Giving It a Think #4: The Fermi Paradox

"Are we alone?" is one of the first questions we humans asked ourselves, even before we realized that the Universe is a vast, filamented web of uncountable galaxies... and not a tight ball of crystal spheres centered exclusively around us.

Two great scientific thinkers answered this question in their own particular way...

Carl Sagan: "If not, it seems like an awful waste of space."
Enrico Fermi: "If so, then where *are* they?"

They both had a point, but since good science brings up at least as many new questions as it answers, I'll focus on what Rico said. (And yes, I feel comfortable calling him that.)

We've come to accept the immense age of the Universe (in the ballpark of 13.8 billion years). We've also learned that the most necessary elements of organic life (hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, carbon) are, item for item, also the most abundant materials in it. Given those facts, shouldn't the Universe be profoundly stupid with life? Shouldn't some great galactic civilization have been formed a hundred million years ago and colonized us by now?

That's the Fermi Paradox. The fact that we turn our telescopes (both optic and radio) toward the Universe and find absolutely no evidence of intelligent life seems fundamentally wrong. In the interest of taking a stab at what we should be expecting, astrophysicist Frank Drake made a famous equation where he started with the estimated number of stars in the Universe, and then whittled it down toward a possible number of intelligent civilizations by nested sets of criteria: How many stars have planets? How many of those planets are habitable? How many of those habitable planets have life? What about intelligent life that can communicate across space? And perhaps most importantly, how long do such civilizations survive?

Today, even though we have more complete answers to some of those variables than Frank did, we still end up with a number that could be anywhere between 1 (that would be us) and 100 million. That's a big range, but take note that any number larger than, say 10, seems like should result in our being able to find alien civilizations pretty quickly. After all, odds are that anyone else out there would have technology thousands or even millions of years beyond ours. So, as Rico queried... why don't we?

There are a couple different theories why not. We'll start with the most cynical one, and work our way toward hopefulness... an approach that I tend to find does the most good in all situations.

Possible Reason #1 - There is no one else, and never will be. It's been theorized that we live in an especially hospitable situation here in our little solar system. We're in our solar system's "Goldilocks zone" (not too hot, not too cold), outside of which it would be difficult for liquid water (and thus our concept of life) to exist. In addition, we've got a nice, big moon that not only stabilizes our planetary spin so that there's a relatively small difference between winter and summer temperatures over most of our surface, but also causes tide pools, isolated little ecosystems that some think might be very important to the development of early microbial life.

Galactically speaking, we're in a placid locale as well, cozily nestled between spiral arms, and yet we don't get interfered as much by nearby supernovas and giant gas clouds as we would be if we were closer to the center. All these factors might point toward life being actually quite hard to get started on a planet. Note that our relatively peaceful planet has had to essentially hit the reset button on life (via mass extinctions) no less than five times... and only one of those was because of a giant asteroid hit. The rest were caused by natural planetary and biological processes.

So maybe life isn't inevitable at all, or the factors that lead to it come into conjunction a lot less often than we think. But let's assume that it does actually happen once in a while. What then?

Possible Reason #2 - Civilizations always die. Any civilization sophisticated enough to communicate across space, and even travel through it, also has the capacity to destroy itself. Perhaps it always does.

Take a look at us. We perpetually seem to be on the brink of doing that very thing, whether through nuclear warfare or climate change (actually, there appears to be a sixth mass extinction going on... *and* *we're* *causing* *it*). Maybe intelligence is just another way Nature has of wiping its own slate clean, like a super-effective, all-species-affecting disease (remember Agent Smith's "humans are a virus" speech from The Matrix?). Maybe the creation of an immortal, space-faring civilization isn't the direction we should be heading in. Perhaps that road *always* leads to strife and ultimate destruction.

Possible Reason #3: They're out there, but hiding. Star Trek called it "the Prime Directive"... a policy not to interfere with the development of the "new life and new civilizations" that they came across. (I actually seem to remember them interfering/kissing the heck out of those new-found civilizations, but I digress...) The idea is that life needs to find its own way, and showing them new technology or letting them know that there's other life too soon might cause society-wide psychological damage (cue the UFO conspiracy theorists who think that the government is hiding aliens from us for this very reason).

So maybe we really are being observed by some pan-galactic overlords, but they're consciously not letting us in on the secret of their existence. It wouldn't be all that hard, really... in terms of viewing the Universe in its entirety, we're still like little kids on a hill looking around through the wrong end of our binoculars. The Universe is so mind-staggeringly vast that we've only begun to explore one fraction of our little part of it. And this blends nicely with the next reason...

Possible Reason #4: We have no idea of what life can look like. At this point, science and astrophysics are defined more by what we *don't* know than anything else. Dark matter, dark energy, dark flow, quantum uncertainty... these are official terms. We're consciously ignorant of what the Universe itself is mostly made up of. Wouldn't it be easy to miss any kind of life that isn't virtually identical to our own?

The SETI program (Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence) has spent a lot of its time and budget searching for structured radio emissions from space. After all, we have been beaming out constant streams of electromagnetic waves for decades, so why mightn't other worlds? But in the last ten years the stray radio transmissions of Earth have dropped significantly, because instead of just beaming radio and TV out into the aether, we've moved more and more communication into underground cables and ever-shorter wireless connections. We might not see anything because other civilizations have done the same.

I'm probably wrong, but this shows a flaw in our thinking when it comes to intelligent alien life. We're necessarily limited to using technology that we know and understand. Who knows what kind of unknown future tech they may be using? Maybe they're not aware of our radio emissions because they've moved on to some other method far beyond what we understand.

Possible Reason #5: This is my favorite answer, and the one I'm rooting for most... Another thing we've learned about the Universe is that stars and planets form out of the wreckage of earlier generations. Just as trees die, fall over and enrich the soil for new trees, stars explode, sending out material and dust (including freshly-minted heavier elements that they can't create otherwise) to seed the next generation. Given that the sun has a lifespan of about 6 billion years, and the Universe is not quite 14 billion, we can estimate that our Sun is part of maybe the third generation of stars that have been created since the Universe began.

It seems to me that we need heavier elements to support intelligent life. Yes, the building blocks of both the Universe and Earth life are identical, but there are many aspects of our complex biology that require metals, minerals, and other materials that are only created when stars go supernova and scatter their ashes out into space. As Carl said many times, our bodies are made of "star stuff". Taking this into account, it doesn't seem unreasonable to me that it might have taken at least two solid rounds of star explosions to create enough raw material for our world, and us, to form out of.

So maybe that galaxy-spanning civilization that doesn't destroy itself with its brilliant technology, and becomes the very first to spread across the cosmos, discovering its wonders and learning to understand the whole, glorious span and depth of it... is really *us*.

Giving It a Think #3: The Singularity

People tend to fall into two camps when you talk about The Singularity: those that think it's the next inevitable step in evolution, and others who think it's impossible. It's hard to think of any other scientific concept that's so fundamentally divided... which is why I thought I should think on it for a while.

The Singularity is a name -- popularized by futurist Ray Kurzweil -- to describe the inevitable moment when humans switch on a computer that is smarter than a human. He, and others who think similarly, believe that people will thereafter find themselves obsolete, surpassed in every way by the ever-increasing intelligence of machines they've created. And while they are certain that human life will be fundamentally different after that point, they are equally uncertain in what way those changes will take place. Will the computers decide to eliminate us? Or will we allow them to take over, relegating us to leisurely existence while they assume all creative, mechanical, and cognitive work?

I have to say, right off the bat, that I don't fall into this latter camp. I think that there is something fundamentally unreplicable about the human mind, and I doubt if there's any amount of microchips that can quite match its flexibility. So I guess what I'm trying to do today is explain why I think that is.

I think it all comes down to what you believe "intelligence" means. If you're looking for a computer that can hold more factual information than the human brain, they're not that hard to come by. But as far as taking that information and formulating answers to questions, the most highly developed one is probably Watson, IBM's supercomputer that dominated over two humans on the game show Jeopardy! in 2011.

While it's true that Watson won the competition overall, it's more telling to see what kind of questions it missed... context clues, for the most past. Watson couldn't distinguish the difference between "the '20s" and "the 1920s", and it ignored the name of a Final Jeopardy category when it answered "What is Toronto?" -- the category was "U.S. CITIES", although that particular fact wasn't restated in the clue.

Okay, so maybe pure factual recall isn't the benchmark we should be using... there's also the famous Turing test. In the mid-20th century, Alan Turing postulated that if computer can convince you that you're talking to a person, then that computer should be considered a person, in every practical sense. It's the flip-side of that junior-high philosophy freak-out question everyone ponders at some point: How do you know everyone around you isn't a robot? The answer, of course, is that you don't... every human life is purely subjective. Thus, computers only have to live up to the same "human" standards that you hold every other person in the world to.

This task, however, hasn't been lived up to all that well, either. In a 2014 AI contest, a computer convincingly named "Eugene Goostman" by its inventor, Kevin Warwick, convinced one-third of the judges that it was a thirteen-year old, mostly by answering their questions vaguely. Any grammatical or factual slips were glossed over by the backstory that the child was raised in Ukraine.

So was this a real pass of the test? There's a lot of debate about it. But for myself, until a computer convincingly fools a majority of people that are specifically looking to determine its authenticity, I doubt we can definitively say that it has.

Keep in mind that Watson (and Eugene Goostman) were built by some of the brightest human minds, provided with millions of dollars and years of research and equipment -- for *one* specific purpose -- and even then, they couldn't quite mimic a human brain doing that same task.

I personally think that the really unique aspect of the human brain -- and the one that it's going to be hardest for computers to ape -- is its ability to take all its factual and emotional recalls and weave them into a story, extrapolating either into the past or the future.

In his excellent and hilarious science book "What If?", Randall Munroe unwittingly illustrated my point with a drawing... A tall figure is standing with its hands on its hips, looking down at a small figure who is wearing a cowboy hat and holding a rope at its side. A table is nearby, and next to it lies the broken shards of a vase. Munroe points out that while it's easy for us to synthesize exactly what has happened here and what is probably going to happen (with only minor differences in detail), a computer would have a devil of a time trying to do it.

And when you think about it, it's not that surprising. Let me try to outline all the information you need to piece together in order to make a coherent story out of this image:

- basic sequencing of cause and effect
- relative size of humans, based on age
- likely relationships between tall humans and short ones
- human body language (the tall figure's akimbo stance can mean many things, but in this case probably connotes frustration or anger)
- the cowboy hat on the child's head suggests character play, which children are known to engage in
- the recognition of the rope as a lasso, based on the shape of the child's hat and cowboy lore
- info on the use of a lasso, and in what way it might become out of control in the hands of a child
- understanding of gravity
- the typical structural makeup and integrity of vases, along with the ability to determine the object *is* a vase when only partially intact
- likely reactions when certain materials (i.e. vases and floors) come into contact
- relative monetary or sentimental value of objects (i.e. vases) held by adults, and likely emotional reactions when that vase is destroyed

I realized, even as I was writing that list, that I was glossing over whole layers of information and intuition that our brain does, instinctively, all in a fraction of a second. Never even mind the fact that we were looking at a *drawing* of an incident, and one with stick figures in it to boot. That adds a whole new levels of image recognition and conceptualization.

Even if it got everything else right, a computer would get totally hung up on what was responsible for the broken vase. Of course, we immediately assume it's the kid with the lasso, but that's only because we've heard enough stories to know that if it weren't, that would make a lot of the details in the picture irrelevant. And since this drawing was made by a human, we assume that the details *mean* something.

That's the sticking point, isn't it? So much of our intuitive understanding is based on the fast that we're humans communicating with other humans. There's a common baseline understanding that derives entirely from developing as a human in a human society.

Think about it from a different angle... aliens visiting our world wouldn't understand our music, and it wouldn't resonate emotionally with them, simply because they haven't grown up with it. They wouldn't have a genetic predisposition to enjoy it, and they wouldn't have been indoctrinated with it since before birth like we have. Even if they studied it extensively, it wouldn't truly be a part of them, and thus forever beyond their ability to comprehend it fluently.

I think that's the trouble I have with the assumption that, once computers have the capability to be more intelligent than us, that they will be. Human intelligence as we know it requires one to have lived as a human, to have grown and experienced humanity from the inside. If you don't have that, then you don't have that instinctive baseline that all we humans do. The best you'd be is a good mimic.

I also don't know what the advantage to building a computer that is smarter than humans would be, anyway, when it will probably turn out to be easier to augment human thought itself. We already know there are places in the brain that can have vastly improve cognition and reaction times if you stimulate them electronically. Improving the human brain itself seems like a better way to go (unless, of course, you care about controlling the improved mind that results). But why build something from scratch when you can improve the original?

My opinion: Hacking the brain is the future we should be thinking toward. It's the original computer, after all.

Giving It a Think #2: Zombies!

This is a good time for zombies. Just as prophesied by dozens of movies and comic books, they're *everywhere*. One of the most popular scripted shows on television is a drama about people living through a zombie apocalypse, for crying out loud. And unlike a recent vampire craze, people are actually discussing a "zombie apocalypse" as if it could really happen.

I understand the attraction/repulsion of the zombie idea. The mystery of death is one of the few universal parts of all the world's cultures. At least in Western cultures, it has become the foundation for a lot of cultural fear, as well... The image we have of the Grim Reaper (skeleton, clad in a black robe, holding a scythe) has been postulated to come from exhumed bodies from the Middle Ages... when people were buried in a shroud, with a sharp farm implement nearby to discourage the corpse from moving around once it's been interred. It appears that long before the voodoo-based idea of "zombie" came into our culture, we were already confused about the line between alive and dead.

This primal fear actually wraps a lot of our biggest worries into a neat package... Not only is it fear of our own mortality, it can be used as a reflection of our fears about many other things: society breaking down, xenophobia, disease, and even poses questions about what it is that ultimately makes us human. But now, I'm thinking past the metaphorical... how would zombies work, actually?

It's been almost fifty years since Night of the Living Dead started to canonize zombie lore, and since then there are a few things we've all come to agree on:

1. Zombies are dead people, resurrected by some means
2. Their only drive is to pursue and eat the living (brains on occasion, but mostly they seem content with whatever they can grab)
3. The only way to stop them is to destroy their brain

(I'm not going to get into the fast/slow zombie argument here, nor am I going to debate about whether you have to be bitten by a zombie to turn into one, versus any manner of non-head-trauma death getting you there. I'm just going with the universally accepted "facts" for starters.)

First of all, are zombies really dead? Let me see... They're up and shuffling around, eating stuff. The brain is still calling the shots -- it has to, or else destroying it wouldn't affect the rest of the body. It sounds to me, on the surface, like they're alive. At least, I'd count any organic being that had all those characteristics as alive.

But the thing we love about zombies is that they're *not* alive like us. They have human mechanics, but with all their humanity stripped away. There are no memories of who they once were, no emotions, the inability to use simple technology (like doors or stairs), no modus operandi other than to shamble around and eat things that are still alive when they come across them. For me, that's really the thing that clinches it that zombies are really dead... they can tell the difference and don't bother eating each other.

The one part of their alive-ness that they do hold onto is that drive to eat. The weird part is, though, that zombies never starve to death -- how could they, right? -- but the basic point is that they don't use energy from what they eat to keep them moving or to repair their dead flesh. Giving them something to eat doesn't seem to benefit them... They don't get stronger, move faster, or hold together any better. It's a prime directive that serves no purpose.

So it seems to be unnecessary for zombies to eat at all. But I think the reason they still do must reside in the same brain that stubbornly refuses to give up the ghost. All that remains, apparently, is the basal ganglia that keeps them mobile... and hungry. The function of this innermost portion of the brain is (in part) to control motion and provide motivation for hunger. It also controls habitual behavior, so that might explain zombie appetite... after all, what's the most basic habit that people engage in? This would also explain why zombies often seem to continue to do what they did in life -- I'm thinking of the mall zombies from the original Dawn of the Dead. So it's entirely plausible that only this portion of the brain works in zombified folks.

But then again... isn't the brain one of the more fragile structures in the human body? I would think that it's one of the first to disintegrate, unless there's something in the "zombie virus" that helps to keep it together.

Then there's the issue of the rest of the body. We don't seem to have a consensus about whether zombies are so haggard and fall-apart-y because that's the state of decay they were in when they were resurrected, or not. On the fifth season of The Walking Dead -- and by this time at least a year of real time has gone by -- the zombies seem to have the physical constitution of butter sculptures, and can be dispatched by a strong hit to the temple (or even a high-pressure fire hose).

For an opposing view, we can look to the granddaddy of long-form zombie lore... The undead in George Romero's "Dead" films (as of the sixth, 2009's Survival of the Dead) look pretty much the same as they did at the beginning of the series. While I'm not sure of the timeline of these films, it seems that many years have gone by, and this would lead me to believe that zombies actually maintain the state they were in at the time they died, and any infirmities they have were either sustained pre-death, or from obliviously stumbling into something in the ensuing time.

But both methods beg the question... how much of the body has to be intact for a zombie to shamble effectively? Most of it, I would guess. Even people who have been bedridden by an illness take some time in physical therapy to build back the muscles they have lost during their inactivity. Consider that most Walking Dead zombies are still ambulatory, and you have to assume that they have enough brain, muscle and bone mass left to balance (since most of them are still ambulatory). That just doesn't sound plausible to me.

If I have to choose, then it seems Romero has it right. This seems to be the only method that cause zombies to not only keep the brain from decaying after death, but the vast majority of the body too.

So, where does that leave us? In order to kick a zombie apocalypse off properly, we need a method of zombiefication that can mostly preserve the body and nervous system , *plus* can run indefinitely without any apparent form of metabolism (and I don't think I'm going out on a limb there... in all these representations, zombies clearly outnumber the living by a vast amount, and it's never been established that one can expire from hunger).

Those are the sticking points, for me: this idea that zombies have the drive to consume but don't gain anything when they do. And the fact that they can run forever. Even with our bodily functions stripped down to a minimum, we'd need at least some kind of caloric input to keep going. The fact that they don't seems to put them entirely outside the realm of the possible. It's conservation of energy... you simply can't have organic perpetual motion machines staggering around.

So, barring supernatural influence of some kind, it looks like the zombie apocalypse won't be happening anytime soon. And if one appears to be starting, it can't last for long. Give it a month or so, and it should blow over. Start your stockpiling now, friends...

Giving it a Think #1: Black Holes

I've heard a story that, when presented with a new problem, Albert Einstein would say in his German accent: "Let me give it a think", and go on one of his long walks to work it out in his head. Taking inspiration from him, I thought I'd perform some thought-experiments of my own. I don't guarantee that I have all my facts right, and I'd appreciate hearing where I've gone wrong, but these are things I'm trying to puzzle out...

I've been fascinated with black holes ever since the Disney movie The Black Hole came out in 1979 (I was 7). I actually dragged my family back to the theater to see it a second time, because I was so intrigued by the idea and scope of it. While the irony of Anthony Perkins being killed by a blade-wielding robot was lost on me, the whole idea of black holes, a place where the logic of the universe as we know it ceases to exist, irreversibly lodged itself in my brain.

I think most people know what black holes are, but here's my attempt at a nutshell definition anyway: when a truly massive star collapses at the end of its life cycle, its own mass crushes it down into an infinitely small point, creating a spherical area around it where gravity is so strong that nothing, not even light, can escape. It essentially creates a hole in space, pulling in everything around it, never to be seen again. Since, like I said, light can't escape, there's no way to see it. It's totally black... hence the name.

Now, gravity by itself is a pretty weak force. Pick up any object, and you're singlehandedly trumping the fact that the entire Earth is trying to hold it down. But gravity has two things going for it: it's everywhere -- every particle in the Universe pulls on every other one -- and it never, ever rests. There are no known exceptions to gravity. Which makes black holes all that much more impressive.

I remember reading in the movie's tie-in magazine that black holes were theoretical. In 1979, no one had ever observed one (which is kind of a weird way to say it, because by definition you *can't* observe one... you have to look for its effect on things around it). By now, we've learned that not only are they real, they are responsible for the formation of galaxies, most of which (including our own Milky Way) have supermassive black holes in their centers.

In the movie, the surviving protagonists (35-year old spoiler alert!) actually manage to fly through the black hole and come out... well, somewhere else. Of course, no one knows whether black holes actually go anywhere. That was kind of a problem for physics, this bottomless pit that seems to defy the second law of thermodynamics -- it seemed like all the stuff that fell in had to end up somewhere. But then Stephen Hawking realized that everything *does* radiate back out, just one particle at a time, super-slowly. It makes me think of a far-future Universe where all the stars have burned out, and there's nothing but these black holes slowly spitting reconstituted matter back out into the otherwise empty, ever-expanding Universe for quadrillions of years...

But that's what I love about black holes. They take everything we think we understand about space, time, matter, and energy, and push it to extremes. And there are all kinds of cool thought-experiments you can do with them. One of these -- which you can hear Neil deGrasse Tyson giddily describe in many places -- is how your body would be stretched if you fell into a black hole. When you're that close to such a strong gravitational body, its pull on whatever part of your body is closest to it (I'm assuming that's your feet, because we tend to think of gravity's pull as "down") is much stronger than the pull on the farthest part. The closer you get, the bigger the difference in pull, so you'd eventually be stretched thin and broken apart into smaller pieces, which would then also be stretched and broken down.

I actually got to see Dr. Tyson speak at the home office of Borders (back when that was a thing). And his description of "spaghettification" -- the official term he's been campaigning for when talking about this phenomenon -- led me to start wondering not so much about what would happen to you if you fell into a black hole, but what you would *see*. Disregard the fact that your eyes would be just as spaghettified as the rest of you... what would falling into a black hole look like? Well, here's what I've come up with... Again, feel free to have any physicists you know tell me whether/where I've gone wrong.

The main thing has to do with what we call the "event horizon". It's essentially the spherical "edge" of the black hole's full effect, inside of which nothing can come back out. It looks black to you because no light inside its boundary can come out. But let's say *you* drifted across this boundary. The Universe wouldn't suddenly go dark, because light can still come in through the event horizon, exactly like you just did. You can turn around and see perfectly well where you came from, because the only light that can't get to you will be that which is now closer to the black hole than you already are.

And this, I think, would create a weird optical illusion. Rather than being aware that you've passed any kind of barrier, you would appear to be continually hovering on the edge of the event horizon, which would be getting smaller and smaller. Not only that, but the light around its edge would get more and more severely bent as the gravity ramps up (in fact, now that I think about it, some light would actually go whipping around the back side of the hole and come back at you, meaning you could conceivably see a super-distorted picture of yourself!).

The weirdest part -- assuming that I'm understanding the physics right -- would be that the same kind of distortion would happen with *time*. You see, Einstein's theory of special relativity says that you can cause time to move slower for yourself in several ways. You can either move through spacetime, or you can be in the presence of a strong gravitational force.

Both of these things have been measured here on Earth. People who spend a significant amount of time traveling at great speeds (say, those on the International Space Station) live at a slightly slower speed than we here on Earth do. That's been proven -- GPS satellites actually have to be programmed to compensate for time dilation when they're locating your phone as they whizz by overhead.

It works the same way with strong gravitational fields... the harder you're being pulled by something, the slower your personal time goes. Given that, it makes sense that moving in to a progressively stronger and stronger gravity well makes your personal time slower and slower...

But here's the catch with slowing your personal clock... time doesn't actually appear to pass differently from your point of view. Everything else around you just moves faster. That's general relativity at work... because physics-wise, there's no difference between you walking down the street at three miles an hour and the earth turning under your feet at three miles an hour.

So here's what I think would happen if you fell into a black hole... Like I said, you'd appear to be hovering on edge of an ever-shrinking event horizon, which would have a larger and more distorted halo of bent light around it. When you turned around to look back at where you were... you would get to see the Universe evolve in fast motion. Although time still ticks along normally to you, you're actually speeding faster and faster into the future. You'd see the galaxies start accelerating... centuries, millennia, and then thousands of millennia of the Universe's evolution passing right before your eyes.

And, if the theory really is correct that in the very center of a black hole, mass collapses into an infinitely small point and thus creates an infinitely strong gravitational field... you would see the entire future of the Universe before you reach that center. In fact, the Universe itself would end before you actually get there. It would be like the ultimate fireworks display.

Of course, this is all providing you can hold your body together long enough to witness it, which I guess is true even if you're not falling into a black hole.

(One caveat: because the speed of light is always constant from your perspective no matter how you're moving through spacetime, I think that the eons of light piling onto you would be of ever-higher wavelengths. So you'd soon be unable to actually "see" the ensuing x-rays and gamma rays that would start pelting you, but let's assume that you have some kind of tech that could translate it into visible light for you. Cool?)

The Novel That Never Will Be

(Note: This is an obligatory first paragraph, because Facebook in its infinite wisdom has decided to preview only the *second* paragraph of linked blog posts. I'd imagine there's a reason for it, but instead attempting to divine that reason, I'm going to include these words so that your first look isn't quite so confusing.)

Do you ever have that dream where you go to your local music store (and here I'm assuming that you know what those are) and find a trove of rare, possibly imported, material that you've never heard of by one of your favorite artists? Have you ever experienced that thrill?

Well, that's how I felt -- and I assume I will feel again when it actually happens -- when I heard that Twin Peaks was going to return to TV in early 2016. As fraught with peril as the idea of a continuation of one of my favorite televised stories may be -- even though it will be helmed by many of the same artists that created the original -- I can't help but be excited by it.

At the same time, it's also stuck a pin in a project that I had been amusedly musing since the original show went off the air in 1991... my imaginary sequel novel. You see, Twin Peaks, while enjoying immense success in its first limited-run season, really fell off in the second. It was canceled twice, brought back through some of the earliest fan protests that utilized the fledgling Internet, and eventually was scheduled for final demolition at the end of its second season. At that point, original creators David Lynch and Mark Frost -- who admittedly had stepped back somewhat and bequeathed the wheel to other creative minds -- returned to steer the project back into the harbor, and left us with a confounding series finale that included explosions, demonic possession, adventures in other dimensions, and left no less than six major characters in unresolved mortal peril. Not only that, it took a break in the middle so Little Jimmy Scott could sing a slow jazz number.

It was material just begging, if not outright daring, to be continued. After a decade of thought, I felt I could bring a unique resolution to it. And so, now that the actual conclusion is pending, I thought I would put down some of what my novel would have entailed. This way, my theories can either be proven right or wrong by the minds that the source material sprang from. Bearing that in mind, be aware that spoilers abound in what follows.

Let me say a bit more about why I liked Twin Peaks: it gets rhapsodized over time and time again, but it really was unlike anything that had been on TV before. It was a prime-time soap opera, yes, but instead of focusing on how even rich people are messed up (Dallas, Dynasty, Falcon Crest, etc.), it dealt with a small town and the lurking horror that lies underneath its all-American veneer. Its pioneering skill as a show was in juggling a multitude of tones and genres at once. It was sad, surreal, funny, sexy, and frightening, often in combination. The central mystery of the murder of prom queen Laura Palmer was brutally raw and tragic at first, and then got weirder and weirder, descending first into the dark secrets of the town's denizens, then into a neo-Lovecraftian mindbender of worlds beyond.

But the thing that was truly mesmerizing for me about Twin Peaks -- what made me tape it and re-watch it relentlessly -- was that everything seemed like a clue to a deeper mystery, and more often than not, everything was. It all hung together with the same kind of logic that a dream seems to make perfect sense right after waking. And the atmosphere, thanks in great part to Lynch's odd creative choices and Angelo Badalamenti's haunting score -- gave the whole thing an simultaneous sense of the alien and the familiar that really sucked you in.

Now, when we left FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper at the end of the series, he had solved Laura's murder and had gone on to grapple with his nemesis, a rogue fellow agent named Windom Earle. Together they had gone into that space-between-worlds called The Black Lodge, where they confronted Laura's killer, a demonic spirit named BOB, in its lair. After witnessing BOB kill Earle and becoming possessed himself, Cooper came back into the real world. In the closing moments of the finale, no one seemed the wiser that he wasn't quite himself anymore. The third season I invented in my head centered on defeating BOB once and for all, and recovering the real Cooper from the Black Lodge.

In my story, the possession doesn't remain a secret for long. It's clear that Cooper is not himself. The real challenge for Sheriff Harry Truman and his team is not letting Cooper know that they know he's not really him anymore. This is tough, given that they have new investigations to make at the hospital. There are many new patients, including Audrey Horne, who survived the explosion in the bank, thanks to the fact that she was chained to the vault door at the time; Benjamin Horne, who survived getting his head bashed against a fireplace mantel by Doc Hayward, but who now has a full-scale freak-out when a chest of drawers with many pull-knobs gets brought into his room; and Leo Johnson, who is being treated for multiple venomous spider bites but miraculously regains his speech because of them.

Annie, the third person in the Black Lodge with Cooper and Earle, lies in a coma. Cooper (BOB), after being reluctantly left alone with her by the sheriff, utters some cryptic phrases about how he'll make sure that she is eternally held between worlds so as not to warn everyone about BOB.

Cooper returns to the home he recently bought at Dead Dog Farm, and Deputy Hawk is sent to observe his behavior. What he sees is Cooper walking through the house obsessively, following a curved path that often causes him to bump into walls. Over the course of several days, he manages to break through them, and eventually carves a perfectly circular path through the interior of the house. When completed, he continues to pace this circle obsessively, stopping often to scream up toward the sky.

Meanwhile, Harry and Andy are doing research, and find in the town archives that Dead Dog Farm used to be called Dead Wolf Swamp before it was drained in a logging effort by the Packard Saw Mill almost a hundred years before. It was considered to be an especially haunted place by the local Native Americans, who believed it was the location of a Sounding Stone, which as close to a real-world location of The Black Lodge as there can be. Hawk believes that it is actually below the foundations of Cooper's house, and because BOB is in Cooper's body and thus unable to cross over and get back home, he is in torment.

But why is BOB so weak, when he was formerly so powerful a threat to the town? The answer is provided by Major Briggs, who knows more about BOB than he has let on. Thanks to his work on Project Bluebook, Briggs has inadvertently discovered clues to the existence of both the Black and White Lodges. (Remember, he is the only one who has glimpsed the White Lodge itself, during the period of three days he went missing in Season 2). He takes on the role of consultant for Sheriff Truman and his team now, telling them what he knows...

In the Black Lodge, as we've seen, time is mutable. In general, though, it tends to run backwards. Every time we've seen a spirit speaking in the Black Lodge, it's been in reverse. So while BOB has been haunting Twin Peaks for centuries, he is actually quite young by now, and relatively inexperienced. From this point of view, BOB's power has gradually been decreasing, especially since he killed Teresa Banks, which was the case that initially put Cooper on his trail. With this in mind, Major Briggs suggests that the best way to destroy BOB... is to *create* him.

Here's where my plotting got a little fuzzy. All things coming in pairs in Twin Peaks, I know there would be a White Lodge sounding stone mirrored on the other side of the titular mountains, most likely at One-Eyed Jack's, where the spirit named JUDY (I added the capital letters myself, to match BOB), who just might be the light side of BOB, has been trying to break through into our world to stop her evil twin.

It all ends with a group of people from the town (roster to be determined) breaking through the gateway into the Black Lodge, confronting their own dopplegangers, and JUDY finally combining with BOB to become the entity they had started out being in the first place.

Of course, along the way I planned to make a bunch of other stops... there's still the fact that Leo will want to kill Bobby Briggs for hooking up with his wife Shelly. Audrey will have to decide what to do when John Justice Wheeler comes back to town after hearing of her brush with death, even as she still has feelings for Agent Cooper. Ben Horne will reveal exactly what he saw in his vision the night the doorway to the Black Lodge opened for Earle, and what he knows about Josie's ultimate fate (was she really reincarnated as an end table?). I also wanted to see James ride his motorcycle all the way to Buenos Aires and find what strange portal Philip Jeffries discovered there (my guess is that it would lead back to Twin Peaks somehow. Or Philadelphia.). I also wanted to delve into the history of The Bookhouse Boys, that secret society that protects the town from evil. Cooper will have to figure out how he can keep part of himself in the Black Lodge so that he'll be there with JUDY to lead Laura into the White Lodge, when she arrives, after the aforementioned twenty-five years... And, of course, I'll want Ed and Norma to get their happy ending, finally. Because who wouldn't like to see that?

Epically Alluring

If you've read some of my other entries ("Big Book Love", for example), you'll already know that I have a soft spot for epics. And recently, I seem to be taking them on even more often than usual. I don't know, there's just something about huge, multi-part sagas that I really enjoy. I used to think that, being a more introverted person, I liked the feel of achievement that comes from finishing them. It might be the same feeling a person finds at the top of a mountain, or the finish line of a marathon. But now I'm thinking that it's not quite as analogous an experience, that's there's something additional that draws me to the epic form. Especially when they're put together in the ways that the three artists whose works I've been experiencing lately have done.

It started when I decided to listen to Wagner's Ring Cycle of operas ("Der Ring des Nibelungen", officially). I had heard a lot of peripheral stuff about it for a long time -- how it influenced The Lord of the Rings, how its use of "motifs" has changed how we listen to music ever since, and of course the Bugs Bunny cartoon "What's Opera, Doc?", which I've seen probably a hundred times.

So over a course of weeks, I listened to all twenty hours of its length. I enjoyed following the story and recognizing where it has been echoed by other fantastic works, most notably how it all comes down to gods, dwarves, giants and men fighting for possession of one magical ring that gives the wearer nearly unlimited power.

But what struck me even more as I followed along with the translated libretto was how ambitious the whole thing was. At the same time, I had to keep in mind that this was all coming from the mind of Richard Wagner, a racist egomaniac who seemed to be fine with twins falling in love and having children together.

What he envisioned for his operatic cycle was to pick a small town, build a massive theater, stage four epic operas on consecutive nights, and conclude the whole festival by *burning* *the* *theater* *down*. It makes sense from a story point of view -- the story does end in a conflagration that destroys Valhalla, the home of the gods, after all -- but from a safety standpoint I have no idea how the whole thing would be pulled off.

But that's what grabs me most about the whole thing. This one tale, that encompasses generations, and presents locales from the underground kingdom of the dwarves all the way to the rainbow bridge that leads to the dwelling of the Norse gods, has been brought together by one man's uncompromising artistic vision alone. And now, there are people who spend their careers researching both the mythology and musicality of it.

Second, this summer I started listening to all seven Harry Potter audiobooks during my commute. I started a little before Harry's birthday (July 31), and heard Jim Dale read the last book's epilogue from disc 99 on my own (Nov. 14).

Again, you have to marvel at the scope and subtext of the whole thing. If the stories are true, J.K. Rowling wrote the first book in coffee shops while caring for her infant child. And as far as I can tell, there is nothing inconsistent in the magical world that she created during those humble beginnings that doesn't perfectly match with the events of the seventh book, which she wrote when she was a renowned world figure and a multi-millionaire.

There's such a clear thematic progression through the books as Harry and his friends mature and the threat to the wizarding world grows, and that clarity only becomes magnified when you go right from one book into the next. Every question you have gets answered, and many things mentioned in passing have payoffs three or four books later. Either Jo had an unbelievably detailed idea of this world when she first started jotting the story down on a legal pad at a coffeehouse, or she is the world's most adept plot-juggler, tying things together and making up magical rules and backstories on the fly that make perfect retroactive sense. Either way, I'm in awe.

Of course, it's almost pure luck that America really grew to love the HP books in the early 2000s, at a time when they felt threatened by dark outside forces, and had to back a government that wasn't entirely trustworthy, which is exactly what happens in Harry's world. But even if such strange real-world parallels hadn't happened, clearly the series will stand for generations as the right way to tell a human story set against a massive, fantastical backdrop.

The third artist I experienced was one that I've been following for a long time, although until recently there's been very little known about him. His name was Henry Darger, and he lived around the turn of the twentieth century in Chicago, By all accounts, he was a grumpy, eccentric hoarder, who worked as a janitor at various Catholic institutions most of his life. When he passed away and his one-room rented apartment was cleaned out by its owners, they found massive works of art, including three huge, handwritten novels (30,000 pages in all) and hundreds of watercolors and collages, some twelve feet in length.

The longest of the novels (at 15,000 pages) is called "The Vivian Girls in the Realms of the Unreal" and details a sort of parallel-universe version of the Civil War. In his retelling, seven young sisters are the leaders of a massive army leading a revolt against a nation of child slavers. The work is expansive and visceral, never shying from violence despite the innocence of its heroines. Some of the paintings depict the strangling and evisceration of children. This, along with the fact that the little girls are often depicted naked and with penises, led many to believe that Darger was sexually naive at best, and a homicidal pedophile at worst.

The truth, it turns out, makes much more sense. In the book "Henry Darger: Throwaway Boy", author Jim Elledge delves into the artist's past, and finds a cruelly mistreated boy, left alone by a deceased mother and alcoholic father, sexually abused and needlessly institutionalized for most of his childhood, compounded by confusion about his homosexuality. The novels and paintings, it turns out, were his way of working through all the things that happened in his life. It's no surprise, then, that the little girls have boys' bodies, or that "Sweetie Pie", a tornado in the shape of a child's face, spends thousands of pages obliterating most of the locales that Henry knew growing up.

He had been working on these projects secretly for decades, which is what I find so astounding about it. This endeavor made up nearly his entire life, and took his entire life. He did find love eventually, but never lived with his paramour in the thirty years they were a couple, and the relationship ended when Whillie (as Henry called him) moved south for health reasons. But of course, multiple versions of the couple appeared in Henry's books, always depicted as younger, stronger, and working together to help the oppressed children.

And that's what makes me think that there's more to epic storytelling than just weaving a complex, consistent story. Henry's tale is the most obvious example of how art can be a device to help you work through issues, to come to terms with your past and, hopefully, direct your future. If done right, they make it nearly impossible for the author to stop telling them, at least until they're done. And sometimes -- as you can see with Rowling's occasional Potter stories in the years since she concluded the series -- not even then.

That's what makes epics so fascinating to me: it's impossible to tell such a huge, sprawling story without putting more than a little of your true self in it. That's the kind of connection I find with these artists; even if I don't agree with or fully understand them, I can tell that there's something running profoundly deep under the surface. Whether it was Wagner's twisted ideology that cautioned against both foreigners and the lure of power, Rowling's boy wizard hoping to live up to expectations he doesn't really believe he can fulfill, or Darger's fractured psyche trying to make sense of itself, what impresses me about all three of these artists is the scope of what they committed to. You can't fake that kind of passion. They felt compelled to tell these stories, and would not stop until they were completed.

What It All Comes To

My father passed away just over a month ago. For a while before and a while since that day, I haven't had all that much to talk about. This regrouping time is natural, I suppose, but still weird to go through. I had been trying so hard to write regularly and keep momentum, but I was still disoriented by my lack of need to keep going. Now, however, I think I'm back to blather on about whatever's on my mind.

I did write down a few things about my dad, and I'll get to those in time, but I think the first thing I want to talk about on my return to the page is something I'd actually been thinking about for a while, and with this new sort of perspective that I have, I think I can now make enough sense of it to share.

It sort of came around through watching my dad go through his final phases. His passing was in no means sudden or unexpected, and I suppose it was as peaceful as we could have hoped for. But it made me think about the course of his life -- first off, he dealt with multiple sclerosis his entire adulthood. When he was first diagnosed in his twenties, he and my mom were afraid that what they were facing was a death sentence. That didn't turn out to be the case, but the disease did gradually wear away at his physical and mental capabilities over the following decades.

Eventually, medical science found something that seemed to help slow the disease's progress, but it also might have made him more susceptible to the type of lymphoma that he was diagnosed with early this summer. At the same time, other relatives of his generation are growing older and more infirm, and it leaves me looking around, and wondering what the point of old age really is.

Is it really supposed to be like this, this slow accumulation of aches and pains and breakdowns, until there's really nothing else to talk or think about other than the imperfect workings of your own body? What kind of purpose does that serve? And if there's no purpose to it, then what does that fact in itself mean? Whether you believe in a higher power or not, does this eventual inward-turning of the psyche make sense?

Similarly, for a while now I've been trying out ways to articulate something about my new perspective of being in middle age -- which, by any measure, I pretty much have to admit I am now -- and how it compares to the one I had when I was younger.

Young people, at first look, seem to be the ones who are really experiencing the world. They're out there every day, drinking in the newest thing that's come over the horizon. They're socializing, going places, doing things. They have their hands and feet in the stuff of Today. Nothing escapes their insatiable need for the New. Their biggest complaint to the older generation is "You don't know what's going on Right Now! You're living in the past!"

But what I think they fail to see -- I know I definitely failed to see it when I was younger -- is that older people see everything new through a lens that's informed by what's already happened in the last few decades. While the young think they're living in a bright spotlight of NOW and that's all that matters, those of us who have been around longer are equally aware of everything that's outside that spotlight. We've lived through what came before, and learned more about the context of the modern world than they hope to can comprehend, at least not until they've learned that there's more to the world than just what's going on at the moment.

And I'm not just saying that because I'm prejudiced toward the world that I've lived through... there's more to it than that. If you're doing it right, your own storehouse of human knowledge and history keeps expanding in all directions, all throughout your life. But what I didn't realize when I was younger -- and which I think younger people *shouldn't* know -- is that your world is so small without that understanding.

Again, I say that younger people *shouldn't* have this perspective, that what they know is merely a small fraction of what the world is really about. If they did, they would be so humbled and bewildered by it all that they would never do anything, never blaze any trails because they'd already know that there are well-established ones that they could much more easily stick to. The only reason I even state this fact here is that, even if they read it, they'll never believe that it's true.

So, I've now got a better understanding of the world and how it works, what's come before. I know that's it's a much more inclusive, less insulated, and altogether more *right* than the way I thought when I was younger. And then I look at what I said before, about how old age can make us turn inward, necessarily make us obsess about our own thoughts and bodies. And I have to ask myself... who's to say that I'm not just standing in the brighter center of an even bigger spotlight, still unaware of things that it would be impossible for me to be aware of until I go through them?

The strange thing is that, while writing this, I just might have answered my own original question. I was asking, back at the beginning of this, what the purpose of all this end-of-life suffering could possibly be for. And perhaps I stumbled across it while thinking this through. Maybe the answer is this -- every day is a gift.

Let me back up such a thudding cliché with a little explanation. And mayhap you'll get a little view into how I view the world in the process... Everything breaks down. It's the nature of the Universe, the second law of thermodynamics. The instant any living thing stops actively trying to prevent itself from decaying, it falls apart. We don't think about it much, but we're assaulted from all sides by other living things that are trying to destroy us every day. They're incredibly tiny, but if our bodies don't repel their advances, then we're finished. It's a battle that happens every day.

Today, we've been able to use our collective gray matter to help our bodies fight this fight. Medicine and an understanding of how the enemy works has brought us to the point where the ultimate breakdown of the body tends to comes from its own internal structure. More and more, we're living long enough that it's the faults in our own DNA that are causing our ultimate downfall. Because the longer we live, the more likely we are to develop cancer, dementia, and all the other fatal illnesses that naturally grow more likely over time.

So maybe, when you're old and reflecting back on things, dealing with the everyday aches and pains and doctor visits, it's to give you a perspective on how glorious life is, even when you're no longer your young, healthy self. Maybe it's a transition from living a physically-based life to living a mentally-based one. The bill finally comes due on the wonders of the life you've been given, whether they've been big or small. It's the preservation of balance.

Maybe that's the lesson that will come nearer to the end of life... and I say that knowing that I can't (and probably shouldn't) fully appreciate it. Maybe all those around us who seem old and infirm know things that we younger folks just can't grasp yet.

And, of course, if they were to tell us, we wouldn't listen.

Seven Billion Nudges

There are holes in Siberia. I’ve seen countless postings of people asking what possibly could have caused them, but it’s quite clear to me: the Russian permafrost is thawing, thanks to climate change. This releases large amounts of methane gas (which we know has been locked up in the ice for eons), which is building up in underground pockets, and increases in pressure until the least resistant thing holding it in is the ground above it.

I really hope this will be another nail in the coffin of climate change denial, but it drove home to me how we are continuing to alter, perhaps forever, the biosphere we live in. It’s becoming more clear – at least to me – that the search for a balance between humans and the rest of the living things on this planet is just beginning, and there is no end to it in sight. Short of a massive human die-off, this is going to be our permanent job from now on – trying to keep ourselves from permanently altering the world we’ve inherited.

Of course, there’s no cause to say that the changes we put on the planet will necessarily be bad. But the main trouble with humans is a matter of sheer numbers; as we can see now, when some of us start benefitting from our technology, soon everyone will be adopting it, no matter how small the environmental impact could be. Seven billion times tiny nudges in any direction could be cataclysmic. We could put millions of cars on the road that expel only water as exhaust, but then we’d have to figure out whether we’re ruining entire ecosystems by putting so much extra water vapor into the air.

Is this self-regulation really a job we can, or even really want to, take on? Should we just keep putting greater and greater amounts of work and money into preserving species that are on the verge of dying out, if the only reason we’re doing it is to keep them around so that we can save them again? I understand that there’s something to be said for trying to preserve the world the way it was before we started completely influencing every part of it, but in my worst moments I wonder if it’s worth it.

This question was brought up in an especially poignant way after Hurricane Sandy hit the NYC area in 2012. In low-lying areas of the coast that had been flooded, I heard stories of people wondering whether the government should monetarily assist people to rebuild their homes in low-lying areas that were now susceptible to being hit by another equally destructive hurricane in a few more years. How important is it that we not give up these pieces of land that nature is starting to reclaim? It’s the same thing with wildfires in California and Arizona… they’re a natural part of the cycle of the Western biome, but we suppress them and suppress them until the dry scrub builds up and when the fires finally do come, they’re devastating.

It seems like a similar problem to me. Maybe we should concentrate our efforts on sustaining creatures that directly affect our livelihood: Bees, pigs, cattle, basically anything that we either eat or that creates things that we eat. The trouble is, these are creatures that we’ve basically created through the process of domestication. Not only that, we don’t fully understand where the immediate family of creatures we rely on ends. If every part of the food chain is integral, we’re probably already chipping at a weak link and don’t even realize it.

On the other hand, it’s unrealistic to think that we have the resources to control a living, growing process like the Earth as a whole. Add an element of chaos? Sure. But even if we could figure out how to actively point these vast natural processes in the right direction, should we try to hold it in stasis, corral it into a simulation of what it was like when we first got here? Or do we find a way to let it evolve as it would have without our technological influence? And if that’s the option we take, how will we know if we’re doing it right?

Clearly, I’m in a bit of a pessimistic mood. Because preserving/saving the planet goes against every basic human instinct of survival. By this I mean that, in every instance, mankind survives by putting priority on its own short-term goals. That's how we've survived all these years, and we do it regardless of how that affects our long-term goals, never mind what we can do for the good of the planet as a whole. Ironically, this tendency is hardwired into us by nature itself.

But maybe there’s hope for progress… I look back at what humans were doing fifty or a hundred years ago and see how hopelessly naïve we were. Not only did we think that the world was indestructible, we thought that we were pretty much indestructible too – not only were smoking and drinking given no kind of social or moral stigma, but we drove around with no seatbelts and saw smog as a necessary nuisance; we tolerated abuse, sexism, homophobia and racism; we thought depression and psychological trauma were things you could just “get over”.

Maybe in another fifty or hundred years we’ll look back and think the same thing. Maybe we’ll be on well on our way to solving our current problems and have a whole new set of runaway issues to deal with. I’m pretty sure that’s the signpost to look for… a culture that looks back and says, “Yep, we figured it all out a hundred years ago, and we’ve been doing it the same way ever since” is pretty much doomed. It’s a good rule of thumb to keep in mind on a personal level too… there’s a quote I’ve seen on the Internet – attributed to Morgan Freeman, as most things are – that says that a person who believes the same thing at 50 as they did at 20 has wasted 30 years of their life.

Whether we like it or not, we've become directly responsible for the fate of every living thing we share the earth with. And we're changing things faster than we can comprehend the result of our actions. There are even factions of our society that are actively championing ignorance about this new role of ours. But when has anything good ever resulted from ignorance, in any aspect of life? True, this isn't a job that any of us want, but we've at least got to acknowledge that it *is* our job. That's the first, crucial step to deciding what to do with the power we now wield.

What I Don't Know About Ferguson

I woke up this morning full of righteous anger -- apparently at the entire world -- that I couldn't readily explain. There simultaneously seemed to reside in my mind a bedrock-solid belief that there is unimaginable untapped potential in us as a species, and an equally strong belief that we are utterly going to fail in fulfilling that potential.

It's been building up over the last few days, and I guess it all starts in Ferguson, Missouri. Now, I should say up front that I'm not going to espouse any particular stance on what's happening there... because I honestly don't have one. Save from what I can glean from headlines and overheard anecdotes, I know nothing about what's going on. This is for several reasons:

The first reason is that I want to see what kind of opinion gets formed by a person who only hears headlines and anecdotes about a significant event such as this -- because I think that's how the majority of people actually get their information. And here's what I do know: a young black man, who may or may not have been under the influence of marijuana or even harder drugs, was either robbing or shoplifting from a store (bit of a distinction there, eh?), and when confronted by the police, was subsequently shot and killed by said police for failing to comply with their orders. This touched off days-long rounds of rioting, which resulted in people being hit with rubber bullets and tear gas, and members of the media being harassed and arrested for filming on-duty police officers.

That's it. That's the sum total of what I know at this point. I have no idea whether I've got the details right or not, because the wide world of Interweb news is keen on nothing if not positing conflicting information using as few words as possible. Which brings me to the second reason I'm consciously not following what's going on... It's impossible to look very deeply into a controversial news story like this without being instantly mired in a swamp of opinion, conjecture, racism, and slanted reporting.

Most people I've seen post opinions about what's going on quite clearly believe they know what happened. The worst part of this is that, by publicly announcing your opinions and facts immediately before having time to assimilate and ruminate, you make it that much harder to change your mind on any given situation as it evolves. Since you've already declared how you feel about something to everyone you know 10 minutes after something happens, doesn't it make it that much harder to do anything but more deeply entrench yourself in that conviction?

I felt much the same with the Trayvon Martin case. Within an hour of the story breaking, it seemed, everyone was taking hooded selfies of themselves in protest. At this point, we had next to no information on what actually happened. A member of Neighborhood Watch had shot and killed a 17-year old. That was all the confirmed facts we had at that point, and yet everyone had already declared whose story they believed. Let me say flat out, I think Zimmerman acted wrongly and killed someone in the process. A young man should not have died in that situation. But would I have changed a hoodie-selfie profile photo when I heard about the injuries Zimmerman had sustained, and if I had, would my decision be based on what would my fellow hoodie-selfied friends would have thought? How tempted would I be to just hold to the opinion I had already stated so boldly, even as more evidence rolled out? What kind of contrary evidence would it have taken to get me to publicly state that I was rethinking my status?

*That's* why I'm not following Ferguson closely. I refuse to participate in the inevitable, endless debate about what facts are true, which were reported in error, which ones are planted by the media, and which ones are being perpetuated by local police/the military-industrial complex/the federal government. If I am going to make an informed decision about the issues that have been raised -- whatever they turn out to be -- it will be when passions have had a chance to cool, and a consensus of basic facts agreed upon. I will not decide how I feel about something that's happening hundreds of miles way until I *know* what's happening.

In a world where we all have the potential to be immediately connected, I am appalled that can't figure out how to accurately determine facts and agree on them. I think the problem may be that we (and by that, I mean anyone over thirty) spent the first half of our lives being indoctrinated into the belief that someone in authority who states something as truth has checked their facts, and is not just playing a 21st century version of the telephone game. Or maybe it's the rush to be the first to present information, truth behind it be damned. It's like we're not using this wealth of information we have it our disposal to get to the truth of things; instead, we're extracting from it the bits and pieces that fit the story we've already concocted in our heads.

Look at Trayvon Martin again. We still don't know exactly what happened that night, but what we do know is that there are two diametrically opposed sides to who was at fault. Not only that, both sides have provided exhaustively documented facts, evidence and diagrams precisely detailing why they are right. If you belong to either of these sides, you're fooling yourself if you think you formed that opinion based on the evidence presented and the cases argued... because it's impossible to. No, you're most likely to still believe the exact same thing you announced to everyone ten minutes after it happened.

The news media isn't doing itself any favors, either, by itching to jump in and try to splash facts together before they verify them. One journalist announced on Twitter that they saw a dead body in the street, about the most incendiary thing they could have said at the moment -- it later turned out that it was merely debris (thankfully, non-human) from an unrelated car crash. That's the problem with yelling things out before you really know what they are in an attempt to be first. The hyperbole you tweet in the heat of the moment actually has greater weight than the reasoned conclusion you tweet hours later after you have a chance to figure out what's actually going on, simply because it's a) first and b) more exciting. And there are countless examples of legitimate news agencies picking up such ill-formed reportage and passing it on, making it seem even more real.

So without even the media to trust, we're left floundering in this churning mess of arguing, sniping, and accusing that passes for public debate. The worst part is that I know if I even dip my toe in it, I'm going to end up with a roiling stomachache and my faith in humanity being chipped away a little more. In the end, the truth will end up lying somewhere in the middle, and sadly, none of us are going to know exactly where.

We've got to get better at this. We've just got to.

The Height of the Matter

Every year on my daughter's birthday, we mark her height on the doorjamb of her room, although if it were up to her, we'd mark it every few weeks. It's astonishing to look at all those marks further down the woodwork and think about how much I didn't know back then, and what I hadn't even guessed at yet about who she (or I, for that matter) would come to be.

It's got me thinking this week about height. When I sat down and started making notes about it, it really became shocking to me about how prominently height and size influence cultures around the world. And, frankly, about how surprising it is that it's shocking. We come into this world so much of a smaller size than just about everything in the world around us. The people that we're closest to tower over us, and the impression never leaves us that we have to literally "look up to" those who are stronger and in control of our lives.

I think this is probably why people look up to the sky when they think about their concept of God, and the power He represents. We're looking for the ultimate parental figure, to care about us the way our parents had (or perhaps the way we wish they had), and the heavens are the only place that is forever bigger than us. And part of most religious rituals is to kneel or supplicating in prayer, becoming even smaller and lower before whatever power you’re praying to. Even when we attempt to elevate people and other gods to greater-than-human status, the best way to do that is portray them in larger-than-life ways... Sometimes these representations are intended to inspire awe by magnification (Michelangelo's David), to deify (the statue of Zeus in his temple at Olympia, the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C.), or can sometimes be seen as symbols of subjugation (Mount Rushmore?), but in all cases, size equals power.

This trend even continues into fashion. Think of all the things people do to make themselves appear larger than they are. You can immediately tell the hierarchical status of a Catholic priest, Egyptian king, or French chef by the height of their hats. When women first started coming into the white-collar work place in force, they augmented themselves with extra-high heels and shoulder pads, trying to make themselves as physically present as they grew in boardroom power.

The simplest sign of humility before someone of greater authority is to literally make yourself shorter by bowing or curtsying. The elaborate Japanese custom of ojigi takes this into the realm of art, with correct posture and form conveying fine levels of meaning. It’s similar to the Islamic religious postures of ruku (bowing) and sujud (prostration). Even when the humility is mostly for show -- such as performers bowing to their audience, even though they've been the center of attention for the duration of the performance -- it still forms a connection of a particular sort between people.

This distinction is so woven into our cultural fabric that people still consider it when choosing partners. Women will think twice about dating a man who is shorter than them, and men will do the same about a woman who is. Of course, this is only a tendency. Still, I can't help but notice that cultures who on average tend to be taller also have more freedom in choosing who they marry... those where the decisions are made more by arranged marriages, or with regard to familial and political alliances – basically, things other than physical attraction -- seem to have men and women of about the same average height.

Physical size, and height in particular, is perhaps the one true universal human trait, which has been noted and woven into all of our cultures in an amazing myriad of ways. As much as we’ve changed, these traditions have persisted because they derive from our common physical form, and the process every single one of us goes through as we move from childhood to adulthood.

Aaron's Top 50 Shades of Grey

Every now and then, there are pop culture phenomena that we somewhat grudgingly partake in, just because we just want to see what the big deal is. We don't want to be the only one at the party who doesn't know what all the others are talking about. That's how I came to read 50 Shades of Grey.

I had heard a whole lot of things about the book before I had even cracked its spine: that it was fantastic/terribly written, that it was a huge step forward/backward for feminism, that it was harmful/liberating to the mental states of women/men, that it was the true dawning/deathknell of the ebook. It's not often that some work of art comes so quickly, fully, and multi-controversially into public view, and even less when that thing is a book. So I felt that I had to give it a try.

I don't think it's my place to tell you here whether 50 Shades, in and of itself, is good, bad, sexy, or offensive. It's one of those things that personal beliefs and taste figure into even more than usual, so for me to attempt to tell you what you're going to think is kind of pointless (I felt the same way about The Passion of the Christ, which is perhaps the weirdest comparison you’re bound to hear someone make about either of these things). I also realize that, being a man, I'm not even in its target audience. But what's really intriguing for me is the way it's made me address a dichotomy in my own head that has been there for a while, and which I wasn't even truly aware of.

When I was a kid, my mother owned a bookstore. If I'm remembering this correctly, there were a pair of shelves that were dedicated to Harlequin romance novels. I think the order-seeking part of me liked the way they were set up... all the same color, all the same thickness, so different from the riot of colors and sizes that were in every other section. It was as if hundreds of copies of the same book had been neatly lined up. I had only a vague idea of what these books were about, or why they all looked the same, but the thought was implanted that they were just as they looked -- nearly identical, completely interchangeable.

This stereotype was perpetuated when I worked at the local public library during high school. There, we had an alcove where the romance novels were stored. While there was a little more variety in their color and size (this was in the late 80s), they still weren't managed the same as other books. There was no order to the way they were shelved, and when the patrons checked them out, we didn't even keep track of which titles they took, just the number of books. There was at least one woman who, every week or so, would faithfully bring in a shopping bag full of them, only to leave with it filled again. The lesson was consistent: these are disposable. They barely even qualify as literature.

I remember telling one of my fellow Borders employees how so many romance novels seemed "predatory" to me -- I actually used that word. It's hard to argue that books with titles like "The Oil Tycoon's Secret Love Child" were created by people doing anything other than looking for women who wish that some rich, powerful man would fall helplessly in love with them just for being exactly who they already are. I saw it as a completely unrealistic view of adult love, and not only that, but it might actually damage the person reading it. Wouldn't some women, after immersing themselves in such a fantasy, I thought, end up closing off to real-world love and affection, just because it couldn't hope to live up to the dreams concocted for them during a Harlequin board meeting?

So this is the prejudice I found myself fighting against when reading 50 Shades. But then I realized something... you could make (and I have actually heard) the same argument against pornography. While I realize that I'm starting to speak in generalities, it seems to be for men what romances are for women. At their worst, both forms of entertainment gravely underestimate the intelligence of the sexes. In truth, these two genres really are means to the same emotional end, and play out surprisingly similar fantasies: someone suddenly appears and sweeps you off your feet, who exists only to provide intimacy to an idealized avatar of you, removing all your worldly cares, allowing you to live in the moment, and making you feel alive.

What it's taken me over 200 pages into this story of dominance and submission is to figure out exactly how the story does what it does. And, to my surprise, I've found that it's really not all that far from what romance novels -- and pornography, for that matter -- have been doing all along. It's a clever melding of the two, in fact.

To figure out what the reception of 50 Shades really has to tell us, let's take a look at how that new sensibility is used in this book, as well as the flurry of BDSM-themed romance novels that have come out in its wake. In a traditional romance novel, you've got to find a way to get your characters together and realistically build their relationship, in both the physical and emotional senses. Now, If BDSM is the backdrop you set your story against, you can effectively drop all pretenses. No meet-cute is necessary, nor any extraneous plot devices. As an author, you can take the quickest short cut to the reason romance readers come back to the genre time and again: intense relationship moments between characters. Issues of trust immediately need to be questioned, insecurities revealed and worked through. In this sense, 50 Shades and other BDSM novels are like a concentrated distillation of other romances. They skip nearly all the preliminaries and kick in with a starting gear of what usually amounts to two months' worth of relationship.

The really fascinating part is that I never even realized that I still unconsciously look down on this whole genre of literature. But when I compare this new, more hardcore style of romance with the identical, disposable Harlequin romances of yesteryear, I've got to say the new stuff at least feels more honest in its intent. Really, it’s just like any other kind of “genre” fiction: it puts real, accessible feelings against an unrealistic background in order to draw attention to them and help us process them in our everyday lives. And when it comes to learning the landscape of such a tricky, complicated landscape as ourselves, that's not necessarily a bad thing. So here’s my formal apology to the romance readers/writers/lovers out there… I’m sorry, and while I’m still not going to start reading it regularly, I think I’m closer to understanding it now.

The Myth of Ownership

As members of a consumer society, we often find ourselves tied down by our objects, the things that we accumulate over the course of a life lived. At times this instinct can get out of hand (see: Hoarders), but mostly what I've been thinking about this week is how media storage is changing, and what that means to the concept of ownership.

Sometimes I take a look at the racks of CDs that occupy a good portion of my bedroom and wonder: I hardly ever have an occasion to play CDs anymore, mostly because I've ripped them all to my computer, store them digitally, and can listen to them in any manner of invisible ways. So why am I hanging onto these physical copies?

One day, I made a little thought experiment. We moved into our house eleven years ago this summer. There are a sizeable number of CDs that I packed up, brought to the place I now live, unpacked, arranged... and haven't touched since. So how much have I paid in total for the physical space that just one of these CDs occupies?

Well, first I calculated the volume of a CD case (and keep in mind that these are all very approximate values): CDs are five inches in diameter, so the case appears to be about five by six. And if we assume a half-inch thickness, that's fiften cubic inches. Now, let's compare that to the volume of my house. All told, it's close to 1500 square feet, and if you allow eight feet of vertical living space for every story, that gives you 12000 cubic feet, which translates to 20,736,000 cubic inches (because a cubic foot = 12 inches * 12 inches * 12 inches = 1728 cubic inches). So that means that each CD takes up .00007% of the space inside my house.

So, what's the cost of storage? Using the capacity numbers I've figured out, and picking a $1000 monthly mortgage as a nice round number, that comes to $.0072 I'd be paying every month to claim ownership of the space that this CD occupies. Multiply that by 132 months (11 years). That means that, since we moved in, I'd have paid a total of ninety-five cents for every CD in the place, whether I've listened to it or not. And since I'd conservatively say I have fifteen hundred CDs, that comes to just over $1425, purely for the space it's taken to house the collection, above and beyond the original cost of purchase.

I know that doesn't seem like all that much, especially spread out over more than a decade. But CDs are far from the only objects in my house that can also be stored in digital form. They're not even the smallest. There are hundreds of DVDs and probably thousands of books in my house as well. Many of these are in mostly out-of-the-way places (since I don't think a six-year old should have ready access to my Hellraiser box set), and there's just no room in the place for all the books to be anywhere else other than the basement -- the kitchen is the only room in the house that doesn't have at least one dedicated bookshelf as it is.

The question now becomes whether it's still worth it to continue this ownership. As more of our purchases and consumption methods become digital, the question becomes more and more relevant. A digital bookshelf is, actually, more egalitarian than a real one. Every title on a e-reader is the same size, in the same place, at eye level. I have to say, I'd be more likely than to try to wade through my copy of Ulysses if it were sitting right next to my Clive Barkers and Ray Bradburys, rather than on a shelf in my basement behind an unused mattress and a pair of oversized stereo speakers.

The key to the future, I'm starting to understand, is balancing the two. Clearly, I wouldn't want my daughter to turn in her shelves of full-size, full-color Dr. Seuss, Kevin Henkes, and other picture books (some of which belonged to me or her mother when we were little) for a dedicated tablet. But there is a lot of stuff in other places that is just taking up space. But if we're going to live in a world where just about all media is accessible through a screen, doesn't it make sense to hold onto only the physical forms of stuff that you have the deepest connection to?

Even the things that used to be the strongest symbols of our culture are becoming less important as an outward show of that culture. America used to be a car culture, but now companies like Zipcar, which is basically an on-demand service where people in cities can arrange for the use of a car only when they need it, can have a million subscribers. It's rapidly becoming that case that a car implies nothing about the person driving it, which wasn't the case as recently as twenty years ago.

I can see that this mentality is starting to take hold. It's a slow, evolving process, but we're starting to move away from the idea of owning objects, and toward the idea of having access to what they represent. It already doesn't matter whether you have a 5000-piece CD collection or a phone with enough memory to hold it all. In the future, who knows how far things will go... Maybe your sense of personal freedom won't be wrapped up in having your own car, but the knowledge that you can get one whenever and wherever you need it.

I'm not trying to predict the future. If we've learned anything, it's that -- if I may paraphrase my favorite online repository of weird information, Cracked -- the future will be awesome in ways that we can't even conceive of yet. But it does seem like the allure of product is well along the path to giving way to the allure of content.

Four Random Musical Thoughts

-1-

When I was in grade school, I saw a skit put on by some older kids from a different school. I don't really remember the context of the event, but the skit was a futuristic version of War of the Worlds. I had no idea of it at the time since I hadn't heard the Orson Welles version yet, but the kids who put it on stuck to the radio show's format of storytelling, with news reports of an alien invasion repeatedly breaking into a music program. While the original had a ballroom orchestra being interrupted, these kids took the idea of "futuristic music" and ran to an extreme, almost to the point where it overshadowed the story they were trying to tell.

Every time a news report would finish, the music show would kick back in, and by that I mean that a couple kids wearing amorphous masks and holding armloads of painted egg-crate material shaped vaguely like guitars would jump around while lights would flash, and a random barrage of electronic sounds came out of the speakers they were using.

For some reason, that spectacle has stuck with me, and it's turned into a running self-dialogue about what music is, what it's for, and how it's defined in general compared to how we define it for ourselves. In particular, I think this singular musical experience (which wasn't even designed to be one!) started pushing part of my tastes to look for sounds and structures that I'd never heard before... to look for the sound of the future.

Often when I hear a new song, or a new artist, I ask myself, "Is this something that couldn't have existed ten or twenty years ago? If I heard it back in 1983 what would I have thought?" I guess I'm trying to figure out if music is really progressing. And I'm finding that while fringier styles come and go (and are always more interesting than the Top 40), pop music stays pretty much the same. Now there's thumpier drums, less ballads and kookier sound effects, but the general style is pretty much the same. It's been amazing to see how hip hop has taken over, been blended into EDM, and had the resulting mixture draped across the same melodic structure that pop music has had for fifty years now.

-2-

We all talk about how music is such a personal thing for us, even though I'm guessing that just about everyone my age has at least a 50% overlap in the breadth of music that we're familiar with. Ironically, it's that commonality that makes it so personal. For folks my age, we all heard this overlap music at roughly the same time, when it first was new. We paid attention, we bought mostly tapes and CDs that we knew about from the radio/MTV (back when those things were almost the same). Granted, a fair amount of it wasn't good, but it's become a touchstone for us. It defines a time, a place, and the people we hung out with. It plugs us back into another time, and that's the purpose it serves, a shortcut to emotions -- often simpler and stronger ones -- that we want to relive.

With the modern ability to distribute music for free to potentially everyone in the world, it's now possible to grow up side-by-side with someone and have virtually no overlap in the music you're both familiar with. So maybe the "music of the future" isn't defined by how it sounds. Perhaps it's better defined by how you experience and assimilate it. There are be many less common cultural touchstones, but sharing your personal playlist with someone can be as intimate as sharing your most guarded thoughts.

-3-

I've recently heard about what's being discovered about the nature of memory. It seems that memories aren't actual packets of information stored somewhere in your head. When you recall something, your brain re-fires the same pattern of neurons in your mind that went off the first time you experienced something. You're actually re-creating the memory each time you recall it, and then it's gone again. Not only that, but subsequent experiences and random noise can color the memory each time you do. In this sense, the purest memories you have are the ones you'll never recall again.

Memory, it turns out, is extremely malleable. There are things that I recall very clearly that I simultaneously know didn't happen quite the way I remember them. We all have stories that we've been told so many times that we think we remember them, although they happened to someone else, or if it's something we didn't even witness at all. Memories don't come from a storehouse that we revisit. They're conjured anew each time we bring them to mind. So in a sense, there really is no past. (As a side note, this also means that your most influential memories -- the experiences that make you *you* -- are only stories that you tell yourself anew every time you recall them.)

Music, though, is the same every time, and that might be the key to the power it has. Songs from our past might be the only memories that haven't changed due to the passage of time, haven't dimmed or been altered in even the slightest way.

With music we love, we can see songs almost from outside time itself, knowing full well what's coming, what's happening now, and how it changes what's come before. (Personal examples: when I hear Nine Inch Nails' "All the Love in the World", the pleasant but broodingly nondescript first half is all anticipation for the shift in gears that comes at the midpoint, where the whole thing reboots and a soft, thudding bass drum and piano slowly build layer upon layer toward the titanic wall of sound at the end. Similarly, the soaring, convergent harmonies in the chorus of Hot Chip's "Take it In" wouldn't mean nearly as much if the verse that came before wasn't so discordant and almost atonal.)

I know you probably don't know these songs in particular, but maybe you get the idea, and have favorite examples of your own that you turn to over and over again, because of this intimate knowledge of their structure. In this way, music has the potential to be even better, more mentally engaging, than our own memories. (And, now that I think about it, these thoughts about being outside of a linear work of art and seeing the whole in a way that can't be done in life can be applied to storytelling of all kinds, can't it?)

-4-

I recently read a fun book called Year Zero by Robert Reid, a sci-fi tale in which the plot hinges on the fact that humans turn out to be the best songwriters in the Universe, and have unknowingly charmed all alien races with this fact. Every non-Earth being has a personal device on which has been downloaded every piece of music that humankind has ever recorded (some 25 million, in case you were wondering how many that was), and can potentially spend their entire lives combing through our terrestrial back catalog.

This got me thinking, though, about what aliens would really make of our music. What would someone with no context get out of this semi-standardized set of chords and song structures? Wouldn't it all sound pretty much the same, on a cultural level?

And that, in turn, made me realize how ingrained in us music is. The fact that we can tell the stylistic difference between singer-songwriters, when there are really only a dozen different notes and about fifty chords they typically play, is really amazing. It seems so limiting when you think about the sheer number of tone combinations that are possible. But we're so finely tuned to it. When we hear a song for the first time, we're immediately assimilating it into this vast library of archetypes... major chords are happy, minors are sad... uptempo connotes excitement, downtempo can mean somber or contemplative. And those are just two of the near-infinite shadings of meaning that music can convey, simply by comparing it to all the songs you've ever heard before and what you have learned that they represent.

So the question then becomes... do minor keys really make us feel sadness at the cellular level, or have we just been conditioned to think that they do? Does the four-note simplicity of Beethoven's "Ode to Joy" really lift our spirits, or is it just the context it's been presented to us in? Is it maybe the way the human performers make it sound, telegraphing their own interpreted emotions to us? How much of the emotion we hear in music is really there, and how much of it is caused by collective emotional shorthand that we've created over time?

There's a physical aspect to it, too. The way our body registers musical vibrations and transfer them to the brain has so many steps: ear canal to eardrum, to tiny bones, to the liquid of the inner ear, to little hairs that shake and send electrical impulses to deep recesses of our brain. The patterns that those impulses form are either harmonic or dissonant. Any being with different physiology wouldn't even hear the same things we hear. How could we hope to get them to understand all the emotional associations that go with it?

So maybe music -- at least our version of it -- is a singularly human art form. It's only in the human body that it will register the way it's designed to, and all the memories it recalls will be called up from the particular arrangements of neurons, and then go back to nothing. It gives the whole process a very ethereal, magical quality.

Join Me in the Fast Lane

Yes, I'm that guy. You're on the highway, approaching a clearly marked construction zone that is going to require that everyone in the two left lanes will have to merge with each other. Per social contract, you move over into the lane that will survive the interchange... and come to a screeching halt. After a few moments of creeping along, someone comes zipping down the vacant left lane, bypassing everyone already who's gotten over, and they breeze along until the barrels force them to finally merge.

Well, that's me. And after you hear my argument as to why I do that, I'm hoping that you all will join me.

Let's kick things off by considering what highways are for. Our great nation has developed a colossal system of roads, from two to five lanes across in each direction, that can (theoretically) take us from one coast to the other, and just about anywhere else in between, without stopping. They're designed to get us all from where we are to where we need to be, as quickly and efficiently as possible.

So, when a portion of that road is blocked, and that efficiency necessarily diminished, why do we then feel the need to make the situation even worse?

Think about it: the most efficient way to keep things moving is for we people to -- within reason -- maintain their speed and utilize all the available road. If you pull over before it's necessary to, you're doing two things wrong. First of all, merely by changing lanes you're making the back-up twice as long as it needs to be. That's just math. If everyone gets over, you're filling one lane with two lanes' worth of cars. Secondly, it's an established fact that most traffic back-ups are caused (or at least made worse) by people either hitting their brakes or changing lanes. And chances are that if you have to figure out where and how you're going to get over, you're doing both of these. This usually causes the person behind you to slow down, and as things progress further back, it's more likely that the next person will have to hit their brakes harder because they don't see the situation that created the need. That's how you end up with standstills.

Now, given that there's inevitably going to be some slowdown as everyone combines lanes, wouldn't the best way to minimize that be having it occur in a pre-specified place? Like the place where the road actually runs out? Some of the scariest traffic situations I've ever seen have been caused by people just starting to realize that everyone else is getting over, so they hit their brakes and try to find a way in, so as not to break the aforementioned social contract, endangering everyone behind them with their seemingly random activity. All this jockeying and tentative "Can I go? Are you letting me over, or do you not see me?" is what creates far more problems than it solves.

So, by getting over "when you're supposed to", which I'm sure varies greatly depending on the situation (but you're intuitively supposed to know anyway), you're actually making the situation *at* *minimum* twice as bad as it needs to be. To me, there's nothing more ridiculous than a line of creeping traffic that is totally ignoring the *completely* *usable* *lane* right alongside it. We're all trying to get where we're going. Let's make the most of what we have to work with to get this to happen.

Believe me, I've completely turned around on this issue from how I used to be. I once was one of the drivers who cursed those who -- in my mind -- thought they were better than everyone else and didn't have to get over until the last second. I likened it to line-cutting, which in my mind is one of the most heinous crimes of modern life. But I've had a lot of time to think about it during the 60 miles a day I've driven to and from my job for the last year. And when you get down to the logic of it, the way we are "supposed" to handle situations like this doesn't make sense.

Say you're standing in line at the grocery store, ready to check out. There are two lanes open, but people are only using one. It's not a matter of the lane just having opened... the register is just open, the cashier standing there idle. Everyone in line for the other register sees this, but still don't get over. How much reluctance would you have in moving over and using that other register?

But still, the social contract persists against logic. I've had people honk at me as I go by -- clearly not because they think it will do anything, just from self-righteous frustration -- and then there are semi trucks that will take it upon themselves to police the closing lane, pulling into it and slowing down to the speed of the clogged lane. This is actually a step up from what usually happens, because people seem to be willing to stay in the closing lane as long as they're not first. Hooray, we're suddenly we're using two lanes again!

Look, we're all just trying to make getting from A to B as small a piece of our day as necessary. There are roads out there designed to help us do just that. But when we start imposing illogical rules on ourselves for using them efficiently, we're just slowing ourselves and everyone else down. So come into the fast lane with me. Let's keep things a-rollin', folks.