(EDITING NOTE: “Long Summer” was the working title for the trilogy that is “Incomplete States”.)

As I was writing this week, I realized that I needed a notebook and pen.

I had the pen. I’ve stowed pens in most of my coats, jackets and computer cases. I often also put one into a shirt pocket or clip it to my collar as a writing talisman.

But the notebooks have been used and not replaced. Fortunately, I have a stash of new composition notebooks, often referred to as ‘lab books’, at home. I pulled out a new one today and stuck it into my computer bag. Once at the coffee shop, I blessed it with my usual annotations on the cover of name, the month and year, and the place where I started using it. As always, I wrote using my Z4 pen. As usual, the ink didn’t dry before I swept a hand across it, leaving a black smear on my heel and a barely legible blotch on the notebook.

I needed the notebook because the computer was coming up short. I’ve been working out further kinks in my chi-particle theory and how it interacts with a wave function collapse to create ‘now’. All of this is the concept behind the novel in progress, ‘Long Summer’. Along the way, I began exploring the existence of more arrows of time than the three Hawking proposed, and did equations and charts about the permutations of time available.

It was all becoming confusing and entangled. Naturally, that led me back to the Copenhagen Interpretation, the EPR paradox, and finally, expanded thinking on quantum entanglement. Hence a notebook was needed. I could draw and chart all of this with explanations and labels faster than I could type. That visual progression helped me organize and clarify my thinking and understanding. I further evolved the thinking behind the stages of chi-particle existence and their properties.

After all that, I could finalize address the aspects of my novel concept that bugged me: how do chi-particles interact with sentient entities (such as Humans) to create a moment of Now?

If Now is the only time that exists (despite the apparent existence of the arrow of time), how and why do entities think of a remembered past/history?

If a past doesn’t exist, how does a perceived past continue occurring during a Now moment?

Of course, one thing to always remember is just because they remember a Now as a past doesn’t mean that the past actually still exists; it only exists (or existed) as a Now moment.

That led me at last to a paradox that I didn’t fully appreciate. The deception of our own observational bias about who and what we are, and how we experience the arrows of time, with apparent knowledge of a substantive and concrete past that actually causes and establishes now, continually gets in the way of comprehending, plotting and expanding in the other directions. I keep returning to the logic of what I know.

All this greatly enhances my appreciation for the amazing thinking and math behind physicists and their theories. My thinking is ‘deep’ to me and causes me angst as I struggle to hold on and comprehend. Yet, their thinking was so much deeper and more complex and abstract. They really are amazing thinkers.

Time to write like crazy, at least one more time.