Science fiction, fantasy, mystery and what-not
Multi-floofing (catfinition) – a form of multi-tasking that involves trying to concurrently serve several cats’ demands.
In use: “He had to multi-floof in the morning, petting each cat and scratching their heads and chins, answering their meows while filling kibble bowls and doling out portions of wet food that addressed their dietary restrictions.”
It was another wild night of dreams, with this one making a deeper and more lasting impression.
I found myself in another land. After meeting a man and speaking with him, I realized I was in Australia. My wife was also present. No reason for being in Australia was given, but I was pleased. I’ve always wanted to go to Australia, and have just missed several times. I still plan to go.
Anyway, in the dream, I was given some papers that turned out to actually be a little book. I didn’t know what to do with it or why I had it. Reading it didn’t help because it seemed incomplete, and my wife couldn’t figure it out, either. Finding another fellow, I asked him about it, and he showed me how it was a continuation of other documents. He said they were living documents, and took me to a huge wall of like documents. After he explained it, I was excited and explained it to my wife. She wasn’t interested.
I was then informed I had to get to another part of Australia. I hopped into a car and began driving, trying to figure out where I was going as I went. The roads were holed and shoddy. Most of them were like slick mud. As I complained about them to myself and merged onto a highway that was also like slick mud, I was overtaken by cars. They passed at shockingly high speeds. “I forgot they don’t have speed limits here,” I said to myself in the dream car, accelerating to match the pace while I looked for signs and directions.
I found myself out of the car and running. Everyone was running. Instead of driving, we were running everywhere. I was still on the highway and looking for where I was going. Somehow, running, I found it and arrived.
People were there, but it was no one that I recognized. They gave me more books. Where all the other books were white, these books were red. I immediately understood that these were new books, and that I had to take them back to the other location, which I did right away. That pleased the people on the other end. Understanding the books and system at a fast rate, I took on the role of explaining to others how these books continued the stories.
Everyone was told to line up to go somewhere else, part of some planned activities. I got in line and found that I was at the line’s beginning, with my wife beside me. As I started to go, I encountered the first man that had given me the books in the beginning. He and I exchanged some comments, and I told him that I knew how the books worked. That made him happy, and he let me go. As I walked through the gate with my wife into a green field bordered by a white picket fence, I realized that he’d been my teacher.
In 1985, I was reassigned from Kadena Air Base on Okinawa, Japan, to Shaw AFB in South Carolina. Part of a mobility unit, my primary mission was to deploy to southwest Asia and exercise command and control of deployed Air Force units. Since we didn’t do that often (other than field exercises), my secondary mission of training Air Force reservists in southwest Asia command and control took center stage. I was on the road a lot. My commander let us drive our cars to many locations. That meant I listened to a lot of music in my car.
One of my favorite albums of that time was No Jacket Required by another Genesis member, Phil Collins. That was a terrific album. While I favored several songs on it, “Sussudio” edges out “Take Me Home” and is the song I’m streaming through my head today.
I was dealing with an iceberg yesterday. The iceberg in this instance was a story twist; I could see the tip but not the vast majority of it.
That’s what causes writing to be fun and challenging for me. I like seeing the tip of teh story and the concept and then imagining and writing to find the hidden depths.
people and then imagining what’s unseen underneath, discovering bravery and cowardice, honesty and betrayal under that tip.
The same is true with those characters. I often see and begin with the tip. Writing the story reveals the rest of the character’s iceberg. While I begin with a general idea of the character’s traits and their role, more becomes revealed as the story’s icebergs are explored.
Walking yesterday, and watching drivers making errors, I thought about how much we as people are ice bergs. I saw drivers making bone-headed errors in judgement. I had to remind myself that that was just the tip, and it wasn’t a matter of awareness, intelligence, or ignorance, that broad labels that I often misapply. I don’t know what mental, physical, and emotional issues are attacking them, what problems that they’re dealing with through meds, thought, or by fleeing. They might be driving, but we don’t know what’s happening in their brains and bodies.
Most of us are the same kind of icebergs on the outside, a typical bi-ped. Despite commonalities between us, like a body, two eyes and ears, and a head, things are different inside. Inside that head is a brain, and in that body are organs. Lots of chemicals are being produced and are being employed via neurons and neuro-transmitters and receivers.
It all doesn’t work the same, right? Have you seen any of the studies about the right amygdala and its size and activity in people who tend toward being conservative in their political views? Their right amygdala is larger and often more active. They tend to be more fearful, and tend to dislike change.
That doesn’t mean they’re cowards. Being fearful and being a coward aren’t the same.
The study also found that the amygdala’s activity could be shifted, and that shift affected people’s outlook. It all began with the observation that the United States became more politically conservative after the attacks of 9/11. A Business Insider article by Hilary Brueck best states it:
“The hypothesis social scientists developed about this effect is perhaps best summed up in a 2003 review of research on the subject: “People embrace political conservatism (at least in part) because it serves to reduce fear, anxiety, and uncertainty; to avoid change, disruption, and ambiguity; and to explain, order, and justify inequality among groups and individuals,” it said.”
A Yale psychologist, John Bargh, wrote about it in a new book, Before We Know It: The Unconscious Reasons We Do What We Do. Bargh explores how our brain’s responses affect our political views, and how that can be changed. For example, in one experiment, after a baseline about political views was established, an exercise was conducted. In the exercise, everyone was told to imagine they were like Superman. Bullets bounced off them. Fire couldn’t hurt them. They’d survive falls off a cliff without injury, and they could fly.
That exercise caused a dramatic change among conservatives and their responses, but no change among liberals. The exercise enabled conservatives to feel safer and less fearful, which triggered more compassionate and optimistic responses in their political views. They became more open to change, and more hopeful.
It’s something that we should keep in mind as we drive around and encounter one another. It’s not always about facts and logic, intelligence and awareness. We’re all icebergs, and what we see is only the tip.
It’s also something to keep in mind as we write about our characters and their motivations and actions.
Time to write like crazy and explore my icebergs, at least one more time.
I was vacuuming yesterday, utilizing the central vacuum system and its fifty feet of hose.
What a snake it would have been.
See, as a child, I used Mom’s appliances to augment my reality. She had a little home salon hair dryer. Contained in a small brown suitcase, it opened up, displaying controls and a lit mirror. You’d attach a hose which attached to a plastic bonnet that she wore on her head. An intake fan was in the middle. Several push buttons orchestrated fan speed and temperature.
The hair dryer was perfect as my spaceship’s controls. The short hose was my communication device to communicate with star base, or, if necessary, Earth Command.
Besides it, we had an Electrolux vacuum cleaner, a canister type with a hose attached. The hose became a snake, serpent, or dragon for me to fight, sometimes utilizing a discarded paper towel tube as a sword, but often something I’d need to battle with my bare hands.
The Electrolux’s canister was my rocket sled. It also worked as a time-machine, enabling a quick escape from now to the future or past. Pillows, chairs, and blankets were employed as forts while boxes were ships and rockets. Mom and Dad’s transistor radios were also communication devices. Sunglasses were useful as protective devices but also enabled me to see into other dimensions. They could also be employed to see over the horizon to far-away places, like China, Europe, South America, and Antarctica.
Things changed. Television developed. I acquired modeling clay and shaped rockets and space ships. By now I was twelve, and drawing these vessels, reading books, and watching television. While those were great vehicles for my imagination, it wasn’t quite as good as opening up the hair dryer and blasting off.
Vancat (catfinition) – the cat(s) at the forefront of an activity or movement, typically a female.
In use: “Being more intelligent and aggressive than the others, Jade was seen as the vancat of anything feline happening in the house.”
I heard “Abacab” by Genesis on the radio yesterday. It’s unusual to hear it on the radio.
The song is sort of hypnotic in its sounds and words, but not very deep. Because it’s hypnotic and I’m simple prey for these things, it hung around in my head’s stream for the rest of the day and was still there this morning. But thinking about “Abacab” and Genesis, I started thinking about Mike +The Mechanics, and their music. Mike is Mike Rutherford of Genesis, and their albums and performances were side projects to his Genesis existence.
Mike +the Mechanics’ music isn’t very deep, either, but fit well on the radio stations of the time. “Silent Running,” with its chorus of “Can you hear me?”, was their first hit, so I thought I’d go with that.
Stormy Daniels was on Sixty Minutes. I watched. Didn’t learn anything new. Her situation with Donald Trump isn’t changing anything.
Nor will Karen McDougal’s situation with Donald Trump change anything.
Nor will what the other sixteen women who claimed, with graphic details, how he sexually assaulted and molested them, change anything.
Trump supporters will not, or do not, care for the most part. A few outliers will quit supporting him for this behavior. Most of Trump’s supporters will not. They’ll say, as Rush Limbaugh has said, “Bill Clinton,” cherry-picking exactly what happened, and twisting memory into making history different. And, or, Trump supporters will say that his personal behavior doesn’t matter, that it’s his political agenda, and what he’d doing, draining the swamp, that matters.
All that infuriates Democrats, many Independents, and those on the left. They’re disgusted when this behavior is uncovered, no matter who the person is, from Bill Clinton to Al Franken, to Hollywood actors and producers. Anger and support withdrawal usually quickly follows.
It’s been pointed out multiple times that Trump hasn’t drained the swamp with the quality of people he’s selected for his cabinet and leadership positions. Trump claims the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were huge mistakes, but he hired one of the architects, John Bolton, to be his NSC advisor, and John Bolton is hiring more of the thinkers behind PNAC and the horrific continuing wars of the Middle East. That’s one more point that seems to prove that what Trump says doesn’t matter, just as he said he’d never be on vacation as POTUS, and never go golfing, because he’d be too busy.
The children’s protests, walk-outs, and March for Our Lives won’t matter either, to Trump supporters and the NRA. They’re doing their damn best to ensure that the narratives are twisted to fit into a surreal political reality.
In the larger context of our politics, it all matters to the world’s citizens. What Trump and his supporters say, how they say it, and what they do, reveal enormous logic gulfs, and shreds their claims to ethics and morals. They can’t see it, won’t acknowledge it, or, when they acknowledge it, rationalize that it doesn’t matter.
No, the best that can be said about these matters is that America’s youth are bending more sharply to the left and equality every day.
Left is such an easy label, but we’re forced to use it, because gun control and equality are defined as left issues. So, every mass murder in a school followed by nothing more than thoughts and prayers pushes America’s youth further left. Every action against equality for transgender people and the LGBT citizens of America that Trump announces, like his ban on who can serve in the military, pushes them further left.
Because here is the funny thing. Not many of the youngest American generations watch television. They don’t read the mainstream media. They find their own news. Those children who organized, who hear Trump’s words and see how his statements don’t align with his behavior, how he flat-out flips on issues and lies about what’s going on, are being pushed further to the left. Every time they go through these lock outs and lock downs in their schools, and hide in fear, they think, “I am tired of this. It’s not fair.” That’s what they said this weekend. And they move further to the left.
Which isn’t good news for Democrats and the Democratic Party. That party holds itself in the center. It’s opportunistic, short on principles and leadership, and doesn’t offer a great vision for America itself. No, this isn’t about whether Hillary should have won, would have won, or did win. Hillary, despite what so many on the right say, has nothing to do with it.
This is about, for example, stripping away the laws put in place after the last economic meltdown, which is what Democrats and Republicans in Congress just did. This is about, as Trump supporters have pointed out, business as usual in Washington D.C., and the merry-go-round of elected officials and lobbyists, and the influence of money in politics.
Trump wasn’t the answer to that.
Neither was Hillary.
No, this is about a new political will that’s growing and shaping itself. It’s growing among the young people. I’m not sure what shape it’ll take. I’m old, male, and white. They, the young, no matter what their color, race, gender and sexual identity, don’t think as I do. They create their own spin, decide their own truths, and pursue their own actions. Egged on by the high costs of living in America, dwindling opportunity, and failed government leadership, they’re moving away from the institutions and norms that were set up as the functioning center for the last one hundred years. Fewer of them are driving, so cars matter less. Manufacturing had already drifted away and they, the young, no longer see it as the savior it was after World War II. Money matters less because they have to do without it. Bankers have already betrayed them, and revealed their infinite greed, so the young have grown up not trusting them.
Water matters more because they see and experience what happens without it. The environment happens more because they see the impact of the plastic dumped into our waters. Equality matters more, because they know people who are transgender, and LGBT, and recognize them as equals and friends, regardless of the law.
And that is the change that matters, because they are bold and powerful, and growing in numbers. When they finally take control, it’ll be something to behold.
As I take up the next chapter, I’m faced with sudden choices. I thought the path was clearly defined when the chapter was begun, yet, when I wrote it, it took unexpected twists and ended up somewhere else. Once there, I saw two new options — and then a third, and a fourth. That forces the writing phase that I call “sitting at a computer with a cup of coffee and staring out a window thinking.”
I know I won’t be able to decide in this session. In a way, it’s like a chess match, where multiple future moves are considered. No, I’ll probably finish the coffee and get up without writing another word, and then I’ll go walk for a while and continue to think. I probably won’t decide while I’m walking, either. I’ll continue to think about the options and moves until I return to write like crazy tomorrow. Then, without making a conscious choice, I’ll begin writing, and let it take me.
That’s the process: realize, and think, letting it brew and simmer, and then write by letting the words take me. When I’m in these moments, I’m reminded of the scenes in Stranger than Fiction when Emma Thompson, as the author, Karen Eiffel, smokes cigarettes and wanders around, considering ways to kill her main character.
I so enjoy those scenes.
