SRF Heavy Industries

Words like beads of dew on a curved flat blade of tall grass, each holographically containing a fisheyed inversion of the scenery behind — cloud-fluffed blue sky below, downward-pointed green spikes above — every word the same and meaningless and yet forming a picture, though distorted and infuriatingly linear and traveling in the direction the blade takes regardless of where you want it to go. Fortunately, here is another dewed blade. And another. Another. Another. The blades, like the strung droplets, gruelingly the same, but just enough different that the whole of the sopping meadow contains the whole of sky, rotated upside down.

Here is a sentence of strung words. Here is another. And another. Another. Descending toward meaninglessness.

So here is another. And another. Don’t worry. There are tens of thousands more.

Remember, these words are upside down.

* * * * *

My puppet lays on its back on the dewed grass, eyes sewn shut — one emptied socket half full of petulant pointy-legged skritching and the other always quiet unless my puppet is in motion — and cold enough to collect dew itself. Its brown weather-leathered chest is bare, as is its head (except for a shock of sunbleached hair), and arms, and legs, and feet. From waist to mid-thigh it wears beach-appropriate flower-printed shorts, too heavy to be trunks for swimming but of a sort that is often used as such regardless. Perhaps because it is sometimes convenient to have a number of pockets to fill with the trifles one finds below the waves.

Pockets are useful things. One of the reasons I maintain a puppet is so that it can wear pockets and carry useful trifles. It is a crutch, but a familiar one, and comfortable.

The puppet is inert, having been dead (and taxidermied) for years and years. I am waiting for the sun to burn off the dew. I confine my awareness to the beach-adjacent meadow that contains it, embedding my self in linear time as an exercise for the string of connected moments that must follow, one after another, slow and awkward like a flying bird, head bobbing, walking the migration routes on foot. I spread myself thin over the expanse of the meadow and watch ten million tiny air-sullied drops of water encourage the outermost surfaces to hand molecules of water to the larger molecules of diatomic nitrogen and oxygen for them to carry it away, reversing the process that deposited it last night. The water molecules are even shaped like birds, winging away to join the flocks in the sky.

I feel the ripples of time like the grass feels the microcurrents of wind that buffer it from the onshore breeze. I cannot resist. I peek above the time-ripples and roll a portion of my awareness back to a ruddy sunrise, the nearest one to the arbitrary here/now of the meadow containing my warming puppet, not much more than an hour distant. I drop back into the grass with the rest of me before I lose my will to follow linearity. Or worse, shear into multiples.

It is tedious. I feel an enormous temptation to shout the entire meadow dry, startling the water into the air like a gunshot sends a flock of starlings aloft. But the sudden fog might draw attention. And the entire point of this exercise is to relearn patience.

A quarter of an hour is an unendurable eternity. Twenty minutes. Another five or ten. I sit my puppet upright. Draw its feet under it, or him, as it used to be many years ago, and compel it to stand.

Its mouth was sewn shut around a cloth bag of various odds and ends ages ago as well, so the pantomimed yawn (covering its mouth with the back of the left hand) and skyward stretch of the right is comedy gold. But there might be spectators watching, morning joggers and others for whom this distant verisimilitude would be useful for not setting off otherness alarms. It looks natural. It feels natural. After all, once upon a time, embedded in time, I used to steer this puppet from the inside. Call it sentimentality, but I have a small preference for not having my handiwork, and my one-time home, shredded by a panicked mob.

[*]

2012 US Presidential Election, State by State, Nate Silver, http://FiveThirtyEight.NYTimes.com

So the 2012 Us Presidential Election is over and went exactly as predicted by Nate Silver at his FiveThirtyEight blog at the New York Times website. This is unsurprising to me, as Silver has had many years of practice at collecting this kind of data and analyzing its worth based on the sources involved and is a competent mathematician.

Still, a huge number of people are surprised. And angry. And crying foul. Because these facts — the measurement of the universe in its current state — are not consistent with what they knew in their hearts to be true.

I blame a combination of things, the chiefest of which are sadistic manipulators who set out to lie to these people deliberately so as to milk their wallets to back a lame mule in a horse race (said sadists being under a separate delusion that the world is cynical enough that a tarted up mule with the best press money can buy can win a horse race). Also I blame Walt Disney.

Stern denial of a fact one does not like, whether one’s heart is filled with bitter hatred or sorrow or the strong emotion of one’s choice or not, will not alter that fact. Ask anyone who has ever watched a loved one die. Neither will wishing really, really hard. (I’m looking at you, Disney.) Facts aren’t poisoned fairies that one can cure with child-like (read: naive) belief and clapping one’s hands.

Nor can one simply apply money and go shopping for facts one likes better, or have them manufactured to order in “fact”-mills. Because people are predictable, they will take your money and give your something in return, but the thing they give you will be something known in common parlance as a “lie”.

And paying huge wads of money to distribute these lies to the largest number of people possible and having them all clap their hands and believe really hard (paying attention, Disney?) will never make your lies true. All it does is leave a large number of people angry, with hands sore from clapping, soaking in the lovely feeling of what it’s like to be bilked for a chump.

Some national cultures have quaint traditions for ridding themselves of this chumpy feeling, frequently expressed in terms of taking to the streets and smashing up stuff and setting huge stacks of tires on fire — when they can’t get their hands on the bilkers and include them in the festivities. These celebrations are too huge and colorful to be fully described with such a tiny word as “riot”, but we’ll make do.

Facts are the way things are. If it helps, you can think of facts as the expressed will of the god of your choice. Many do, and those are typically happier people, and less bilkable. Also, if it helps, you can think of faith as sticking to your guns in the face of inevitable unfavorable outcomes — again, many do — instead of a childlike naive magical belief that, if performed strongly enough, backed firmly with unwavering, profound yet unfounded emotion (thanks again, Disney), will warp the world in the direction of your strongest and most selfish desires.

Screw you, FOX NEWS — and screw your owners and programmers — for the misery-spreading propaganda engine you are, and, yes, also, screw you, Disney, for lying to five generations of children about how the world works and what faith means.

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