More Die of Heartbreak

Yeah, it's been a while. A couple times I almost came back and tried to write something, but then The Fear would stop me. It's been so long, what if I can't pull it out anymore? What if I suck? My mind is a blank, what will I write?

Well, I'm tired of caring, so I'm just gonna wing it.

A warrior lyricist of my acquaintance had recent cause to lament an urban development project that threatens a bit of cherished childhood (or at any rate post-adolescent) real estate. I often hear her wax nostalgic, but more often for some aspect of "the good old days", rather than for any specific childhood memory or experience. Or maybe I'm just not listening. Salome, veiled, dances with Mnemosene, and all memory becomes art.

Once in a while, though, some tantalizing glimpse of previous lives (of which I am sworn never to speak) is revealed in a gap between the shifting veils, and I collage it in with the various other pieces in hopes of constructing a coherent whole. Living in an abandoned office building? Now where did I put my pencil...

And That Makes Me Think Of:

Isn't it funny when you go to some reunion, and look around at all the people you went to high school with, and realize how much they've all changed? There's a real cognitive dissonance there, seeing the balding, overweight forty-something guy in front of you, and trying to reconcile him with the captain of the football team, lady's man extraordinaire, who used to steal your girlfriend and shut you in your locker. You have a view of both ends of a story arc, when most people see either one end (current coworkers), or the whole thing (family members). But there's a middle piece missing.

Everyone has changed, you think.

Everyone but me. I'm the same.

So, with time, people change (duh). And this phenomena is symmetrical. What that means to me, I guess, is that your new best friend, who you've known for a couple years maybe, was a very different person way-back-when. Maybe not a person you would look twice at. Or dangle a participle in front of.

Hey, I didn't say it would make sense. I said I was winging it.

A Slice of Cliché

"MORE!", I hear you scream, as we crest this foothill on our climb to the peaks of math-metaphor ecstasy. Let us then ponder the infinite, O willing and supple pupil:

The constant pi, denoted π, is defined as the ratio of a circle's circumference C to its diameter d. You probably already knew that.

But pi turns up in a surprising number of places. It rears its head in the cosmological constant, Heisenberg's uncertainty principal, Einstein's field equation of general relativity, Coulomb's law of electrical force, the Magnetic permeability of free space, and Kepler's third law, to name a few.

As a whimsical example, imagine that you are shackled to a cold iron rack, in the cellar of a madman's château, watching a razor-sharp pendulum scythe through the air above your helpless nubile body. The evil Count asks only that you answer one question, and he will set you loose:

"Posit an infinite rectangular lattice of perfect 1-Ohm resistors, just so:


Calculate the resistance R between two nodes in the grid. To one node", cackles the Count, "we will arbitrarily assign the coordinates (0,0). In this coordinate system, the other node lies at (1,2). With each swing of the pendulum, my dear, my revenge draws ever closer."

Well it turns out that there's a whole branch of mathematics devoted to this sort of thing (natch), but the bottom line is this head-scratcher:


Where R is the resistance between the origin node, and the node described by coordinates (m,n). See the pi? No? Well for our current example of (m,n) at (1,2), it all reduces to this:


And so pi has reduced the infinite to an easily solvable, finite-boundary solution space. Well, "easily solvable" is relative here, I guess. I certainly don't understand a word of it.

What I do understand, though, is that here is a number with its hand in the infinite. The digits of pi basically extend on forever, a number with no end. Pi, like beauty, truth, identity and enlightenment, is ever incomplete, ever approximate. It has a head, but no tail. A starving ouroboros.

How sad.

The good news, though, is that it perfectly embodies proof of the human mind's ability to abstract the infinite. Oh sure, there will always be a bunch of literal-minded diehards trying to calculate pi to the umpty-billionth digit, to kill the magic, but the majority of non-insane individuals are capable of reducing it to a symbolic representation of that ratio, and to use the gestalt π as a placeholder for all the strange concepts it represents.

And now there's one more.

Mathemetaphor

There are a number of interesting (to me) opportunities for parallel between the pure abstract world of Mathematics, and the messy, sensual worlds of philosophy, art and thought. Like all parallels, they tend to converge toward infinity. Of course we can't just jump right into this feast of parallax without building up to it with a little digestif. So, by way of a cheese platter (and there may be some olives in there as well):

A Sierpinski Gasket is a type of ternary Cantor set, or self-similar set. It is constructed by taking a triangle, removing a triangle-shaped piece out of the middle, then doing the same for the remaining pieces, and so on and so forth, like so:



The result – if an infinite series can be said to have a result – is a pattern of infinite boundary, and zero area. This totally counter-intuitive concept is poetry in itself. To imagine that by recursive Swiss-cheesing, we can arrive at the Infinite, not by adding to the whole, in the gluttonous, possessive fashion of current North American consumerism, but by taking away, after the fashion of Francis of Assisi, Buddha, the Jain Dharmists:

"Trees renounce fruit and keep us alive. The mountains cast away stones and pebbles, which we use for our works and art. One should renounce worldly possessions devotedly within one's power (shaktistyaga)."

Hey. I'm not saying I'm ready to give up my iPod. This is all merely by way of illustrating that the path to enlightenment is multifold. There are many trail heads (We'll talk about Pi next time), and some of these lie outside the province of our personal expertise.

If you're catching what I'm pitching, throw it back in the comments.

The Case For Case

What the hell is up with the ee cummings orthography? No capitalization, no punctuation. Do you think that makes you an artist? And how is that better than PEOPLE WHO SHOUT ALL THE TIME BY TYPING IN ALL-CAPS? Why is one acceptable, and the other, not?

Still, I guess if your muse is so controlling as to dictate the use of capitalization and punctuation, then you must obey. But just be aware that everyone else thinks you're an ee cummings rip-off douchebag. It is distracting, and detracts from whatever otherwise uplifting prose you might produce.

I mean, seriously, Why not Ezra Pound, or Robert Frost?

At The Pump

Did you ever play with Silly Putty™ as a kid? Silly Putty is a bizarre polymer, and seems to like switching back and forth from gooey almost-liquid to bouncy almost-solid. But like most polymers, it has a transition temperature at which its physical properties change. In this case, there is a glass transition temperature T_g, below which Silly Putty will behave like glass, and shatter instead of squishing.

Often, the viscoelastic properties of polymers have a rate dependence, and this is the case with Silly Putty. Do the same amount of work over a shorter period of time -- say, hit it with a hammer instead of squishing it between your butt cheeks -- and Silly Putty behaves as if its T_g has been raised. It'll blow into a million pink bits. Don't get it in your hair.

Another cool thing you can do with Silly Putty is squish it onto a comic book or a newspaper, and a ghostly reproduction of the image will be transferred onto the Putty. If you squish it around for a bit, the image will appear to dissolve, but your Putty is a little less pink now. Do this enough times and it'll turn an ugly shade of gray.

Silly putty also bounces, stretches and flows. It is very resilient.

So with all of these wonderful, seemingly magical properties, Silly Putty seems to me to be the perfect metaphor for ... something. But what?

Lost In Translation

On our way back up to work from coffee today, Ironman and I were forced to circumnavigate an inconveniently parked Canada Post truck. Ironman was vocal in his condemnation of the mailman's parking skills. I suggested we should write an angry letter.

A ridiculous conversation followed: how, exactly, would one address a letter destined for the actual postal service? I proposed (probably incorrectly), that you could probably just leave the address off entirely, and assume that it would find its way. During the short elevator ride, we were unable to satisfactorily resolve this thorny dilemma. Ironman, to me: "You should blog about it".

And here we are.

There's something "meta" about addressing a correspondence to the very entity responsible for the delivery of said correspondence. From one point of view, it's as simple as tipping the paperboy, acknowledging the existence of the physical machinery responsible for the abstract concept of "delivery". From another, it's one example of a self-referential meta-psychosymbolism that informs all human language and thought. And guess which of these points of view we will be discussing?

It's pretty widely accepted that language plays a pivotal role in the healthy neurophysiological development of the human brain, particularly in childhood. Stories about children raised by dogs, or abandoned to their own devices from the age of three, never fail to include a chapter on the shocking underdevelopment of various essential brain functions. Language teaches us to think, and vice-versa. But only to a point.

We use language to describe things, and in so doing, create our own personal symbolic dictionaries for dealing with concepts. Semantically, the word "rock" is not a rock, nor does it describe or refer to a particular physical rock. It triggers instead a chain of recursive psycho-symbolic dereferentiation that eventually unravels into a semantic symbol of "rock"-ness. And that mental image somehow stands in for all the rocks in the universe, or at least those we can perceive.

It is almost ridiculously simple for the human mind to construct a psycho-semantic representation of concepts like "infinity", or "everything". I mean, you can't actually conceive of all the physical objects, or actions, or concepts that fall under the umbrella of "everything", at least not as easily as "rock". But language, and the semantic associations it invokes and informs, is crucial to our ability to describe the concept that describes the indescribable.

Everything is basically meta data, describing other meta data, along an inferential chain of semantic associations, that end in a sort of shorthand notation for the world around us. In computer languages, this chain is finite, ending with "machine-language" instructions that interact with the actual, physical hardware of the machine. This simplicity is sacrificed in the human brain, in favor of the capability for higher thought.

Rather than a "chain", think of an infinitely branching "tree" of associations. While your brain is busy translating the word "rock" into the mental symbol it's meant to represent, it will apply the semantic value of the word, the pragmatic value of the context in which the word is used, the syntax, or structure of the inter-relation of other symbols used in the context, and a bunch of other stuff I barely understand. And through the application of all of these contextual signifiers, will prune the tree for the possible meanings of "rock" into the one symbol that makes sense.

When this mechanism breaks, as in Aphasia or some other cognitive disorder, it basically breaks language. A stroke victim, unable to communicate, may or may not still be able to understand "rock". May or may not lose the capability for abstract thought, the very capability that was created using the scaffolding of language.

If it's possible to address our mailman's callous disregard for parking etiquette by writing a letter to Canada Post, then it follows that we can fix a broken mind by communicating with it. This can be tricky, like arson at the Fire Department, when the part of your brain responsible for communication is the part that's broken. Imagine the effectiveness, in this scenario, of a language based on smell, or temperature, or light.

It does not follow that it's possible to break a healthy mind by withholding meaningful communication, though it would be fun to try.

And now I'm bored of this (I can only imagine how you must feel), so in conclusion,

Dear Canada Post,
Please don't park on my fucking sidewalk.
Sincerely,
A concerned citizen.

Secrets I Keep From Myself

Sometimes, when I'm bored, I pick my nose. But I don't eat it. That's just gross.

When I smoke in the rain, I get the hiccups.

The other day, Indira (a lovely woman, who ends all her emails with "have a wonderful day") signed an office-wide email with her job title as "Human Ressources Coordinator". For some reason, I still don't really know why, I thought this misspelling was funny, and somehow ironic. I should instead have taken it as a sign of her humanity, and therefore her suitability for the post.

Boxer is right. I'm a total misanthrope.

Victoria's "Secret" is that her brassieres and panties don't look like that on all women. Or me.

More and more, the things I hate the most about other people are usually the things I dislike about myself. Okay, maybe this isn't some mind-altering revelation to you, but still.

No one in the office knows that I have pierced nipples, including me.

I don't get modern art. Or most poetry. Or Wi-Fi. Or how my car works. I don't get a lot of things, actually.

Son has total power over me, and I don't mind. Does that make me a bad father?

All the thoughts I have, that I thought were original, aren't really. Including this one.

I used to say "This too shall pass", but after a while I stopped saying it.

Molly Haskell said: "For a woman, there's nothing more erotic than being understood." ... I wonder what the hell she was talking about.

The short answer to "What the hell is wrong with me?" is: "I can't afford therapy".

Now Cluck Like a Chicken

When you've figured it out, when the little light goes on in your head, you will experience a revelation so profound that you will void your bowels -- literally shit yourself -- in ecstasy. You can thank me later. Preferably from some distance downwind.

Get your tin-foil hats, chillun', it's time for Krazy Konspiracy Korner! This week: Is your government developing a Top-Secret mind control device? Docile, cow-like civilians? Credulous voters? Infotainment standing in for Journalism?

Okay, but time out. If you're seriously not scared or angry at the thought of a human brain being controlled remotely, then it could be this prototype of mine is finally starting to work. Now take off your top.

This year, for Halloween, I will attire myself as the abstract concept of Evil. What do you think that looks like? Devil horns, perhaps? Maybe some kind of Snake-man? Whatever it is, it'll probably involve a briefcase. Ayn Rand wrote: "To discuss evil, in a manner implying neutrality, is to sanction evil."

Although I notice that she never actually comes right out and says that this is wrong.

I plan on losing to "The Human Condom" at the office costume contest. What man could look back on his life and call it complete without at least one humiliation at the hands of a giant prophylactic? Reminds me of my bachelor party. Ah, Good times.

So every morning now, I throw open my window and make love to the world. Not literally of course -- not since the court order -- but my humors are, for the moment, in equilibrium, thanks to a generous course of caffeinated beverages and age-inappropriate candy. Happy Halloween, victims! And always remember: Half the time, manic-depressives feel better than you or I could possibly imagine.

Also, if you wake up in the middle of the night, and I'm standing over your bed, go back to sleep. I'm just playing "Dracula".

Blue Skies and Brittle Smiles

So here we are, in the throes of Indian Native-American Summer. Neither lazy autumn, nor fully a return to the halcyon summer, and about as far from the bitter, frozen, whistling wasteland of a Montreal winter as it's possible to get. It's warm enough for shorts and sandals, but I've decided to spare you the sight of my winter-pallid legs, and hobbit-hairy toes. You can thank me later.

Much discussion of late, with IronMan (among others) on the art of small-h-happiness, the merits of trees over forests, and What, O What, Does It All Mean, Really? Heady stuff indeed, but the final syrupy essence is that: a) you can't just wait for happiness to happen. b) Big-H-Happiness, the meaning of life, the one thing that will just complete your existence here on Earth? That doesn't exist. So c) You have to cobble it together out of smaller pieces.

Big-H-Happiness is Enlightenment is Nirvana is Truth is Beauty is Meaning is God is The Soul. This is the thing those little monks in the orange robes spend their not-inconsiderable lifespans pondering. Once in a thousand years, a "living Buddha" achieves perfect enlightenment, and let's face it, you're not him.

Small-h-happiness is Autumn colors (or in Boxer's case, shoveling your sidewalk. Freak), is hugging your child, is finishing a Sudoku, is watching cartoons, is riding bikes, is dinner with friends, is making love. These small joys are pretty much within reach for all of us, and they add up to... Something. Probably something pretty good.

Our consumerist society teaches us from a young age that rarity equals value. Gold is worth much more than salt, by reason of its rarity. We are taught that "common" things, commodities, have little or no unit value. And so it's perhaps made a little easier to commoditize the small-h, and to always be looking for the magic bullet of enlightenment. And of course I, prey to all the foibles of the human condition, fall for this trap every time.

We are so busy looking for the forest, that we fail to see the trees. So obsessed with the Big Picture, that we ignore the magic of those tiny pixels of which it is composed. Eyes always on the horizon, we trip on the the artifacts of our missed opportunities. Searching for le mot juste, we write a bunch of crap and overstate our case.

Any conversation on this topic with IronMan usually ends with a half-joking resolution to Lower Expectations. "If you're not satisfied, lower your expectations until you are". Then we laugh. But there's many a true word spoken in jest. Narrow the scope. Lower Expectations. Don't look over there, look right here. Stop waiting.

Today we talked a bit about Boxer (yes, Leila, we talk about you when you're not around. Aren't you appalled?). How the hell does she do it? She's always so damn happy (or at least she fakes it convincingly). Boxer smiles, even when she's crying, which is tough to pull off.

Not that I cry.

You know, being a guy and all.

StumbleUpon

Bertrand Russel once said that the point of philosophy is to start from something so simple as to not be worth stating, and to end with something so paradoxical that no one will believe it. In Plato's Meno, the title character asks Socrates "How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?" In other words, how can you know that you've arrived at the truth, when you don't know what the truth is?

Socrates runs circles around Meno, suggesting that by this logic, man cannot search for that which he knows, because he already knows it, nor for what he doesn't know, because he wouldn't know what he was looking for. Of course, this is the dumbest thing EVER, and so Meno, duly chastened, shuts his uninformed trap.

Personally, I'm of the opinion that the most rewarding way to arrive at an unknown truth is to trip over it in the dark, while on the way to the fridge for a midnight snack. Usually there is a sufficiently loud noise, as of a small plastic McDonald's toy being crushed by a grown man's bare foot, possibly a chair falling over. Some quiet but earnest swearing may also erupt.

More often, though, I resort to the "There is no absolute truth, and therefore to explore the nature of the Known or Unknown is ultimately without reward, so let's just watch Survivor."

This morning as I was leaving the house, Son gave me a big hug and said "I very love you, Daddy".

So cute.

Behold This, Biatch

Keats says "Beauty is truth, truth beauty, that is all ye know on earth, and all ye need to know". Keats, in many ways, was a genius. In many other ways his stuff is utter, utter shite. The same can be said of most of us. Literary deconstructionists and philosopher pedants like myself will try to put one over on you by suggesting that The Truth Can Sometimes Be Harsh And Disturbing, So How Is That Beautiful, eh Smart Guy?

By way of riposte, allow me to arm you, not with any real ammunition, but something that makes a loud noise and bright light, enough to distract these assailants while you escape via carefully pre-planted neologism. Just as there is no Objective Beauty, there is no Absolute Truth. While it's quite the leap to suggest that this mere coincidence implies equality, at least in this, they are equal abstracts, convenient placeholders for whatever the hell it is we were just talking about.

Ooh Look! Something shiny!

I spent a thoroughly delightful evening in the company of the League of Overachievers last night, "swilling wine with willing swine", as it were, and came away with that warm, fuzzy, light-hearted feeling that has been all too rare lately. Boxer, IronMan and Directrix were all there, along with Boxer's Big Kid (probationary League intern). Of course I dazzled with my usual charm, wit, charisma and bonhomie (or at least drank enough wine to convince myself of my own charm, wit and charisma. The bonhomie, I still maintain, was genuine).

Of such an intensity was the awesomeness, that at times I cried tears of joy, and where my tears fell, tiny white flowers blossomed. Until around 2:00 AM, when I cried tears of intense peptic discomfort as all the wine I had downed wreaked it's tanniny revenge.

So, for lack of a feast, my brain has baked us a couple of Welsh rarebits:

1. Clichés should be avoided like the plague.
2. Speed Dating vs. Carbon Dating: Discuss.
3. The trick with Midget Porn is to watch it on a really big TV. Then it's just like regular porn.
4. Did you know that the word "gullible" is not in the dictionary? ("Oh no", you will say, astute reader, "I'm not falling for that one. Everyone knows there's no such thing as a dictionary!")
5. Yes, I sometimes have stubble. Does it make you want to kiss me any less? No? Then what's the problem?
6. I wonder if they have Methadone clinics, but for boobs? I'm totally addicted to boobs.

Next time: Stay tuned, victim! Is that...doggerel?

Probably not, actually.

Extraterresticles

This one thing I did once, was I used to be a member of this dinky theatre company that put on plays in church halls. Loads of fun? Check. Chance to play dress-up? Roger that. More gay than a Liberace pool party? Right on. And, like everyone else, I'm sure, I briefly entertained fantasies of doing it for a living.

I longed to be one of those wide-eyed Minnesota girls, fresh off the bus to L.A., waiting to be discovered, but eventually chewed up and spit out by the pornography industry, a used-up husk of a beef-jerky-skinned relic, a caricature of lost innocence In A World Gone Mad. It was not to be, alas, but really, every job is an acting job, when you're expected to act like you give a shit.

The ability to laugh at myself, and, more importantly, everyone else, is the chief counter-argument to my Universal Disqualification theory. After all, laughter is the best medicine (unless you're a Christian Scientist. Then it's pretty much the only medicine you've got).

On the subject of medicine, Son spent last week in hospital, recovering from pneumonia. For a four-year-old (and his parents) this is a Big Deal. Wife never left his side, despite my attempts to convince her, except to go home for the occasional shower. So I spent a large part of last week visiting him, trying to keep him from getting bored with the hospital's meager selection of DVDs and toys.

At some point, his Yaya promised him a scooter, once again making the mistake of thinking that he'd forget all about it once the fever broke. Now, between doses of banana-flavored antibiotics, all the considerable bandwidth of his age-appropriate attention span is focused with monomaniacal intensity on the eventual fulfillment of this promise. The Scooter is forever just beyond the horizon, beckoning, beguiling, tempting. He cannot look away.

Things at work proceed apace. The recent layoffs of key personnel have been closely followed by the resignation of Dr. Dee, who has been an inspiration and father-figure to me during the last four years at Company. His kind but firm management style will be missed, and Doc, if you're reading this, I'm crying on the inside. Really.

Since Boxer was punted, a little over a year ago, it has become a rough and calloused province of my heart that receives this type of news, and so the emotional impact is somewhat diminished. But it's still like losing a member of the family. And now we wait for the inevitable organizational fallout, the hit to employee moral, the uncertainty, and the exodus.

Once you've been through this a couple of times, it almost becomes a pattern, like chapters in the old testament, or the five stages of grief, specific quadrants through which the wheel of our stationary cycle must turn, in order to rise once again to some functional mark. Which reminds me:

The Roman philosopher Boethius, one small constellation in the night sky of the Dark Ages, re-popularized the concept of the Rota Fortuna, or Fortune's Wheel. The basic concept is that Fortuna, goddess of fate, spins this wheel, bringing some fortune, and others grief, according to her whim. Boethius warns against the attempts on the part of foolish mortals to stay the movement of this wheel, for "if Fortune begin to stay still, she is no longer Fortune."

In other words, don't try to change your fate, because that's not the natural order of things. This was a convenient and popular message at the time. Peasants were absolved of any responsibility for their own misery, and kings and nobles got the message out to the proles that "hey, this is your lot in life. Suck it up." I'm a lazy, lazy fucker, so this whole "Fortune's Wheel" philosophy is pretty cool with me.

Philosophy being what it is (ie: a load of bunk), this message has largely been lost to the age of reason. Fortunately for long-buried Roman philosophers, we are poised once again to enter a new Dark Age of the mind, and the resurgence of all this old claptrap is nigh. Keep in line, don't bring water on the plane, don't make a fuss, and whatever you do, don't make eye contact. and if you end up in Gitmo, well it's just plain bad luck.

But fascist governments aren't the only trend governed by this cyclical pattern. The emotional health of any individual, or Company, can be brought high or low just as arbitrarily. And no amount of banana-flavored antibiotics will help.

I wanted to insert some horrible metaphor about "buying a vowel", but I can't be bothered.