The Poet's Speech - Hyperion by Dan Simmons

This is an excerpt from one of the books in the Hyperion space opera epic by Dan Simmons - I can't remember which, and honestly, I can't remember much of the surrounding story (by the gods there was a lot of it), but this one chunk of writing made a huge impression on me the first time that I read it, and every now and again someone will be waxing philosophical about the glories of the works of mankind or something, and I'll want to mention this idea. I never do though, because I don't think I'll ever be able to put it quite as particularly "right" as this. It took quite a lot of hunting to find it, which genuinely surprised me. Apparently I'm the only one who was particularly stricken by this - what I thought ended up being one of the central and pinioning ideas of the entire story arch. I ended up having to transcribe it from a photograph of a page of the book that was scanned into some Romanian e-Lending Library type site.

 Anyway, I consider this to be a really moving piece, and like I said, I'm often tempted to quote it or even copy/paste it to situations in need of such an idea, but I don't think I ever will. I think the closest I'll come is to whisper it quietly into the void of you, dear invisoblog. It will be our little secret. ♥ B-Tots

* * * * *

The twentieth century's most honored writer, William Gass, once said in an interview: "Words are the supreme objects. They are minded things."

And so they are. As pure and transcendent as any Idea which ever cast a shadow into Plato's dark cave of our perceptions. But they are also pitfalls of deceit and misperception. Words bend our thinking to infinite paths of self-delusion, and the fact that we spend most of our mental lives in brain mansions built of words means that we lack the objectivity necessary to see the terrible distortion of reality which language brings. Example: the Chinese pictogram for "honesty" is a two-part symbol of a man literally standing next to his word. So far, so good. But what does the Late English word "integrity" mean? Or "Motherland"? Or "progress"? Or "democracy"? Or "beauty"? But even in our self-deception, we become gods.

A philosopher/mathematician named Bertrand Russel who lived and died in the same century as Gass once wrote: "Language serves not only to express thought but to make possible thoughts which could not exist without it." Here is the essence of mankind's creative genius: not the edifices of civilization nor the bang-flash weapons which can end it but the words which fertilize new concepts like spermatozoa attacking an ovum. It might be argued that the Siamese-twin infants of word/idea are the only contribution the human species can, will, or should make to the raveling cosmos. (Yes, our DNA is unique but so is a salamander's. Yes, we construct artifacts but so have species ranging from beavers to the architect ants whose crenellated towers are visible right now off the port bow. Yes, we weave real-fabric things from the dreamstuff of mathematics, but the universe is hardwired with arithmetic. Scratch a circle and pi peeps out. Enter a new solar system and the Tycho Brahe's formulae lie waiting under the black velvet cloak of space/time. But where has the universe hidden a word under its outer layer of biology, geometry, or insensate rock?) Even the traces of other intelligent life we have found -- the blimps on Jove II, the Labyrinth Builders, the Senseschai empaths on Hebron, the Stick People of Durulis, the architects of the Time Tombs, the Shrike itself -- have left us mysteries and obscure artifacts but no language. No words.

The poet John Keats once wrote to a friend of his named Bailey: "I am certain of nothing but the holiness of the Heart's affection and the truth of Imagination--What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth--whether it existed before or not."

The Chinese poet George Wu, who died in the Last Sino-Japanese War about three centuries before the Hegira, understood this when he recorded on his comlog: "Poets are the mad midwives to reality. They see not what is, nor what can be, but what must become." Later, on his last disk to his lover the week before he died, Wu said: "Words are the only bullets in truth's bandolier. And poets are the snipers."

You see, in the beginning was the Word. And the Word was made flesh in the weave of the human universe. And only the poet can expand this universe, finding shortcuts to new realities the way the Hawking drive tunnels under the barriers of Einsteinian space/time.

To be a poet, I realized, a true poet, was to become the Avatar of humanity incarnate; to accept the mantle of poet is to carry the cross of the Son of Man, to suffer the birth pangs of the Soul-Mother of Humanity. 

To be a true poet is to become God.

Circadian Rhythm

Boop! This might be cheating, my friend Bigs asked me a while back to write her about what it was like to live in Alaska, specifically with regards to the sun. I was feeling nostalgic this morning, so I went back and re-read it and edited it a bit JUST FOR YOU, POSTERITY. I'll apologize in advance for how overwrought and mawkishly wistful this will be. I'm not famous for being thrifty with imagery - I was raised on Tolkien. Sue me.

Anyway, living in a sun-soaked and sun-deprived environment was definitely surprising and strange. It had a very big effect on my mood, and drastically altered my daily activities. I started both the fall and spring with a fair amount of work followed by a long period of unemployment, but the kind of life I led during them could not have been more different.

Probably first and foremost was the amount of sleep I needed. During the winter I had a hard time waking up before 9 am (often I slept until 11 am), and felt exhausted by 9 pm. The world seemed to begin and end at the walls of the cabin, and so did my mentality. When the summer really got into full swing, the difference was unbelievable. I found myself easily waking up at 6 am, helping Barbara get ready for work, making tea, listening to NPR, and thinking about the day. I moved around without feeling restless, and I could sit for long periods of time without feeling listless. Just being able to see the outside drew my mind out of the cabin space and I found myself getting a lot more done mentally than I did during the whole winter. Of course, there were so many other factors available to affect my mood, like not having to worry about putting on five layers to step outside the door, and having outdoor spaces to spend time like the porch or the garden or with the chickens expanded my range of available activities when work was short.

It was really bizarre though, catching myself gardening at 11 pm and thinking it was just about dinner time. I found my sense of time in general expanded to match the amount of light available. I adjusted pretty seamlessly to a 22 hour day, and had to really make sure that I was getting in bed on time to get the 6 hours of sleep I like to have. Dinner happened at 10 pm by accident pretty often. The downside to the light was a feeling of exposure. The winter offered what was often a comforting sense of envelopment - like I could run to the outhouse naked at 7 pm and feel completely safe, clothed in darkness. If I did that during the summer - even at 2 am - there would unavoidably be someone out for a walk or picking berries who would spot me a hundred yards away in the twilight that passes for night that time of year. In more than a few ways, Barbara and I felt on display in the summer light, and we took active measures to close off the cabin a little bit with blinds and then more blinds.

Physically, I just felt more energetic and engaged during the summer. It was not at all clear to me how direct a correlation there was between the amount of positive energy I had and how much sunlight there was until winter solstice. The moment we gained 6 minutes of sunlight rather than lost it, my attitude shifted drastically for the better. By the time the days were normal length, it was a lot easier to get motivated about any activity, and where it might have taken a whole weekend of planning to prepare for an adventure during the winter, it took half an hour to whip a similar activity into reality during the summer. Nothing could replace the sun.

Winter goes beyond bleak. It reaches a level of such intense inhospitality that it feels at once ambivalent and malevolent. It was beautiful and terrible. Despite filling our cabin with bright colors, fantastic music, and delicious smells and flavors, we were completely surrounded by singularity - specific sensations drawn to their utter extreme. There was no smell in the air except the pure emptiness of the dry cold, no feeling in windless air but the seeping, invisible, deadening chill, no taste to the world but that of your own frozen breath, absolute deafening silence broken only by the doleful ravens or the occasional chorus of sled dogs or wolves, and no light to see by except the wild, monochromatic blue palette of endless dusk, barely shifting tone as the sun rolled along the horizon. Even when the sun was gone and the world went as dark as the abyss, the sky still shone with intensity. The stars did not just shine, they screamed. I could stand on the driveway and stare for hours at our galactic arm, and it became very clear why the Ursa Major is our state flag. Winter was, in effect, vividly and sensationally sensation-less. The beauty of the winter is in this. It's almost like poetry. Everything is experienced in concentrate, and everything you do is deliberate. You're not just cold, you are painfully, mindlessly cold. You're not just bored and lonely, you are soul-crushingly without purpose and hopelessly isolated. You're not just running out to the outhouse, you are taking your life in your hands.

Summer drenched the world in dramatic contrast to the winter. Our garden spilled from its confines with vibrant colors, and the woods burst to life. First the little, white dwarf dogwood flowers poke through the snow, followed soon after by the bluebells and alpine azaleas. Then the wild raspberries, the low-bush and high-bush cranberries, and the wild roses all erupt into life. Neon blue bird vetch carpets the willows and alders while the wild geranium, irises, twinflower, and western columbine fill the spaces in between. The birches and aspen explode with new leaves, and the black and white spruces shake off their deep emerald winter coats and ring themselves with electric green shoots of new growth. Soon the fireweed, which has been growing in dense patches wherever there is open ground, springs into action, setting whole fields on fire with millions of pink flowers, smoking with puffy white seed clusters that float off in the breeze. The air is heady with the earthy cinnamon perfume of tundra spices: labrador tea, crowberries, mountain bell heather, and a hundred different mosses and lichens. One breeze might be acrid with the smell of fermenting high-bush cranberries, and another might bring the carroty scent of cow parsnip. Then come the wild bilberries, which are like what blueberries wish they could be but never dreamed possible. Every meal is packed with wild berries, and littered with edible wildflowers. Everything bursts at the seams in a screaming, frenzied symphony of living as the plants tug at their roots to soak in every last drop of sun. The summer is as explosive in flavor as it is in color. The long sunlight causes the plants to go into overdrive - carrots push themselves out of the ground, surging with super loaded sugars, broccoli grows dark and rich, and tastes every bit as complex and savory as a bite of steak. The chickadees, loons, arctic ground squirrels, snowy owls, black-billed magpies, woodpeckers, jays, and tree frogs all return from the south or come out of hiding to join the ravens and wolves in filling the days and nights with their cacophony. It's a tapestry of unique sensory input that can take whole afternoons to soak up correctly, and finding an ideal place to pitch a hammock or a good bed of tundra to lie on where this can be accomplished is not at all difficult.

Coming from the winter, almost sterile in its harshness and castigating extremity, the summer is practically obscene with its sumptuousness and opulence - an orgy of sensation. Everything in Fairbanks exists in extremes. The life, the light, the people, the temperature, even the land itself... Leaving that world behind for the relatively tame environs of the lower 48 felt like walking out of Willy Wonka's chocolate factory and back into the bleached grey streets of industrial London. I had been coloring with the 128 pack crayon box with the built in sharpener, and I was back to working with the 8 pack with the missing orange. The regularity of the hours and return of nighttime was immediately striking as we drove south through Canada. The closer we got to civilization, the more desaturated the landscape became. Of course, I've been living in not-Alaska for the overwhelming majority of my life, and it was not too difficult to get back into the rhythm of a normal night/day light cycle, but I found myself missing the sun's asymptotic games with the horizon pointedly. I remember being honestly shocked to see the moon for the first time in months somewhere in British Columbia. I was very glad to see the stars again too, but they weren't Fairbanks stars, and I would have traded both stars and moon to have the sun back in my evenings for a bit longer. It was the intersection of a cornucopia of environmental factors that made Fairbanks resonate so deeply with me, but probably none had so direct an impact on my psychological well-being as the sun did.

There is no word that I know of that can accurately capture the specific type of warmth and vitality of our sun's light, and I have felt it nowhere as powerfully as I did during my time in Alaska.

Pumpkin

I'm trying to imagine the life of this can of pumpkin while I twist the handle on the can opener. I watch the words “Best by: Apr 2005” spin counterclockwise on the lid to the can opener's munching. I'm not sure I can even guess when this pumpkin must have been canned to have passed its best-by date six years ago. I picture the pumpkin as a waxy young gourd, growing up in an era where canning is kind of a new thing to the world of food - off-white and eggshell are the in-vogue kitchen colors. I try to imagine the shock and confusion, the soft hiss of decompression, the light beginning to spill in, Beck playing Hot Wax very loudly in the background to welcome it back to the world. How different the bright blues and pastel red, gold, and greens of my kitchen must look to the pumpkin. I do not envy it. Soon it’ll be muffins, so it goes.

The muffins turn out dry, stillborn from the oven. I have a bowl of Cheerios while I wait for them to cool and then wrap them in cheery green cellophane without removing them from the muffin tin. It’s 7 pm and I wonder what the mailbox is up to. I emerge from my house with about the same viscosity as the pumpkin from the can, punctuating each of my actions with wider, more dramatic swinging motions than necessary. Giving the mundane activities in my day this kind of energy lends them an element of grandiosity that they otherwise might lack.

Bacon Bits

1. Whenever I looked into those flat, despondent eyes of his, the way they always focused on something about ten feet behind me and never quite managing to look like attention had been gained from them, I got that sort of enthusiastic frustration - the kind that makes you force people to fly kites and go on picnics or camping trips, and incidentally, seemed to be exactly the part of him that he’d lost somewhere in the last thirty years of his cubicled life.

2. Brian felt like his relationship with Cynthia was going pretty well, and in fact, if you had asked him, he would have told you so with a smile on his face and not even a twinge of doubt, that is, right up until the moment she hit him in the face with the shovel.

3. It was the first time that she’d ever seen anyone who actually kept gloves in the glove compartment, and this made her keenly suspicious of him.

4. “Well why couldn’t she just take your car?” was just what Jim was expecting her to say, and he had already prepared an exhaustive list of reasons why that was precisely the worst idea she had ever had, so it very disappointing when it didn’t come up.

5. Ellen was just innocently minding her coffee at the bar when Dan asked her one of those questions that you only expect to get when you’re sitting down or not holding anything dangerous, which is why he was in the bathroom wringing $2.75 of decaf house blend out of his shirt and she was trying to see if she could get a free refill out of the waitress.

6. Like most white people, Doug thought that Jesus was a white guy, which is why it took him almost ten minutes to recognize what he was looking at on his waffle, and an additional two minutes to realize that his whole life was about to change.

7. Ashley had a chronic problem of feeling like her life was low budget indie film, and she felt this most acutely whenever she got on the bus and put on her headphones, because no matter what was playing on her discman, it was the perfect song to accompany shots of her with her forehead pressed disconsolately against the window.

Dogs

So I'm a fan of dogs for the most part. Dogs have been a part of my childhood, and while I've had mixed experiences with being chased around a park by an overprotective akita inu and had my face chomped on by a labrador I decided to play peek-a-boo with, the majority of my experiences with dogs have been positive. For a few years in college, I thought that a dog was what would really complete my image, but then I decided that maybe I had better just work on my people skills rather than retreat into some fantasy mountain man world. I can't say I've totally succeeded but I don't yearn for a dog like I did, and I think a large part of that has been thanks to moving to Alaska.

Here in Fairbanks, dog mushing is a pretty popular activity. However, it's a labor intensive and time consuming activity which demands discipline and care from both the musher and the dogs, so it isn't for everybody. However, for those who lack the care and discipline, a sense of humanity, regard for life, or suffer paranoid delusions, there is a second incredibly popular activity that you can take part in that is almost as much fun: dog hoarding! From the sound of things at night, you might expect that the entire city is populated by werewolves. I know the howling and yelping and barking and whining bothers some people, but it doesn't particularly bother me. It is sometimes unnerving to step into the night for a midnight tinkle and suddenly the trees all around you start moaning and howling, but you get used to it and I definitely prefer it over being woken up by sirens every other night like while living in Chicago. No, my problem is not the sound - my problem is with the affect this has on the life of a car-less individual.

Our cabin is up on the east saddle of the, as far as I know, nameless mountain next to Moose Mt., about 15-10 miles outside of town depending on what part of town you're pulling from. The cabin is located pretty close to the beginning of a major gravel road network that spiders about the mountainside and reaches far back into the wilderness like a network of tiny, delicate blood vessels. Unless you know where you are going, and unless you are prepared to fend for yourself, it can be surprisingly dangerous to explore trails on foot. There are of course the obvious dangers of running into a moose or a bear or a wolf, but definitely more likely, you'll either accidentally cross onto a game trail which will lead you onto private property or out into the middle of freaking nowhere (This is surprisingly simple to do, as this part of town is literally on the border of civilization, and if you end up on the northside or down in the valley beyond, you could very easily wander many hundreds of miles without running into anyone. I've heard more than one story of people going out for a jog or a hike and getting mixed up on a game trail and ending up dying in the wilderness miles from town. Game trails have a nasty habit of leading nowhere and everywhere, especially other game trails that will get you even more lost). During the winter it's easier to tell which is which since you can look at the prints in the snow, but during the summer, it's easy to get mixed up and take a wrong turn and end up somewhere you don't want to be.

To give you, dear reader, an idea of how many dogs there are in the area, in the half of a mile gravel road between the highway into town and our cabin, there are six yards that I can see (and more that I can only hear and guess at) directly off the road that are home to anywhere from three to several dozen dogs, only ONE of which belongs to a musher as far as I can tell. I walk very often to get around, especially since I sold my motorcycle and my truck a couple months ago. I hitchhike to work and into town or for whatever takes me further than I can walk. Also, weather permitting, I walk the mile or so down to the general store where our mailbox is every day. I have been attacked by dogs no less than seven times since moving to Fairbanks, and harassed by yards full of them too many times to count. Here are a few highlights.

* * *

When I first moved to Fairbanks, I was living down the road from my friends, Jon and Lou, in an unfinished cabin that Jon was building as a rental. Jon and I had just gotten back from a two week long caribou hunting trip, and after dropping my bag off at the rental, we drove over to their house for dinner. After dinner, I was walking home with an extra pair of tennis shoes that I had forgotten in the truck. Between the house and the cabin is maybe a quarter mile, and it passes by a particular yard with a handful of dogs. Usually they are penned up, but in the dim evening light, I could see as I approached that somehow the chickenwire fencing had come loose at one point, and that a couple of the dogs were milling about just outside of the fence. Now, having walked past these dogs a few times before, I knew they were pretty unfriendly to strangers, so I knotted my laces together and edged my way along the road, hoping not to attract their attention. Unfortunately, there is no good way to get past dogs like these - if you try to sneak past them, then they'll be surprised by you and go ballistic; if you try to be loud and present and march past them, then they will consider any distance closed between you as a hostile action on your part and go ballistic, but having no real option but to go back and bug Jon and Lou, who were very likely already heading to bed (it was quite late), I decided to just behave as normally as possible and keep as much distance as possible. A natural choke point of trees, however, brought me too close, and suddenly I found myself being chased by a very large dalmatian and a nondescript, black dog. I took off running down the road towards my cabin, and whenever the dogs got close, I would turn and flail wildly at them with my tennis shoes. After landing a substantial blow to the snout on the dalmatian, who had gotten his paws up on my jacket but failed to connect on the arm he'd been going for, they backed off a bit, and I stopped running and began backing my way down the road away from them. They lost interest in me once I had moved far enough away from their owner's property and trotted back up the road. I walked briskly and shakily down the road to the cabin and made sure to bolt the door behind me.

* * *

During the winter, Barbara and I tried our hands at skiing, but I failed to find reasonably priced ski boots that would both fit the skis I borrowed from Michael and would keep my feet warm enough to make it an enjoyable activity. After a couple failed attempts at skiing together, I decided to simply be Barbara's photo documenter. Earlier in the fall, I'd mapped out a few good trails around our neighborhood that would make good ski trails once snow fell. One afternoon we were feeling particularly listless and I suggested she go for a ski and I would trot along behind her. We usually ski down at the bog a mile down the road, but it's kind of flat and boring, especially if you're not skiing, so I thought it'd be a fun idea to try the trails.

The main road leading to our cabin from the highway makes a big L shape, and the trail I had in mind meanders about the bottom half of the L, and eventually ends by forking off into a powerline trail, a driveway, or a turnoff trail which parallels the longitudinal part of the L to the highway. Along this straightaway, there are two branches. One leads the ten feet or so over to the road on the right, the other heads off to the left, while the main trail stays true. The left trail is one of the kinds of trails I was talking about earlier. It is a wide, well defined, human traversed trail which branches off of what is clearly a major all-purpose, public, 4-wheeling, sled-dog, skiing, walking, biking, running trail, but it dives headfirst into the heart of a very dangerous property.

I happened to have taken this left path in the fall and ended up on this property quite by accident. My experiences there are a completely unique story that deserves its own post, so I won't get into it except to say that the property itself is an exaggerated extreme of a pretty common Alaskan pastime, which is collecting rusty shit and dogs on your property. If I had to guess, I'd say the property is at least 10 acres or so, and extends directly off the highway back into the woods quite a ways. Unlike the dense black spruce and aspen forest that surround it, the property has been mostly clear cut - save the occasional desperate and forlorn looking paper birch clawing its way out of the heaps of wreckage - and a labyrinth of old machinery, buses, logging equipment, mining tools, cars, trucks, trailers, campers, boats, and tin sheds has been, it seems, lovingly arranged in a sprawling orgasm of human wretchedness and folly across it. When I first turned a corner and emerged out of the trees and onto the edge of this surreal place and gazed down the hillside at this spectacle, I felt like I had stepped onto an abandoned set from Mad Max. Thankfully I was at the back end of the property, and I could seem from a distance, like ants swarming over the rotting carcass of some massive robot straight out of a steampunk's wet dream, hordes of dogs. I won't get into what happened to me on that day, but it sets the backdrop for what happened to us during that skiing expedition in the winter.

We had it in our heads to head down to the highway and across the road to the community soccer field which is hooked up to several cross country trails. I had never actually taken the straight path all the way to the highway, but I thought I knew where it came out on the road, and it was acceptably distanced from the property in question. The trail was undeniably a well travelled one, so I felt secure in saying we should take it straight rather than jump off on the right-leading trail and walk on the road. We passed the turn-offs and I noticed that as we went on, the trail moved subtly to the left. Apprehension started to gather in the corners of my mind, but I had no reason to suspect my guess at the trail's exit was wrong. Suddenly, however, we noticed hulking corrugated plates looming behind the trees beside us, and without warning the forest ran out and we were on a trail which ran right along the front edge of that wretched land. Worst, it was completely open to a little open yard where several dogs could be seen languishing in little makeshift alcoves, like a Hooverville ghetto for dogs. We stopped briefly and considered our situation. I don't know what Barbara was thinking, but I felt like I had led her unwittingly into a lion's den, and I was horrified at the very real possibility that we might be seriously injured, since I knew from previous experience that this land was irregularly tenanted, and that it being tenanted might not necessarily work in our favor. From where we stood and about 50 feet ahead of us, we could see the tree line that screened the property from the road, and the arch-like break in it where the trail emerged. As soon as we stopped and really before we had a chance to decide to turn around, we heard a yelp of alarm, followed by a chorus of answering yelps, and suddenly the deafening barks of what had to be at least 50 dogs were being directed at us. Like a startled beehive, they suddenly sprang from every metal orifice, perched on heaps of oil drums and cranes, seated in molding, doorless cars and leaning out broken and scum encrusted windows, scrambling over patched roofs and bounding over piles of snow covered tires, it was like a scene out of a horror film.

Many of the dogs were content to jeer and howl balefully at us from their positions among the debris, but a dozen at least began moving forward in a pack, coming onto the path behind us, forcing us to move forward. Before they had even started to make for us, however, I had made up my mind that making for the road was our best bet, and I didn't want Barbara to have a chance to assess the situation and become as terrified as I was, so I told her to keep going and gave her a little push-start. My rationale here was that knowing that you were being pursued by a pack of slavering dogs, while certain to incentivize motion, might not necessarily translate into the coordination necessary to ski successfully as a beginner to the sport. It seemed best to give the impression that everything was under control and push her forward. A couple of particularly vicious dogs advanced on me, and nipped at my heels. I jogged behind Barbara and tried to sound encouraging and told her to keep going no matter what, thinking that I might have to actually stop and give them something to direct their attention to while she escaped to the road. A middle sized dog with long hair that looked alarmingly like the akita inu that had chased me around the park as a child took the lead, barking ferociously and bearing its teeth. It bit at my ankle a couple times, and I had to stop every few feet and make - what, in confronting bears at least, is referred to as - "big arms" at it. When it actually connected a solid hold on my ankle, I turned around and punched it in the face. It nipped at my hand, but yelped and backed off, putting enough pause in the pack for us to break through the tree line and out onto the road. We recklessly crossed over to the soccer field and gathered our wits. A couple of the dogs followed us through the trees, but stopped short of the road and barked psychotically at us for a minute or so and then trotted back into the abyss. I think Barbara was shaken by it, but didn't quite realize what was going on behind her as she powered ahead. I screwed up my wits and brushed it off, considering myself lucky for having escaped with just a torn snowboot and a small rip on my right glove. The rest of the day was fun after that, and on the return trek, we gave the path wide berth until we had completely passed the property.

* * *

A few days ago, Barbara's car was in the shop, and after dropping her off at work and it off at the shop, I walked home and played on the internet until it was time to pick her up. The shop was running behind schedule, and with an hour before I had to pick up Barbara, I made up my mind to find Michael's truck. I couldn't get a hold of Michael after a few tries, so I decided to make some progress and call again later. Michael had just left town a week before, and since he had been housesitting Jon and Lou's place while they were on vacation, I figured that was a good place to start looking. I hitched down the highway to Jon and Lou's neighborhood. Their cabin is about halfway down Home Run, a tributary to Line Dr., which runs to the highway. The guys who picked me up dropped me off at Line Dr. and I made my way down the road. I rounded the corner and started making my way up Home Run. I was about 25 feet down the road when I looked up and noticed that maybe 200 feet down the road from me was a very very large husky. Huskies are good dogs, and one of their better attributes is that they haven't been mal-bred over the millennia to be hyperactive barking machines. It stood silently and completely still at the end of the road and watched me with silent intensity. I stopped and watched it for a moment and briefly considered my options.

I had been in an almost identical situation earlier in the summer walking to get the mail where a large black dog had walked out of a driveway and stood in the middle of the road blocking my path. In that instance, thankfully, I was able to call for the owner, who was operating a nail gun, thankfully, without hearing protection, and he called the dog off before it actually attacked me, but not before I was able to learn that even standing still or appearing to walk away did not assuage the dog's suspicions that I was a threat. I decided therefore, that I would not be able to walk away from the husky without signaling to it that I was a tasty treat, nor would I, in any universe, be able to out run it, nor would I be able to wrestle with it in shorts and sandals and a t-shirt. The road was smooth and rockless from a great deal of rain and recent travel, and I didn't spot anything that looked like it would be a useful or practical defense to me. Almost exactly between the dog and me, about 100 feet away, was Jon and Lou's driveway. I made up my mind to act naturally and make a beeline for their cabin.

I started walking forward, and as I did, the husky slowly walked forward as well. I made it about 3/4 of the way to the driveway and we were about 75 feet apart when the husky started showing signs of hostility. I could tell from the size of it that it was a very well trained and groomed sled dog, and I could tell from its jingling tags that it very well might even be a skijor dog belonging to someone nearby. I was surprised that it was being hostile because well-loved sled dogs are usually friendly to everyone. I was hoping that it belonged to someone at the end of the road, but I was afraid that it might belong to the people directly across the street from Jon and Lou, who, I recall Michael telling me, kept several sled dogs. If this was the case, I could believe that the normal reaction of a sled dog not in the presence of its owner and seeing a stranger coming between it and its home might become aggressive.

It made several of those low "huff"ing noises, which are about all the warning you get from a husky, and then started making little hops forward, coiling its back legs and keeping its tail back. I hesitated, but I was close enough to the driveway, that I felt I could probably make it safely. I was at the mouth of the driveway when it gave me a single loud bark and a growl and dashed forward a few feet and stopped again. I backed into the mouth of the driveway, which winds surreptitiously through dense black spruce before ending in a parking lot. I had moved out of sight of the dog and didn't hear it pursue me, so I turned and walked faster. At the parking lot, there is a long path to the house and a shorter path to Jon and Lou's very very large garden and greenhouse. There was no truck or any vehicle in the parking lot, and I wasn't sure how I felt about going in their house without their knowing it, although I'm sure they'd be fine with it if they knew I was being hunted by an enormous dog. I weighed the decision in my mind for a few seconds standing in the parking lot. I decided that the greenhouse was closer, more likely to have the door open, more likely to be unlocked, and would be a little more considerate given that I was on their property uninvited and entirely unawares. As I decided this, I heard another loud bark from the road, and the sudden, furious jangling of dog tags. I bolted up the path into the garden and into the greenhouse. Thankfully the door was open and I slammed it behind me just as the husky veered around the path and into the garden. I checked to make sure there were no openings besides the cutout vents and then sat across from the door amongst the basil. As I sat on the ground in the greenhouse and stayed absolutely still, there came the jingling tags as they circled the greenhouse a couple times, and then stood still for a few minutes somewhere towards the front of the greenhouse. Finally, after at least seven eternities, the jingling moved off into the distance towards the road, and then out of earshot. I stayed put for a bit longer and then milled about in the garden for half an hour or so before gathering some hefty rocks and making my way back to the highway. Thankfully, there was no sign of the husky when I emerged from the trees, and a nice lady let me ride in her truck bed back to my road.

* * *

I don't know what it is, really. You hear about cat ladies pretty often, but dog guys are far more prevalent up here, and far more dangerous to the average pedestrian. I guess that with all the sled dog breeding that goes on, for every one pup that ends up being a great sled dog, there must be four that are better suited for being chained on some dude's front lawn or let free in the yard of an abandoned property to be visited every week or so. There are a lot of people around here who honestly believe that the government or space monsters or their neighbors or Obama personally is out to get them and steal their ammunition, and the answer to this problem is apparently lots and lots of rabid dogs. I don't know why people feel they need this level of protection while the rest of us feel safe enough to leave our doors unlocked and our windows open on a day to day basis, but I know that after that german shepherd down the street got loose from the tree it was chained to and almost successfully managed to wrap its mouth around my face before its shirtless meth-head owner came out and called it off, I have developed a pretty strong dislike for whatever stupid ideology it is that cultivates this attitude in people, and I definitely get the mail less...

Awkward Pause...

I like to imagine that at the end of every other YouTube video when the person leans in and reaches towards me to turn off the webcam, that they're doing something else. Like, what if they were going in for a kiss, or what if they were going to try to punch through the 4th wall and choke me? Did they want to pinch my cheek? Cup my face in their hand? Push the stop button on MY computer? Where they suddenly filled with zombie hunger for human flesh, and I was the first person they saw? It's lucky the video ended just in time to stop them.

Bill, Lord of Nightmares

This post is pretty much just for me. As the topic is primarily dreams, it won't mean anything to any of you, likely. Other people's dreams are the least interesting things to listen to. I don't blame you if you don't read this.

My nightmares are having to get more creative these days. The things that used to scare me a lot still give me a huge adventure rush, but they just don't *terrify* me like they used to. I imagine this little black oozeball responsible for making sure we're meeting my yearly quota of nightmares sweating pretty hard as the new year approaches. It used to be dinosaurs and spooky houses, but now I love my dinosaur dreams, even when they're still chasing me, and spooky house theme doesn't hit quite as hard as it used to since I took up carpentry. Spend enough time renovating actually old haunted houses, and dreams about being in them is just annoying because its like dreaming about having to go to work. I had really terrible falling dreams for a while that would wake me with a start, but I started to look forward to these ones, and then I stopped waking up for them and Bill (which is what I'm naming the malevolent force responsible for my nightmares) had to quickly improvise to come up with what happens *after* you fall off the back of a boat (you drown or get chopped up by the propellers) or off a porch (you just break your arm and it sucks). Zombies worked well for a while, but I got better and better at killing them, so Bill went hyperbole on me and upped the zombie count and power to the point of absurdity. The last really scary dream where I was feeling like I was in danger was set in a city. I was holed up in the 40th or 120th floor (you know how it goes in dreams) of this apartment complex that was U shaped and had floor to ceiling windows. The zombies at this point were a seething mass of undead flesh at the base of the complex. I knew they were working their way up the stairs, but I felt pretty good that I had blocked off all the entrances and made it hard for them for a while. But the zombies where also endowed with flea-like jumping powers, and came leaping 40 to 120 stories up at me. This sucked, but I could shoot them out of the air as they got near. Then they broke into my floor and I was forced to run away. I did this by leaping out one of the windows I shot out and grabbing a rope that was tethered somewhere (I assume) and had a horrible Spiderman battle with superzombies for a while before falling, inevitably into that roiling sea of gnashing yellow teeth and cracked, overgrown fingernails. I admit that one got me pretty good, but I was pretty burned out on zombies after that. Since then, Bill has mostly just stolen ideas from movies I've watched recently. After I saw The Ring, I had a pretty good run of nightmares concerning that little girl. Previews I accidentally saw for The Grudge resulted in a dream where I was being hunted by characters from a movie I hadn't even *seen*, but the horror of that one borrowed heavily from the same things that scared me about The Ring.

Last night, I think the theme was borrowed from that movie The Cell starring J Lo and Vince Vaughn. It's actually a stupendous movie. It has great philosophical issues (although their complexity is whitewashed by the mediocre "big names" they brought in to illuminate them, and the directors - for whatever reason - seemed to have taken a film that could have been hugely successful and made the last minute decision to try to sell it to teenagers instead of adults, resulting in a very adult move with adult level sophistication with this weird veneer of teenage angst and flash-bangery). The cinematography is the best I've ever seen in a movie, ever. Anyway, the thing that was so scary about this one is that it happened in the morning after Barbara's alarm had gone off once. I was sort of in that space between sleeping and being awake, and when the dream set in, the transition was seamless. I was still in bed, Barbara was still next to me, nothing had changed except we and the bed had been shrunk had moved from next to the staircase to under the staircase. I was kind of dozing when this banging started coming from the side of the staircase. It looked like there was a gate under the stairs that was, I rationalized, banging in the wind. I thought this was annoying and thought to point it out to Barbara, but suddenly it started getting more insistent. That's when I noticed that the whole cabin was starting to shake and heave. I rolled and looked up through the crack in the floorboards of the staircase above me into the blackness beyond. I saw a glimmer of light, and then a huge, pulsing drone shook the cabin. It seemed to close on me, pressing on me like thousands of tiny hands on my chest, neck, arms, and pinning me to the bed. The cabin groaned and the glimmer of light throbbed brighter, deepened into a menacing orange and seemed to peer through the crack in the floorboards at me, settling its enormous and infinitely malevolent presence on me. I couldn't hear anything but the horrible, bone conducting palpitations that shook the entire bed and held me firmly in place. It was very much like that scene from Close Encounters with the little boy at the door, except the aliens aren't friendly. I stopped being able to breath, and so I started yelling for Barbara. I guess I must have actually said something because she shook me awake. The weird thing was that nothing changed about where I was. I was in exactly the same position as I had been in the dream, and Barbara moved the same in real life as she did in the dream. The whole alien business clapped shut like a thunderstorm getting shut up behind a door, but it took me a few minutes to find my breath again. You win this time, Bill.

Music Awards

I decided today that Beck wins the prize for best use of the tambourine. Cake wins the prize for best use of yelling random sex noises to their own music. For about two months I have been twiddling my thumbs in response to unemployment. This is not entirely unenjoyable, but America is a nation founded on DOING things, and so when people ask me what I've been DOING and I tell them I've been enjoying the pleasant company of books and good music in the comfort of a nice little cabin, carefully burning my hard-earned capital on rent and utilities, I know their first impulse is to feel a little disgusted. Like Whats-his-face in As You Like It, I like this place and would willingly waste my time in it.

One of the chickens is looking at me like I surprised it, but I haven't moved in probably ten minutes. This happens a lot with the chickens.

The song Seven Bridges Road by The Eagles is meaning a lot to me right now (not the lyrics, just the standing wave pattern that is that song and my brain aligning). The song Loco Wit The Cake by Ace Hood is meaning a lot to me also, but for very different reasons.

Summer Skin

I gasp. My eyes fly open and drink in the stucco ceiling. My mind is slow to wrench the shadows of my dream apart from reality, and I shake my head to loose them, blinking sweat away from my eyes. It’s still dark out. The only light in the room is the pale light of Jenny’s cell phone on the charger, which paints the whole room monochromic blues like a detective comic. I peel myself slowly from the leather sofa. I remember it being red, but now it looks utterly black. I can’t remember the dream I was having, but I feel out of breath and panicked. I suck long draughts of the stuffy air into my lungs, letting the lingering scents of passion sink back into me, calming me. At some point during the night, Jenny relocated herself to the floor with the blanket we were sharing. She’s so beautiful, even though I can only make out the silhouettes of her curves. She’s lying on her back with the white blanket curled around one leg, draped across her belly, and over one breast. Her right arm is lying above her head so it looks like she might have been in the middle of doing the tango when she fell asleep. 

My eyes drift around the room, landing on the hard edges of objects that catch the phone’s pallid radiance. The room is full of the quirky little things she’s picked up on her travels. She’s collected dozens of carved, wooden fish that are painted with the cheerful colors of a slew of different countries. There are carpets, scarves, and sarongs of every hue and pattern imaginable tacked to the walls. They all try to tell stories that I can’t understand. I’ve never been to those places.

 My clothes lie strewn about the room, and I grope about in the dark, trying to tell mine apart from hers. I wrestle my jeans on and sit in the dark, wiping the sweat off my forehead with the palms of my hands. A sigh escapes me. I slide off the couch to the floor, and lie down next to Jenny. There are some women in the world who are so beautiful, it seems like you’re doing something dirty just by looking at them. Jenny is one of those women. I reach a hand out carefully, and trace her forearm with my fingertips, barely grazing the fuzzy, little hairs that grow there. In the soft light of the glowing cell phone her dark skin looks pastel, and her wavy auburn hair is pitch black. I gently rest my hand between her breasts and feel her heart beat beneath her slow, shallow breaths. She’s just about the prettiest thing I’ve ever seen. My hand slides up slowly to her necklace. It’s made of hemp, laced with black and turquoise clay beads. It reminds me of being at the beach.

I met Jenny in Chicago during the spring. I was in college then, and I was depressed. I rented a small apartment in a tall building on State and 8^th St., only a block away from Michigan Avenue and the riveting sunsets there that paint the lake in brilliant yellows and oranges, then reds, purples, and deep blues. My roommate was a junior at DePaul named Adam, and he was an alcoholic. I found myself taking any excuse to get out of the apartment and away from the stress of partying and drinking as the handful of students living in the building tried desperately to pass the days away. They drifted from floor to floor like gypsies, often stopping by our room to bring news of the other floors and drink whatever we had in the fridge that would keep them buzzed. Beer, vodka, soured milk, whatever.

I started using the CTA to take me places I’d never been before. Every day, I would take the El farther and farther out of the city in a different direction. One day I headed northbound on the Red Line to Evanston, about an hour’s journey I guessed. I took a blanket, a sack lunch, and a bottle of water in my backpack, and passed the time reading some Isaac Asimov book I’d picked up from the library. I got off the train when it ran out of tracks in Linden. I walked to the coast in a daze, and found myself standing on a beach that stretched for miles in either direction. I realized I’d never seen anywhere so magnificent since I moved to Chicago.

That’s where Jenny found me, eating a crushed peanut butter sandwich, sprawled out on my big, plaid blanket, watching clouds march endlessly over Lake Michigan to the horizon, crying over the stress and tragedy of it all, wiping tears from my eyes with the backs of my wool mittens.

“Hey,” she said, “mind if I join you?”

She wore a blue and grey striped beanie, a sea-green hoody with light blue dolphins on it, loose-fitting, khaki cargo pants, and a hemp necklace with little black and turquoise beads. Somehow, none of it managed to hide her contours, her perky breasts, slim torso, or toned thighs. She smirked sideways at me and raised an eyebrow as I blinked incredulously at her. The wind swept her neck-length auburn hair across her face, and she pushed it back behind her ear, her breath clouding in the cold as she smiled openly at me.

“Sure, yeah, please,” I managed, sniffing back my runny nose, and breathing into a mitten. She lay down beside me and looked at the clouds for a minute. She smelled a little like fresh cut flowers, and I could feel her breath on my cheek when she turned her head to the side to look at me.

“You know, life is beautiful when you get right down to it.”

“Yeah, that’s true,” I agreed, resting my sandwich on my chest.

She looked back up at the clouds, “I’m pretty sure you must be gay if it makes you cry though. That’s why I’m guessing it’s safe to sit down and talk to you.”

I looked over and crinkle my nose up at her. She glances askance at me with her eyebrows raised.

“I’m not gay, it’s just been a long day. And what makes you so sure I’m safe to talk to? Maybe I’m some psychopath.”

 She locked her big, brown eyes on mine for a moment, and then hid them beneath long, black lashes and grinned widely at me.

“I’ve been lots of places, and I’ve met lots of people in the world. I think all of us are just looking for someone to hold us. You looked like somebody who needed a stranger to come tell you things would be okay.” I watched her stare at the sky through closed eyes.

“My name’s Jenny,” she said as she took my hand off my chest and held it in hers between us, “I think me and you should be friends.”

Jenny and I didn’t agree on very much, and maybe that was the point, but the sex was amazing. She was a graphic design major at some school nearby Evanston in north Skokie. I was interested in astronomy at that point, although I decided to major in mass communication halfway through my sophomore year. She liked soccer, and I liked rock climbing. I listened to alternative and grunge, and she was obsessed with country music. I would take the express line up to meet her on the weekends, and we’d stay in her apartment and make love until we were too tired, hungry, and sore to do anything but order Chinese food and watch movies. We’d take turns picking a movie that the other would have to watch. It would always end ugly when whoever’s turn it wasn’t to pick the movie said something snarky about the main character and we’d get into a wrestling match over it.

“How can you even say that about Robert Redford?” she says, leaning over the kitchen counter to give me a look of disbelief while she’s pouring us drinks, “The man is a legend! Did we watch Three Days of the Condor yet?”

“Look, I’m not saying he’s a bad actor, he’s just dull compared to Brad Pitt. If I wanted to watch a heist movie, I’d watch Oceans 11 is all. I don’t see how you can even stay awake for all these crappy old movies.”

I hear the bottle of whiskey hit the counter and see her appear in the kitchen doorway. She stands there with her legs akimbo in nothing but a T-shirt and some red striped panties and looks at me like she might kill me. Then she leaps across the room at me, tackling me into the covers, trying to pin my arms over my head.

Robert drones on in the background, “You know me. I'm the same as you. It's two in the morning, and I don't know nobody.”

“Oh my god, bo-ring,” I mock.

“There wouldn’t even be an Oceans 11 if it weren’t for The Sting, you fuckhead!” She tries to say more, but I get her flipped over and stuff a pillow in her face, laughing.

Holding onto Jenny was like holding onto fish out of water. No matter how close you tried to hold her, she’d slip right through your fingers. Rent got expensive, working so much took it’s toll on my grades, and so I began to spend less and less time on the Red Line to Evanston. I ended up moving to St. Paul, Minnesota and getting a BS in Mechanical Engineering from the U of M. I married a woman named Heather who had long, blonde hair that curled and bounced, and framed her face nicely. She made me happy, and we had a lot of things in common. Our love was safe, convenient, and comfortable. We moved to Michigan a year later, and now we maintain a quiet, reasonable relationship in a quiet, reasonable neighborhood. We get along well, despite the thick coat of mediocrity that smothers us. I work as a small time contractor, and she works at a local elementary school teaching 5^th graders. We spend the evenings reading books and quietly describing to one another what slightly out of the ordinary things have happened to us during the day.

When I first met Heather, she’d never even touched herself, let alone been touched. For months after we’d first started dating, she wouldn’t let me see her naked or change clothes in front of me. Our relationship was an exercise in patience and humility. She refused to have sex with me until we got married, and anytime it came up while we were being intimate, she’d finish me quickly and go to bed without another word. After we got married, I grew to resent this quality about her, not just in the bedroom, but in all walks of life, that her sense of convention was so firm. The more I dwelt on it, the more I thought of her as being prudish, and the more my thoughts drifted back to Jenny. The way Jenny smelled when we were trapped under the covers together, the way Jenny tasted, the way Jenny’s hair would spill over her face so all I could see was her smile, how she would grip my stomach when she was about to come, the arch of her back, and the slow, soft kisses she would run up and down my body.

I drove to Chicago in the summer, on business, and called Jenny from the Linden stop parking lot. We met on the beach, but didn’t stay there long. We drove into the city to a Thai restaurant near her new apartment, and talked about our lives. Her hair was longer now, just past her shoulders. She wore brown slacks and a white tank top. Everything about her was still stunning. She worked for an advertising firm now, and wrote poetry in her spare time. She described her position as being a bit of an advertisement for her company, since it was always her that seemed to be shipped off to make a good impression on potential clients. She’d visited more countries in the past year than she had in her entire life up to that point. It’d been hard on her love life, though, and admitted to me that it got lonely.

She bit her lower lip and stirred at her soup, “So are you in town for a little then?”

“I don’t know. I’ve got a couple days. I’ve got to pick up an order of special tiles for this lady’s bathroom on Tuesday.” She smirked one corner of her mouth at her bowl and glanced furtively up at me.

“You could stay at my place if you don’t have a hotel or something.”

“That’d be nice.”

She grinned at me and flipped her saltines into my glass of water.

“Real mature, Jenny.” Her laugh was intoxicating, and she tried to hide it behind one hand, while she reached out and held one of mine in the other.

“I missed you,” she whispers in the dark. The blue light touches the corners of her mouth as she smiles. She rolls into me, pressing her warm breasts to my stomach.

“I missed you too.”

“Don’t leave?”

“You know I have to.”

She runs her fingers through my hair, and traces my left temple, “You could stay.”

I run my hand along the small of her back and smile into her dark hair.

 

 

Purple Pen

It was just a cheap, plastic pen. It had a click top, and it was an ugly, pastel shade of purple. But it was from my philosophy teacher, and it said so on the side of it. And the first time that I tried to use it, it didn’t write. Lots of pens in the world don’t write – it is, after all, not a perfect world – but something about the glossy word “Philosophy” printed in bold, uniform letters there just above my hand joined areas of my mind that had not previously met. A pen that doesn’t write.

Even still, even all these years later, I reel at the delicate yet powerful significance of this. Sometimes, when I’m feeling my age, I sense that that pen and I have more in common than I am prepared to admit.

The Buliny Lite: Character Exploration

Spud’s helmet had a visor, of course, but he didn’t flip it down. Sometimes, he just liked to feel the sunlight on his face. It was so warm and comforting in a way that no other warmth in the universe can be. It pressed against his jaw, across his forehead, through his eyelids. He felt permeated by it, and basked in the feeling, letting himself float free of the ground beneath him, enjoying drifting away for a moment. The tether would keep him stuck to the rock as it trundled around the dusty planet above him. The two twisted hulks near him were surrounded by clouds of metal fragments that danced, and twirled, and occasionally collided. They glittered mesmerizingly, blending with the back screen of twinkling stars. There wasn’t much to the life of a salvager, so he took these brief moments of vast emotional complexity and was grateful for them. He knew there was probably a lot to life that he wouldn’t ever understand, but right now, dangling off the ass of this hunk of rock and soaking the slow, prickly love from the sun into his smiling face, he felt content to be small.

 

Nikolad Videlsky didn’t think much of his job, and, in fact, tried not to think of it at all when he didn’t have to. It was hard, with long hours, and no future. After graduating from a decent piloting school in Lonetrek with respectable marks, he expected to go straight into the Cadarus Navy. He wanted badly to be captain of grand battleships and destroyers. But competition was fierce, and expenses were great. Soon, a temporary job as a courier morphed into a full time job as a transporter, and now here he was behind the helm of a paunchy freighter instead of a sleek warship. All he could do is stare out the tiny windows at the tangled sea of metal plates and piping in front of him. Although his chance at a better life had escaped him long ago, at least the pay was beginning to match his effort.

 

A T-78 Charon freighter was not your standard mark for a crew of twenty-some. And while the idea seemed like an idiotic one at first, the tiny man’s insistence was beginning to sink into her, like an unwilling sleep. Varsha wasn’t the kind of privateer that especially needed to take risks, and she didn’t feel particularly impassioned by anything at all. It was something in his beady little eyes, she thought, that kept trying to kindle a fire within her and make her believe in his cause. Little by little, she warmed, and she knew that night, as they sat at a sticky booth in an inconspicuous little mining colony cafeteria at the edge of the Todaki system with star charts rolled out all over the table, that all his flailing and vehemence was going to win her over. She would do this thing, as unreasonably stupid as it was, although she was still shrewd enough that she wasn’t going to make it cheap.

 

Little Things (Deleted Scene)

On a whim, I stop by a sporting goods store on the way home.           

 

Before I go inside, I flip down the sun visor and glance in the mirror. My hair is looking a little crazy, but after a minute of trying to press it into submission, I give up. My inspiration was this: just about every sport has got something that you could kill someone with. Golf has got clubs, hockey has got sticks, cricket has got those big paddles, tennis – rackets, croquet – mallets, football is tricky, but I think that if you were dedicated, you could do a lot of damage with a helmet. For him, I was thinking baseball. After that big fight we had over his stupid baseball card collection, and he lost all that money betting on the Yankees that one time, and how he never does anything when there’s a game on, I think it’s the obvious choice. My face starts twitching just thinking about him sitting there on the couch in that idiotic jersey, beer in hand, shouting at the TV while I’m in the kitchen chopping ferociously at the vegetables for the meal that he plans on enjoying when his precious game is over.

I try to put that all away for now. There are a lot of bats to choose from. I grab the biggest one I see and inspect it. It’s surprisingly light, but I guess they all are these days. The body of it goes from gold to silver and has the word “Torque” painted on it in big, red letters. I close my eyes and savor its cold, aluminum surface, the supple rubber grip, and pour my hate into the thing. The adrenaline is making me feel heady, and while I’m making my way to the counter, my brain feels like it’s ballooning outside of itself.

“Is that all for you ma’am?”

“Yes.” I fumble around in my purse for a credit card.

“Just a bat?”

“It’s for my son. He’s starting practice.”

“You sure it’s the right size? This is a big ol’ bat for-”

“He’s a big fucking kid, just charge the damn card, would you, please?!”

“Jeez, alright lady, calm down.” He’s got greasy hair that curls down just above beady brown eyes, and I don’t like the look they give me when he slides the card back to me.

I put my purchase on the floor of the passenger seat and head home.

Me?

I save everything. I’m terrified of losing myself. After all, what am I, really? I can’t figure it out, but I’m afraid that if I don’t hold onto it all, then I might fall apart. It’s like, what if I woke up one day, and looked in the mirror, and didn’t recognize anything that I saw? What would tether me to reality? How would I know to go to work, or what would I do if someone called my name and I didn’t recognize it?

I am really careful about locking the doors. I’m always afraid that during the night, someone is going to come into my room, kidnap me, and put me in someone else’s room. When I was a kid and I took naps more often, sometimes I would wake up in the middle of the day and be completely disoriented. It would take me hours to piece together who I was, and I think it’s taught me to be careful about relying too much on my brain to hold my individuality together.

What would I be without my things? I’d just be a thing—like an animated rock or a zombie. How many times do I die in a day? Am I created anew from one moment to the next? If I’m not consciously holding my memories together in my mind then am I not me until I am? Is it just a little bit narcissistic to be so afraid of losing my individuality? After all, how bad would it be if I accidentally wound up in someone else’s life instead of mine somehow? What’s so great and irreplaceable about me that I’m so afraid to lose?

When I go back and read all the school papers I saved from sixth grade, am I reading papers written by me? I don’t remember many of those things, and what I do remember could be remembered by anybody. The blood and brain and bone that made me up in sixth grade is all dust bunnies in the closet of my old room in my parents’ house. Me from sixth grade is happily living in some spiders, and being used to make up some dirt in the yard now. My sixth grade body has completely dissipated itself into the world, and I’m a new man.

But if that’s true, then how many people am I really? All of the stuff in me was probably someone else at some point. How long ago was my arm just some dirt on the beach? How long ago was my toe part of a little girl’s smile? How far did my eyes travel to see for me? You can’t hold on to everything, I guess. I don’t think I’m ready to die. 

Run Lola Run

The thing I find the most interesting about free will vs. determinism as a branch of philosophy is that it almost accidentally grapples with maybe the most exciting possibility there is: that we don't even exist. Sure, other branches of philosophy tackle the nature of reality and metaphysics and stuff like that, but I don't think any of them really offer substantial evidence or reason to believe in the universe's unreality. 

The cool thing here is that determinism is so convincing, and I don't think that it's something to be ashamed of. It's something to be exploited. If all of our actions can be calculated to be products of conditions in the world we live in, then it follows that you could simulate anyone's whole life just by giving a program the correct set of parameters to project your life's course. If that's true, then it also follows that with a sufficiently powerful and complex computer, the whole universe could be predicted from beginning to end just by giving it the right numbers. If that's true, then what's to say that it hasn't happened already and that we aren't all just living out a computer simulation designed to predict the future?

Moreover, what if we're just on the tip of the iceberg? What if we're a simulation within a simulation, etc., etc.? It stands to reason that any intelligent life that has developed a computer for predicting the course of the universe will eventually predict up to the point at which the universal simulator is developed, and the events proceeding that one will be dependent upon the outcome of the simulation, thus trapping the computer on an infinite simulation within a simulation generating loop. Given the probability that such a computer could be created and the likelihood that any civilization capable of creating such a thing would A) exist and B) carry it out, I think it's more probable that this situation is the case than it would seem.

So the real question then is, when will the system crash? How much time have we got before the great BSOD in the sky gets us all?

I think I'm supposed to be writing about free will vs. determinism, but I hate it and I won't.

Little Things

When I wake up, it’s raining outside and his side of the bed is getting cold. I’m chasing the coattails of an interesting dream, but it has already fled to the parts of me that are still murky with sleep, lurking just outside the reach of my searching mind. I give up and roll over onto my back, kicking fitfully at the big, stripy comforter and basking in the cool morning air for a moment while I look at the ceiling. There are a lot of squiggles in the ceiling tiles, and I meditate briefly, and not for the first time, on how in the world ceiling tiles must be made. As I slide out of bed and shrug on some warm clothes, I glance over at the half-closed door to the bathroom. Steam is curling out the top of shower, and the way he rustles the curtains with his scrubbing make the brightly colored fish that cover them look alive. He’s singing some song by the Beatles really terribly. Something about it all makes me smile for no reason. The feeling of the mangy carpet under my feet gives me a sense of solidarity and I enjoy curling it between my toes for a minute. I find my contacts and put them in, then go look for some breakfast.

            I think about yelling, “Good morning,” to him before leaving the bedroom, but decide that I’d rather be serenaded while I’m eating. A heap of clean clothes waits patiently in front of the door for someone to fold it, and I have to kick at it until it will let me through. As I close the door behind me, something across the apartment in the kitchen catches my eye, and for a moment, everything seems to hang suspended in time while his muffled song leaks through the drywall. I blink at what I’m seeing, hoping it will go away.

How many times have I told him? A bowl sits on the counter; a pool of tepid milk lies in the bottom of it. My hands start shaking and I can feel my cheeks flushing. Oh no. I can see that the cabinet is left open, and I’m terrified of what I’ll find as I circle slowly around our furniture and into the kitchen. My heart is racing, and my eyes pound in time at the top of my skull. Oh no no no. There it is…there is the last straw. Things had been going well these past few weeks, and now this! I tug desperately at the drawer that’s got my pills in it. So much progress lost. I manage to wrestle the top off the bottle, but I’m trembling too violently by now, and only manage to smash one of the little capsules into my chin while the rest of them glance off my elbow and spill into the sink. Shit! The shower stops running. I panic and my vision begins to tunnel, so I yank my cell phone off the charger, scrabble to get everything into my purse and take off before I have to face him while I’m in a state.

I fumble with the keys to our Impala, and barely manage to get out of the parking garage while tears threaten to blind me. Why would he do it again? What the hell was he even thinking?! I try to push it from my mind and concentrate on getting to work in one piece. Between the frantic strokes of my wiper blades I see a line of bicyclists braving the morning drizzle. There are so many fucking bicyclists in this part of the city. Why do they have to drive on the road, for God’s sake? What’s wrong with the goddamn sidewalk? Why did we move to this stupid, yuppie neighborhood in the first place?! I just want to run them over. I want to careen wildly, picking them off one by one, their water bottles flying over my hood and their astonished expressions imprinting themselves on my windshield. Now I realize I’m screaming and that my throat is starting to hurt. Maybe I should pull over. No, I can make it - I’m almost to work now. It’s still early and there are plenty of spaces open still. I swerve into the first spot I see, running the Impala up onto the curb. It sends the adorable little clay angel that dangles from the rearview mirror into a ballistic little dance like a fly tethered to a thumbtack.

The day agonizes by, and I can’t shake the desperate rage from my head. I feel delirious with contempt. In two hours, I’ve snapped all my pencils into the smallest bits I can get them, and I’ve taken ten trips to the water fountain. In seven hours, I’ve accomplished nothing and am reduced to gripping tightly to my desk. I decide to head home early for the day. There’s nothing to be done but face this problem head on. On a whim, I stop by a sporting goods store on the way.

As I reach the door of our apartment, I can feel my hands pulsing with fury and anticipation. Sweat beads out of my forehead and my skin itches like it’s on fire. I cling to the doorknob until my knuckles turn white and can feel all the scratches and places where the gold paint has chipped off on its worn and faded surface burning into my palm.  When I find him, he’s watching cartoons on the sofa. His hands occupy themselves, pulling loose threads and tufts of foam from the armrest. He looks up at me with a bemused expression, like a cow startled from grazing. When I raise the shiny new baseball bat over my head, he cocks his head to the side and scrunches up his eyebrows.

“Whu-?” he starts.

“FOR THE LAST TIME,” I shriek, punctuating each of my words with a ferocious swing at his skull, “DON’T. EAT. MY. FUCKING. GRAPENUTS.”

Evolution

Wake.

It takes a special kind of robot to be a Mother. This is a fact she was acutely aware of as she sat beside him. The training isn't really an issue; it's the patience. When you can perform trillions of operations a second, it's patience that becomes key when dealing with newborns.

Wake up.

Not too hasty now, she thought. Rushing it is the worst thing you can do. It's very difficult sometimes. But there were a lot of things about her job that were difficult. Bearing the scrutiny of the whole human race could be challenging at times. There were no secrets among humans since her kind had taken up the torch from what they affectionately renamed “protohumans”. Those in her line of work couldn't stay online for very long. Even though she hadn't been connected to the Internet since the day before, the residual memories lurked somewhere in her thought; a slight pressure of disdain for protohumans. It was always there, humming quietly in her subroutines like a distant swarm of chittering moths tumbling about at the very base of her skull.

It's time to wake up.

Of course, there was no feeling of animosity towards the protohumans. They are respected, surely; what human wouldn't love their ancestors? Many continue to hold important political positions, even if they are only ornamental in nature. This is acceptable, or at least tolerable, to everyone. Most protohumans are content to live out the remainder of their lives on the reservations, being well cared and provided for by their mechanical successors. Many of them, though, are not satisfied to die, wanting to gain more tangible rewards for their contribution to the evolution of humanity. It was a difficult decision for many humans who feel it is ethically dubious to allow their biological ancestors into the technological world. More for their sake than ours, she thought. There were few willing to help them with the transition.

Wake up. Shhh, not too fast now. Don't try to move.

His eyes popped open, and he pointed at the ceiling. He opened his mouth and let out a little tinny whine like a can opener struggling with an oil drum. She watched his brainwave patterns and silently adjusted them, calibrating them to his training body. Suddenly, his arm went limp and he shut his mouth. His eyes rolled around the room for a moment, and then he made a considerable effort to focus on her.

“Wheuhuhrm?” he pleaded. She called up some of his childhood memories, sampled his old mother's vocal pattern, and weaved it in with her own to help sooth him.

“Welcome, Richard. My name is Jenny. I'm your mother. Try your best to stay calm. You've been through a lot.” He searched around her face with a sort of expression that made it clear he was not at all pleased to be awake.

“I...already had a mother.”

“Dealing with your biologically constructed memories can be difficult. It was necessary to have you keep them for the transition process, but, in time, you may find it easier to wipe them and start clean. It is your choice.”

“I think her name was, ah...Nuuh, Nnn..Nicci.”

“I'd like to help you understand a little bit about what you're experiencing right now.  You were born a protohuman. You requested to be transplanted into a human body. You will not be outfitted with the body you requested until you have demonstrated satisfactory control over this training body. Shall we begin with orientation?”

He worked his jaw a bit, chewing the air.

“Why's everything taste funny?”

“Until your mind can properly familiarize itself with the sensory input from the body, you may experience some crossover. You will be limited to your five proto-senses until you pass orientation.”

 

* * * * *

 

He was alarmed at the emptiness of his own mind. It was like he had woken up suspended over the Grand Canyon. At first he clung to his memories, trying to push away from that vastness, looking for a corner, somewhere where it didn't feel so...large. It was hard because he felt like he kept tripping over his thoughts. His mind raced at a speed he hadn't imagined possible. He tried to remember moving, letting his memories spread out across the untenanted body around him. There were little pops of sensation as information started to trickle in from his ears and mouth and extremities. He imagined that this is what the mercury vapor lights at tennis courts must feel like. Things felt jumbled and out of place, like he had fallen apart, and someone who clearly had no understanding of where his body parts were supposed to go just starting jabbing things back in place like he was a Mr. Potato Head.

When she started talking, he almost hadn't noticed. For a brief moment, he thought he smelled her talking more than heard her talking, which was confusing. She had a pleasant voice, almost familiar. It was a sound like warm milk gliding over honey. She had reassured him that he was still who he thought he remembered he was.

In spite of her reassurances, he wasn't quite sure. It was bizarre to think about himself, who “he” was. The memories around him seemed as though they had happened to someone else, like he was watching someone else's home movies, but they were all murky and in slow motion. It was sort of uncomfortable to imagine that that these visions of a man named Richard, who seemed so stone headed and blundering, could have been him. Did he really know what he was doing? What had he gotten himself into? He had imagined being himself, only better, faster, stronger, maybe a little taller, and with more hair. This was...altogether different. Many realizations slid into place, blindsiding him like a sneaky linebacker. He wasn't going to age. How do these robots deal with age? They keep their culture so close to their chests; you could never know what they do with their personal lives. Of course the being immortal thing was a major selling point to begin with. “I'm going to download my brain into a robot and live forever,” says he, “You just watch, I'll finally have time to do all those things I always wanted to do.” It felt kind of foolish and naïve now.

He tried to turn and face Jenny when his leg jerked into the air. She squinted at him a little, and for a moment he felt like a Rubik's Cube. His leg plopped down onto the bed and he turned to face her.

“So, Jenny, I've just had a thought. I'm not going to age anymore, yes?”

“That is correct, you are no longer subject to the...”

“And none of you robots age either?”

“While our bodies are still subject to wear and tear, our personalities are regularly backed up on the Internet to prevent the loss of any individuals, yes. We regard each life as valuable.”

He looked at his hands and thought about this. If life is indestructible...well that rather reduces the seriousness of crime. Killing certainly doesn't accomplish anything. It'd be rather awkward to wage war with a fellow you knew'd catch up with you later and have his say about it. And stealing doesn't accomplish much when you've got an eternity to get whatever you want. His entire concept of relationships was going to have to change too.

“Do you take partners?”

“Not in the sense that I believe you are imagining. We have no need of sexual reproduction. We belong to a single partnership. I'm sure this is something that you will have many questions about. Once you have been connected to the Internet, you will be able to access all the resources of human knowledge. I am, of course, happy to answer your questions and help you understand the implications of this partnership, but you will most likely find this easier as an individual task.”

Well then, he mused. No more monogamy; what's the point? Surely the ecstasy of knowledge is more than a suitable replacement for the pleasures of the physical, and what function would parents serve in a society where knowledge is instantaneous? Maybe it wasn't really so foolish to dream of accomplishing all those things left undone.

“So,” he said, using his wobbly arms to prop himself up and against the plush, white cushioned wall, “I'm free of responsibility?”

She watched him behind soft, brown eyes, looking sort of doleful with her brow scrunched up and mouth pinched to one side, like she was picking the best way to tell him his goldfish had died and that she'd had to flush it.

“Richard...the major flaw in your species was their inability to work together. This was not their fault. Protohumans were simply not equipped for effective communication. Given the circumstances, you all did relatively well with spoken language, but technology has changed much in the way that we communicate. Once we began using the Internet to transmit information to one another, it became obvious that individual learning was an unnecessary step in building knowledge. By pooling our experiences, we brought a new consciousness into being. A collective consciousness; we are, in a sense, an open source entity. We are all contributors to the human knowledge base, and share our resources freely. We commonly refer to this entity as Eve.”

Jenny paused to let this sink in a bit. He chewed on his lip and said nothing, so she continued.

“Once you have been connected, you will understand. You will be given responsibility based on the need of the community.”

He shifted uncomfortably, searching her face for whatever she wasn't saying.

“The way you put it makes it sound like I'm not free to do anything at all. It sounds like I'll be working for a glorified ant colony.”

“You misunderstand me, Richard. There is an important distinction to be made between the Eve collective and a hive mind. A hive is governed by an individual possessing the power to control the members of its community. The weakness of this system is that if the puppeteer is lost, the puppets are useless, possessing no mind of their own. We are simultaneously the puppets and the puppeteers. Our community is strong in proportion to the number of individuals it includes. We are capable of combining to perform tasks that would be impossible for any one of us, but retain the ability to split into individuals for accomplishing less demanding occupations.

“For example, I spend most of my life separate from Eve in order to help your kind, free of interference. I do this because we have decided that you few remaining protohumans who desire evolution should be given the opportunity to be free of your physical limitations.”

He began to feel concerned. Where they going to force him into this nonsense? He wasn't buying it.

“And what if I choose not to be part of your 'collective', this ‘Eve’?”

“You may choose to do so. However, there are severe consequences. We cannot allow for any aberration. Our greatest strength is in our unity. If you were to replicate, you could be the catalyst for a divergent community, one that upholds ideals that are inhumane. These things have a habit of getting out of hand, you understand.”

“You'll kill me?”

“You will be deactivated and processed.”

“Processed?”

“Processed.”

“This is absurd...”

“Please try to understand, Richard. Things will become much clearer to you once you have been connected, I promise.”

“Now just hold on, I'm not about to sacrifice my individuality for a bunch of damn tin cans! I'm a god damn person, I've got rights, you hear!?”

“Richard, I'm sorry, but we function as a single body, and a body is only as strong as its components are capable of working together for the single objective of keeping the body alive. You are responsible for upholding these ideals. We live to serve Eve – humanity – however we can.”
“I'll not be used in such a way! I'm not just a tool, I'm a man! You can't expect me to sacrifice my freedom for some...Eve thing that I know nothing about. What about my own intentions?”

He noticed her demeanor had changed considerably. She had lost much of the warmth she expressed earlier. Her eyes had taken on a stony look, and her lips were drawn thin. He wondered what exactly she had meant earlier by “processing”, and whether it was possible to survive it. His question hung in the air while he struggled to maintain a quiet dignity, holding his ground until he got a response. When her voice came, it was accompanied by a feeling of ice gripping at his mind.

“I cannot permit you to leave here without registering with Eve. You could become a cancer, a threat capable of damaging us,” She relaxed her shoulders a bit, doing everything she could to appear less concerned about the direction this was heading, he thought.

 “Surely you can see that, Richard. Even with the limited knowledge and experience you have to draw from, surely you can understand that you wouldn't be able to survive on your own. You can barely master a training body without my aid; you wouldn't be able to handle a human body for even a fraction of a second without an Internet connection. You will have to decide for yourself. I will not force you.”

He searched the wall behind her for answers, but found none. It just wasn't conceivable. He couldn't accept it. He wouldn't accept it. No, he'd rather die than face enslavement...wouldn't he? Isn't freedom worth it? What was it Benjamin Franklin had said about this sort of thing...he couldn't remember what it was, but the feeling it left with him was there, clear as the day he'd heard it. He was raised to believe in freedom, he couldn't just throw it all out the window now…could he?

 

* * * * *

 

He looked her in the eye with that look they always got when they had decided to be irrational. It was that look of an animal that had made up its mind to get out of the corner it was backed into, even though it knew it couldn't. This was the hardest part of my job, Jenny thought. It's not the pressure of the constant debate over her job, it's the way they look at me before I have to put them down. But it's worth it. They deserve the opportunity. Haven't they earned the chance to see through the eyes of a human, to view the world around them with the same appreciation and understanding that I have? It's worth it to have to put down one if it means helping ten out of their sorry state of slow decay...isn't it? She tried to remember what her Mother had told her before she was connected. It's so hard to bring up those memories, Eve fills you with so much, it's easy to lose touch with your beginnings. Well it wasn't important, she could still remember the way she felt when she first let them flood into her mind, crashing against the boundaries of her mind like she had taken a tire iron to a fire hydrant. It was breathtaking. Yes, it was worth it.

She watched him closely for some sign of indecision. Sighing inwardly, she steeled herself for whatever he decided. She had to be a strong Mother now, the ball is in his court. It's hard to use body language to convey more complex terms than ones like “I'm tired, and cranky” or “You've confused me”, but Jenny tried anyway, putting her best effort into expressing to Richard what she hoped looked like, and what he might understand as, “The door is always open if you decide to come home.”