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2/25/98. Why are so many Buddhists amateur astronomers?
Earl Griffith, who started the Wichita group, actually teaches high-school astronomy. And one of the other people in that group has a telescope with a diameter larger than the scopes of some observatories, mounted on a motorized tracking system he built himself, with the entire unit sitting on an aluminum thingie that can be towed behind his car. The man is serious about his stargazing. Stanley Lombardo, who leads the Lawrence group, is also an amateur astronomer. I don't know all that many Buddhists, really, so the sample isn't big enough to generalize from - but the pattern, if it's really a pattern and not just a coincidence, is striking. I suppose you could make a case that Buddhism attracts people who are interested in matters of very large scope, matters that are very impersonal. I suppose. The line of reasoning seems contrived. Still, something about the fit between Buddhism and astronomy feels right, though it's not the sort of thing you could ever predict. 2/26/98. An ongoing confusion. I have never understood the ritual of food - the social importance people attach to eating together. 2/26/98. My old pastime. The odd combination of power, delicacy, and technique that climbing requires. Also, the need for speed versus the need to stop and rest (and knowing how to rest), and having to be gung-ho versus having to think ahead and look ahead and listen to your own reservations: go-for-broke commitment versus being willing to quit when advisable (say, when you're looking at a death fall). I never had the decisiveness, nor the delicacy. The only thing that saved me was pure determination, born of panic and terror. The way great climbers combined seemingly contrary qualities always did (and still does) leave me in awe. 2/28/98. Saturday morning cartoons. Cartoons have changed a lot. They used to be done with cel animation, and the production values were good. Then the cost went up or something, and the work was farmed out to places like Korea, where they moved crude cutout characters in front of unchanging backgrounds. Now we're back to something reasonably good again - Ren and Stimpy, for instance - except for South Park, which sets a new low in production values. 2/28/98. Privatization. This is a myth. Everything I have seen leads me to believe that politicians are either stupid, or they're pulling the wool over the public's eyes. For instance, when the state of Kansas privatized adoptions, none of the public employees who had been doing this work lost their jobs. They were simply transferred to other work. The savings came about by farming the work out to a private agency, and that agency is required to do just as much silly, useless paperwork as the state did. But the agency is paid less. Any savings is taken out of the hide of people like my wife, who seems never to be home these days - including today, Saturday. She let our son stay up an extra 90 minutes last night, just so she could have some time with him. 2/28/98. Sparrows. I hate exotics, especially house sparrows, starlings, and pigeons. Today I finally got around to cleaning out the nests the house sparrows made in the lights above our garage doors, and closed up the holes so they can't come back. I remember Granddad and his sparrow traps. He would drown the sparrows he caught, and I thought this was cruel and unnecessary. Now I think he was doing the right thing. 2/28/98. The Diamond. I've tried the Diamond three times - if I may be allowed to stretch the word "try" beyond its usual limit. The first time, the Big Thompson flood got in the way. After all the deaths, I left; climbing seemed like a trivial, worthless thing suddenly. The next time, Steve and I went up into the park, and I had a nasty fall on a training climb and banged myself up. The third time, Bob and I went up and bivvied near the base. A huge storm came up. Each time, I get closer, but somehow, I'm just not interested any longer. 3/2/98. The old Indian. The old Indian in Colorado Springs. He was something of an exhibit at one of the tourist attractions. When he came here to visit his Kansas City friends, they'd call us up and we'd go over and see him. Why? I really did like him; he impressed the hell out of me. But I never could figure out what he saw in us. 3/4/98. The super-direct on the Dru. I waited too long. Always wanted to do that route, but now a huge pillar has fallen off and erased the route. Guess I'll have to build a replica in a giant climbing gym... Things have changed. A couple of Swiss ran into problems on the mountain about the time of the rockfall, called for help on a cell phone, and got a helicopter rescue. A cell phone. Why does a cell phone on a big wall strike me as the ultimate absurdity? It's like a brothel for someone going through boot camp. 3/5/98. Emaciated rock stars. Why are there so many of them? Mick Jagger, Steven Tyler, Rick Ocasek, Alice Cooper, David Bowie. Guys like Meat Loaf are really rare. The older generation of rock musicians, especially singers, seems skinnier than the guys in their 20's. 3/5/98. Portugal. Why have I been to Portugal three times? I just keep going there, every 7 or 8 years. Saw a coffee-table book on the place this evening in a bookstore and could barely restrain my urge to buy it. I don't enjoy the place all that much when I'm there, but I always want to go there again. This doesn't make sense. 3/5/98. Better living through chemistry. Prozac, Ritalin, and hormones. Seems as if everybody's on one of them. Welcome to Brave New World. Soon we'll have drugs to enhance memory, too. Psychoanalysis is out of date, and so is gritting your teeth and just getting through it; now we use chemicals. It may actually be better this way. So why does it make me nervous? Are my fears just the usual jitters when everything is changing? 3/6/98. That could have been more... The French girl in Malaysia I shared a cabin on the beach with, and left the next morning... The two American girls on the train to Madrid. They were travelling with a private detective from New Zealand, but there were two of them and one of him, and they needed an extra guy. They wanted me to come to Pamplona with them, for the running of the bulls. "We'll have a party," they said. I was in too much of a hurry to get to the Alps, and passed... The girl who tried to pick me up in Las Vegas at breakfast and take me back to L.A... The night spent talking with Valorie P. Though we talked the entire night, I can't remember one word of what we said. She was delirious with fatigue in the morning... Anne I., and the conversation in the kitchen. 3/6/98. Muscular women. I do not understand the craze for women with visible abs and large, hard muscles. This will seem like a bizarre, temporary aberration when people look back on it, in 20 years. Sort of like looking at those hideous clothes from the '60s. 3/8/98. Half Dome. When he was visiting, John Sailors told me he remembered me saying I'd never forget the look on the faces of the hikers on the top of Half Dome as I climbed up over the edge. But in fact I had forgotten all about it. How is this possible? Their reaction was priceless. I suppose. Actually, I can't remember much... 3/9/98. Bring out your dead. It is interesting and revealing that Himalayan mountaineering is perhaps the only activity in which the dead are regularly abandoned with no attempt to bury or retrieve the bodies. There is nowhere but snow to bury them, of course, but often no time and no energy to spend on them. In this way, it is perhaps the most extreme activity; even in war, soldiers will try to retrieve their comrades. Though high-altitude mountaineers are sometimes ambitious and callous, the environment is so extreme that tending to the dead is a life-threatening luxury. 3/9/98. Ed Bender. Where have you disappeared to, Ed? Are you alive? Do you know what happened to Phyllis? 3/13/98. We're all bozos on this bus. The man who makes reasonable assumptions and forges ahead, gets things done. But he looks like an idiot when his assumptions are wrong. The man who makes no assumptions and double-checks everything that could possibly go wrong, gets nothing done. He, too, looks like an idiot. 3/13/98. Intelligence versus unnecessary work. The intelligent man is the one who invests the necessary work to make a difficult, time-consuming chore simple and easy. For instance, the old Vikings scorned the younger Vikings who built masts on their boats and used sails. The older Vikings thought the young ones were lazy. So they were, in a sense. But the older Vikings had to row. It seems obvious to me who was smarter and more adaptable, laziness be damned. 3/16/98. A national disease. Why do people in this country have such an obsession with they way they look to other people? Do we think there's nothing else by which we can be judged? Or do we watch too much TV and too many movies? 3/19/98. You must do what you can. Vote, recycle, practice nonviolence, whatever: do it even though no one else is. The only thing you can begin with is yourself. So other people don't vote, recycle, etc. - so what? That's not an excuse. You must do what you can. 3/19/98. Linda Hall. I love everything about the place: the grounds, the buildings, the quiet, spacious interior of the main building. I even like the lecture series. There's something gracious about the place... Their web pages are sadly inadequate, though. 3/29/98.Culture shock. Of all the countries I've been to - and I've been to dozens (see the blue dots on the world map for a partial list) - the only place I've ever experienced culture shock has been on my return to the United States after six months in Asia. This is unquestionably the weirdest country on the planet. We're just too technologically advanced, and technology alienates us from ourselves. I felt much more at home in Kathmandu, or in rural Japan, or even Mandalay, Burma, than I did here. The speed and complexity and proliferation of objects in this county were very difficult to adapt to when I returned. All the other places I'd been felt less alienating than my native land, where I'd spent 96% of my life until then. This is difficult to believe, I know; it certainly surprised me. But it is completely true. 4/6/98.Tolkien. I used to think of the Ring trilogy as an adventure story and a fantasy, but after I started reading it aloud to Colin, I realized that it's a moral tale as well. It extols the virtues of loyalty, courage, and self-sacrifice, and paints as evil the desire for power, especially when it leads to the enslavement of others. You could do much worse than to accept these values as your own. 4/8/98.Stuff I've got... that i didn't used to have: an answering machine, voice mail, a PC, an ISP, a web page, Turbo-Tax, word processing, a pager, e-mail, a cell phone, a CD player, video games, a VCR, a microwave What's next? Take my life, please... 4/13/98.The progress of war. World War I was worse for the soldiers; World War II was worse for the civilians. Changes in technology and social structure have changed war, as they have changed so much else, so that their effects propagate more widely, and so that distinctions that were once ironclad cease to exist. It would be interesting to know whether the mass murder of minorities by Hitler and Stalin could have occurred under the regimes that preceded those two monsters. I suspect not, both for technical reasons, and because attitudes would have made it impossible. Though genocide had occurred before (the Turks against the Armenians; white Americans against some native American tribes), nothing so systematic had taken place in either Germany or Russia. (I may be wrong, out of ignorance, of course; such things may in fact have happened.) Perhaps only a technical mind-set would make possible such a systematic attempt at extinction. Unrelated (technical) ends promoted technical efficiency, which rewarded a technical mindset that became so habitual that it was applied to mass extinction, which became an exercise in technics. This was so habitual that it even became Adolf Eichmann's defense: he claimed that he was a functionary, and that his work was only such things as coordinating train schedules; he could not see that this made him as guilty as the men who worked the levers to release the Zyklon B on the Jew in the showers. Here's the formula, in Germany as in the Soviet Union as in Bosnia as in Cambodia: the dedication to an overarching political principle that exalts one group at the expense of others (Germans uber alles, or the Party over the bourgeoisie, or Serbs over Muslims and Croats, or revolutionaries against anyone who might pollute the purity of the revolution) leads to the attempt to root out the enemy, and allows the murderers to excuse their evil on grounds of their own righteousness. The technical skills and mind-set promoted by the effort to build the nation can make this more efficient, and therefore more evil. It is obviously more evil to kill 6 million (Hitler) or 20 million (Stalin) than to kill fewer. The inescapable conclusion is that technology used this way is evil. Whether technology is evil in itself is a quibble, simply because it can be evil. So two questions remain: how to prevent technology from being put to evil uses, and the more fundamental one of how to prevent these mass outbreaks of evil in the first place. I'm afraid that neither of these problems will ever be solved, because our species is incapable of changing itself. We are doomed, sooner or later, to destroy ourselves. But hope is imperative. We must struggle against evil, even if it costs us our lives. Each of us is nothing; it is only together that we can be great. And we can be great only if enough of us individually do something to make us great. That is the only hope we have. I am nothing, and so are you. Collectively, something may come from us - after we're dead. In the meantime, though, we can't let that mutual hope blind us to the evil that mutuality commits when it excludes other people. Our mutuality must be universal, it must include everyone we meet or can meet, or we will inevitably commit evil. 4/21/98.Hollywood movies. There's a lot of fantasizing about personal omnipotence. The hero runs through a hail of bullets and never gets hit. He crashes his car and walks away. He lurks in the shadows and behind trees, and takes out his opponents one after the other. He's surrounded by bad guys and knocks them all down with his fists and feet. Not! It might be artistry if it were believable; when Bruce Lee did it, it was believable, but he's the only exception that comes to mind. The movies we're seeing now were old and tired before they were made. The only thing they have going is technical polish - no scratches on the film, convincing special effects. Otherwise, they're nothing but shit: flat characters, feeble dialogue, absurd plots. They do nothing to earn our suspension of disbelief, so they shouldn't earn our money. It's a commentary on how pathetically shrunken our lives have become that instead of going to the movies to fantasize about glamor, as people did 50 years ago, we go to them to fantasize about power and violence. 4/23/98.Today. An absolutely perfect day: perfect weather, and the flowering trees at their absolute peak. Gorgeousness everywhere. Driving along gawking at the flowers and trees. Perfection. I didn't bother going to work today- took it off. I turned 50 early this morning. What can I say? I'm still trying to figure out what I want to do with my life. I don't wonder where the time has gone, I know where it went: I frittered it away. What seems strange to me is the insubstantiality of my past life- going from one phase to the next, the prior phase just vanishes and becomes something thin and attenuated. You start a job, and college is just a memory. You come back from travelling, and the travelling turns into some sort of mental slide show, and some yarns to tell your family and friends. What happened to it? How did it disappear? We live in a lot of dimensions, but time is the only one I've never been able to comprehend whatsoever. 4/26/98.Social Darwinists. Any time you studied a major intellectual movement in school, the texts would name the leaders of the movement. The sole exception was Social Darwinism. There weren't any Social Darwinists, apparently. Someone name one for me, please. 4/28/98.Cats. The only domesticated animal that doesn't exhibit herding behavior. 4/28/98.PETA. Sometimes I wonder what planet these people are from. They're completely detached from reality in most of their complaints about how we treat animals. Certainly much of what we do in the raising and slaughter of animals is cruel. But I heard a caller to NPR complain today that to train a dog to serve us is to misuse the dog because the dog has its own needs. This is lunacy. Dogs who guide the blind or help the semi-paralyzed out of bed are performing a service that is useful to the people they help, regardless of the dog's so-called needs. And what I've read about them leads me to believe that the dogs get satisfaction from their work, and develop a bond of affection with their owners. But regardless of this, people are more important than animals, and this is how the world works. Get used to it. Let's have some loyalty to our own species for a change. It should be obvious to anyone that we're wreaking ecological disaster on the planet, and we should do everything we can to preserve biodiversity. But let's not get carried away and extend this to the protection of species that we raise for our own use. Dogs are our servants. We shouldn't be deliberately cruel, but we bred them to serve us. That is their function. 4/29/98.When I was a math student. That first summer, I had a very peaceful life, and I spent most of my time studying, concentrating and working very hard. My life was very simple, there were no complications. Maybe as a result of this life I was leading, people began to appear to me in a very different light than they ever had before: all the same, something wonderful about them. Not parts of God, exactly, but something like that. Not exactly beautiful, not perfect. I was noticing something both simpler and more obvious than I ever had before. Somehow everyone was alike, marvelous and clear, and the things that showed on the surface, the usual personality characteristics that seem to thrust themselves at me, the things that were usually noticeable, became somehow clear and I saw past those things, and saw some other thing that was much more important, that everyone shared. 4/29/98.Imponderables. I have been told, and read, that relativity and quantum mechanics are contradictory, yet both are experimentally verified, and neither of them has been refuted by observed data. In fact, the evidence for both is quite good. Together, they are the foundations of 20th-century physics. But they are incompatible. Who says physics makes sense? Perhaps it's like mathematics - Godel's Incompleteness Theorem: you can have consistency, or you can have completeness, but you can't have both. This appeals to me enormously. 4/29/98.Things I don't believe in. Abortion, women in the armed forces, and homosexual marriages and adoptions. And people accuse me of being a liberal. 4/29/98.The time my Computer Science project was stolen. My term project, no less, and it was stolen while I was in Portugal. I'd been working on it in the evenings instead of going out, had pages of equations, was struggling. Someone broke into the car in the Algarve and stole Phil's camera gear, and my folder. Picturing their confusion when they opened up the folder, probably expecting valuable personal effects and passports they could sell, and found page after page of formulas, is the only enjoyment I get from this memory. Oh, and giving the police report to the professor to prove that I wasn't lying. He asked me what language it was written in. "Portuguese," I said. He must not have been listening. 5/15/98.Snoop. The discussion with Colin about whether Snoop Doggy Dog had been killed or not. It's shocking, in retrospect, that such a topic could be handled so matter of factly between a father and his twelve-year-old son. Rappers getting shot left and right, and we take it for granted. 5/15/98.General Specifics. How my thinking has changed: didn't even understand at first that the lecturer on quantum cryptography was interested in how information can be carried by the individual quanta when they can't be properly disentangled; he was interested in a very general, very deep question. I, on the other hand, was simply interested in the practical considerations - what this can be used for, the limitations, how to generalize it to several parties, etc. I used to be like him, now my viewpoint is narrower. 5/15/98.Coincidences. Years ago, in that house near St. Peters': sitting talking to Gloria and Jack and Susan, thinking about Marilyn: the woman who used to be my girlfriend lived in that house when she was married to the man who later was briefly involved with the woman who was now my girlfriend. It was odd, but my whole life was like that at the time. This was just after the period of my life where every woman I dated was a vegetarian, but I never knew it beforehand; and when I couldn't go anywhere, no matter how unlikely, without running into people I knew. Now my life is quite the opposite. There are no coincidences. I miss that, deeply. 5/22/98.Fish in a barrel. One should never think too much about cliches, such as "shooting fish in a barrel". This is supposed to be something you'll succeed at without any skill or luck. But the bullets are slowed by water, or skip off it. You won't kill any fish, nor will the bullets punch holes in the barrel; they'll lack the speed. So, is the implication that you're supposed to shoot the barrel itself from the outside, to make it leak? Does anyone else find these cliches confusing? 5/28/98.Popular names. Everyone was named after Michael or Mary or some other saint when I was a kid. Times have changed. The odd thing is that the popularity of names now seems to be determined as much by sound as by anything else. A lot of girls are named with "Y"s: Tiffany, Brittany, etc.; and boys (my own son included) often end in "N": Colin, Duncan, Brian, and so on. Why? 5/28/98.Tattoos as a statement of individuality. We have so little of it left that some people are making a statement by turning their skins into artwork. The irony is that it's a trendy (and therefore conformist) thing to do. 5/28/98.A Catholic contradiction. I've never seen it mentioned, but it seems very ironic to me that Catholic priests, who are forbidden to marry or have sex, and in particular the Pope, should be so emphatic in their opposition to birth control. These priests are the same ones who are using the ultimate form of birth control: total abstinence. This seems to me the height of hypocrisy. ("Every sperm is sacred/ every sperm is good. Every sperm is needed/ in your neighborhood.") 5/28/98.Another American character flaw. Why the hell do we always have to be doing something? This attitude is a waste. We need to be more patient. We need to be able simply to sit and let time pass. (It was Pascal, I think, who remarked that all the world's problems spring from the inability to sit in an empty room and do nothing.) 6/1/98.Running as character. Running seems to display more individual style than walking. Some people (mostly young) run with a bounce. Some run mechanically. Some swing their arms a lot, and others don't. There are those who clench their hands, and those who hold them open. Every runner is unique. Whether true or not, they seem to reveal a lot about their personalities in their running styles. 6/5/98.Meeting old lovers. M - drove her away by picking a fight. B - thought, how could I ever have loved someone so commonplace? J - didn't recognize her at first. M - ran into her at a kinky party in a downtown loft; she was surprised to see me there. M - ran into her at a party in Westport; glad to see her, but she was embarrassed - I was the old boyfriend, and she didn't want me there, when she had a new boyfriend. Conclusion: it's better to do everything possible to avoid old girlfriends. 6/8/98.The kleptocrats. The kleptocrats are history: Marcos, Mobutu, Suharto, and now Abacha. All kaput. What I find curious about these guys is why they would steal so much money. Why would anyone want that much money? What could he do with it? How could he spend it? Even someone like Suharto, whose entire family became stinking rich. Why? You can't possibly enjoy it all. It's just a big damn burden. 6/11/98.Games. The contrast between soccer and the games popular in the United States could hardly be greater. Our games (baseball, football, basketball) are filled with abrupt changes and a sense of urgency, a need for constant stimulus and release. Even late in the game, one rarely gets a sense of real urgency watching soccer players. Soccer flows; the start/stop of our games is lacking, replaced by continuity. Our games are obsessed with the control of time - the last few minutes of a game can last ten times as long chronologically as what shows on the clock, as the game clock is stopped for timeouts and huddles, and between possessions. In soccer, no one knows exactly when it will end but the referee. The rules in our games are complicated. The rules of soccer are extremely simple. Our games all rely heavily on eye-hand coordination, but in soccer the hands are are used only by the goalies. Our football and baseball are "bursty", but soccer is continuous. Our football and baseball are not aerobic; soccer demands endurance. Our games demand exactness and rigor, especially our football; but soccer is approximate - the players line up ten yards from the kicker, more or less, and no one seems to care if it's exact. Soccer is like life: it flows on, with occasional moments of drama, and then, at a time only known approximately, it ends. American football and basketball are a stream of releases - of little orgasms - but soccer has more foreplay, you can get immersed in it. April 11, 1999. Had to add these quotes from an article in today's local newspaper: "A bunch of people in shorts who never stop running long enough to use their hands and only rarely accomplishing their goal: Face it, it's a communist sport. Football is land acquisition and total aggression: very American. Soccer is, well, very foreign." (Glenn Parker, a local professional football player.) "If you're turned on by a game that stops every eight seconds for 45 seconds of planning, well, I can't do anything about that. I like a game that never stops." (Alexi Lalas, a local professional soccer player) 6/11/98.Smoking in public. I'd thought smoking in public had disappeared in this country, but this week in a casino, and then at a rock concert, I found it still alive. I'd forgotten how it soaks into your hair and clothes. The only habit so dirty it dirties the people who aren't even doing it. 6/29/98.Techno-meltdown. Here are my experiences with technology, and the use human beings make of it, in the last two days: *Someone killed the job I was running, in the wee hours of Saturday morning, completely fucking up my work schedule and costing me a day. *I couldn't get into the office last night because someone had expired the card that gives me access, and never bothered to let me or my boss know. *I couldn't report my hours this morning because the power was out in the building where the home office is housed, and apparently the PBX isn't battery-backed up. *Win95 crashed and burned while I was doing something important, and when I rebooted, it warned of possible disk corruption and took its own sweet time (almost an hour) to check the hard drive, only to conclude that nothing was really wrong. Fuck you, Bill Gates. *It takes forever to remove the necessary old data from the tables on my server to make space for new data, probably because of heavy chaining of records; a simple query can take nearly an hour. The result is that I'm nearly a week behind in my work. The new hard drives won't arrive until after I've moved on to my next contract. Good luck, guys. And the next two days: *Phone conversations with various people being cut off (cell phones, internal calls on PBX) *Roof at work is leaking (admittedly low-tech) *False alarm (no fire) at work (the alarm company was working on the alarm system; the fire department actually showed up while we were all standing under the trees) 6/29/98.Psychic? We were out shooting off fireworks night before last (fourth of July), when the phrase "Tasmanian devil" went through my head. Two seconds later, Colin said the exact same thing out loud. He had no fireworks named Tasmanian Devil, so I can't explain it. I usually explain these things as a coincidence, but this time, "coincidence" would be a stretch. 7/29/98.The ancient Romans. I've nearly finished I, Claudius, and am as stunned at the depravity of some of the characters - Tiberius and Livia and especially Caligula, but others as well - as I was when reading the Decline and Fall. One book is fiction, the other not, but they hold the same message: degeneracy. Sad, to think that so much of our culture springs from the ancient Romans. For all their talk of virtue and ideals, there were too many monsters among them. Their values were based on brutality and greed and selfishness. The desire for empire was nothing but the desire for plunder and power and fame. And was there ever another time and place where the mass of people entertained themselves by watching men kill each other, and watching innocent people consumed by wild animals? What troubles me most is not that degenerate behavior occurred - it always will - but that it was so systematic and widespread. They seem almost to have cultivated it. Too many of them aspired to the same sorts of things as the Marquis de Sade; but de Sade was an aberration, and he was imprisoned. In ancient Rome, he would have fit right in. There was nothing about that culture, nothing at all, that was worth saving, except perhaps the achievements in stone: architecture, roads, and aqueducts. |
2/26/98. My earliest memory.
I was small enough to fit in a little sling chair that fit over the top of the car seat. My legs went down in the leg holes, and I sort of dangled there, next to my mom, looking forward through the windshield. (This chair was much like the sorts of things people now put babies in, that hang from doorways, so the babies can bounce. Except in this case, it didn't hang from anything, but the back hooked over the top of the front seat.) There was a little steering wheel in front of me, with a horn that beeped when I pushed it. The wheel also turned, and I could never figure out why the car turned when my mother turned her wheel, but not when I turned mine. I must have been quite, quite young. 2/26/98. Another early confusion. When people referred to the "big hand" and the "little hand" on a clock when I was a kid, I never knew whether "big" meant "fat" or "long", and "little" meant "skinny" or "short". I still have to have things spelled out; ambiguity has haunted my life. 2/26/98. Jargon. To ponder: is the jargon of various endeavors revealing of some of their essential qualities? What is unique about each one? What do they have in common? Someone must have written about this - in jargon-free, intelligible language. 2/26/98. Colin's heirlooms. The heirlooms Colin has inherited: from Susan's side, the old samurai sword, from my side the pre-Revolutionary butter bowl. Both of them kept in a safe deposit box at the bank. I never had these things, and I'm glad I didn't - to have to carry them through life, taking care of them, would be a responsibility. He'll always have to make sure they're safe, whenever he moves, so they can be passed down to the next generation. 2/27/98. Angela Hewitt concert. Went to the Angela Hewitt concert tonight, and for the first time, Bach no longer sounds mechanical and heartless. The first time. I am amazed. The woman is a brilliant Bach interpreter... Between the introductory part (where she gave the audience pointers on how to play Bach) and the concert, and during the intermission, they kept trying to tune the piano. Without much success, it seemed to me. My mother, who has a better ear, was quite annoyed... I kept thinking about missing tonight's Highlander episode, the third part of the Avatar series, which I've wanted to see for a long time. The irony- a great concert, and I regretted missing that cheesy piece of TV crap. 2/28/98. Nukes. I turned 13 about the time of the Cuban missile crisis, and I clearly remember my father and mother discussing how to get out of town fast should the missiles start flying. She was trying to plan, but he pointed out that the Army ammunition plant was to our west, the Air Force base south and east of us, missile silos to the north, and rail yards smack in the middle of town, only a few miles away. There was no hope of getting out, in other words. This left a lasting impression. I lived in terror of nuclear weapons, and I rejoice that my son doesn't need to. Maybe we can put this evil genie back in the bottle. Maybe there's hope for us, after all. For a more eloquent statement of how it used to be, read the last essay (the title essay) in Lewis Thomas's Late Night Thoughts on Listening to Mahler's Ninth Symphony. For the full thing, I later stumbled across Cosma Shalizi's on-line copy of the essay. 2/28/98.The increasing popularity of climbing. Even in the early 80's, when I was teaching climbing, I had reservations about more people getting into the sport. It's reached disastrous proportions now. It used to be a rare individual indeed who pursued this, and that's as it should be. I don't want to queue for climbs any more than in the past. 3/1/98. Illness and spring. There is a bird calling outside, a two-note descending call, over and over, which is audible over the hum of the PC and the gargling of the aquarium. Sometimes I remember the illness that almost killed me ten years ago, that they never did diagnose. All this would be lost. Sometimes I remember lying in bed that weekend, when Prime Health had refused to see me and my condition was deteriorating, looking at the clock, and my blood oxygen was getting low as they later found out, and my brain was empty, and all weekend long all I did was factor the numbers on the clock: 10:11 = 3 * 337... 10:12 = 4 * 253 = 2 * 2 * 11 * 23... et cetera. They finally took me on Monday, when I walked in and they saw that my face was the color of the wallpaper. They called an ambulance and sent me straight to the hospital. When they released me a week later, I tried to read, but the words made no sense. I couldn't comprehend them. Nothing has been quite the same since. Now I know I will die. 3/5/98. Gullibility and rumors. Remember when the story was going around that a woman over 30 (or was it 35?) was more likely to be killed in a terrorist attack than she was to get married? It was baloney, of course. But people actually believed it. The net is going to make this worse - probably already has - by reducing the time it takes false information to spread. Churchill said, as best I can remember it, "A lie is halfway round the world before the truth can get its pants on." 3/5/98. Sinking ships. The last four places I've worked have gone down the tubes after I left - at least for people with jobs like mine. PARS moved most of the programmers to Atlanta, an abysmal place to live. Knight Ridder shucked off their Financial Information Group to Bridge, who canned 80% of the people in DP. Brite passed from Stan Brannan's hands to the new guy from Florida, and now everybody hates working there; people who have been there from the beginning are leaving. And TWA's DP and datacomm is being sold to MCI, which, inevitably, will lay off at least half the people... My great talent seems to be jumping ship before it sinks. Now, if there were only a way to make money from this ability... 3/6/98. The old Swiss priest. The Taroko gorge is a deep, long gorge in Taiwan that cuts across the island. There's only one place the road is wide enough for 2 busses or trucks to pass, so convoys start from the east end and the west end, timing themselves to pass at that single wide spot. Along the way, at the bottom of the gorge, is a single house, the only house for many miles. An old Swiss priest was living there. He had spent years in Tibet, but wasn't upset about the Chinese taking the place over: "It's always been that way. The Chinese come in, and when the Tibetans get strong enough, they kick them out again." He smoked cigars, and he was utterly cheerful about everything. He showed us his Swiss Navy: little motorized plastic ducks in a tiny fountain in front of his house. He flipped a switch and they spun around, quacking. He had three classes of accomodation: capitalist, socialist, and Marxist. I forget what the first two were - maybe with capitalist you got your own room, and with socialist you shared a room? But I clearly remember Marxist, which was what he wanted us to choose, and we did: you slept on the floor with a blanket. 3/6/98. Fear of... I finally figured it out: my fear of water comes from fear of drowning, which, like my fear of being buried alive is probably rooted in the asthma I had as a child - fear of losing my breath. 3/7/98. The Japanese. Their insistence on doing everything according to form, whether or not the form makes sense, whether or not they know any reason for the form. The opposite of Americans, who always want to try it a new way just because new must be better. 3/7/98. Handedness. Why is left-handedness less common than right-handedness? Does anyone even know? 3/11/98. A murder. I still can't get over the time in the early '80s when there was a shooting in the 3500 block of Walnut, near my neighborhood. The crack problem was bad at the time, and 2 young guys stole a hamburger from an old man, and then killed him. I cannot comprehend this. They took his hamburger and killed him for no reason at all. Even if someone could explain this to me, I wouldn't want to understand. 3/11/98. Abstractness. We are becoming abstract because we deal with abstractions. In particular, the work most of us do has nothing to do with making things or growing food or hunting. We sit behind desks and talk on the phone to people we've never met, and manipulate spreadsheets. Someday we will realize that this is a psychological disaster for our species, but by then we will have passed the point of no return. 3/13/98. I was just wondering... Dear Dr. Death: do cookies cause cholesterol? 3/13/98. "I told you so." yer mom was rite: sit up straight, eat good, keep a civil tongue; you only realize when you become a mom or dad 3/15/98. The constellations. I've never been able to see the shapes of the constellations, with the sole exception of the Big Dipper. None of the others look like they have the shapes people attribute to them. One of my passing interests in childhood was astronomy, but I gave it up when I couldn't "see" the constellations. I thought I had a defect. Now I think the other people do: they're suggestible. The stars are random, it's obvious. These people's minds are playing tricks on them. 3/18/98. I hope you're okay. Whatever happened to Colin's tutor from Andover, who was a teacher in the public school there, and was trying to start a private school? She was a Scientologist, which would usually have put me off, but she was cheerful and alert, and kind to Colin, and I liked her. She put up her home to finance the school she was trying to start. She was being manipulated by someone behind the scenes, who never appeared, and wasn't taking the risk. She couldn't answer the tough questions about financing and that sort of thing; I suspect the endeavor fell on its face. Too bad. She was a lovely human being. She loved kids, and teaching. 3/18/98. Paintball. Colin went to Jaeger's last night. Of all the places to play paintball, a cave has to be the niftiest. There's just something about a cave; it's why they set computer games, and Dungeons and Dragons, and Hack, underground. 3/29/98.French smokers. The affectation and self-consciousness that mar the French national character reach their apotheosis in the way they smoke. If you never meet a frog in person, and never travel there, watch a French movie and you'll see what I mean. They all smoke as if they are sending the message "it is I, in the act of smoking". There's nothing unself-conscious about it. Why the hell do they bother? Do they enjoy the idea, rather than the act? The poor French. Outside of sex and food (both admittedly important), they're completely clueless. They carry too much mental baggage; instead of the thing itself, they're like a Mandarin analyzing a classical poem for its allusions. It never seems to occur to them that anything might be an end in itself. Instead, every act has to have a theory behind it. The best example I've seen of this is in Solo Faces, where the author has a Frenchwoman ask the protoganist what the "philosophy" is behind his cheating on her. Since when do you have a philosophy behind sleeping with your woman's best friend? The man she asked the question of naturally didn't know how to answer; no one with a normal brain could answer, because the question was nonsense. The poor frogs. They're absolutely friggin' clueless. 4/13/98.Why I am not a Christian. Ministers sound insincere to me; the tone of voice when they are preaching is phony and puts me off. There are too many conundrums to the theology; the problem of evil is perhaps the most obvious: how can God be caring, people wonder, when a church gets hit by a tornado, and a porno bookstore is spared? The whole religion sounds like gibberish to me, anyway; there's too much jargon, especially when people are interpreting the Bible. In the end, it seems crystal clear to me that we live in an indifferent universe, and that the personal god of the monotheistic religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) simply doesn't exist. He's a comfort blanket. But the problem I'm left with is this: if it is impossible for me to accept these religions, as in fact it is, where do I find the basis for an ethical system? The best choice for me, Buddhism, seems rather weak in this respect. And it presents many of the same problems any other religion does: buying into theories for which there's no evidence, the usual gibberish discussions and contradictions any philosophy or theology leads to, and so on. And the idea of being reborn and suffering for millions of years is not a happy prospect. All that's left me is this bleakness: the knowledge of my own infinite insignificance, the First Noble Truth (life is suffering) without the remaining three, no hope of an afterlife, no hope of enlightenment, nothing but extinction at death. It could be worse, of course: I could believe in hell. 4/17/98.The plumage of our sexes. Among birds, the male is generally more colorful in order to attract females; many fish are like this, too. In general, I think, the gender that makes the choice of mate is less colorful. So we have to conclude that among humans, the male makes the choice - or did make the choice, for such a long time that he evolved to be the drab one. As a male, I like it that women are so glorious. They are endlessly interesting. 4/18/98.Spring. Redbud trees, Bradford pears, tulips; birds in breeding plumage; women in flimsy dresses. I live for this time of year. 4/20/98.Cats and dogs. Ignorant though I am on the subject, it seems to me that there's much less emphasis on breeding cats for specific personality characteristics and body types than there is on dogs. There don't seem to be any cat breeds comparable to the dog breeds like the Labrador or Shelty. These breeds of dogs love water (the Lab) and are so obsessed with herding that they'll try to herd cars (the Shelty). Nor is there anything comparable to the weird bodies some dogs have (the daschund comes to mind)- with the exception of hairless and tail-less cats. Cats are all pretty much the same, except for the length of their hair. Why is this? Is it because cats are less useful than dogs, and so are not bred for specific uses? Or because the love of dogs and the love of cats takes different forms - the love of dogs being, in many cases, more pragmatic. 4/21/98.Patience. Kindness is the supreme virtue, but patience is close behind. My life has been so tormented with impatience that is has prevented me from applying myself to anything, and accomplishing anything worthwhile, and it has ruined nearly every human relationship I've ever had. I wish I knew why every stimulus provokes that flash of impatience. I would do anything to get rid of that. 4/21/98.The two best smells in the world. An infant's scalp, and a new car. 4/21/98.Being tough, or being tender. People of my parents' age believe in putting on a brave front. They help other people by not showing their own pain. I'm really not sure how useful this is, but it's certainly better than the other extreme, in which you let it all hang out without a damn about how it affects other people. But there should be some way of showing your pain without imposing on everyone else and causing them discomfort. 4/22/98.Streets. Only 11 cars eastbound in front of the house in the 5 minutes bracketing the hour of 8 a.m. this morning. The traffic has dropped since they blocked off the west end of the street. In Wichita, though, we never had any, living at the end of a series of tee intersections, at the end of a cul-de-sac, and backing up on a wheat field. Beautiful silence. 4/23/98.Innocuousness. "If you can't say anything nice, don't say anything at all." Nonsense. How will anyone ever hear the truth? How will anything get better? Business and government would hose us, if the press didn't expose them. The same applies in our personal lives. Courtesy, yes; sweeping things under the rug, no. 4/26/98.Conundrum. There's nothing wrong with perfection. Is there? 4/26/98.Deafness. Somewhere I read that blindness cuts you off from things, and deafness cuts you off from people. It seemed true enough to me, at least from my childhood experience of deafness, but if I had to choose, I'd be deaf, not blind. The world of things is more important to me than the world of people. 4/28/98.The ascent of rock to orthodoxy. Rock (or "rock and roll", to use the archaic name) used to be something you listened to on AM radio in the car, and in your room - even trying to get stations from as far away as Oklahoma and Chicago at night. You bought 45s, and danced to it. Rock certainly didn't have critics who made their living off it, or TV channels devoted to it. It wasn't a religion. Now it's more than a religion: it's a universal orthodoxy for everyone in college and high school. You want to really rebel? Listen to something besides rock. Even your parents will think you're not normal. 4/28/98.Rhesus pieces. Scientists have just performed a head transplant between two rhesus monkeys. (I'm not making this up!) They haven't got the spinal cord right yet, so the monkeys are paralyzed. But I can see it coming already: some rich guy has a fatal disease, and someone else is brain-dead. So the rich guy with the fatal disease pays the brain-dead guy's family to let him take over the body. Frankenstein redux. Give it 5 to 10 years. If we don't outlaw it, it will happen. It may happen anyway. 4/28/98.A word of advice. I gave platelets today, for the second time. The first time wasn't bad, but this time I forgot to increase my calcium intake until just a few hours beforehand. My testicles tingled, my heart felt like it might dissolve, my kidneys felt pinched, I had little incipient spasms trying to start in my upper back muscles, my lips tingled, and the rest of it I've forgotten. The nurses gave me some Tums, but when I tried to eat them, my jaws hurt and felt like they were made of metal and locking at the hinge. Listen to Uncle Marc: take plenty of calcium, starting at least 24 hours beforehand. 4/28/98.Mind pollution. The loss of silence and space: 100 years ago, there were plenty of empty places, and there was no noise of internal combustion engines. Now you must go to Alaska. Even in the remote deserts, airplanes may fly over you. Everywhere you go, you are reminded of the presence of other people. How can you get to the great emptiness in which you forget man and remember his unimportance? We are destroying everything with our omnipresence, and we have begun to believe that we are apart from nature, not inside it, because everywhere we look, and every time we listen, there is something we have changed. But we have only changed it. We have never, and will never, create anything, because we can only use what is around us. All our artifacts, all our technology, everything we make and own and use, is nothing- nothing but a transformation of a world more enormous than we can imagine, which was given to us for free, and which we are destroying. 4/30/98.Piano competitions. How are piano competitions organized? Is it like a blind tasting, where the judges don't see the competitors? Is there an audience? 5/1/98.Confused at work this morning ... because I was trying to think about more than one thing at once. This is always a mistake; I'm barely capable of walking and chewing gum at the same time, much less figure out three different problems. Worse yet, I occasionally find myself forgetting the one thing I'm thinking about, right in the middle of thinking about it, although this problem was much more common in my attention-deficient youth. Best of all is not thinking about anything. That's a blissful state of mind. If you can call it that. 5/15/98.Droppin' your g's. It's lazy English, and a good-ole-boy affectation. 5/15/98.Children and books. How children interpret books is very different from the intrepretations those of us who have ready many books make. When Colin read "The Giver", for instance, a book that I myself had read not long before, he thought that the main character had found shelter and happiness at the end. But I had read many books that ended similarly, and I interpreted the ending to mean that the boy was dying, and that he reached the cabin only in his imagination. Adults read the symbols that children haven't learned yet. What saddens me is that our culture is fragmenting, and we are losing those signs. Maybe this is part of the reason for the lack of civility in public discourse - we simply don't understand each other any longer. There was a time when every literate adult knew the Bible and Shakespeare and a few other books, and they all understood the references to these. This is no longer true. What we have instead is a lowest common denominator from television shows and movies, and they are sadly debased. The hero never dies, for instance. The fictional conventions we use are pathetically lacking in complexity, and in applicability to our own lives. They have absolutely nothing to teach us, and may in fact be harming young people - for instance, by leading them to believe that violence can solve problems, and will go unpunished. If Hollywood rewrote "Macbeth", the queen would take the fall, and the king would go unpunished. 5/22/98.Screwing up. I hate it, hate it, hate it. Paid $300 too much for the new car because I looked at the wrong figure on one of the four bids. Words fail me. Inadequacy. 5/22/98.One day only. The car dealers have a special interest rate to get you into a new car the first day you show up on their lot. The health clubs have a special deal, if you sign up right now. Even the porn sites on the Internet (which I've seen strictly by accident, you understand) advertise free time if you sign up immediately. It's the universal sales scam. 5/25/98.The gunfight. Sitting on my front porch, reading a book. A young black guy came walking up the street and went into the apartment building across the street. A few minutes later he came out, arguing with four other young black guys, three of whom were shirtless; the fourth wore a silk suit. They stood in front of the building, laughing at the guy who had come to confront them. He left. A minute later, he came walking back, his arm held down, oddly stiff, at his side. He lifted that arm and started shooting at them. They all dived for the bushes except the guy in the suit, who now had a gun in his own hand and was firing back. I didn't stick around - dove inside and called 911. The police were there minutes later, but by then everyone had disappeared. The cops entered the building, shotguns at the ready, found no one, and left. They didn't make much of an effort to find anyone, because some time later the guy in the suit emerged, holding his shoulder and hunched over, moving slowly, and was helped into a car by one of his buddies. The other guy was hit, too, but had left before the police arrived. (Someone who lived down the block and witnessed the gunfight told me this.) I never found out whether either of those guys was tracked down by the police. I wonder how they had their wounds tended to, whether they had their wounds tended to. And what the hell the argument was about; pimping and territory, I suspect, given the traffic in and out of that building at the time: whores and johns. 5/28/98.Climate change. The climate of the past ten thousand years has exhibited unprecedented stability. This is the time period in which human civilization has developed. Could there be a causal relationship? For example, could stable climate have permitted us to develop farming, when earlier attempts failed because of cold or heat, or fluctuations in temperature? 6/3/98.Good and evil in art. Evil and unhappiness and pain are more interesting in books and movies than their opposites are - because they're more problematic. We don't have to come to terms with goodness and happiness. We do have to figure out how to handle evil and unhappiness. But this isn't the whole story. They're more exciting, too, for some other reason. 6/5/98.The wages of wage-earning. Why must having a job be mutually exclusive with having a life? There's never time to go anywhere and do anything interesting. I can't take any climbing trips, I can't travel around the Far East for 6 months at a time, I can't sail across the Pacific. Instead, I have to tend to getting a new car for my wife because some idiot in a pickup truck rammed her and totaled the old one, or getting my son to his various social functions. All this has to be fitted around work, which consumes way too much of my life. Anyone who has a full-time job in this country and thinks he still has a life is pathetically deluded, but as they say, ignorance is bliss. I've lived the other way, though, and I miss that way of life. Just to have a month's vacation a year, the way people do in Europe, would be a vast improvement. Anything. Anything but being stuck in this rut. 6/5/98.An American euphemism. If you read and listened to Americans, you'd think there's an upper-middle class in this country, but no upper class. No one wants to admit to being in the upper crust, but it isn't true. Our upper class is more of a meritocracy than most other countries, but it exists. It is a fact, and we are hypocrites to deny it. 6/14/98.Old families. This whole idea of so-called "old" families confuses me. There's not a one of us whose ancestors don't go back beyond the Stone Age. Claiming blue blood because of a family name or family prestige is an illusion. Go back far enough, and you'll find the crook who founded the family, or some scoundrel who preceded him. No one has any better ancestry than anyone else. This is simply one way people can feel superior, as long as they don't think the matter through. 6/16/98.Math. The main appeal of math for me was its beauty. There was a compulsive fascination about working things out, and seeing how they fit. I didn't just do the calculus problems assigned; I did, or tried, them all - every problem in the book. But then, like everything else, it lost its fascination. It seemed that the further I went with it, the messier it got. Diff. eq. was cookbook, so I dropped it the first week. Statistics doesn't even rate as math. Abstract algebra was like machinery; it was just a bag of tricks void of meaning. Analysis was repulsive. The most beautiful thing, above everything else, was number theory. God it was lovely. But it wasn't enough. I finally lost interest. 6/16/98.Fat asses. I notice that a much higher proportion of teenage girls have fat asses now than when I was a teen. The statistic that kids are getting fatter is true, at least from personal observation. 6/17/98.The economy. Everything to do with the economy baffles me - the cyclical nature of the business cycle, its unpredictability, what could be called the insubstantiality of it. I haven't been able to learn anything from observation, either, since most people seem to have jobs that consist largely of busywork on matters that are no import to anyone. The economy seems to boil down to this: we're all just taking in each other's washing. Still, this doesn't explain how the economy expands. I give up. They left out the economics gene when I was conceived. 7/3/98.And speaking of conceived... On the radio show "This American Life", a girl asked her father where she'd been conceived. I can't imagine a less interesting question. 7/3/98.Bliss. I've lost it; it never happens to me any more, just looking at a beautiful scene, or having a wonderful day. What happened? 7/3/98.Death of the insects. Stopped by Mom's tonight on my way home. We were talking about the damage we're doing the planet. She pointed out that you rarely see butterflies these days, except an occasional monarch. And the bees are gone. And the lightning bugs are only a fraction as many as when I was a kid. Yes, it's true. And most people haven't even noticed. 7/3/98.Trees. The last lecture at Linda Hall, the speaker mentioned that scientists haven't figured out where 25% of the extra carbon we're pouring into the atmosphere is going. It seems to me that the trees are growing faster. It would be easy to check this - do some corings. A research project that's brain-dead-simple. Hey, you out there! Do I have to send you an engraved invitation? Do it, man. 7/29/98.Ideas to investigate. The relationship between the monotheism of Akhenaten and that of the Jews - did one influence the other? Wasn't it the Egypt of Akhenaten from which Moses led his people? It would be ironic if the religions of the West, which sprang from Judaism, were partly a legacy of that freak Akhenaten, the man whom Freud called the first individual in history... Also, the idea of the master race and the chosen people: did Hitler hate the Jews because they claimed to be the chosen ones, and he believed that the Germans were? Is it even possible that he stole the idea of the chosen people from the Jews, transferred it to his own people, and tried to exterminate the originators of the idea in order to erase the discomfort of his theft, and to remove the other contender? |