Decay

The thought of you is heat…
And I am a cold river current.
With a little bit of warmth in my pocket:
The memory of you.

I love you like the cold loves the heat,
Like the valley loves the mountain.
And like the ocean loves the land,
Death loves life.

Immutability

At the unassisted-human scale, a moving train coming at you is a “move or perish” situation. At the train scale, an asteroid coming at you is a “move or perish” situation. At every scale, there exists something to create such a situation. This creates waves of seeming immutability which travel throughout the cosmos, with reality itself moving, lest it perish by coming into contact with a significantly greater reality.

When the wave comes, you’ll feel an undeniable urge to move, to breathe, to flow with the tides of immutability coursing throughout the universe.

PersAInality

Instead of training the latest GPT model with information about everything, what happens when you train it with only information about one person?

And then let it interact with people?

Will it learn?

Is a trove of digital information gleaned through years of constant connectedness enough to accurately model a person?

More importantly, how long until this personAIlity is used as a testing grounds for even manipulative targeted ads? To predict behavior? To arrest preemptively? To dopplegang and produce live deep fakes?

Will it be possible to know you’re texting with the human version of your friend in a year? What about a phone call, 5 years? Video call, 10 years?

How long until a personAIlity of your mother can fool you in every single method of digital communication? And will you choose to keep talking to “her” after your organic mother has died?

Expiration Date

What if I told you you were going to die in exactly one year?

Better yet, what if I told you I could make a number appear on your phone, representing that year? When it gets to 0, you die, quickly and painlessly.

As a bonus, you can make it go up, or go down, simply by the things you do. No, it’s not strictly tied to time, but it does count down on a fairly regular basis. So much a day, a week, a month. Sometimes it goes down more, sometimes less, but every change is tied to something you do. Every couple of weeks it’ll go up a lot, enough to even out how much it went down, and then some. At least it used to.

Lately, it’s been going down a lot more than it’s been going up, regardless of what you do. Rather, it’s actually been going down less, but it’s been going up much less, so the net effect is that it’s been going down fairly steadily. And with some quick math, you figure out that it’ll be about a year before it hits 0 at the current rate. A year.

What would you do with this year?

For me, that number is my net worth. Once I can no longer afford to live…I won’t. The universe will have told me that’s it not worth it for me to be alive, at least not at this time in this society.

It’s an odd sensation, watching your expiration date grow closer and knowing it’s because the world does not value your authentic self.

What would you do? Compromise yourself to extend a now inauthentic life, or live authentically within the time you have left?

Truth be told, I expected my number to hit 0 months ago, but here we are. Still fresh.

At the Azeotrope

Essence of Poet:
Beauty-distilled emotion;
Talk little, say lot.

“Do you like to climb mountains?”

Up to her chamber window
A slight wire trellis goes,
And up this Romeo’s ladder
Clambers a bold white rose.

I lounge in the ilex shadows,
I see the lady lean,
Unclasping her silken girdle,
The curtain’s folds between.

She smiles on her white-rose lover,
She reaches out her hand
And helps him in at the window-
I see it where I stand!

To her scarlet lip she holds him,
And kisses him many a time-
Ah, me! it was he that won her
Because he dared to climb!

“Nocturne” by Thomas Bailey Aldrich

Calling for Help

A friend said, “promise me that if you’re running on fumes, you’ll call me before you run completely dry, ok?”, and I responded…

Let me tell you a story that might help you understand

During the tail end of 2020, I took the 1125CR on a road trip over to the Sierra Nevada. At this time, much of California, and that part especially, was covered in smoke from wildfires. I wanted to see it for myself, as well as to ride some of the national park roads in the rare time when there was no traffic. Also on the docket was a stop at General Sherman, the largest tree in the world by volume, and to hit up a bunch of roads I hadn’t ridden yet for RoadRatings.com

The route was all planned out, with gas stops at reasonable distances, places to stay, etc. So I ride out, and have a wonderful time with the smooth tarmac and beautiful scenery all to myself

Even the worst of the smoke didn’t give me too much trouble as I continued deeper and deeper into the wilderness. A couple of roads were closed due to active wildfires, but I found alternate routes easily enough.

Well into the mountains, I start taking the in-and-out section of CA 180 with maybe 40 miles left of gas, easily enough to make it to the Kings Canyon Lodge gas station I had planned on. It’s on a side-road of CA 180, a bit beat up and narrow, but still quite enjoyable. On getting there, I see some weird pumps, and a sign saying that they’re America’s oldest double gravity pumps. Cool!

Then I see the small sign to the right, “closed”. Shit. Check my phone for the nearest gas station. No service. Shit. So I start heading back to the only other structure I saw on the way in, a ranger station maybe 10 miles back. No one’s home. Shit

So I keep going, back to the intersection of CA 180 and CA 245, where I last saw a person, at the park entrance gate. I pull up, with the fuel light having been on for maybe 15 miles. I didn’t notice when it came on, and it’s only good for about 20 miles total. Asking the ranger where the nearest gas is, he says, “Just down CA 180, thata way.” – “how far?” – “oh, about 15 miles, maybe a bit more.” Shit. After some back and forth, it came to light that he didn’t have a gas can, a way to siphon gas, and couldn’t leave his post to drive me to the station to get a can. Shit shit shit.

So I start heading that way, knowing I’ll run out of gas within the next couple of miles, and that there likely won’t be anyone coming on the road due to the fires. Fortunately, I’m heading westward out of the mountains, so it’s about 80% downhill, where I put it in neutral, turn off the engine and coast, and then turn it back on and feather the throttle to get up hills.

After 45 nerve-wracking minutes, I see the shining beacon of a Valero in the distance, downhill, and coast in, fill up, and continue on the trip to see General Sherman and other oddities on side roads

As I’m making my way up the Eastern side of the Sierra Nevada. I head out from one of the small towns dotting US 395 and see a Fish and Wildlife truck going a bit slower than traffic. I edge past him ever so slowly. Maybe 20 minutes later, I see him pull up next to me on the highway, lights flashing. Apparently, he was just about to call CHP, because he could barely catch up to me in his truck, which he says is speed-limited to 90 mph. This on an empty, straight desert highway with very little traffic. He writes the ticket, I’m disgruntled, and I go on my way, already planning how I’ll defend it in court.

Some weeks later, I get a piece of mail saying that the court date, which was written for January, was actually going to be one year later than when it was originally written. Ok, no problem. Kind of weird that they’d want to wait so long, but I get it, small town, big fires, they had more important things to deal with than speeding tickets. It would give me plenty of time to look into how to argue the ticket and make plans to show up to court and have it dismissed/reduced.

A few months go by, and a week into February, I get a piece of mail saying that I had missed my court date, was found guilty, had to pay the fine, and got the points on my license. Looking back at the ticket, the cop had written it for Jan of 2020 (over a year in the past), and the correction was to set the date for Jan 2021. Seems the officer and I made the same mistake, except he got to correct it, and I got shafted.

So, in both instances…the gas, and the ticket…where could I have asked for help? I knew I was in a rough situation, but the moment of circumstance had all but determined the outcome. The time to ask for help for each would have been before I had known either problem existed. By the time I knew I needed help, it was too late, and there was nothing to be done.

More poignantly, by the time I’m in a way that I need to ask friends for financial help, the momentum of crippling poverty will have all but overtaken me.

When Things Fall Apart

Thoughts of suicide first came to my mind when I was twelve. Or at least, that’s the earliest I remember them. Even then, it wasn’t an emotional reaction to a momentary dissatisfaction, but a cold calculation of long-term effects. “How long will I have to endure this? And is what comes after worth the suffering? Do the pros outweigh the cons?”

At that age, I lived for the weekends, when my mom would drive me to Books-a-Million. Taking over the lounge area at the back of the store, a group of us would spend nearly the whole day playing Yu-Gi-Oh, and later, Magic: The Gathering. The deep strategy of the card games fulfilled a mental craving unsatisfied by my time in school. Treading the cold waters of the week was possible, because the weekend provided an island full of sustenance, rejuvenation, and warmth.

Several years later, my mom encouraged me to go to a boarding school for the intellectually gifted. Those last two years of high school were the most continually bright of my life. The school provided a nearly constant source of interest. Not only were the courses broad, deep, and challenging, but the people were captivating. Exploring the beaches of the island of this life, I was happy.

This feeling continued into college, where I chose the most difficult major, and then picked another, completely unrelated major to go along with it. This kept me intellectually challenged by interesting and diverse coursework and problems. My body was engaged with gratuitous amounts of soccer, ultimate frisbee, and mountain biking. I tried research. I tried industry. I tried women. I tried motorcycles. I tried drugs. Mapping the coasts, valleys, and hills of my island, I was happy.

Later, graduate school started as more of the same, but in a new and exciting location, Boulder, Colorado. Outwardly, I transitioned more of my time to riding motorcycles in the warm months and skiing/snowboarding in the snowy ones. Inwardly, I sunk into the two most intriguing things I’d experienced: psychedelics and love. Having found the tallest mountain on my island, I’d become determined to climb it. I would follow my passions as far as they led me. I would love unconditionally. I would reach the peak, and I would fly. My island had meaning; it had a name, I realized it was ME. I was happy.

Now, six years later, my happiness has been on a steady decline, and with it, the balance shifts towards the cons. Work has been utterly unfulfilling, consuming my time and energy, and providing nothing other than money in return. Love has abandoned me, taking my sense of purpose with it. As I climbed, my mountain let loose an avalanche that swept me into the sea. Tossed through the trees, bashed against boulders, and spat out into the sea with a cry of “et tua Sanitas!”, my world went dark.

Maybe it was the drugs? The medicine that had kept me afloat those first five years. Maybe I should cast it off and start swimming? I resolved to live a full year entirely sober to see if that was contributing to the shifting scales of my ultimate philosophical question.

A year and some days later, I’m broken and bloodied, with nose barely above water. No land in sight. The sun-touched warmth of my island is merely a memory of a memory.

“The trick is to enjoy it fully but without clinging, and when the time comes, let it dissolve back into the sea.” – Pema Chödrön

Confrontation by Proxy

For $15, I had my first bachata lesson, after which the floor opened for regular dancing. To my eyes, they were all experts. Every other song, I’d stand back and watch the sensually mesmerizing movements, trying to glean some move I could inflict on the next poor woman to agree to entertain my infantile attempts to step to the beat.

With my back to the mirrored wall, scanning the room, my legs nearly gave out when I saw her. My heart groaned at the entirely unexpected sight of her, eyes closed, heaving her chest in someone’s embrace. But it wasn’t her, not really. Sure, the body was the same size and shape, down to the slight hunch. The face had the same strong lines. Her hair was the same dirty blonde, and was even in a ponytail, and the same length. Her clothes had the same style. But, it wasn’t her. Her arm was unscarred. She was a bit older. A bit taller. But all of that only revealed itself on closer inspection. At first, and second, and even third glance, if I’m being honest…I was awestruck to find her here, half a country away, in a little dance club, swaying in someone’s arms on a Wednesday.

When I asked her to dance, I did not expect the thick Torinese accent, nor did I expect the sensation of confrontation. As if I were testing an ideal, I dared her to be unlikeable, because maybe some of that dislike would translate over to her. She was delightful. Moving smoothly with my unpracticed steps, and complimenting me on my horribly broken Italian, we joked and had a very nice dance. But thank god. Thank god I didn’t like her laugh! What’s more, out of everyone I danced with, she was the only one to step on my foot.

Fighting for Peace

I was ready to rid myself of her. In fact, I was on the very eve of doing so, on walking away from the thought of her. A new life waited, one that freed my soul from her gravity. I had uttered “good,” but before I could say “bye,” she ensured I wouldn’t be able to, not so easily.

She bound me in judicial chains, ensuring the legal system forced her to stay in my mind a while longer. Now, instead of moving on, instead of burying the corpse of my dream life, I must retread old conversations, replay foregone scenarios, and remember her ever longer. She couldn’t let the heartbreak heal, but tore at the stitches to see how I’d bleed.

Under the guise of ridding herself of me, she ensured her place in my mind. One last wound as I took my first step away from her. Just a little something to remember her by, I suppose. As if the world weren’t enough.

“Go away”, she screamed, as she pulled me near.

Ironic.