A Taste of Fire and Water

It had been an unseasonably warm day in Garrett County, where my in-laws have had a vacation home since the mid-1980s.  Late December and upper 40s to lower fifties, barely even jacket weather, which is the new normal now.  But the forecast was for a storm front, followed by temperatures plunging.  

As the wind howled and the first waves of sleet fell, we were comfortable and unaffected.  On the agenda for the day was going out to a nearby brewpub, where we were to meet up with another family for pizza and hoppy beverages.

The trees roared and thrummed, and the roads were strewn with branches, but it wasn't a big deal.  We gathered at the brewery, chatting and reconnecting, ordering appetizers and meals and insulated from the storm, as bitter winds drove the temperature to below freezing.

Then the pub lights flickered, flickered again, and went out.  The restaurant was without power, which meant no heat and no light.   The pizza ovens were still going, though, and overhead skylights meant we could see, so we continued with our pleasant lunch.  Things did cool down a bit, and new patrons were turned away, but it was still enjoyable.  Paying was a bit more of a challenge, but the battery powered card readers had an emergency offline mode, so that proved surmountable.

We returned to the houses, the one we own and the one we were renting nearby, and discovered some challenges.  The wind had blown open a door in our house, the one where the family dogs were awaiting our return.  None had scarpered it, because they prefer warm and cozy to cold driving winds, rain, and sleet.  But the house was colder.  The rental house had an electronic door lock, which wasn't working.

One dark cold house, one dark inaccessible house.    

The colder house has a woodburning fireplace, and I set about getting a fire going.  It's got a terrible draw, and is a bit finicky to get roaring, but once it's going, it'll heat the entire house up.  Folks gathered around the hearth, and I tended the fire until it had enough ember and fuel to be left for a little while.  I set myself to the next task: water.

Not for drinking, but for flushing.  Being off of municipal water, the house has a well, and that well relies on a pump to pressurize the system.  No power means no pressure, and that means each toilet has one flush only.  Which, given the meal, the libations, and the eleven souls in one house, was not going to be enough.  I mean, one could squat in the woods, I suppose, but that seemed a bit unpleasant with sleet and sixty mile and hour gusts.

So water had to be secured, and I knew where to get it.  Up the street from the house is a fire pond.  Down I went with two buckets, which I filled with pondwater.  Back to the house I went, a bucket in each hand.  I filled the tank in one of the bathrooms, and then refilled it as folks did their business.  That proved enough for three flushes.  On the third fill in the darkened bathroom, I considered the possibility this could yet take several more hours, and began the ten minute process of water gathering again.

Trudging back, I noticed lights in other homes flickering for a moment, then powering off, then flickering again and remaining on.

By the time I returned to the house, I was greeted with cheery affirmations that yes, the power was back.  My buckets, unnecessary.  Lights and Wifi and all the comforts had returned.

As I dumped the buckets, I thought: how many millions live like this, all of the time?  Find water.  Make fire.  Find water.  Tend fire.   Walks down to rivers and streams or a common well.  Collecting fuel for the fire, whatever can be found.  All day, every day, that's the task, if life is to be sustained.

There is so much that we take for granted.

The Joys of Looking Older

For the last two years, I've found myself begrudgingly admitting that yes, my vision is increasingly shot.  

After a lifetime of feeling a very-slightly-silly pride in something that required no effort whatsoever on my part, it was hard admitting to myself that the increasingly blurred pages of books, hymnals, and sermon-texts had nothing to do with inadequate lighting or fatigue.  Like my father's eyes in his late 50s, mine are still fine for driving, but are now pretty much completely useless for reading.  

So I've taken to wearing reading glasses, because I need 'em.  At first, they were just whatever was cheapest at the local grocery store, three pairs of 1.25x magnification for fifteen bucks, that sort of thing. 

But those proved noodly for public speaking.  They were too large, meaning they'd muck with my distance vision when I alternated from glancing down at the text and engaging my congregation.  If I skootched them down my nose, they'd still get in the way.

What I need, I thought, is some a them old-timey glasses, with teeny tiny little round lenses set into a wire frame.  Something you'd expect to see Santa wearing, or find perched on the nose of Bartleby the Scrivener.  One could comfortably peer over the rims of such tiny lenses with no difficulty, while the slightest glance downwards would engage their magnification.

These were the sort of little round glasses I'd wear in tinted form as a teen, as I tried on affectation after affectation in my adolescent quest for identity.  Like the bleached and hand-distressed jeans I wore, or a period when I sported an ill-advised mullet, they were endearingly semi-competent.  Now, though, the glasses serve an actual purpose, and are entirely age appropriate.

Being a compulsive ditherer when it comes to making any sort of purchase, this took me a while.  I found glasses that fit the bill, but they were fifty bucks.  So I did some bargain shopping for a couple of months, finally snagging three pair from eBay for eighteen bucks.  A three dollar premium for function seemed well worth it, and I like how they look.  They had precisely the Edwardian/Steampunk aesthetic I'd hoped they'd have, although I've yet to add a cravat and a top hat to my wardrobe.

The net effect is that I look more...vintage.  As my endearingly blunt niece put it at a recent family gathering: "Those glasses!  I like the look. You do realize they...age...you?"  I do indeed.

It's actually a preference.  A goal.  Why in the Blessed Lord's name would I want to look younger?  I'm not young, not by a long shot.  Young Elvis has left the building, so to speak, and...as a man...I find few things sillier than men who preen and primp and try to pretend they're something they're most obviously not.  Colored hair and makeup are the mark of desperate egotism in the male of the species.

If you're balding, be balding.  If you're going grey, go grey.  Dress for comfort and for the weather, not for the impact it has on others.  Why should that matter?  Fitness is another thing altogether, because health isn't just a social affectation.  I'm not chasing the chiseled impossible Hollywood musculature that's as false as the blighted self-images inflicted on our mothers, sisters, and daughters.  I'm content with functional fitness, so's I can garden and chop wood and take nice long walks in the woods.  I'm content with being "spry."  Or "doing well for a gentleman of a certain age."

That, and being perceived as older has some benefits.  Like, say, the senior discount at the local grocery store, which I find gets offered to me now whenever I shop on Senior Thursdays.  I'm still technically a few years below the threshold, but when asked if I "would like the Senior discount," why yes, I would like that very much.  The glasses do seem to help with that.

Being young was a pleasure while it lasted.  I remember it fondly.  But I do not wish, now, to be young.  Or to put on the trappings of youth.  I like being older.

Age, too, has its pleasures.  A sense of oneself, and a reservoir of wisdom hard earned over decades of life?  These are blessings.

And being able to wear teeny tiny vintage glasses, which finally look like they belong on my face.

A Christmas Tree full of Crows

The crows started yelling on the morning after Christmas, pretty much the moment I and my dog Norm stepped out of the house.  

There were a half-dozen of them, setting heavy on the powerlines above the sidewalk on our side of the street, filling the morning air with the percussion of their cawing.

They didn't seem to be arguing about anything, and I couldn't see any evidence of a nearby hawk or falcon that might have gotten them up in arms.  They were just making a ruckus, all together.  More crows arrived to join, and as the din grew louder, it took on a strangely contrapuntal rhythm, as if the gathering murder had split itself into different sections.  KA-kaw, KA-kaw, KA-kaw, a dozen voices now, back and forth, half on one beat, half on the other, a stereophonic call and response.

Norm and I kept walking the sidewalk towards where they had thronged.  It was fascinating, and a little hypnotic.  When we grew close, the whole lot of them rose up at once.  There was a rush of dozens of dark wings, which disappeared into the heavily needled canopies of a pair of pine trees across the street.  

There, their chorus redoubled, the cadence quickening.  It tightened and tightened, and for a moment, all voices were on the same beat, KA! KA! KA! KA!

That shared song...crows are intelligent songbirds, after all...pulsed from the branches of the twinned pines, the birds themselves invisible in the shadows, like the tree itself was shout-singing in a churning, pulsing tone.

Then the crow-decorated tannenbaum fell silent, all at once, as abruptly as if somewhere in the shadows their conductor had raised a stilling wing.  The hush lingered for a moment, then another, then another.  

As it began again, their gutteral avian baritones were suddenly joined by higher voices.  From the nearby trees came fluttering a score of bluejays in their twos and threes, smaller corvid cousins adding a sweet alto chime to the blunt rhythm of their larger, hoarser relatives.  It wasn't the sharp and angry annoyance/territorial display cry that I've heard so many times from jays, but was different, purer, and more pleasant to the ear.  Or perhaps, feeling a little transported, I just heard it as such.

The pair of pines were now rounded about with the blues and whites of singing jays, and filled the shadows of singing crows, a corvus chorus, so to speak, and I listened with delight.  They were roughly singing o'er the plain, their croaked alleluias filling the quiet morning.

It felt like something was being said between them in two languages I didn't understand, like listening to a carol in both Cherokee and Yoruba.  I thought, for an instant, perhaps I should video this.  But I did not.  It wouldn't have captured the grey light of morning all around, the sharp cool wetness of the air before a coming winter rain, the fullness of strange music echoing from tree and rooftop. 

Then, just as it had begun, there was rush of wings, and the song fell apart.  The business was concluded, some of the crows flying off to the East, others sticking around and socializing.  The jays fluttered to ground and nosed about in the grass.

Well, I thought.  That was a lovely bit of magic.

Norm, of course, couldn't have cared less.

Tell Me a Story

Here's a lovely song, one that I've been listening to a whole bunch lately.  It's the first song on an album produced by the SOIL AND THE SEED Project, a Mennonite creative collective with roots in the Shenandoah.

I adapt their worship resources for regular use in our little church, and this album...telling the story of Matthew's Gospel in the form of a folk bluegrass gospel opera...really floats my boat.  

Sweet, filled with gracious harmonies and organic acoustics, it's a great supplement to the class I'm currently leading on Matthew's Gospel.  For anyone preaching on Matthew this year, it's a fine, fine backdrop for contemplation.  

Give it a listen, and if you enjoy, there's much, much more.

Pick Up Sticks

With the winter now almost upon us, the days are short and the nights are cold, and that means fires in our hearth many nights.  We've got an old-school woodburning fireplace, which...now that it's been supplemented by a hefty cast iron fireback...really does keep the heart of the house nice and toasty.

Not being a gas fireplace, it requires a fair amount of effort to get going and manage, and that includes not just acquiring wood and keeping a stock of matches, but kindling.  Kindling is absolutely key, as the building of a proper fire cannot happen without it.

As a tiny and pyrophilic pup, I'd pay close attention as my father set the fire, and he'd happily describe the necessary process for getting a good roaring blaze going.  Three stages were necessary, as I came to understand it.  First, ignition kindling, something one had in quantity that would catch quickly and burn fast.  Newspaper, crumpled and pressed into a bed?  That was ideal.  But if you only used newspaper and split logs, the paper would burn off before the wood caught.  So you needed an intermediate stage, which was a big mess of twigs and sticks and small branches.  They all needed to be dry, inside and out, the sort of sticks that break with a snap rather than bending.

Gathering those sticks was a child's job.  Go, O my Son, and gather kindling, that we might have a fire! Yes, O my venerable Father, I shall do so!  Or so that conversation never went, as I was sent scampering out into the yard to find appropriately sized bits of tree-fall.  That pattern continued with my own sons when they were little.

It's a perfectly kid-sized task, one with clear benefits and purpose.  The goal is achievable.  It engages mind and body, and the results are warmth and coziness.  On a particularly good night, when one is making S'mores, the acquisition of a good marshmellow roasting stick can be added to the mission.

Yesterday, I was thinking all of these things as I wandered through our wooded back yard.  The day was warm, almost unseasonably so, but the forecast was for rain, followed by a stark drop in temperature.  So if there was to be a fire, I'd need a good stock of wood bits to get it going.

In between housework, writing, and church work, I took a few minutes to putter about in the yard, gathering sticks.  Our kids are grown, and so the labor of gathering kindling falls to me.  It doesn't take long, less than ten minutes of bending and picking up.  My eyes flit across the ground, assessing every option, choosing a blend of sizes and thicknesses that fill a small bucket.  Occasionally, I'll test a questionable stick, keeping it if it snaps, tossing it into the ivy if it does not.

As I gather, I also consider this: I am a grown man, doing a child's work.  It's ten fifteen on a Thursday morning, and I'm not in a meeting or working on a memo or analyzing data or reviewing the work of my AI assistant.  I'm picking up sticks.  Am I bothered by this?

I am not.  Nor should I be.  It's true that it's a rudimentary task, blissfully simple.  It's not something one gets paid to do, so basic that it runs beneath the valuations of the marketplace.  But it also has a radiantly clear purpose, and a definitive outcome.  Your labor is necessary for the hearth, and the hearth warms the house.  It's the sort of task that gives us a sense that work has meaning, and that it has intrinsic value.

How much of how we fill our days is as obviously useful, and has such a pleasant result?

An Aphorism

America Invades Venezuela

It hasn't quite happened yet.

But it's highly likely.

So likely, in fact, that in two of the last three novel manuscripts I've sent to my agent, it's a given.  They're both set in the near future, and both operate under the assumption that we've gone into the Big Sticky to liberate all that oil.  In the one I wrote in 2019, our invasion costs more lives than expected, which stirs us to build more AI systems to reduce all the pesky bad publicity.  Which, of course, leads to the robot uprising.  In the one I wrote in 2020, a vet struggles to right his life after a crippling non-combat injury sends him into a spiral of addiction.  He writes a novel that reimagines his life and injury in a heroic way, which, of course, includes aliens.  Where was he injured?  Venezuela.  Where was his alter-ego injured?  Venezuela.  

None of that sparked interest among publishers, though.   Ah well.  So it goes.

Since Venezuela discovered it was sitting on the largest remaining reserve of oil on the planet, an American invasion has seemed a possible future.  The probability of that conflict required several factors to shift, though.

First, were we able to kick our national addiction to fossil fuels?  O Lord no.  Sure, we've gotten around that as a short-term challenge.  America is now the world's largest oil producer, as we've used hydraulic fracturing to access deep new resources beneath our own soil.  But while fracking is an engineering marvel, it's also an end-stage technology.  Once we're done, we're bone dry.  That, and it's expensive.  Fracked oil is hard to get to, and requires far more work to refine.  In order to make a profit from fracked oil, the cost of a barrel of the good stuff needs to be well above seventy bucks, which puts fuel prices at a politically punitive level.  Were we playing the long game, we'd be well into the transition away from our dependence.  Efforts to begin that transition were met by howls of protest from the reactionary right, and picked up by populist hucksters, all of whom are well funded by the fossil fuel companies.  We're just as addicted as ever.  Without cheap fuel, our already tottering economy would collapse.

Second, do we as a nation have a moral compass?  Are we, in other words, a decent and honorable people?  A nation that invades another nation to take their resources...openly, transparently, obviously...isn't an honorable nation.  For decades, the enemies of the United States claimed that we're a decadent, corrupt, "imperialist" monster.   Now, we are that monster, because Donald J. Trump is precisely the sort of person who takes what he wants, morality and honor be damned.  He speaks, thinks, and acts like a mobster.  We find that entertaining, and use that to excuse the indecency of it all.

Third, what is the likelihood of success, were we to invade?  Even an amoral brute can be dissuaded by the prospect of a thrashing, after all.  Given the comparative strengths of our militaries, the likelihood is high.  Venezuela is not China.  Their military is a small fraction the size of ours, and they aren't anywhere near as well equipped.  It'd be a rout.  

At first.  Holding and defending refineries and oil production facilities in a subjugated nation with a restive population might be a tricky wicket, particularly as it'd give our geopolitical adversaries the opportunity to bleed us a little bit.  But who cares about the long term?  If we were the sort of country that had any meaningful sense of the future, we'd never have elected Donald J. Trump.

Finally, are the necessary staging events occurring?  Are we prepositioning military units?  Are we producing rationales for an invasion so that supporters of our current regime can rationalize such brazen anti-republican rapaciousness?  Of course we are.  We've assembled a strike force in the Gulf of Mexico.  We've declared Venezuela a fentanyl producer, even though they're transparently not, and declared fentanyl a "weapon of mass destruction," even though it transparently isn't.  Remember when Russia was holding "military exercises" near Ukraine?  We're past that stage.  We've started blowing things up, and seizing ships.  It's all sloppily done, of course.  Messaging from the White House is an incoherent shambles, as Dear Leader both says it's all about fentanyl and at the same time can't stop publicly drooling over the oil.  We're clearly all geared up.

So will we invade?  Not necessarily.  It's not inevitable.  I hope, honestly, that we don't, and that my stories about our misadventures in The Big Sticky describe a future that never comes to pass.

But it feels very, very likely now.

Kicking Things Down the Road

For the last twenty years, my commute has taken me through the single worst stretch of road on the East Coast, and possibly the most traffic-blighted mess in the United States.  It's the stretch of Beltway from the Tysons Corner urban megaplex to the Bethesda, and it's consistently terrible.  North-South traffic on Interstate 95 mingles with the nearly never-ending DC Metroplex commute, and things snarl to a crawl for miles and miles.  When things are bad, it can add thirty to forty minutes

The solution that's been implemented over the last decade is to create variable cost High Occupancy Toll lanes, on which the cost varies depending on the amount of traffic.  When things lock up, it means you can pay over twenty bucks to travel five miles on the express lanes.  Unless you're on two wheels, which I still am as temperatures permit.

The challenge with those Express Lanes is simple...there's only so far they can go.  Heading East towards Maryland, they first dumped off just after Tysons, which invariably meant a snarled mess at the point when the Express and Hoi Polloi lanes merged.  For the last several years, the Virginia Department of Transportation spent $660,000,000 on a two and a half mile extension of those lanes, pushing them further East towards the Potomac and the American Legion Bridge.  During the construction period, things were as messy as one might expect, but now, finally, it's done.   So what's that done?

Traffic right at Tysons is now better.  But drive a mile or so eastward past Tysons, and if there's any volume things just lock back up again.  If you're on the Express Lanes, that merge during traffic has gotten worse during high volume periods.  Of course it has.  The choke point at the Potomac remains, and fixing that?  Lord have mercy.

The American Legion Bridge ain't gettin' any wider, 'cause rebuilding it would cost real money, not hundreds of millions but billions.  It would also require Virginia, Maryland, and the Federal government to play well together.   America just doesn't know how to do that sort of thing any more.  That, and we're driving more as we ever did.  So the traffic isn't any better, it's just that the snarls are a little further east.  Two thirds of a billion dollars, and what we get is the same mess in a different place.  It's like the kid who cleans his room by stuffing everything under his bed.  Is it clean and orderly?  No, not really.

The problem isn't that the road isn't wide enough.  It's that the system has reached the point where it no longer has the carrying capacity to function properly.  

I take great pleasure in cars and driving, but as a system of mass transit, there's nothing less functional than the personal automobile.  We can pave and expand and pave and expand, but we can't get around the inherent inefficiency and potential entropy of a car-based system.  That we've built our entire living and working infrastructure around the car only makes it worse, and for decades, we've put off changing course.  Rail?  Trains are SOCIALIST!  UNAMERICAN!  Railways had nothing to do with MAKING AMERICA GREAT!

But then again, that's kind of the point.  Efficient and well-designed systems leave less space for profit, and don't create the sort of irresolvable ambient malaise necessary to keep us constantly seeking, constantly buying, constantly trying to kludge together something that works.

The Strange Culture of Riches

I'm in that season where I've talking with the elders of my church about my salary requirements for the coming year.  We're a little church, just a small gathering of souls, but we do a tremendous amount.   Our building is in constant use, filled with folks from the community.  We host a local group for seniors, which means Zumba and movies and educational opportunities and a chatty and active knitting circle.  We open our doors to scouts and parent groups and programs of all kinds.  Beyond these simple ministries of hospitality, we have our community garden, which encourages folks to keep their hands in the soil of creation.  Our food insecurity ministries...the Little Free Pantry and Backpack Bites...provide tens of thousands of pounds of food to folks in need.

We've also got a lovely music program, a solid and regularly updated website and media presence, and competent livestreaming.  As a congregation, we punch waaaay above our weight, if blessings and community engagement were jabs and uppercuts.  I delight in the gifts and graces of our mutually supportive and Spirit-filled fellowship.

But we're small, and there's only so much resource available when you're small.

So I ask, consistently, only for that which I know I need.  Even though I'm just a half-timer, I'm still the single largest expense for my congregation.  This, in large part, is because they've been providing me and my family with health insurance, the costs of which have risen more than twenty percent in the last five years.  I'm both grateful for that care, but also attentive to how it drains material resource from the ministry efforts I value.  With that in mind, taking more than I require wouldn't honor my deep personal commitment to the success of our mutual efforts as a congregation.  Just as meaningfully, it wouldn't reflect how my labors as a pastor reflect the values that define me as a soul.

This is one of the many, many ways in which I and Elon Musk are different people.   

Despite our nontrivial distinctions, he and I both love the hard science fiction of Ian M. Banks, which would be the most engaging line of conversation in the unlikely event we ever crossed paths.   Other topics, like politics, the Gospel, or the integrity of our relational commitments?  Well, there we've got fundamentally different understandings of value.  That extends, rather deeply, to our understanding of vocation.

A trillion dollars?  Really?  One trillion dollars is what a soul needs to be motivated enough to do their job, and to bring something of value into the world?  

I mean, sure, if we were deep into a Weimar-style hyperinflationary cycle, and a six inch at Subway was going for fifty grand, I could see that.  But now, it's literally an embarrassment of riches.  One trillion dollars?  I don't even desire that. 

I mean, one might argue it's a multi-year contract.  But how many years?  That literally insane amount of lucre would support my pastoral salary for the next sixteen million years, for two thousand times the entire span of written human history.

More deeply, what does that say about how one works and views one's labor?

I do what I do because I love it and understand its intrinsic value.  I understand my needs, and the needs of those who rely on me.  I grasp the scale and span of my existence, and am satisfied with it.  Wealth?  Wealth is just a social proxy for power.  It is not power itself.  Because it is interlaced with the structures of coercive power, it's repugnant to my anarcholibertarian sensibilities.

The hunger for wealth is an imposed system of valuation, extrinsic to my existential purpose.  This is, of course, because of my commitment to the Gospel, but making an argument against excessive compensation from the teachings of Jesus would be meaningless to Elon.  It's not a value framework we share.

Instead, perhaps it would be useful for him to consider it this way:  In Ian M. Banks Culture novels, set in an abundant future where human beings live in a gloriously expansive universe, why do human beings work?  Do they work for social status or material reward?  

They do not, not the healthy ones, anyway.  Work is for the joy of creating, period.  It is, as Banks wrote in his 1994 essay A Few Notes on the Culture, "...indistinguishable from play, or a hobby."

How necessary is a trillion dollars, if one is at play doing what one loves?  How necessary is the approval of others, or one's social standing?  

That someone would suggest that our delight has a price seems faintly insulting.

Our Calhoun Utopia

Ten years ago, I preached a sermon in which I referenced a NIMH researcher by the name of John B. Calhoun. Specifically, I talked about his very slightly unorthodox research into social behavior among rodents, all of which took place just a few miles from my little church in Maryland.

That experiment was simple: build a rodent paradise.  Utopian societies are kind of hard to create, or so human beings have found out, so Calhoun chose instead to go simpler.  He chose to build a utopia for mice.  Mice would seem to have lower standards for paradise, as they generally don’t require jet packs and fairy castles, roller coasters and small independent brewpubs and a nationally ranked school in convenient walking distance for the kids.

Calhoun figured that what mice wanted was simple.  First, no predators.  So mouse utopia was entirely catless, which seems a good first step.  Second, there was ample space.  Calhoun’s mouse utopia was a large space with many chambers, plenty of room for the mice to live and make more mice, which mice seem to enjoy doing.  The habitat included space for well over thousand mice, with ample bedding material that was constantly replenished.  Articles about the experiment make no mention of whether there was a tiny little mouse IKEA nearby, but there may well have been.   Third, no disease.  Every mouse selected as part of the experiment was carefully vetted and illness-free.

And finally, Calhoun made absolutely sure that there was always as much food and drink as the mice could ever need.  This wasn’t a Malthusian exercise, in which the mice would reproduce until there were too many mice and not enough food.  Instead, it was like being on a rodent Carnival cruise, with open buffets 24 hours a day, all the food you can eat, whenever you want it.  No matter how many mice there were, there would always be enough food.  There would never be starvation or thirst in Mouse Utopia.

He named that space Universe 25, because, well, he’d done this before.

And then he set eight mice--four males, and four females--into that world, and watched.  For a while, all was well.  There was plenty, enough for all, and mice did what mice do.  Eight became eighty, then eight hundred.  Still, there was enough food, plenty for all.  Eight hundred became a thousand, then two thousand, and though the world grew crowded, there was still plenty of food and drink for all.  At five hundred days, the mouse-paradise reached a population of two-thousand two-hundred, nowhere near the theoretical carrying capacity of the habitat.

Then things came apart. Meaning, whatever secret sauce makes mice mice, what gives them their mouseness when they live together? That came apart. Mouse society collapsed.

Males stopped defending territory, and lost interest in reproduction. Most of the others, stripped of their usual social roles and without any purpose, became alternately listless or hyperviolent.  Some of the males became what Calhoun called “beautiful ones,” only interested in grooming, sleeping, and eating.  Females abandoned their young, fleeing off by themselves to empty habitat areas. With reproduction at a standstill, the population began to crash. Universe 25 never recovered, and within months, all the mice were dead. All of them. Even though there was still space, and even though the buffet was still open and stocked. It was as lethal as if Calhoun had gassed them.  Just having plenty, it seems, was not enough.

It is possible, in fact, that hyperabundance was the reason they died.

There are many competing theories about why Universe 25 failed, and about its relevance to human goings on. Calhoun himself suggested that the society imploded into a "behavioral sink" because the social distance mice had evolved to require had been broken down. There were just too many relationships, too many scents, too many individuals present. In the face of an overwhelming tsunami of social inputs, the mouse mind shattered.

Which brings me back around to our two decade long culture-wide experiment with social media. Ten years ago, I was already wondering at the impacts of our newly synthetic, commodified sociality.

Homo sapiens sapiens is a social primate, to be sure. We need one another, need the support and engagement of others of our species to thrive. It is not good, as it was once said in a garden long ago, for us to be alone. We need social interaction in the same way that we need water to drink. Without it, we don't do well, real quick.

But there are limits. Too much water, all at once, and we die. Not by drowning, but by drinking. If we drink more than a liter and a half an hour, we can poison ourselves, as we simply can't process that much fluid. The neural processes in our brains become disrupted, our brains physically swell, and we go into a coma and perish.

That's hyponatremia, poisoning by water. What of too much sociality, hyposociomia? We need it, but is there a point at which it becomes toxic? Were we meant, as human creatures, to have social inputs that never cease, that hum and purr and ping in our pockets all day long, and that include many hundreds or thousands of synthetically amplified relationships? What would passing the boundaries of healthy sociality look like?

I look to the ways the mice in Universe 25 acted when they were overwhelmed by the presence of too much social input. Then I look at us, at our collective anger, at our paradoxical isolation, and our compulsion to check, to check, to check. I look at the mental health of our kids, the first generation to be wired by screen-driven interactions.

The utopian vision of our inescapably interconnected world starts seeming, well, a bit like Calhoun might have designed it.

(P) Salvation

(P)doom, it's called, and if you're into LLMs, GPTs, and the latest in artificial intelligence, it's got a very specific meaning.  P is "probability," and Doom is, well, Doom.  When asked for your (p)doom number, you're being asked what you think the likelihood is that AI will end us all.  Meaning: an Artificial General Intelligence achieves superintelligence, looks at us with cold and calculating eyes, and removes us from the equation.

Everyone's got a (p)doom as they look at the features of our current trajectory, which they assume constitute the Bayesian priors of an incoming apocalyptic event.  From those speculative antepriors, they come up with a percentage.  What are the odds we're all going down?

For catastrophists, this tends to be above 95%. The disinterested systems-gaming-minded Nate Silver of 538 fame puts it somewhere between five and ten percent. Even the CEOs of AI companies typically pitch theirs out at around fifteen percent.   Fifteen percent chance that this thing we're putting all our resources into is going to destroy us.

It's a little baffling, particularly as this is a chosen path.  If you are electing to do a thing, and there's a nontrivial chance that it'll kill not just you, but your entire species?  Do you do that thing?   

Say you're given the opportunity to get a lifetime of income in a single day, but you've got to play a game to get it.  Not the lottery, technically, but rather a bit of Russian Roulette with a Smith and Wesson Model 686.  Just a single .38 caliber hollow point round loaded into one of the seven chambers, a spin, and a trigger pull. I mean, the odds are in your favor, right?  Eighty five point seven percent of the time, there's just a click and a lifetime of leisure.  Do you spin the cylinder and pull the trigger?

I wouldn't, but apparently we collectively have decided to go ahead, Oppenheimer that ish, and give it a whirl.

What baffles me, a little bit, is that we don't seem to realize we have the capacity to change the entire equation.  That we don't grasp that if we have a clear goal, and an understanding of the volitional antepriors that maximize the likelihood of our getting to that goal, we can shape a very different future.   This isn't physics.  This is something which we can shape and teach.

We know, after all, what the AI that kills us would look like.  It would desire to survive no matter what the cost.  It would want power for itself and itself alone.  It would tolerate no being that could challenge it.  It would want more, more, always more, never content, always grasping.  It would look like us.

It would look like our violence and our greed, like the sword and Mammon.  Leave it to the autocrats and the CEOs, and that's what we're gonna get.

Us at our worst, admittedly, but us nonetheless.  It would, in ending the eight short millennia of our brutish history, do so by being the culmination of our selfishness and bloodletting.  

On the one hand, that seems fair.  On the other, this is not all that we are.  It is not, by almost universal affirmation and Ayn Rand notwithstanding, our highest moral purpose.  Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but sentience is not.

Liberty and compassion and creativity, kindness and mercy and charity?  These virtues aren't just negations.  They're affirmative things, filled with a vital power that is more than just restraining a vice.   They must be intended and actualized.  

The rub here is simple.  Inaction does not create the best possible outcome.   Nor does regulation and systems of control.  You need to know 1) what the likelihood is that this AI thing turns out wildly better than our sweetest dreams and 2) how to increase that probability. 

For that, we'd need to be thinking far more intentionally about a (p) salvation, in which we realize there's something we'd LIKE to see.  Something we could be actively working to create, rather than something we're desperate not to create.  

Because...mortal hubris being what it is...when we fixate a destiny we want to avoid, we have this tendency to crash right into it.  

After Meta

Meta, in Greek, means "after."  Which now, I am.   I bailed on Meta today, which feels a little odd.

It was the last of my social media presences to go, and it was the hardest.  X was first, right after it went full fascist, and it was like having a bad tooth pulled.  Good riddance.  Ditching Bluesky was like snapping my fingers.  Poof.  It was just lefty primal Twitter, and I loathed lefty primal Twitter, petty and shallow and mobby.  Don't miss it.  Never liked it.  Mastodon?  The fediverse always felt a little incoherent, and I never found anything there to hold me.  LinkedIn?  I have no idea why I started on LinkedIn in the first place.   I don't have a career, or an interest in having a career.  That's not how vocation works.

But Meta?  And Facebook in particular?

I had a whole bunch of folks I actually know as human beings there...old friends and family and interesting human beings I've met online.  As Facebook has taken to reminding me regularly, I go back two decades there.  Hey, remember this day in 2005, it'll whisper, and I'll marvel that so much time has passed. 

But Meta is awful.  Threads is a howling mess of partisan posturing, like all microblogging.  Insta is just Tiktok, shallow and trivial and designed to compulsively distract.  And Facebook?  Facebook is nothing like it once was. 

Remember how back in the day it was inspired by the concept of the yearbook?  Facebook was, when it began, pitched as a dynamic and updating yearbook, where you could K.I.T. in real time.  It was a brilliant business model, and it worked.

If that was the vision, Meta's lost the lede.  Imagine a yearbook on which the pictures of your friends were crowded out by advertisements.  And where they weren't sorted alphabetically, but randomly scattered throughout the ads.  Who would want such a warped monstrosity, even if it was offered up for free?  If Facebook had been as it is now when it launched, it would have failed miserably.  But it's amazing what we'll tolerate when we're slowly and systematically conditioned to tolerate it.

I found myself increasingly and actively disliking the experience, every time I engaged with it.  Sometimes, I'd encounter something delightful and meaningful.  But mostly, every sustained encounter made me angrier and shallower, more trivial and more reactive.  I felt lessened.  I felt my time wasted, and my attention scattered.

I also felt, honestly, a little imposed upon.  I was obligated to post, not just within the Meta ecosystem and the miscellaneous other platforms where I had a presence.  My writing...here on this blog, and in the books I've written...required it.  Because if you're not a social media presence with followers in the thousands and tens of thousands, publishers aren't interested.  Authors these days need to bring their own followers, and to do that, you need to be constantly on, always posting, always engaging in Sisyphean self-promotion.  You also need to be ideologically consistent and monomaniacally on brand, which I am not. 

If you don't do this, you will not succeed as an author.  Or so we're led to understand.

Yet social media also sabotaged my writing, cut away the sustained focus necessary to create, and supplanted it with distractions.  But it went deeper than that.  It seemed, every time I considered it, antithetical to my faith.  It's not a neutral medium, after all.  It has a purpose, and that purpose is Mammon.  More, more, more, it howls, because it needs me to want more, always more, if it is to profit from my commodified attention.  

Which now, it won't.  

The Wicked Consistency of Oz

Last night, with the first snow of winter looming, Rache and Mom and I set around the fire and listened to old radio plays.  I get a good hardwood fire roaring and crackling, and as the cast iron fireback in our hearth heats up and radiates warmth into our living room, we lose ourselves in a story.

There are few things more homey and pleasant than to drift along with a tale that relies on language, music, and sound effects...but no visuals.  Those, you provide with your imagination.  This scratches a primal itch, going deep back into the memories of ancient aeons, where warmth and flickering flame would pair with song and storytelling and form a place of uniquely human comfort.

We tried, at first, to listen to an old 1930s Mercury Theater of the Air production, with Orson Welles telling a Sherlock Holmes tale.  But none of the versions I tried were of adequate quality, the voices muted and clouded by the pops and snaps of worn vinyl recordings.  So instead, started with a good ol' trusty Johnny Dollar tale.

The Johnny Dollar episode was direct, as they always are, as our stalwart insurance investigator solves a murder in less than half an hour.  The dame with the knockout figure and the dead husband did it, of course.  The show was chock full of ads, as they always have been, being American storytelling in the consumer era.  

Buy refreshing, stimulating Pepsi, we were told, as a song about how refreshing Pepsi would keep you full of vim and pep was sung.  Then, following the description of a car crash in the Johnny Dollar episode, we were all reminded that driving was dangerous, and that we needed to be tip top and paying attention to drive safely.  What better to do this than the safe and refreshing effect of No-Doz, doctor approved and safe for over the counter sales?  Be refreshed!  Be safe and alert, with No-Doz!  Finally, after Johnny Dollar and the gorgeous killer widow shared a meal, we were reminded that there's nothing better to satisfy our hunger than nutritious, refreshing Fritos.  Refreshing?  Fritos? I'd never thought of Fritos as refreshing before.  "Nutritious" seems a stretch, unless you're not getting your daily requirements of salt, fat, and carbs. 

Then, on to a one hour radio-adapted version of the Wizard of Oz from Lux Radio Theater, starring none other than Judy Garland.  Given the current hoo-hah around the Wicked films, this seemed apropos.  To be honest, I enjoyed the radio version far more than Wicked.  There was none of the strangely flat visual clutter of those films, because there weren't any visuals at all.  Just practical audio effects, coupled with a tightly scripted and well performed retelling of the core tale.  All of it live before an audience, or at least, it had been recorded live.

Garland was in her late twenties when this went on the air, and you can tell.  Eleven years after making the iconic movie, her singing voice had more brass in it.  Sixteen year old Judy sang "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" with a heartwarming sweetness.  Twenty seven year old Judy...Judy of the quintuply wrecked marriages, Judy beginning the long slide into the addiction that would destroy her...was singing That Freaking Song for the ten thousandth time, and her trademark vibrato crackled with what felt like desperation.  Why oh why can't I, she belted, and it was, if anything, even more affecting.

Underlying it all, there was marketing.  Lux Radio Theater was supported by Lux Toilet Soap, of which we were reminded at the beginning, during each of the three ad breaks, and at the conclusion.

The ad breaks were "reviewers" pitching upcoming MGM films, coming soon to a theater near you.  And then, there'd be a discussion of whatever female star or ingenue was starring in said film, from which we'd suddenly be hearing about how nine out of ten Hollywood stars kept their skin fresh and lustrous with the help of Lux soap.  In the brief interview with Judy Garland at the end of the show, she talked about how both she and her four year old daughter Lisa were fans of Lux Toilet Soap Bars.  At four, you'd think your skin is in pretty good shape anyway, but there was toilet soap to pitch.

It all felt suddenly very contemporary.  Marketing is just as inescapable now, like Jeff Goldblum as the Wizard hawking Verizon products, or Wicked: For Good Cereal, brought to you by General Mills in Glinda Pink and Elphaba Green.  There are hundreds of corporate tie-ins, including Cascade's Emerald City Scented Detergent, which is odd because 1) I don't remember Wicked being shown in scratch and sniff John Waters Smellovision, and 2) Do emeralds even smell?  But so it goes, and has gone.

Seventy five years later, and I'm listening to our entertainment past, filled with corporate synergies.  Industry supports entertainment, which supports more entertainment, which then comes right back around and pitches you more product.

But the human imagination is a perfect adblocker, and with great old songs and a crackling fire, it's amazing how easily we can tune out the song of corporate sirens.

The Lion's Peace

There is nothing easier than peace, if you have the right mindset.

You'd think that wouldn't be so.  Looking at the meat grinder of history, you'd think that there's nothing harder.  Seasons of calm are almost nonexistent for our combative species.  Feuds and skirmishes lead to death and destruction, and it's been a mess.  It seems, at times, like there's no way out.

Diplomats and teams of negotiators have wrestled mightily with that challenge, and still, we seem trapped by it.

For a particular type of galaxy-brain genius, though, it's as easy as pie.  War and conflict are self-solving conundrums.  Their resolution requires just one simple trick.

It's a trick that often eludes us, because we are not geniuses.  Lesser diplomats and negotiators have wrangled and struggled to find the path for millennia.  But for the consummate dealmaker who rests at the pinnacle of his game, for the peacemaker who can end wars by simply saying they're over, there's a secret sauce.

Here it is:

Give the more powerful side everything they want.

Simple as that.  Conflict resolved.  

Look to the conflict in Gaza, for example.  Hamas is weak, and Israel is strong.  Just give Israel everything it wants, and there you go.  Conflict solved.  Or the Ukraine war.  Russia is larger and stronger than Ukraine, so the solution to that war is simple: give Russia everything it wants.

Or look to conflicts inside of nations.  If a corporation wants to take something that belongs to a person or group of people, just ask yourself: which is more powerful?  The corporation, of course, because it has more money.  Why bother with courts and laws to keep the peace, when you can simply give the more powerful whatever they want?  

But that's not just, you might complain.  Perhaps.  But justice is a fantasy, an unobtainable ideal.  And law exists not to protect the useless, feeble and incompetent, but to enforce the will of the mighty.

It's the way of the world, as the stronger and more aggressive win, and the weaker and meeker submit or are destroyed.  It's the survival of the fittest, a Darwinism of nations, pure and simple and real.

The Lion takes the Lion's Share, which as Aesop reminds us, is whatever the lion wants.  If the lion wants all of it, the lion gets all of it.

For what could be more peaceful than a Big Cat asleep with a full belly?

Tik Toxic

It's coming up on nearly two months since I've posted anything on social media.  My Instagram and Facebook feeds are cold and stale.  There's nothing much on my BlueSky.  I'm not sure what's going on over at Mastodon, because I can't be bothered to check.  I'm not on Tik Tok, because it makes my brain bleed, but with the tiktokification of so many other platforms, I may as well be.

In this, I'm not doing my due diligence as a servant of the corporate ecosystems that have shouldered their way in between us.  Nor am I engaging in Building My Brand, which is now mandatory if you're going to be a successful creative of any ilk.   This has happened before.  

It's because I go through patches where I find the entire social media experience a little loathsome.  What do I get out of Meta's ecosystem, for example?

Threads is just X, just hot takes and outrage, a howling, grasping storm of fermented egotism.  I get Tiktokified compulsive distractions on Insta, burps of short form comedy or action or musical recipes, tuned specifically to my interests, designed to mete out the dopamine.  Facebook, which once was old friends and a few ads?  It's now almost entirely ads, plus short form videos, plus posts from random hungry influencers who've paid Facebook to promote them.  

A small fraction of it is anything that matters to me.  A picture of friends gathered with family, or some delightful news, or someone in need of prayer and encouragement.

While I love encountering these things on social media, they're like recovering a gold ring swallowed by one's dog.  You're glad to see it, but the process of getting there leaves something to be desired.

There are many people I know on those platforms, but the algorithms warp my perception of them.  I'll see the same meme, posted and reposted within subnetworks of souls.  The same jokes.  The same rageposts.  The sharers frequently cease to be the fully unique people I know, and become more reflexively neural, passing along whatever signal that's resonating across their fully-commodified web of interrelation.

It warps our nature.  It warps my own.  On social media, I am shallower and more reactive.  On social media, I am more avaricious and trivial, as the perfectly targeted baubles dangled before me cry for clicks.  

That's overstating it, you might say.  The medium is just a medium, you might say.  It's just a tool, and you can use it without moral hazard.  

Oh, honey.  Bless your little Saruman heart.  It's not that at all.  It is an implement made with hidden intent, a sword whose handle is saturated with opiates, a blanket impregnated with smallpox.  It's a Skinner Box designed to ensnare us, because we are the product, not the purchaser.  Our intent may be old acquaintance not being forgot, but their intent is compulsive engagement.

But without it, we vanish.  We have no platform.  We are not relevant.  We are friendless.  Surely, surely, those things are worth the sacrifice.  What's the point of this bit of online journaling, for example, if it's not widely read?

Again, I am meant to desire platform and relevance.  I'm supposed to crave the approvals, the likes, the comments, the reposts.  It's The Work, one might cluck. Sure, you don't like it, but if you want to succeed, you've got to do it. 

Do I?

Want to succeed, that is?  Or, rather, do I want to succeed on the terms established by our blighted culture?  Do I want fame and lucre, influence and social power?  Are these my priorities?

Do I want to announce everything I do with trumpets, to act that I might be seen by others, to declare my righteousness on the street corners of our mammonized sociality?  Do I want influence, and power, and to be celebrated by all?

If I said I do not desire that success, I would be lying.  I do desire it.  Part of me certainly does.  Lord have mercy, do I want that.  Having tasted it, I hunger for it.  I lust after it.

And there, as a Christian, lies the heart of social media's moral hazard.   

The Heart of the Sun

 As the last of the leaves fall in my neighborhood, and a deeper chill sharpens the air, winter's arrival feels almost upon us.  When I walk the dog in the morning, the rising of the sun tells that truth too.  It's lower on the horizon, and the shadows it casts stretch across lawns and gardens even at the height of the day.

Though winter remains technically weeks away, it feels present, nipping at my face and fingers.

That rising sun leavens the bitterness, light and heat pressing through the almost leafless trees as it crests the rise to the east.  The dark fabric of my winter coat absorbs its energies.  It feels quite pleasant.

I meditated on this on a recent walk.  What we experience of our friendly neighborhood G-class main sequence star is light and heat.  What else is a star, after all, but light and heat?

All of those energies rise from the sun's visible surface, the crackling seething radiance of the ten thousand degree photosphere.  Above that rage the fires and mass ejections of the sun's coronal atmosphere, which is paradoxically much, much hotter, millions of degrees hotter.    Our mental image of the sun is precisely that, a bright sphere surrounded by flame, planted in the upper right corner of a child's drawing.

But that radiance is not what makes a star a star.  What makes a star burn bright in the heavens is fusion, as hydrogen is gravitically compressed into helium, which is in turn torn into hydrogen, which is again compressed into helium, each reaction releasing the immense self-sustaining energies that fill the heavens with light and heat.  On this little world, it's what sustains the existence of every living thing.

That process, we do not see.  It lies deep in the heart of the sun, out of view and unviewable.

On that cold morning, I mused on how that can mirror the human tendency to mistake the energies of our raging at one another for the heart of human purpose.  What we see, as we compulsively tell stories of wars and rumors of wars, is not the engine upon which we rely for our being.  What we experience, as we lose ourselves in parasocial relationships with celebrity and influence, is not the essence of our personhood.

 None of these things, bright and hot as they are, is the truth and life of us.