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.
At Saturday’s GOP presidential forum in Iowa, newly minted frontrunner Newt Gingrich tore into the Occupy Wall Street movement, pointing to it as a symbol of exactly what’s wrong with America. “All the Occupy movement starts with the premise that we all owe them everything,” he explained. “That is a pretty good symptom of how much the left has collapsed as a moral system in this country, and why you need to reassert something as simple as saying to them, ‘Go get a job, right after you take a bath'”
There is an unpopular war going on, protestors are in the streets, cops fly into sickening displays of police brutality at every peaceful protest they show up at, and right wing politicians are telling the dirty fucking hippies to take a bath. When did 2011 turn into 1972 and can I at least have my eighteen year old body back?
Ultimately, your relationships from grade school will always be what they were. Years go by and you happen chance to cross paths with someone you knew once upon a time. Maybe they are someone you paled around with. Maybe it’s someone who bullied you. Maybe it’s someone you were, and still are, deeply madly in love with. And the two of you tentatively reestablish a link between you. And maybe you both decide not to let the past happen again. You’re both grown up now. Things will be better this time. And for a time they are. And then, slowly but it seems inevitably, you both fall back into the old patterns of behavior. It feels like you are trapped in a time warp, no matter what you both do. And perhaps in a sense that’s what it is.
It’s like the time travel paradox. Say you have powerful regrets about events in your past…so you invent a time machine, so you can go back in time and change what happened. Maybe it’s something you regret doing, or that was done to you. Maybe it’s a chance you wish you had taken. So you invent your time machine and go back in time and you fix that thing you have wanted to fix all these years. But now the present stops being what it is and so you live your life with no powerful regret, and no need to go back in time and change anything. And so you don’t invent that time machine after all, and you don’t go back in time…and so nothing gets changed after all…
The universe does not permit paradoxes like that to happen. Somehow, someway, however it must, time will not allow itself to be mucked with. It isn’t about you. The universe does not care about you. It doesn’t care about your regrets, about your wounds, about all the chances you never took. All it cares about is its rules are never broken, it’s mechanical structure never breached. The laws of time and space are what they are and they don’t give a good goddamn about you. Time must flow…perfectly…
I have a theory: Whenever you reconnect with that old school friend, or pal, or enemy, or crush, you are going back in time and your attempts to change that relationship will inevitably be defeated. Because time won’t let you do that. The physical universe just works that way.
And if you can’t move on, then just let it be. You endured that regret all this time, you can live with it a little longer. Maybe.
We ask these questions naturally. And as we grow up we are given answers. We sit in our parents laps and we are told how it was the family came to be where it is now. How it was mom and dad met. How it was we ourselves came to be. And when we are young, we do not question them. They become unconsciously part of the bedrock of our lives.
And sometimes…sometimes…some few of us when we are older, look back upon those answers and discover that they make no sense.
I was born in California, to a mother who had traveled there shortly after her father had passed away. That is the basic fact of my life. Mom grew up, was born and raised in Greensburg Pennsylvania. But I was born in Pasadena California, and raised in Maryland after mom divorced dad and moved here. And it’s only been recently, now in my fifties, that I’ve looked at that and wondered. She was born and raised in Greensburg, and yet suddenly her and her mother uproot themselves in the late 1940s and move clear across the country to live somewhere they knew practically nobody. And when she divorced dad, her and her mother moved back across the country again. And it wasn’t back to their childhood home they moved, but once again to somewhere else that they knew practically nobody.
Well even when I was a small child I often wondered about that. And always when I asked, I got the same story.
Mom’s father had died she said, from a series of massive strokes, back in a time when medicine could do little for stroke victims. The event had disturbed her deeply. She moved to California she said, because she could not bear to live in the house she had grown up in, because the memories of the events of her father’s death were too traumatic.
Mom’s emotional life during that period was rough. Before her father died mom had loved a man, a navy man, who had gone to war. It was world war II. He was Jewish and, she told me, her father had not particularly liked Jews. But, she said, he had come to know the man she loved and that had changed him. He had eventually come to like this man, Morris she said his name was, and as time went on approved of their love.
Then one day, so she always said, he had come back from the war changed, disturbed. Her beloved sailor had been on a ship that was ordered into Nagasaki harbor after the war ended. His ship she said, became trapped in the harbor briefly due to all the bodies floating in it from the atomic bomb. She said the sight of it had driven him mad.
So her relationship with her sailor came undone. Morris’ family, she said, had taken him off to a mental hospital. She never saw him again. And then her father had his stroke. He lingered horribly, for months incapacitated, unable to do anything for himself, unable to speak or even feed himself. After six months of it he had another stroke and died.
Mom said that afterward her dreams tormented her. In the way people did back then, before the funeral his body had laid in rest in a coffin situated right in the living room of the house. Family and friends had held the service for him right there in the house. That was common in those days. Mom said that afterward she had dreams of her father rising out of his casket, and walking up the stairs to her room.
After her father was laid to rest, her mother sold the house, and also his nice cabin in the woods in the hills of Pennsylvania. That cabin was a special memory of hers….of summer months spent there with her father and the family, her dog Jigs, and all her childhood friends from Greensburg. Sweet childhood memories. She would tell me fondly of the summer months spent there. She loved that cabin, and was for the rest of her life sorry that it had been sold. The new owners had left a fire burning on a stove…the cabin had no electricity…and it had burned down.
But they had to leave Greensburg, mom always said, because she could no longer bear to be in the house she grew up in. During the war her younger brother, Dean, had found work in California, and so mom and grandma left Greensburg and traveled to California to live near him. Grandma bought a house in Pasadena, presumably with what she had gotten from the sale of the house and the cabin. They moved close to where her brother lived. And one day they traveled to Catalina Island, and there, on the pier in Avalon, she met dad. They married, and soon they had a son. Me.
That is the story I was always told. It is the story of how I came to be. And now I look at it, and it makes no sense.
My grandfather, who I never met, who mom always told me because I took an interest in electronics and technology that I took so much after him, had two nice homes, and a business. And after his death they sold it all, and simply left everything they had, everyone they knew, and moved across the country to a new place where they knew nobody but her brother and his wife. Because mom could not bear to live in the house where she grew up.
Really?
I’m fifty-eight years old now, and now I look at this story and it makes no sense. Maybe everything happened just for the reasons she said it did…but now that I look at it with the experience of my own adulthood I can’t escape the feeling that some important piece or pieces are missing. Perhaps to understand my doubt you need to understand something I do and maybe you don’t: what the distances we’re talking about here seemed like back in the day before cheap jet air travel and the Internet.
I am old enough to have glimpsed the last days of the great passenger trains. When I was a kid, most people didn’t travel by air…that was for rich people. And in their day passenger air travel would have been burdensome even if you were rich. Before the first Boeing 707s passenger airplanes were propeller things that took much longer to go from coast to coast. Nearly everyone back then traveled by bus or by train. Train mostly for the longer distance trips if you could afford it. It took days, not hours, to go from coast to coast. So any sort of travel from the east coast to the west wasn’t just a trivial thing back then. If you traveled far away, let alone moved, you just about fell off the planet as far as your family and friends back home were concerned. You might send a postcard or two back home… Having a wonderful time, wish you were here… You sure wouldn’t phone home. Way too expensive. Back then long distance phone calls were an expensive luxury. Postal mail had two grades…regular and air mail. You sent letters by air mail if you wanted them to get there in a couple days. Otherwise it might be weeks to get something from clear across the country. The highways and the rails where how most people and everything including mail traveled.
So if you went on a cross-country trip you were on another planet until you came back home. And then it was everyone gathered around while you showed your snapshots and told your stories of the far away place you’d been to. To actually go live on the other side of the country, well, you might as well have moved overseas. It’s hard to grasp now, but that is how it would have been for my mom and her mother back then. When they left Greensburg they didn’t just go move to a neighboring town…they didn’t even move to a neighboring state. They moved about as far away from Greensburg as they could and still remain in the lower 48.
Now I’m grown up and I look at this and wonder…did she not have any roots there? I know she had a job there for a brief period at an architectural firm…she used to tell me about working with the ammonia stench of the old blueprint machines. And…she had friends there. I know because he spoke of them, but not often. There were a few she kept in correspondence with. They were friends she never saw again. After mom passed away I was given a stack of her old correspondence, but there were no letters to her from her Greensburg friends among them.
And there is this…as I grew up I just accepted the constant tension that was in the family. It was just part of the background noise. But she was the apple of her father’s eye…daddy’s girl. That is the one thing everyone seems to agree on, even the ones who later cut her out of the family. I have albums of the photos her father took of her…he was, like me, an amateur photographer. The photos all show a beautiful young girl, posed in various scenes in and around the house and the cabin.
He loved her very much. And she loved him very much. If there is anything I am certain of it is this. But throughout my own childhood there was tension between her and the rest of her family…all except her younger brother Dean and one cousin. It was a tension I always put down to her marrying my father, who they all despised. But looking back on all of it now it just seems to me that the tension had to be caused by more then that. Something more must have happened to her to make her mother take her away from the town they both grew up in, and had spent their entire lives in. Whatever caused the friction in that side of my family tree, it started well before mom met dad at the pier in Avalon.
I’m fifty-eight years old now, and while I don’t think of myself as worldly I am old enough now to understand some things better that I could not have while I was growing up. She had a life in Greensburg. She had friends, family, community. And so did her mother. Greensburg was their home. They were both born and raised there. It was where everything and everyone they had ever known was. And I was told they sold everything, their house and the cabin, and left it all for California. Because mom could not bear to stay in the house she had grown up in after her father had died.
It makes no sense. They could have bought another house. Surely whatever trauma mom experienced she’d have needed her friends. Surely grandma would have had friends of her own there as well to help her through the death of her husband. In an age before cell phones and cheap long distance, when letters took days to arrive from the next state over, let alone clear across the country, and when long distance cross-country phone calls were so expensive people would gather around the telephone at the appointed time to wait for the call, to move from one end of the country to another would have been like moving to another planet. They’d have both given up everything they knew, everyone they knew, to literally start life all over again in California. Because granddad died of a stroke?
No. Just…no. It makes no sense.
I am not on friendly terms with that side of the family anymore…not that I ever really was. Except for uncle Dean nobody was really nice to me. I was my father’s son, and they despised him and I was living evidence of that marriage they all hated. I had his face. At various times when it was useful to them, and particularly to grandma, I was told I had all his bad traits too. Did I talk too much? Well he’s his fathers son isn’t he. Did I forget to do my homework? That’s his dad in him. Was I too proud of something I had accomplished? A piece of artwork? A good grade in school? His dad was vain like that. Did I a get a bad mark in class? His dad was shiftless like that. Stubborn? His father’s blood obviously. Whatever I ever did that was wrong, it was always because I was my father’s son. I got used to it. By the time I was seventeen and began to realize my homosexuality, I already had a lifetime of training in coping with being hated for something I was that I couldn’t help being. So it wasn’t all for nothing.
The only one who really took an interest in me was uncle Dean. Mom and he always got along great, and I have lived to regret I grew up on the east and not the west coast where I could have been near him and away from the others. Whatever it was that was the cause of so much tension in the family, her brother Dean was never bothered by it, or blamed her for it. Shortly after mom passed away, I took a trip out to California and visited my aunt Cleone, uncle Dean’s wife, and she told me something that shocked me enough to make me pretty much divorce myself, finally and forever from that side of the family. She said one of my cousins, a daughter of mom’s oldest brother Wayne, an uptight right wing jackass, had told mom after Wayne passed away that mom would not be allowed a grave in the family plot in the Greensburg cemetery. I put it down to their hatred of dad, but it made me furious. It still makes me furious to think about it. So I’ve pretty much disconnected myself from that branch of the family tree entirely.
Whatever they thought of mom, she was a good mother to me, and a thoroughly decent person. She set a good example for her son. After she passed away people in the town she had retired to would come up to me…people I didn’t know from Adam…and tell me what a ray of sunshine she was everywhere she went. That wasn’t an act…I grew up with it, it was her. It made me absolutely furious how that side of the family treated her…all except her brother Dean and her cousin who lived in the small Virginia town she retired to. He cousin also loved her very much. Her older brother and the rest of that family, not so much. And me…I’m living evidence that mom married a man they all hated. So I can get no answers from them, and I wouldn’t trust any I got now if I asked.
I had always, until now, put the family static down to her marrying dad. But now I look at it and it just seems so…wrong…so incomplete an explanation. Was that really all of it? I don’t know, but I am certain now that there is something that I was never told, because the story makes no sense. You just don’t pack up and leave everything, even over such a traumatic experience as your father dying of a lingering illness. Something happened.
Dad, let it be said, had…issues of his own. The marriage didn’t last. Mom loved him to the day she died, but the marriage didn’t work. Mom divorced dad when I was two, and she and grandma took me and moved back across the country…but not back to Greensburg. They moved to Washington D.C., to live near mom’s cousin, who was living there at the time. She got a job as a clerk for the Yellow pages. We lived in a series of small apartments. Whatever money they had from the sales of the house in Greensburg, the cabin, granddad’s business, and the house in Pasadena, somehow was all gone. I grew up in a very low budget household, being raised by a single working mother, in a time when women made about 60 cents for every dollar a man doing the same job made. Mom’s family in Pennsylvania made no effort whatever to help her out. It was something I took for granted as a child…but now it really stands out. I’m having a hard time now believing that was all because of her marrying dad. They basically shut her out.
But not grandma. Someday maybe I’ll write about what growing up was like with that cold constantly angry, fire and brimstone Yankee Baptist women in the house. Somehow she remained a bridge between mom and I and the rest of that side of the family, and a powerful force in it. She stayed by mom’s side from the time granddad died to the day she died, but at times it seemed to me more to punish her daughter then support her as she tried to raise a kid by herself in a 1950s/1960s world that regarded single divorced women with children as less worthy of respect then prostitutes. I never saw grandma smile, unless it was at the misfortune of others. When bad luck struck other people it always seemed to satisfy her somehow. And I remained a favorite target until the day she died, because I had the face, and the last name, of the man she hated. Stinking Rotten Good For Nothing Garrett Just Like Your Pap was her favorite name for me.
And me…I grew up with next to nothing, but I never really noticed that until I got older. I was fed on a bland, low budget diet but I never went to bed hungry. I often wore hand me downs but I never left the house in dirty clothes. I never saw mom cheat another person, lie to them or say anything about them behind their back that she wouldn’t have said to their face. I never once heard her utter a curse word or saw her take a drink or light up a cigarette. When I was a kid the first time I ever saw someone else’s mother smoking it shocked me…I didn’t think mothers did that. Mom sat down with me and my homework, tried her best to teach me right from wrong, and always encouraged my creative impulses. We didn’t have much, but I had what I needed to grow up on: I never doubted mom’s love. Never. Grandmas hate, and the disdain of most of that side of my family, I just accepted as part of the background noise. The love of a good mother can give a kid all he needs to stand up to whatever static life brings his way.
How her older brother, various other members of that side of the family, and especially her own mother treated her is something that some days makes me livid to think about, and others completely baffles me. She really was that ray of sunshine everywhere she went, a completely decent person and a good mother. Some of my childhood friends had horrible parents. Everyone told me how nice mine was. Everyone. It wasn’t an act. Yet her own family, with one or two exceptions, treated her miserably. I never once heard her complain. At least, not when I was there to hear it. Mostly the family tension was just there in the background. Always there. Something I just shrugged off whenever I thought about it. Mom loved me, that was all that mattered. The only time it burst out into the open in my presence, was when I was 16 and they discovered she had started seeing dad again. It was like being in the center of a nuclear blast. But that incident centered on dad. That they hated him does not really explain it all.
Something happened. Something more then just her marrying dad. Something that made them leave Greensburg and everything and everyone they knew, and when her marriage failed, prevented them from returning. Something her family, other then her brother Dean and her cousin, never forgave her for. Probably I’ll never know what it was. Mom never strayed from the story. Nobody else did either.
[Edited some for clarity, and add a few details that I missed occurred to me…]
The Scene: A table in an upscale restaurant located in a trendy vacation resort. Two old friends are sitting across from each other. One openly gay since he was seventeen, the other a Happily Married Man having long since overcome the unwanted same-sex attractions of his youth. They are discussing Openly Gay Friend’s problems finding someone to love and settle down with. Happily Married Man is finding it hard to believe that Openly Gay Friend has been single and struggling all these years.
Happily Married Man: Don’t you have any gay friends?
Openly Gay Friend: Oh yes. About half my friends are gay. I have a regular Happy Hour crowd I try to go out with every Friday. It gets me out of the house.
Happily Married Man: How long have you known them?
Openly Gay Friend: Oh, most of them since the mid-eighties…
Happily Married Man: Wow…I can’t believe they haven’t tried to hook you up. Didn’t they ever even try?
Openly Gay Friend: Oh get me started…there was this one time…
Happily Married Man: You need to get some better friends!
Openly Gay Friend: They’re nice people. I think they just don’t get me…they just don’t get romantic types. They think I should just go get laid and that’ll make me feel better. They don’t get how random loveless sex might make someone like me feel a whole lot worse afterward, not better.
Happily Married Man: You need to get some better friends!
Openly Gay Friend: I want you to understand something…that isn’t just a gay thing. If I was straight and my happy hour group was a bunch of other straight guys I’d be getting the same advice. Just go get laid and you’ll be fine. The cure for every lonely heart is to just get laid. The popular culture pays a bunch of lip service to the idea of love and romance, but it’s all about just having sex in the straight scene too.
Happily Married Man: Sex is overrated…
Openly Gay Friend: I’m not saying that…
Happily Married Man: It’s just a bodily function.
Openly Gay Friend: Uhm…
Happily Married Man (emphatically): When you’re on your death bed it won’t be the times you had sex you’ll be remembering, but all the people you loved.
Openly Gay Friend: Yes…absolutely! That is so very true. But I would want my last memory to be the times I spent laying down with the one I loved. That one special body and soul relationship…that’s what you would be remembering. At least I would…if I’d ever had that. (looks wistfully at Happily Married Man, then looks away) But your life is what it is…
Happily Married Man (rolling his eyes): Stop whining….
Openly Gay Friend: I’m not whining…
Happily Married Man: You’re whining. You have to work with what you’ve got to work with and accept that. Stop thinking about what ifs. Sex is overrated…
Openly Gay Friend: Well yes, I agree completely that it isn’t all there is to life, but it’s still important…
Happily Married Man: It’s like a fart.
Openly Gay Friend: I’m sorry?
Happily Married Man: This may sound strange but think about it. It stinks for a little while, and then it’s gone.
(Openly Gay Friend looks blankly back at Happily Married Man)
Happily Married Man: Sex is like that.
Openly Gay Friend: Uhm…it helps if you’re having sex with a person you’re sexually attracted to. (ironically) Then it’s actually a lot of fun…more engaging…more satisfying…(looks Happily Married Man in the eyes) and it makes a whole lot more sense that way. You kinda understand then why everyone else is so into it.
Happily Married Man: You’re a piece of work…you know that? Well it’s getting late and I have to go home now. I’m a happily married man.
Openly Gay Friend (unhappily): So I see. And I’m still single and unhappy. And for gay men of our generation it will always be a time before Stonewall won’t it?
Happily Married Man: Stonewall?
(This was mostly a real conversation. Some lines were edited for brevity, and Openly Gay Friend didn’t actually say his last two lines to Happily Married Man because just then his head was spinning. But now he wishes he had.)
Stories To Definately Avoid If You Believe In Love: Scenario 2. Didn’t I Say I Warned You?
Continuing our gallery of morose, possibly horror story grade film or novel scenarios, here’s another based on the stream of thought I had contemplating the plot device in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. That’s the one you may recall, where the two lovers break up and one decides to undergo a procedure which erases the other from their memory, and the other, sad to learn of it, does the same. Then they reconnect anyway which only goes to show they were really meant for each other to begin with and love isn’t always a fairy tale but a lot of hard work for both people. Yes, yes…so very romantic. Actually, I love that plot device. But somehow it always turns a tad dark in my imaginings…
I have an idea. It’s a story about a heterosexual man…
When he was a teenager he was well liked by his teachers and friends. He’s very open minded, somewhat more so then his parents who are mostly liberal, but with some hang-ups about class and gender and race. They’re not raving prejudiced, because that isn’t fashionable, and they try, really try their best, to teach their kid not to be that way.
In school he befriends a gay kid and right away they start to get along really well. He defends his gay friend from bullies and takes his part in political arguments about gay civil rights and same-sex marriage. They become very close friends. Brothers almost. But as often happens, not just in gay/straight relationships either, he finds his perfect girlfriend, and the gay kid finds a nice boyfriend, they slowly begin to drift apart.
The gay kid’s boyfriend turns out to be a real jerk, and as he grows older it becomes a pattern with him. He falls into a bitter cycle of one disastrous affair after another. Nothing seems to work for him.
The straight kid’s girlfriend on the other hand is his perfect match. They have a lovely, almost fairy tale romance that grows ever more beautiful over time. They marry, have beautiful kids, he finds the career of his dreams, they settle down in a nice suburban community with good schools and decent shopping.
Fast forward. The straight guy is in his late middle age, and he is reflecting on how happy his life has been. Especially compared to most of his classmates from way back when. Many of them have had it really hard. One day, he reconnects with his gay buddy from back in the day. His gay buddy has had it hard. Very hard. He’s still single, and bitter.
They have lunch together one day and they instantly reconnect like old and dear friends. The gay friend is happy that his old pal has had it so good and it is obviously sincere joy. Seeing how happy his old friend from high school is makes him a bit happier too, brings him out of his gloom and lifts his spirits. It makes him believe once more, after so long, that life maybe doesn’t have to suck after all. It can get better.
He decides to tell his straight friend that he’s re-considering something his parents tried very hard to talk him into back when they were teenagers. There’s a procedure…it’s frowned upon in more liberal circles, but not illegal…that can change a person’s sexual orientation from gay to straight. It’s just been so hard living my life as a gay man, he says, so lonely, so terribly terribly lonely... For all his accomplishments as a gay political activist, his private life has been completely miserable. I’m not sure I want to go on the rest of my life like this, he says. His straight friend is appalled. He urges his gay friend not to do it, it would be a sell-out, not just to the cause he’s long fought for, but to himself, to his soul. Yes, says his gay friend, but…it’s so hard being so alone. At least as a heterosexual, I’d have more of a chance at finding the kind of life you’ve had.
It is a sad conversation, but by the end of it the straight guy has mostly convinced his gay friend to hang on, and live an authentic life. Even if you change he says to his gay friend, how do you go on knowing that it isn’t really you, but something that was done to you? Then his gay friend lays one more thing on him. The procedure can be coupled with a memory wipe, so you never know you were once gay. New memories are introduced to make you believe you were always straight. That’s completely outlawed now against children, but he says, even on adults it’s a lot harder to do that to someone our age. Too many memories…the risks of complications are much higher. No…he finally says, it isn’t worth it.
They get up to go their separate ways and now it seems the gay friend has had a definite change of heart. No…it’s too late now to even think about changing. Better he had done it back when he was a teenager. But really…better still to live an authentic life. And anyway he says with a shy smile that takes his straight friend back to their school days, the worst thing would be having to forget you.
They part ways. The straight guy had always known his gay friend had a crush on him, and for his part he was always very fond of his gay friend. Back in school they were almost inseparable. Brothers almost. But it was always clear to both of them that it could never be. He is thoroughly heterosexual. He has always liked women. And now he has a wife he loves very much, and even at their age they still have a great sex life.
But now something is bothering him. He does a little digging into this ex-gay procedure. It was something he’d never really looked at before. He’d always opposed it, had always spoken out against it. There had been attempts to outlaw it completely that he had supported. But activists had only succeeded in outlawing the practice on children. Mostly he avoided the issue altogether. And now that he thinks of it, that seems a little strange. In his own low key way he is actually very politically aware and active. But his style was more behind the scenes then his gay friend’s upfront activism.
It quickly falls entirely out of his mind. Then he gets an email from his gay friend thanking him for the visit after all these years, and the encouragement. He writes that he’s redoubling his efforts to find a mate after all, and getting back into the fight for full gay equality. He would still like to see the ex-gay procedure completely outlawed, and he tells his straight friend he’s getting back into that fight now.
Oh yes…that. Now it begins to bother him how uncharacteristically he’d just put it all out of his mind. It was something that should normally still bother him about the world he lived in. His parents had raised him to be tolerant and progressive, even if they’d had their own repressed doubts and prejudices. Homosexuality wasn’t something they’d ever much discussed when he was a teen. But as an adult, often while remembering his gay schoolmate, he had always worked for the better, more inclusive world.
Now he looks more deeply into it, forcing himself at times, posting reminder notes just to make sure he follows up on things he finds out about the ex-gay process…its invention, its history of usage…the patterns of its use…the political controversy. Sometimes it’s a struggle to maintain an interest…he has so much else he’s busy with in his own life. But soon his wife, also very much the progressive and pro-gay rights person, gets involved and begins helping him with it. He has told her the story of his gay friend’s struggles and she is very sympathetic, and as disgusted by the very existence of the ex-gay clinics as he is. With her help, he maintains focus.
So he digs for information and learns more and more about the procedure that turns gay people straight and wipes their memories of ever having been gay. What he learns appalls him. He periodically writes his gay friend back and tells him about what he has uncovered…much that was never really fully aired in public. His gay friend is overjoyed to have his old pal back in the fight.
But at night the research is also causing him very unpleasant dreams…dreams about sudden violent arguments with his parents…or someone’s parents, he is not sure. He wonders if they are real memories or just his own projections of what his friend’s home life must have been like.
One morning, saying nothing to anyone of his plans, he goes to a private investigator, someone who he has read about, who has done much of the main investigation for various gay rights groups concerning the ex-gay clinics. This man has a reputation for uncovering secrets in not always legal ways, but his revelations were crucial in getting the procedure against children stopped. He asks this man to check to see if anyone in his high school class had been taken to one of the ex-gay clinics, and then had their memory of being gay wiped.
The investigator takes him into another room, stacked with filing cabinets, some bulging. Through various court cases, and a few not completely legal methods, he has acquired tens of thousands of what were once secret files, documents, recordings, some he is still not at liberty to disclose the contents of publicly. These files have proven critical in the search for victims, the investigator says, and the prosecution of some of the people who ran the clinics, as well as the outlawing of the procedure against children.
Tell me a little about the school you all went to, says the investigator. Tell me about the neighborhood, the area churches, politicians, community leaders. Certain ex-gay clinics were intimately connected to certain churches, and certain politicians. Tell me a little more about the students…and…about yourself… The whole sordid story of these clinics is in these files. Tell me what I need to know, and I can give you the information you are looking for.
He spends hours talking to the man, who all the while is entering data into a small computer. Then the investigator gets up, walks over to a filing cabinet, and after a little flipping through the files inside, pulls one out. He hands it to him. In it is a name and a case history. Somehow he is not completely shocked to learn that, yes, there was one kid from his high school that got sent to an ex-gay clinic.
Him.
He reads. The evidence in the file suggests it was done to him against his will. His memory of ever being gay, of ever even suspecting he was, was completely wiped. He checks the dates. It had to be he realizes, very soon after his parents found out about his gay friend.
And then and there in that office, reading the notes on his case for himself after all those years, he remembers it all in a sudden rush…about when his parents first learned about his gay friend. They had turned suddenly angry and suspicious. They’d had an awful argument. The next day some men had entered his bedroom in the middle of the night, and taken him to a place…somewhere…somewhere dark…
He can recall no more then that. But it is enough.
He walks back home in a daze. He loves his wife. Really deeply and truly loves her. And without a doubt she loves him. Their sex life is great, even in late middle age. They have beautiful kids, grown now and pursuing their own careers and love lives.
But…he loved his gay friend too. To his gay friend he has always been a straight buddy. Yes, his gay friend had a crush on him…that was always something they both knew, but it was always clear to both that it could never be, because he was straight. Except he wasn’t. At least, not born straight. He looks back to their teen years together and sees it clearly. They were always more then just friends. They were soul mates.
I…I loved you…
And he sees the life his gay friend had…his very lonely, bitter struggle…and sees now, clearly, the life he could have had…the life they could have had.
But…what does he do? What Can he do? Who does he tell? What good would it do to say anything to anyone at this point? His parents have both passed on…he, his wife, his gay friend, are all at the doorstep of old age. What good would it do to tell anyone? But there is more. The last words the private investigator spoke to him before he left the man’s office echo in his brain: You know don’t you, that the procedure can be reversed. You can be the man you were born to be again. If you want. Others, many others, have had the procedure reversed.
But could he really, after so much time has passed? And what would happen to his family then? What would they have? He loves them very much.
It’s not true that there is only one perfect soul mate out there for each individual. His gay friend still has a chance to find someone to love, and be loved by. They both know this. He decides to say nothing. The investigator had assured him that nothing would be said about him unless he specifically authorized it. Privacy laws forbade it. When he gets back home he finds an email from his gay friend telling him he’s dating someone new now, hoping that this time it would be different.
He agrees to meet them both for lunch somewhere, he and his wife and his gay classmate and his new boyfriend. And at that pleasantly cheerful little gathering of old friends and their lovers, he sees that this new guy is nice on the outside where it doesn’t count, but isn’t any better deep down inside where it does then any of the other guys his friend has hooked up with in the past. He can see another broken heart coming for his friend all over again. And it makes him angry, angry at the new boyfriend/creep, angry in a deep dark place inside where he had never been angry before.
His wife sees the broken heart coming for his gay friend too. He’s such a beautiful spirit, his wife says to him later. It’s so tragic he never found someone. I hate how this world treats people like him. Not just that he’s gay, but that he’s such a beautiful spirit. It’s so hard for people like that to find love. So hard for everyone really. I’m so glad I found you.
Not all horror stories have blood splashing everywhere.
“Evil enters like a needle and spreads like an oak tree.”
-Ethiopian Proverb
Stories To Definately Avoid If You Believe In Love: Scenario 1. Remember, I Warned You.
Another one of the Big Three major loves of my life finally decided to get himself a Facebook account recently…I discovered during another of my periodic name searches. I mentioned on my status update that I wished there was a Forget You pill I could take, but that I’d only take it for one of the Big Three (Hi Keith!). A friend then directed me to the film, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.
I was already aware of that film, although I haven’t watched it yet. But the central plot device is a beautiful one for a romance story: Two people who choose to undergo a procedure that makes them forget about each other, who then hook up again later anyway, which means they were really meant for each other to begin with. Yes, yes…a very lovely tale of true romance. And one I’d happily read myself, if it were presented to me in a gay context.
Writing it myself is another matter, and not just because I’d have to copy it outright from somebody else, a thing I regard with distaste when I see other would-be artists doing that. On the other hand, Picasso himself said a mediocre artist copies and a great artist steals. And this plot device is just brimming with possibilities.
Unfortunately for you dear reader, those possibilities always seem to take a dark and morose turn with me. I can’t imagine why that is. But in the interest of getting some of this stuff that has always been percolating in me ever since I can remember…I seem to be able to think up more ideas then I ever have time to follow through on…let me belabor you with a few scenarios for a novel or movie. Go ahead and use them. If they flop and everyone hates you for making them sit through it, you can always blame me.
Here’s Scenario 1…there isn’t much to it. Call it, The Good Life…
It’s about a gay guy who tries all his life to find his soul mate. Comes out to himself as a teen, but instead of going through fear and loathing about his sexual orientation, he accepts it, and tries extra hard to make himself worthy of a nice boyfriend. Gets good grades, graduates near the top of his class, never cheats or lies or steals. He’s no cardboard prude by any means, but he tries extra hard to be a worthy lover, so he can attract the man of his dreams. Unfortunately for him, all he ever gets are the boyfriends from hell…the ones attracted to Nice Guys because they’re easy to manipulate and fun to cheat.
That’s his life. One bad, failed romance after another after another after another. His gay friends are no help either. Oh they believe in love all right…but they think our hero is a tad childish to believe in Romance and finding that man of your dreams. Better they keep telling him, to settle for Mr. Right Away instead of Mr. Right. Who knows they say, that sexy rent boy you purchase for an evening might turn out to be a steady thing. And if not, hey, he’s affordable at least. Time and again, though he never finds out what the audience does, they fail to connect him to other guys who might actually be right for him. Romance is for daydreamers.
Eventually he’s a very old man. And one day he realizes this is all that will ever be. He sees that he will never find that love of his life after all, that he is going to die alone and loveless, never having been loved, never having had that life affirming body and soul relationship with another person, never known that quiet peaceful joy of holding, and being held in the arms of the one you love. Now, at the twilight of his life he sees, finally, the reason that there are so many beautiful love stories out there isn’t because there really are so many beautiful love stories out there, but that so terribly many people are like himself, lost and lonely and aching for a love that will never come. He wishes he had never been born.
But all is not hopeless. Modern technology has an answer for everything. He takes the last little bit of his life savings and goes to a clinic, where they replace all his bad memories of failed romances with a fake memory of meeting his soul mate when they were both teenagers and they have a happy life together and then in their shared old age his soul mate dies (peacefully of natural causes) and he morns. But then he goes on with his life because they both promised each other that they would if one of them died before the other.
He leaves the clinic knowing only that he had checked himself in for a very normal and natural case of depression after his one true love had passed away. The doctors and nurses there he remembers, were all very kind to him, and all said he’d been a very lucky man to have found such a beautiful meaningful love, and he left the clinic feeling a little sorry for them, because they were still searching for it.
He spends his last few years peacefully remembering his lover, spouse and soul mate, and dies one day a happy man, knowing he had lived life to its fullest.
You see? Even horror stories can have happy endings.
So it occurs to me while having to restart both the iPad and iPhone this morning to get them responsive again, that either Murphy’s Law applies to software systems too, ie: software increases in complexity to its level of incompetence, or the 2nd law of thermodynamics applies to software, in a sense: with every upgrade, chaos always increases…
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