ectoblog.com

Even the purest vegan will slap at a mosquito.

As I was reading the comics page in the newspaper this morning, it occurred to me that over half the comics on the page have been around at least as long as I’ve been around. Hi & Lois, Hagar the Horrible, Wizard of Id, Mark Trail, Funky Winkerbean, Dennis the Menace. Even, god help me, Peanuts, which is the seaweed-strewn immortal zombie of the comics page.

Because these strips have somehow tottered into my adulthood, I still see the same characters and names that I grew up with. And many of these names aren’t being regenerated in maternity wards. New mothers and fathers are naming their kids Joshua and Heather, not Dennis or Rex or Linus. Therefore, because these comic strips have the vampirish quality of continuing to exist despite everything, a time will come when the only place these names appear is on the comics page. Kids today, the Joshuas and the Heathers, will still be reading about the Dennises and the Heathcliffs when they are adults.

Which is really weird; it’ll be as if I had to read “Ezekiel the Menace” or “Hatshepsut and the Pirates” or “Nero Google & Marduk Smith.” Okay, Barney Google and Snuffy Smith is a bad example, but you get the point.

I have exactly two superstitions. Between them, I can explain the universe.

The first superstition is that if I talk about something, it’s not going to happen. The Pizza Gods superstition is a manifestation of that.

The second superstition is that if I talk about something, it IS going to happen. For example, if I were to say–and this blog entry should in no way be taken that I am saying that, because I categorically am not– that I’m going to die in an automobile accident in six months, I will die in an automobile accident in six months.

I live in a tidy world, populated by unspeakable horrors.

I don’t like hearing mathematicians talk about how inelegant or uninteresting a particular problem is. If a problem has an inelegant solution, that says nothing about the solution, but everything about the code that’s used to solve it. Our symbolic mathematical code (and by extension, all our codes) crumbles around the edges. It is out on the edges of a code’s utility to make sense of a problem that the solution becomes inelegant.

I can solve driving a screw with a hammer. The method is inelegant, but the problem isn’t. Using a screwdriver would be an elegant way to solve the problem. When a mathematician talks about inelegant solutions, he’s not talking about the problem (even if he thinks he is); he’s talking about the way he went about solving it. It’s not true that the problem is uninteresting, it’s just distasteful to tackle a problem that your tool (symbolic mathematics) can’t handle adequately. So there are problems out there waiting for elegant solutions, waiting for elegant tools; waiting for their screwdrivers to be invented.

A lot of solutions were inelegant until the appropriate tool was invented. For example, problems needing calculus to adequately describe or solve them were inelegantly solved (or not solved at all) until calculus was invented.

We as people are not done creating codes that solve intractable problems elegantly. I hope I’m here to see it the next time it happens.

The best metaphors are extensible and fractal in nature. They are as finely formed in their molecules as they are in their enormity.

For example, the billions of people are like the Oort Cloud surrounding the sun that is Society. And it’s natural for the people out there to want promotion to the inner system, to want to be a comet, or an asteroid, or Jupiter. To want to be famous or important; to possess gravity.

The metaphor can be extended to the human soul-as-star, and the various organs and cells as the Oort Cloud clamoring for ascendance (or at least benign indifference). Then there are the cells nesting deep, with their own satellites, two layers below the sun. It’s a matryoshka down to its utter parts.

Metaphors are seldom perfect. The society-as-solar-system metaphor, for instance, strays in part because it’s not perfection to split Society and people apart, as the sun and the Oort Cloud are apart. But it’s still evocative to me, and maybe, by extension, others.

Some people yearn for a particular metaphor that explains everything to their satisfaction. Like religion, which makes many people feel warm and safe. The bible (and other religious guidebooks) is one resonant metaphor after another. That the stories and parables can still fire the imaginations of countless millions thousands of years later is incredible. What amazing stories to transcend the eons.

There are other people, though, who just like metaphors, and always more of them, and who don’t require the safety of perfection. I’m making a case that all Art, and a greater part of everything that we do, is a yearning for metaphor. To see what a thing represents. To see the similarities inherent among the things in the world.

It’s a yearning for communication, really. To share your world with others. How do I know that this tree (or a tree) means the same thing to me as it does to someone else? By likening it to some second thing, then searching for recognition in the eyes of others. In other words, by proposing a metaphor.

Enough of that. I have another celestial metaphor that compares stars and society:

Society is a star, but we don’t know what kind of star it is. It could be a yellow star, with a long and glorious arc. Or it could be a red giant, that is consuming raw materials at such an enormous rate that they’ll all be gone quickly. It could even be a thing which reaches for the heavens with a single-minded purpose: to continue to be. I mean, we as a civilization have the resources and the know-how to plan and build enormous rocketships to colonize other planets and systems, if we’re willing to accept enormous want and hardship to do it. We’re perfectly capable of it. Society could be a thing like that: a supernova that sprays bits of itself throughout its neighborhood.

There’s really no reason to think that is the way it is, and there’s really no reason to think society isn’t a red giant rapidly running out of fuel, given the evidence. But it is nice to think that there are other possibilities, given the metaphor.

I think the difference between who I am now and who I was when I was a young adult is in the amount of things I’ve noticed. It’s just a sheer quantity. And like Stalin or Lenin or a famous Russian general or Tom Clancy (inside hoops) was fond of saying, quantity has a quality all its own.

As I’ve grown older, my methods of doing anything have gotten more streamlined. For instance, I take the cheese and the turkey out of the refrigerator at the same time now, to avoid having to backtrack, in the assembly of a sandwich.

I’ve noticed the seasons, I’ve noticed the stars, I’ve noticed the cyclical nature of the economy. I’ve noticed that longjohns are good to wear when it’s very cold. I’ve noticed there’s a sucker born every minute.

I’ve noticed things that I couldn’t possibly have noticed when I was twenty. Because some things cycle so slowly that twenty years isn’t enough to see their range of behavior or activity. Just can’t have been done. I might have grasped things in an intellectual way, but there’s just no substitute for experience.

Which is something else I’ve noticed.

I want to be exactly this rich: I want to have a nice, big country house in southern Mississippi, and I want several absolute holes in other states in the middle of nowhere, holes priced like 2 year-old expensive cars. I’d like a hole with air conditioning in the desert, a cabin hole in the mountains, another cabin hole in the mountains of Alaska, and a backwoods hole in upstate New York or New England. Way out in the middle of nowhere. I want a hole within a day’s driving distance of any habitable part of the United States. A hole network, if you will. Is that asking so much?

I was trying to come up with a good, succinct definition for the term ‘domesticated animal’ the other day. I realized that the definition has to reference cats and dogs, but it also has to reference horses and cows and silkworms. We humans make a lot of other animals work for us.

“An animal that we make work for us” doesn’t quite cut it, because of cats. Cats don’t do anything, as far as I can see. So the definition I finally came up with is

“an animal who can’t eat without our say so.” We are the Kibble God to our domesticated lackeys; that’s why they stick with us.

In a way, the Government fills the same role for us as we fill for Rex and Sniffles. There are many things we can’t do without the government’s say so. Years ago, of course, it was illegal to brew beer; the government said we could eat X, but couldn’t drink Y. Many people still brewed beer, but they were bad, bad dogs.

I want to start a formal petition to God, requesting a fabulous omen. I think I could get a lot of signatures.

It’s important to understand beer.