Sign on a road on the border of Talent and Phoenix in southern Oregon:
Today’s Bumper Sticker
“Fake news will ruin the Internet.”
– Benjamin Franklin
The Beer Tree
I was with a friend at a concert last night. He drank a Bud Light while I enjoyed a 10 Barrel Apocalypse. He always drinks Bud Light.
Cool for him. My beer buds don’t align well with Bud Light. I find it too thin, and lacking in depth and flavor for me to claim as a regular, or even to have in my rotation.
I contrast this with my Wednesday night experience. One of the BoBs regularly brews his own, and brought a couple bottles for us to sample. He called it an Imperial IPA. From his description, it sounded like a double IPA. However you reference it, this beer was fantastically smooth and flavorful. He’d bottled it in May, so it was just under two full months old. I’d expected high I.B.U.s and hoppiness, but neither were present. With an A.b.V. of eleven point two, it had a kick.
What impressed me that night was first, his explanation of the ingredients, and how he brewed it. Next, another friend’s insightful questions about where the hops were sourced and other factors surprised me. In retrospect, it seemed like he’s contemplating brewing his own.
As I do when drinking beer – or wine – I became contemplative. I ended up contemplating beer over my coffee this morning. My coffee choice is much narrower than my beer choices, but it’s evolved to that point. For my morning coffee, I like a French or Italian roast, without milk, cream, or sugar. For my writing session, I prefer a four shot mocha.
For beer, I have a choice tree. I prefer dark beers, so they dominate my beer tree, but my beer choice depends upon the food, event, and offerings. At the top of my list are Imperial Stouts. They usually deliver a significant kick, so they’re not often chosen. Dropping down the list, I’ll look for stouts and porters, followed by ales and I.P.A.s, Pilsners and lagers. Besides enjoying dark beers, when sampling one of the others beer variations, I’ve discovered I like citrus overtones, especially grapefruits. I don’t usually like fruity beers, but this year, I enjoyed several delightful beers with watermelon. I’m not surprised, as I enjoy buying and drinking watermelon juice.
And yes, I like my beer cold. I’ve tried it warm, several times (you know, to get a data set), and I prefer cold beer with a moderately small head. As an aside, I’m not fond of coffee in beer, unless it’s in an ice cream float. A coffee flavored stout with vanilla ice cream on a hot day is a damn fine dessert.
The thing with all of this, as with so many things, is that our individual choices are unique, and our reasons for reaching them are often more complex than the thought we give to them. While I give my beers a lot of thought and like to taste from a large swath of samples, because you never know what might impress you, my buddy preferred his Bud Light because of its light flavor, low alcohol content, and the lack of need to think about which beer he’ll drink, and whether he’ll enjoy it.
Which is why I’ve made the coffee choices I’ve made.
Love Those Search Engines
I decided on a whim to look up my grandfather. He passed away long ago, and I was curious about what the Internet would uncover. It’s actually because I’m killing time while KDP manipulates my files.
So I put in “Paul Seidel Pittsburgh PA” to begin.
The search results were quick: “We found Patricia Seidel.”
Who is Patricia Seidel, and why is she coming up when I’m searching for Paul?
Besides Patricia, I found Paul Seipel and Mary Seidel. They did also find Paul Seidel, but not nearly as often as Patricia Seidel. She, I thought, must be amazingly popular or mourned.
I decided that I would add “obit” to see how results changed. That made a fundamental difference; besides adding Robert Seidel to the results, John, and Jonathan, I was also presented with the latest in Pennsylvania obituaries, and Harrisburg, PA. All references to Paul Seidel were now gone, except in my query.
Other variations were tried. So were other search engines. None of it mattered; they had found the results they wanted to present. It’s too bad it didn’t match what I wanted to find. Google was best, coming up with an ad for Family Tree that had seventy-nine death records for Paul Seidel. A few of them were in Pennsylvania. Besides that on Google, though, they found Suzanne Seidel for me – just in case I really wanted to find her, I guess – and Paul Uranker. Paul Uranker was Jayne Seidel’s brother. Boy, that cleared up a lot for me. I always wondered about good ol’ Paul and Jayne, and their relationship, although I never knew her last name was the same as mine. You learn something new, you know?
Google also gave us the results for the Railway Journal for some specific date and month that mentioned St. Paul. Grandpa Paul was a good guy who drank a lot of Iron City beers, worked for Montgomery Ward, smoked packs and packs of Pall Mall cigarettes, and rooted for the Steelers and Pirates on TV, but I never heard anyone call him a saint.
Razors & Computer Security
Remember back when razors came as a single blade? Then we advanced to twin blades and multiple blades. My current razor has three blades. It’s all in the pursuit of the closest shave possible.
And that was a good thing. It used to be so hazardous walking on the street as a man. You’d be going along, minding your own business, when, suddenly, a car screeches to a halt beside you, lights flashing. Uniformed people would leap out and surround you. “Let us feel your shave,” they would order, “to ensure it’s the closest that it can be.”
You had no choice but to comply, or risk getting sent to a barber for a shave. Our nation had no tolerance for any but the cleanest shaved man.
That’s how it seemed, at least from the commercials and advertisements.
I’ve always been amused by that approach, that more blades mean a closer shave, and more particularly, that a close shave is critical to civilization’s continued existence. We seem to be going down a similar path with computer security. If one layer of authentication is good, two is better. Hence, they’ve launched double-layered and two-step authentication. Naturally, it’s doomed to fall. Experts don’t seriously believe an absolutely secure computer is possible, if it’s accessing the web.
But I see a day in the future when companies and websites will tell you, “We’re more secure, because we have three layers of security.” Then someone else will announced, “Our security is better because we have four layers,” and the security race will be on.
Razors and computer security weren’t the first to think that if some was good, more was better. Remember American car ads, touting lower, longer, wider?
Ford probably took the idea of more is better to an unusual but clever conclusion. They speculated that if some was good, then more is better with its front-end dive on braking. If some dive indicated your car’s brakes were doing their job and stopping you, then more dive would indicate better braking, right? They saved a lot of money and gained sales by gaming people into the perception their brakes were better because of that impressive front-end dive when you slammed on the brakes, when nothing had been changed.
Of course, we’ve always had the cubic inch and horsepower race. Still do, actually. Because, as they say, if some is good, more is better.
Probably why we have so many nukes in the United States. At least it feeds the perception that we’re safer.
Like with computers.
New Trump Sayings
Donald Trump came up with a new expression the other day: “prime the pump.” He was discussing the U.S. economy with a magazine at the time. It’s another example of his tremendous ability to see and grasp complex situations and reduce them to something that can be tweeted and remembered.
Here’s a few other expressions he’s originated since becoming president.
- A snowball’s chance in hell.
- Between a rock and a hard place.
- Once in a blue moon.
In each of those four instances above, the Tangelos mascot said, “Have you heard that expression used before? Because I haven’t heard it. I mean, I just…I came up with it a couple of days ago and I thought it was good. It’s what you have to do.”
He also claimed that he came up with the famous statement, “Ich bin ein Berliner,” while discussing the Berlin Wall with President Kennedy. Although only seventeen at the time, Trump said, “Walls always fascinated me, always. I had a gut feeling, you know, just a hunch, just a hunch, but I trust my hunches, I trust my instinct, that walls, like the one in Berlin that we built to protect us from communisms, were going to be important in my life, someday, and I was right. I was right.”
#fakenews
Well, almost fake news.
Time Suck
What does space travel, laundry, and cats have in common?
Why, they’re all time sucks, of course.
My wife shared information from an article about time savings and modern American life. Most households, particularly women, have seen a dramatic decrease in how long it takes to prepare meals. It used to require about two hours per meal. Of course, breakfast was rarer in those days.
On the other hand, laundry is an area where people don’t save time. The reasons derive from our attitudes toward hygiene, washing clothes, the increasing specialization in clothing, and fashion. We have and wear more clothes, and change them for more uses, whereas we used to accept being a little dirtier. The increased quantity and specialization equals more time doing laundry.
My time sucks today were more prosaic and had less to do with modern living. One involved a clogged toilet in one bathroom, a clogged sink in another bathroom, and a vomiting cat.
I’d just finished bathing and dealing with the clogged sink when Quinn puked. I was whining to myself about the sink and my hairiness. I’m sure that’s what caused it. The master bath has two sinks, and it was my sink that was clogged. He bugged me for food. He’s a small critter with a high anxiety level that causes him to leap up and race out of a room, so I’m always trying to fatten him up and encourage him to eat more. I fed him, per his request.
Then it was time for some morning business. All was successful, until the flush. Water rose and nothing went down. As I swore about that, I heard puking in the other room. I raced out in time to witness Quinn heaved a hair ball and his meal.
His deed was done on the hardwood floor. That means clean it up ASAP. I grabbed toilet paper and did the task. It was still warm, of course. Some dribbled onto my hand. I gagged reflexively, not a lot, and not as much as I would have in the past. Still, I wonder what it is about warm puke that causes me to gag.
Then it was back to the toilet. I’m not usually religious but facing a clogged toilet usually coaxes a prayer out of me. “Come on, flush,” I said, flushing. Then I corrected myself, “Come on, go down.” My prayers were answered, restoring my uncertainty about God’s existence.
Back in the office, I encountered another time suck. The story in my novel in progress requires Handley to take a shuttle. She enters the airlock but then what does she do? What’s the Avalon‘s layout? To address that, I needed to make a cup of coffee. Coffee helps me think.
Then I sketched the shuttle’s layout with pencil and paper. I should have been satisfied, but my secret geek required me to go to the computer and Illustrator and do it properly. That led to demanding details about the shuttle’s space capabilities, intended purposes, crew requirements, cargo capability, blah, blah, blah….
Done at last, ninety minutes later. By now, I was staring at the rear end of ten thirty. Gadzooks, time had been sucked up.
Of course, I need to point out that space travel wasn’t really the time suck; it was the creative process of writing about it. Does that count as a time suck? Maybe not. I suppose that I didn’t need to go into such detail to create the shuttle, but that’s my nature.
I reckon that’s a confession. It’s really my nature that’s the time suck.
DeeMichael
I’m supposed to be writing, but instead I’m procrastinating. I know what I’m supposed to be writing. I wrote it in my head this morning. Then I got here, turned on the computer, opened my documents and said, ready, set…in a minute.
Instead, I surfed the news.
My name is Michael.
It’s a pretty damn common name. At one point, during the beginning of a conference call a few years, eight people were on. Four were Michaels, and one was a Michelle.
I was scanning headlines today, and I saw another variation of Davonte. I’ve seen several variations the last few days. I don’t know the name’s origins. At one point, it was pretty unique. Now it’s becoming common, although I don’t think it’s as common as Michael, yet.
But after that, I thought, I’d always wanted to change my name. I’m tired of being a Michael because there are so many Michaels. But what can I change it to?
The answer came to me today. Mom’s nickname is Dee. My name is Michael.
I could be DeeMichael.
Maybe that can just be my writer’s name, just to separate us and provide clarity when I’m talking to him and he’s talking to me. Right now, it’s just, “Michael this, Michael that.” It gets pretty Michael-tedious.
But if he becomes DeeMichael, we could have a better conversation. Instead of just urging Michael to write, I could tell DeeMichael, “Hey, man, get on it, DeeMichael. What’s the matter with you? You’re supposed to be writing.”
Giving my writing ego a different name can be tres freeing. I can tell others, “I was talking to my writing friend, DeeMichael, and he said that more Americans believe Elvis Presley is alive than believe Jesus ever existed. Over half of Americans believe Elvis is still alive.”
Michael – that’s me – is a shy, deferential guy in most situations. DeeMichael can have a more exuberant personality. He can be more energetic. Probably is. As my creation, I can also make him younger. He can have different tastes, hobbies and habits. He doesn’t drink alcohol. “I’m not adulterating my body. It’s my temple.” He does take in caffeine. “Coffee is good for you.” Facts don’t matter to him. “I’m a writer,” he says. “I’ll make up my own facts. According to an essay I read in the Union of Concerned Scientists newsletter, most facts are been overtaken by greater understanding and insights within ten years, and are no longer true. You can look it up. You know it’s true.
“Look how facts have changed in the last couple hundred years. Science used to say egg yolks were bad for you, and then egg whites. High cholesterol was supposed to be bad for you, too.
“Used to be that they said smoking cigarettes didn’t cause any problems. That’s a fact you can look up. Doctors and actors endorsed them. They wouldn’t endorse something that, something that hurt people, and they weren’t, because they thought they were safe. All the science said they were safe, and then it turned out that they’re not safe.
“Look at the use of mercury in hats. That was considered safe and normal. Lead in paint, lead pipes, lead in gasoline. For that matter, gasoline was a brand name, like Kleenex. It’s a fact. Look it up.
“People never thought humans could fly. Never thought they’d reach the Moon, neither. Now we have a secret Moon base established up there. It has a population of ten thousand.
“Oh, yeah, it’s up there. You don’t know about it because it’s secret. But I have a cousin with a friend? Used to work for the NSA. He told me that there’s a secret base up there. Ronald Reagan established it. The budget is secret. It’s part of the Defense budget. That’s why it keeps growing. What, you really thought it was to build a bigger military? Why? We already have the world’s largest, more powerful military. We don’t need a bigger, more powerful one.
“Reagan built that moon colony up there because they realized the climate was changing and there was nothing they could do about it. So the colony was established as a place to save humanity. They’ve taken all the important paintings and things up there already. Everything in the Louvre, MOMA, and all those places are fakes.
“That’s why climate denying is so important now. They need to ensure climate change takes place, or we’ve wasted a lot of money. Plus, studies have shown that if there’s global warming, flooding and storming, it’ll scour the planet clean. Then they can come back from the Moon and start fresh with a clean planet.
“Of course, some of these big storms, like that Cyclone Debbie that just hit Australia? Man made. Yep, we can control the weather. We’ve been able to control it on a small scale for the last twenty-five years. But now it can be done on a bigger scale. Cylone Debbie was another test.
“It’s true. You can’t look it up, not on the normal Internet, but you can look it up on the secret Internet. Yeah, that’s right, there’s a secret Internet, used by the United States government, along with some of the world’s wealthiest people. That’s where the truth resides. Once you become a billionaire, you’re invited to log on. It’s true, man. Someday, it’ll all come out. Then you’ll see.
“All those wars going on in the Middle East? Fake news, just to distract and confuse people. It’s a front to help divert resources to the moon base. And Donald Trump isn’t POTUS, either. That’s all a fake government. The real government works in secret. It’s not led by Barack Obama, either. All that political stuff coming out of Washington, D.C., is just for show. Believe me. It’s a fact. That’s why Congress never really passes anything. They’re just supposed to be putting on a show, which is exactly what they’re doing.”
That DeeMichael. I’ll tell you what, he’s quite a character.
Fitbit Writing
I’ve had my Fitbit for three and a half months. My daily average for steps is eleven thousand, seven hundred. My daily miles are five point five two. My personal best for daily steps was seventeen thousand, five hundred.
Until yesterday. Yesterday, I achieved almost twenty-two thousand steps and ten miles. I confess, if I’d known I was so close to doubling my average, I would have done it. That’s how I’m wired.
Now it’s the morning after.
I feel great but I question myself about what my Fitbit goal and expectations should be. I will work to reach and exceed my daily goals. I want to attempt another big walking and exercising day.
It’s the same way with writing. I typically write about eleven hundred words a day. I also edit, revise and polish. That’s part of my pantser organic writing process. My writing mind is like a loom weaving the story. I move back and forth through it.
Some days, I catch fire. The most I’ve ever written in one day was five thousand words, five thousand very intense words. Just like walking twenty-two thousand steps yesterday, it felt awesome. The next day, I wanted to do again. Why, if I could do five thousand words a day, every day, I’d become impressively prolific.
But the next day’s writing session was a struggle to achieve my standard output. I fought to achieve one thousand words and felt exhausted and disenchanted afterwards. It’s been like that with other writing days when I’ve doubled or tripled my average. Why, I tested myself to understand.
After thinking about this over the years, I’ve concluded that I do have a finite daily energy level. Exceeding that can happen but it takes it toll on the next day. I don’t know if science and medicine back me up on this, or if others have had the same experience. I know through my military experience of working twelve plus hours a day through illness and terrible conditions that I can draw deeper from the well. But doing so requires me to shut out absolutely everything else.
That was easy to do in a military environment. We had an established mission with a high priority. Other missions and units were depending on us. If we failed, a domino effect began. The stakes were high. So was the visibility.
Our expectations also set us up for success. Everyone outside of ours – family, friends and other unit members – understood our focus. They knew we didn’t have time or energy for anything else, and they gave us space.
But the writing experience is different from the military experience and the Fitbit experience. With Fitbit goals, it’s a personal goal. If I don’t make it, well, that sucks, but c’est la vie. The military commitment was well-established and understood.
Writing, however, is a terribly personal beast that has a hold on me. While the Fitbit goals require physical commitment with some smaller levels of intellectual and emotional commitments, I have all that in me, no problem. The military commitments were drawn at higher levels from those same veins.
The veins of energy and activity required for writing are much, much different. Physically, sitting in a chair, thinking, reading and typing, it doesn’t seem like it should be taxing. Yet, it becomes physically exhausting. Writing takes more out of me than walking all those steps.
Likewise, from intellectual and creative points of view, writing is more of a debilitating challenge. I worked for a decade for IBM as a planner and analyst. I was often presented with unique business cases to analyze and consider for my recommendations, observations and inputs. Those were interesting and challenging logic problems, and required intensely creative problem solving approaches, but still, they fell way short of what’s called for when fiction writing. Yes, my stories, characters, situations and worlds tend toward being complicated and involved. I remain constantly astounded by the levels of commitment I give my writing.
Returning to my Fitbit goals, I understand that twenty-two grand was a terrific result for me. I’ll enjoy it and move on because my goal is not to beat myself every day, but to maintain and achieve an average that will help me toward greater goals of being healtheir. In other words, the daily steps are not an end of themselves but part of a larger process.
So it is, too, with the writing. The word counts, editing, revising and polishing are not the end results. They’re part of a larger process of conceiving, writing, finishing and publishing a novel.
Time to write like crazy now, at least one more time.
A New Notebook
(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.
