Rain on the Fourth Day of Christmas

Today the gift was being able to wake up in the dark to the sound of a soaking rain outside. The front was arriving at dusk last night. I went out into the park to look at the low grey clouds that were seeping across the sky in bands. The leading edge of the large front from the ocean. 

This morning I woke up before three and went to pray the Rosarry, and then came back and slept until past six o'clock, and lingered in bed until past seven, which seems scandalous. It was still dark. The rain was pattering on the roof, in metallic thuds from contact with drainage pipes. It is the night of the year. We are all supposed to be resting from the effort of the year. The true Christmas season. It is a time to trust in the safety of God to preserve us, as the baby Jesus was preserved in the cradle.

When I think of soaking rain, I now think of the trees and cacti that may tip over in the mushy ground, so I hope it is not a too-heavy-at-once situation.  Everything has a price, even the beautiful soaking rain.

Lucky Artist Boy

 

We went on an outing to Phoenix today, driving on the freeway towards downtown and getting off at Indian School Road to go to Arizona Art Supply. I had been there just a few days ago while Christmas shopping for Jessica. She had given me a list of art supplies she wanted for Christmas, with links to an online art supply retailer. I had felt uninspired to go there. I felt no joy, as I never do during Advent and the run up to Christmas. Instead I had decided to find the coolest old art supply place in Phoenix, which was easy to find, and find as many of the items there in person. I told the woman at the store in a way, she had given me the gift of going to an art supply store with a specific need to do so.

At the time, I found about half the items she wanted, and found what I thought were substitutes for the others. I also saw a portfolio carrier I thought she would like, as she totes a lot of paper things around for her drawing class. On a whim I purchased it, thinking she would be delighted to see the surprise. Instead it turns out that she couldn't use it. I had the receipt and said I'd return it. We decided to make it a field trip together, and today we went there as planned, driving down together and parking in the same parking lot, in the complex with the Goodwill, just off 51 on Indian School.

At first the clerk told me that portfolios were nonreturnable, but the manager overheard this, and came to register. She was pleasant and helpful, and as I was bringing it back with the tags on, they gave me my money back. Then we walked around the store for a while, and it was fun this time to linger and look at paper.  I used to draw and make pastel portraits in college, and I have gone through spates of drawing since then. It is fun just to examine the types of paper they stock. It feels so tactile.

Jessica found a bunch of supplies she liked. I told her to choose a few things she night not otherwise get, that were splurges. We went out of the store with well more in value than we came in with. The manager had chosen wisely.

Afterwards we drove the street in Phoenix to a old school hamburger stand, called Lucky Boy, where we had burgers and fries, eating them in the old school dining room amidst what appeared to be many regulars at the nearby tables. The neighborhood around is one with the classic midcentury brick bungalows that were so common. They are on the upswing in value and many have undergone renovations and improvements. The hamburger stand dates from 1951.

Such is what we did this year, on the Third Day of Christmas.

We Have Christmas Backwards

We have Christmas all backwards. Yesterday, December 25, is not supposed to be the end of the Christmas season but the beginning. Instead we have moved the celebration of Christmas, to the days and weeks leading to Christmas, which is supposed to be a period of penance, fasting, and prayer. We do the opposite of that, and then we wonder why it feels empty and unfulfilling so much of the time.

Then after Christmas, when we should be just beginning a twelve-day season of joyous celebration, we take down our decorations and go back to our humdrum lives. We live our barrenness after, rather than before. 

This is part of the general trend of reversal of all things Christian, especially Christmas. This year I went through the entire Christmas season and saw not a single mention of the baby Jesus outside of the few weak Christmas carols sung on the Great American Family Network, which split off from the Hallmark Channel specifically for cultural reasons having to do with same-sex relationships in their movies.  We have reached the triumph of a completely secular Christmas stripped of all its Christian significance. Our Christmas carols are now original pop creations of Maria Carey (its melody unsingable by anyone but someone with her talent), and the rather monotonous one by Paul McCartney. They aren't bad songs. They were humorous novelties when they appeared. Now they are the entire songbook, along with other secular modern ones. The ones referencing Christ is not diminished. They are completely gone from Pop Culture.

So its no wonder we have Christmas all backwards. People burn themselves out celebrating during Advent and then wonder why the magic isn't there. Our conceit is that the human soul (and body) can be re-engineered in arbitrary ways. Who cares if the celebration is beforehand? We are stupid I think. God will have His Advent from us, one way or another, just as He will have His sabbath, and his Jubilee. We can cooperate with that, our we can try to defy it, but the score must be evened out.

I personally am enjoying the second day of Christmas as I write this, and am thinking of what I will still give as Christmas gifts this year, up until Day Twelve. The world may have blown itself out during Advent, but I am just getting started being Christmasy.

In Which I Pay a Visit to the Ghost of Christmas Present

 

Yesterday we had a stay-at-home Christmas, as Jessica's stepfather was ill and we could not visit them at their home down in the RV park Mesa where they live. Although I regretted missing out on the fellowship of the day, I admit it was pleasant to "go nowhere" on the Feast of the Nativity, and to simply enjoy the stillness of the world as much as possible. It being Sunday, there were pro football games on as well, which made it particularly relaxed.

Twice--in the late morning and in the late afternoon--I went walking outside, making my way through the buildings of our complex, then crossing the street to new park and the undeveloped desert nearby, as part of my daily rambles there. On a normal day I would bring my stool and my book on quantum field theory, and would read a bit, and think about another paragraph in the paper I am writing. Yesterday being a feast day, and such an important one, I gave myself no such assignments but let my mind go where it wanted.

On both occasions, coming in and out of the complex, in the narrow little private streets between the three-story buildings, I could hear, at various places, the buoyant conversations of parties and get-togethers emerging from the upper floors, the voices and laugher coming from the windows and the patios. The temperature was pleasant. Few would need to keep the widows closed.

Hearing these groups of people was startling to me. I realized it was the first time since living here that I recall any such thing. Usually--in fact in all other times I go out walking---I never her these spots of laughter and merriment. Perhaps a single one every once in a while, but never multiple ones going on, sometimes overlapping if one stands in certain places.

At once, hearing them, I was carried away to memories long ago of living in communal areas---student housing complexes when I was a child in Iowa, and in later years, and especially in New York, or Europe---when such sounds were normal even when it was not Christmas. In such places one heard the evidence of human social interactions and fellowship from behind closed doors as a regular part of life, even on a regular weekend.

It was poignant to hear them now. It filled me with great joy, to know there were people inside enjoying each other's company, around our complex, and beyond. Yet my knowledge of the rarity of it made me conscious of its lack. It made realize how dead and lifeless this place is for the rest of 364 days of the year. It made me realize how isolated and isolating this place is, and how this true for most of America. 

The craving for fellowship is one of the features of Christmas. The night before we had watched the 1938 movie version of A Christmas Carol starring Reginald Owen (pictured above). It's a very short and fast telling of the story, and adaptation of a radio version that was popular at the time, and as such it leaves out various motivations for the development of the character Scrooge in his youth concerning the reasons he is miserly. Yet what is so obvious in the story is that is that it is his need for human interaction--conviviality and fellowship--that drives the story and his conversion during the wee small hours. It is his being able to overhear Christmas merriment in private houses, and feeling estranged from them, that lets me see what he is missing. 

How far we have come. I grew sad thinking about all the people across America and the world who were in fact alone on Christmas, and who would love to be at a party, at least acknowledged as alive, and yet were not welcome anywhere. All Scrooge had to do was stop excluding himself from other people's lives. How lucky he is, compared to so many today who have no idea how to come in from the chill and be welcomed. We have largely solved our problems of material want and depravation today. No one need go hungry for any length of time. Today our great lack is for the things that the Victorians considered natural and free, and available to anyone if they chose it---human company.

As I type this I am about to go on my morning walk. It is Monday, the day after Christmas. Today I will hear no merriment, and will not hear it for another year if are here again next year. I am so grateful for what I have. 

When Marriage Meant Something

 Last night Jessica (aka Ginger) and I continued our annual tradition of watching our favorite holiday movie, Christmas in Connecticut (1945) starring Barbara Stanwyck and Dennis Morgan. Every year that we watch it, my understanding and appreciation of the story deepens. We both have large parts of it memorized at this point. We always watch out for the scene with the cow that forces itself into the plot in order to bring the lovers together. It's one of my favorite cow scenes in Hollywood movies.

Each we notice new subtleties and details. Jessica noticed the that the box containing the mink coat that Barbara Stanwyck wears at the beginning of the story says "Sherwood Furs" on it. These are the kinds of things you notice when you have the seen the movie so many times. The mink coast is a simple of the kind of life that Stanwyck's character (Elizabeth Lane) thinks she wants at the beginning of the story, but which she happily discards once she has found true love.

So much of the joyous lightness in the movie comes from the character of Uncle Felix played by S.Z. Szakall (pictured above, trying to teach Barbara Stanwyck's character how to cook). He is the life force in the movie.  He literally stops the "bad wedding" for happening simply by insisting that music must be played (foreshadowed by the fact that we are introduced to him in his restaurant with no dialog but only live music, like a silent movie).

We have almost his entire dialog memorized at this point, and we wait for him to say certain lines. Even so, we still notice new ones. By the way, even Felix has a character arc in the story. He goes from having a poor relationship with cows to a good one. He reconciliation with the bovine force of happiness is parallel to the lovers coming together. One shadows the other.

The tightness of the story is impeccable. There is almost nothing wasted in the entire movie as far as spoken lines or visual shots. Everything seems to reference something else, an support the characters in the roles they have. 

As I watched the movie this time, I felt a kind of distance from it that I had never felt. Perhaps it is the fact that I have lost the last members of my family who lived through World War II as adults. That generation is gone, and with them, the whole era portrayed in the movie seems disconnected from our world. So many of the subtleties of the interactions of the characters would be lost on modern audiences. We have a whole generation of young people who have grown up without experiencing anything resembling courtship as it used to be. Moreover, even outside of the romantic drama in the story, there are many assumptions characters make in regard to behavior of each other which would be invisible to many young folk today. 

I believe this is more than "changing times." It is the fact that people in 1945 experienced nearly all their interaction with other human beings in person, or at most, over a land-line analog phone. The expectations of mutual behavior were generated by these in person, physical, interactions.  For a great many of us, and perhaps the majority of young people, now experience most of our meaningful interactions with each other digitally over the Internet.  We no longer have the vessel of expectations that people in the past assumed to exist, and assume would always exist.

It makes the experience of watching the movie much less rich and detailed for young people today perhaps, unless they specifically are interested in discovering how people in the past behaved in each other's presence---not just because they are young but because they have never experienced a world in which physical in-person interactions were how one negotiated one's expectations of the world.

One of the things Jessica noticed was the sympathetic treatment of the rejected male suitor in the romantic drama of the movie. He is not portrayed as a cad or a villain. His flaw was his blindness to the fact that he and Barbara Stanwyck's character are not suited to each other, and that she doesn't love him. He doesn't see this only because he himself has not experienced true love. He remains a gentleman in the movie right up the last scene in which appears, graciously escorted another married woman off to find her breakfast.

Another thing I noticed this year was that what I thought was a plot hole is not indeed a plot hole. When Stanwyck and Morgan (the lovers) are in the sleigh together, why can't she tell him that she is playing a ruse regarding the dinner she is hosting for all of them? The answer is because we don't want her to do that, as an audience. For one thing, she has indeed promised to marry another man, even though we know it is a sham marriage. We don't want to her break that promise and start plotting with another man, whom she really loves. She has to resolve that issue publicly and honorably by breaking it off with her fiancé (even though as a woman, according to traditional rules she has the feminine privilege to change her mind during an engagement, up to the last moment). Also, as Jessica pointed out to me, it would mean destroying the experience of the weekend for Dennis Morgan's character, who is a war hero. So I get why she has to silent there.

Eventually she will speak up, and all the issues will come out, and the force of love is restored. The movie works like a giant cosmic story machine to bring out the result. It is a fantasy of course, but one that captures, through art, the messy complexities of real life and courtship, which is never so tidy as to fit into a movie.

The Vow I Refused To Take

 

Yesterday I finally got through the trauma of sending out my Christmas cards this year. It should not be a trauma, because I find great joy in sending personal communications to others. It's a trauma because, as I explained, in previous posts, in brings up an awareness and reflection of the things that separate me from others, more than at other times of year. The trauma is all in the build-up to writing personal notes, reminding me of what I can and cannot say to them, lest I trigger some anger in them. I have no need to discuss politics with them. Among the Christmas cards I receive, which are few, there are often sly references to politics--the kind of tests that Lefties send out to others to ping them, to make sure they are on the same page about everything in the world. We all still hate Trump, right? 

I got only one such comment this year, a reference to the "crazy people out in the Arizona" from someone on the East coast. I would never dream of engaging back with this. I love the person who sent it, even though he is a friend I haven't seen in many years, and who lives with another man in what society now widely recognizes as a conjugal relationship.  

I like to address the envelopes of my Christmas cards with formal titles of people, like Mr. and Mrs., etc. whenever possible. What do I do in this case? I use the abbreviation of the plural of monsieur.  I want to believe my friend is flattered and humored by this, in a fun way since we were both in French class together in high school. My French classes back then spawned many relationships I still have, albeit loosely. At Threadfest in Southlake, my friend Kelli Phillips introduced me as someone she met in the same French class. 

I would never dream of imposing my personal beliefs on my gay friend in a Christmas card, or any other venue. He would never know my beliefs on this unless he asks me point blank. I would have to tell him, and it would probably lead to the end of our friendship. So I enjoy the friendship while I still can. One day he will find out, perhaps soon, and he will perhaps cease the friendly back-and-forth we have.

I would try to tell him that my belief is that acceptance of his status as being in conjugal relationship with another man is something I extend to him as a personal courtesy to him. It is a case by case basis. I do not believe it is something that society as a whole needs to be forced to acknowledge, the way it does for a man and a woman. I've never heard anyone else express it quite like that. It took me a long time to work that out in my mind. 

Five years ago I went to a wedding ceremony between two men that was held in the Lan Su Chinese Garden in downtown Portland (pictured above). Jessica and I flew back to Oregon. He was one of her medical school colleagues, and graduated with her. I always liked him. 

I was horrified during the ceremony. The actual vows between the two men seemed like an afterthought. Instead they had us, the audience and attendees, swear a vow to support them as a married couple. 

This is bullshit, I thought at the time. You invite people and then make them take a promise? This is not the way it is supposed to work. It is a mockery of a wedding ceremony. I refused to mouth the words and kept my mouth shut during the vow, even as the audience members tried to outdo each other with their enthusiasm to shout "WE DO!!"

I was insulted and angry at my hosts for this stunt. I felt like I'd been swindled. I resolved it was the last gay wedding ceremony I would ever attend.

Such are the things that swirl in my mind while writing Christmas cards. As for my friend who received the card, I have nothing against him, and even let slide the political comments he makes that tell me that he assumes I am also a liberal who agrees him.  I pray for him--not because he is gay, but because he is my friend, and I wish him nothing but happiness and joy sincerely.

The marriage at the Lan Su Garden in Portland didn't last. They went their separate ways shortly afterwards. Of course so do marriages between men and women these days, but the whole thing seemed like a joke, with the point of it being getting us all to say that vow like we did. 

New Year, New Thoughts

Reflecting on the things I write about in this blog, I realize I cover many of the same themes and points over and over. I suppose it is like climbing a mountain, on a circular path that winds around it, much like in Dante's Purgatorio.

I hope that each time I come around to the same points and themes, my understanding and compassion for others has increased a bit from the last time. I hope I put away some of the wrath I have felt, and able to understand God's mercy a bit better than last time.

One of the reasons I do not want to be a well-known blogger is that I would feel beholden to a consistency as a public figure. Here in these pages I can write the same laments and insights over and over, and there is no consequence. I am a work in progress, slowly molded. Next year, God willing, I will write about some of the same things.

Over the past year what I did notice that was new was that my last liberal friends have found it increasingly difficult to tolerate my presence in their lives. All of this, I assure you, is due to their heightened awareness of my convictions, which only comes by their direct questions to me. The fact that I do not back down in my beliefs, but calmly try to explain my point of view has enraged them even further. 

All of this I see as a sign that we have gone to another level in the Culture War.  I expect to lost all of them by the time it breaks. So long as I keep my relationship with God, then I will feel joy through it all.  There is nothing they can do to shake that. I think they have realized that, and that's what drives them nuts about me. In the end, the only recourse for them is to shut me out of their lives, and forget they knew me.

But I will not forget I knew them. Even if they send my Christmas cards back with an obscene scrawl over them (I am half expecting that), it will not matter. I will still love them. I meant to do this, I know, and my conviction of this only grows with time.

What will I be writing about next year, provided I am still writing this blog? Who knows. I keep writing here because it is the surest way to get thoughts out of my head, that are swirling around. If I write them down, they make room for other thoughts. This is why I write. I have to.

With my new physics blog, I can empty my mind from rational scientific thoughts, of which I have many lately. But really the way to do that is to write something for a peer-reviewed journal. This is what I am also doing today. Or trying to. It's a lot harder than these notes, in a way, although there is nothing personal in them. They are supposed to be he opposite of personal. A different challenge. By next year this time I hope I have left all my current physics thoughts in the dust, because I will have written them down, and new ones, completely foreign to me now, have taken their place.

Sending Christmas Cards Unironically

 Today my goal is to send out the rest of my Christmas cards for this year. It's a bittersweet task, not the least of which is that I have to remove names of people who have died. That's pretty much the only reason I take someone's name of my list. In the case of my liberal friends, I still send them cards, with the best of wishes for them. It is all sincere. I do wish them the best, whether they agree with me on politics. I know in most cases, this sentiment is not returned. To some of them, they will see my card and become enraged. This is partly because my cards this years are explicitly Christian, with a depiction of the Nativity and a religious message inside. For some, this is all it will take, to send them into a rage. So horrible is the Christian message to them. I don't know who will react this way, but certainly some will. I try to say something extra in each card that is reflective of the personality of the person receiving it. In the case of people who are hostile to Christianity, I even try to say something supportive of their politics which is sincere on my part. 

The virtues and goals they express for the world are things I can usually agree with, even I disagree about how to go about them. I realize some of them will see this as snarkiness on my part, or a trick. They can't believe that I can possible wish them peace and joy, despite our differences, perhaps they would wish only an "F-U" to me, or a "please go away and die, I can't believe you are the same person I once knew, etc." None of that matters to me. In fact, I know it is part of the challenge on my part, to love and respect them despite ur differences, with one of those differences being whether to love and respect the people you disagree with. 

That we are so far apart on this last point is poignant, because it is my experience that liberals, if they sense you disagree with them, seem to believe that you simply haven't gotten the message yet. You need to be informed that you are wrong, and then you will change your mind.  They don't understand that I already know how much we disagree, that I understand where they are coming from in many respects, and yet I still believe what I believe. 

Most liberals I know, when I meet them now, are ready with a story about something that happened to them recently which demonstrates just how stupid and ignorant Christians are, and how obnoxious they are in the public sphere. They always have a personal incident to tell me about. They are eager to share it. Bless their hearts. I love them for that. I love them all still. I do wish them joy and peace in the new year. It is a test for me to maintain this, knowing how they feel. I will say nothing to them that needs to be unsaid later, even if there is no later, which is probably the case.  Sending Christmas cards, as I've said, is civilization itself to me. Even if I am the last one, I will do it.

Coldest Days of the Year

 December in Arizona is the coldest time of the year, just as June is the hottest. As I kid I remember reading this in a book about weather. It surprised me, because it aligns well with the actual solstices. In the middle of the country where I grew up, the hottest and coldest times of the year do not align with the solstices but are offset by weeks. The hottest time is in July or August. The coldest is in January and February. Not so in the southern regions, like where I live now. I still fascinates me that in December we experience the coldest times when the days are shortest, as they are now.

The last few years, since 2018, I have had a daily schedule which has me getting up as early as 4 AM, sometimes earlier. These last few weeks, I have found myself sleeping in until 6 AM, even later. It feels so decadent to me to wake up at 6 AM now, as if I've slept away half the day. Not in my wildest dreams could I imagine keeping the hours I did when I was in college, or graduate school. 

It's easier to sleep in when the sun is so late in rising. Also lately I have waking up in the middle of the night, and after an hour or so of wondering if I should just get up and start my day, then falling back asleep until late in the morning. One day I slept almost until 7 AM. It felt scandalous to me.

This week it has been particularly cold, some of the coldest days we have had since we moved to Arizona. It got down into the Thirties last night. The rabbits are fluffed in their fur.

Of course one cannot talk about the weather lately without it becoming political quickly. How they have ruined the small talk we used to be able to have, at least about this subject.  If I talk to a liberal friend or family member, I expect any remark about the weather to be greeted with a sermon regarding the need to institute a world government in order to control our behavior. So I avoid even talking about the weather. If I get the sermon, I usually play dumb, as if I didn't understand them. I do this kind of thing a lot for the sake of the peace of the moment. There is no reasoning with such people. We know that all evidence must support their point of view. If it's hotter than normal, colder than normal, or just too normal---it all means the same thing. World government, ASAP! 

In the near future, it is possible I will doing a streaming show on Rumble regarding the War on Science, which I recently began writing about, as part of my comeback as a physicist. The comeback feels in full swing. I feel my thoughts pulled to particle physics a lot lately.  There is a part of me that knows there is no changing people's minds, unless they want to be changed. If I focussed on that, it feel lousy. One could despair. As always, I think to the future. I think of the generations to come, and the legacy we leave them They will have to pick up and carry on after the world-destroying utopian tantrums of madness that people are falling into lately (see the previous post).  They will wonder how we let it all happen. They will be very angry that they were deprived of the normalcy that we got to experience in our youth, from Baby Boomers on down, and then turned around and said "yes but now we need to dismantle all that, because we know better." 

We at this moment can help them rebuild by leaving behind as much truthful evidence of our convictions as possible, so they can start from a higher state than if they had to start from scratch. 

The Other Matt

 Is that clear to you now? (clip starts at 12:37).

I was speaking on the phone today with a friend about how it is important to narrow our focus in regard to our contributions to the world.  We must focus on the things that we alone know we can do, while we on this earth. If we do this, others will step forward to do the things we thought we had to do as well. Matt Walsh reminds me of that kind of thing. He says things I would feel the need to say, in the way he says them, if he were not there to say them. I can delegate that to him, and instead focus on the things peculiar to my talents. This kind of emerging specialization is something I am fascinated with, as we continue to win the war, by the Grace of God. We are finding our niches, that are our particular contributions. 

America deserves Kamala Harris to be President, just as it deserves France to win the world cup again.

Dear Fellow Hypertraditionalist

"The true soldier fights not because he hates what is in front of him, but because he loves what is behind him.” G.K. Chesterton

 Everyone I know and whom I also respect, and with whom I can laely find fellowship in any way, has some aspect in their personality and soul which can be called hypertraditionalist.

It reminds me of the movie The Village directed by M. Night Shyamalan. I have to discuss it with a spoiler here.

The story is about a group of present-day Americans who, scarred by personal trauma in their lives, collectively retreat into a "living history" past compound in teh woods, completely cut off from the outside world. It is like some fantasy island Amish adventure that lasts the rest of ones life. The movie implies that this retreat into the traditionalist past arises from the wounds the characters have suffered in the present-day world. As a viewer, one is motivated to feel pity for them.

I like the premise in the movie. Perhaps the wounds I have suffered in my own life are the reason for my own  hypertraditionalism. But I don't want any pity because I think we are all of us suffering those type of wounds because the outside contemporary world, instead of the being the baseline reality of sanity and normalcy by which things should judged, should itself be regarded as a soul-mangling hellscape designed to shatter out minds and bodies into splinters and lead humanity into darkness.

At the same time I write this, I make my living doing advanced tech projects, and I am using the Internet to communicate to you, my dear reader out there. 

We negotiate the ways in which we can be hypertraditionalist, each one of us. We are part-time actors in our various living history museums, whether they are located in four walls, or in the words we speak and the manners by which we treat others, and raise our children. It can be in the way we seek health and relief from pain. Above all, it can be in the way we worship God,

We are each of us conserving something we think needs to be conserved. We have appointed ourselves the conservators of this piece of the shattered landscape of the world, because someone needs to do it. We are glad when we see others step forward to be conservators in their own way. We have no jealousy but rather relief when we see others come to join us, and work with us shoulder to shoulder.

We know the culture as a whole is not with us. It seeks to demonize us, and destroy us, even with a soft voice on the radio mocking us. Even when they can find anything overtly wrong with us, we know they will lie about us, making up any accusation they think might stick with others.

We do not begrudge those who desire to live in contemporary mores without our perspective, but so often we see that this is accompanied by a willingness to believe the lies about us, in a bad faith manner. IT suggests to us they simply hate us, and want us to go away and vanish. They do not want to extend the courtesy of live and let live to us to us, but must force our submission to a great paradigm in which all things traditional must be seen as pitiful, like the characters in the movie I mentioned.

I feel sorry for them. Perhaps they are just one trauma, one bad scrape with the world,  from joining us. To me, it feels as if we are the lucky ones. I have felt great joy after embracing this knowledge about myself and others.

For those of you out there fighting the good fight, acting in your living history way, I salute you with Christmas joy. Let this be my Christmas card to you. Know that many of us are deeply grateful to see that you are with us, even if we never speak or see each other.

I am Anti-Woke

One of my guiding stars of late in the Culture Wars is Paul Chato, a Canadian who made a long old-school career as a Hollywood executive, and now gives us the perspective of his years of wisdom. I thought this video was particularly watershed in terms of telling us where things are at the moment in Hollywood, whose new cultural products I have largely abandoned, but which remains part of my thinking about the world in a big way. Among other things it is important that we see the situation at large in perspective, despite any short-term political gains and losses.

Rendezvous in the Park

 I have certain thoughts that I entertain only in park. As I walk along the path by the pond I see them up ahead like a friend waiting to meet me, sitting at the picnic table. I sit down and begin conversing. Some of the thoughts are technical, like the chapters of the physics book that I carry with me. Some are personal, and my life and people I have known. It depends on the weather. On rainy days it will be more reflective. Today the rain stopped, and we had cloudy cool skies with enough sun to keep from being chilly. A good days for physics. A good day to use the ramada in the park to test the chapters of my quantum field theory book. I get all the chapters correct easily, but miss on a few subsections. They are in the advanced chapters, where the advanced material has not yet entered a deeper understanding in my mind.

Coming and going on the path, I usually peek into the Library, to make a daily audit of the comings and goings of the titles, adult and children in nature, on its two shelves. When I pacing around in my thoughts in the ramada, I sometimes catch the red box of the Library out of the corner of my eye, as it sits along the path, and I my mind processes it as a person.

The puffy clouds over the mountains remain, beautiful with grey and white textures, casting luscious shadows on the mountains just below them. The clouds are reflected in aching clear splendor in the bond as one walks along the path.

It took me several minutes of pacing in the ramada, and sitting at one of the picnic tables with my book for several more minutes, to realize that there are now four metal picnic tables in the shelter instead of two. 

My old friends, those thoughts that wait for me, distract me, it seems. Meet me in the shelter, I tell them, as I leave my apartment. We will talk about quantum field theory.

The Darker Type of Verdant

A few days ago we got soaking rains. A front came in. The skies grew overcast. The heavy drizzle was chilly and the nights were cold indoors, requiring space heaters. 

When this happens, a mist comes over the McDowell Mountains, darkening them under the blanket of grew puffs that shroud their summit, like something out of a fantasy story. The shadows below the clouds draw out the green of the vegetation, and it turns from the sun-faded succulent green to resembling jungle tree tops. That is, you can't tell the difference between the low Sonoran vegetation and what might otherwise be the treetop canopy of the Blue Ridge of Pennsylvania, or the Coastal Ranges of Oregon.

The smell of rain is delicious to breathe. I think about people I've known, that I've lost along the way, to the world. Do you think we would be friends again? I want to ask some of them. I wish I could give them blanket amnesty from words we might have exchanged in haste, confusion, and anger.  

 Advent. The world yearns for deliverance. Today I went shopping for Christmas cards. They are not easy to find, the boxed set. I went to four places before finding them at Barnes and Noble, where there was a small selection. Hardly anyone sends mail anymore to each other. I call myself the last letter writer. Letter writing is civilization, and when I go, so will go civilization. I don't want that to be true, but at the moment it seems that way.

Going through the selection, I examine only ones depicting the Nativity. Of the more than fifty choices of design on the tables, there are perhaps eight that qualify. They are all abstract representations. One apparently shows an empty crib. No baby Jesus.  Another makes sure to show the Holy Family as People of Color. I don't mind the color of the figures but I hate feeling like I am being lectured to by a Christmas Card. 

In a couple cases I notice the cards do not depict the Nativity per se, but rather depict Nativity scenes in front of churches.  That is, we see a contemporary rural church in the snow and in front of it is a creche of the Holy Family, alone and unobserved in the snow. We experience the Nativity as simulacrum several times removed form us, and thus not a threat.

I want to choose a design with animals. Animals are important in the Nativity. Disappointingly, none of the cards depict cattle, except one of the simulacrum cards of a modern creche. So in the card, it is supposed to be a fake cow, and it is not even clear that it is a cow.  You will never find a painting of the Nativity form the Middle Ages or Renaissance that has animals that does not have an ox or cow.  The absence of cows on these sets of cards speaks volumes to me.

I think about the people to whom I will send cards. The box has fourteen yards. I will use all of them I hope. Do I have Mark and Laurie's address in Reno? I hope so. I certainly want to send them a card.

There are people I would love to send a card to. I wonder if I could get away with it, without angering them? In some cases, the Nativity scene would be enough to trigger them. 

Amnesty. Just tell me somehow you want to be curious about each other again in an innocent way. That what's I'd convey to them. 

My last living connection to Oregon, who is the only person in that state who will certainly be among my addressees, is a guy who used to be the Poet Laureate of that state. In met him years ago when he taught one of my English classes as a young visiting professor-poet. I sent him a postcard from Edinburgh this summer, because I knew he was leading a tour there later that summer, as part of his professorial position where he nows teaches in Portland.

He and I probably have many differences in how we see the world, yet he is my brother. I treat him as such. He emailed me after my postcard and said he wanted to be in contact. So now I send him my highest caliber of thoughts on a regular basis and wait for his return. It is playful. He sent me pictures of a specimen in a museum in Scotland, after he took his tour there in August. It is a bronze axe head dating from Antiquity. He himself found it, when he was a boy, climbing on Arthur's Seat, the great ancient mound just downstream from Edinburgh on the Forth. He gave it to the museum, and finally he had come back to see it.

It was beautiful to receive the gift of his correspondence. It is hard to have a conversation by email. It is no substitute for the way people used to communicate by mail. I have thought a lot about this, and why it is so. The bottom line is that digital-only communication has destroyed our culture.

It's hard to imagine the type of intimate communication we used to have with each other, that we no longer have, because nobody has it anymore.  We are living broken disconnected lives, stewing in resentments from afar, believing we are in contact with the entire world at once because we can see their names and pictures on small LED screens we carry with us everywhere.

We don't even hear each other's voices on the phone anymore. The analog phone system, where you could hear each other breathing during the pauses, no longer exists. We hear only dead digital pauses now, a simulacrum of the sound waves that used to be carried continuously from our lips to another'e ears by the means of copper wires. Our voices are now converted into ones and zeroes, and our messages are wrapped in the boxes of email applications, surrounded by the hoopla of color of websites and such. We don't have the paper to ourselves. We can't write important long things to the edge of the page, our handwriting becoming a scrawl because we cannot keep up with our thoughts. None of that type of communication exists anymore.

The world yearns for more  Childhood is broken. Courtship is broken. Marriage is broken. Work is broken.  I am writing this to you because I know you feel it too.

Does God Believe in the God Particle?

 

An interesting question to contemplate. I wrote this post about it on my new science-related Substack. Comments encouraged!

The Verdant Lawn and the Library

 The word verdant seems exactly the word to apply to the grassy lawn of the park, which is actually a thing green of green grass, somewhat yellowed this time of year, that surrounds the pond. The pond itself is brilliant blue reflecting the sky above. A heron comes to the pond as park of its territory. It often arrives in the morning. The green of the grass around seems gorgeous and inviting. It is like the golf courses around here. They look like little bits of curated Eden against the brown dirt and rocks. The border is always abrupt. The mountains in the background look like the desert floor, but thrust against the sky, as close up as I remember the Colorado Front Range foothills, when one is a mile away.

The green of the grass is a very different hue that the green of the desert. The desert here is very green---the Sonora is a living desert, as they say--but the green of the desert is dull sunwashed green, like the color of World War II Army uniforms. 

You can't see the verdant lawn as one comes into the park from the north, because it is on the sloped lawn leading down to the sunken pond. One approaches on the path, seeing the pond and the green grass as one approaches. A little bit of Eden. Civilized.

As one approaches the ramada that sits on the southwest corner of the path around the lake, one sees the latest addition to the park, which arrived only last month. It is one of those little library boxes, brilliant red like a London phone booth in miniature, mounted on a metal post painted in glossy black. Civilization.

I walk past the library each day on my way to the ramada to study physics. I always inspect the library, to see what comes and goes. There is nothing in the box I would probably read. I recognize some of the popular authors. All the books are ffiction, I think, on the top shelf. Novels. The bottom shelf is all kids books.

Proceding on the ramada, I bring out my copy of Itzykson and Zuber's Quantum Field Theory, the Dover reprint I bought that smells of liquid laundry detergent, and  with its cover now well worn backwards.  I've got almost the whole second level of the table of contents memorized now using my method. I realize I said the concrete pad under the ramada was rectangular. Of course it is not. It is rectangular on three sides, but along the side it connects to the graveling walking path, it is actually the arc of a circle, such that the pad flares outward there, instead of being rectangular. I use the creases in the concrete to memorize chapters. Where the inset reaches the edge of the pavement I assign a chapter and put the title there. I memorize them by pointing at the intersections at the edge of the pad.  I assign the subsections as places nearby. I've gotten to four subsections in each chapter. Most of the thirteen chapters are now complete in my memorization.  Only a few of the chapters have five subsections, and these I am still working on.  Only one chapter has six subsections. By this I know the authors gave this chapter special attention. 

Learning to Share the Desert

 The park across the street in which I have been spending so much time lately, memorizing the headings in the table of contents of my quantum field theory book, is the development that replaced a portion of what I called the "undeveloped desert" next to our complex. This is where I spent so much time walking by myself in mediation, or sitting on my tripod camping stool in various favorite spots obscured from the street and any nearby houses. 

I've written about some of my favorite particular spots in the past, including locales I called "the Sandy Bottom", which was a portion of a small wash where it widens out just upstream from an ancient ironwood tree, and flanked by a palo verde and towering majestic saguaro. The cluster of these three great trees around this spot in the wash became a regular, almost daily, retreat for me from the world. This was especially true during the days of the 2020 lockdown. Thankfully our lockdown in Arizona was mild, and things returned to normal fairly quickly here, as opposed to other states where the politics drove mandates to keep everyone indoors as much as possible, in part a rebuke to those of us who wouldn't accept their authority to tell us what to do.

This patch of the "undeveloped desert" is actually a remnant of the sprawling ranch that once existed here, which stretched along the base of the McDowell Mountains, and which gave way in the 1980s to the many modern housing developments, including the apartment complex in which we found our current home (it was the most expensive complex we could find in north Scottsdale at the time! The undeveloped desert was one of the perks for me. I almost never saw anyone out there in the day, but I would find remnants of the presence of young people who knew some of the secret spots for night activity. I began to feel as I were the "ranger" of the land there, and found myself at times cleaning up trash, or pushing stolen shopping carts over the rocky ground and then wheeling them back to the nearby grocery store.

At the time we moved in, there were already signs posted along the road indicating that the land would be developed into a park, deeded over to the City of Scottsdale for just such a purpose. The signs had information about websites to visit to see the plans, and dates for hearings regarding the development. The dates were in the past, and the signs were somewhat faded in the sun, which happens rapidly here, as one might imagine. I had been hoping that our tenure here would pass entirely without the development of the park coming to pass, as I knew it would make over, perhaps destroy, not only my little "spots", but the general isolation and peace I found there.

If nothing else, the shutdown put any plans on hold because no one was doing any work on such projects for a year. Then in late 2020 new signs went up indicating that "phase whatever" of the plans were proceeding, with new hearings coming and going. A small protest movement among homeowners nearby sprung up against the plans, not against the development in general, but. because the small lake that was to built there was not aligned in a way that people walking their dogs would get the best view of the nearby mountains. I kid you not--that was what people cared about.

This was playing out right after the 2020 elections, which was a time in which I felt that America might have been lost entirely, given over to the tyranny of stolen elections. During those desperate weeks, I was convinced, as many were, that Trump would certainly not let such a result stand. When January 20, came and went, and Biden was inaugurated in a sealed-off nonpublic ceremony in Washington, D.C., it was as if the entire nation had become a prison.  We were numb, those of us who saw what had happened.

It was exactly then that the construction equipment arrived on the undeveloped land, and the big chain link fences went up sealing off a big chunk of it. My only consolation then was that the fences did not surround my favorite spots, including the Sandy Bottom and its majestic trees I love. But they were right up against the fence. The new park would come within a few feet of my favorite spots. I could not bear to visit them for many months, stretching to over a year. The development was slow. How long does it take to develop a park? Apparently a long time, in part because the park was meant as a flood control and water storage facility for a huge complex of soccer fields being constructed on more undeveloped land to the south (the loss of which I also mourned, but knew was inevitable).

Those were the months during which my spirits were low, and I felt nothing but loss of things I had loved---not only my little comforts and joys, but all of America, in some form or another.

The months came and went, and I ignored the development, only sometimes peering over the fence at the scraped surface of the desert, and the large basin being dug in the ground for the new lake. I avoided allowing myself to feel anything at all over it, because it would be only painful. I periodically checked to make sure that the saguaro and the ironwood were still standing just outside the chain link fence, defiant next to the cloth curtain on the fence that became ripped from the wind over until it finally gave way. Things were touch and go for a while, as the contractors had created a make shift road for their heaviest of equipment to access a gate in the fence right next to the palo verde. In doing so, they destroyed the upstream part of the wash entirely (goodbye my rabbit friends, may you find new homes!), filling it with large chunks of gravel. The drainage of the wash would no longer be needed, as the water would shunted upstream into underground pipes that would feed the lake as flood control, apparently.

I barely noticed when the park officially opened, with a little parking lot for people to enter, and a walking path and access road around the sunken lake, which was surrounded. by verdant green grass, a spectacular with the brown desert around it, now cleaned up and landscaped. The access road passed within a few yards of the wash and thus the Sandy Bottom, and other little spots of which I have not written.

Finally last month I grudgingly began accepting the park and going into it. It is still relatively little used, and I often have the park to myself, with perhaps a few other souls.  Yesterday was an exception. On Thanksgiving morning, it was crammed with perhaps a dozen people, most of them couples walking their dogs on leash and off leash. When I see this, I typically try to avoid getting anywhere near them, as people who let their dogs run off leash, from my experience, believe that their dog is a perfect friendly animal and universally accept the rule of "the dog gets one free (friendly) jump on anyone who comes near it." They will call their animals off of you only after this initial assault, when its paws on your chest, whether you wanted that or not. The idea as that I shouldn't even be there without a dog myself for the other dog to jump on. Without my own dog, I become the target, and that is just how it has to be.

Fortunately the park is ample enough that I can gently avoid getting near anyone I suspect of that. I can negotiate interactions, depending on my mood, and often pretend to wander off the road if I see someone coming like that. There is plenty of room for all of us.

The ramada where I bring my books to study is on the far corner of the park and lake from where I enter, and thus I can spot from a distance whether it is occupied. Usually it is not. I can see the empty metal round picnic tables and make my way to them. As people come along the path, I am thus placed in the ramada away from the way at enough distance that I am not being overtly rude if I stay absorbed in my reading as people pass. Or I can look up and nod and say hello, which I enjoy doing most of time, truth be told. I like people, and all animals including dogs. It is just a matter of choosing when I want to interact with them.

I still go out to the remaining undeveloped part of the land, and even have new spots I have found. I still still next to the ironwood, even though I am only about twenty feet from the paved path where people now walk. I sit unseen and undetected by the shrubbery and the large limb of the ironwood that hangs over the wash.

But I have come to love the ramada as well. There is something beautiful about civilization, and being able to sit in comfort at the metal table, with a view under the roof of the ramada across the peaceful little pond and its surrounding verdant landscape, with the brown McDowell Mountains in the backdrop, the flanks of which are only minimally developed as the site of the most expensive homes in the state (typically twenty million dollars and up). I would not trade my view for the ones from the home in any circumstance. I like that this spot is public. I like that I am not the "owner" but a "sharer."

Trump's Rule of Five

 "In any textbook or monograph, etc. on a scientific topic, the most important chapter tends to be Chapter Five."

The Ramada Method of Learning Advanced Science Subjects

 Having finished my talk at Threadfest for nonphysicists (see two posts back), and having returned hone from Dallas to Scottsdale, my self-appointed task this week, during this break of otherwise calm especially after the recent election, is to devote myself at last to the delayed task of writing a scholarly physics article for the proceedings of the conference I attended last summer in Prague. 

This is a monumental task for me, to write my first real scholarly article in a quarter century. Among other things, I have to relearn the typesetting language for physics and mathematics articles, of which I was once an expert at using back in 1997. I bit the bullet and relearned it, because I cannot do such technical things on a computer while also thinking about nature in the deep way demanded to be a physicist.

I need to get the paper out fast. The deadline has already passed, but Martin (who is in charge) assures me I still have time. He has not lined up the referees yet. I have known him long enough to know that I can get in a paper, but I want to do it swiftly as it is bothersome to him to have "herd cats" with the attendees to get their submissions in. Over time I have earned a reputation of being one of the few who bothers to reply to his emails, and to heed deadlines. If I run over, I want it to be worth it. I want to say something meaningful. Fast and meaningful means my paper must be short and to the point. This is the challenge--to say what I need to say in as direct manner as possible. I have no idea who the referee will be. They could be friendly, or they could be hostile, even within our small sect of heretics outside the physics establishment. In principle it should be no problem getting my paper accepted as part of the proceedings, as it will in part report on my talk last June. But I'm addressing big issues. The wrong referee could lose his mind seeing the citations I am going to use. I go on worst case scenario, This my argument must be impeccable.

At home I pace around, then go to the computer and write. I take long breaks when needed to walk out doors in the desert. I take breaks not when I am hard up for thoughts---I have too many to use. Rather I take breaks when the ideas and thoughts are coming too swiftly. I take walks to cool them down. I bring a physics book on advanced theory, on the very subject I am writing about, from the standpoint of its conventional accepted presentation. The book is one of the most well-known on the subject, written four decades ago but still used as a standard reference on the theory of particle physics.

I barely cared about the material in the book for much of my time in graduate school and after, in the twilight when I still did physics, or thought I could. Now, many years later, I return to these sources. I have kept all my books on physics and they are now in sight of me on the shelf as I write this. This particular book is one that had been missing in my library back int he day. I had other well-known books on the subject, and I could not make my way through them, and my budget did not allow for purchase of all the books I wanted. But in returning to physics I acquired this one, using spare income that barely mattered to me now. It arrived in the mail last year, a paperback reprint. As I opened the package, it reeked of scented laundry detergent that had been spilled along its pages, staining them. I could have demanded a refund from the seller, but I decided this was the copy I was meant to have. It still reeks of scented detergent, but less so. As I dig into the later chapters that have so-far escaped my obsession to learn, I smell fresh waves of scent being liberated from the paper.

The condition of the book allows me to take it outdoors without a thought of damage (I have since acquired another indoor-only hardbound copy of the same volume). On some days I walk through the parts of the undeveloped desert near me that still remains undeveloped after the recent park-building that took a chunk of it away, and which lasted over. a year and half, during which I shunned the desert entirely out of sorrow for what was being lost to me.

On this way I went into the park, which I have come to love. The sacrifice was worth it--the small lake which is part of the irrigation system, surrounded by green grass and with proper walking paths. On most days I find it empty, or with only a few other people (so long as I don't go out during prime dog-walking hours). The treasure of the park is a small ramada at its southwest corner, under which are two round metal picnic tables. They are almost never occupied, either one, and so I usually can count on being able to bring my book there, and to sit flipping through the pages, back and forth and all over the book, trying to push forward my understanding of this complex subject by a small amount, looking for some big breakthrough of understanding all of it, but in my wisdom anticipating that if I can walk home with even a small bit of the picture of theory added to my understanding, and have it be a permanent insight, then the time outside will have been well worth it.

I spent a half hour using what are now my methods for absorbing advanced material. One of the basic principles I have learned that saves a lot of time is to realize that you can't just pick up any physics book and read it like a book from the first chapter to the last. Even physicists who know the material don't read the book that way. Classes are taught that way to graduate students, but it doesn't work to do it sequentially.

The subject is a very hard subject, the core subject that gives rise most advanced in theories of particle physics, namely quantum field theory. 

How do you learn a subject like that with a book like this? My method is to first memorize the table of contents.  Do not memorize it in its detail sequentially, but approach it top down. If the book has sections, learn those first, then the chapters, then the subchapter, etc. If you do this, I guarantee you that you will a much better experience learning any advanced scientific topic, for example organic chemistry, microbiology, etc. The idea is to build an architecture of the knowledge of the subject in your mind, and then to slowly fill in the rooms of the architecture with details. 

The ironic thing is that I had stubbornly refused to use my own method on this very book I was taking to park. I had been dong a preliminary "plowing through" of the first few chapters, doing it the hard way.  In part I wanted to test my own method, and see what happened once I used it for real.  

Sometimes, sitting at the picnic table or on my stool, I let the book (now getting well worn in my day pack) fall open to a random section. This is the most sporadic way possible to approach the subject.

On this day I decided to finally use my method. I was going to liberate myself. I was ready to understand quantum field theory. I needed to know it in a way that I had not known it. I was like Popeye taking the spinach. 

The book, at almost six hundred pages (if I recall here) is divided into thirteen chapters plus an Appendix. The Appendix is actually the most important part, because that it where the author shoves the mathematical tools necessary to understand the rest of the material.  For now I just memorize the sections, as the terms in the section headings are well familiar to me. It am memorizing them so my mind will associate them with the chapter headings I will now memorize.

I have been reading through various parts of the book for months, so the chapter headings aren't new to me. But until this moment, I could not have told you which chapter was chapter 5. Maybe I could guess. Now I will know, and it will be permanent knowledge.

To memorize the chapter headings, I decide to use the ramada itself, in particular the rectangular edge of the concrete patio on which it stands, which gives way on its various sides to either the gravel path, or the grassy lawn, or (on its rear side) the (relatively raw) landscaped desert portion of the park. 

In Battle Against CERN

After my talk at Threadfest in Southlake, my ego was greatly inflamed from the praise and flattery I received. In some sense, I had claimed the mantle of "house scientist" among our small community. From now on, I have to live up to it. This means, I realize, that in following through I will need to be more public in persona and come out from hiding. I am currently in the midst of figuring out how to do that.

All that ego inflation is coming crashing down this week because I am turning my attention to writing up the scholarly paper based on the talk I gave in Prague this summer. This is to be peer-reviewed and to appear in the conference proceedings. The deadline has already passed but I am assured I can still sneak my paper in.

This is very humbling because my paper is to be full-on attack on the current regime of high energy physics and advanced particle theory. It is humbling for many reason, not the least of which is relearning how to use LaTeX (pronounced LAH-TEK) after many years. This the typesetting "language" that for many years has been used to markup scientific papers for submission, so that equations look nice in print. I was once an expert on LaTeX to the point of typesetting a 400-page book full of equations and diagrams. That was back in 1998. Learning LaTeX again is like learning to walk again in physical therapy. It is coming back very slowly to me.

Even more humbling is the idea that all the mouth-shooting-off I've been doing to lay folks about how CERN is perhaps a big nothingburger when it comes to the fundamental elements of the universe will come smack up against some referee who may not be friendly to me. So I write the article with this in mind. I want to say only things I can legitimately defend as truth. What do I know, compared to all those super-smart folks?

Even more humbling still is that once in print, my paper will be read by other people who may base their opinions on mine. This is the heaviest burden of all in my mind. It makes me terrified of spreading error. We have so much error lately.

Teaching Physics in Texas---Again

 November has come and we are almost at Thanksgiving. I am spending a peaceful Monday in what feels like a moment of weightless calm amidst all the activity lately. On Nov 9 we flew to Dallas to attend the second Threadfest conference, where as before I was a speaker.  At the previous one in April in Nashville I gave a talk called "Nashville and Narrative", which I later transcribed as a movie to my Rumble channel here. The subject is the history of American media and technology, as it relates to the Cultural War against traditional values and middle/rural America. The talk, and the conference as a whole, were massive hits and I got much positive feedback.

This time the conference was in Southlake, Texas, which is closer to the home of the organizer of the conference, Patrick, who became a friend of mine last year when I met him at a patriot's conference in Las Vegas. I reminded him of that this time in Texas, and we both marveled at home much the world has changed since October 2021, when we still felt in exile.

So much has changed even since April. I went to Europe and gave my first real physics talk in over two decades, and it too was a big hit in its own way. When I told Patrick about it, and mentioned the subject, he was greatly intrigued, and he asked me to do a lay version of it for the next Threadfest. Up until the last minute, I was not sure I could pull it off, but this time too was a huge hit with the attendees---several hundred in the hotel ballroom. It was my first time "teaching physics" in Texas since 1998, a fact I mentioned to the audience.  The title of my talk was "Does God Believe in the God Particle?".  I'm hoping to do an online version of it as well using Apple Keynote and iMovie.

Just as at the first Threadfest, I helped Patrick out by being "co-emcee" at the event, and stepping in to during transitions when he was occupied, and introducing a few of the speakers. I love doing this kind of thing. It brings back my own limited theater training. One of the things that I told Patrick we needed at the first event was to make it "not only a conference, but a show." It was almost a huge disaster, of course, but we pulled it off, and this time it was much easier, in part because Patrick thoroughly vetted the venue by multiple visits. He has already declared that the next Threadfest, in November 2023, will in the same location. He likes the hotel staff and he actually made money this time, instead of having to be bailed out from the room commitment as he did in Nashville. 

The theater part is fun for me because it feels as if I contributed "classical knowledge" to all these younger folks, at least half a generation younger than me, who did not get the benefit of coming of age during a time when classical arts of all time were still being passed along. I just imagine what would Johnny Carson do. We need people on our side who understand the power of theater. 

At the first time event, I even prepared a humorous karaoke number, poking fun at us and our "mini-movement". It turns out there was not a good time for it in Nashville (The show must go on!) but I put that up on my Rumble channel as well. You won't get the inside references, but you can at least hear me sing. 

Euro 22: Recovered Memory

My friend dropped me off at the main train station in Gdansk, in order for me to catch my train. I had booked the ticket online from the Polish railroad company's website without knowing that I should have booked in from a closer station within the city of Gdansk. The main station was harder to get to, as there was construction out front. As I got out of the car, my friend received a giant series of angry honks from the city bus behind him. I felt embarrassed I'd made him drive me to that spot.  

I chucked my GoLite backpack over my shoulder and scurried around the concrete barriers seeking the temporary entrance to the station, which was not obvious.  Finally I got inside and found the main underground concourse from which one accessed the various platform. I had plenty of time to spare before my train, but following my best practices of travel, I located the platform immediately, verified the train number on the ticket on my iPhone, then allowed myself the liberty of exploring the station for twenty minutes before my train's arrival. My backpack was heavy on my shoulder, so I kept my walking to a radius near the stairs to my platform that would be easy to cover if I lost track of time. I am always assuming that I will lose track of time.

Then some kind of miracle happened. I wandered up a long bank of stairs into what was obviously the central bus station of Gdansk. It was much smaller than the train station. When I walked inside, I saw the ticket windows, and above them, under the high ceiling, the map of the Polish bus network. The room was not large. There was only one other person in there. It was dark and dirty, with light streaming through the high windows like the clearstory of cathedral.

When I saw the map above the ticket window I knew immediately. I have been here!

I was there, I knew in 1990, when I last visited Poland. I must have taken the bus out of town that year. Usually I remember so much of my travels, but I had forgotten what I done in Poland, the minute movements, yet here it was, given back to me. It was a recovered memory that I now had, of being in the station. I was one of my favorite moments ever.

Euro Trip: The Rest of the Trip: Poland Breathes

 Now that it's the end of summer it's time to wrap up that thread about what happened after my talk in Prague.

On Friday morning, I checked out of my flat and took the metro one last time to the train station, where I bought a ticket for Ostrova. I waited a few hours in the station, which had changed so much since 1992.

I took the afternoon train to Ostrova and then hoofed it to my hotel, a half hour walk with my backpack. It's an old post-industrial town. I stayed at an older local hotel near the center, the Hotel Maria. I liked the name. It got decent ratings. I asked for a good Czech restaurant and had a local beer in a tavern. The city square was magnificent in the late twilight. I walked along the river. There were no tourists but me.

The next day I walked back to the train station, bought a ticket to Częstochowa, in Poland, the site of its national Marian shrine. I spent two nights in a hotel that was about a half hour walk from the station. The walk took me up the main boulevard in the town. I prayed the rosary on my beads as I walked to the Hotel Mercure with my backpack. I was a pilgrim after all. The next day I went to the shrine at the monastery and saw the Black Madonna, and prayed the rosary there as well, as much on my knees as possible. I bought some gifts at a gift shop attached to the monastery grounds, and had a hot dog. The sign in Polish said "hot dogs--as they used to be."

After two days I took the train to Warsaw, where my only task was to catch the bus This proved massively harder than I thought, in part because there was no left luggage at the train station (so I had to carry my backpack during the half-day layover) and also because a thunderstorm that dumped rain on me as I circled the only Stalin-built Palace of Culture looking for the obscure private bus stop. I finally found it, across the street, and stood in protection from the rain under the sign of a modern mall along the main street until my bus came. I almost got on the wrong one, among the many private companies with their small inconspicuous signs, and was yelled off by the driver after showing the QR code on my phone. Getting yelled at my bus drivers in foreign languages is something that will happen to you, if you vagabond like I do.

By the end of the day I had arrived in my destination, the small town of Lomza (WOAM-zhuh) in northern Poland, where my old friend of thirty-seven years, Janusz, met me at the bus station. The bus station was much more modern than when I left this place in 1990. Poland has modernized a lot. It is actually very impressive, as I would tell my friend, and eventually his wife. I also told two of his four children and several of his grandchildren,  none of whom were born when I last saw him face to face.

We spent a couple days at his house in the little town where he has lived many years, and where his parents live. He no longer goes into a hospital to work as a psychiatrist. Instead he does he practice from home, since the pandemic. His professional office is filled with publications of psychiatrist. During my stay, he consulted on a legal case regarding the sanity of someone he had examined. It is the kind of work he does.

After two days my friend, his wife, and I took a road trip to Gdansk where they have an apartment, in a newer complex that was once the site of barracks of the Imperial German Army. Gdansk is not try about playing up this part of its history. Historical it has brought in German tourists, some of one whom were born in the city. It is not a sensitive topic among Poles, apparently. 

The occasion of the road trip was a national holiday in Poland, Corpus Christi, a Catholic feast day of recent origin that falls on a Thursday in mid June.  On Corpus Christi, I donned my sport jacket in which I had given my talk, and my friend dressed in a jacket too, and we went to mass at the parish church. It was packed. Many young people dressed in white. After mass, as is custom, the procession went out into the neighborhood with one of the priest holding aloft the Body of Christ for the world to see. We stopped at four different places where we got on our knees and prayed. For now, all of this tradition is still alive in Poland, but it is like America in the early 1980s, as I told my friend. The next generation will not be fervent Catholics. They will not remember, or care, what the priests and nuns did for the freedom of Poland. That sacrifice gave Poland a little breathing room in history. 

In Gdansk we took a marvelous cruise on the city to see the old harbor front, some of which has been rather tastefully restored to modern structures from its wartime devastation, matching the historic character of the city well.

On one afternoon when my friend need to work, I took a very long walk on the beach starting at a park that abuts the Baltic. I saw thousands of people sunbathing in the summer sun. I took off my shoes and walked in the surf. Along the way I passed some nuns. But more startling was seeing how few of the women  had any sort of tattoos on their arms, the way that western women have disfigured themselves like plague victims. It was so beautiful. There are a few tattoo parlors in Poland, here and there, but still not that common on a given street. Like I said,  Poland has a little breathing room. My friend told me point blank: you guys in the west have to get your shit together, and beat this, before it comes for us.

Euro 2022: The Talk

 I gave my talk on the fourth and last day of the conference. I was scheduled to go on the second day, but Martin had changed the schedule. His idea was to have each of the four officers preside over one of the days of the conference, and give our respective talk in the morning of our day of playing emcee. He would start off the first day, as president. Folks had such a great reaction to my Zoom presentation in 2000 when we had our virtual conference (in Virtual Prague) that the idea was for me to go early and give people a similar "welcome to the conference, and to the City of Prague" presentation as before, and summarize what was to come in the rest of the conference. It is surprising how little of that kind of thing there has been. Physicists are into their work. On the other hand, I think a lot about these things and I love doing them, so I find it joyful when I can fulfill that kind of role for people.

As it happened, I had to switch to the fourth day, however, which was in a way a ego deflation, because it mean less exposure, and many folks leave after the third day. In particular our esteemed treasurer, an octogenarian from a black university in Washington, D.C., who like Martin and I were at the first conference in 1998, was one of the early departers, so I was volunteered to switch with him, which I gladly accepted. Ego deflation is good. 

Besides it mean extra days to prepare for my talk, which I knew would be a big deal when people heard it. For the first three days I floated the idea around to people during breaks, and especially over dinner, which was always a social occasion when we swapped that kind of information. Physicists don't do physics over dinner. But they will talk about the talk they are going to give. No one wants to get too deep into thinking about theory when you don't have the data or equations at hand, and moreover, physicists like doing other things besides physics. In fact, most of the time we talk about everything under the sun, which is why it is so great to be a physicist. 

As such I was working on my talk up to the last minute, rising super early in my flat near Hradcanska Metro. By then I knew I could get coffee and a chocolate croissant at the cafe across the street, but it opened only at eight in the morning, so for several hours in the early morning, without coffee, I churned through my final slides using the Apple Keynote application on my Macbook Air. Later that morning I'd have to give my talk right off the same slides. I was nervous that I would let people down by not being prepared enough. 

This was an important topic, one that I'd been promising people for three days running now. Our vice present, a young fellow who is chairman of a physics department in a rural New England private college, was particularly eager.  The young generations are clued into these kinds of things. They know something is wrong, and has been wrong for a long time. We knew it was wrong too. We just thought the way forward was to keep on going, and bust through the other side, from falsity into the truth.

It turns out we have to back up. We have to go back in time. We have to fix what went wrong. It got off track. It's too late for most of us, but for the young folk, they will need a path forward.

As I would pose to my audience in my talk: Consider a hundred years from now, when they are writing about this time, and of physics in the second half of the Twentieth Century. Will they say they spent a century valiantly exploring and discovering the subtle and fundamental intricacies of matter and energy relationships, or will they say they spent sixty years mired in the minutiae of beta decay, based on a faulty model of the neutron?

Euro 22: Joining the Morning Parade of Music Students

 In the morning I rose early enough to make the walk all the way down to the river, and crossing the bridge, picked my way through the old city to find the building housing the conference, at the Czech Technical University. Not using my phone map, I walked past it several blocks on the first try, because I had plenty of time, and I wanted to see some of the old city at that hour of the day. As such I found myself going twice past the Rudolfinum, which is the National conservatory of music and philharmonic. During the rest of my stay in Prague, when I took the Metro directly down to the old city, instead of walking, I would come out of the underground next to the Rudolfinum, and would usually walk to the conference while passing through the old entrance along the side of the great music hall. Coming up out of the Metro on the escalators I was not infrequently accompanied by the morning commute of music students toting their instruments of various sizes, brining them up out of the Metro to the daylight on the same escalator alongside me. It made for a joyous morning commute.

Euro 22: Home in Prague, City of Mozart

 June 5 : Train to Geneva Airport by myself then checking bag and clearing security, then waiting while EasyJet flight to Prague was delayed.  Lousy food in the terminal. Girl across from me in the lounge had a Mozart score and was reading while waving her fingers as if learning it for an instrument.  Had been apprehensive about transportation between Prague Airport and downtown flat at late hour of evening, but found my fears foolish after landing, and let by myself be swept with the flow, buying a ticket and boarding the bus that took me to the end of the Metro line in the usburbs, then catching the train inward to the city center, disembarking with backpack at Hradcaska Metro station, which comes up out of the ground in big plastic tube-like structures. I'd rehearsed the streets in my mind. Two blocks down, and turn the corner. Number 4. I found the keypad and followed the instructions I'd memorized. Indoors an automaatic light came on. A pre-war walk-up flat, classic style. I was home.

Europe 2022: Four of Us in a Medieval Town

What on Earth could possibly allow me to assert that much of modern particle physics, and by extension the results at the Large Hadron Collider at CERN were so in error, to the point of being bullshit?

What gall! Yet these were the thoughts swirling in my head while we toured the place, and later, as we drove back toward Lausanne, with Okki detouring down along the lake front on the local road for a couple hours, and we stopped and had espressos in a small French-speaking town.

As we got to Lausanne he jumped back on the autoroute, so that we could go easily through it, and pass through to the other side, going northeast along the lake, where the road climbs the bluffs that afford the heavenly views through the gaps in the mountains on the far side, revealing the ridge of the high Alps beyond. 

An hour later we were off the autoroad, onto the side roads headed towards Gruyère, the town famous for its cheeses. We passed the cheese facctory and museum in the modern town and headed up to the hill towards the medieval town, which is the real Gruyère. We parked on the hillside in a grassy area to which visitors were being directed by locals in vests. Then we climbed the road into the town on the gravel road, hearing he ringing of the giant cow bells as the cows were paraded into town on a road above us. We could not see the cows, only hear them.

The town was buzzing with a festival. We passed through the arch and realized that amidst the crowds along the ancient street in either direction were booths from which local food was dispensed, through presentation of tokens that were purchased at a table at the town entrance. Okki went back and bought some for both of us, and then we began touring the food booths, using the bowl for some stew, and also just using our fingers for the various sweet delicacies, and winding up with some ice cream. We took beers in a restaurant, and then Okki and I walked up around the town, and down to the church, and saw the cows with the bells in lower meadow. Okki got a text from Stefan saying that he and his wife had parked below the town and would meet up with us. 

We went and found them and then there were four of us. 

Europe 2022: God and the Large Hadron Collider

 After we had explored the globe museum for a sufficient time, we exited and crossed the road using the traffic island to the other side, where we easily found the visitor's center. We had decided to forgo a tour and instead visit the permanent exhibitions on our own. We would have needed to sign up for the tour, and wait for it until the appointed time. Neither of us wanted to do, and I told Okki that frankly I didn't see the need for it. Having worked years ago in similar facilities, I knew that usually there was very little to "see" that struck one as being interesting. "Lots of cables and big metal boxes," I told him. Sure, the concept of what was happening might be interesting, but it took a special eye to see it. I could look at Lawrences tiny cyclotron in the kiosk in the globe building and see the swelling of scientific discovery. I was less interested in the same thing with the great collider underground.

So we followed the tour. I skipped over the informational timelines. I cared only about seeing the replicas of the detectors and other "real life" things from the display. By far the most interesting thing to me was the ordinary metal tank of hydrogen gas that had been the original source of the proton beam, now replaced by a similar, There had been a similar ordinary tiny metal bottle of hydrogen for Lawrence's 1930 cyclotron in the kiosk display case. The only difference for the great collider was the size of the tank.

Amazing. Yet it makes sense. To make protons all you need is ordinary hydrogen gas, which you send through an ionizing chamber, to strip off the electrons, leaving the bare proton in the nucleus. Then you begin of cranking them up to high energy, by the ring like structure of cyclotron (like Lawrence's little gadget), or its later improved descendant, the synchrotron (which is the type of instrument buried beneath CERN that is 27 km in circumference. 

Simple basic physics. A beam of protons. That was, as I said, by far the most interesting thing I saw in the permanent exhibits at CERN. It reminded that underneath it all, it is the same animal in many respects as the little gadget in the museum across the street, and that provided a nice connection to the real physics of the real world.

It's not as if the other details about the particle collider at CERN were not interesting to me. I could well have gotten in the details of not only the beam itself (i.e. how the protons are cranked up to high energy in the giant ring by intense magnetic fields, and then diverted into each other to slam head on, creating what are called "scattering events." There is a lot of very interesting engineering there. More interesting still are the detectors, of which multiple ones different type are placed around the giant ring to the observe the affect effects of these scattering events from collisions. These are the instruments that are used to confirm theories, etc., about the nature of underlying physical reality on fundamental level.

Yet even as I looked at all these detectors, I kept my reserve. I felt no sense of great thrill knowing they were being used to unlock the secrets of the universe. In fact, I struggled not to feel a bit of contempt about it all, knowing that it was very likely that not only were they not being used to unlock the secrets of the universe, they were quite likely being used in a giant swindle, of not only the public, but of the scientists themselves, who had convinced themselves they were doing something meaningful and great, akin to the great discoveries of the past.

After passing through the permanent exhibits, we passed outside the building into the inner courtyard from which we could see the nearby office buildings and dormitories for resident scientists. Again these were very familiar in their look. I could easily imagine what they looked like inside. To a scientist, they would be interesting, to an outsider they would be little to see. It had been part of my plan, simply to look upon these buildings, to remind myself of the lives and careers that had spent by generations of people, not only at CERN, but at other such facilities, and in universities building up the theory behind it all.

I couldn't help feel sorry for them. There but for the grace of God...

Europe 2022: We Enter CERN

The highway drive was spent in pleasant conversation with each other so that I barely noticed that we were coming up on Geneva on the autoroute. As we neared the city, we both attempted to contribute to the navigation, Okki using the onboard GPS voice and map, and me using my knowledge and memory from the maps I'd studied, and then going by the road signs just like we used to in the old days. We made the correct turn on the road to the little town of Meyrin, where the lab is located,  and soon we were obviously at the site, but the CPS took us to a secure entrance, not the visitor parking lot. Somehow the combination of talents had not given us a flawless arrival. Okki got gas a station next to the big globe museum while I used my iPhone to go to the CERN web site and look for the parking lot on the visitor instructions page. 

We figured out our error and soon found the little service road around the black of the giant globe, where had the morning visitor lot to ourselves. We parked and approached the globe building, which houses the Universe of Particles museum, and we went inside. It was dark like a planetarium with glowing exhibits befitting something having to do with space and cosmology. There were small global like kiosks, chest high, scattered throughout the room with small viewing ports to exhibits inside. The design made it difficult for more than one person to look inside the exhibit at the same time. 

The exhibits had various exhibitions of landmarks in particle physics, both theoretical and experimental. The ones I found most interest were the ones containing actual historical artifacts, especially the one with the first ever particle collider, the cyclotron, which was built in 1930. It was less than a foot in size. Beautiful. Simple. Crude as a revolutionary scientific instrument should be. 

The second artifact I loved seeing was the original NeXT machine that ran the first web server in 1989. 

There you have it, the modern world in two machines.