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. 

My 2022 Trip to Europe (vi): The Physicists

 Our first stop, however, would the great physics laboratory.  I had been delighted that Okki wanted to see it. We had originally planned to visit on Sunday, after which Okki could drop me off at Geneva Airport for my flight. But it turned out that the visitor center at CERN was closed on Sunday, a fact I found out from their website, the use of which bears the irony of it being the first ever home page on the world wide web. I had used it on the command line in 1991, before web browsers existed, typing www cern.ch in order to access their Esperanto language course. 

Now I was using it to close in on CERN itself.  I had many reasons for going there, not the least of which was the coolness of it all, to visit such a facility, but also with the agenda I had in mind,  with the talk I was going to give in Prague in just a few days.

We took the elevator to the basement and retrieved Okki's small sedan, recently purchased while he was in Spain, and then navigated the treacherous driveway up to the street, with the necessary use of convex windows on both ends. I could now understand why Okki hadn't offered to pick me up at the station. It was hassle getting in and out. 

He programmed CERN into the GPS system and it took us through Lausanne down the road that accessed to motorway, and we zipped westward through the green lush landscape along the lake toward Geneva.

On the way, I told Okki a few things about CERN he might want to know, trying always the perspective of someone familiar with such facilities, and with the people who work in them, and moreover about the theory they were purporting to explore, with the great instruments they had built there.

I mentioned I sent to him and Stefan an email a couple weeks prior,  joking that we could go to CERN together, and then stage a performance of a play by the Swiss playwright Friedrich Dürrenmatt, called Die Physiker ("The Physicists)", which was written after World War II and set in the French-speaking part of Switzerland. 

The story is rather twisted, legitimately in the genre of horror. It is set in a mental institution called, in French,  Les Cerisiers, (The Cherry Trees) (a reference to Chekhov, certainly).  When I first saw the play in 1988 it was being staged by the theater department of my university in Oregon, which I had started in 1985 after my last visit in Lausanne. When I saw the people, I was within weeks of leaving, having presumably fulfilled all the requirements for a physics degree.

It had been the last thing I thought I would do when I went there in 1985, to study physics and be a physics major. But because I'd been traveling abroad out-of-touch in Europe that summer, I had not responded to the card they sent, that I was to send back, indicating my preference for a faculty advisor in the department I wanted to make my home. So they gave a physics professor, a rather odd-looking Canadian balding but with a long white beard akin to an old testament prophet, as my grandfather would say, upon seeing his photograph.  I'd been so intrigued by him I had decided to take his introductory physics class as part of the classical quadrivium-trivium curriculum I was determined to make for myself while there. 

One thing had led to another, and I'd wound up being a physics major, and then going to graduate school, and getting to work with some of the greatest minds on the planet who are physicists, some of whose was the subject of the ongoing research at CERN.

After all this, I was heading there with an agenda. I wanted to check it over, and feel the reality of it. I didn't need a lab tour. I knew what labs looked like. I just needed to see what was there on site above ground, and a little of what was below. Most of all I wanted to lose all inhibition about talking about it. I wanted to remind myself of the people who had spent their lives and careers there, and who enormous professional reputations, even among the lay community, to uphold. 

I wanted to do this because in a few days I intended to tell a room full of very learned and sharp-minded physicists in Prague that I was confident that one could discuss the possibility thatphysics had been off track since perhaps 1930, and that most everything in fundamental particle physics since about 1962, including all results coming out of CERN, was rank bullshit.

My 2022 Trip to Europe (v): Stefan the Man

 The other cool thing Okki and I were going to do on Saturday was to meet up with Stefan. I was psyched about that, even more visiting CERN. He had been unable to meet me at Zurich Airport because of his work (he is a very diligent executive, and has risen up the corporate ladder through a series of jobs with different employers). 

He is also crazy and nutty in the same way both Okki and I are, and love being with the both of them. In this case Stefan was brining along his wife, a Brazilian woman. They were driving in from their place north of Zurich along the German border. Ginger and I had visited them there in 2014, and we had last seen Stefan while he had come to Las Vegas for a conference in 2016, and driven down to stay at our place in Fountain Hills.

He and Okki are close friends, like a duo. Hard to think of one without the other. In a very similar, but not in how they look, other than both being taller than average. Okki's rounded facial features, as does his lingering accent, betrays his origins as Finn, whose parents moved to Sweden in the 1960s for employment. He grew in. working-class exurb of Gothenburg which has since becoming mostly Iraqi. Stefan came from wealth, also in Gothenburg, and has tall melancholic look that seems very Nordic. 

Even though they are both from the same Swedish city, and of the same age, and went the same technical college in Gothenburg, they met only when both had gone to Aspen, Colorado in the late 1980s to work menial jobs in order to be ski bums. Both had leveraged their technical skills quite well in order to build financial stability working normal jobs for normal companies, while simultaneously seeking out, whenever they could, adventure travel together in Latin America, which might become a raucous week-long party adventure, barely sleeping until one could no longer stand up, or going hard on the slopes of a delightful bowl-basin in the Rockies or the Alps, or other mountains. Okki had recently lived in Andalusia simply for winter skiing above Granada. He had moved to Switzerland after falling in love with Zermatt, after a recent trip there with Stefan and other hard-skiing Swede. Lausanne had been chosen as comfortable base from which he could work remotely and access the winter heaven-on-earth just a short train ride away.

Our plan was to meet up with Stefan and his wife in the town Gruyère, which is famous for its cheese. There would also visit the Geiger Museum, which shows the work of the Swiss artist known for his grotesque imagery, who made the concept and sets for the 1979 movie Alien. 

What a day it would be. 

My 2022 Trip to Europe (iv): Denying Political Intrustions Into Friendship

June 4 -- I woke up Saturday morning on the air mattress and was psyched for the day. As each night before, I had barely gotten any true sleep. I kept waking up every hour or so, and unable to sleep much further. The jet lag was extending my misery. I wanted a good full night's sleep very badly but it was being denied to me by my body's slowness to adapt. 

Nevertheless I brightened up with the full sun and was glad Okki wanted to linger a bit. We made breakfast. Okki used Alexa to bring up the news. He gets all his news this way primarily from two sources BBC and NPR. During our contentious conversation on the patio two nights prior, I'd told him, in response to a question, how much I despise those particular news sources, but I wasn't surprised he still played them. It's a difference between our side and their side: they can't help telling us and showing us "how it's done" with the news (i.e. how I'm supposed to listen to it, from the correct sources, and how I'm supposed to process it). The short NPR snippet he played lived up to every expectation. It was clear it was all about making suburban women swoon with anxiety over the latest gun tragedy, to gin up support for the Democratic Party, for which NPR was a straightforward party organ.

They even went further, by having their second morning story be about how a couple school teachers in upstate New York (Rochester, I think) sent mean tweets to their students, and were reprimanded. I almost busted out laughing, but I listened placidly for the sake of my gracious host. If he needed to tell me what his news sources were, then I would politely listen, and comment only later, at his invitation. 

For NPR to care about such a minor incident, there had to be an aspect of the story that allowed the listener to make a tsk-tsk value judgment about White working-class conservative people in the heartland (which includes upstate and western New York at this point). It had to further the narrative of Critical Race Theory, or the something about LGBTQ. I didn't pay attention long enough to hear which ones. It would only have enraged me privately to have to listen to the agenda being shoved into people so hard.

The two of us had better things to do than discuss political differences. We had a full day planned. First on the agenda was to drive into Geneva, and visit the giant particle collider facility at CERN.

My 2022 Trip to Europe (iii) : Random Strangers in the Park

 June 3 -- Friday. Okki had to work at his job today. Before he started work we walked from his apartment into the city center for breakfast, and then he cuts me loose to go back to his flat for the day to work remotely (his job is all remote), while I walk around the old city.  In 1985, I had walked the other direction from the station, and had not even known there was an old city to Lausanne, as well as cathedral, which is generally now the immediate focus of my attention in any city I visit these days. Using a map Okki had given me, I climbed the hill, went inside the cathedral (which ceased being Catholic in the Reformation and was adapted to Evangelical Swiss Protestantism). I sat in the pews an prayed the rosary with the beads I had bought in San Francisco a year and half before.It was my attention to pray the rosary in as many places as possible, where it was appropriate. 

I enjoyed the spontaneous experience of lingering among the folks on the terrace in front of the cathedral, with its view over the city towards the lake. Young couples were hanging out together, and other small groups of people, skewed towards the young. It is good among young people and feel their energy. It can be hard thing to do, if one is not comfortable with how one lived one's own youth.

The central part of Lausanne--the old Roman part dating from antiquity--is very hilly, no doubt on a naturally well-defendable bluff overlooking the center of the great lake along its axis. It's a natural point of control in the geography. It is not like Zurich, or Geneva, which are built along the banks of rivers where meet one of these lakes. Lausanne feels more ancient, and it is.

Of course you probably known it is the birthplace of the modern Olympics, and its headquarters, along the such things as the International Gymnastics Federation, which I passed multiple times as it was near Okki's rented apartment building. I hadn't known that before this trip. I'm a bit nonplussed about the Olympics lately. They have come to feel to me to be part of general Globalist religious movement, of which I do not care to participate. I was hoping Okki wouldn't insisting on visiting such places in Lausanne with me, and to my relief, he didn't care to make that the center of our exploration.

In the evening, as the sun faded late, we walked along the lake front in the park, talked to random people we met, which Okki loves to do, and had dinner on the patio terrace of restaurant a block from the late. It fun was to speak French. Then we walked home, up the hill on the meandering streets, cutting through a long tunnel, and were exhausted when we got home. 

No politics that night. Just fellowship and random strangers in the waterfront park.

My 2022 Trip to Europe (ii): What Lausanne Reveals

 June 2 -- We land in Zurich a couple hours late, past 10 AM local time, which I don't mind. Okki had already indicated he needed to work (from home) at least until, and if I arrived at his rented AirBnB flat in Lausanne earlier than that, I'd have to chill out. My late arrival meant I'd get there closer to the end of his work day. 

My backpack showed up in the luggage, thankfully, but when I touched it I found it was soaked through and through. It confirmed my fears while sitting on the tarmac at JFK, and seeing luggage carts in the rain. I reasoned my oddly-shaped pack would be at the top of whatever pile it was in, on the carts, and might have borne the brunt of the rainstorm. Everything inside that might be damaged by water, including the vintage maps I'd brought along from previous trips, were wrapped up in ziplock bags. I'd gone crazy with ziplock bags the night before I left, going to Target and buying three different sizes, and using them both for organization and rain-protection. But all my clothes and my Rumple synthetic blanket were drenched. I felt stupid because in the pack were three large garbage bags specifically to use for all my possessions in the pack. I thought I would use them if hiking in the rain. It didn't occur to me that I would need them while in flight. Mistake number one of the trip.

Through Swiss customs, my task was to get to Lausanne by train. First step was figuring out how to buy a train ticket. From my meticulous research, I knew the station was directly across from the entrance to the terminal,  I probably could have bought one all the way to Lausanne.  Using the machine, and making it easy on my self by choosing English instructions instead of German, I navigated the menus, buying a ticket only as far as Zurich central station for now, where I could buy another ticket for Lausanne. I don't mind these interactions in foreign countries. They are part of the fun. When I put in my credit card to verify my purchase, it rejected it. Uh oh. Bad sign. The last thing you want to see abroad. It is for this reason mostly that I have multiple bank accounts and multiple credit cards--so I don't get stuck while traveling. I went through the process again, through the same screens, and used by debit card and this time thankfully it worked. Sigh of relief. 

I caught the train into Zurich, wondering if it was the right one, and the conductor was happy with my ticket, so I figured it was heading in the right direction. I had used my iPhone to tell me the schedules to Lausanne, and bought a ticket in the machines for the next one, using my debit card, which worked. So far things felt rocky but I was in motion. No big screw ups yet. While I waited for the train, I strolled through the Zurich station, marveling at the architecture, which I love--those old European stations, even if they are partially modernized. The one thing I miss is the clackety-clack of the old schedule boards with their mechanical flipping letters and numbers. Now it is all digital. Somehow it doesn't feel as much like you are on a train trip in some faraway place.

I thought about the previous times I'd been in Zurich, going back to the summer of 1992, when I was by myself, and only passing through because Switzerland was expensive, and in 2014 with Ginger, when we "did Switzerland right" because I had a decent-paying job I would work at while abroad.

Switzerland felt almost normal, routine for me now. I wouldn't have come here except for my friend Okki, who had recently relocated from Spain to Switzerland, all the while holding down the same remote IT job for an American company. He'd moved into his new rental only a few days before, sending me photos of the spectacular view over Lake Geneva.

You can usually set your watch by the Swiss train schedule, and soon I was seated on my train, headinbg out of the city and into the lush green countryside of Switzerland, along one lake and then another on the way to Lausanne. One chain of trains got me there in a couple hours.

In the station there, toting my backpack like days of old, I looked around, trying to remember it. Did I remember? It was here, at the tail end of that glorious trip in the summer of 1985, when I conquered all my fears and emerged into manhood, that I had gotten off the train (because my ticket allowed one to break one's trip, and I didn't want to get back to Paris quite yet). I had put my old blue Camp Trails internal frame pack into left luggage, using some of my last cash, and wondered around Lausanne, winding up in a park where I found a quaint old well-kept building that was a movie theater.  I resolved to see whatever was showing and walked up to find that it was a hard-core porn theater, the nicest looking one you'd ever see. A sweet old lady sold me a ticket and for the first and only time in my life I went solo to such a showing, feeling like it was so ironical that I couldn't resist following through. Then I had slept on the train station platform waiting for the express to come through in the night, to catch it onward with my precious ticket I had bought in Athens, that would get me home, and would sleep on the train.

I told Okki this story when I finally got to his place, walking twenty minutes from the station to his flat, cheerful like days of old. I told him how ironically, in the autumn after that trip, I went back to college as a transfer to a small liberal arts college in Oregon, and that one of the dorms was called Lausanne Hall, named after immigrants from that city, and that I had two girlfriends "in Lausanne" that fall.  Such are the adventures of youth. I was at different stage of life. What would the Swiss city reveal to me this time?

That fall in 1985, turning 21, I found myself the object of much female attention at my new college, partly because I was a bronze sculpted god from my travels, and more importantly, I was fearless and cocky. I figured there was nothing in Salem, Oregon that could possibly matter, or intimidate me, I could always move on. I assumed I would always feel that way. I didn't realize that effect of such adventures, like the tan I had gotten, wear off and must be renewed. When it did, during that first year in Oregon, it would horribly confuse me, even depress me, as if I lost the Grail.

I told Okki that using Google Maps, and a little bit of deduction, I'd located that old porn theater in the park from 1985. It was once part of a casino, which makes sense, and which I vaguely remembered, but it no longer showed porn flicks but was a proper art cinema.

Okki had plans lined up for the weekend for us, but he would need to work the next day (Friday). We didn't go out that evening but sat around in his flat, on the patio with its magnificent view over the city and the lake. The discussion went late into the night. I had barely slept on the plane, and was overcome with fatigue but the vagaries of jet lag kept me awake and we talked on the patio. The conversation got rather heated. As he has done over the phone (using Whatsapp), he gets animated asking me, on the edge of anger, how I can support Donald Trump. The school massacre in Texas had just happened, so of course I got an earful about how America needs to conform the rest of the world on gun issues (Ain't gonna happen, I said. You better come up with a better way to stop school shootings? Are you open to alternative solution or does it HAVE to be a gun ban?). He's a very strong atheist, and he also peppered with me inquisition-style probing about why such a rational scientific man like me can believe in God. I tried my best to be frank with my answers to him, but often I needed clarification to his questions, i.e. Do you believe in Santa Claus? He found this very frustrating, telling me just to give a straight answer, and I tried, but it kept getting worse and worse. I very much wanted him to not open up this can of worms, but he needed to "go there." I knew this. I knew how people get disturbed just by knowing someone disagrees with them. I felt resentment towards him, that he, of all people, had succumbed to the need to break me down, even humiliate me. It felt so boring to me. So stereotypical. 

Yet he was ultimately able to pull back and say shake my hand, and say, I love you and respect you, Matt, and of course I did the same in return, because of course I don't care that disagrees with me. I'm not threatened by that at all.

Finally at 3AM, with him needing to get up in a few hours for work, we went aside and I crashed on his air mattress, while all of my clothes were draped over his dining room chairs, drying from having gotten soaked on the tarmac in New York.

My 2022 Trip to Europe (i): The GoLite Has Its Day

 June 1 -- 7:15 A,M Ginger drives me to the airport, PHX Terminal 3 for Delta. I wait at the counter and check my bag for the hold, my gold 50L Golite backpack, that is ultralight. Light as. feather but sturdy, I am sure. I've had it for years and never really used it. GoLite was a Colorado e-commerce company founded in 2010 Boulder and did well before going bankrupt from overexpansion into brick and mortar (which by the laws of retail forced them into becoming an outlet for women's apparel, and away from the hardcore ultralight enthusiast core of their original business.  Now it is time for that old purchase of mine, from the heydey of the company, to shine. Before checking it in, I pull all the straps as tight as possible, and buckle the small horizonal straps in reverse way to hold the big straps down to the back like.a bundle. Attached to it is an old REI screw-on luggage tag that I have had for many years, and inside the little plastic window is a card with my name, phone number, and my Scottsdale address.

I have plenty of time before takeoff, over an hour. I listen to some downloaded videos on my iPad with my noise-canceling headphones.These are things. didn't have when I started taking a backpack over to Europe. I carry the iPad, headphones, and other necessary gear, including my Macbook (which I do not want to check into my backpack), inside my old plum-colored REI Flashpack, which has served me so well. Insidce the inner pouches are my passport, other necessaries, and spare contact lenses  These are all the things which I do not want to leave my person. I have to go on the assumption that my backpack will disappear in flight and not show for days in Europe, if at all. What I carry in the Flashpack is like the command module of a spaceflight. The rest can be lost and the mission can continue. But I do not want my GoLite to get lost. It would be a big hassle and no fun. It's simply a matter of thinking worst case scenario.

In the Phoenix Aiport, after going through security, I purchase a bottle of Smartwater and and a sandwhich to have on the flight. We leave JFK on time. Window seat. Arrived in JFK after 5 hour flight. Changed terminals to another one using a shuttle bus across the tarmac, Storm clouds and light rain in the last light of evening. Found gate for evening flight to Zurich. Bought and ate two slices of pizza at a walk up place next to the gate. Found myself enjoying remembering the proper way to order pizza in New York, using the brisk shorthand that New Yorkers do for such interaction, which is not rude, but considered polite, because it wastes as little of the time of both parties to the interaction. Wondered if I'd overeaten, given that food would be served on board for dinner. Boarded fight on time. Window seat in exit row in economy on the right. Traded a view being blocked by the wing for the extra legroom, which I wanted for the trans-Atlantic night flight. To my delight, the other seat remains empty. I will have the row to myself. It is right next to the mid-cabin restrooms, which I know will be both good and bad (given the traffic). I decide it is a net plus, to be able to stand up and use the restroom whenever I am inclined to, and when it is empty.

All looks well. Then we wait. And we wait. We are still at the gate. A massive thunderstorm system has hit JFK. Pilot warns it may be awhile. I use my iPhone to look at the weather radar. A massive system of storms is stretching all the way across the Catskills into the western New York as far as Lake Ontario. It is moving southeast and the front edge has just passed over JFK. Indeed it's going to be a while. As the hours add up at the gate, I begin hoping that we will stay on the plane and depart, even if we wait all night to take off. Please do not cancel the plane, or make us get off. We wait so long that by law they are required to let us off the plane. Finally after four hours, with the local time almost Midnight, the pilot announces departure. At this point I am glad I had the two slices of pizza. I think about my golden GoLite, and hoping it made into the hold. I think about something I wrote in a spiral bound journal, as the first entry in it, 37 years ago, almost to the day,  whie sitting in a departure lounge at the same airport I just left: I feel like I've swallowed a tub full of eels.