My Pick: Biden-Sinema

Krysten Lea Sinema. Born July 12, 1976 Tucson, Arixona

My advice to Joe Biden for his Vice Presidential pick?

Kyrsten Sinema, the senior U.S. Senator from Arizona.

Why Sinema? Because by doing so he will make her a star within the Party. Her elevation to prominence this way will make her a natural favorite to head the Democratic ticket in 2024 or later. If Biden doesn't pick her, she might have to wait until a later election. It will be more difficult for her.

Sinema will not deliver Arizona to Biden. Picking her will actually help Republican Senator Martha McSally in her re-election bid. But all that is beside the point. Biden is going to get blown out hard in the Electoral College, and probably lose the Popular Vote by a healthy margin, and take the Democratic Party with him. The Democrats have all but assured themselves of this. Donald Trump knew exactly how to play them to get them to commit Party suicide. Sane Democrats should want this result  and look forward to it.

Note that I have poor track record of guessing the VP picks from the nominee, so I don't expect Biden will pick Sinema.   It's more difficult to forecast the decision of a single individual, than an entire state, or a collection of fifty states and the District of Columbia.

The other possible choices for Biden are disasters. Warren will bring momentary enthusiasm but no additional votes. Harris is toxic, a guaranteed and proven loser. Susan Rice may go to prison. Biden will probably pick one of those. Any other choices would be a Ferraro-like joke, a person with no future in the party.

Biden is going to lose the black vote anyway, at least in the sense of how much he needs to win it. At least a third will vote for Trump. Biden might as well go down with glory by deciding who the leader of the party will be going forward.

Sinema is native Arixonan (not a good track record for these folks in national elections but so be it). She's Frisian. That's super cool.

She was born during the Bicentennial month of July 1976. If there is anything America will need going forward, I think it is some Bicentennial-type energy, especially coming from a rebulit-from-the-ground-up Democratic Party after this coming election. Obama and all his cronies will be purged. The Democrats will finally be sick of them, which we be great for the country. .
.
Personally I'm psyched for the U.S. Sestercentennial!

Or shall it be the U.S. Quarter Millennial?

Will it be Mike Pence or Kyrsten Sinema celebrating at Mount Rushmore?

Atlas Shrugged: The Ultimate Fantasy of the Pathological Feminine

continued from How Woke is John Galt?

This wasn't the review I was planning to write about Atlas Shrugged. I was expecting to write a more nuanced headline for the post. But I have never in my life hated a book more than this. I'm writing this whole thing below as quickly as possible so I can move on from thinking about it.

Funny but for two-thirds of the book---the first 650 pages---I actually enjoyed it. I understood why people liked it. I thought it was a good yarn, albeit a bit raunchy in the way only a woman could dare to write (there's way more sex in the story than I anticipated). 

But I wanted to see where it was going. I particularly enjoyed the detective story of tracking down the fate of the automobile company in Wisconsin. There was legitimate suspense and good build up in those phases of the story.

Things started to go horribly wrong at the two-third mark when the main character---the female heroine Dagny Taggart---finds herself in the Atlantis-like terrestrial paradise in the Colorado mountains, and also meets the main hero character. At that point I felt horribly let down by what was supposed to be a utopia. It felt wrong. The story started to fall apart. I found myself repulsed and bored by the things I was supposed to like. I started to dislike the characters. 

Things got worse from there. I began to stop caring about the characters all together. They were never fleshed out enough for me to care. I stopped being on their side. But even with a hundred pages left, I kept thinking, "Wow, this could have been a great book, with a few changes in the story, and if it were edited down by at least a half." If you've ever tried to read Stephen King's own versions of his stories, which are filled in scatological madness and child pornography, you know the value of a good editor. No way would he have become famous if he had been left to his own devices.  But one can see that Rand was a no-compromise author, and boy does it show.

In the last three chapters I just gave up entirely on the main characters, and just plugged along to finish the book. I had come to hate it. The story had degenerated into triteness and garbage. Rand's skill as a storyteller failed her completely in her desire to emphasize her philosophic points.

At the climax of the story the main character---the most heroic and virtuous man who ever lived---gives a long-winded speech on the radio that supposedly grips the entire nation. It was fifty pages of some of the worst, most boringly rambling prose ever, as the character hectored the nation, insisting that he was the first man in the history of the world ever to discover the secret of life.

In the last two chapters the story fails entirely. The plot is all wrong in how it wraps up---way too abruptly for the length of the story. The supposedly sympathetic heroic characters are revealed in their wretchedness. I loathed all of them. I wanted to see them fail. I never got to understand them even after a thousand pages.

Ironically the supposed villains are never truly punished. Mostly they just fade away and we never learn what happens to them. The only truly sympathetic characters in the book---Eddie Willers and Cheryl Taggart---suffer the worst fates. The former has a mental breakdown trying to restart a broken locomotive by himself in the middle of the Arizona desert, his worst sin having been to love the heroine since childhood (see the fate of the man who does not live up to Rand's ideal of the masculine). The latter characters impulsively  commits suicide by jumping in the Hudson River when her husband tells her of his infidelity. Neither of those things needed to happen in the story. But these are imperfect people to Rand, not worthy of full consideration as human beings, and thus they must suffer. 

By the last third of the book, I had come to see the work as the product of the pathological feminine. The heroine is loved by the most heroic men who ever lived. She takes one after another as her lover, and as she leaves each one and moves up the ladder of heroes, each stays devoted to her, and they ultimately help her rescue the greatest man who ever lived, who is the only one worthy to copulate with her. At the end of the story they fly off together in an airplane, high-fiving each other for their victory in destroying the world, with the heroine surrounded by her collection of lovers.

In being the product of the pathological feminine imagination, the book reminded me a great deal of Fifty Shades of Grey. This latter book is the fable of a woman who yearns to escape the hellish path reserved for contemporary women, namely being urged by society (i.e. by other women) to sample the company of dozens of lovers, one after another, replicating the career of a prostitute and imitating porn actresses until every last shred of her innocence is gone, and the only men who can provoke desire in her are the worst sorts of malevolent men. 

This is done in the name of empowerment and in pursuit of self-fulfillment. Then one day, after she is bored with the parade of sexual adventures, and finding she is no longer at the peak of her attractiveness, she can find the perfect man of her dreams who accepts her and loves her despite her past, as she her were a tender virgin. Fifty Shades of Grey is the fantasy of finding the perfect alpha billionaire, who makes her undergo all of the prostitution and porn acting, but at his command, and for him exclusively, so that she can the perfect ending without ever having to undergo the hell-life hell of taking dozens of lovers in a serial fashion..

Likewise Atlas Shrugged is the pathological female fantasy of a mid-century woman trapped in the duty of having to participate the masculine world of work and achievement, all the while surrounded by inferior men who do not live up her ideal of what a man must be. So she fantasizes about the perfect hyper-masculine man who will take revenge on the world on her behalf, who will destroy everything and reduce civilization to a rubble all so that she can escape with him (and her other lovers) and become his devoted servant wife, obeying his commands and desires in a simple household setting.

What separates Ayn Rand from the most malevolent forms of contemporary woke feminism is Rand's belief that a few strong masculine men still exist somewhere in the world who are worthy of her and women like her. Without that belief one they both merge into the demonic fanatical desire to see all weak men of the world castrated and destroyed.

The heroine of Atlas Shrugged is a terrible human being. In the last chapter she shoots an innocent throwaway person in cold blood to save her lover. Her unrepentant murder of this unnamed inferior character is portrayed as heroic, the product of ultimate virtue, as is the outright deception of all the main characters at the end.

The book cleared up many things for me, among them why Ayn Rand is unable to see any precedent in her work besides Aristotle. This is just a cartoon fantasy on her part.  She presents nothing more than a cargo cult imitation of a philosophy. I finally understood this when she described the physics behind certain inventions in her book. The science is ludicrous in a way that it never needed to be. But clearly she didn't care. She knew better than every physicist alive, no doubt. The perfect engine invented by the hero character supposedly converts "static energy into kinetic energy." 

I almost choked with laughter reading this. Likewise the doomsday device (that literally wipes out half of the state of Iowa at the climax of the story) is a sonic weapon that is based on cosmic rays. Uh, sure, ok. Of course science fiction must bend the rules, but my gosh---this is worse than the worst parody of the most ridiculous low budget movies as depicted in a comedy skit. Just imagine the philosophy version of that, and you have "objectivism" in a nutshell.

It explains to me the fanaticism of the Randian cult members who use this book as a guide to life. Bill Still, who once ran for the Libertarian Party presidential nomination, just released a great short Youtube video explaining what's wrong with (big L) Libertarians, and why they are actually Leftists rather than conservatives. I just watched it as finished this book and it really put the pieces of understanding together in my mind. 

I laugh at myself, at how for the first half of the book I was fascinated by the question of why Rand had changed U.S. history so drastically, making it so that the first transcontinental railroad was not built by instigation of Abraham Lincoln and the U.S. government, but by a private individual. 

I was convinced that somehow this was a clue to the alternate universe of Atlas Shrugged in some deep way. I was intrigued by a comparison of the fictional Taggart railroad with the real Union Pacific, the history of which I know more a great deal about For example the one-time chairman of Union Pacific, and the real-life heir to the UP fortune--as close as possible a person to the main character---was actually the Governor of New York at the time Rand published her novel. I wonder what he thought of this.

By the end of the book, I realized all of this was way too sophisticated an analysis of her book, just as was my earlier attempts in my youth to make logical sense of her philosophy. It feels like a parody, and excuse for her to hate the world, to hate all forms of religion, and to wish destruction on her enemies. Everything else feels like a window dressing around this.

Weirdly, I am glad I read it, even though I hated it when it was done. I have little patience with Leftists who might say, "I told you so." Unless you've read through all 1069 pages of this turkey, then I don't want to hear your opinion. It's just hearsay. I'd rather talk with people who read it and liked it, rather than those who would condemn it without having read it. At least I'll grant that respect to Ayn Rand. Like I said---I wanted to like it, and I liked the premise of the story as a whole. I just deeply hated the characters and the resolution of the plot.

I'm still willing to read the Fountainhead at some point as well. It's loosely based on Frank Lloyd Wright, who is an important figure in the history of Scottsdale. Maybe it's a better story. Maybe I'll like it. At least it's shorter, and they made a decent Hollywood movie out of it (something that would be impossible for this book, I now understand). 

In the Land of Non-Playing Characters

During June it felt as if our apartment complex was emptying out. Moving trucks arrived to take people away, but no one moved in to replace them. We had begun to wonder if something weird was going on. We live in one of the pricier complexes in North Scottsdale, so we thought perhaps it was related to the shutdown. The management had begun sending out email notices reminding all of us of the rent deadlines. They had not done this before. At first I took it personally, until I realized it was part of the new normal.

In the last week, however, there have been two new occupancies in our building, including the unit directly below us.  J just met our new downstairs neighbor, a young woman. J had gone to her office to see a patient, and when she returned she found the new resident had parked in our space, so as to allow the moving van to use her own space. J insisted on making her move her car, in a friendly way. The young woman has a vanity license plate on our car that suggests she graduated from a Big Ten university and was a swimmer.

They had a short chat. J introduced herself and the young woman replied with her own name.

"And she didn't say anything else, did she?" I asked J.

"No."

"The conversation lasted exactly as long as you asked questions, and she answered your question without giving any further information, right?"

"Exactly."

We both laughed at that, because we had discussed this a couple weeks back. I had noticed this phenomenon I just described. Over many months we've spent here since moving in, I had done my usual thing of being friendly and striking up conversations with people as I met them.

People were always friendly back to me, at least on the surface, but they never once introduced themselves unless I took the initiative. This applied even to one's direct neighbors---people across the hallway---and to people I saw almost every day as I came and went from the building.

It applied to people of both sexes, and to couples with children. Age didn't matter. It applied to everyone below fifty years of age, including the guy with the BMW in the garage next to ours. He looked to be a few years younger than me. During the shutdown I had set up a work space in the garage which I used before it got too hot in June. As such this guy I mentioned walked in front of the open garage door every day while I was there, sometimes multiple times.

We conversed, but it was always at my instigation He was affable and smiling. He waved at me like an old friend if one gazes met. But he never spoke to me unless I spoke to him. I learned a lot about him from him by asking him questions over the weeks, dribbling them out little by little, building on the knowledge I'd gained thus far. I learned that he was born in Germany and came to the United States as a child. I had once been to his hometown in Bavaria years ago. The most surprising thing about him to me was that despite being German by birth, and still knowing how to speak German, he had never heard of Goethe. He didn't even recognize the name when I told him.

In each case, when I spoke to him, after a few questions on my part, I had the feeling I was detaining him. He never once asked me questions about myself. Never once did he ask me anything about my own background, or what I did for a living, or anything like that.

Likewise I found the same situation with others, including the young couple with their infant daughter. They lived in the unit directly across from ours, that faces our balcony directly. I saw them nearly every day, sometimes multiple times a day, as they seemed to be constantly taking their daughter out in their stroller. They too were extremely affable whenever I saw them. They would wave to me with friendly recognition---provided that I waved to them first. Otherwise they ignored me.

One time I saw them with their garage door open. I called over to them, using their names. They never used my name back to me. I assume it had never registered with them when we introduced ourselves. 

"Oh, Illinois license plate?" I said, seeing the back of their car.

"Yes," the young woman replied. It was almost always she who talked to me---her husband mostly stood around as an accessory.

"You're from Illinois?"

"Yes we are."

"Oh. I used to live in Illinois briefly," I said. They looked at me without saying anything, as if we were all in suspended animation.

I took me a moment to remember the name of the town where I had lived, as an intern during college doing physics work at a government lab. 

"Downer's Grove," I said, recalling the place name I hadn't thought of in many years.

"Oh yes" she said, smiling in instantly recognition of the place. Her husband made a gesture of recognition as well.

Then silence. 

"Well great to see you again!" I said, after an awkward pause.

"Yes, bye!"

I never learned where in Illinois they lived, or anything else about them. I never learned why they had moved here. I think they moved back to Illinois when they left. I could have asked them as they were moving out, but by then it had begun to feel weird, to ask anybody any kind of question like that. 

There have been no exceptions to this rule of one-way conversation in the time I've lived here. It used to weird me out. I still does. but now I expect it.

I'm tempted to think is related to the nature of Scottsdale, and the transitory nature of residence here. But I think it goes deeper. It seems too universal for that.

After a while I began to joke that everyone here was in the witness protection program. I thought it might be about me somehow, but it just happened to J as well. It went exactly according to the script I knew. It was relief to hear her describe her interaction.

I hate to say this, but it reminds me of the trope of the Non-Playing Character (NPC) which is a widespread meme on the Internet. The idea of the NPC comes from interactive computer video games, the type where you play as a character and move throughout a world on some kind of story-quest. In these games, certain characters are programmed to provide simple interactions with your character, that supply the you with specific information and nothing else beyond that. If you try to talk to them within the game, they just tell you the same things over and over, or issue a set of simple phrases generated by the artificial intelligence of the game program.

I hesitate to use this term, as I said, as the term Non-Playing Character has become a dehumanizing insult in online culture. I know these people are other human beings, made in the image of God Almighty as we all are, and deserving of that respect. Yet this is actually how it feels while interacting with people around here--that I've found myself in a world of NPCs. It feels downright creepy.

I keep wondering how this all came to be, and if it has always been this way. Maybe I just never noticed.  Maybe I just have a different level of discernment now. Or maybe it is something new and horrible in civilization. 

The weirdest aspect of this is that it does not make feel lonely. Instead it seems to clear up the loneliness I might feel. Loneliness is something one feels around other people, when one feels the absence of connections that one wishes to exist. Now that I no longer expect such human connections with people---because such interaction seem impossible---I do not feel the lack. In a strange way it is liberating.

There are a few older residents here---people at least seventy and older. I see them from time to time from a distance. I haven't had a chance to talk to them, but I imagine that if I did speak to them I might have real human interactions. I still want to believe that. 

The Many Battles of Istanbul

It's Friday afternoon as I write this. I'm listening to the live stream from St. Mark in Boca Raton, where they are holding a special prayer service in coordination with the Greek Orthodox churches around the world. The service is in mourning for the reconversion of the basilica of Hagia Sophia into a mosque after ninety years as secular museum. All the church bells in Greece are tolling as I write this.

As I've written before, my visit to that building in early July 1992 was one of the stirring events in my life. I just commented on the live stream of the prayer service that it was one of the reasons I came to my faith in God. This is because it connected to me to all the Christians who have ever worshipped there---commoners and Emperors, saints and wretched sinners. For someone else it wouldn't have been important as a step to faith, but for me it was.

That trip in the summer of 1992 was one of the big turning points in my life. I could write a great deal about it. I kept a detailed journal. I feel like I came back greatly altered.

There was perhaps no bigger moment in that trip that the few days I spent in Istanbul, or as the Greeks still call it, Constantinople.

While I was there I stayed in a cheap hostel along the square near the train station. It was along a street with other cheap hotels and outdoor restaurants that catered to tourists. No doubt the entire quarter has been changed beyond recognition over the years, but in my mind I can still picture how it was twenty-eight years ago.

The room was on the second floor of the small hotel building, and from the balcony out on the street the street, one could see down the street with a clear view to Hagia Sophia, as well as the Blue Mosque next to it.

The latter structure was built by the Ottoman Turks after they had conquered the city in 1453---the event being commemorated by the live stream I am watching. The mosque was built specifically as an imitation of Hagia Sophia, with the intention of surpassing it in beauty, to show the superiority of Islam over Christianity.

Certainly the mosque is beautiful structure in its own right, and the interior is a marvel to beyond. But for me, there is no comparison with Hagia Sophia, which is almost a thousand years older.  There is an organic majesty inside Hagia Sophia, despite its desecration which destroyed so many of the mosaics there, which the Blue Mosque cannot compete with. But I suppose that is a matter of taste.

I spent almost the entire time in Istanbul in one of those two buildings. I had visited the city before, in 1985, so it was not a priority for me to explore it. Besides, much of the city is not very interesting outside the neighborhood around those two buildings. Back then if you tried to wonder around on your own, Turkish men would recognize you as a foreigner and approach you, hassling your for one reason or another, usually offering to provide a tour. I had just come from the Ukraine before going to Istanbul, so I pretended to speak only Ukrainian. I don't know if I was very convincing. All in all, it was easier to stay in the thick of the touristic area, as one was not easily singled out as one would be on the side streets.

While I was at the hostel I witnessed one of the most amazing sights of my life. One evening after dinner, while I was in my room, a massive storm front came upon the ancient city, darkening the sky over the the two structures side by side. I went out onto the balcony with a couple other guests and watched it play out, looking down the street towards the two massive buildings.

It was no ordinary thunderstorm, but one of those tempests that produced a quantity of magnitude of lightning that one rarely sees in ones life. At one point, at the peak of the storm, the thunderheads were aligned such that were directly over or in back of the two structures. The lightning bolts came down hard and thick, as if attracted by each structure, fighting back and forth with each other in a giant unceasing battle of electricity. I don't know if the structures themselves were the target of the bolts, or if they were striking the ground in back of them, but he effect was as if the electricity was flowing directly into them.

The storm seemed to stay in place an abnormally long time, unmoving while the lightning seem to strike the two structures repeated back and forth, as if replying to each other. Curiously the rain never reached the hotel. The entire drama took place at a distance from where I was.

Even at the time I thought I had been allowed to witness something beyond my comprehension to understand, something sublime and terrible. If it had happened today, I could take a video of it my smartphone and post it on Youtube. But in 1992 none of that was invented. We had to get along with witnessing things in person, with our own eyes.

The Furor is Burning Itself Out

A couple morning ago, after I woke up and lingered in bed, staring up at the dark ceiling, and checking for the first sign of daylight through the blinds, I had a peaceful feeling left over from a dream. In the dream I had been in my hometown and had visited a coffee shop run by a women's collective of some kind. I went inside the shop and bought some coffee. It was pleasant. I didn't feel out of place, as I always do now in such places, due to the overt politics that is pushed in my face, that tells me that I personally am what's wrong with the world. Instead it was just a coffee shop.

I miss those days. In the peacefulness of the morning, I wondered how long it would take to get back to something like that. For some reason the dream has left me feeling like the fever of the furor in America had already broken. Perhaps I'm imagining it, but I have this sudden sense as if the momentum of the rage is now retreating, like a deflating balloon.  It could never be sustained and now it is burning itself out.

Monsoon Season Has Arrived

I woke up at the usual time this morning, a little past 4:30. I lingered in bed a few moments before going out to the porch. When I finally motivated myself and opened the door I was greeted by a sound that I had not heard in months---rain. It was so startling to hear it that I had to lean out over the railing to draw in the aroma.

The first rain in Arizona always marks the start of the Second Summer---monsoon season. When I was younger, I imagined monsoons were violent weather events. In reality they are simply shifting weather patterns that bring moisture off the ocean to an otherwise arid region.

The clouds have been teasing us for weeks, growing dark at times, and even sending shoots of rain downwards, but without any rain reaching the ground. Finally this morning we got the first rain since April. Within a half hour it had stopped. Experiencing it was one of the benefits of getting up early.

The start of the monsoon season varies greatly from year to year. The average start is the third of July, as J found out (she keeps track of these things), but in my experience there is a huge standard deviation. Last year it barely arrived at all. But the first year we were year there were huge downpours in August.

When the heavy rains do come, they will flood the creek bed where I take my walks. I have not been out there in weeks due to the extreme heat. It will give me an excuse to return, and to check on the rabbits.

The Things That We Liberals Believe

When Lars texted me the other day from Spain, he brought up the U.S. presidential election by way of sending me a link to a video of the Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson. It was titled "Why Trump will win in 2020." He said our mutual friend Stefan had sent it to him. He wanted to know what I thought of it. Of course he disagreed with it, he said.

The video turns out to be from last November, made during the Democratic debates, which seems like a different era at this point. Back then Democrats were actually concerned about how Biden looked on camera!

But I never got the sense of what the title of the video was supposed to imply from its content, so there was little for me to comment on. I didn't get why Peterson thought Trump was going to win, other than a brief glimpse. I need juicier content than that, and I wouldn't expect it from Peterson. It's not his style to go out on a limb about politics.

But I appreciated that Lars wanted to discuss it. He is almost alone among anti-Trumpers that I know in being genuinely curious as to why we on our side believe and think the way we do.

As for Peterson, I was already familiar with his work. A couple years ago when I was doing my self-designed online college curriculum via Youtube videos, I added one of his courses---is 2017 Maps of Meaning course that he taught at the University of Toronto.---into my mix as an "elective" among my computer science courses.

I found the lectures interesting and thought-provoking. I was familiar with much of the underlying material regarding archetypes because of previous exposure to Joseph Campbell and Carl Jung. My late mother began reading Jung when I was in junior high school, and we would discuss Jungian ideas on the way down to visit her Jungian analyst in Boulder, so it became part of my worldview before I even became adult.

Like me, Peterson is a liberal but not a Leftist. Like me he is opposed to the current illiberal forms of Leftism that have taken over the Democratic Party. I share his strong opposition to Communism in this regard. In courses he is aware that his lectures may be the only voice speaking out against Stalinism that his students will hear during their college career. He does a great public service in this regard, as Communism is the de facto secular religion among many college faculty members now.

He's.a big fan of Dostoyevsky, and he brings him up in many of lectures in references to points he is making about sociology.  One of my favorite parts of his course was his explanation of how Dostoyevsky foresaw the descent of Russia into violent insanity as it became increasingly godless in the late Nineteenth Century.

Ultimately, however, Peterson and I do not share the same worldview. Peterson is fundamentally a Nietzschean. I find a lot that is interesting in Nietzsche and aspire to read more of his works, but ultimately Peterson can't get beyond Nietzsche's critique of Christianity, which he calls devastating. You can see this tortures him, and it has left him in a place of depressed nihilism about the world.

As a side note, since I'm reading Atlas Shrugged right now, I must add that it is impossible to take Ayn Rand seriously in her claim that her only philosophic influence was Aristotle. Much of her attitude about the strength of individuals seems directly cribbed form Nietzsche. Even if she didn't read him, she lived in a world that was had been remade intellectually in his wake, and she should have known that.

Peterson often speaks in his lectures about the dangers of looking into the darkness of the abyss, lest one become overwhelmed by the monsters. Lately the news has reported that in the wake of his wife's illness, Peterson has been suffering from mental illness and has withdrawn from public life. He has been seeking treatment in clinics around the world, receiving forms of psychotropic medication.  I do not know any details, so I cannot speculate on what is going on, but one cannot help but wonder if looking so hard at the monsters finally caught up to him. His many enemies delight in this, and use it as judgment against him.

When Lars sent me the video of Peterson talking about Trump, he asked me if I still thought Trump would win in November. He himself believes Trump will be finished off in the election. I told him that I was as confident as ever that Trump would win.

That Lars and I can have this kind of conversation at this moment of history is more than a little refreshing. His response to my opinion was not raging hatred but rather a suggestion of a friendly wager, which I am up for. If only it were this easy to get along with everyone.

One thing he told me that struck me as funny was his claim that despite our differences, 98% of us want the same things in the end. We just disagree about how to get there.

It's a nice sentiment, but I don't think it is true. It might be true for Lars and me, but we are both liberals (I am also a conservative, but that's not important here).

As for the wider scope in American politics, Lars's statement about how we all want the same things might have been true in the past, when we were talking about such things as the health care system, and how much government should be involved in it (an issue that I'm personally open to discussing many possible courses of action).

But at the moment, I can't help look at the Leftist illiberals on the other side and take away the idea that one of the things they want is for me and everyone like me to be dead (or to be silenced, shunned, re-educated, etc.).

I have seen more than a few videos, op-eds, and social media posts of Leftists saying they want to dismantle the United States as we know it. They want to institute a revolution that sweeps history clean of the toxic past, including Christianity, which they claim is a legacy of a racist and colonialist era.

But isn't this simply a difference in methods? Perhaps what we all are after is justice.  Is the Leftists' desire to see me dead just a difference in how to get to a state of greater justice?

But I'm not sure what justice means to them, other than whatever it needs to mean at the moment, to make people feel good about going along with their goal of power. The criteria keep shifting and are often contradictory. You aren't supposed to ask too many questions about what it means. That's the essence of Post-Structuralism---the non-fixability of meaning.

We've seen this kind of drama play out repeatedly in history, as Peterson reminds us in his lectures---the quest for a Year Zero reset that removes all the ills of the past. It's a great way to create piles of human skulls.

Thinking about all this, I'm inclined to put Dostoyevsky on my reading list after I finish Ayn Rand. Or maybe Solzhenitsyn (another favorite of Peterson). It seems like a natural progression.

Three Cheers for Zeke, the Masked Crusader of Brooklyn

It seems like a different era already, when Zeke called me from Brooklyn in March, just after the shutdown began. I hadn't talked to him since the previous summer when I had seen him in person in a little breakfast place just off Flatbush Avenue during my trip to New York. In the wake of that meeting, he had arranged for me to do some work at the design firm he co-owns in Portland.

When the shutdown began in March, and New York was hit hard, I had texted him as a matter of courtesy to see how things were in his neighborhood. He called me back and we had a nice friendly chat. He and his girlfriend were holed up in his flat in Williamsburg. He joked that one of the benefits of the shutdown was the home delivery of alcoholic beverages such as prepared cocktails. For a certain type of person this seems to have been a great bonanza that made up for part of the inconvenience of being self-quarantined. I don't drink much--only in the company of others--but I could tell that it was something that people would have a hard time giving up once things got back to normal.

At the time Zeke had already become an early convert to the idea of using masks to stop the spread of the disease. He was so early in this regard, and so passionate about it on social media, that he was interviewed by a local New York news affiliate. This took place against the backdrop of the Dr. Fauci and the World Health Organization insisting that masks had no effect on the spread of the disease. The national media was ridiculing anyone who stated that masks would make any difference.

Zeke and I are probably polar opposites in politics, but I know that only from his social media. It never comes up in conversations about business. He's extremely friendly and sanguine. So at the time it never occurred to politics would ever come into play on this issue. Rather, inspired by him, I went along with his suggestion. I didn't think it would actually do much to stop the disease, but it seemed like a decent idea, since every little bit that one could do would help.

At that time it was impossible to find any type of mask online or in stores, so I used a purple bandana from one of my visits to Burning Man, with the well-known festival logo on it. It's very common at the festival wear one around one's neck, to pull up over their faces in case of a sudden dust storm.

The next time I went to the neighborhood market, I tied the bandana around my neck and went inside with it pulled up over my face like a bandit.  I suppose I was one of the first people in north Scottsdale to do this. No one else in the store, employees or customers, was wearing any kind of face protection, as hardly one thought about it yet. I felt like an Arizona desperado. But no one flinched as I went around the store, mostly checking out what items were still missing, such as rice, which was nearly cleaned out at the time except for one bag of Black Japonica that sat lonely on the shelf for weeks on end.

Within a few weeks it seemed like everyone was clamoring for masks, and they were still impossible to buy, so people started making their own. J's mother made several types of patterns for us using the sewing machines at the community center of the RV park where they live in Mesa.

Looking back it seems obvious that all of this would get politicized, as it now has. Sometime in early June, when conversing with some Democrat friends of J's parents, I noticed their obsession with punishing those who didn't wear masks. It was clear they thought they had found a winning issue against their opponents. Only Trump supporters rebelled against masks, goes their reasoning, and in doing so they were. menace to public health.

Unfortunately many clueless Trump supporters have gone right along with this script, not realizing that this is precisely what their opponents want them to do. They want Trump supporters to make a big deal about how they ain't gonna wear no stupid mask. Then they can say, "look at those stupid Trump supporters! They don't believe in science!"

It's the kind of bad faith argument from the Left that repulses me about their entire cause. It's usually never about the specific thing they want. If they were actually interested in having everyone adopt masks for public health, they would stage their appeal in a completely different way. But they are not interested in unifying the country around the idea. They are interested in dividing the country, and unifying their side in a hectoring stance against their opponents.

If they were interested in public health they wouldn't endorse the idea of thousands of people crammed into a public plaza in Portland screaming through their cloth face coverings while standing right next to each other. They would discourage this. But they don't. The revolution is more important.

Of course there are plenty of folks who are indeed concerned with the public health aspects of it.  These people are on both sides. J's mother wears hers obsessively to protect her husband, who has a heart condition, and who is in the high risk group because of his age and his illness.

I'm still dubious that it does much to stop the spread of the disease, especially among healthy people. Moreover, it is debatable whether we actually want to try to stop the spread (instead of just slowing it down, to avoid overwhelming the hospital system, which was the original purpose in March, and which seems to have been successful). It's almost impossible to make rational scientific judgments about what is going on, given the unreliability of data as it is being reported. 

Nevertheless, my attitude remains essentially what it was when I went into AJ's market with my Burning Man bandana back in late March. Despite any doubts I may have about the efficacy of wearing them, I will do it as a matter of courtesy to others and in the pitching in to the common effort.  Also there is a city-wide executive order from the Mayor of Scottsdale, and so I will of course comply with all local health regulations.

Personally I'm not worried about getting the disease, and any effect it would have. I can't imagine a scenario where I would get such a heavy viral load that it would overwhelm my immune system. I'm confident that my immune system, if exposed to it, would be able to fight it off and produce the antibodies, and eventually the T-cell immunity, so that I become part of the herd immunity.

As for Arizona, people were freaking out last month about the spike in cases. But the death rate never shot up very much and now it looks like the peak has passed. I'm intrigued by the idea that air conditioning may be at the root of this recent spread, especially as the case loads are now spiking in the northern states. Perhaps this is a good thing, however, in that it may produce a healthy herd immunity before winter arrives, when the disease would be more deleterious in its effects.

Even after all this is over, it will take years, even decades, to sift through the data, to clarify what it means, comparing the apples of one country to the oranges of another, and to make judgments over what would have been the correct course of action. Everything right now has a political edge to it, which is unfortunate. I can smell bad faith arguments a mile away.  The Leftists want their appeal for everyone to wear masks to be a victory of power over their opponents.

I understand the pushback against this politicization by some of the President's supporters, but I cringe at it as well. They are only making it harder for him, and he has a lot to deal with, not the least of which is a Bad Faith press corps and the fake news media, which is always looking for the attack vector that they think will best take him down.

For a while it was "OMG we don't have enough ventilators", and then it was "testing, testing, testing," and now it is "mask up!", with the last one spoken with the tone of voice that implies "you idiots" at the end. Like everything on the Left, it's never just about what you do, but how you feel about it while you're doing it.

At least Zeke seems to get it. Like everyone else on his side, he forgot about the virus for six weeks while we obsessed over destroying Whiteness in America. But that having been accomplished, it's time to back to the virus. Looking at his social media feed, I see none of the political posturing of humiliation. Instead I think he just wants people to wear masks. That's a Good Faith stance. Bully for him.

The Magic Rule of Computer Programming

A view of my current desktop on my iMac showing Xcode with the iPhone simulator running my current version of Set. Notice the cheat button at the bottom of the phone screen, which was part of the extra credit in Professor Hegarty's assignment. I designed it so that it highlights two cards of a matching triplet, and then you have to pick the third one on your own. It turns out to be a good thing to implement because in testing the game while building it, you have to play it over and over again. If you've played Set you know this is not so easy at all!

When I sat down to do the midterm assignment for the latest Stanford CS193P course on designing iPhone apps--building a game of Set---I knew it would be challenging. I had just listened to Paul Hegarty's lecture on animation programming, and I knew the assignment called for building an app in which cards are dealt out from a deck in animated fashion, flying through the air to land in their right place on a grid of rows and columns.

I figured the parts of the assignment leading up to that step would be fairly easy. I told myself I understood the basics. So for the moment I set aside the animation part and went about building a simple version of the game app in which the cards just appear automatically in their place on the screen, with the correct symbols on them for a game of Set.

Yikes was I ever wrong!

Even this simpler part turned out to be way more challenging than I expected. Normally I wouldn't mind. In the type of programming I usually do for work---building web applications on servers, and also coding how things look in a web browser---I can almost always do what I need to do by a careful step-by-step approach of testing and debugging. In that kind of programming, I know how to get into the nitty gritty and track down whatever is going wrong until I can fix it. It's like being a Canadian Mountie who "always gets his man." It's a system that always works.

But iPhone programming is a whole new ballgame for me. For one thing, to build iPhone apps you have to use Apple's own software, called XCode. Moreover you have to use a special programming language that's new to me, and (most importantly) you have to use special libraries in that language for how things are displayed on the phone screen.

It's this last part that really threw me off.  The logic of the underlying coding is easy for me to understand, but in the end, if it doesn't look and behave right on the screen, it's just bogus, as Professor Hegarty would say.

In this case, when I set out to make the simpler version of the game, it seemed to work at first. But when I had the program deal out more cards, as is supposed to happen during the game, everything was messed up. The grid on the screen reoriented itself to make room for these additional cards, but no new cards actually appeared. There were just blank spaces on the screen where the new cards were supposed to be.

Moreover the cards already on the screen, the ones that got shifted to make room for new ones, were messed up in a way that seemed random. Some were correct, but others weren't the right size anymore, and the symbols inside them stuck out beyond the edges of the card. There didn't seem to be any pattern to why some cards behaved correctly and others didn't. Not good!

It didn't make sense to me. At first I tried to get into the nitty gritty in my usual way, which involves having the program itself print out debugging messages that tell me what's going on at any given point in the program. This is the tried and true way that most programmers do it, and in my usual method of programming, this works in almost every case to track down the issue.

But with the way things are done iPhone programming, and the new graphics libraries from Apple, I couldn't do that. In some places where I wanted to have messages printed out, you aren't even allowed to put in those kinds of statements. Even the ones I was able to put in seemed to indicate that everything was ok, and that my program ought to be working!

It was one of those moments when I questioned whether I had the chops to do this. If I had been enrolled in the Stanford course, I could use the class discussion board to contact the professor, but being a "party crasher" with the free version, I was on my own. Nothing in my deep-dive Google searches or on Reddit helped at all. The material was brand new. I couldn't find anyone else who had even tried to build this assignment yet.

In a way this situation is very liberating. It felt like a throwback to decades ago, before there were dozens of sites on the web with all kinds of answers to common programming issues,. You had to figure things out on your own often from documentation in books, which you had to go buy in Barnes and Noble.

For a few hours, being stuck like this, I went through a range of emotions, most of them bad. I'm not really enrolled in this course, I told myself. There is nothing at stake except my ego and my own resolution to finish this assignment. Maybe I'll just call it a day and move on to the next assignment.

But it would sure be nice to figure it out, I thought. If I could make it work right, then I would really own the knowledge in a deep way, which is exactly what the assignment was supposed to do. Wow, this place Stanford really is great for learning things.

But what to do? Fortunately I had a fallback.  It came to my rescue and saved the day. I call it the Magic Rule of Computer Programming.

The Magic Rule of Computer Programming is not a standard term. You won't find it on the web. It's just something I made up.

In fact I didn't even call it that until just now, because I had to call it something for this blog entry. Nevertheless it's pretty accurate as a term. It's something I discovered years ago that gets me out of 99% of any kind of programming jam like this, where something isn't working and I can't figure out why.

The Magic Rule of Computer Programming comes from the realization that you are never really out of ideas about what to do. You only think you're out of ideas.

In almost every case that I'm stuck like this, and it seems hopeless, I just ask myself this question:

"OK, what's something I could do, to make a change to the program, that might touch on the issue at hand in some peripheral way, but which I don't think will actually do anything to fix the problem?"

Surprisingly it's usually an easy question to answer. There is almost always something one I can try to do, but which I have shunted off in my mind as not the right solution, because it doesn't seem like it would do anything.

So I force myself to try the thing that I think won't work. Most of the time it turns out to be the right thing to do to fix the problem.

On a basic level, it is simply the idea that when you are stuck, do something you can do.

And if that doesn't work, there's often a second obvious thing to do, just like it, that I've already made up my mind as being hopelessly wrong. Ninety-nine percent of the time one of these obviously "wrong" things turns out to fixes the problem.

So in my temporary despair about the iPhone midterm assignment, and having resolved that I would complete the assignment even if it took six months of plugging away, I applied my Magic Rule.

I tried the one thing that I could do, that might change the way the program worked in regard to the display of the missing cards. I expected nothing would happen.

Lo and behold it fixed it! The newly dealt cards began appearing on the screen. Only after it worked did I realize why it had to be the right solution.

Likewise a second application of the Magic Rule cleared up the issue of the symbols sticking out past the edges of the cards.

Woo hoo! I was on a roll. I was going to finish this thing in no time.

This morning I hit yet another despair-inducing dead end and had to fall back on my rule again. It's been a roller coaster experience in the last few days.

Fortunately there is no deadline and when I'm done I think I'd be ready to work in Silicon Valley, although that is definitely not my goal, for many reasons. These days I measure myself by this type of abstract criteria of excellence, which I alone determine.

In programming things tend to balance out, as far as effort. Some things you think will be hard turn out to be easy. To get full regular credit for Hegarty's midterm assignment, his students were allowed to skip making the "swerve" design on the cards in the Set deck, and also to skip making the stripes inside the design (instead using simpler versions of these). One could do those things for extra credit, he said.

Of course I was going to do all the extra credit.  It turns out both of those things was fairly easy, although I'm still working on the right bezier curves for the swerve, as you can see from the image above. At least it doesn't look like a bowtie anymore.

Among other things, I've banned myself from writing to Professor Hegarty until I've finished every last bit of every assignment in the course, including the extra credit. Not until I've mastered the material will I feel worthy of telling him what an awesome course he made. No doubt he would immediately understand the Magic Rule as I've stated it.

Does the Magic Rule apply to real life? It's tempting to think so, but computer programming is not real life. There's no guarantee something will work in real life situations, the way there is with computers, which are always logical. But I think it's a pretty good philosophy to keep in mind.

In any case, at the the rate I'm going, I'll be ready in another day or two to tackle that animation of cards flying out from the deck that I mentioned. I'm sure it will be a piece of cake!

The State of the Christian World

The Cathedral of St. Peter and St. Paul in Nantes. which burned this past week. See this video about these two saints and how they reflect the two types of communication we receive from the Holy Spirit

I can tell I'm becoming a junkie for religious livestreams because I can offer reviews of the various liturgies from around North America.

The Latin Mass from St. Mary in Pine Bluff, which begins at 5:30 a.m. Pacific Time, is visually beautiful yet one can hear almost nothing the priest says. This is actually close to the experience of attending a Latin Mass in person. It's not mandatory that you understand the priest. He is there to lead the sacrifice of the mass. Only at specific times is it necessary to hear him, so it's mothing I can complain about.  Much of the time all you see are the motions of the priest, with the music filling the church.

It's always a jolt when the priest comes out to give the sermon in English (usually he re-reads the Epistle and the Gospel in English, that he just read in Latin at the altar). Father Heilman at St. Mary gives powerful sermons that address current events in a stirring way, so it is worth tuning in. In the past he has mentioned participating in protests at the State Capitol in nearby Madison. He pronounced "Wisconsin" the way a native does, with the first vowel like a short 'e'.

Not surprisingly this week he mentioned the attacks on Catholic churches around the nation, although he did not include the fact that another French cathedral has burned, this time in Nantes. It was heartbreaking to wake up to this in my news feed yesterday and brought back sick memories from last year.

Fortunately the roof was saved this time, but nevertheless the fire destroyed a five-hundred year old pipe organ. In this case it was confirmed to be arson, set by a refugee from Rwanda who was angry at the prospect of being deported by the French government. He was being supported by the diocese. It's impossible for me to imagine this mindset of disrespect and hatred towards one's hosts, no matter what has happened to you.

In the other Latin mass I watch--- the one from St. Joan of Arc in Post Falls, Idaho which comes on at 9:30.---the priest Father Rapoport is young and less skilled as a preacher. Thus his sermons aren't as stirring as Father Heilman in most weeks, but I still like to listen to them. This week his message was mostly about having the proper reverence in church, and to avoid whispering and to make sure that one take's ones children to the bathroom in an appropriate way during mass. He mentioned that the church is growing, and soon there could be many hundreds in the congregation each week, once restrictions are lifted from the shutdown. It's important to establish good parish habits now, he said, before it gets out of hand.

The Latin mass at the Idaho church is plainer, with a simpler altar and fewer altar boys. But the microphone at St. Joan picks up much more of the spoken liturgy which is one of the reasons I tune in. Alas the live streaming from St. Joan is not as dependable, however, and sometimes the Youtube stream doesn't even come on at the scheduled time, or it gets dropped after a few minutes for some reason. Everything's a trade off.

As for the Greek Orthodox liturgies, I've noticed the ones from Holy Transfiguration in Marietta and St. Mark in Boca Raton both begin at 5:45 A.M. Pacific, but the Holy Transfiguration liturgy seems to take longer by at least a half hour.

Overall the Greek Orthodox liturgies are more moving to listen to, as they are almost completely sung, with everything clearly audible, and with the priests and helpers trading off (there are even women who participate, always with head coverings). At St. Mark, sometimes all the celebrants sing together, especially announcing the Gospel, and it sounds like a barbershop quartet. The oldest priest--he is at least an octogenarian--is the high tenor. His voice is shaky while chanting by himself, sometimes mushing the words, but he comes through in a beautiful clear tone when he exerts himself.

At Holy Transfiguration, the chanting sounds more like a monastery, with a constant background chant underneath the main celebrant. The church itself is smaller, so the tones resonate against the walls in this way.

Otherwise the liturgies are both almost identical, uncannily so, even down to the list of specific prayers for the week, which are mandated by the orthodox patriarch of North America according to a specific calendar.

This week the Orthodox churches specifically commemorated the Christians who were killed or displaced by the 1974 Turkish invasion of Cyprus, a war that is still technically only in cease fire.

There is also to be a special prayer service to be held this Friday at exactly 4:53 P.M. (Eastern Time, I take it) to commemorate the Fall of Constantinople in 1453. It is part of a special worldwide orthodox prayer in response to the first Muslim prayers that will be offered in Hagia Sophia this Friday, when the structure reverts to being a mosque again after ninety years as a secular museum. I'm definitely planning to tune in for that.

As for the Armenian liturgies from Sourp Hagop (St. James) and Sourp Kevork (St. George), I'm still getting accustomed to the subtle difference between the two, as I don't speak any Armenian. The former is inside Montreal whereas the latter is in the suburbs of that city, giving them an obviously different feel. I can tell the interiors apart by sight, but that is all for the moment. I recently discovered that St. John in San Francisco offers a livestream of their Armenian liturgy as well, so I might add that to my livestreams next Sunday.

Armenia is the oldest Christian nation on earth, the king having converted in the early 4th century before Constantine made Christianity the official religion of the Roman Empire (while himself remaining a pagan until the end of this life).

As it happens, in the last week Armenia and its a muslim Azerbaijan have gone to war again. There were riots in the Azerbaijani capital in support of an invasion and a conquest of the Armenian capital. It's hard to get truthful reporting about what is going on, as it is all but ignored in the western press.

I'm still looking for a good Coptic livestream. I think it would be a good addition to the mix.

Update: The St. John Armenian livestream (which comes on at 10:30 Pacific) has a scrolling feed that translates the Amernian into English in real time! Awesome!! The priest gives the announcements in both Enlish and Armenian, so I got a rundown on the parish. There's no one in the church right now besides the priests as the governor of California has shut everything down. Also I wonder if they are breaking the law against singing in church from the executive order signed by the governor (the liturgy is sung by the priests). A quick search tells me the order is being challenged in court on religious freedom grounds. I just "checked in" to their online service on their website, which means I enter the raffle for a handmade Armenian church facemasks. The priest just announced they are looking for help producing their livestream. Makes me wish I knew something about that (other than as a watcher).

Update2 : This Coptic liturgy stream from St. Mary & St. John in the East Bay also does transcription and translation in live time. YES!! Only downside is that it's the same time as other ones I already watch. I love watching things in real time. I feel like a football fan at one of those sports bars where they have all the games on at once. Some of them I'll have to watch on a delay throughout the week (It does make it easier now that I've renounced watching the NFL on Sundays).

My Type of Computer Gaming

Lars texted me yesterday. He made it out of South America and is now is southern Spain, living temporarily in a condo with a view of the sea. Even as a native Swede, the prices of Europe compared to Ecuador were a shock to him.

"Like a gut punch every time you step outside," I told him.

It can make you want to stop eating. Lars is much more social than I am, and he has already made friends at his favorite drinking hangouts. Those kind of expenses add up quickly.

Having started his new job working remotely, he is immersed in a crash course of the cloud platform of his new company. This is in addition to the self-imposed training he undertook in Ecuador during the shutdown to master the cloud infrastructure of the major players in the field, which at this moment happen to be Amazon and Google, with Microsoft in third place. Now he needs to learn his company's propriety architecture, which sits on top of these big providers. Learning this kind of thing feels like a full-time job into itself. He said that he might be ready to actual start doing his normal job in a month or two.

I replied with an update of my own situation. I said I was ecstatic because Stanford had just released the Youtube videos to their CS193P course on iOS programming---building apps for iPhones and iPads. It was something I'd been wanting to learn, and I'd half-started it a couple years back when I was doing my "virtual computer science degree", mostly through MIT but also through Stanford, MIT has put almost their entire comp sci curriculum online. Stanford is more selective that way, but what they do make available is usually the juicy advanced courses like this one, that you can't find anywhere else online. When you go through these courses, you know you are getting a Silicon-Valley-level education on a subject.

Paul Hegarty teaches this iPhone programming course on a regular basis, and they have been putting up the course materials online over the years. But they had not updated it since 2017.

For some computer platforms and languages, this would hardly matter, but for anything involving Apple, the coding required to build apps gets out of date very quickly. If you do that kind of work, you have to keep abreast of the new technology incessantly. This spring Apple came out with a whole new way to design and build iPhone apps, and thus all the old Stanford courses were obsolete, even more than usual.

Normally I would have gone to other sources online to learn the current Apple way of doing things, but I absolutely love Hegarty's lectures. He is the kind of instructor who has catapulted me to a whole new level of understanding of what lectures can do.

He has an amazing rapport with his classroom audience, even though one never sees them or hears them in the videos. I can tell by his tone of voice, and the way he scans the room at different points, that he is highly aware of the difficulty of certain topics and he knows how to explain things in a way that circumvents the common ways that people might misunderstand something. I used to try to do this kind of thing when I taught university physics---pausing in the right way, and emphasizing certain points that would be difficult to learn. Hegarty is a skilled master at this from many years in the classroom. If I ever teach physics again, I will have a new level of understanding of technique from him.

So in March when I discovered that I couldn't learn the current way of doing iPhone programming fro his course, I decided to go through the old course from 2017. I liked his style so much that I decided it would be worth it. It would put me on par with coders from last year, and then I could learn the new way from some other course online.

But that was easier said than done. I wasn't enthusiastic about it. I listened to the lectures and took notes, but I didn't do the homework assignments---building the required apps---which meant at the end of the course I had only a passing knowledge of the subject, without really being able to do it on my own beyond the basics. At least that counted for something.

Then two weeks ago I learned that Hegarty had put his new course online, that he had taught this past spring, that was updated for the new way of building iPhone apps. It felt like Christmas to me when I heard this. I resolved to do all the homework this time, like I was a real Stanford student.

The only downside is that because of the shutdown, Hegarty had to teach this quarter's course from his office desk, almost entirely through screen capture. I miss the subtle interplay he has with his students, that comes from watching their faces as he teaches. But he's such a brilliant and experienced lecturer that much of that comes through anyway.

Hegarty always starts his courses by going through a demo of how to build a version of the game Concentration with a Halloween theme. It must be his favorite holiday. Right now I'm halfway through the challenging midterm assignment which involves building a version of the card game Set, in which one matches three cards depending on certain criteria. The mechanics of the game itself is not hard to program, but the assignment requires implementing complex animation, including making the cards fly out from a deck as they are dealt out on the screen. At the moment I have only a vague idea of how to do this based on the lectures, but experience has taught me that I'll figure it out if I'm persistent. Nothing like that has ever defeated me in coding, for the last thirty years. You just have to be patient enough to keep trying.

Neither Lars or I play computer games as a hobby.

"This is our computer gaming," I told him,

How I Learned to Hate Andy

continued from A Man in the Groove of Georgetown

Whatever criteria that the Georgetown residence staff had used to match roommates that fall may have produced some perfect pairings---as I said, I got along fine with my initial roommate---but in the case of Pat, it failed hard. The match-up produced nothing but misery and drama, and kicked off a series of events that would lead to me getting a new room and a new roommate in Xavier Hall.

Pat hated being in Andy's presence from the moment they met---not Andy B., who would become my second roommate, but the other Andy, who came from North Carolina. I'd read Look Homeward, Angel, and very much enjoyed it, to the point of designing my high school graduation announcements based on that theme, but at the time, Andy was the first person I had ever met from that state. I think he was from Raleigh.

He was large--as tall as Pat, but instead of the loose-limbed slackness of a bass player, his frame was expansive and big-boned. Walking around his room, he took large encompassing strides like a basketball center, his long arms, moving in outwards to take up as much space as possible. He shook your hand with a solid grip when introducing himself, which he did unabashedly, in the thick tidewater accent of his state, and with a voice of extraverted confidence. He was like a giant friendly dog, one with sparkling clear blue eyes that gave him a blissful faraway countenance even while he looked right at you. Above all, he liked to talk.

"Hah thair, y'all! Ah'm Andy from Nowth Carahlahna!" Pat would screech, in the rankest imitation of his roommate's tidewater accent, while gripping the sides of his head in anguish. It was torture for him to be in the same room.

Not surprisingly the worst clash was over music. Andy was much less interested in the esoteric multitrack masterpieces in Pat's collection. He had his own music, and his tastes ran to hard-driving Southern Rock. He wanted to play it out loud and fill the room and hallway with it, to create atmosphere. One of his favorite artists was called the Marshall Tucker band, which Pat mutated into its obvious vulgar insult parody, spitting the name out in disgust.

Within twenty-four hours of moving in, Pat was going nearly insane, and he made no secret about it. He drew sympathy from a gang of friends he assembled in those first few days, from others on the first floor he took into his confidence--Dan F., Karl from Long Island, Andy B., and me---as well as a Trina and Vanessa, two girls who were roommates on the second floor.

Almost immediately we were all aligned against Andy, and this is the part of the story, looking back at this, where I am ashamed to remember how easily I fell into this opposition to Andy, because of Pat's dislike for him, even though Andy never did a thing to me directly to make me want to dislike him. In fact, it was just the opposite. Andy was never anything but friendly. He seemed impervious to any knowledge that anyone disliked him, or could possibly dislike him. He seemed to have no off button, and was eternally upbeat. It was as if Pat could insult him right to his face and Andy would react as if Pat were speaking a foreign language and would go on with what he was saying, filled with eagerness to explain everything about himself and his own life.

It was a character flaw of mine---no small one--that I could be drawn into ganging up on someone like that, someone whose worst sin against me was trying to make friends. I let Andy become a cartoon figure in my imagination, and I never questioned what that meant in a moral sense. Looking back I wonder who he was, and if he was wounded at all by our ostracism. If he was, he never seemed to show it.  His clear blue eyes seemed to see beyond the pettiness of the moment.

The reason I went along with it, however, is obvious to me. I wanted to be a part of that group in the dorm. It was like an intoxicating drug, to belong to a posse of other young people my same age, and to be accepted by them as an exotic piece of the puzzle of fellowship. Those first days in the dorm, when everyone is away from home for the time. is magical. It is at this moment that long-lasting friendships can be formed in a way that is less available even as one goes through college, and become almost impossible in one's later adult life, except in rare circumstances.

To be fair, Pat never made antipathy towards Andy contingent on his own friendship. I doubt he wouldn't have cared at all, if I have befriended Andy on my own. To Pat it was all about the fact that it drove him crazy to be inside the same eight-by-ten-foot room as Andy. Everything could be solved if that situation was changed. If it felt like disloyalty to my new friends, to consider Andy anything less than obnoxious, that was purely in my own imagination. I enjoyed the emotional drama of it.

At least I'm spared from having to know that we caused Andy grief by our behavior. As far as I know, he adjusted well to the room switches we would later undertake, and he didn't give us any further thought.  I hope he didn't. I get the idea that he found plenty of activity outside of Xavier Hall in the wider campus, through his classes and other people he met. No doubt he introduced himself to everyone on campus at one point, until he found enough like-minded souls who weren't put off by his brand of extraversion. He was better off for it.

 If I met him today, I'd probably want to apologize for being a jerk, or least projecting that attitude, but I suspect he would have long since forgotten it, which is to his credit.

A Man in the Groove of Georgetown

continued from When We Were All Democrats

During the weeks I had spent out at my aunt and uncle's place in suburban Virginia before the start of my freshman year, they had put me up in a spare bedroom in the basement next to the family television room. I had no particular agenda while I was there. It was just a cushion time to allow myself to get used to being in the East.  Compared to the openness of Colorado, the East felt lush with its overpowering greenness and dripping with humidity. The incessant sound of insects overwhelmed my ears whenever I went outside, although it seemed like I was the only one who noticed it..

In the languor of the humid August heat, I mostly hung out with my cousin Chris, who was exactly the same age as me, and had also just graduated from high school.

I had plenty of free time just to lounge around in the style of idleness and boredom as only teenagers can do. There simply wasn't enough good things on television to fill one's time without feeling as if one's brain was rotting, so n those days before the Internet and computer games, this often meant reading books, sometimes one right after another in succession. I did an amazing amount of my reading this way, and my reading habits suffered in later years when I no longer needed to fill the time this way.

In the television room of the Virginia house, I found a shelf containing a small library of paperbacks that included some of the works of Kurt Vonnegut. The paperback editions had a distinctive theme in the covers, each with an identifiable color. They were appealing on a book shelf sitting next to each other. It made you want to read all of them.

In high school I had read Vonnegut's Cat's Cradle, which had a scarlet cover in that edition, and had very much enjoyed it, as did many of my friends. Vonnegut was as close to mandatory reading as contemporary fiction got among young men at the time.

After reading it, we had delighted in adopting the terminology of the religion of Bokononism that Vonnegut creates in that story, which is portrayed as a deist Caribbean variant of Buddhism, with calypsos as sacred hymns, and with an emphasis on appreciating the active role of coincidence in one's life, including making connection with strangers who may turn out to be part of one's life "team." In the book the term Vonnegut uses for one's life team is a karass. Acting with one's karass, in a loose and even unaware collaboration, one does the will of the Almighty without being aware of it most of the time. It's impossible to know everyone who is in one's karass. It may only become obvious later in life.

Among the Vonnegut books I found on my cousin's shelf which I hadn't yet read were Slaughterhouse Five and Breakfast of Champions. As only a recent high school graduate could do, I ripped through these works, pouring through them while spending lounging on the basement couch, and when we went on a camping trip in southern Virginia, where I read them while lying on a cot in the screened tent between trips out on to the lake to go water skiing. Reading Vonnegut provided conversational material with my cousin and my uncle Mark, who had both read all the books on the basement shelf.

As it happened, giving myself a crash course in the works of Vonnegut turned out to be a good move, Once I got to Xavier Hall, I found that my new dorm friend Pat was an even bigger fan of Vonnegut, to the point of having memorized an substantial collection of short selections from Vonnegut's works. He could recite passages at will to a humorous effect appropriate to the moment. I knew but a fraction of the ones I had at the top of his memory.

He knew all about Bokononism, so in a way we had religion in common from the start. We passed each other's cathechism quizzes with ease.

"If you wish to study a granfalloon,.." I might begin,

"...remove the skin of a toy balloon," Pat would say, grinning with delight while completing Vonnegut's explanation in Cat's Cradle for this invented term, one that referred to the surface-level leagues and associations of our lives which are not true karasses. Instead they are the empty-of-purpose human-created teams such as being in the same fraternity, or being from the same town, or being alumni of the same school.

Pat found it funny that I was from a place called "Fort Collins". One of his few points of reference for the West was a minor character in Slaughterhouse Five, a U.S. Army officer who came from Cody, Wyoming. When I'd read the book, I hadn't identified with that character, since he was a World War II soldier, but in Pat's fanciful associations, the character and I went right together in his mind.

"Do they have Indians out there?" he asked, jokingly. He said he pictured my hometown as a wooden stockade with a calvary regiment, like a movie western.  I told him there had been such a fort, but it had been decommissioned a hundred years before. Yet I soon sensed there was no need to dwell on this type of literal truth with him. Instead it was more fun to let him build up a mental picture that we both knew was inaccurate but which could be the source of a whimsical slant that relieved the tedium of everyday life. In early Eighties it was still relatively easier to entertain these romantic anachronistic misapprehensions about other regions of the country.

In coming East I had thus transformed from an ordinary eighteen-year-old kid into a living breathing incarnation of an exotic region of the country. I liked it. It made me feel as if it imparted some edge to me over the other kids at Georgetown from the East, one that somewhat evened a deficit of sophistication that I imagined was always against me.

Pat soon set me straight on my delusion that everyone at Georgetown had come there to study at the School of Foreign Service. He was enrolled instead in the College of Liberal Arts, which everyone just called by its initials CLA, and which allowed a much broader selection of electives than the focused curriculum I had signed up for. He thought I was nuts for forcing that kind of unnecessary strictness on my studies.

His art for the Art House was music, and in his case, it was a bona fide passion that was one of his main hobbies, both in its creation and its appreciation. As I would learn, he was skilled at the electric bass guitar (or at least I think it was the bass). He hadn't brought it down with him at the start of the semester, so it was a while before I saw him play it. Given my experience with other musicians over the years, I now see him as almost the epitome of someone who can play that instrument well. He had the correct body type---long and lean with a slackness of posture, yet able to stand with a solidity that would allow one to to bounce and sway with a sustained rhythm, manipulating the strings without losing any steam over an entire performance.

From Pat I soon realized how superficial was my knowledge of music, it having been gathered mostly from top 40 AM radio, the playlist rotation on mTV, and a few albums owned by myself or my parents. I  having introduced to more refined tastes by my cooler friends in high school, but with Pat I learned that I had barely scratched the surface of contemporary musical knowledge.

I was surprised, for example, to learn from him that a band that had made one of the popular music videos of that era, whom I vaguely assumed had been making their debut with that video,  actually possessed a long and celebrated discography going back into the 1970s.  Pat could explain the evolution of their sound from the first album to the video I knew, and why it signaled a new era in their production techniques to accommodate the trends of the video era.

His tastes reflected the rarified ones of a true band musician who had learned to distinguish the creative from the stale and non-innovative.  Above all else he loved the album-producing masters of the Seventies who had never released singles for the radio, but whom other other well-known musicians had emulated in their own work. He was a connoisseur of their high artistry of electronica and analog multi-track recording. He had brought down a selection of his best vinyl with him from Philadelphia, and these found regular play in his room in Xavier as soon as he had set it his stereo.

I picture him best lying on his bed in his room in Xavier, looking up at the ceiling with his eyes closed, his hands propped behind his head on the pillow, wearing a t-shirt and long-legged jeans, and also with the giant bulb-like earphones on his head, the type that had gone out of style for normal everyday use in the age of portable stereos.

The earphones would be connected to his nearby stereo by a thick cable, and on the turntable, an album of one of the artists of his collection would be rotating at thirty-three and a third revolutions per minute, sending the needle of the arm through the tightening spiral groove in the vinyl, reproducing at will in his headphones the tapestry of sound that the musicians had willed into existence through their effort and genius.

When not wearing headphones, he played his albums over the speakers only with his door shut, alone or with a trusted friend. If he thought you might appreciate his collection, he might share samples with you.  Otherwise he didn't push his preference and offered no critique or judgment of your own. In that way he was the perfect bassist, gathering in the sounds of all others around him while riding the steady beat, and sustaining it a way that let others play their own melodies on top of it.

Conversations with him were thus a constant improvisation of the musical and poetical. He could  mutate a song lyric he knew instantly into a funny reference to current events, or a to someone we knew on campus.  The mutated lyric would become the preferred patois by which we referred to that person.

On our way to hear the university president speak give a welcome address to the freshman class in the campus chapel, Pat spontaneously mutated a line from obscure song by a British progressive rock band of the 1960s, replacing the name Timothy Leary in the lyric with the university president's name, and  singing aloud Timothy Healy's dead. No,  no, no, he's on the outside looking in. 

I didn't know that song at the time, so I had no idea why he was singing the name that way. I barely knew who Timothy Leary was, as all that Sixties stuff was ancient history by 1983. But it was great fun to imitate him. To this day when I hear that song, I can't help but change the lyrics in my head.

Some Are Carpenters' Wives

Last night I woke up in the middle of the night, having just had a dream about an old friend of mine.

Normally I don't write about dreams, or pay much attention to them, but in this case, after waking from the dream, I was struck about normal the dream was. There was very little of the surreal quality that normally occurs in a dream. Instead it felt much like a normal real-life conversation I would have had with my friend, if I were to see him today.

I last saw him seven years ago, and we had our last real conversation in 2012. We were once very close but we drifted away years ago. Over the years our conversations grew less intimate and more formal. Our interests diverged. Our estrangement as close friends, however, predates the political break I've had with many people I once held as friends.

He and I have great differences in the way we see the world, and in our political philosophies, but he has never been a great user of social media, except in the case of LinkedIn, where makes occasional posts that are related to his position with a large international organization that does work in the environmental field. He doesn't repost complaints from celebrities or harangue other people for their political heresies, like so many other people I once was friends with. As a result I'm fairly certain we could still have a cordial conversation, if we ever met again.

That's exactly what happened in the dream. It was a completely normal conversation, catching up with each other and our lives. There was no hidden rancor. I didn't feel like he was setting me up for a "gotcha" sting like so many of my leftist friends, who have come to think I must be stupid and easily led into their traps, because they believe all people who disagree with them are stupid in that way.  So the dream felt quite refreshing.

In real life, my old friend is a busy man with many responsibilities in his organization. I've long since faded in his consciousness among the sea of people he knows. As part of his responsibilities, he has to talk to people all day long by phone, giving orders and relaying messages. The last time I talked to him, he bemoaned that his whole job consisted of the same phone conversations over and over.

As such, during the dream, as I talked to him, we were interrupted by somebody related to his work, an employee of his, and he had to turn and talk to that person. This too felt exactly as it would have taken place in real life.

The only surreal part of the dream occurred at this moment. While he talked to his subordinate, I turned and looked the other way and saw that I was inside his house. I saw his wife, at a distance, and she recognized me. She's a lovely person that I have known since shortly after they met, and I went to their wedding twenty years ago. She smiled and came over to greet me.

Thinking about her reminded me of a realization I had years ago, after I left New York and came back to Colorado. At the time I tried to make contact with my old circle of friends, many of whom were still close to each other, and got together for common activities. I was at a party, hosted by the friend I've mentioned and his wife, that included most of the old friends we knew. At the time they lived in Boulder. I hadn't seen many of those people in a while.

After the party I realized I had spent most of the time talking not to my old circle of friends, but to their spouses, both male and female, including my friend's wife who was in the dream. Talking to them felt normal, as if I could be myself and talk about anything that came up. They treated me as a normal human being, whereas the interactions with my old friends felt uncanny, as if they could only see me as the person I used to be years ago, even as they still got along with each other. I felt like a musician at a concert trying to perform his current work, whereas the people in the audience only wanted to hear the tired old hits from years ago, that had no traction in me anymore.

I had been away for years, of course, so in a way this was natural. Yet I had kept up with all of them, and had visited Colorado regularly, so it's not like there was a lack of continuity. I knew at the time that something else had happened, a deeper split among us, that had separated me permanently from my old friends. I knew it would never be the same with them, and since that time I have lost the expectation of intimacy of fellowship with them that I once had. Only in a few cases is the friendship still alive, in a way that is not simply a legacy of a friendship from years ago.

This fading away of the expectation of closeness with them made it easier when politics came between us as well. Around four years ago on Facebook it became apparent that many of the people I once knew had adopted the stance of intolerant leftism that sees everything as political, and sees everyone who disagrees with them as morally heinous. By then I had enough detachment from them that I could say goodbye to them in some way, that they didn't even know was a goodbye, and remove myself from their awareness, eventually deactivating my Facebook account. I had no desire for any kind of final statement to them. I could not bear to witness the kind of ugliness that had overtaken them, in their enlisting in what I saw as an army of contracted hatred. I preferred to remember them the way I once knew them.

A couple days ago, right after I wrote the last blog piece about Portland, I had felt an almost tectonic shift of awareness in myself. I realized that although part of me still longed to see many of my old friends, I had no desire to talk to them.  I might want to see them and wave to them from afar, with a friendly smile that would be sincere. I would even be willing to listen to them, if they had something they needed to say to me, but I had nothing to say to them, so long as they were in the grips of the kind of madness they had fallen into. I am so disappointed in so many of them this way.

I know in a few cases that there are old friends who do not at all want to see me, nor to listen to me, but would be fine giving me an earful of what they think about me. It's their right to think of me as they wish. At the present time, I would simply look at them and turn away.

This awareness of personal boundaries is one that I had never quite experienced in my life. I had always granted others this kind of boundary---of not wanting to talk to me, for various reasons---but I had never truly granted it to myself. Afterward I realized this, I meditated on this awareness. It gave me great peace,  one that preserves the sincere charity I still hold for them, as brothers and sisters in this world, yet with a newfound nuance of  reserve and detachment, one which does not feel injurious, and which is not meant as injurious to them

I felt I had finally let them go at last. Then last night the dream came to me, and I woke up, and stayed awake so that the dream became part of my conscious recollections. I went outside onto porch and said prayers to God with my friends in mind.

Some of these friendships are gone forever, and I will never these people again, because in so many cases seeing them depended on my initiating contact, which I no longer intend to do. But in some cases, through happenstance or through their own initiation, I might see them, and we will talk again, in some way cordial or friendly. Whether that happens is not up to me, and that is the part I am at peace with.