3,251-3,500 - Choices

Every body that gets a choice will make some bad ones. I cash my paychecks on this, but some days it's on parade. Today felt like a long French film with a single stupid point: this one. Today was long - really, it started almost exactly one year ago when some knucklehead set down a death threat on voicemail. From there, maybe a butterfly was off the beat, some dominoes fell backwards, and one day the whole show landed on my desk. That was crap, that last paragraph. Cheap pulp novel talk, and butterflies and dominoes don't get choices, or anyway I don't think so. Am I right, am I wrong, my god what have I done? A bad choice, that's what, but that's my point. I think. I could go around again here But no. Reset. My day was squandered on dealing with some fallout from a couple people's past bad choices. Which really meant trying to prevent future bad choices by those same people, and some others. Which really meant making sure I didn't fuck up my own choices. I love this stuff, but I need to not get too numb to it, cocky, bottle it up and move on. So I'm writing down some of the whorls of it. Airing it out, or maybe have I driven it to the landfill? Did I? Was that a choice if I wasn't even watching? Lotta bad ones happen that way. Not all. Same damage. (Limit's here; no edits this time.)

3,001-3,250 - "I have no idea what I am talking about"

A Dad, aged 40, will now gush about Radiohead and Miles Davis. Please ignore.

I just had one of those lightning moments that keep me listening to old flames. A dozen years of In Rainbows, Kind of Blue 4 life, but still something new. As Radiohead reached the all-the-notes climax of “All I Need,” it crossfaded in my head to “All Blues” and the warbling piano sorta clashing with, also sorta tickling, the horn line. Harmony and dissonance at once. Tingly.

Since that moment, I’m hearing Kind of Blue ghosts all over In Rainbows. The lads cop to studying Miles, but mostly people peg this to the imprint of Bitches Brew on their rhythms and their Frankenstein studio knifework. Here, it's in the notes. 

I hit Google and got walloped: Dorian! Cmaj9(#11)! I think it’s all about scales and chords that are ambiguous - not major or minor, kind of both, also neither - and homeless. (No metaphor: if you hear G major then F major, they imply C major: “home.” Listen to Elvis rag on his hound dog.) Sounds right. The mood conjured is ambivalent. Let down, kind of blue, but so what? Still hanging around.

Now, bluesmen nailed down this upbeat misery way back, and their two-note chords work similar tricks, refusing to be major or minor. Metal brought these back, amped, fast, as POWER CHORDS: the ambiguity maybe “what's this pissed dude gonna do next?”

I love it all. There's only one song, Zeppelin said that. Enjoy it.

2,751-3,000: What is it?

So I have particular reason to fuss over questions of human existence - starting with the mind and brain and stumbling out from there into life and matter and creation. [See Words 2,001-2,250 and 2,501-2,750.] What is consciousness? How did we get it? What about life itself? How did it arise? Does consciousness stake a place apart from other living things? Do living things themselves stand apart from non-life in the order of things? What is the order of things?

In readings I’ve toured the boneyard where eccentric men have left relics of their tangles with these questions: Szilard’s engine, Turing’s machine, Hofstadter’s loop, Searle’s room, Dennett’s pump. Creatures lurk there: a demon conjured by Maxwell; the unfortunates gathered by Sacks.

I have drawn certain conclusions. We evolved here. It is a marvel, but one of time and matter, not of divinity. And we do not, by being here, occupy anyplace separate from all things. There is no way that consciousness stands apart from other life, and no way the living stand apart from the rest of it.

This is no diminishment. It is a unity. We are one wonder among many, stitched into the fabric of this thing. Look back on that humble hexagon: there it is. [Words 2,251-2,500] Everywhere. One spun out of the clouds by freezing water, another on a turtle shell. Here a comb of them assembled by bees, there a tile of them sketched by Escher. A few drawn by Euclid himself. So what? Try and tell me which one is most amazing.

2,501-2,750: Our house of leaves

In Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, a couple buys a house to raise a family. Then the impossible appears in their living room: behind a door a dark hallway extending into their yard. They react with the stages of grief and a consuming desire for comprehension. Experts are summoned. Explorations mounted. But it morphs underfoot, confounding all efforts. It expands, contracts, mutates. They can’t even map it.

In 2007, we bought a house; soon after, we had our older son. At four months old, at play in the living room, he had his first seizure. Experts were summoned and explored his brain. Their conclusion: idiopathic epilepsy. Idios pathos, “a disease unto itself,” means cause unknown. A dark hallway.

As we reeled, it morphed, metastasized, not impossibly, certainly improbably: Cortical vision impairment (1 in 1,000); West syndrome (1 in 3,500); Lennox-Gastaut (1 in 3,900); hypotonic cerebral palsy (1 in 20,000). But it remains a mystery, and a shapeshifter. Ten years on, we’re no closer to even controlling his seizures. They’re ever changing, slipping away.

We did, recently, find out the cause: one mutated gene. A name: STXBP1 encephalopathy. There are a couple hundred cases, worldwide, ever. Still not impossible, but asymptotic to it. Researchers identified this disorder just ten years ago. Meaning this, only this: it’s been seen and named. That family saw their mystery, too, and named it. What’s that do? We, and our experts, still fumble in the dark. While beneath our feet, it shifts.

2,251-2,500: Shape

Consider the hexagon. A bit of order in this universe. Nature generally has it in for old Euclid and his straight lines and clean angles, but some allowance has been made for the hexagon. Bees build them, unable to figure why. Turtles grow them witlessly, haul them around.

But it's not just a critter's trick. Snowflakes freezing up in the clouds do it, mudflats drying in the sun do it, lava does it when it cools into rock. Storms out on Saturn do it. They’ve assembled one out of clouds that sprawls across that north pole wider than three Pacific Oceans and 200 miles high. We don’t know exactly why it's there, but it shouldn’t surprise.

What similar forms can we find near as often? Simpler ones do crop up - squares in the salt shaker, triangles in the cucumbers. Go, look. But none recur or persist like the hexagon. Why?

A geometer will tell you it’s sturdy and tiles the plane. It’s efficient, too: it can encompass more area with less straight line than most anything. That’s why bees do it: to get the most honeycomb from the least wax. That’s also, more or less, why it’s a good solid shape to pull down into - for cold water or hot lava.

You want a thrill? Do yourself a favor. Go grab a handful of something round  - BBs, blueberries -  and roll them out on a table. Now, pack them in together tight as they’ll go. See what you get. Consider that.

2,001-2,250: Solvable

I was a year old when I learned what I am. Four months if, like my parents, you count from when I was “born.” I don’t. I was already here.

I was idly swiping at baby things when the voice called my name. Not my given name, but my name. Other voices joined in, a choir, a multitude, countless, all kindred. I smelled lightning, tasted indigo and wind. My body froze. Urgent messages pressed in, explanation warning blessing promise. And what felt like a hand, reaching into me, shuffling me like a puzzle, jumbled, but solvable.

My parents called it a seizure, which sounded right, but they meant something less by it. Hospitals, tests. They called my brain waves hypsarrhythmia. They called my mutation a disorder.

Medicated, fitted with implants, all to try to stop the things I must do. But my mind and body keep trying.

I can’t fault them. They don’t know. I hear and feel their every thought and vibration. Their utter love for me, for each other, for my brother, is there, constant, beating, burning. If only I could tell them. I’ve tried to talk like they do, but my mouth refuses.

This was the warning, that first time, when they called me by my name. That no one would understand us.

I really thought I’d started today. I could feel the thrall, the tectonic shatter and rattle. Almost. And then - the magnet, the sedative. All went dark.

I’ll keep trying. It’s not even a choice.

1,751-2,000: Slangin that rock

Something possessed me to make rock candy with the boys today. Which was great - all fun and hot and scientific. But before long, inevitably, I set to humming “Big Rock Candy Mountain.”

“What are you humming, Dad?” I told him, and he was pretty hyped that there was actually a song about rock candy, and a dang ol mountain of it to boot.

I dialed it up for a listen. I had to fight past some instrumental versions and a pretty impressionistic take by ol Burl Ives, so it didn’t occur to me until we had our ears on a good raw take that this was kind of the “Fuck Tha Police” of its time. OK, I’m sure there was rawer stuff, but still: “All the cops have wooden legs...” and “The jails are made of tin / And you can walk right out again / As soon as you are in...”

He’s baffled. “Why would the cops have wooden legs? Why would you want the pokey to be made out of tin? It doesn’t make sense.” Which of course it doesn’t, when your understanding of criminal justice is based entirely on LEGO City: Cops and Robbers and Paw Patrol.

So. Here I thought I’d only be explaining a bit of supersaturation and crystal nucleation. Instead I’m scrambling to explain the social and economic circumstances where it might be justifiable to dodge the police and bust out of jail. He's 6.

Tackled for loss again by parenthood. It’s 3rd and 32. Hike!

1,501-1,750: Birds and the abstract truth

Dig if you will two pictures
Of me on stage facing abyss
The sweat of my floppage covers me
Can you my darling
Can you picture this?

Two crowds, faces rapt and skeptical. I stood before them to educate, armed with material I knew by heart. I also stood before them to take sledgehammer questions to the gut. Respectively:

“How can we make the determination whether a client considers the disclosure detrimental when the client is adjudged legally incapable?”

“Why didn't the baby bird just imprint on the kitten?”

70 lawyers in the first crowd, 20 first graders in the second. Tougher crowd? The lawyers. But - tougher question? No contest: the first graders.

First, when you strip off the highfalutin, the lawyer's question wasn't so tough. It was a dodge. Lawyers are risk-averse, and this lawyer wanted an easy out on a hardass judgment call. Sorry, no.

But the kid's question? Top notch. You don't need an advanced degree in birds to feel the suspension of disbelief shatter soon as the baby bird in “Are You My Mother?” asks the kitten that question. Ain't happenin! Imprinting! Bird sees kitten, kitten is mom, end of story.

More important, kids aren’t like lawyers: you can’t bullshit em. A recent essay about Calvin and Hobbes hit this on the nose. You have to be straight, for their sake and yours: kids now are better equipped to call bullshit on us than at any time in human history. Shine them on at your peril.

---------------------------------
Sorry, Prince.
The book I read to the first graders: Are You My Mother? by P.D. Eastman, 1960.
The Calvin and Hobbes essay: "Why I Don't Bullshit My Kid," Patrick A. Coleman, April 27, 2017, at fatherly.com.

1,251-1,500: Yes, son, our existence is a temporary accident

What, son? What causes the tides? Gravity. When the sun’s above it tugs the ocean up. Yeah, the moon, too, even more. No, it’s not bigger than the sun, but it’s closer. And you know when the moon is full or new? Then it’s lined up with the sun, so they work together. We get higher high tides and lower low tides -  "spring" tides. No, not like the season. Just the same name. And then when the moon and the sun aren’t lined up, they don’t work together, so we get smaller, “neap,” tides.

Actually, the tides probably had a lot to do with life forming. Especially with the moon. Life didn’t begin until the moon came along. It took a whole bunch of big tides, big springs and small neaps, just a lot of sloshing around, to really churn stuff up so life could form. In tide pools, basically.

No, way bigger tides than now. And faster. See, back then the moon was closer. It went around faster and the earth rotated faster. It was like a big blender. Since then, the earth’s been slowing down and the moon’s been drifting away.

Why? Actually, because of the tides. It’s hard to explain. But the tides sort of work like brakes, slowing down the earth spinning, and also they are pushing the moon away.

Yeah, I guess so. Someday the earth might stop spinning. Someday the moon might float off and leave. I don’t know. But we have some time.

1,001-1,250: Knowledge, how does it work?

Remember when we all had a good laugh at Insane Clown Posse for daring to ask how gravity works? Me too! So I was a bit flummoxed to learn that the original rhyme was about magnetism, not gravity. This may be another example of the Mandela Effect, like the Barenstein Bears, or it might just be my mistake. Either way, it’s yet another reminder to show humility about the things I think I know, to be humble in the face of all that I don’t, can’t, know.

I think they were really asking why, more than how, and expressing comfort with not having a good answer. The song was called “Miracles,” after all, and was filled with childlike wonder at the everyday ineffable. We should be impressed that these hardscrabble Detroit clowns could see the world like this - unjaded by their past, uncalloused by their success.

Find me an explanation for magnets or gravity that answers “why?” Google it up, and you’ll find your betters at NASA and the universities subtly redirecting you to “what?” and “how?” What these forces are, and their mechanics of action, have all been well described by physicists. But that’s not what I asked! Why are some materials magnetic? Why does an electromagnet have magnetic force? Why does mass have gravity? Why does spacetime curve?

Please, if you know, share. If you don’t, quit laughing and enjoy the damn universe. It’s OK. No judgment here. We are all in the dark. We are all clowns.

751-1,000: Aggrieved

Hey, everybody! Which joker ordered me an iPhone? I’m not even a Verizon customer, but this was thoughtful. Guess I have a secret admirer! Tee hee!

Wait. Oh, dear. I’ve had things stolen before, but getting my car prowled or my bike swiped was one thing. This is different: you ordered this in my name, sent it to my house? This is not just an offense. This is an indignity!

Coward! Brigand! You ordered movables on my account, you low schemer. You traded upon my  name, my house, my home. You conspired to interdict the delivery, run off with the cursed gizmo, saddle me with an installment contract. The gall! Worse, by your avarice, you have held me up to Calumny before the Community! Not only those fine men of Verizon - the pride of Bedminster! - but also the United Parcel Service, that fleet-footed host, sons of the timber, toast of Seattle. And those sober gentlemen of the Experian firm of Dublin and Nottingham. All dragged heedless and unknowing into this damnable farce, in my name. How can I go in publick after such humiliation? 

Now, with your fiendish gambit in ruins, do you expect I’ll just, what, make do? Lick my wounds, lesson learned? While you melt back into your gutter? No, sir! No. This will not stand. I hereby give my Notice, before all Free Men, that I will have my Satisfaction. Show yourself! At dawn, for pistols. Show yourself! Come! Stand, and receive my Judgement! Show yourself! COWARD!

501-750: The tomcat and the toaster

I was getting coffee in the lunchroom and somebody was having a tangent over the sink.

“When I was a kid - I grew up on a farm, so - we had this great big tomcat, but he was a housecat, but my dad never got him fixed,” she said.

I perked up; never heard a tomcat story that didn’t go places.

“Well what happened was we caught him pissing into the toaster.”

Touchdown!

“Oh, that smell,” said the other lady. “That cat pee smell! And burnt toast! You had to get a new toaster!”

“Well, what we had to do was get the cat fixed.”

The story reached its moment and ebbed off, but it left a highwater mark. Why did that tomcat figure pissing down the toaster was a good idea? It struck me that he musta seen everybody putting things in there and then taking them away, and saw a good way to get the word out, disperse himself around things. He wouldn’t need to keep riding circuit, pissing on every shoe and basketball. Efficient. More sleepin. What he failed to see was that just because you put something in a toaster, does not mean somebody else wants it.

He lost his balls on this deal.

This thought locked arms with another that was moldering upstairs. This was the first election I’ve seen where candidates had taken to sending us rubes text messages about the sunshine they thought we might maybe want blown somewhere soft. Those candidates lost, mainly.

251-500: People in your neighborhood

You got to teach your children well. Don’t let em just pick up a dollar bill and start reading the back of it unsupervised. Guidance.

I been puzzlin since reading Jeff Vandermeer’s Borne. It’s fraught with carnival nonsense like a bear precisely five stories tall who has his ability to fly stolen off by a witch, but there’s a pearl there. Call it a tragedy of errors. A well-meaning parent tries to understand and instruct her sensitive, curious child. But she misses some signals, doesn’t flesh out every detail of things, and consequently the kid goes off the rails and shits the bed, morally speaking.

The other day my son expressed his understanding that we celebrate Christmas on account of being “American,” as opposed to our neighbors being “Jewish,” doing Hanukkah. He also thought a thing called “volcano” could not also be a “mountain.” That didn’t coldcock me as much. But I realized it’s the same; for him the words “volcano” and “Jewish” are equally unloaded.

Forgot to see the world through his eyes. Children start with “me,” spend a lot of time working out “you” or “them,” and need loads of help with “us.” Didn’t realize the neighbors’ habits - building a rad fort with our prunings for Sukkot, asking me over to turn off a lamp on Saturday - were a chance to blow the doors off his notions of “me” and “you” and “them” and help him get savvy on “American.”

Son, volcanoes celebrate Hanukkah, but we’re all mountains.

0-250: Willie, Wailin, and Me

Willie Nelson is a conman. Carrying on this goofball cameo in his own living joke, some Cheech and Chong routine about a magic bus? Just a once-great songwriter whose genius peaked eons ago?

Don't let him fool ya - he's really tryin to school ya.

Pay attention. To how he sneaks all around some molasses beat, dropping precision-guided phrases. To how he moves his lips, feints and retreats from the mic, just ticklin ol Trigger. He is in total control. Now he's got your sidearm.

What other tricks is he up to? Dozens, likely. I know one - his Christmas album just tripped my Willie alarm.

Even casually listening to “Here Comes Santa Claus,” you feel something. You can't put your finger on why, but that organ gets you bobbin your head, dreamin bout Santa.

Willie is at it again! Stealth reggae!

Huh?

A story: 1997, college, my dorm room. I’m sittin around, got the Highwaymen on. Finbar, a music major, is just in my room, dorms-style. Along comes Willie with “The End of Understanding.”

A couple of bars in, Finbar flips right out. “He’s - this - he’s playing reggae! What the hell?”

I’m thinkin, shut up Finbar, this is old fart country music. But no. Finbar puts the needle back, plays along on guitar, educates me: reggae is typified by staccato guitar on the offbeats, them hyphens: 1 - 2 - 3 - 4.

Hear the piano, plunking that offbeat? “This is reggae, by definition.” Dang.

That’s when I got my Willie alarm. Pay attention.

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"Here Comes Santa Claus" is on Willie's "The Classic Christmas Album," 2012. "The End of Understanding" is from the Highwaymen, "The Road Goes on Forever," 1995. He's recorded it at least two previous times, which don't feature stealth reggae that I can detect. Right around then - '95 or '96 - Willie started work on an openly reggae album, "Countryman" (2005), the recording of which - I love this - rivals Chinese Democracy. Ten years in the making. Ten years, and it was received as a lark, a novelty - Willie Nelson doing reggae? The doofus! How high was he to think this might work? Ha ha ha ha ha. Which Willie probably gives no shits about. “Willie hears ya. Willie don’t care.”