The evening of my abrupt trip back home from Walt Disney World I had a dream. I’d made the trip back from Orlando in a haze of deep depression; the kind I usually endure over the winter, around February, around Valentine’s Day.
Before sleep, as I lay in my motel bed and read my Facebook stream, I saw Wil Wheaton fretting about not wanting to go to sleep for fear of having night terrors. He has very bravely and publicly talked about his struggles with depression and I assume that the night terrors are a part of that. The deep depression I feel now as I turn in for the night isn’t of the clinical sort, or at any rate I don’t think it is. The evening before I had given a small gift of gourmet chocolates to a certain someone for his birthday, and he handed them back to me. The lonely ache I am feeling this night is almost like a second home to me now, and it is not night terrors I am worried about. Some dreams scare the steaming shit out of you but then you wake up and it’s just a dream. But some dreams, not terrifying, play with your emotions like a dog plays with a stuffed rabbit.
I’m in a coffee house somewhere I don’t recognize, chatting with a handsome guy who I’ve never seen before but I somehow recognize in this particular dream as an old boyfriend from many years. We chat casually about this and that and then out of the blue it seems, he asks me to marry him. Overjoyed, I tell him yes, yes I will.
Then we are in in our tuxedos standing together at the altar. The church is old, but more of a simple meeting house kind of church than the Baptist churches I grew up in. Its old wooden pews seem relaxed and comfortable, not stiff and unyielding. There are tall windows of unstained glass through which pure golden sunlight shines through, free and clear. Oddly, I see rows of old wooden bookshelves tucked between the windows, full of books. In my dream the thought of a church chapel doubling as its library delights me. It speaks to me that my boyfriend, now my spouse-to-be, brought me to this place to be married. I am overwhelmed with joy.
We make our vows and the minister pronounces us married. Oddly, he holds up the marriage license for us and everyone there to see and says that “Now it’s official”. I can’t read what the document says but that’s not unusual. I’ve written before about how for some reason I can almost never read anything in my dreams.
Everyone adjourns to a room next to the chapel where a reception is taking place. I suddenly realize there was no marriage kiss at the altar, so I walk over to my spouse and embrace him happily, give him a delighted kiss on the mouth, and tell him how much I love him and how happy I am to be married to him. As I do this I am thinking how sure I was this day would never happen for me, and it did after all. I am overwhelmed with joy.
He pulls gently away, smiling, but I can see he is very embarrassed about something. So are the people standing nearby. I step back and my spouse and our guests begin talking among themselves, as if to ignore what just happened. Something seems very wrong all of a sudden, but I don’t know what.
I step outside, confused. Didn’t I just get married? Didn’t he ask me to marry him? Then I realize there was no exchange of rings either. I am walking though an old part of town where the church is situated; a smallish main street with shops, all closed I am assuming because it is Sunday and here they still don’t open things on Sunday. As I walk I can see my reflection in the little shop windows, in my tux, walking alone down an empty main street. I begin to realize that this wasn’t a wedding after all, it was a rehearsal, and I was not the one getting married to my old boyfriend, he had merely asked me to stand in for someone else, who could not be there for that rehearsal.
But this theory is confusing too. Didn’t he ask me to marry him? Didn’t we have a marriage license? But I could not read the names on it. I glance at myself in the shop windows again, and oddly, for some reason, start practicing skipping down the sidewalk, like I used to do when I was a kid.
Still not sure that was what happened, I go back to the reception trying to think of a way of asking my boyfriend if he was satisfied with how things went without admitting that I don’t actually know what is going on and getting an answer from him that will tell me. The ersatz reception has moved outside now and everyone is enjoying themselves. I walk up to my boyfriend but before I can say anything his spouse-to-be drives up in their car, towing a small hardware trailer full of gardening things. Now I know. The Spouse-To-Be was out buying things for their house and could not be there, so I was asked to stand in for him for the rehearsal.
They embrace and he asks my boyfriend how the rehearsal went and I wake up.
A dim morning light filters through the motel curtains. I check the clock. It’s a little after 6am. I get up to pack the car and finish the drive home, alone.
The dream world can be an amazing, lovely place to spend some time. But it has its drawbacks. Some of the following is obvious, some not so much, at least to me…
The Part Of My Brain That Can Read. I am completely illiterate in my dreams. Whenever I come across a book or sign or anything I need to read, I just can’t. I can see the text, I just can’t make sense of it. This is interesting in a somewhat disturbing way: in real life I am a voracious reader, but I’ve read that others experience this same effect in dreams. I assume it’s because that part of your brain is…well…sleeping. Sometimes, but very very seldomly, I remember the text well enough that when I wake up I can then read it. And as you would expect, it’s pretty odd, random and meaningless. Like the title to the book I found on a pile of trash in a bookstore that I was so frustrated I could not read the frustration woke me up and I remembered it and it was “Old Book”
The Part Of My Brain That Sees Color. This is also something I’ve read that others experience. My dreams are almost exclusively in black & white, though lately I’ve experienced the occasional color moment.
Light Switches. Lately in my dreams, whenever I find myself entering a dark room or house and I try to turn on the lights, nothing works. This is usually a prelude to the dream going bad on me, but sometimes it’s just frustrating. I’m writing this post just now because last night it happened again…I was walking into a house to find something, and it was dark inside and I tried various light switches and nothing would come on, and I remember in my dream getting really irritated that I was having “that damn light problem” again so I pulled open some window shades and let light in that way. At least the sun still works in my dreams.
Bullets. While being pursued by thugs or monsters in my dreams, reliably when I reach for a gun the gun works just fine but the bullets have no effect. I don’t get the click, click, it’s EMPTY, effect other friends of mine do. My gun is loaded and I can shoot just fine, but nothing I hit seems to care. It’s gotten to the point now that I usually just start beating the damn things over the head with the gun rather than bothering to pull the trigger.
Toilets. This is usually my dream telling me that I need to wake up and go to the bathroom. When in a dream I get the urge to go, and I start looking around for a bathroom, inevitably in every bathroom I check the toilet is missing. The hole in the floor where it connects is there alright, but the toilet is gone.
Automobiles. This isn’t something that does not work, so much as one very odd thing I almost never do in my dreams, that I would expect after having lived to the threshold of old age to have done at least once. In real life I absolutely love driving. In my dreams I am nearly always walking. Which is also something I like doing, don’t get me wrong. When the weather is nice I am always out for a walk, and I bought my house where I did specifically so I would be close enough to work I would walk it. I grew up in a household without a car, so maybe this is part of it. But I have owned a car since I was old enough to drive and I love to drive too and it’s just odd that in my dreams I never seem to even think to drive anywhere. And what is more, there are almost never any cars in my dreams, even parked nearby. Trains yes. Lots of trains for some odd reason. Train tracks and trains show up in the strangest places in my dreams. But the one and only time I can remember ever dreaming about driving somewhere, it was This Horrible Dream that still creeps me out.
It wasn’t often some guy I thought was drop dead good looking and sexy asked me out on a date, but that happened one day when a fellow user of a gay BBS I did volunteer work for sent me an email complementing me on some posts I’d made and calling me “intense”. I was happily taken by surprise. At the end of that email, he asked if we could meet up.
I figured it wasn’t going to go well when the first thing he told me when we met at the Dupont Circle Metro, was how much he hated my sunglasses…
“You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.” -Inigo Montoya, “The Princess Bride”
Here’s another word people keep using: Homosexual.
So I’m seeing the chatter about how this new Gallup poll (you know…the folks who did so well predicting the outcome of the last election…), gives us a more accurate figure for the percentage of gay people in America than Kinsey’s ten percent, and I can only conclude they aren’t paying attention to what they’re reading, don’t understand where that ten percent figure came from and/or what the Kinsey scale actually was.
Kinsey’s scale of zero through six, where zero (exclusively heterosexual) and six (exclusively homosexual) described the sexual behavior of his subjects over the previous three years of their lives, based on extensive face to face interviews with them. The report stated that ten percent of American males were “more or less exclusively homosexual for at least three years between the ages of 16 and 55” by grouping the percentages of the five (Predominantly homosexual, only incidentally heterosexual) and six positions on the scale together to come up with that ten percent figure. Later gay rights activists used this to claim that ten percent of the population is homosexual.
That’s an arguable, but perfectly defensible claim based on Kinsey’s data which, again, came from subjects who were only asked about their actual sexual behavior for the previous three years. But it is measuring a different thing than Gallup asked, which was…
“Do you, personally, identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender?”
See the difference? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
The problem has always been the percentage of people who are homosexual you get in any given study depends on how the people who did the study define what “homosexual” is. It seems so clear cut and obvious on the surface of it and yet different people, even in all intellectual honesty about it, have different definitions…let alone those who want to marginalize us when it’s convenient (their numbers are too small for society to cater to their whims), and exaggerate our numbers when convenient (nearly all child molesters are homosexuals…it’s how they perpetuate themselves since they can’t reproduce…).
At this stage in my life, after all I’ve seen of this world, I am still comfortable with that ten percent figure. But I’m calling it desire, not necessarily how someone behaves or how they self identify. I Know people, and so do many of us who are gay, who would fit comfortably in either that Kinsey five or six position and yet would nonetheless have assured Gallup that they were heterosexual. It’s called “The Closet” and a lot of people are still in it….some still in denial, some not. In my generation and earlier especially, you see a lot of gay men who married young, as a way of turning themselves straight. Some of these have remained in those marriages, living behind that mask still, after all that has passed by them in the struggle, and I can’t find it in my heart to blame them for that. They love their wives very much. Add to that those of us who are out in various stages, even out to everyone they know and work with, and who would be unwilling to answer that question from a stranger.
I still think ten percent is probably right. But even those of us who are militantly out and proud don’t always seem so to the passing stranger. There is no gay lifestyle. You likely won’t know unless you are close enough to a person to know, and even then you might not. And still, even today, many people simply don’t want to know it about themselves. It does not surprise me either that perhaps only three to four percent rather than ten are willing to live openly just as they are, and fight the fight for our human dignity that still needs fighting.
“Do you, personally, identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, or transgender”, is a question worth asking of course, and maybe someday better researchers than the louts at Gallup will ask that question. But it’s really not the point. The word does not mean that.
…She cried as she explained that she only chopped up his body with a chainsaw once it had started to decompose – and temporarily put the pieces in a freezer before taking them to the cellar and encasing them in concrete…
Something to tack onto my refrigerator to remind me not to get romantically involved with a married German…
Danger…deep thinking ahead. Sorry…but I’ve been chewing on this since my last post about “Why is there something rather than nothing”. Probably it’s all the Science Channel stuff I’ve been watching lately.
Run it backwards. The question I mean. Or…forwards let’s say. Instead of why is there something rather than nothing, ask how do you get nothing out of something. I’m serious here. Supposedly matter is never destroyed, it’s simply converted into the energies it sprang from, and energy is never lost, it simply goes to entropy…a state where you can’t do anything with it. That, as I understand it, is the rule by which our physical universe works. The following is from Wikipedia…
The four laws of thermodynamics are:
Zeroth law of thermodynamics: If two systems are in thermal equilibrium with a third system, they must be in thermal equilibrium with each other. This law helps define the notion of temperature.
First law of thermodynamics: Heat and work are forms of energy transfer. Energy is invariably conserved but the internal energy of a closed system changes as heat and work are transferred in or out of it. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the first kind are impossible.
Second law of thermodynamics: The entropy of any isolated system not in thermal equilibrium almost always increases. Isolated systems spontaneously evolve towards thermal equilibrium — the state of maximum entropy of the system — in a process known as “thermalization”. Equivalently, perpetual motion machines of the second kind are impossible.
Third law of thermodynamics: The entropy of a system approaches a constant value as the temperature approaches zero. The entropy of a system at absolute zero is typically zero, and in all cases is determined only by the number of different ground states it has. Specifically, the entropy of a pure crystalline substance at absolute zero temperature is zero.
Okay…so as I read this, and as I have always understood it, you can’t destroy energy. Energy is invariably conserved… You just move it from one place or form to another. You need energy that hasn’t degraded into entropy to do work, but when you do the work, transfer energy, entropy increases. No transfer of energy is ever 100 percent efficient. Some is always lost to entropy. Eventually entropy is all there is. But as I understand it, the energy is still there.
So…the thinking these days as I understand it, is given that the rate of expansion of the universe is increasing as the universe gets bigger, the end game of our universe is The Big Chill. That is, it spreads itself so thin the energy in it approaches absolute zero and it’s all entropy nearly all the matter in it has decayed and maybe there are a few protons left but even those will eventually decay and then time simply stops. (the best definition I ever heard of time was when a physicist on a science program I was watching ages ago said that “time is one damn thing after another”.) Fine. I’m told physicists working in the standard model will basically dismiss questions about “what happened before the “Big Bang” as meaningless since time did not exist before there was a universe. There was no “before”. Okay. Fine. So no time before there was time, and time will stop eventually. But at the end of time and beyond if energy isn’t gone (let alone the space) then you don’t have a state of absolute nothing. You still have a “something”. And from all I can grok here you can’t make it go gone.
So once you have something you can’t make it nothing again. You can move the something around but you can’t make it simply disappear. Energy is invariably conserved. If that’s true, then you can’t ever reach a state of absolute nothing. Not in this universe, not in any universe. If you could find a way to drain all the leftover energy out of this universe, all you’re doing then is just putting it somewhere else. If it cannot be destroyed then how do we say it nonetheless had to have been created at some point? If the question is where did the something in the Big Bang come from, then it’s looking to me like the answer is, it was always there.
So maybe we’re back to the concept of forces that are simply eternal. Which is as hard to wrap your head around as absolute nothing, but then you pretty much had to figure whatever the ultimate answer is it would be.
Why does the universe go through all the bother of existing? Why is there something rather than nothing? William James called this “the darkest question in all philosophy.” For Wittgenstein, the world’s existence was cause for wonder. “It is not how things are in the world that is mystical,” he declared, “but that it exists.”
… I was brought up in a religious family, so the stock answer was that God made the world, and God himself existed eternally by his own nature. As a teenager I started to doubt this theological story. I became interested in existentialism and got my hands on a book by Heidegger called “An Introduction to Metaphysics.” The very first sentence was, “Why is there something rather than nothing?” I can still remember how the sheer poetry of it bowled me over.
Well…this is a question I think we all ponder early on in our lives. And for most of us, raised in religious households of one sect or another, the answer is given simply: God created everything. And for those of us smart asses who asked the obvious follow up, what created God then? The answer was God always existed. He got lonely so he created us!
Which…eventually stopped being a satisfying answer to the question. Eventually I came to understand that unless you postulate eternity everyone believes something was created from nothing. We just disagree on the number and order of the steps.
Fine. We are not Gods ourselves that we can really expect to grok the answer to that question completely. The details may simply be beyond the grasp of the human brain. One of my favorite passages from the Bible is still where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth? We were not there to witness it. All we have is the result of whatever processes took place. If space is the final frontier then the birth of the cosmos is the first mystery from which all other mysteries, all other questions arise. But we can try to figure it out and we are a curious kind. We want to know the story of our birth, why we came to be, what does our future hold. And I still believe that if we are brave and honest we can get close to those answers.
Perhaps the problem is that creatures with finite lifespans such as ours just can’t get the concept of eternity. Why not simply state that the cosmos always existed? It seems after all the simplest answer. To me it’s simpler to assume a small set of eternal forces of nature then such a highly complex thing as an eternal supreme intelligence always existed…and I accept that your mileage may vary. Fine. But maybe we’re all missing something. Or rather, assuming it.
There is a warning given to young programmers: while designing a system, beware the hidden assumptions. I think it’s a good rule in general, to ask from time to time, what do we know, and how do we know it? We tend to assume that nothing is a the most stable of states which if left alone, if untouched by some outside force, will simply always exist. How could it not be so? Then some months back I was watching Dr. Michio Kaku discussing physics and the origins of the universe and he suggested something very provocative, at least to me: Perhaps nothing is the unstable state.
And if you were to dismiss that speculation as simply nuts I’d have to shrug and reply that thinking the entire universe could have sprung from a singularity probably looked like pretty nutty thinking back in the day. But then people began hypothesizing what you might find if it were so, and evidence was gathered. The first step in gathering evidence can sometimes seem nutty. It’s because the mindset is failing you, your tests based on it keep failing, and you’re just going in circles. The first person to challenge a very entrenched mindset is going to sound nutty. That doesn’t necessarily mean they’re right…usually they aren’t…but if you keep running into brick walls it might mean your frame of reference just isn’t working and you need to consider others that might look and sound nutty. Just keep in mind that what matters ultimately is the evidence. Lots of paths science takes turn out to be dead ends. The point is to keep looking and respect the evidence. Let nature speak for itself.
But to find the evidence, you need to figure out where to go looking for it. If the question, “why is there something rather then nothing”, is a challenge to prove that something can be created from nothing, then perhaps the universe has already proven it. We are here after all, and if you believe in God, fine, then God is here too. But if nothing existed before either God or the cosmos then the cosmos has already pretty decisively proven that something can in fact, be created from nothing. Quite a lot of something actually.
So then the question becomes not so much a why, as a how. Maybe rethinking the assumed absolute stability of nothing might be a start at it. Maybe the answer turns out to be something like that it is impossible for a state of absolute nothing to even exist because that state is simply too unstable.
Suddenly I Have This Strange Urge To Pick Up A Bone And Kill Something With It…
A random tweet returns me to a puzzle I’ve been chewing on for some time now: what do I call a damn smartphone? Really…like my iPhone…it’s not merely a phone anymore. In fact the phone part of it is the least used functionality. So I’ve been trying to think of a generic term for…whatever the heck these things are now. Sure, they evolved from cell phones. But now…
What really got me pondering this question was I got an app a few weeks ago that turns it into a flashlight or a magnifying glass (er…it’s called “Over 40″…sigh…). It uses the built in camera flash for the flashlight part, and the camera itself for the magnifying glass part. WTF? So now what was a telephone is something that can morph into a flashlight or a magnifying glass when needed. I don’t recall reading any science-fiction when I was growing up that had phones in it that turned into magnifying glasses for tired old eyes. Video phones yes. But a magnifying glass? A flashlight? A compass? There’s a compass app. WTF???
So once again I start pondering the thing. Smart it is, yes, but phone is only a small part now of what it is. In my mind, the word Smartphone doesn’t really cut it anymore. You little dickens…what did you grow up to be? It’s a telephone. It’s a music player. I can read and send email with it. It’s a radio. I can play local stations or stations anywhere else in the world. It’s a news reader. It gives me weather reports. I can get the temperature outside or in Key West. I can call up a weather radar view and see the storms nearby and watch their motion before they get to where I am. It an atlas whose maps are always up to date. It can tell me where the nearest restaurant is, the nearest motel. It can tell me what the traffic is like where I’m headed. It’s a calculator. It’s a camera. It plays videos. It records videos. It’s a pocket dictionary and thesaurus. It’s a compass. It’s a calendar. It’s my appointment book. It’s my todo list. It’s a flashlight. It’s a magnifying glass. It’s a notepad. I can read books with it. I can hold it up to the night sky and it tells me where the planets are, what a star’s name is, the name of the satellite passing overhead.
Then I realize if I painted it entirely black it would look a bit like Clarke’s monolith…
Thing about most dreams is once awake you recall how limited your mental bandwidth was (for lack of a better term) while you were in it. It’s the thing that telegraphs to you instantly that you are really awake: your mind is all there. In most dreams (at least my own) I have no memories of prior events, no sensation of thinking really. I don’t feel my body or even notice it much. There are none of the usual sensations of motion or my environment. I don’t feel temperature, don’t feel the air around me, don’t feel the sensation of gravity on my body. My consciousness is entirely on the surface of things. I am an automaton strolling through the dream.
But some dreams are so vivid I find myself remembering things, including past dream events I’d forgotten. I have conversations with the people in my dreams and think in depth about what is being said to me while talking to them. I can feel my environment, feel hot or cold, feel the wind, feel gravity tug at me while doing things like running or climbing. I sit quietly and ponder something and I am thinking in depth, just as if I was wide awake. And lately I’ve noticed myself even daydreaming in my dreams.
What is it when you’re daydreaming within a dream? I was doing that last night.
Our minds…our human consciousness…it is such an amazing, intricate, constantly surprising thing…
While at the grocery store this morning shopping for office snacks, I pick up what I think is a jar of “low fat” peanut butter. “50 percent less fat then regular peanut butter” says the label cheerfully. Peanut butter being a dietary staple, I give the matter some thought. Then I see a logo on the side of the jar that reads, “dry roasted peanut taste”. That ominous phrase “peanut taste” makes me look closer. I notice that nowhere on the jar does it actually say Peanut Butter. So what is this stuff? Ah…the fine print. Yes, it looks like peanut butter, it’s stacked on the shelves right next to the peanut butter, the label says “50 percent less fat then regular peanut butter”, but it is not peanut butter. It is peanut butter spread.
Sol was right…
Okay…you can turn my cheese into cheese food product, you can turn my lemonade into lemonade flavored drink mix, you can turn my potato chips into potato crisps, but this…This is a snack food abomination. What’ll it be next…chocolate flavored Hershey bars???
A Little Coffee And Embarrassment To Wake You Up In The Morning…
So I see Gideon Sundbäck, the inventor of “Hookless No. 2”, essentially the modern metal zipper, was born today. And everyone who hits Google this morning will learn that fact too. Well most everyone. There will be some out there just as discomposed about it all as I and never work up the nerve to pull on that zipper.
I sat there for several minutes staring at the Google doodle not sure what to do, looked around to make sure none of my office mates could see, then finally went ahead an unzipped it, slightly embarrassed about the whole thing. Laugh at me, I was raised in a Baptist household. I never touched the zipper on Sticky Fingers either when they were real ones, deeply embarrassed that I was even tempted by it.
Despite the devices attributes, the public was not receptive,” writes fashion historian Ronald Knoth. “The pulpit decried, ‘The Hookless Fastener’ as ‘the Devils fingers,’ [because it made it easier] to remove clothing with autonomy.
Saw it coming did ya? And so as the years went by, the sound of zippers unzipping began to play in the background of every adolescent’s daydreams…
To the gentleman about my own age in the bar I was just in who got Very friendly with me while I was trying to enjoy my crabcakes and a drink: No, you are not the married man who has permission to hit on me. And no, I don’t care if your wife is cool about it either.
A few years ago, I decided that it would be interesting to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Not just regular “from scratch,” but really from scratch. Like, I’d make the buns, I’d make the mustard, I’d grow the tomatoes, I’d grow the lettuce, I’d grow the onion, I’d grind the beef, make the cheese, etc…
Therein follows many months of building a house, raising livestock, planting gardens, realizing he needs to mine his own salt, needs not one but three cows (one for milk for butter, one for the beef, one for rennet for the cheese)…and so on…
Further reflection revealed that it’s quite impractical—nearly impossible—to make a cheeseburger from scratch. Tomatoes are in season in the late summer. Lettuce is in season in spring and fall. Large mammals are slaughtered in early winter. The process of making such a burger would take nearly a year, and would inherently involve omitting some core cheeseburger ingredients. It would be wildly expensive—requiring a trio of cows—and demand many acres of land. There’s just no sense in it.
A cheeseburger cannot exist outside of a highly developed, post-agrarian society…
Some would say that’s a good reason not to have a post-agrarian society. I strongly disagree. Never mind steel and integrated circuits. The Industrial Revolution gave us Cheeseburgers.
Ayn Rand placed the dollar sign as the iconic symbol of capitalism and the Industrial age…proof I submit, that the lady had no art in her soul. She should have made it the cheeseburger. Seriously. When her and Owen Kellogg left the abandoned train at the end of part two, instead of revealing himself as an agent of the strike by pulling out a cigarette with a dollar sign on it, he should have started snarfing down a cheeseburger from Hugh Akston’s diner. That newstand at the end of chapter three should have been a burger joint and the old man reminiscing about when they made burgers out of real meat and cheese, not collectivist tofu and soy. He should have said to Dagny Taggart, “I like to think of burgers held in a man’s hand. Big fat juicy ones dripping with cheddar cheese and mustard. Food, a dangerous force, served with a side of fries and maybe also a dollip of coleslaw…” At the end of the book John Galt could trace the outline of a cheeseburger in the sky.
This blog is powered by WordPress and is hosted at Winters Web Works, who also did some custom design work (Thanks!). Some embedded content was created with the help of The Gimp. I proof with Google Chrome on either Windows, Linux or MacOS depending on which machine I happen to be running at the time.
