City on a Hill

So I'm back. Vacation was good. Yeah, kids are... you know... good. I... well, lots of shit happened. Fuck the preamble. Let's get vulnerable.

I decided to take the kids to San Francisco for vacation. There are several reasons for this: 1) It's a driveable distance from me. Or at least it appears so on paper. Seven-to-ten hours in a car with three sweaty boy-children turns meters into miles and miles into moonshots. All of this, the length of our nation's loveliest state, was lost on them in favor of tiny 3"x4" screens of Pokémon fighting Marios or some shit. AND YET they still found a way to annoy the fuck out of each other and, as collateral damage, me for just about the duration of both rides, up and back. Normally I embrace the distracting technology parents and educators disdain. I was promised soporifics and borderline catatonia from video games and I got neither. How can you be entirely disengaged AND joined in the most violent of verbal slanging matches at the exact same time? I think TV psychologists have got it all wrong. I think kids today might actually be multitasking social geniuses the like of which we have never been burdened to see.

2) I was also promised a full court recruitment of my kids by the Gay Community. I have no daughters, so I'm hoping at some point to convince one of my boys to turn out to be a homosexual. I like my kids, but what I've always really wanted was a son-in-law. Someone to make passive-aggresive comments about at Awkward Christmas. Someone desperate for my approval and attention, knowing full well it will always be reserved for the actual children of my loins, but still determined to try and try and try to impress me in that grasping, quixotic dance of failure only sons-in-law can really fully express. But no, no recruitment. Not a sniff. Every time we saw a couple of dudes holding hands I would nudge my oldest boy into them "accidentally" on the outside chance The Gay might actually be contagious, but still nothing. Not a single One Direction poster in his room. Ah well. I'm not out of options. I guess it's back to the Boy Scouts.

So the driving thing was part of a clever strategy to save myself money on this vacation. Where the plan fell down, I realize in retrospect, was driving to one of the top five most expensive locations in the world. San Francisco is not cheap. It can be, but I'm too hairy to be a twink but not quite enough to be a bear. I'm a tweener. I'm doomed to a life where I have to buy my own appletinis.

Some other shit happened, but I'm not ready to go all the way there yet. When I said "let's get vulnerable," I meant in relative terms. I was looking at a mostly blank page at the time. This is way more revealing than that was.

The only other thing happening is that I have a dog again. But only temporarily. See, I had two, the one died and the other I sent to live with the ex-wife. She has another dog, a bigger yard and a better premium cable channel package, so it seemed like the humane thing to do. Only she went away on vacation with the kids (ha, she'll fucking see) and the dog I gave her--the healthy dog I gave her--came down with horrible kennel cough and can't be boarded. So he's here now. I followed up my vacation with alone time in my big empty house wiping up little puddles of noisily-achieved dog phlegm. I don't know how your week is going, but I fucking win.

I'm going back to last week's post to watch the bunny video again. There is lightness in the world. Thank God we have the interwebs to help us find it.

Summer Break

I'm on vacation from work this week, which any of you with children will know means I'm way more exhausted than I would be at my place of employment. Thank God only four more days until I can go back to the quiet comfort of laboring thanklessly in exchange for an inadequate wage.

In the meantime, here's a video of a bunny eating a carrot.

I'm Not Wearing Anything Under This Lab Coat

Wow! So...

A 20th-century breakthrough figured out that atoms were made up of three particles: protons, neutrons, and electrons. Then, as physicists are wont to do, they started smashing the particles, which broke down into even smaller particles.

OK... and?

Scientists figured these itty-bitty particles were quarks, held together by gluons. Then scientist Peter Higgs proposed the burning, yearning question: Surely there must be one uber-particle that creates an invisible field (called the Higgs field) that adds mass to matter.

Ha! Totally. Is that... oh there's more? Sorry...

It's theoretically possible for a particle to have no actual mass at all, and indeed, the photon is massless. But that's the exception. All other particles -- protons, electrons, neutrons, neutrinos -- are eventually pinged by the Higgs bosons that suffuse the field. That tiny collision converts the particle from a packet of energy to a packet of matter. (The Higgs acquires its own mass through its own interactions with the field.)

Right. But I...

It can explain why some particles have mass, but why others, such as photons of light, do not.

I bet that's not it, is it? Fuck, I knew it...

A Higgs boson particle is essential to the so-called standard model of physics -- the generally accepted theory about how the universe works. Finding it would effectively confirm the standard model.

Standard model. Naturally. You know what, just go ahead...

Space.com thinks the particle could explain dark matter... ZeeNews ponders that perhaps inertia (or drag) can be reduced in future technologies, like a jumbo jet. Two Vanderbilt University theoretical physicists propose a "long shot" pipe dream about time travel

I'm pretty sure that's it. And this is from the article designed to explain this shit to dummies like myself. Let me see if I can paraphrase it: invisible glue-y stuff will give us better gas mileage for planes and also time travel. Got it. Although I think that last one is something of a fudge because if I can get from New York to LA 20 minutes faster than I now can, that kind of already counts as time travel.

Just to be clear, I'm glad someone is out there doing it for us. It doesn't bother me greatly that I have no idea what "it" is and less about how it's done. Given the right metaphor, I can kind of grasp the mechanical idea of hybrid cars, the ballpoint pen or different types of yoga, but there are going to be limits. I'm happy to accept that my iPhone works essentially by magic. I appreciate the effort put into articles about the Higgs boson widget, but I think I can respectfully ask that the well-meaning journalists trying to lay out these things for us just leave us in the dark. Not only is it a battle lost before the first trumpet sounds* but the lonely wail of the rallying call is lost in the hurricane klaxon of roaring bandwidth carrying the great concerning conundra of why Tom Cruise called his wife Kate instead of Katie and the like.

Down among the intellectual lumpenproletariat, there are only two things we need to know science is doing: 1) working on the cancer thing and 2) faster download speeds. Essentially, we want to live long enough to get our porn delivered right now. If we figure out what "dark matter" is in the meantime, that'll be gravy.

Also: as far as I know, dark matter is indistinguishable from gravy.




---

*you know what the uneducated do with trumpet players, yes?

I'm the Man

I understand that I should be compelled by a sense of civic duty and personal political purpose to write something witty and scathing about the Supreme Court vs. Affordable Care Act thing or the even funnier story about the frenzy of misreporting that accompanied the ruling's publication, but I kind of can't. It's not that I'm precluded by any kind of gag order or professional conflict of interest. Despite what you might think, I am not currently nor have I ever been a justice of any rank on the Supreme Court of the United States. Back in '07 there were some rumblings that maybe I was Ruth Bader Ginsburg, but they gained little public traction. My ex-wife did employ some unusual shaming techniques.

No, instead of constitutional law, media criticism or the art of horseshit political spin,* I've got something else preoccupying my thoughts at the moment. Basically, it's this: I don't have a lot of ambition.

Odds are you knew that. Not because I've said it before (although given the volume of output over the better part of the last decade and my contrarian reflex abhorrance to originality, it's a near statistical certainty), but because I've never once directed any of you to read anything I'd written anywhere else. This format is an ideal combination of nonexistant standards of quality and zero requirements for output or self-promotion, all of which suit my lifestyle preferences organized around novelty individually-wrapped processed snack foods and virtual athleticism. Blogger was invented and instantly, I'd peaked.

Beyond the career angle, I've also never had any ambition to be in charge of anything or anyone. It's less magnanimous egalitarianism and more just an overwhelming wave of pre-emptive exhaustion I drown in when I consider the level of interest I'd have to maintain in order to order any aspect of anyone else's existence. I'm not a libertarian because I believe in road paving and that somebody should be in charge, I just really would prefer it not to be me.

This stance is problematic in the face of procreation, which I have knowingly done three separate times in my life. I chose to stick around after each instance, partly out of an unimaginative interpretation of the responsibilities of paternity, partly out of revenge against the life choices indulged in by my own parents and the rest of their Baby Boomer brethren and partly because of my complete financial dependence on my wife (at the time). It was full-on fatherhood or freeway underpass, those were my choices. I like plumbing and mattresses and hot food warmed by something other than a magnifying glass or an armpit. Those things sometimes come with the pricetag of full determinative power over the life of (initially) otherwise helpless human people. Don't think I didn't waver.

My quest to avoid responsibility also fell down in the area of pet ownership. I know it's less politically correct to think of oneself as a pet "owner" in 2012 and more of a "companion" or "partner," but I find it difficult to un-wed myself from the concept of ownership when I have receipts.

Pets are a responsibility, but honestly if you do it right, not really much of one. We were/are dog people and I figured out fairly early on that if the food and water bowl stay filled and you're fairly responsive on the door when they scratch, they more or less entertain themselves, especially if you have two. If you have two, you don't even have to throw a ball.

The real problem comes in after you've had that dog for a good long while, say 12-ish years, as a randomly unround number. Then all those non-decisions you haven't had to make while Poochy was sleeping in the sun or barking at the neighbors or muzzle-deep up their own assholes are suddenly cashed in after a couple of bad days and a visit to the vet. When things get rough for old dogs, the vet even stops being particularly helpful and just wants to know what you--yes, You, only ever You--want to do in the best interest of what used to be your congenially self-maintaining animal lodger.

Now I'm the physician, I'm the hospice-care worker, I'm the judge, I'm the parent, I'm Jesus, I'm Jesus' Dad. I'm everything all at once. And she's hurt and she's uncomfortable, but she's still got the brown eyes, her tail still thumps, she doesn't know what the catheter is for, she's just happy to be out of the house. And, of all things, she can see/smell/feel the strain that's breaking your heart and she, of all creatures, is trying to comfort you. I don't want to be here, I don't want to say, I don't want to be asked anything else. I don't want to watch the injection go in or listen to her snore her last snore and I defnitely, most definitely, do not want to sit cross-legged on a linoleum floor in a little room, unable to take my hand from her head above her staring, unseeing brown eyes that will never again close.

It's too much to ask of me, constitutionally speaking. And if I'm being honest, I asked it of myself when I agreed to take on a pet in the first place, as we all do, whether we've thought it through to that logical, horrible endpoint or not. And if I'm being honest, I'll likely do it again.





---



*wherein every occurrence simultaneously means wholly one thing and its exact, mutually-exclusive opposite in the same media instant.

Manning the Barricades at a Reasonable Hour

Meritocracy, in my opinion, is pretty overrated. The upside is obvious and repeated ad nauseam--anyone can be anything they want and rise as high as anyone else, with just a modicum of relevant talent and even more hard work. I used to think this was mostly propagandist bullshit until 2008 when we elected a black anti-religious Muslim-extremist Kenyan terrorist president. That wobbled my cynicism just a little. But not for long.

The formula of hard work + talent is a bit under-thought. Hard work is itself a talent, isn't it? I've been to chain restaurants and PTA board meetings, so I know first hand: not everyone can do it. Really we've privileged a small subset of the population based on a genetic quirk that makes them more likely to disregard the lure of YouTube clips of a cat fighting a beaver when there's work to be done. Yes, the congenitally focused tend to be on time and, when the rest of us do manage to show up to whatever it is we've been called to, they run rings around us by being "prepared" and "aware of the import of the moment" and "sober." This is not an objective way to determine the quality of a candidate or employee or potential romantic partner. This is genetic cheating. It's an unthinking privilege-by-predisposition mindset; a process not dissimilar to how we arrived at racism, the Hindu caste system or American social Darwinism. We as a society have set aside the best positions and the easiest paths to them to those who have, by a lucky accident, been born with the fluke of a sustainable attention span. The rest--the massive majority, by the way--are all left behind to eventually get around to struggling over the scraps.

Is that really all there is to it? Success I mean. Conscientious diligence, measurable execution and the spontaneous generation of output. If two of us are doing the same job and one guy puts in seventy hours per week, with tweezer-like attention to sand-grain-fine details and an inexhaustible aptitude for converting time available into work produced... fuck, what possible chance do I have in the face of that? Seventy hours? In one week? I can't even gin up the reserves to put in that kind of energy to something I like doing. How much historical dynasty management simulations can a guy play before even that has to be set aside for plugging names of albums I already own into Spotify because it's faster than finding the CDs? OK, it turns out it's a lot. And maybe without the distraction of kids or work, that could happen for seventy hours in a week, but because the society in which I was burdened to be born into only rewards us for the contributions we make to the common goal of wealth generation and productivity benefiting the economy as a whole,* I'm sitting here trying to think how I can justify the purchase of a toy-inspired video game in a non-birthday, non-holiday month while the doers among us are out there buying most of a county. This is a cruel system.

The obvious leveler in this game is reality television. It's been 400 years since the founding of Jamestown, the beginning of the must-work-for-food tyranny stigmatizing the daydreamers, and it's taken us this long to finally find a way to become so wealthy and powerful to afford to reward those who lack not only the talent for hard work, but any talent whatsoever. This is, in my opinion, a gross overcorrection of an obvious injustice, but at least it's a foothold. A beachhead. A place to push off from as we begin the assault against the elevated, fortified positions of Achievement and Discernible Worth.

But heartened though I may be, I know it will eventually come to nothing. We're talking about a social revolution of, by and for the work-shy and perennially distracted. If we're going to do it, it's going to have to happen before the new season of Wipeout starts.





---



*the whole thing smacks of communism.

The Man Inside Me

I gave up direct-replying to other blog posts a while ago, partly because I backed off my breakneck pace of daily long-form posting about five years ago to escape the self-imposed pressure to produce. And because my personal life went temporarily to shit. And because long-form personal blogging as a means of social expression collapsed in the gravity wake of the necessary sort of black-hole vortex that shows up to sweep away all things sociotechnologically current in order to make room for whatever's next, whether we're done with the last one or not. It's difficult not to be nostalgic or even a little bitter about the unwanted cultural-relevance reshuffle, even if the same singularity also freed us from the big-hair-and-padded-shoulders-type retrospective embarrassment that was MySpace. There might be a tendency among some of us to remember that period a bit over-fondly, like they were the digital Hôtel de Rambouillet and we were all hanging out with Balzac, but maybe with a few more dick jokes mixed in. I tend not to re-read my older work too closely for fear that really it was just expanded versions of droning, precious inanity begging to be rescued by the chirpy, character-limited inanity of Twitter.


I can say that I don't read anyone else's blog anymore, not really. I don't even read this one, to be honest. It's just not to my taste. I never really cared for the self-congratulatory pop-culture referencing, the pseudo-comic tangents or the tortured metaphors. It's like reading a Spalding Gray monologue translated into whalesong and then back into English. I'm not saying you can't like it, I'm just saying it's not my cup of whatever it is you enjoy drinking more than I do. Something with gin in it probably.


I do read Andrew Sullivan's blog, not because I like him more than I like you, it's just that he puts WAY more work into his than you do. There's research and intellectual consideration and aggregation of opinions from all around the internets, all handily collected and filtered through the prism of the overeducated gay English expatriate I always imagined myself to be. It was there that I was directed to read a blog post written by someone else entirely, which I haven't done in quite a little bit. And, because I can take direction like any good textual bottom, I didn't even just skim, I read the whole thing about the openly gay Mormon guy happily married to a fully informed heterosexual woman.


The first level of interest is obviously purely prurient. I'm curious about the sex. Like most intellectually lazy people, I only have my own experience to draw from for parallels, so I imagine he must feel the same way about the delicate lady bits the way I feel about cock. Which, and I'm sorry to be graphic here, but is not unlike the way I feel about cooked spinach: yes, I understand the intrinsic value, but I've no interest in putting it in my mouth, thank you. Not only is it a totally gross image, but it's not even an apt one since, as I sit here and really think about it, I would likely blow a guy before I'll eat cooked spinach. I don't mean that sequentially, like one's an appetizer for the other, I mean preferentially. I hope that was clear. No fucking way I'm doing both.


Just to paraphrase the blog post, this guy is a marriage and family therapist who acknowledges his biologically-arrived-at sexual attraction to men and (not squirrelly implicitly but openly stated) pheremonal indifference to chicks. So getting deeper than the prurience (because, you know, no pictures or diagrams or anything), we're left to actually consider how this works. The first reaction is obviously to understand the situation in pure Lifetime Movie of the Week terms, where this poor bastard lives a Secret Life of torment and guilt and compulsive re-reading of back issues of Men's Fitness under the oblivious, perky nose of his trusting wife (probably played by Crystal Bernard) who doesn't realize she shouldn't feel so guilty about sleeping with the Latino personal trainer with the good teeth (probably played by Antonio Sabato Jr.).


The second is to cast a sidelong glance at the Mormon angle and brace for the injunction to pray the gay away, Marcus Bachmann style.


But it doesn't happen. Dude just talks about how he loves his wife. It’s weird how it’s about love and it’s so clinical, so practical. But that’s what makes it resonant: the lack of corroding, distorting romance, both in the ideation of love as it is AND (this is more important) in the idea of religion and god. I was thrown by the application of an actual New Testament version of all-loving god, which is absent almost entirely from the public sphere without being immediately shaped down into an amorphous blob of unanthropomorphic hippie "spirituality."


There's also a strain of modern American liberalism that would fault a person like this for being inauthentic, for denying his "true self," as though the center of our selves is necessarily a political expression of our biological (ethnic, gender or sexual) identity. Which is kind of the same intellectual process used to support racism and patriarchy.


My basic position on this is the same one that is creeping into almost all of my social and political positions as the partisan edge of my youth dulls against the ultimately un-fell-able tree of experience: I don't want to have to care if I don't have to. The Ex-Gay Movement people I'll pay attention to I guess if they're going to run out into the community and spread shame and hypocrisy and un-gayness as a system for fixing what they have chosen, tragically, to identify as not only a personal but a societal ill. But I find it hard to get excited one way or the other about a dude who's made the conscious decision, with the informed consent of his missus, to plug his nose and go vaginal spelunking on a semi-regular basis. He's clearly not a threat; he keeps his shit in-house. And, just to make sure I'm not on anyone's side in the overall reaction spectrum, neither is he my hero. It's dressed up as personal courage I guess or challenge-conquering, but it's a challenge of choice and entirely of the guy's own invention. It's hard to give him too much credit for that. I didn't tell the guy he had to marry a girl. As an invented challenge, I guess in that way, it's kind of like the Iraq War, except with no civilian casualties. Which, ideally, is how you want a war to go if you can help it.

The Call is Coming from Inside the House

The fundamental question, of course, is: Are we alone?

It's fundamental because of it's multifaceted applications. It fits in the scene in the horror movie a few music-less seconds before the guy with half a face and a power tool for a hand jumps out of a closet. It works with throaty mock surprise for a randy couple finally ensconced behind a closed door. It's appropriate in the middle of the woods at dusk when distracted campers realize the rest of their church group nature outing has disappeared into the trees without taking a thorough head count. It's the appropriate panicked address to one's self-stimulated genitals when you hear a door open in another room of what was supposed to be an empty house.

The implications are broad, yet highly context-specific. No one is going to mix any of those two uses up, one hopes. It's all about tone and situational relevance, of course. Normally, however, that particular question, "Are we alone?" usually evokes the existential/philosophical/astronomical mystery of the potential of extraterrestrial life.

Mathematically speaking, the question just about answers itself: of course not. It doesn't make any sense that in all the wide, expanding universe, that nowhere else at any time have the conditions existed on any planet to produce something else somewhere that breathes, eats, fucks and shits. I don't know if it's obvious yet or not, but I was able to graduate high school and obtain two separate university degrees and take exactly zero biology classes, so I don't know exactly if those are the xenobiological criteria for determining what constitutes "life," but I feel like the sentiment more or less ballparks it. It is only a coincidence that these same four criteria would also qualify the as-yet undiscovered life form for his/her/its own reality television show.

I've never really understood the basic framework for the search for life. Every time a new planet is discovered circling some wobbly smudge of light umpty-zillion miles away, the question immediately applied is whether or not it exists in the so-called "Goldilocks zone," which, if I remember the fairy tale correctly, has something to do with unlawful entry, food theft, vandalism and squatting. The exact way the metaphor applies is lost on me, I admit, but the upshot is: is the planet the right temperature to support liquid water and therefore the conditions to produce and sustain squishy carbon-based organism such as ourselves?

Our fascination with so-called extremophiles has allowed us to broaden our criteria somewhat as we keep accidentally finding life thriving in what used to be thought of as the unlikeliest of places, but it's turning out that that, at least on earth, there are almost no environments that aren't also habitats.

Based on this, and keeping in mind what I've already said about my formal training in this realm, I've decided I'm going to Fix Science by making a simple and obvious observation: life is fucking everywhere. Just assume it's on every planet. In every crevice and crack, every peak and valley, every moon and dust cloud, in sunbeams and interstellar space. Assuming that any "life" we find would have to conform to the uninteresting confluence of bullshit occurrences that led to us being manufactured by our former interstellar colonial overlords just lacks imagination. Why would it have to look like us? Or better: why would we want it to look like us? Is that what we want? More people, but from someplace else? Aren't those always the worst kinds of people? Well, I guess those are the second worst people, right after the people all around you all the time. The ones cooking with what can only be vinegar and galvanized rubber in the downstairs apartment or listening to Armenian banjo dirges at 4 in the morning or gumming up the cable internet so it takes you five hours to download your Taiwanese bootleg copy of Aces: Iron Eagle III for free. Those people are clearly assholes.

But look, we're spending so much time and energy trying to make all extraterrestrial life be just like us. It's a failure of imagination, first of all. And it's really expensive and time consuming to find perfect planets with the same meticulous effort it would take us to find an individual sugar crystal on a white-sand beach. If we were to stop looking, it wouldn't be giving up. It would be because we'd just agreed to decide we'd succeeded. We (most likely) found extraterrestrial life. We (probably) are not alone. It's (within the acceptable statistical margin of error) all around us, all the time. It's possible to accept it without having to seek it out or (my God, so much worse) invite it over.