehow, on my own, I got into the passenger seat.

At home, I fell asleep, then woke up to find a strange, wandering thing moving across my face. Five or ten seconds passed before I mushily realized that it was my left hand… but foreign and inexplicably alien; even once I knew what it had to be, I could not recognize it.

Maybe 20 minutes later, I started to write this bit, while weeping apologies and horror to Linda. By then, my left hand had become a friend again – or at least an acquaintance – though the fingers hitting the keys were typing gibberish.

Why am I including this note here, though I feel it disgraces me? Because sending it out solidifies my need to know what happened.

And knowledge is far more important than disgrace.