tangled

test.

Labels: intent

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"Always listen to the experts. They'll tell you what can't be done and why. Then do it."  - Robert Heinlein

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http://jimmycotton.blogspot.com/2008/12/mastercard-commercial-you-will-never.html

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FCC *cancels* hearing on free internet

http://news.cnet.com/8301-1035_3-10122586-94.html?part=rss&subj=news&tag=2547-1_3-0-20

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I have always been a patriot. I have always loved my country.

I am an atheist and do not pray. I love, respect, and obey the constitution and and value the Bill of Rights, precisely because WE created them, rather than having them handed to us on bricks.

But for the first time in my life, I fly a flag in front of my house.

That's something important.

Labels: intent

Goodbye, Bettie Page

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I'm, sorry, and this is NOT racial.  But the Chinese government and government machinery is FUCKING INSANE:

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/09/world/asia/09china.html?hp

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Somehow, I thought I'd be 20 (and innocent, which I was NOT then) forever. And that somehow life would just unfold. So, So many things I would do differnently, it amazes me.

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"spinspin69"

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Some are driven to an action; a passion, a hobby, an occupation, a real life.

Some are, in a way, lost. Lost in interest, or drive, or the movement involved in daily life, or the need to make a real living....but are lost, any way.

As I am.

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I remember pollywogs. I remember running half naked in the garden. I remember a goat, and a compost pile. I remember a treacherous downhill dirt driveway that often bruised knees when riding a tricycle. I remember beautiful afternoons outside, with my sisters, playing silly games.

I remember working in the shop. Lifting lead into the old Linotype, and magicaly watching as WORDS came out. I remember ink, and drawers full of type.

I remember learning science at a little table: the structure, and differences, between the Hydrogen and Helium atoms. I learned about electronics, some. I remember days on a dinghy out in the kelp.

I remember the fire that took it all away, July 26, 1977. I remember trying to save the house (and my sisters' stuffed animals) before fleeing. I remember eating at a McDonald's on Milpas when we all met.

And then everything changed. Everything.

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I cry during movies. Or during sappy parts of books.

How many normal, heterosexual men would admit to that? And whatever your response, why?

Women seem either overly weepy at everything, or able to control their tear ducts to a degree I can't fathom, leaving their (unnecessary) mascara unsmudged.

How odd. 

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The west has always entranced me.

My travels through the the west, my time in the desert, my time climbing rocks and cliffs...alll have affected me. Listining to the Coyotes at night, or watching the sun rise on the eastern Sierra. Our pride as humans is overwelmhing and stunning.

Keeping watch: we all take our turn. But in the end, with any honesty, it is the wild open spaces of the American West that draw me. May these canyons, hillls, fields, washes, remain for all time in excellence and glory.

And blow up the Glen Canyon, for crissakes.

Labels: intent

So, I got an email from an old friend today.

Did it dredge up memories -- both good and not so good -- yeah.

But it also reminded me of the value of friendship, no matter how many years separated.

You know wh0 you are.

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I'm a sucker for sappy films.

I don't often watch them, but when I get sucked in, it's all over.

So: "The Holiday", 2006, Cameron Diaz, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Jack Black.

Labels: intent, movies

Death terrifies me. I mean terrifies me.

As an atheist and agnostic (see other sources for definitions; they're worth differentiating), I believe, for lack of additional evidence, in this life and no other.

Frankly, I'm rather attached to this life. And My greatest, truest, most honest desire is this: to witness history. To see what we become, or do not become. To witness the future on grand time scales so large as to make me dizzy while sitting down.

Not only us: I want to watch rock worn away, uplifted, continents drift, the Sun and stars evolve, the galaxies waltz, the vast and minute, the great footwork of the great Astaire and Rogers of time's arrow.

And I know that I will witness no such thing any more than a grain of sand on a beach witnesses and comprehends the greatest of human achievements. Less, to be sure.

And yet I wish it. Beyond all else.  From whence do legends of immortals come? From these feverish dreams of time within control. From within our desire -- born of evolutionary intelligence -- to surpass evolution itself.

My cat knows nothing of time, really. Food, rest, play, pleasure, fear, comfort...and, I like to think, Love. But immortality? Is she to be envied? Some, who might be called wise, would say yes. But that Zen-vectored view isn't one I can share anymore. I seek more. I seek the impossible, the forever cat, endless catnip.

Labels: cats, deep time, evolution, forever, geology, immortality, intent, time

I have some cameras. I have some tripods. I have all of the 'stuff'. There are lights, wires, filters, lenses.

I have amazing microphones and preamps. I have ridiculously capable audio software. I have dead cats (+ 5 for non-incorrect inferrence) and good sealed cans (no, I am not canning animals for winter).

I have five different keyboards, at least three good word processors, and almost 40 years worth of material.

{ commercial break }

I have nobody in front of my cameras. I have no voice reaching into my microphone, pleading and demanding audience with the world. I have no words striving for freedom, aside from these silly exercises in construction. 

Confusion: what target? Shoot to kill? To capture? To enhance, or represent? I feel befuddled and non-understood swahili in my own intent, no subject for whatever verb I might arrive at.

Labels: camera, intent, marginal, no quarter, people, photography, target

Volume at 11 (+1 points if you get the reference), post-grunge girl-punk rock on the AKG's (another +1 for that reference).

Tied directly to my living, changing mirror-image doppleganger reflection of 9/11 because of a particular song. Not a mother, meself. But horrific imagery, beautiful tragedy blended on high in a Cuisinart with memories of that morning (walking to Calculus III class, talking to M on the phone: "They're gone." "What do you mean?" "The whole things. Gone.")

"Why can't I get along with you?" (2 points for double reference).

Labels: 9/11, intent, Portland, Sleater-Kinney

OK, so politically, I'm not a fan of coomunism. Or any of its bastard children. But this is an interesting link, and on a much, much smaller scale that traditional view of communism: Brithdir Mawr Community

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Rain in Colorado east of the Rockies is always something remarkable. This is due to what is called a "rain shadow" - the mountains to the west, facing the prevailing wind, the jet stream. The clouds drop their rain and snow as the wind pushes them higher in altitude, and as they lower on the lee side of the mountains and face the endess, flat plains of the American heartland, they stop giving up moisture, most of the year. This is why there is desert to the east of the Sierra Nevada, and is why the Colorado, Wyoming and Montana flatlands are drier than one might expect. It's also why, when it DOES rain here on the front range, we sometimes become entranced by water falling from the sky, manna, sitting on the front steps, simply listening to the drops falling.

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From an email I sent earlier: I'm so enthusiastic about Barack Obama's candidacy that I've started to habitually check myself, asking myself if I'm becoming overzealous, or am being 'taken in' by appealing rhetoric. Just to be safe, you know? But the conclusion I keep arriving at is that this really is the turning point it appears to be; that he really is what he looks like. I'm a cynic at heart. Deep down. For me to feel as strong as this about a f***ing politician, of all things, is seemingly unlikely...and yet, he has captured my attention in a way that I can scarcely explain. As I read somewhere recently, I think I might have an inkling of what conservatives felt when Reagan came along. Suddenly, a person comes out of nowhere, embodying my ideals and my ideas, and does so with integrity, focus, honesty and energy. If I were a religious man, I would thank God for Barack Obama. As it is, I'll just thank Barack. And vote.

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Walking in to a Border's bookstore the other day to purchase an electronics magazine, I found myself needing a restroom. I proceeded to the upstairs facilities, and while in the stall found two books that had clearly been taken from store shelves and left in the restroom. Curious, I glanced at the titles, and thumbed quickly through one of them.

As I left the store, I approached the young woman at the service desk and informed her that she might want to ask a male employee to fetch the books in question from the restroom. As I walked away, I said "Whoever left them there, the titles chosen were...amusing."

The titles in question? How to Get Hot Women Into Bed: Ultimate Seduction Techniques for Real Guys and
Boink: College Sex by the People Having It (this is the one with the dirty pictures in it) The amused look on the young woman's face was priceless.

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It's been a long time since I looked at the contents of this blog, much less posted to it or published it.

My personal site remains chrismaytag,net, but I've chosen to resume using my now more-than-a-decade-old domain 'tangled.org' to publish things to

For now, all of the old entries are here. I don't know yet about the comments, which is a shame, because much of my favorite stuff that happened in the old blog took place in the comments. I had regular readers who were actively commenting on my posts, and with whom I had great conversations, both through comments and email.

I'll see what I can do about making sure that old comments are restored...or I will remove all posts prior to this one and treat this as a new blog entirely, as its purpose, my life, and my reason for writing again have all changed since the blog's inception.

Suffice to say that entries will be sporadic, and that I have no specific agenda in resuming my writing other than to have a place to write.

For my photographs, please visit Flickr , and keep in mind that I recently lost several gigabytes of my best photographic work due to a rare, rather dramatic and seemingly permanent RAID 0+1 array failure. What's on Flickr is what's left, and it's not my best work.

I am also moving from windows to all Macs - laptops and desktop, everything. I'm tired of Windows.

We'll see what happens here. It may fizzle again...which would be fine. But in the early days of blogging, when tangled.org had its greatest readership, there were thousands of individual readers per day, which, at the time, was pretty impressive for a non tecno-illuminati blog.

But for now, it makes sense to make things easy for me to have a place to write.

Labels: beginnings, intent

I can contain nothing Tears burst forth Like the dying breath Of a dying man rescued Left helpless By a single falling leaf I cry out Laughing.

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SF novelist Cory Doctorow has posted what he calls a "Red Mars: a very belated appreciation". He says "Because now I've finally read Red Mars, and I am agog at what may be the finest sf novel I've ever read...Robinson doesn't just shine here: he glows."

I agree, Cory, and welcome to the fold.

Robinson's trilogy is that peculiar and particular variety of SF: fun for the lasers-and-rockets hounds, while still being rewarding - deeply and richly rewarding - for social theorists, political thinkers, even revolutionaries.

It's good to see a writer for whom I have a great deal of respect appreciated and honored by another writer for whom I have a great deal of respect.

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The tiny ogre was repulsive,
But tasted like a peach

and

Awful meaty bones
a sad vision of
bloody pink

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Every now and then, something happens that reminds me of why I decided to teach. A friend ran a public show about quasars in the planetarium this evening, and a group from a local community college came to see the show. This "astronomy 101" class was of all ages, eager to learn, and seemed to be having a good time.

Later, my friend and I were scheduled to use the big scope for an observing project. I stopped by the smaller scopes, where we hold a public telescope viewing session every Friday evening, to find this same group eager for a look at Saturn or Jupiter. With the clouds rolling in, it was clear that they, and I, weren't going to be able to observe this evening. At the request of the instructor who had invited them to visit us, I held an impromptu tour & talk with this group about telescope, taking them upstairs to show them the big scope. I talked a bit about telescopes and quizzed them about some things. One kid, there with his mother, knew all the answers. "What kind of telescope is this?" "catadioptric, or cassegrain", he said. "And how about this one?" "refractor", was his quick reply. He was so eager, so interested, all of us - the adults - laughed, glad to see a kid excited like that.

It seems to me that we are born curious -- and then become incurious unless we are lucky. I hope his mom keeps bringing him to the observatory, because he's well on his way to being one of the lucky ones. After I locked up and left the observatory, I saw them leaving and said "thanks for coming tonight!" His mom said "don't worry...we'll be back."

Good enough.

Labels: intent

Now this is beautiful! Folks on the right - especially the "business right" - are all about the free market. And on this, I agree with them: let the market decide...as long as the playing field is fair.

And so, here, it is. By buying up "pollution credits" (and letting them expire, unused), the Acid Rain Retirement Fund manages to use the polluters' favorite weapon - the free market - against them. How's that for economic Jujitsu?

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In a discussion about the origin of the (in)famous 'smiley face' [ i.e., ":)" ], I found the following. It appears to be a Nabokov quote, although it is uncorroborated [ ed: now it has been ]:

Q: How do you rank yourself among writers (living) and of the immediate past? Nabokov: I often think there should exist a special typographical sign for a smile – some sort of concave mark, a supine round bracket, which I would now like to trace in reply to your question.

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We are our own favorite storytellers. We talk incessantly to ourselves, of course, but mostly in that quiet, internal, voice that often seems as if it's someone else's. But sometimes we tell ourselves stories out loud, as ourselves and to ourselves. First-person-squared.

I found myself talking about my favorite hummus today, speaking out loud to nobody as if somebody had asked me my opinion on all of the locally available hummus brands: why it was better than Ideal Market's, why I didn't like the stuff that Whole Foods sells. My little discussion of texture and flavor, hometown economics, market preferences - they were all intended for myself. And yet, and yet...they were for some other listener, as yet unidentified.

When I'm hiking, I sometimes become aware of myself, suddenly, as if waking, except that I am in the middle of a long oratory indulgence: speaking before the United Nations, talking to the local kids hanging out on the sidewalk, justifying my socio-political positions to, again, a mysterious audience.

Is this audience myself? Is it, in fact, me that is talking? Does it matter? What I do know is that if I could speak with such force, such emotion, and such conviction while actually speaking to people, I'd have everything I needed to be a politician, a preacher, a demagogue of the first order.

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Today I received some spam for "penis enlargement pills", with the following text at the bottom:

Hell is other people. - Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)

Whenever I climb I am followed by a dog called Ego. - Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900)

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There is an application which is used by astronomers (called "IRAF", maintained by the National Optical Astronomy Observatory) for scientific image reduction and analysis; I've heard it said that it is extraordinarily un-user-friendly. I've also heard it described as "user-abusive", and I've got to agree. It's an extraordinarily powerful piece of software, but seems to have been written by machines, with only minimal attempts at making its interface accessible by actual humans.

Similarly, my cable box seems to have been designed by people who never attempted to use said cable box. Various computer operating systems exist that claim to make things easier for users - including Apple's OS-X and Microsoft's Windows XP - and which fail spectacularly. My Palm Tungsten PDA uses a famously simple, clean interface which is famously "easy", and yet I still find myself scribbling things on paper for later entry to save the people around me the spectacle of several minutes of tapping just to take down their address and telephone number. My cell phone - a new and very nice model with lots of gee-whiz features that appeal to geeks like me - is nonetheless a pain to use. I could go on, easily.

I just don't get this...we have lots of smart people who can figure out how to put people on the moon, make transistors 90 nanometers across, stop light in its tracks, and unravel the secrets of DNA...and we're still unable to make tools that don't abuse us in the process of helping us.

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I've been looking into various ways of posting images to weblogs from camera phones. I've yet to find a solution that appeals to me...if you know of a good solution, please let me know.

Specifically, what I want is something that will let me email a photo to an email address (which I can host), and have that photo automatically saved to my server and the img tag placed into a predetermined webpage.

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Camilo Mejia has chosen.

What, exactly, he has chosen remains to be seen...but one statement stands above the fray surrounding his decision to claim conscientious objector status when ordered to return to Iraq as part of the occupation forces:

"I was an instrument of violence. Now I have decided to become an instrument of peace"

My sense: Any person who chooses justice over complacency and uniformity with his/her peers is a hero, to me. Very important note: this is not meant to suggest that those who choose to continue service, under protest, in spite of their doubts are in the wrong. Indeed, I think the world of them - I merely mean to point out the difficult, honorable decision made by Mejia.

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Sorry to include this on the main page, but once again, Dennis surprises (and pleases) me: Kucinich Advocates Tripling NASA Budget

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I live in Boulder, Colorado. I am a student at the University of Colorado where football reigns, seemingly supreme. For years, allegations of various sorts have been made against the school's football program, its student participants and directors, but official blame-avoidance mechanisms have always managed to deflect most criticism...until the last few weeks. Several players have been accused of sexual assault in the past, but recent stories concerning rapes and other assaults (as well as "escorts" being used as enticements for players) have perhaps finally managed to penetrate some of the veil of denial and wishful thinking that permeates the university's administration.

Last year, CU was irresponsibly listed (based on surveys completed by some 5% of students) as the nation's "number one party school", ignoring the reality that many of us work our asses off because we love our studies and are not swilling beer at frat parties while cheering sub-par football players who have been repeatedly accused of sexual assaults. This cheapens our work, cheapens the reputations of our extraordinary, world-class instructors, and cheapens the achievements of those men and women who are both good students and good athletes.

It's time for the CU administration to recognize this. Students are not noisome income generators, they are the primary reason for CU's existence. Football might be a nice luxury for a well-performing student body, but it is not a necessary component of collegiate life. It's bad enough that many campus facilities are closed on game days to avoid damage caused by unruly fans..when we allow this kind of inappropriate behavior as a community, we endorse it.

My suggestion? It's a radical idea: Let's cancel the football program, put a roof on the stadium, and turn it into classrooms where actual education can occur. That is why we're here, no?

Labels: intent

Ann Coulter's disparaging opinion piece about former Sen. Max Cleland, and the Center for American Progress' article nicely illuminating her lies and generally tearing her to icky little bits of ignorance.

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"I suspect I have spent just about exactly as much time actually writing as the average person my age has spent watching television, and that, as much as anything, may be the real secret here." - William Gibson

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It seems as if whenever I get telescope time scheduled at the observatory, it snows. Perhaps this will continue during the summer? I'll be magic! I can schedule time in the dome, and then impress everyone with my ability to make it snow in July!

Labels: intent

I woke from a dream, walked to the laundry room and extended my hand to the lump in the corner on the shelf: a new climbing rope, unused. Satisfied, I walked back to bed and returned to sleep. The dream was about a canyon, pink rosy marble overhangs and walking through the creek for miles while marveling at its undiscovered, hidden potential. "It's the biggest overhang I've ever seen!", I said to the red-haired MTV-girl/climber/dream-thing next to me. We placed several tents on sandy, dry ground above the creek, and investigated a fully equipped 1960's era kitchen inside a cave, and then went climbing. Now I am drinking coffee.

Labels: intent

For once, I'm less than furious at something George Bush said. Going to Mars (and, to a lesser degree, the Moon) is a good thing. But man in the White House failed to make a strong case for his plan not because it's a bad idea (it's not, in spite of some structural & organizational idiocies) but because he knows that it's not his plan to fund. NASA, being the recently reformed and sheepish (or so we hear) agency it has become, began to identify how it was going to meet the former Texas governor's mandate with a handful of extra dollars. Clearly, no existing program, planned or current, would not feel the budget trimmers' blades stripping yet more muscle from the already lean and atrophied body of the US space program. It sucks, but until money begins to come back down into the gravity well instead of disappearing up into it, we'll face hard decisions. I can live with that. However, when it became clear to me yesterday that NASA was going to abandon any further Hubble Space Telescope (HST) maintenance missions, I started getting angry. Angry because HST could continue its mission until we have equivalent capability in the visual and UV bands. Angry at the short-sighted, myopic attitudes of NASA adminstrators past and present, whose mindless focus on the dysfuntional, largely useless International Space Station has drained dollars from NASA's proper missions: planetary science and human exploration. Angry at the media, whose pandering to Bush's PR machine limits debate to the most rudimentary sort. Anger at the electorate for its continued willful ignorance of Bush's intentions.

Labels: intent

Everyone - I am planning to redesign & re-launch the site, along with a photo blog (with images sent from my cam phone). If anyone has any notions about how I ought to integrate photoblogging into the site (before the release of MovableType v3), please do let me know.

Labels: intent

From JPL's main public website:

"NASA's Deep Space Network has received a signal confirming that Mars Exploration Rover Spirit is alive after rolling to a stop on the surface of Mars."

Coming on the heels of the ESA's Beagle2, this comes as very, very welcome news. Mars awaits! UPDATE: A few images have been beamed back already, in what appears to me to be an ahead-of-schedule release. Remember those remarkable images from Pathfinder? These will be better. UPDATE 2: This page has loads of good stuff and is updating regularly

Labels: intent

I heard this guy speak tonight at this event which was a benefit for these facilities. Space folks are cooool.

Labels: intent

"Come in, she said, I'll give you shelter from the storm"

waking with Dylan and relishing the delight of cold, dry feet on hardwood winter comes, and crossed signals fade into the quiet rest of dry leaves piled against coming cold. do I understand the question? What I remember is that of all things, blood comes back and that time does not. A simple twist of fate, and it's tomorrow already.

Labels: intent

Progressives are beset by an impossibly degenerate player on the game board: the American voting public. As votes for conservative (as repressive, law-and-order candidates are often called) rise, the progressive, Liberal camps find themselves struggling not only to find a candidate worth supporting, but also to defend their own beliefs. In light of this, the popularity of Rep. Kucinich is no surprise. He talks the talk and walks the walk. His voting record is exemplary from the progressive point of view. His performance at the Iowa debates was, in spite of bad scripting preparation and poor ability to control the debate, was also worth noting. And yet many progressives view him as desireable, but not electable. His colleague, former Vermont governor Howard Dean is the front runner. He has eclipsed all previous Democratic fundraising records, and is popular amongst a Democratic-voting public tired of the fake-Liberal stances of other candidates like Joe Lieberman and John Kerry. He has yet, however, to really light a fire underneath the Democratic mainstream. Who is our Saint George? I want my vote to matter. I want a candidate who has the vision, balls, and righteous indignation of Kucinich, the electability of Dean, the establishment acceptability of Kerry, and the charisma of Bill Clinton. I am tired of half-measures, of backroom deals that hurt those they are intended to help, of the hypocritical stances of elected officials. Whois worth my trust? The Democratic party needs a candidate whose identity is a composite of these candidates. Next?

Labels: intent

The less we say about it the better, make it up as we go along. Feet on the ground, head in the sky, it's ok, I know that nothing is wrong. Sometimes music can be transcendent.

Labels: intent

Teaching has been on my mind lately, as well as on my plate. In addition to my regular full schedule, I'm working for a professor and taking a seminar on learning theory, constructivist learning, etc. while trying to act as a sort of peer-facilitator-cum-teaching-assistant for two groups of Introductory Astronomy students. I'd like to think that my passion for learning comes through all of the time, that my love of the sky and physics and science in general act as a motivator for my sometimes-lost students. But I know that it doesn't always do so, that sometimes they're not going to be interested no matter what I do, or that their more immediate concerns will get in the way of the questions that I enjoy talking to them about: why do we have seasons and what leads to a neutron star and what's outside the Universe and where are all of the population III stars and why is the damn sky blue anyway? But sometimes my enthusiasm does inspire, sometimes it does motivate. My favorite teachers have always been the passionate ones, no matter if they were freaks in their passion for their subjects - the freaks were, in fact, the best. Sometimes when I get excited talking about something and my students laugh at me I'm happy because it's a compliment. It means that they're seeing my love of the subject and responding to it. And I'm guessing that this means that I'm going to be a freak teacher, too.

Labels: intent

My condolences to the people of my birth state, California. Me? I've been looking at Canada.

Labels: intent

This morning I joined a friend and fellow astronomy student and our boss (also friend and mentor), who is a professor of astronomy and director of our observatory and planetarium, at a local farmer's market. We had two telescopes trained on the Sun and the Moon, as well as devices for projecting the Sun's image for safe viewing. We answered questions about the Sun, Moon and Mars, while telling people about the Friday evening observing sessions held at the campus observatory. We shared what we knew of the sky with children as young as 3 or 4, and with adults old enough to remember the first world war. One little girl, looking at the Sun through a telescope eyepiece turned to me with an indescribably curious, attentive expression on her face. She said "is it far away?" "Yes," I replied, "very far away." Looking back into the eyepiece, she said "then it must be very big." My chest got a little tight, my eyes a little wet, and said "yes -- and you're very smart to notice that!" She smiled, and moved aside for her mother. Someday, she might remember that moment as the beginning of a love affair with the sky. How, on Earth, could I ask for anything more?

Labels: intent

el•e•gi•ac Pronunciation: (el"i-jI'uk, -ak, i-lE'jE-ak"), —adj. Also,el"e•gi'a•cal. 1. used in, suitable for, or resembling an elegy. 2. expressing sorrow or lamentation: elegiac strains. 3. Class. Pros.noting a distich the first line of which is a dactylic hexameter and the second a pentameter, or a verse differing from the hexameter by suppression of the arsis or metrically unaccented part of the third and the sixth foot. —n. 1. an elegiac or distich verse. 2. a poem in such distichs or verses.

"Suddenly, this fellow to my left whom I hadn't seen began playing the most beautiful song on a set of bagpipes, and it was just him and me and the sunrise and the silhouette of the Temple of Joy off in the distance. It was such an elegiac, perfect moment -- but I can't describe why. "

Labels: intent

One of the driving forces behind the development of writing seems to have been the need to keep track of who was who, what they owned, and how much they owed in taxes. We, of course, see writing through a different lens, that of many thousands of years of literature and history. But it wasn't until much later that we began to see records of individual lives. At the end of the twentieth century, we began to see the digitization of our world: communication, art, learning, all have begun to move from the analog to the digital. The things we carry with us through time form a physical ghost of ourselves, and this ghost helps us to define the nature and boundaries of our lives. We treasure certain things, images, memories, and we discard many more. As more and more of our lives are archived digitally, recorded on digital video and embedded into searchable databases (both of our own making and of external origin), we give birth to a digital ghost, the sum of our digital lives, stored on hard drives and network servers. These ghosts began as ethereal as any, but as time goes on, we add our dialogue with the outside world to the body the ghost: our emails, our banking records, our picture libraries, our calendars and to-do lists, etc. Thus does the original absurdity of Microsoft Windows' "My Documents" folder become prescient (if still very silly). I can imagine a time when our digital ghosts will accompany us everywhere in the form of software agents, custom designed for each of us to be truly personal personal assistants. Imagine that your are hiking, and see a beetle walking across the trail, and you stop to look at it. Something about it tugs at your memory, and you ask your ghost (whose physical presence takes the form of a small tear-drop shaped pendant around hanging from your neck and a cochlear implant in your left ear, both tied to a personal databank via wireless network) to remind you. This ghost knows everything about you, and has been a part of you since birth. It remembers every interaction, every experience, every note you've recorded. It tells you that when you were eight you were asked to collect a bug outside for a science experiment and couldn't bring yourself to kill a beetle you found in your yard. Knowing your tastes, the ghost also suggests several items relating to beetles it thinks you might enjoy: a poem, a painting. So, then, a new version of an ancient phenomenon: record keeping. We are what we do, and what we do has become (partly) digital. No longer are we Body and the Mind therein; we are Body, Mind...and digital Ghost.

Labels: intent

Ap•pur•te•nance Pronunciation: (u'purtnuns), noun [OF. apurtenaunce, apartenance, F. appartenance, LL. appartenentia, from L. appertinere. See {Appertain}.] 1. That which belongs to something else; an adjunct; 2. an appendage; an accessory; something annexed to another thing more worthy; 3. in common parlance and legal acceptation, something belonging to another thing as principal, and which passes as incident to it, as a right of way, or other easement to land; 4. a right of common to pasture, an outhouse, barn, garden, or orchard, to a house or messuage. In a strict legal sense, land can never pass as an appurtenance to land.

"Globes . . . provided as appurtenances to astronomy." --Bacon. "The structure of the eye, and of its appurtenances." --Reid.

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Many of us are now actively engaging in "I told you so" behavior in the aftermath of the televised portion of the Iraq War, as we watch whatever Iraqi street cred we had dissolve, Iraqi resolve stiffen and the administration's loud claims that Iraq "is not another Viet-Nam" grow ever more shrill. As impolitic as it might be to gloat, progressives and their hoary cousins the academics, activists and tree-huggers of the old left feel an intoxicating righteousness, as if evidence of the administration's misdeeds were a cure for the post-election (post Monica?) malaise. And that's dandy, as it might be enough to get us out to vote. So here's the problem. The goal isn't proving that Bush et al. are wrong, it is demonstrating that we are right. We cannot simply point to dead civilians in Afghanistan or suicide bombings and sniper attacks in Iraq, shouting about how our candidate didn't vote for the war. Speaking so loudly often implies a lack of anything further to say. We must answer the harder questions that lay on the world stage like props: just what do we do about people like Kim Jong Il, Saddam Hussein, or the fraction of Islamic clergy who incite violence against anyone? If we hope to lead, for our ideals to lead, we must have answers rather than righteousness. Got any?

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su•per•nal Pronunciation: (soo-pûr'nl), [key] —adj. 1. being in or belonging to the heaven of divine beings; heavenly, celestial, or divine. 2. lofty; of more than earthly or human excellence, powers, etc. 3. being on high or in the sky or visible heavens.

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Now that nobody visits anymore, a notice: changes and updates will be made here at some point soon, now that I'm out of classes (but not class) for a while. Keep checking back here.

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I knew it had gone out in the middle of the night when the small light seeping in from the next room disappeared, in perfect conjunction with the sharp crack of snapping wood and a bright flash in the window. Morning was fine, if awkward (lacking the coffee maker, news, radio). Afternoon was spent elsewhere, but with evening I returned home to the darkening neighborhood, the unfamiliar quiet of a home without machines humming. I had spent a good hour, headlamp on my head in the dark, sorting old, dead candles from good and arranging the coffee table so that I could read in the semi-dark, a dozen candles arrayed like some catholic altar full of saints. I had gone into the back and scrounged an old propane lamp, and had set about burying all of the food from the freezer and fridge in the front yard's snow (three feet deep in a place or three). One side of the street was lit, lucky. The rest of the neighborhood, for blocks, was dark, "concord to alpine! fourth street to the high school!", said one passerby, with enthusiasm. As I finsihed burying the food, I paused to finish shoveling the front walk, sweating, and looked around at the snow, tree branches hanging and broken and shattered. And then the front porch light, all of them, for blocks, came on. And all up and down the street, I watched as people went inside to watch the storm.

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Someone died yesterday, someone fine.

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It's all been said, in many places and by many voices more eloquent than my own. I need not recount the news to you, or point to symbols or speak of sacrifices. What I will do is to say that the sky is vast. The sky is of a size such that our dreams vanish into it; yet we pour them into that great vessel overhead and see our own futures in its endlessness. Those who fly are cursed with passion: to reach, to seek, to push forward. And I say that that curse is worth choosing, just as our dead did. Godspeed, Columbia.

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In a recent article, the following statement was made:

Viet Dinh, an assistant U.S. attorney general and one of the government's spokesmen on security topics, said in a recent interview that the Bush administration would not abuse these far-reaching [surveillance] powers. "I think security exists for liberty to flourish and liberty cannot exist without order and security," Dinh said.

I beg to differ. When we pursure liberty, order and security are the result - the by-products of freedom, the earned interest of those who willingly put their faith into the vessel we call "the people". But what about order and security as prerequisites? If we assume that order and security are necessary for liberty, for freedom - then we have assumed that a police state is our destiny...our goal. I am not afraid of Arabic, Persian, Muslim (etc), men walking down my street. I am afriad of government surveillance cameras on my street, in my city, in my country. I will fight them - with letters and votes, at first. But later? We'll see how far they try to come. I say stand up and speak up now, while we still can. This isn't the America I know, isn't the America I love.

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From the had to share dept: I am making this entry from a laptop, sitting in a Starbucks on California's central coast, across a wireless internet connection. Look, no wires! This is quite possibly the coolest thing since ice cream.

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I have been brought to tears by a rock. Likewise, the mathematics behind a supernova explosion's expansion rate has also evoked within me the strongest of reactions. And time, laid out before us in the night sky, brings me to my knees. So fine a thing is the universe in which we live, that it should produce creatures such as ourselves to wonder at its symmetries, be fueled by its curious imbalances, be awed by its grandeur beyond all measure.

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The aching weight of time: children standing, proud and without preconception; the aged, grimly or with beaming expression observing the goings-on. Each conversation, itself a thread being woven is left in midair: the shutter is tripped and all is caputured in an instant, history made flat, two dimensional and yellowing already. Each moment, so filled, so fast.

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Standing at the kitchen sink in the dark, sleepless, I look through a window into the workshop. Between meters and tools and wires, red figures balefully declare "4:12". To my right and closer at hand, smaller and somehow less dreadful, numerals on the coffee maker tell me "2:44". The sickly green numbers of the microwave, reflected in the window in front of me add their "6:49" to the count. Moments later, now sitting at the keyboard, the machine and an atomically-tuned clock on the wall give a more accurate "4:00". Accurate, but no more comforting. I am throwing myself into each next moment hoping to fall into some sleepy trap, finding only the minutiae of unsettled mind and unquiet body. Grimly, I click through the waking world's news.

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I smiled at the conductor's mannequin, although I doubted anyone lived there anymore. Old habits die hard.

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[ draft ii ] It was, I suppose, in his own mind I who walked in his shadow onto the stage. But to me, I felt only my twin's pale presence behind me as my legs carried me to the microphone (It's so far away, so distant. Urgently, then: TURN AROUND!). But the words we had all just heard still echoed in my mind, and the moment was lost or it was not and I walked and I walked past security details and public relations 'bots and I found myself facing two million people who had exhaled the same air I was breathing, and countless more across the seas and on two more worlds. I grabbed a microphone and I spoke. I said: "NOW IS THE TIME!". The fuel of right action beneath me, I said it again, even louder. "NOW is the time!" I saw an ocean, an angry ocean like a blister, a welt, spread to cover the world from the inside out. Lenses flashed in my senses as helicopters and other things circled overhead. I wondered at the bullet heading for my temple, but forgot about it when it did not arrive: more came to my lips and there is never the holding of words back. What is there the holding back of? Only truth, only options. Words came. "For how long have you eaten from another man's mouth? For how long has his blood been flowing in your veins, his woman's milk into your baby's belly? For how long has his suffering eased your pain?" More answers than there are stars, like I could feel each one against my skin. I closed my eyes, imagining my parents: unaware of my role in what they heard or even where I was (I heard: they thought you dead, Alex, you know that), listening to my faint voice on their illegal radio in the potato cellar back on the western slope, afraid, and thinking of the past. "For how long has your protector been your enemy? For how long has he been the source of your motivation and the channel of its transmission and the means of its distribution? For how long has your choice been his to make, your voice his to speak with?" On the left, an explosion. It was welcome, almost, a novel change in a novel moment. I saw bodies, though, and then I saw the barrel of a tank pushing into the the great square. Two more behind it. Each frame then slowed, the player quickly responding to my request to slow down its replay of that afternoon. Thirty frames per second to two or three, the video screen slowing quickly, unseen behind my closed eyes. I knew those events better than the recording did itself: the explosion and the bodies, the surge and the crowd. And then the second tank barrel aimed high, quickly, and then issued a sigh as it fired. The first and third tanks followed suit seconds later. I was told much later that ten-point-three seconds after the first volley, there were a series of puffs above the rightmost reaches of the sea of faces (and bodies and minds and nicknames and families) before me. Seconds later, more puffs above and to my left...and more, more, up and down the endless tides. I thought to run, but knew that no escape was waiting for those of us who had volunteered. Even as this was happening, great waves of sound reached my ears. No ocean spoke thus, no speaker ever played such a tune. "NO MORE! NO MORE! NO MORE! NO MORE!..NO..." The sound and echoes of machine-gun fire and grenade explosions mixed with the voice of a collective body of mind now made, course now set, from this point forward. I thought for a single second that if there was hope, it might be that sound. I thought "radio, fly! if others hear those voices as I do, all is not yet lost. The scene repeated around the periphery, they tell me now, looking at recovered footage and listening to eyewitness accounts. The tanks and the guns, the chemicals and the bodies. Nobody has yet told me why I live, perhaps nobody knows. But here I am. They tell me that two-hundred-fifty-thousand people died from the initial gassing, and another three-hundred-sixty thousand during the chaos of following two days. Those who were there but who (somehow, somehow) found a way through the noose can still be seen thirty years later in any city on any body. They are the dead: in makeshift clinics and alleyways, protests and institutions, dealer dorms and beat cafes, they wander, having seen all they need. Only a few - dozens, perhaps a hundred or three - still man the walls. But we watch not for enemy weakness, only for incoming threats. We are not guardians, although we enjoy the bitter, bloody taste of claiming that title. We are only those willing to ring the bell when the headsman came. We spoke. So many of us to so many others in so many cities on three worlds. But not enough. Or they heard, but were numb or could not believe or could not risk or were already too weak or were already too bound and tired and diseased and dead. Two nights ago, a thirteen year old girl was caught stealing water from a cache almost at treeline, well within our watch zone. We had seen her, but lost her in the late summer willows. We had only seen her again when one of our recon groups returned to camp later than usual. I looked at her now, trying to fathom why she would have come all this way from Denver, at this cost. A broken arm (no hope of it having it put right here..., I thought), her state told a sorry tale. I, myself, wanted only to leave, not to heal or to persuade or even to vanquish. I was tired. I am tired. I wanted to sleep.. She told me of her engineer father, her security forces brother, her mother. She told us of the camps, and the genetic feed-matching resource IDs. We had heard. Not this exact story, but stories are notions, patterns. We knew. This girl, we high in the ice, mad with cold and certain loss and failure and death, she told us of worse. I wanted to strike her, knew others near me did as well. We listened. Then she told me her desk had shown her a video, one from that day. Perhaps the very one I had replayed for myself, although I doubt she or anyone else knew I had been the Speaker in Denver on that day. Three decades and receding: the stages, the crowds, the tanks, but all just as raw today. Had one of our virii made it through their firewalls? I noted a flurry of activity in my peripheral vision, glad to see that the IT and Security teams were on the ball, looking to see if we had managed to force imagery back into the infostream. We'd been trying to break the silence imposed by their media channels, but it was anyone's guess if we'd actually managed to do so. So we listened to her story, thought about our own.

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I remember June, July. Months for standing up. August, the swollen heat of an endless day laying my critical heart out on the sidewalk while my self - the true one, anyway, the one I take to visit good friends and like the best - went to the mountains, and found as many flakes of mica to pick apart with a raw fingertip as there are stars above.

But Autumn? The leaves are a surprising addition to the fractured video I watch behind my eyes each day as I head to campus, a daring alteration by the wizard behind the curtain (he is still in charge, isn't he?) to the expected stability,normalcy, pattern, routine.

Write and calculate and record and repeat. Stare at them long enough until the right part of your brain falls asleep and then you can see it, the pattern, make a prediction now, quick! before it wakes up and that's supposed to be science.

And then leaves fall through the open window, and I forget that nothing made sense.

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Glancing up from my work, I watched two women walk down a hallway. I suddenly had the distinct sensation that all was not as it seemed; one of the women (the expression on her face, or the lack of familarity with which she moved in her skin, or the way she looked around as if struck as much as I by the strangeness of being) was clearly a moment out of time, isloated in a fractured way from the continuum of moments, a chop-edit incident of listening to a conversation I didn't know I had been having. The impression was more like a memory than it was a thought even as it happened, more a scent than a thing, story than observation. Then the freeze frame was gone and the world continued on its tumbling, brick-breaking roll down the mountainside, but I was still there and I remembered.

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When in doubt, eat chocolate, she told me. So I did (listen to your mother!). At five thirty in the morning, putting the polishing touches on the calculations I had put off and then off again all weekend long, I sat eating chocolate and drinking coffee. And then tried to go to sleep, the slim hope of a few more hours of weekend rest enough to convince me of my ability to sleep when available time allowed, regardless of caffeine and chocolate intoxication, or of my no-longer-eighteen nervous system. On the cusp of a newborn (and already moving much too fast) week, I laid on my bed and felt the chocolate work itself into my into my mind, and the caffeine into my cells. Hours later, I would discover that the work was incomplete: leaving off two parts of the final problem is a little like waving a big sign at your instructor that says hello, I'm not paying attention.. But the chocolate was good, even if the sleep was not.

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As I stumbled from my bed to the shower, I thought about Sir Isaac's underwear. In more pertinent particular, I thought about whether he ever had to pause in his pursuit of the laws of motion and gravitation in order to do laundry because he had no remaining clean underwear or socks. As I gathered my books on the radiative processes in the universe and the mathematical methods of theoretical physics, I wondered to myself if Maxwell ever had trouble finding dishes to eat off of because he had been too busy connecting the electrical and magnetic fields to clean his house. Sometimes, in the midst of my seemingly endless hours of mental gymnastics and wrestling with the twin demons (dance partners?) lady mathematics and dame physics, I forget that there is a world outside. That world, the larger and often distant abstraction that life on campus makes of those parts of the cosmos not covered by syllabi, is at the core of my suffering, and my joy. It is with a great sense of wonder that I am reminded of it by the sight of sunlight filtering through the first of autumn's turning leaves, or by the flickering light from distant stars and nearer worlds in the night sky. Those stars, dancing to the beat of Newton's drum and shining with the light of Maxwell's equations, are the cause and beginning of my journey.

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The return to classes has been difficult, a dry season of focus. My attention span has withered in the summer heat, and in the torrent of new ideas, I find that I long for a flood of clarity. I sit tonight crawling on hands and knees through the withering noonday heat of vector calculus and integrations of particle radiation; I pause from time to time and dream of a nourishing downpour of insight. Time for a pause, a break from the onslought of matrices and cross products. Walking outside for the first time all day, I walk under the evening's dark dome to find a gentle rain falling, the first such comfort in what seems like forever, here in the dry, dry rockies.

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To those few of you who are still with me after my hiatus, I'll be starting the new semester on Monday, and will be writing again (as I usually do while in academic mode). I will, however, be away from email and the web from the evening of Tuesday the 28th through Monday the 2nd, when I will be at Burning Man (as I've done since 1997, with these people).

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"Is he still alive?" I walked outside while waiting for the estimate. My father's poem: older than I am, on tack-torn paper, yellowed with age. Behind glass, I thought, protected from open-window gusts and the countless refoldings between apartments, years illustrated in creases and stains, it would preserve my sense of him (to me / Flagstaff and Gallup / are the twin capitols / of train rumble at 3 a.m.). I see him with hunched shoulders against the wind, a Bob Dylan in an Aston Martin, Navajo wine bottles underfoot and a raging mind behind quiet eyes. I thought of him in this way, a figure receding...and then called him, asking some question or another. The image corrected, approaching now: the man rather than the image, his voice as familiar as the poem waiting for a frame. "Yes, he is."

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The fan died, a cloud of smoke and the smell of burning electronics replacing the steady stream of cool air. The words died at the cursor, my fingers poised over the keyboard in mid thought. I re-read the part of the Eliot's East Coker that had caught my eye. I hadn't known the name of my main character, nor why you would care. I had nothing more than an opening line, a handful of pleasant-tasting sentences that threatened to run in different directions, resisting cohesion. Saved by the fan's dying circuitry, I replaced the word processor with dish soap and marked the progression of days while rinsing many mornings' coffee spoons. I thought about the stories that wouldn't come, the names of my children that I may never have. I thought about what I will name my goldfish when I am eighty-seven ("eighty-eight"), and I thought about how a very very long time ago, Aristotle probably had trouble imaging what life must have been like for people a very very long time ago. Summer smells a little bit like forever because everything is stretched out to fit into the longer days.

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He did not know why he was here, walking alone over broken, steep ground at dawn, in the bottom of a gully, more than two hundred kilometers from the nearest settlement and half a world away from his home and his work. The invitation had come two weeks before, while he and the rest of Mars' nearly two million inhabitants had been busy preparing for the Perihelion Day celebrations which were underway even now. Seemingly unimportant, the message had waited in his inbox among dozens of other missives from people with whom he carried on conversations both professional and personal. Two days before, deep in the bowels of yet another night in which he would not find sleep, he had seen it, and read it, and then stared at it long into the rising twilight of morning. It had been sent anonymously, but had been sent to his private address, the one he reserved for his few friends, the handful of distant family he had left, the handful of strangers with whom he had shared his bed over the last two decades on Mars. It said, simply:

You are invited
- a friend

There was a date and a time, the moment of perihelion, and landing coordinates. Once there, directions written in Japanese on long, thin strips of rust-red silk blowing in the thin Martian wind had instructed him where to go. The instructions had also asked him to leave behind cameras, transmitters, even his wristop. A strange calm had had come over him as he piled these things in his flier's seat and began walking through the cold, still young morning. While flying through the black night, he had worried that this was some bizarre form of industrial espionage, that someone wanted his expertise in Martian biota for some unknown and nefarious purpose. He worried that he was headed into some trap, that some former colleague or jealous ex-student was seeking revenge for some imagined slight. He worried that he was being led away from the institute, that something terrible was taking place there even as flew halfway around the small planet. He even worried that the countless sleepless nights had caught up with him, finally, and that he had imagined the whole thing. But something about that silk, blowing gently in the endless wind, had convinced him to continue on. Pausing, he climbed on top of a house-sized boulder that put his eyes level with the gully's rim and scanned the horizon. It was always hard to see very far on Mars, the planet's small circumference bending the horizon away faster than he remembered from his earliest years on Earth. The rise upon which he had left the flier was no longer visible, and the small and distant Sun, rising slowly over the chaos of crater rims, washes and gullies, was his only means of knowing that he was still headed in the correct direction. He continued on this way, finding the rhythm of footstep and breath soothing. Without the ever-present chatter of his monitor in his ear, without his contacts showing him scrolling news headlines in his peripheral vision, without the reminders about unaddressed items on his to-do list, the whole of his awareness became focused, and yet somehow widened, expanded. He imagined that he could hear the thin, fast wind through his helmet, and reveled in the crunch of regolith under his feet. No person has ever walked here, he thought. Why do I feel so much at home?. He placed a foot on that slab there, he drew breath. His other foot found purchase, he released breath. Two kilometers fell away behind him in this manner, and then ten, the gully floor narrowing and rising slowly to meet the rim, until at last he faced a small amphitheater. Seeking an exit, he found a low-angle system of fractures in the rock, and ten meters later pulled himself onto level ground. The mesa ran off into the distance, with similarly eroded drainages at its edge. He knelt in the fine, dusty regolith and listened to his heart slow, his breath find a quieter rhythm. No tracks indicated a path, and no sign lent instruction or purpose, and so he sat. The Sun was higher now, not quite at its zenith. Darker stones of all sizes littered the surface, with its familiar Martian reds and oranges. Some of these were broken slabs, some of them still sitting flat atop pedestals of softer, still eroding material. He sat, and he did not think, although he did notice that he did not think. He sat and watched time unfolding, Mars telling its story in real time, firsthand. He sat, and noticed, and breathed. Eventually, though, he did begin to think. It began as memories, drifting slowly and without connection. The summer spent in New York, a flash of June smiling at him as she brushed a horse, as she pulled weeds in the garden. Years before, when they had met at college, her shy smile, the ferocity of her will as she argues some point or another. And later, as she lay dying at Bethesda, the doctors unable to help, unwilling to quit. The first sobs scared him, coming out of nowhere and wracking his body with unfamiliar heaves. The years, the memories, and the floodgates opened. From a bottomless well it poured, and as he sat there, alone, he was seared by the pain he thought he had left behind, buried on Earth in another life, with his dead wife. Losing himself to it, he eventually quieted and stared dumbly at the ground, dazed and full of a sorrow he dared not disturb lest it take over and become everything. Many hours passed, although he did not notice this. He was where he was, and he became silent. A sort of half-sleep came over him, kneeling on the ground with his hands on his knees. He talked to her, conversations from the past unfolding in his mind. He told her about Mars, about how much she would love its wide open spaces and the joy of exploration and discovery. He told her about the lichen, his work, the way the seasons defined the ecology here even more strongly than on Earth. He told her about his work, about walking alone through the streets late at night, unable to sleep. He told her about being alone, and he wondered why he hadn't told her these things before. He was awake. The wind moved faster now, and the dark cloud of a dust storm gathered across the horizon ahead of him. He looked around, saw nothing, and stood. He turned and saw his footsteps leading back to the gully, turned again as something attracted his eye. Readjusting his rebreather, he began walking toward whatever it was. As the skies darkened, he moved across the mesa, winding his way through the stone slabs and shallow, wind-carved hollows. Half a kilometer later, the light had dimmed considerably, and he wasn't sure of his eyes when he first saw the figures ahead. He neared, and they became solid, white figures against darkest red. He saw two people running, leaping into the wind in great arcs, arms flailing. Wearing exposure suits like his own, they were figures only, anonymous. One moved toward him, carrying a writepad. It held it up to him, and he read one word: welcome! It reached out and after hesitating briefly, attached a small transceiver to his suit. Immediately, his ears were filled with a cacophony of voices, the low rumble of drums, singing. He looked around, said "what?" A female voice laughed, and the figure in front of him reach out and stroked the side of his helmet, as a mother to child, and he heard "welcome to mars!" Shaking his head as if to clear it, he said again: "What?" With another laugh, the figure turned and ran to a nearby rock, leaping into the storm. The drums gathered speed and volume, and other sounds wove themselves into a tapestry of sound. He wandered, saw many people: dancing, running, sitting. As the dust flew and the wind blew, the cacophonous beat of the drums shifted in time to the pulsing of the storm. Occasionally an exuberant "Mars!" was audible, a figure standing into the wind with arms spread wide as if to embrace the whole of it. And then he laughed. From deep within, the sort of laugh that makes you fear you'll never regain control, the air coming out of him in great heaving bursts. He laughed until he could stand being still no longer, his legs aching to propel him. Leaping into the air again and again, he felt the air buoy him, lift his arms impossibly. He came upon a group of figures, faces obscured behind mirrored faceplates, beating out strange rhythms. He joined them and found a way into the pattern, his arms slapping the pads with increasing speed, until his legs called to him to run again. For hours it seemed, he and these faceless others played with the storm, calling out to each other, calling out to Mars. As the sun sank and the sky darkened into night, the wind slowed, and a fine haze of dust drifted through the air. His arms ached, his legs complained when he moved to quickly. He wandered through the stone garden, and sat down to rest for a moment. Morning, a clear sky. A thin coating of dust lay over everything, his most recent footsteps from the night before only partially visible. He was ravenously hungry, but was able only to drink water from his suit as he walked in a lazy circle around his rocky bed. He saw no one, saw no tracks. The sun gave him his bearings, and after a short while he began walking back to where he thought his gully ought to be. After finding the amphitheater, the walk back down took only hours and he sat in his flyer by mid-day. What had just happened? Who were those people? He had no answers, but knew that some seed had taken root in him, some new story was unfolding. Somehow he found this amusing, and smiled as he closed the door and began to hum a children's melody from dim and distant memory. He set the autopilot, and as he rose into the air watched the horizon drop, bend into the familiar Martian arc, and begin sliding beneath him. With the open air beneath him and dome of the world above him, he closed his eyes and settled into a deep sleep as he began the long, long trip back home (apologies and thanks to Kim Stanley Robinson, whose Red Mars contains a passage that inspired this short piece)

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It's 2 a.m. Do you know where your dreams are? They're cowering, filling the dark corners of worry, swept under the rug of discontent and left waiting at the station for the late, late train named Hope.

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I've always disliked blogs (or 'journals,' to use my preferred term for what it is I do) that talk incessantly about blogging, entries, et cetera. But I've been wanting to mention to my readers for a while now my thoughts about my recent entries, and what might appear here in the months to come. Longtime readers will note that the nature of the content here has shifted, sometimes imperceptibly, towards entries of a creative, rather than purely descriptive or "check out this link" nature. At the same time, I've been giving a great deal of thought to the process of writing, as a craft, as opposed to it's simple use as a means of telling people some piece of information. The recent piece titled "No Direction Home" is a good example of the kind of short, carefully drafted writing I'm inclined to create these days, and I enjoyed writing it, and others recently, a great deal. What this means as far as this site is concerned is that while I will continue to point to interesting items on the web on the sidebar to the right, the site will probably head more and more towards being a venue for what I hope will be an improving (and interesting!) body of short fiction. As always, I welcome any and all comments from readers new and old. If you haven't seen anything new here for a while, don't despair: inspiration is often sudden and a story will spring forth fully conceived (if not fully executed...) just when I least expect it. Thanks for reading, and check back often.

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Your life is yours because your spoons are arranged haphazard, just so you didn't know you planned for each stumbling morning but there they are waiting for your hand.

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Falling out of bed, I called to Alex to take his dirty shoes off of the stairs and then headed for the kitchen, where my wife was trying to find the travel section in the newspaper. Coffee and NPR, I thought, smiling, just like when I was Alex's age. With few words and many gentle touches, we danced around each other in the small kitchen, listening to Szandor Davis on the radio explaining why he was running for a fourth term. That, I thought, was not like things were when I was younger. That and so many other things. I wondered often if Alex would believe me if I explained that presidents had once been limited to two terms, had had to operate largely within the confines of the wishes of an elected congress. I wondered if he believed the history we had to teach him on weekends and during the long candle-lit nights, taught then because the schools no longer considered history important, or worth teaching in the face of the official ire of the National Needs Learning Program. When the drought came, nobody expected it. We had all been expecting rains, had been told for years that we should expect floods and increased precipitation as the planet warmed. Even as the first dry years turned into a decade, the Industrial Dozen were sending their unified armies to their borders, hardly able at times to bar entry to the lost peoples of those countries too poor and too weak to have been invited into the fold of what had come to be called, somewhat cynically, "Our World". The western world. That people "out there" were dying, starving, blowing away in the wind was not lost on people in the northern Americas, or in Europe - but the continuing worldwide drought and the diseases for which we we had no cure (and still do not, I thought, glancing at Alex's wrist biometer, blinking innocently green, and then my wife's and my own) were sufficient worries that there was no general public move toward assistance or relief. "Each to their own house," the editorials said, offering rationale for the abandonment of four fifths of humanity. And it was, in reality, hard for us. Our wealth and power and resources did not give us an easy route through those years, only some slim hope, a chance. When Davis was shot by a "southern terrorist" at a meeting of petroleum producers halfway through his second term as president, the people hardly had the will to question his intentions when he declared martial law and told congress to go home for six months. That the cable news did not show the food riots in the American south certainly contributed, and when reports of the massacre of anti-government protestors in San Francisco by the Homeland Defense Forces surfaced on the internet, most people outside a small region of northern Europe found that the net simply stopped working for more than thirty hours. When it came back, the news online was of success in marine aquaculture, promises of a large harvest from the Gulf of Mexico and the North Atlantic. When the rains came, they came suddenly and globally, beginning with a small storm that appeared over the Urals, and then Bangladesh. Within weeks, the hot, dry skies most of the world saw each day had been filled with clouds. When they came, it was as if a veil had been lifted. People began to speak a little more freely, some started planting, couples got pregnant, the net was full of hopeful talk about having turned the corner. Those working ground that had not seen a plow in years talked about a good harvest within two years. Within two months, however, it was clear that this was not the end of the bad times we had all hoped for. The rains kept coming, and the dead soil washed away in great rivers of loss. Three months after the first rains, the great swarms appeared, covering first east Africa, and the whole of south Asia, and finally the globe. The insects had responded to the great rains as we had - building, eating, having children. With no food and no end to the rain, they moved in great clouds over the whole of the Earth, and for many people, those for whom aquaculture had never been an option, locusts and grasshoppers were collected as fast as they could be, dried and stored against the future. These new dietary staples brought with them a second new threat. When the first cases of Form B, the second known form the of the virus that had taken so many lives during the drought, first appeared it was hardly commented upon. But within weeks, in a pattern strikingly similar to the migration path of the great insect swarms, over seventy million people had been infected worldwide. Within another two weeks, half of those were dead and half a billion new infections had effectively shut down health care everywhere. Nobody questioned the troops banning movement between cities, or the insecticide being sprayed over every city, every field. Nobody said very much when the nukes went off in Bangkok and Hanoi and Kuala Lumpur, or even asked who had done it. They were dead anyway, in the face of this new viral threat. Our survival hung in the balance, we said, we can only do what we can to survive. Alex had never known another world, had only seen life as struggle. We were comfortable, by modern standards: we had electricity five days a week for ten hours at a time, and there was a school for him to attend. We had good jobs, in as much as we had jobs. The district had been spared from high infection rates by our high altitude, and the only food riots had been years ago. The big military and tech projects to our south had ensured an educated, well cared-for populace, which made our life much easier than most. As I contemplated these things and watched my family, the commentator's voice on the radio suddenly turned to static, echoing the rain outside. My wife and I looked at each other, knowing that troops had discovered the NPR underground broadcast station again. How long before someone rigged another pirate transmitter? How long before someone had the nerve? I remembered the open discussion we used to hear when I was young, and thought about those mornings listening to the radio, reading newspapers, and I looked at Alex. No, not like when I was a kid at all. Not at all.

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The first thing that I noticed was the crickets. As I walked up the Chautauqua trail toward line of trees a quarter mile distant, I closed my eyes and felt wave upon wave of symphonic chirping guide my feet, the humid, earthy smell of the just-passed rain hovering like a blanket over the grass to either side. Some distance ahead, two young women walked, and another, older woman ahead of them. My legs loosened, my mind quieted, my ears simply listened, and the trees came closer. Approaching the line of trees, I passed the pair of young women, whose frantic conveyances of gossip and insouciant sharing of secrets was being broadcast to any and all ears within half a mile: "I'm akshully sweating up here! How gross!" Despite the burning in my legs, I forced myself ahead and past, desperate for the quiet amidst the trees and rocks. A bit past my usual resting-rock, which I reluctantly passed in my need to quickly put distance between myself and the loquacious twosome, I approached the other woman I had seen ahead of me. We shared a quick shake of the head, a nonverbal "don't they ever stop talking ?" But there were, also, the birds. There was the utterly timeless, high-pitched singsong of the invisible treetop sirens, what I've always thought of as 'afternoon birds', like endless sighs of contentment in the fading day's sunlight. And there was the somehow medieval caw, caw of the ravens and the pierce of the peregrines patrolling the cliffs above. turning from the main trail at my accustomed place, choosing the steeper of the trails available, I found that the birds and cliffs and I had aimed higher than those who were behind me. One foot and then another, breathe in, breathe out. Sound of stone and dirt underfoot, the wiping of the brow, mind quiets. Three times, I stopped: once I leaned against a tree, once I stood on a flat stone among a million others, and once I couched down, one knee in the dirt. The tree guards a bend in the trail, where a switchback guides those on foot first one direction and then another. The trunk bore the marks of a thousand hands, bodies swinging around its circumference on the downhill grade. This tree, and all of its kind, smell like butterscotch. They are, to me, butterscotch pines, although they smell like other things to other people, and I know that there is a different name given to them by park rangers and biologists that has nothing to do with butterscotch and which is, therefore, incorrect. The ravens agreed with a caw. The trail crosses a broad rockfall, with shattered pieces of cliffs that came before arrayed in a lengthy swath down the hillside. Pieces of this stone have been arranged such that a walking person can navigate across without undue risk of stepping on a loose stone and suffering the same fate as has befallen the stones themselves. It was on one such stone, a rather large and flat one, that I stopped. The wind in this gully raced downhill unimpeded, and I imagined that I could see its curls and foaming crests as it moved over, through, around the rocks and the trees. Overhead, one of the nesting peregrines from the surrounding cliffs made light of my imagined ability to read the wind. I had forgone jacket or sweater, gloves or hat, and so was glad as I returned to the cover of the trees. The switchbacks became steeper, and I was soon far from cold. From dusty trail, I clambered over rocks as large as a house, through a cleft, and back into trees. Seemingly as soon as I lost myself in movement, the trail ended, and I looked out into the narrow but deep defile between the ridgecrest and the great mass of Green Mountain proper. Afternoon sunlight was buried in low clouds on their long slide down from the continental divide, and as I felt the sweat dripping from my brow, and then drying, tightening the skin on my face, I listened to the wind, my heartbeat, the ground squirrels among the broken stone. I knelt down and leaned over the edge, looking down, and watched a pair of the small creatures move in freeze-frame jitters, first here and then, suddenly, there - watching each other and me but mostly listening, as I was. After what might have been twenty minutes, I heard quiet breathing and the crunch of footsteps behind me. Reluctantly relinquishing my solitary possession of the crest, I turned to see the two young women I had so easily and eagerly thought so many nasty things about only a short while ago. I sat back, appropriately ashamed, and hunched against the wind in a cleft in the rock, smiling at them, as they reached top in silence. The grasped each other's hands, and just stood there, looking, and listening. The solace of high places.

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Looking up, I knew with great certainty and conviction that they were looking back at me, crossing the gulf with the same sort of contact we feel when making eye contact with a stranger, the wry grin and slight dip of the head as if to acknowledge that "yes, I'm here. I see you, too." They were not impersonal, not pinpricks in the great sphere above or tired actors in the busy stagework of the constellations. They were right here, with me, you. That sense has often - usually - escaped me since, but I have always remembered that first awareness of being part of the great vast and, more importantly, not feeling lost within it. I don't mean to anthropomorphize the sky and stars. I can look at spectra and see the lightest of elements and a pinch of the rest, I can trace their evolution and describe their layered composition. Physics. But we are watched by those distant lights all the same, in the sense that for all of our smallness, we are as much a part of the universe as is anything else. We look out, we conceive, we test. We are thinking creatures, born of salts and water and no little bit of chaos and luck...and are thinking of ourselves, as we look out at the swirling storm in all directions, observing ourselves in the fires in the sky. I've heard it said before that we are the universe coming to know itself, and it conjures up nicely the sensation I'm after: like feeling suddenly alright, at home. p.s. - take a look at the new photo section (link at left)

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Can I live on berries and coffee and lemonade? Please?

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Things have endings. The tail ends of things are tricky, because we're used to looking forward in time. When we come upon a terminal point, we're still looking to the unfolding of events, even as we've just turned the last page. In this way we find ourselves gradually (invisibly, incrementally) turning the corner into middle age (or in the midst of final exams, unexpectedly, having missed April somehow). "What happened?", we ask, and rightly so. It's the correct question. Not because missing the cues that alert us to impending closure is particularly important, but because it's what happened that is important. And so the years aren't discrete events we tick off as they pass, but an integrated volley, salvo upon salvo, of things that happened. This process of things happening, this unfolding of our future history, is something we often take for granted. Time with good friends is doubly precious later, when they're gone from your life and you from theirs; the curious way some memories are etched deeper with time and others fade almost as they're made is not at all evident in our minute to minute existence. We thrive in the interplay between past and future, comparing what did happen with what might happen, making plans, adjusting for outcomes, but we rarely stop and look around: who is this person next to me? Will I know them in ten years? Twenty? Do I remember what I had for dinner on Friday, which was so delicious at the time? What should I ask my parents, or my sisters, now, while we're all young? Is there a way to distill the way the air smells right now, because I want to know this when I'm 97? I'm not at all sure that it's possible to live in the three worlds - past history, present and future history - and still be sane. A Zen Buddhist monk might say that that the present is all there ever is, and smack you on the head with a bamboo rod, laughing. And he'd be correct, in very real ways. But the fact is that most of us are, most of the time, living with one foot in memory and one foot in our future histories - the future we "live into," just as full of stories and people and emotion as the past history we call memory, and trust so much. Living into something so ephemeral - and so very customizable - is addictive, and quite natural for us humans. But I sometimes wonder if the constant looking forward and backward hasn't made us great planners at the expense of being great livers.

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I'm sure you've all seen some reference in the news to the new images from the Hubble Space Telescope. I want to tell you all to hold off on clicking on "hubblesite" or "stsci", because their servers are completely overloaded as a result of the demand to see these stunning new images. But I'm not going to tell you to wait: go! click! Go now! To be alive now, at this time, with the utterly stunning, awe-inspiring visions Hubble has given us is something I will be grateful for all of my life. Such exquisite things there are to be seen, and such lucky and clever monkeys we are to be able to see them.

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My sense of seasonal change is focused, sharpened by the changing light of each morning. Each passing day is like sliding down the great face of a wave in a small boat - tuned to the swell, knowing the mood of what lay beneath. As autumn comes, I feel the shortened days as airy sighs against the skin; the damp leaves piling up in the gutters get behind my ears and tell me stories that smell like woodsmoke. Spring is such an impoverished word to describe this time, though: each day there is some new outrageousness, some stunning display of exuberance and disequilibrium on nature's part. I have risen before dawn because the day's newness - sunrise a few minutes earlier or later, low clouds or unsettled wind or crisp blue dome overhead - were of such fascination that I couldn't wait to go outside or sit and stare and smell the air. There is a wrenching and subtle music to the passage of time - melodies within melodies - that echoes Kepler's Music of the Spheres, heard on a rocky planet sweeping out its equal arcs in each passing day.

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I still have trouble seeing myself as an adult. I've been able to vote, buy tobacco, and fight for fifteen years, and I'm still amazed when I look into the mirror and see grey hairs at my temples. The issue is compounded by the fact that I am still a student, and an undergraduate at that: the people I spend my days with are, for the most part, much younger than I am. These things, coupled with the fact that I still live like the younger man I keep thinking I am conspire in layers to create the slightest of discrepancies between my self-image and my public identity, the me that exists on forms and in databases. Every now and again something happens, often something simple, that resets this discrepancy, that makes me think about where I am and where I'm headed in novel ways. Sitting in the physics basement the other night, working to solve a problem or three, we talked about mathematics and physics, engineering vs. science. At one point, I said something about teaching high school. Now, I don't know that I ever will teach high school, but it is something I think about. A woman I know peripherally from several classes turned to me and said, quite believably, that her favorite teachers - the interesting ones - had always been science and math teachers. Then she said that she could see me teaching high school science. Hearing things like this from myself, or from friends and family is nice. Hearing it from someone who isn't directly aware of or involved in my life made a bridge between the external and the internal, and I rode home thinking about all of the great teachers I've been lucky enough to study under. Glenn Kennedy, who struggled to convey the finer points of English grammar (even the crude details) to a daydreaming, delinquent thirteen year old. Mark Clark, whose intensity and knowledge were matched only by his ability to teach philosophy and literature to similarly distracted teenagers. Jim Gaw, who could make counting Drosophila specimens as interesting as he could subatomic particles. There were others, and there will be others. But thinking about teaching has me thinking about teachers - and how they always seemed larger than life to my young eyes, and how the grey at my temples will look to a classroom full of...kids.

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Nothing can be worse than this step I'm taking right now, I thought. Nothing. Until the next step, and the next. I am gasping for air, and my feet are raw and my skin is burned and my pack is heavy and fuck everything anyway. I have trouble seeing past the sweat in my eyes, much less the land around me. And what land it was! I have been back since then, or to country nearby, and I am always reminded of how myopic my vision was at the time, how isolated my frame of reference. Limited as I was to the confines of my still-young experience, I had no real basis for understanding, much less comparing or rationalizing or integrating what I was going through. When I was about fifteen or so I was, for various reasons, about to embark on a new chapter in my life, radically different from the urbanized and, I see now, apathetic years I had spent in the San Francisco bay area. The story that lies behind this isn't particularly relevant. What matters is that at fifteen and change, I found myself carrying more weight that I had ever carried before, in the company of strangers, with ill-fitting boots and a worse-fitting attitude, above treeline on a mountainside in Colorado. We had been straining towards the infinitely distant pass all day long, and I knew it was the first of two we had to cross within the next week and a half, and all I could think about was hot showers, my walkman, and potato chips. We finally made it up that day, only to be pummeled by a dangerously close lightning and rain storm that night, which was spent huddled in damp sleeping bags under poorly rigged, sagging and flapping tarps. The next day we were resupplied, and I made it quite clear that I wasn't going to be continuing, pleading medical necessity. I left with the resupply van, and spent the next two days churning inside myself, variously bemoaning my circumstances or enumerating all of the ways that everyone else was to blame. Standard fare. The third day, I woke up early and made a beeline to speak with my hosts at breakfast, where I informed them that if it were possible, at all, I would like to rejoin my strange companions on their strange journey. This dim spark of wisdom was hardly even nameable as such, but there it was nonetheless...and by noon I had trudged along a trail, alone for the latter half, until I caught up with the ragtag tail of dozen similarly imprisoned children, deep within their own stories. My timing could not have been better - the second pass was on the afternoon's agenda, and I was laden with additional food and water, my feet newly abused by the suddenly unfamiliar and heavy leather boots. But I had asked to come back, and I descended into an ever-fiercer battle internally as we ascended ever higher that day. To my mind, at the time, it was as if I had been told that I was to take over for Sisyphus. It's not fair! Well, no, of course it isn't. But being asked to be a better person than you are isn't easy - and I suppose that's the point. By late afternoon, the August skies were mostly clear, dotted only by fast moving cumulus around the horizon, but I was so deeply unaware that I almost fell as I approached the ridgeline and was overcome with vertigo looking down the other side. Ringed around us were the high peaks of the range, a sight that I now look back on with great fondness. Not because of the obvious, but because the next few minutes have impacted me ever since. I've been lazy since then. I've been very, very dumb since then. And I've certainly been very discouraged by various things since then. But I've also been dedicated, hopeful, committed, disciplined since then. I've been smart and witty in ways I couldn't have been before that day, and I've been on other passes, in other boots since then. I felt it change in me, like something moving, trading places. Looking out, down, around, sitting there silently, I looked down at my boots and realized that those were my feet. I had walked the whole bloody way up. Such are the beginnings of awareness.

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I wonder sometimes about "functional lifetimes". It's assumed in the industrialized west that a person's productive career will span a range of time on the order of forty years - from the time one is a young adult until sometime in the 60 - 65 range. Some individuals are certainly able to work for much longer, and some people enjoy more than one career. But productivity slows as our bodies age, and our interest in pursuing new avenues of engagement wanes as age steals our physical energies, our mental acuity and our conceptual flexibility. What will happen as lifetimes begin to increase, as I think they will? It seems clear that for many people, again in the industrialized west, lifetimes of twice, or three tines the current norm will be possible within a generation or two. Such people will live through three, five, ten careers in a lifetime. The accumulation of knowledge and experience will be stunning - no longer will simple knowledge be moved via teaching and training. Indeed, as these individuals move through time, they will not only acquire new skills, but there will be a cumulative effect, which might well become synergistic under the right circumstances: As the social worker who became a lawyer who became a farmer who became a writer who became a politician becomes a human rights activist, there seems little room for doubt that the efficacy of such a person would be greater than the individual experiential sums might suggest. That's a rosy picture, for the selected few. But it's not the whole picture: the vast, vast majority of people in the world are unlikely to have access to the medical and financial resources necessary for the sort of extended lifespans we're talking about. That alone will cause a rift through humanity that will make the educational and economic gaps we see today look like sidewalk cracks. What is more, there is something to be said for generational cycling. True, the passage of information from generation to generation is inefficient, as far as the term goes. But the rigidity we gain as we age and become more sure of the accuracy of our worldview becomes a liability when practiced on a global scale. New generations may have to reinvent the wheel more often than we'd like, but they also have the advantage of viewing the world with new eyes, over and over and over. I think that this phenomenon can be just as much a boon as it is a burden. As the world acquires generational layers to a factor of ten, instead of the current three or four, we can expect a great deal of benefit to the species and planet. But we can also expect trauma and dysfunction, as the biases and attitudes of the aged come into conflict with the demands of the young. Does anyone see a way around this? Are we bright enough and flexible enough as we age to bend to the demands of a brave new world, generation after generation? When we're four hundred and thirty two years old, will we have the humility to listen to the new and preposterous ideas of a revolutionary thinker who happens to be a ridiculously young thirty, or fifty?

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Just a note to those of you who may have been heartbroken (or just confused) to find tangled down during the last few days. Sunday evening, I discovered that a) the site was down, and that b) I was unable to get into the server via any method to see what was wrong. My telephone calls to webhosting.com were ignored, and while some functionality magically reappeared, I was still unable to log in via FTP to set the rest right. This was the last straw, and I've spent the last two days wrestling with domain records, registrars, nameservers and the rest (all the while juggling rotating magnetic field & induced emf problems with one hand and Taylor series & nonelementary integration with the other, all behind my back, blindfolded). The upshot is that we appear to be live on the new server, with a new hosting company which makes us very happy because they're so cool, and we're done with the week's exams to boot. Look for good things to happen now that I'm converging back on feeling human again. Thanks for bearing with me.

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There are very few things in the world more attractive than a pretty girl in 501's, sitting in an old beat up Toyota truck.

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That last one isn't included because of its visual appeal or stunning composition. Rather, it's a funny little joke about the physics building on campus, where so many of us spend so much time. For those days when we're too busy to step fifteen feet out the door, they've provided us with a handy live video feed. Just in case we started to feel a little...disconnected.

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There's a hill near my house and often, when riding my bicycle down it, I try to balance in my saddle, stretch out my arms...and occasionally close my eyes. From that hill, looking west, the hills (white or grey, green or brown, depending on the time of year) roll westward and the air coming down from them is clean and fresh in a way that my fabric softener will never match. Lately, though, I've been too preoccupied to even notice that I'm on this particular hill. Falling behind tastes like bile, and incomprehension is the handmaid of despair. I rode down to the market this evening, to fetch the morrow's breakfast and get away from my desk and books. The door has been open all weekend, but my schedule, my mind, have been as closely bound and tightly knit as one could imagine. Spring in the rocky mountains is an utterly actual thing, smells and colors and weather and textures so stunning that it's easy for them to begin to seem unreal...and this is made all the more so when one is immersed in study; frantic with the knowledge that each step forward may be two back, but that you can't see which end is up so it hardly matters at all. On my ride to the market I saw someone unloading his day's equipment from his pack on his front lawn: rope and harness, gear and the chalked hands of a climber. All I could do is keep riding, grimly focusing on the assignment sitting, incomplete, on my desk, ignoring the dim memory of my own gear stashed in bags in the back porch. I saw a family putting kebabs on the grill, onion and garlic scents making their way into the street, and thought about whether I would have rehydrated food for dinner, or merely reheated. I saw a woman I used to know sitting in the window of a cafe I used to frequent, lost on a sunday afternoon in a stack of books, and I thought about all of the books waiting for my attention, and their own sunday afternoons. Friday night I found a stack of photographs in my spare room, images of long, hot days in deserts far away...and thought about the handful of days I might be able to find this summer to get away. I remember all of these things, and it's a struggle not to give in to the looming sense of loss they conjure. I miss the endless days on foot, empty trails and canyons, pages of washboard dirt stories to be read, or written. The smell of rain drying on dirt, the sound of the year's first bees buzzing outside and the familiar stretch of muscle underscore my glaring deficiencies in what I am spending my time doing...and it's all I can do sometimes not to throw up my hands in surrender, load my pack, grab my boots and go.

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I have a clock, an analog clock, on my wall. It was given to me by my mother, and it listens to the broadcast time derived from the atomic clock on which all of our time standards are based. Twice now, as I've been sitting here at my desk, I've heard a strange sound, like scurrying cockroaches (I don't have any) or a sprinkler outside (it's warming up, but I haven't seen too many sprinklers yet this season). The first time, when I saw what had been making the sound, I felt immediately like I was in some low budget Twilight Zone knock-off. This time I just smiled. The clock sweeps its hands back, and then forward, an entire hour once every six months as we move into and then out of daylight savings...and as I type this, it has just finished at one-o-clock, and I never even saw twelve. Curiously, I think I've been working on neutron star assignments on both occasions, and the fast scurrying-ticking sound is reminiscent of their pulsar siblings.

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Like an engine running low on fuel, sputtering to life and then failing again as it coasts into the gas station, winter is losing its grip. It was only moments ago, it seems, that I was bemoaning the its slow onset, it's whimpering entrance. And it was, to be sure, a less than imposing season: only a handful of good storms, only a few truly cold spells. And while I'm not eager to move to Minnesota during the short days of of the inward months, I do love a good storm. My plants, inside my windows and protected from the uncivil fluctuations of actual weather, continue to bloom before my eyes. The succulents and the ferns, the big broad-leafed one with the oddly albino leaf in its center, even the small, round and pricklish cacti in their fist-sized pots are getting into the act. I have a preference for certain plants, and a distatse for others - much like I have for various sorts of weather, various sorts of days. As days are still-and-always filled with physics and mathematics, long hours at screens and longer ones with books, so too do nights have their own flavor, their own composition. As spring comes, prancing and oblivious down the lane, the evenings slowly turn from blanket-wrapped spells of sleeping on the couch while dim music mixes with the roar of the furnace to front door open and warm breeze visits to the chair in the front yard, where the world passes by with a wave, the joggers and the dogs and the bees and the bicycles all waking from their winter nap, all of them seeking bright bright light and the feel of air on bare skin.

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I'm still here, I promise. I'll be working on a quick redesign before school begins again and I thrust myself back into the fray for the final push. I've enjoyed my week off immensely, and I've accumulated some writing material as well. More this weekend, but for now...ciao!

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Welcome to spring (as of just after 19:00 UT today). A few minutes in the yard at sunset (and a few minutes in photoshop) produced this:

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