unscriptured

So next week is St. Valentine’s Day, a day for the celebrating, and the marketing, of romantic love.

I’d ask God to be my valentine this year, but that whole “romance” aspect kind of gets in the way. I was thinking maybe we should have a day like Valentine’s but only for non-sexual love, sort of a “bromance” day but not limited to just guy-guy. I mean we already have a sort of “bromance orgy” day, we call it “Superbowl Sunday,” so we don’t need a bromance day, but we could use something more inclusive and more diverse. We could call it “Just Friends Day” and we could give that little speech about how we like each other but we don’t “like like” each other and have it not be a bad thing.

I asked God what he thought of the idea and he pointed out some dangers and pitfalls. If it really took off, would we be expected to give “Just Friends” cards to everyone? Well probably not, but then how good a friend does someone need to be to be “just friends?” And if someone thinks they’re a good enough friend to be “just friends” but you don’t “just friend” them, will they think that maybe you do “like like” them? And what do you do with someone who really did give you the “just friends” speech, but you’re not yet ready to be only “just friends” but you’re afraid that if you don’t then you’ll never have any chance for them to change their mind?

Yeah, relationships really are a complicated part of the human condition. Ultimately God and I agreed, we really don’t need any more holidays putting pressure on the ways we interact. Maybe a national “put bacon on your sandwich” day, though?

I pretend to be a morning person.

One of the musical artists that God and I really admire is Ben Folds. Back in 1995 Ben wrote a song called “Best Imitation of Myself.” It’s a song about putting on a facade, but a facade that none-the-less strives to show a version of the real you. Your public persona, as it were. That’s not the kind of pretending I’m talking about.

There are lies that people tell themselves until they begin to believe them. And even lies they tell other people until both they and those other people begin to believe them. That’s closer to the sort of pretending I’m talking about.

But in a good way.

God says it’s like telling myself “little white lies,” until I believe them.

The human mind has an enormous capacity to ignore reality and substitute its own. That’s really the basis of hypnotism, we use trance states and mental gimmickry to program a new reality into our brains. We can tap into that ability to ignore the tremendous hurt, pain, and devastation that our selfish actions thrust upon the world, as so many Wall Street execs have amply demonstrated; or we can use this quirk of human nature to make ourselves into better people than is our natural inclination, to encourage ourselves to every day make some small contribution to the betterment of all mankind.

I’m doing none of that. I’m just pretending. And I’m doing it to make my own life a little better but not at the expense of everyone else. In fact, by making my own life a little better, I’m actually making other people’s lives a little better too, but that’s a completely accidental side effect.

See, like so many people I’m really fond of electric light. It allows me to do things when the sun isn’t bothersomely out visible in the sky. Ever since I read Tolkien’s most famous works back when I was in Junior High, I’ve called the sun by its rightful name, “the evil yellow-face.” This has a lot to do with having what George Carlin refers to as “phosphorescent Irish skin.” I don’t tan, I freckle. And as a lot of people can tell you, the road to freckles is paved with second degree sunburns. So like I was saying, I like to do things at night, which leads to staying up late, which leads to sleeping in late, which leads to not being a “morning person.”

But then I moved to Arizona, to the Sonoran Desert. As much as I dislike the morning sun, that’s got nothing on the sun that’s out in the afternoons in Phoenix. So I learned to do things like go to the zoo from seven in the morning until no later than nine or ten. I did my grocery shopping when the store first opened in the morning. Anything I could do before noon, I did. And I discovered that even in Phoenix, when it came to not being a morning person, I was a pauper. I could pretend to be a morning person and go out and get stuff done. Other people, didn’t seem to be able to do this.

So I not only got to do things in the cool of the day, I got to do them relatively alone. And I may have mentioned before, I’m rather fond of being alone. So I’m not in Phoenix anymore but I still look for ways to do things when other people aren’t, I still pretend to be a morning person, it’s just that now I do it to save my sanity, not to save my skin.

Amazon is so close to being a “social network” that God tells me it seems like they must be deliberately holding back.

Millions of people have Amazon accounts. We go on to their site and spend time looking at things. We don’t post status updates, but we post product reviews. We even tell them about things we already own, when they recommend that we buy them. We establish connections by connecting the wish lists of friends and family to our own accounts. We tell them other places we like to hang out by buying gift cards and by adding things from other sites to our Amazon wish lists. And don’t even get started talking to a privacy nut about the things Amazon can tell about us by what things we buy, by what book titles we look at, and by what things we tell them don’t interest us.

So what’s stopping them from going the rest of the way, what’s stopping them from becoming a true social network? God says they could do it if they wanted, but that they just don’t feel like it yet. He says they could go from recommendations by collaborative filtering to recommendations by direct collaboration.

One of the big activities of teen girls is hanging out at the mall, going from store to store, and goading each other into buying things they don’t really need. Imagine that in a web browser. You have multiple panes open in your Amazon tab, in one pane is the trendy pair of jeans that your best friend just recommended, which Amazon has helpfully translated from their size to yours, in another is the latest CD by Matchbox Twenty, which you just noticed is on sale, you drag it over to your friend’s icon and you both preview the songs together, bitching and giggling all the way.

Okay. Taking the mall experience online? Maybe God is right and Amazon just isn’t ready, but even if they were, I’m pretty sure I’m not.

Outside of track meets, adults in America don’t run. We jog, we power-walk, we trot. We don’t run.

When I asked her about it, God told me that it’s because we recognize that life is a marathon and we need to hold something in reserve. I suppose then that that’s one of the markers of having grown up. Of course, I don’t think many teens run either, so maybe it’s the first marker of growing up.

Those of you that have kids, watch for it. Do your kids still gallop down the stairs on Christmas morning after they stop believing in Santa Claus, or before? How old are they when they stop running from the car to the ice cream store and then back again because you’re not moving fast enough? When do they stop chasing the dog and start walking the dog?

We say that childhood goes by so fast, and it does, but maybe part of why it does is because it just can’t stand to stand still.

I never really thought much about it until God pointed it out to me this week, but there are different styles of passive aggressive. And noticing this actually gets me closer to believing that corporations are people.

Please note that “closer” is still “a long way off.”

Not only are there different styles of passive aggressive, but the two stores where I do most of my grocery shopping, Costco and Trader Joe’s, both engage in such tactics. They both try to encourage us shoppers to behave a little more ecologically responsibly, in that neither of them wants us to get new grocery bags every time we shop. Sure it helps them in that they get to spend less on bags, but in these two cases I’m willing to believe that ecology is a real part of their motivation, not just a convenient excuse. I’m less willing to believe that about hotels that want me to reuse towels. But I reuse the towels anyway, because even if I suspect their motivations, they are right, reusing is the right thing to do. But I digress; back to bags.

Trader Joe’s approach is to put up a little signage, and to make sure that they have strong, reusable, bags, not just for sale but prominently displayed both when you come in the door and at many of the checkout stations. If you don’t use them they don’t scold you, they don’t even mention it, they just cheerfully bag up your purchases in handy brown paper bags. With handles.

Costco is a little more direct and a little less convenient. They don’t generally have reusable bags available for purchase. They also don’t have throw-away bags. They’ll let you use empty boxes that they would otherwise recycle. They’ll let you use your own reusable bags that you bought somewhere else, like, say, Trader Joe’s. Or they’ll happily put all your stuff back in your cart and let you figure out what to do with it from there.

So Trader Joe’s is the friendlier place, but they make me feel a little co-dependent. See, Costco actually gets me to be more eco-friendly, Trader Joe’s doesn’t. Trader Joe’s just gets me to feel a little guilty. I don’t have nice reusable bags, but I do have a sturdy plastic crate (not a stolen milk crate, but a similar thing that I actually bought). When I go to Costco, I put all my stuff into the back of my car and then when I get home I go inside and get my crate. A few trips back and forth and all my stuff is neatly stowed away. When I go to Trader Joe’s, I let them put my stuff in bags. I later use the bags to haul out my recycling, but still, I feel a little guilty for having them. After all, I could use my plastic crate to haul out my empty bottles and cans and it would be almost as convenient as the bags.

Oh well. God says at least my heart is in the right place. Come to think of it, I think that’s God being a little passive aggressive too.

Another year bites the dust and a new one begins. It’s 2013. For those with triskaidekaphobia an ominous year indeed.

So is the thirteenth year of a century inherently unlucky? Does having the number thirteen on nearly everything in sight really push the bad luck, or does it wear it out? That is, does all the bad luck get used up early in the year leaving the poor number thirteen spent and trying to catch it’s breath?

God tells me that he doesn’t believe in luck, except for that which we make for ourselves. But then he also told me that the Mayans ended their calendar when they did because they knew this year was coming. I don’t really get that though, because, well, it’s not a thirteen on their calendar.

Today is a day in limbo. Not the limbo that resides somewhere in the middle of the metaphysical triangle whose corners are Heaven, Hell and Purgatory, but the limbo that exists in the week between Christmas and New Year’s.

Nowhere else in the United States calendar do two holidays exist so close together. Not just any holidays, but two of the biggest, two that each take up at least a day and a half, celebrating not just the days themselves but also their “eves.” And this year it’s particularly acute, since the holidays proper are on Tuesdays, so the Eves are on Mondays, so the holidays make additional grabs to see what of the weekend before they can also eat up. And this year we even tossed in that whole “the world’s going to end” thing on the Friday before Christmas because of an idiotic misunderstanding of the Mayan calendar.

Party like it’s 1999 indeed.

So where am I going with this? Nowhere. Actually God told me I should take the week off. He says practically nobody in the U.S. is getting anything accomplished this week. But I said, hey, I should write something.

So, um, something. Well, Happy New Year!

So last week I was talking about how Christmas tends to take any song with a winter theme and try to claim it as one of its own. I brought up the point that one of the things I like about the Christmas season is it expands the selection and styles of music that I listen to. When I discussed that with God, she actually got kind of wistful on me.

She says that even while languages tended to tear apart the bonds of humanity, breaking us off into little fiefdoms, music still mostly managed to bring us back together.

Then we discovered electricity and electronics. Ever since then music has gone through its own Tower of Babble phase. As a species we’re no longer just listening to music. We’re listening to Rock, or Jazz, or Country, or Hip Hop, or, I don’t know, Zydeco, or any of dozens of other genres and micro-genres. Music now has as much ability to break us apart as it does to bring us together.

She finds that sad. On the other hand, she says you can take away Celt-a-delic Rock’n’Reel only over her dead body.

It’s that time of year when I listen to my various Holiday playlists. I have my songs categorized according to various aspects, allowing me to segregate the religious songs from the secular, the traditional Christmas tunes from the fringe, or even songs that are really just winter tunes from ones that owe their allegiance to specific holidays.

One of the things that I like about the seasonal songs is that they help us to branch out from the usual artists and styles and try something different. In my winter selection there’s tunes like Jingle Bells, It’s a Marshmallow World, and Baby It’s Cold Outside. These are great songs all of which I discovered through collections of Christmas music, but none of which have anything actually to do with Christmas.

I suppose you could look at that as just another way that Christmas attempts to absorb everything around it.

War on Christmas, indeed, humph.

No this isn’t a post about Pearl Harbor, it’s about “The War on Christmas.”

God tells me that Christians know a lot about “the war on Christmas.” Well, maybe not most modern Christians. And maybe not from the point of view of the war being “on” Christmas, as opposed to “by” Christmas. Because along with how most modern Christians aren’t really that knowledgeable about what’s in the Bible, they also aren’t terribly knowledgeable about the history of their own religion, let alone other religions.

So a lot like the current flare up over class warfare in the United States, the war between Christmas and other mid-winter celebrations, holidays or their equivalents, isn’t being portrayed honestly. The current battle, in both cases, involves a group that is currently on top, claiming that the group that is trying to get back on top, or at least get back to even, is trying to start a war. The reality of it, and God backs me up on this, is that these “wars” have been ongoing for hundreds of years. Most of the Christmas traditions that have been around seemingly forever, were stolen from earlier, pagan, traditions. The early Christians found it hard to compete with existing celebrations, so they came up with their own. And then they made their own enough like the existing ones that people could transition fairly easily.

So when someone around you complains about “the war on Christmas” or complains that the poor are just trying to start a class war, take heart, those are just signs that they’re starting to realize that their privileged position is finally getting a serious opponent. If they lose a few battles, they may even start to realize the world is a lot bigger than they thought. They might even learn to share.

It’s now full on the holiday shopping season. God finds it kind of interesting that we humans invent new seasons, or overlay things on existing ones. He thought that “winter” was good enough for this time of year, but not us, we have to make it “Christmas Season” or “Holiday Season” or “Shopping Season.” Still he finds it amusing as long as we avoid rioting in the aisles of our local mega-store.

One of the things that I’ve always found somewhat trying, this time of year, is trying to balance things out. In some ways it was easier when I was poor. I figured out how much I could afford to spend, I made a list of the people to whom I wanted to give presents, and then I divided the money evenly to get a target price. Then I’d hunt up things in that range. But when I started to earn a bit more money, it was no longer that simple. Now I have to consider things like what’s the budget of the target of my largess? Will they feel badly if I spend more on them than they spend on me? Will they feel slighted if I spend less on them than on some mutual friend?

Luckily I’ve managed to sort this out in a fairly egalitarian way, or really, in three ways. With most of my friends, we just don’t exchange gifts. They’re the sorts of friends I’d probably send greeting cards to if I were more organized in that sort of way. There’s another group that have banded together in a formal pact, we draw names and use the one name we draw as a surrogate for the group as a whole. And we have a set target value, so it’s all very clean and safe. Then the third group is the kids. There’s various kids that I know, that I see enough of through the year, that I want to get them something. But they don’t much compare notes, they don’t much focus on how much the presents cost, and they know very well that they don’t need to get me something and that if they do, they have no way to compete on budget. So we get to be lopsided and everybody’s happy.

Of course, God doesn’t like to make our lives too simple, so he tosses in some ringers. He makes sure there are people that come in and out of my life so that I’m never sure if I should get them something or not. Some of them feel the same way about me. So we play the balls where they lie. And it’s always best if those balls are well infused with rum. Which is another thing I love about the season.

Yesterday was Thanksgiving here in the United States. You might, therefore think that I’m going to talk about the things we have to be thankful for and the things that God is thankful for and so on and so forth.

But I’m not. And not only that, I’m not going to talk about gluttony.

Instead I’m going to talk about a related human strength, empathy. Empathy is the basis of the best of human interaction. It’s what guides us to being fair. It’s what makes us want to do more for those we love, than they do for us; because when they feel good, so do we. The old Cherokee saying, “Don’t judge a man until you have walked a mile in his shoes,” is all about empathy.

Okay, I lied a little up front, I am going to mention being thankful. You see, yesterday when God and I were talking, she did ask me what I was thankful for. I told her I was thankful that at least most people tried to live by the Golden Rule. The Golden Rule is most classically stated as “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.” God said he had a problem with that particular invocation. The problem is that it doesn’t account for all of our differences. A not-quite-over-the-top refutation would be that just because I would enjoy having peanuts in my food, doesn’t mean that I should put peanuts in the food of someone severely allergic to them.

I argued that such an example is merely following the letter of the law, not the spirit. In that example you could say that the proper reading of the Golden Rule would be to give my friend food that he or she would enjoy and which would not be detrimental to their health, not give them the exact food that I might be craving at the moment. God said that was right, but that supported her complaint about the wording since to make my point I resorted to altering the wording for the circumstance. We did go back and forth a bit and I got her to concede that English is such an imperfect means of communication that it’s nigh on impossible to come up with a single pithy phrase that couldn’t be twisted around to support something other than its true intent.

But she convinced me that we could do better than “do unto others.” She wouldn’t give me a phrase of her own, she’s learned that being quoted often works against her, but we talked around it a bit until I finally came up with a phrase that she said was better. So my suggestion for the new meaning of the Golden Rule, “Use your empathy.” And that’s where we left it.

Coming up next week is… I don’t know, an event, a holiday, a festival… I don’t quite know what to call it, but it goes by the name Black Friday. It’s the day after Thanksgiving here in the U.S. Unofficially (and pretty much everything about Black Friday is unofficial), it’s the start of the Christmas shopping season. Mind you, organized people, and even some not-so-organized people, have already bought some of their Christmas presents, or Hanukkah presents, or Solstice, or Kwanzaa, or whatever, but that’s “out of season” so it doesn’t count, or at least not in the same way.

So Black Friday, stores compete to open ever earlier in a bid to get a jump on our holiday budgets before the other stores can. Someday, all stores will open at the stroke of midnight at the end of Thanksgiving if we don’t find a way to reign in unfettered capitalism by then. Anyway, the various stores will run various forms of ads trying to convince us that their store is THE place to be when the doors open. These ads will include traditional phrases like “up to X% off” or “only Z available at this price.” Both of those are things that God and I agree, well, suck.

We talked about it a bit, and I’m not sure if it was his idea or mine, but we think that no ad should be allowed to say “up to X%” without also saying “at least Z%.” And whichever statistic is the least flattering to the product in question must be in a font size at least twice that of the other value. And not just the number, the whole phrase. I’m sure they’ll just find some other way to lie without really lying, but I can dream, for just a little bit, can’t I.

Well the elections here in the U.S. are finally over. Some of my picks won, some of them lost. So it goes.

I asked God how she felt about the outcome, was she pleased, was she upset? She told me that it’s just one election, that from her perspective it doesn’t much matter. She asked if when I glanced at an hourglass if I cared whether a falling grain slid to the left or the right. She told me that like sands through the hourglass so are the elections of our lives.

“Cute,” I said, “making an allusion to the opening line of the soap opera ‘Days of Our Lives.'”

Then she told me she was actually making a reference to “Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure.”

“But ‘Days of Our Lives’ came first,” I said, “Bill and Ted’s was making a reference to the TV show.”

So she set me straight, she told me that it only appeared that way from my impoverished view of time. She said that the writer’s of the movie came up with the line, and she liked the movie so much that she thought it would be a fitting tribute to it, it being a time travel movie and all, if she took something from it and seeded it into the past; so she took the line and went back to the 1960s and gave it to a writer who was struggling to come up with a new show.

And the rest is history. Or at least the sort of history that you see on TV.

I didn’t get to see much of God this week. He popped in briefly just to tell me that he was busy trying to lessen some of the damage being caused by a lot of hot air on the east coast.

“Ah, hurricane Sandy,” I said.

But no, he told me, the hot air was from a bunch of preachers trying to claim that God had sent hurricane Sandy because of New England’s tolerance for homosexuality and abortion.

I went to a wedding recently and, of course, it got me to thinking about the whole love and togetherness thing. Theodore Sturgeon, the brilliant science fiction author, once said “You write a story about loneliness, and you grab them all because everybody’s an expert on that one.” But I’m not. Maybe I once was but I’m not now.

And God tells me that that surprises some people.

It was in the days when I was least alone that I think I might have known something about it. These days, when I’ve been living alone for a decade and a half, and out of romantic entanglements for much longer than that, loneliness is one of the furthest things from my mind. This isn’t to say that I want to be alone, but I don’t mind it. Actually, not only don’t I mind it, I much prefer it to many of the forms of being together that I’ve seen, and to most that I’ve been in, at least of the more-than-just-friends variety.

I like myself. I like spending time with myself. And according to God, that’s the biggest reason that I haven’t had a lasting relationship. It takes a certain desperation for most people to overcome the inherent complications of intimacy in order to form a union, in order to become a couple, with all the compromises and friction that that involves. And sure some of the friction, of the literal kind, actually helps to make it worthwhile, but much of it, of the metaphorical kind, doesn’t.

So while I might like to have someone around, someone to share the ups and downs, and the discoveries and the revisitations, I need a special kind of someone, someone who is happy with himself, someone who doesn’t need me and who won’t mind that I don’t need them. And someone like that? Well, they don’t have much motivation to find me.

So it’s a good thing I’m happy with myself. But then, maybe it would be an even better thing if, by way of incentive, I were just a little more familiar with being lonely.

Sometimes it’s a thin line between hope and insanity.

By now most people have heard the expressino that one definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. This works in a certain macro sense but doesn’t work on every scale. It’s sort of in conflict with The Butterfly Effect. And for the few of you that don’t know what that is, it’s the notion that in some large and complex systems, a very small input can end up producing a very large output. The canonical example being that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in The U.S. can end up causing a typhoon in India. A slightly easier to understand example is how a shout of winter joy can end up displacing a few flakes of snow, which in turn displace a few more, leading very quickly to an avalanche.

Of course, God points out that the reverse effects can be equally true. A butterfly’s flap could just as well prevent a typhoon as cause it, and few are the shouts that end up in tons of snow careening down a mountain.

But back to that thin line. Yesterday I arrived at the BART station just in time to hear that the next train due was being taken out of service at the station before mine, because of mechanical problems. This does cause a cascade effect of making trains run late for a while, but it’s not the lateness that I want to comment on, because there’s really not much hope in running late. But where there is hope, and hope to the level of insanity, is in the minds of the people trying to get on those late trains.

See, this happened right at the peak of rush hour, just as all the skyscrapers around my station in the financial district are starting to disgorge the main mass of their workers, all tired and ready to get home after a long day’s work. So not only was a train taken out of service that would have bled off the early arrivers, but while it was in the several minute process of being taken out, the not so early arrivers come pouring into the station. So now trains that were already going to be full are going to start resembling sardine cans.

And people at the front of the lines, when they see that there is no way to squeeze in through the train door where they are, will rush over to another nearby door, one where they can see people are not only not able to blithely walk aboard but where they are bunched up and trying to inch their way on. Yet somehow, even though this can be seen from two or three cars away, these people rush over, believing that they will be able to board.

And that’s why I say that there’s a fine line between hope and insanity.

It’s the middle of October, so seasonally speaking, we’re in the midst of fall. I grew up in Los Angeles and then moved to Phoenix for a decade. All the books and movies that I consumed in my life either didn’t talk about the seasons, or made some pretty clear delineations between them. Fall is crisp, the leaves change color and drop from the branches, there’s a chill in the air, and the animals are packing away food to get them through the winter.

Or so I read.

As I said, I grew up in the southwest, and not in the mountains. One season is pretty much like the rest, the temperature goes up and down, sometimes it rains in the winter and spring, but in general, my reality and what went on in books didn’t much match. God told me this week that that’s part of why I naturally gravitated to Science Fiction and Fantasy, I was used to reading about things that didn’t match the world around me. I guess my attitude was basically, well, if the world I read about is going to be “made up” at least make it interesting.

So it’s October again. This means I’ve completed six years of posts on unscriptured, and God and I have covered a lot of ground. Like many old friends we find ourselves often falling into familiar patterns, repeating old discussions, rehashing old insights. So while when I started I posted several times a week, I’m now down to just once. Sometimes it’s hard to find something new to say each week, but with God’s help I manage.

I’m not one for generally waxing nostalgic, so I’m not going to go all retrospective on you now. I’ll just give you two quick stats. One, I’ve made more than 450 posts. And two, those posts have totaled just short of 140,000 words. Those two numbers may or may not sound like a lot to you; by themselves they sound like a lot to me, but spread out over six years, they really aren’t all that much.

So I guess the lesson from God and me today is, a step at a time can actually take you pretty far.

Okay, I take it back, that lesson is just from me. God says he doesn’t want his name attached to something so trite.

God and I were having one of those rambling conversations that ultimately lead to me complaining about something. Then, just a moment too late to stop myself, I said something that I knew was going to lead to God telling me that “the grass is always greener on the other side.”

But I was wrong.

Instead she told me that every blade of grass is the right shade for someone. And just as there are a few shades of green that account for most grasses, there are also often a few generalizations that can cover most people.

So while I was pointing out that man seems drawn to whatever is harder to get, I was missing an important part of the equation. I pointed out that when everything was made by hand, the epitome of desirability was the ability to produce goods so alike that they were indistinguishable, but that now that mass production is the norm, folks flock to sites like Etsy so that they can pay a premium for goods with the genuine imperfections that come from handcrafting. But God set me straight, she rightfully pointed out that the same people that clammer for homemade goods are not the ones that go nuts for injection molded trinkets, on the whole.

Then, even before I could say, “well some of them are,” she pointed out that some people want certain goods to have a homemade feel but other goods to have the smooth perfection of mass production, and that some people like having essentially the same goods both in handmade form and in laser-precise editions, and that these two variants are just two more shades of green.

She even told me that if I thought about it hard enough, I could probably even come up with fifty shades of green. I told her I wasn’t masochistic enough to try.

God and I have been vaguely following the U.S. presidential election campaigning, and we’re both confused and aghast at how close the polls show the two sides.

Mitt Romney, representative of the ultra-rich, made his money by dismantling businesses, shutting down divisions and firing or laying off everyone who worked in them. In some cases the fees his company charged for this left the remaining divisions able to do nothing but file for bankruptcy and cave in to their insolvency.

And Mitt is running under the mantle of “Job Creator.”

God says he’s done everything but force Mitt to wear a big sign that says “hypocrite” but somehow Mitt was still nominated and people other than die-hard lifelong Republicans still intend to vote for him. We just don’t get it.

In my week in Yellowstone National Park I spent a lot of time looking at animals. I spent even more time looking for animals, but that’s the nature of the beast, only some of the places you look will actually have them.

Some of what I saw: Elk, bison, mule deer, wolves, squirrels, chipmunks, osprey, pelicans, sea gulls, geese, ducks, and many insects, the most interesting of which were the butterflies and dragonflies. I kept asking God if I could see a grizzly, or at least a black bear, but she just smiled and turned away.

Watching the critters it’s human nature to start making broad generalizations about the way the different species behave, and to connect those behaviors to people we know. I mean this goes back as long as we’ve been human, and appears in stories as far back as The Tortoise and the Hare, probably further. There’s even an offshoot of organized science fiction fandom that is built around this, the so-called “furry fans.”

Furry fans have often been cited as the lowest of the low. Now I realize that since the coining of the phrase “dotcom millionaire,” the pecking order of trod upon self-identified minorities has been shifting around, so my information here may be a little out of date, but if you go back a decade or two it’s accurate. If you want to be ostracized and shunned for your interests and actions, without actually doing anything illegal, about as low as you can go is be to be a science fiction fan. But once you sink that low, you discover that fandom itself has many layers, many subdivisions that each have their own level within an unspoken hierarchy. Now these layers have shuffled around through the years as franchises have come and gone, and interests have waxed and waned, and as new generations have supplanted old, but somehow, through it all, the furries have managed to stay at the bottom.

And that alone makes me want to join them.

I haven’t spent much time in the heights of society. Growing up my family was poor, not dirt poor, not meat only once a week poor, but collect loose change for spending money poor. Then I developed an early interest in science fiction. Then I discovered I was gay. And a computer geek. Needless to say, I learned to identify with the underdogs. And I learned that the strata of society that one occupied really had nothing to do with whether or not you were a good person. There are good people at all levels, and there are bad people at all levels.

So, moving on… One of the things that furries do, is take on a totem animal. For purposes both of communication about their selves and for exploring a form of alien thinking, they choose an animal and will play the role, often ever so slightly, of being an anthropomorphized member of that species.

Now I’ve had two problems with joining them in that game, the first being that I hate to find my self limited to picking just one, the second being that I’ve had no idea what one I would pick. Now it’s easy to dismiss the first issue by saying, well, keep changing, don’t pick just one. The problem with that is that I don’t want to spend much time researching animals and learning enough about a bunch of different species to be able to fairly represent them, and I’m not willing to do a superficial job of it, I want to know the right answers to questions people may ask. I’m willing to spend the time to edge into it though, to learn a tiny bit at a time, but I’m not willing to over and over again spend a bunch of time learning about a new species.

And the second issue? Well, I was looking at a herd of bison and God sort of nudged me with her elbow and suggested, why not them?

One of my friends, one of my furry friends, is a squirrel. He told me that part of why he picked squirrel is that he looked around at the furry folk and saw an overwhelming predominance of carnivores, of hunters. This makes sense if you go back and remember that the furries are at the bottom of the stack. If you feel like you’re part of a powerless minority, and you have the chance to roleplay something, why not make that something something powerful. But my friend looked at this and thought, the poor underrepresented prey, and realized that he needed to be a prey species. I think his reasoning may have been akin to my own feeling that I should join the furries, if there are good people at the bottom, good people that others are missing out on, why not go to them, join them, and not be missing out.

So I’ve been on the lookout for a prey species that is a good match. I think bison may be it. They’re big, I’m big, so I wouldn’t be trying to misrepresent my size. They’re not oblivious to what’s going on around them, but they mostly don’t let it bother them, and I think that’s not too far off from me either. And while they’re loyal to each other and hang out in groups, they’re also perfectly happy to go off and be alone by themselves for an extended while. I’m not completely convinced yet, but I’m definitely leaning their way.

And in Yellowstone stores they even have hats to make you look like either a bison or a wolf. Of course the wolf hats fit but the bison were too small. Even the makers of silly hats recognize that “real” adults want to be predator not prey. Sigh.

It was actually something of a shock coming back home this week, going to my daily job in the city, and getting back into my routine. Being home was comforting, having my own bed to sleep in, my own couch to throw my luggage and laundry upon, my own refrigerator to raid, but going back to work just felt wrong.

I can’t really explain it. I love my work and I even made good progress on my current project this week. It wasn’t work that was wrong it was being in downtown San Francisco, where everything was even taller than the lodgepole pines I’d gotten used to but where nothing really tall has leaves. I tried inoculating myself by spending the last day of vacation in Las Vegas, if anything can get you break you of the habit of wilderness and prep you for a return to “civilization,” Vegas should be it. And unlike many people I actually like the excess of it. I love the huge swaths of neon, the architectural flamboyance, the sheer gaudiness of it all.

But it wasn’t enough.

Yellowstone has its own sense of excess. The geysers may not be choreographed to music like the fountains at Bellagio, the green of the forest may not be as pure as the glass of the MGM Grand, and the animals may not be as playful as the white Tigers at the Mirage, but there’s something wholesome and real about the things that exist not because of man but despite him. When I’m out there I don’t need God by my side.

I think I may have found one of the fundamental differences between myself and the people who make religion a part of their lives, for me it’s enough that these wonders exist, for the religious, it’s not. For them there must be something behind the curtain, these things must exist for a reason, and if there’s a reason than there must have been something, someone, that did the reasoning. It strikes me as a shallow scared view of the world, and it makes me sad that they need it.

I’ve been spending a week in Yellowstone National Park, taking in nature’s wonders. Of course, one man’s wonder is another man’s waste of real estate, or, as I’ve seen plenty of times, another man’s trash can.

Anyway, I’ve got more geysers, trees and wildlife to go look at, so I’ll be brief today.

One thing I did ask God this week is why he created Yellowstone. He told me it was from one of his jazz phases. He was just doing variations on a theme, seeing what he could do by mixing water and heat with various other things. Then he confided in me that really one of the better things to with water and heat is to brew coffee. He wishes he’d thought of that one.

God tells me that humans are funny creatures. For many of us our biggest fear is that other people are just like us inside, yet for others our biggest fear is that no one else is really like us inside. And those two positions are irrespective of whether or not we like our inner selves.

So today’s lesson is: Learn to like yourself on the inside, work to like yourself on the outside, and strive to make your outer self better than your inner self in every way that you can.

Oh, and God says I should add a note to self-loathing, closeted, non-heterosexual preachers: God loves you the way he made you, so quit taking out your own issues on the rest of us.

I was complaining to God about the twin evils of sales and advertising, how they manipulate the human psyche to create useless needs and frivolous wants. He let me go on for a while I pointed out how they sow the seeds of endless dissatisfaction, just so they can make their quotas at any cost, heedless of the carnage they leave in people’s minds and the toll that takes on society as a whole.

But God told me, by way of analogy, that I was complaining that a starving dog will steal scraps of food from the table without bothering to look at why the dog was starving in the first place. He told me that advertising can let us know about things that will make our lives better, sometimes in frivolous ways but sometimes in ways both deep and meaningful. He pointed out how much I love to watch the trailers before movies, and yet those are just advertising. He told me that sales, that selling, can aspire to match us with the right solution to our problems, sifting through myriad possibilities to find the product that best fits our mental and fiscal needs, that will make our lives both better and easier.

In short, sales and advertising are noble pursuits.

It’s just that they get polluted and poisoned by our broken system of capitalism, which leaves some dogs fat and lazy and others diseased and starving.

I’ve figured out what Hollywood and Washington D.C. have in common.

God and I went to see the new remake of Total Recall this week. Like any big budget Hollywood special effects extravaganza these days, it looks amazing. The craftsmanship that goes into blockbuster movies today is incredible. In every way but one. And that one is what God and I figured out this week that they have in common with most of our nation’s politicians, especially the conservatives: Hollywood does not believe in, or at least has no respect for, intelligence. Most filmmakers have really bought in to the old saying seeing is believing. If they can put the image of a tunnel through the center of the Earth in front of us, they assume we’ll believe that it is possible. They don’t care that a middle school level of science education can expose the lack of science in their science fiction. And politicians don’t care that basic fact checking shows that they lie, over and over again they flat out lie and just assume we’re too stupid to notice.

I’m a better audience than most of my friends. Have I mentioned that most of my friends are smart? I do buy into the believability of the absurd; at least through to the credits. The better the film, the longer past the credits I can hold on to my belief. Also, the more the filmmaker’s make it clear that they don’t themselves believe in their own absurdities, the longer I can hold on to my belief. In the Harry Potter movies and other fantasies, I know that the people in charge know that it’s all make believe, so I don’t mind making believe. But with something like Total Recall, I’m not sure that they don’t know that chemicals in the air don’t respect zone borders, so it makes it hard for me to believe not just that people are safe in the zone, but that there really can be a woman with three breasts.

Oh, and speaking of multiple breasts, Hollywood, if you’re going to have two female leads, could you do something to make it easy to tell them apart?

And politicians? Well, they’re not going to change so long as the system means we really only get to choose between two of them at a time.

So God popped by while I was looking at porn again. You can apply that “again” to just about any part of that sentence and you’ll be right, by the way. I’m not going to bother to permute it for you here, though.

Anyway, she did it this time because she wanted to show me an amusing article on the military trying to urge soldiers to not spend their time looking at porn. The article kicked off by talking about not having them do it on the work systems at a missile watch site and it makes perfect sense to me that you don’t want people surfing sleaze while working. Not that all, or even most, porn is sleazy, but, well, you get my drift. It went on though to talk about some religious crusader that was trying to make sure that stores on army bases in Afghanistan didn’t carry magazines of a prurient nature, even things as mild as Playboy, because soldiers would look, compare the airbrushed models to what they had waiting at home, and find their own relationships lacking, thus, somehow, guaranteeing marital infidelity.

So I told God what I think of that. Now I like porn as much as the next guy (well, as much as some next guys, probably more than some next guys but also probably less than some next guys, too) but the only porn that I’ve been able to find embraces only two of our many senses, sight and sound. Even the dumpiest, least interesting person that I’ve been lucky enough to have sex with had things going for them that appealed to more senses. There’s a kind of warmth to touching another person, skin-to-skin, that can neither be faked nor recorded. There’s myriad smells and tastes that come along with engaging in sexual play, not all of them pleasant, but all part of the richness. So, yeah, porn may be pretty good, and occasionally parts of it are even aspire to perfection, but it still comes up lacking when compared to the real thing, in the same way that some artificial flavors are pretty good, but still don’t compare to what you can pull off of a tree.

The last two novels I’ve read dealt with the issue of how to transition from an economy of scarcity to one of abundance. It was enough of a coincidence that I asked God if she was sneaking messages into my unconscious. She said she does that all the time but that the messages have nothing to do with economics.

To be fair, one of the books really only brought up the issue at the end, and didn’t so much address it as point out that it was something that that fictional world was going to have to address in its very near future. I’d tell you what the book is, but since I’ve already given out that spoiler, I probably shouldn’t. And the second, which is called “Manna: Two Visions of Humanity’s Future,” is actually a political monograph presented in sort-of-novel form. I say “sort of” because it doesn’t concern itself with things like character growth, or antagonists and protagonists, just with presenting a possible future.

The problem with learning much of anything from either of these books is that they both bring about the state of abundance through a kind of magic. In one it’s done by invoking “the far future” and assuming that we do an impressive job in developing nanotech. This is a pretty easy bet to make, given a long enough timeframe, but it really doesn’t help address the issue of what can we do now to both bring about an abundant future and to make sure that we transition to it without having to resort to guillotines. And in “Manna,” where the author is expressly trying to show two likely futures that can come from our technological development, what he’s really trying to show is how one path could lead to abundance and another to dystopia, so he’s not so much interested in how we actually deal with the transition to abundance as with that we make the transition happen. So again we resort to magic, there’s some handwaving and some mumbled incantations about products being completely recycled with no waste but he doesn’t really talk about how that is possible.

Still, with enough effort and with incentives and goals other than just profit, it’s a possible future. The trick is just steering it from possible to plausible and then from plausible to probable. And to do all that without any smoke or mirrors.

Well, God says maybe a mirror’s okay.

Perseus famously encountered three old women who had one eye that they shared, trading it amongst themselves so that they all had use of it at least part of the time. While not as common as stories of captured princesses or of shapeshifters up to no good, the idea of trading body parts comes up in human literature from time to time.

God commented on this the other day and he wanted to know if I had any insights to offer. Is it simply due to our fears of losing body parts in injuries, or is their some other dynamic going on? Maybe these are just morality tales intended to teach us that we should always be willing to share with those less fortunate than ourselves.

We bandied about some serious ideas for awhile, things like the notion that trading eyeballs is the fantasy equivalent of bionics, then we went for the more frivolous by suggesting artificial legs and arms are just the first steps on the slippery slope to Star Trek’s Borg. Finally I turned to song. I played two songs from my collection for God to listen to.

The first song, “Detachable Penis” by King Missile talks about how handy it is to have a detachable penis, but also complains that sometimes it gets lost and the singer feels like less of a man until he can find it again. The second song, “Penis Envy” by Uncle Bonsai is a woman’s tale of all the things she would do if she had a penis. She sings about how pants would seem tighter, how she’d have something to play with when alone, how she could stuff it into a whole host of unlikely places.

If we could just get these two musical acts together, think what a glorious new myth could come out of it!

I love and hate surprises. While God says that the sort of cognitive dissonance that it sounds like I’m talking about here is one of the things that she loves (and hates) about us humans, she also insists that I explain a little more of what I mean.

One of the things that can be comfortable about getting old, while at the same time being annoying, is getting “set in our ways.” We (and by “we” I mean “me” but almost certainly a lot of other people too) develop habits so that we can get through life without too much bother. Part of developing habits is good. I’ve already done the experimentation to find out that I’m really fond of my brand of mayonnaise and that the competing “whip” has nothing miraculous about it, so I’ve made it a habit to buy the right brand. Part of developing habits that is, well, maybe not bad, but at least annoying, is that a lot of the joy of discovering and figuring things out is gone.

So how does this relate to “surprises?”

It’s pretty simple. Surprises interrupt our routines. Now I don’t mind it when the surprise is something that’s really nice and when the routine interrupted is not particularly important, but as I’ve established more and more what I like and what I don’t, the odds that the surprise is something better than the things I’ve already made a part of my routine, get smaller and smaller. So less and less I look forward to being surprised in my everyday life, but I know that there’s still plenty of awesome surprises waiting for me, and I wouldn’t give up the chance to get those if given the choice, not even if I knew that I could have the perfect day but that to get it I would have to have that same perfect day every day for the rest of my existence. So for me, yeah, surprises are better than perfection. But could we maybe schedule them so that they don’t interrupt my routine?