SRF Heavy Industries

This one time I was trying to read a graphic novel — yes, Mom, that’s like a comic book, but thicker — and the cat was trying to convince me I should do otherwise, like cats do. The book was propped up on the desk and I was holding it by both sides. The cat was somehow draped from arm to arm, nestled up against my belly, purring and blowing spit bubbles through her drool, and grunting with annoyance whenever I turned a page.

This is the same cat that I swear cracked the bridge of my nose headbutting me awake at 3:30AM a couple of nights ago. I spend too much of my life scooping poop and chiseling up hairballs he’s hidden to find much anything he does cute anymore. Especially when he burns into my insurance deductible and makes people order x-rays of my face. I was able to talk the doctor out of that part (“How about we just pretend this is the 1850s and I just bite down on a handful of tongue depressors while you wiggle it and tell me what you think?) because I need full use of all the brain cells I have left.

Yes, the graphic novel was about superheroes, and, yes, those are pretty frequently wish-fulfillment fantasies acted out by cardboard people of unearthly proportions wrapped in Spandex and hardly anything remotely like literature. But frankly — and I’m talking to you again, Mom — I’ve trolled through the Romance section and flipped through a few. All you’re missing is the Spandex, and that’s only sometimes, and the artists that earn like $75 a page drawing it all out, scene by scene. Comics hardly have the market cornered on cardboard characters, unearthly proportions, and wish-fulfillment.

Yeah, sometimes they’re soap operas interspersed with punch-ups — just like the “professional masked wrestling entertainment” from which they derived, like, a hundred years ago. But not all the time. Sturgeon’s Law — “90% of everything is crap” — applies across the board to everything. So maybe one in ten romances are quite a bit closer to literature. And one in ten comics. Hell, one in ten books of any kind. Frankly I think it’s unfair to give books a head start just because they couldn’t afford a cover artist. Even without a Spandex or ripped-bodice specialty.

And I understand what I’m saying is all being weighted based on the mouth it’s coming out of — an out-of-shape guy who’s life is dominated by his mother who lives less than two miles away and the small incontinent animal he shares his apartment with — an animal of a sort we never actually bothered to domesticate, but just kind of rolled over when they moved in — who beats him up occasionally. I know I’d lose the fight denying the appeal of fantasies of power to affect circumstances and dominance and the occasional interaction with a woman of unearthly proportions wrapped in Spandex might appeal, so I won’t bother.

But where the literature part comes in is that power and resources aren’t distributed evenly across the board, perhaps doled out more generously to the deserving. Perhaps its a good idea to play through “What If?” scenarios to try to guess in advance how things would shake out if power fell into the hands of various sorts of people of various backgrounds and various takes on responsibility and duty and compassion and insight into possible consequences of drastic action. Maybe one in ten, perhaps more frequently if you’re discerning enough about what you consume to seek out storylines from particular writers, you run across a chilling tale that lets you have it straight about what people would do if power actually fell into their hands. Good people, bad people, confused people, heartbroken people, people who have never had a bad thing happen to them ever in their lives, people who have never known anything but misery, people who think they deserve it, people who are sure that they don’t.

It doesn’t take a sledgehammer to tell you that these are the sorts of people that have power over you now. These are your judges and cops and bosses and the movers and shakers that pay for political campaigns and run corporations that bury their trash in your backyard and sweep their dirt so far under the carpet that it doesn’t show up until after page six, if at all. These are the people that end up as despots or freedom fighters, half of whom scrambled hard to take advantage of every opportunity that got them closer to their goals, half of whom had it all thrust into their laps and just want to blow it all away and go fishing. These are your ministers and editors and cable channel programming directors and tour guides and tax assessors and back alley thugs and anybody who can step up to you and make you do anything, anybody who can control what you get to see and hear, which is the same thing.

It wouldn’t make them any more obvious to give them glowing whips and portable cannons and biceps and/or breasts the sizes of their heads wrapped in day-glo Spandex. And all you have to do is look them in the eyes to see which ones are wearing Spandex in their own heads. Those are the ones you have to watch out for.

The big question for comics fans is what superpower you’d want to have and what you’d do with it. Trust me when I say I’ve thought about this a lot. And my answer has finally stopped changing. If I could have any power I want, I want to be able to show anyone I meet what they truly look like to other people. If I felt like being a bastard, maybe I’d carry around a knife to hand over for the wrist-slitting afterward. For the other bastards.

Failing that I’d like to know whatever mystic secrets that would allow me to toilet train twelve-year-old housecats and make them hoof it for hardwood, tile, or linoleum when it was time to hork themselves hollow.

[*]

This one time I was visiting my grandmother in the apartment we rented for her by the park with all the cherry trees. Sakura trees, actually, having been bred to flower but to not produce fruit.

I thought that was bizarre and wasteful once, deliberately selecting for trees that would leave people and wildlife hungry. But experience has taught me that not all cherries are edible. Some are flavorless or perpetually sour and only attract the bees and wasps when they fall. And as beautiful as cherry trees are, with the amazing smell when they are blooming, they are shady fragrant havens of buzzing, stinging death once there is fruit — unless they’re in a tame orchard, tended by professionals. A city park is a poor place for a fruiting cherries unless you want to feed the homeless one week and sting them to death the next.

And then my grandmother taught me appreciate the sakura by showing me how to make tea from the blossoms, just like she was taught by her grandfather what must seem like a thousand years ago to her, as well as to me. Cherry blossom petals are edible, too, offering subtle flavor as a garnish to anything bland. Oatmeal, rice — anything with mild flavors, for which a tiny hint of blossom brings the texture to life. When the sakuras were blooming, grandmother would serve us cups of milk in her best tea china, each blessed with a thimbleful of green tea and a whole sakura blossom floating on top.

A gulp of ordinary milk, the same stuff we chugged in a hurry while getting ready for school every morning of our childhood, unappreciated, became a handful of joy and peace, something to be savored in the moment and mourned when it was past. We were never so ungracious as to ask for seconds, as that would show we missed the depth of meaning in the blossom itself — abundant joy in the moment, soon to be gone, then a treasured memory that would be spoiled by gluttony.

The blossoms always return when it is time.

Grandmother was seated at her kitchen table, Western style, in a chair she could easily get into and out of. The tea was brewed from a kettle heated over her gas burner, resting in a pot to steep and cool. I retrieved four china cups and brought them to the table. One for her, one for mother, who had demanded that I come in previous years and now could not keep me away, one for grandfather, who had not sat in his chair for six years now, and one for myself. I poured milk for the three of us who were present and living. I brought over the tea pot and sat it briefly on a trivet on the table, then poured a dollop into our three cups. I put a handful of blossoms into grandfather’s cup, then after a brief moment, pulled out three blossoms. One went into grandmother’s cup, one into mother’s, and finally, one went into my own.

Before I sat down, I splashed hot tea over the remaining blossoms in grandfather’s cup to release their scent.

Incense would have been appropriate under other circumstances, but today, a cupful of sakura blossoms was a perfect offering.

We all sat a moment, then grandmother picked up her cup and took a sip. Mother sniffed back tears and picked up her own cup, and after another moment, I picked up my own. I inhaled deeply and drank, not just the scented milk, but a steady sip of thirty years of memories.

I had visited their home in Japan one spring and summer when I was very young, prior to starting school. I remember bright pictures of landscapes, each with their associated smell — diesel buses, the fish market, a grassy field for sports where we caught grasshoppers and stick insects and hand-fed them torn blades of grass. We all regretted the proximity to the silk factory and the paper mill when the wind blew from the wrong direction. The smell of the sea. The clean smell of the flank of a tame deer at a historic park in the oldest capitol. The smell of lacquered paper in my hands, for folding. The smell of my own arm unexpectedly covered in giraffe saliva from a lick at the zoo. The smell of wood and asphalt and stone washed down by a typhoon. The smell of a ceramics kiln fired with charcoal and prunings from the local tangerine orchard, with the unmistakable scent trapped in the glazes. The chlorinated smell of an indoor wave pool at a water park.

This one tiny sip never ends. It lasts throughout the rest of the spring, through the brutally hot summer, an autumn crisp with fallen leaves, and every snowy winter to follow.

The blossoms always return when it is time.

[*]

This one time I was working on evaluating algorithms for solving mazes. On one hand it seems kind of useless and abstracted, and frankly it is, but there are a lot of real world problems that can be treated as mazes — assuming you have a good maze-solving strategy you can apply. Also, this is where my department gets the grant money, and my position specifically (for the next eight months), so, at the very bottom, a job is a job. And if it eventually helps somebody, that’s cool.

A popular old standby is the strategy referred to as “the half-blind leaky rat”, wherein a rat (or a cheap digital cursor representing said rat) follows, say, the left wall, leaving a trail of urine so it can tell if it finds a loop. It is slow, and thorough, and fails on particular kinds of mazes with loops and disconnects. Actual rats are quite a bit smarter, and an upgrade to this algorithm is to just build a physical model of the maze, put the rat at one end, a smear of peanut butter at the other, have the undergrads run fifty trials over the weekend while you go camping, then come back Monday and see what the rat does.

There are all sorts of AI learning systems that save us the trouble of building physical mazes and exercising and feeding otherwise bored and hungry rats, but that’s another project entirely and I don’t get to work on that one. I just got to read their papers and evaluate their results.

And then there are amoebas. Individually, pound for pound, they’re the most vicious predator on earth, stalking through little puddles and streams and flows, engulfing their prey whole and taking them apart for, well, parts. And chemical fuel. But when resources run low, they all Voltron together and form a slime mold, with the ability to ooze around en mass, with distinct tissues and vessel structures for transporting food and waste and reproductive fruiting bodies for distributing spores and — well, it’s all massively creepy. Its like you could dissolve a rat in water and have all the cells go off on their merry hunting ways, but when the water dries up again you get the rat back. Or maybe a handful of smaller rats, if they all ended up split up into separate smaller puddles before things dried up.

And if you take a slime mold and drop on it several pieces of food, each representing by mass the number of people in different towns or neighborhoods, you end up with a network of vessels that would be the perfect, most efficient network of roads or rails or whatever to build for a transportation system. Amoebas are a bit tougher to model because we don’t really understand the Voltroning process at the necessary depth, but trust me when I say people are working on it. Furiously.

But organic systems are creepy and slimy and smelly. Even their digital models. I like the solutions that depend on physical systems and modeling them. For instance, if you build a model maze, watertight except for the entrance and exit, fill it with water, add a little pressure until you get a good flow going, and then inject some dye — all you have to do is look at it and see which way the dye goes.

If modeling a zillion water molecules and pressures and flows sounds about as complex as building an intelligent rat from scratch, you’d be pretty close to right. But the kicker is modeling a single water molecule is pretty simple. Its getting time on a supercomputer that can model a zillion simultaneously that’s the expensive part. Fortunately a number of commercial HVAC companies that built ventilation systems for skyscrapers have some money to spread around to model and test their setups before they spend fifty times the amount to actually build and install the damned things, so the code actually exists. And what counts as a supercomputer these days is getting cheaper and cheaper. In fact, in the basement of my building is a room full of second-hand home game consoles all connected together, and that setup makes a first-generation Cray look like a pocket calculator. For that matter, so does a modern cellphone, but I’m sure you understand what I’m getting at.

It turns out that voltage is even more clever than pressurized water. If you build the actual model, fill it with an easily ionized gas, give the entrance and exit a hefty electrical potential difference, turn off the lights and hit the switch, all the paths that work will glow, with the shortest and best path glowing the brightest. Modeling that is no tougher than modeling water or air flow, assuming you adequately understand the physical and chemical principles of ionization and fluorescence. That’s less useful to the HVAC people, since they also care about side eddies and diffusion and trying to keep carbon dioxide and heat from pooling up and putting workers to sleep in their little cubicles in the afternoons. Or at least the good ones do. But anyway.

As for the problems that you can solve like mazes? That’s most of them. Every choice is a choice of paths to take through a maze, with a starting condition and a desired outcome that would represent the maze’s exit. Everything, at that level, is a series of mazes connected end to end, with the starting condition being where we are now and the end where we’d like to be, from getting a particular candidate elected to survival of the species if particular crises were to crop up. Each choice is a step in a particular direction, and even if it overtly looks like you’re going in the wrong direction, you want to take all the steps that get you to the place where you need to be to get onto the right path out.

But people are rats at worst and amoebas at best, in scenarios like this, and the universe is keyed to work like the mazes that lightning solves best, paths from past to future solved in parallel, with the viable paths determined by a quantum-mechanical sum-over-histories approach, where every possible path is the right path, or at least a right path. And if we’re to survive long term, its a race between those two algorithms.

Our current strategies are working in the short term, but in the long term my money’s on the lightning.

[*]

This one time this entire town was a meadow, full of waving grasses and grazing deer and bison. Maybe even caribou came this far south, but almost certainly elk. Beavers dammed the streams around here and this place even did time as marsh and wetlands. Maybe a tornado came through every once in a while and ripped up turf and stalks, maybe knocked down a tree or two, wherever it was that trees were content to congregate and endure some sunburn and windburn.

Tragedies were an occasional harsh winter, where blankets of snow refused to roll back and let the grass through, or warm-weather droughts that burned like brushfires started by lightning, only longer and deeper into the soil.

Tragedies didn’t involve a drunk bear running down your fawn and lurching off at high speed, uncaring, not even stopping, not noticing a cracked skull or crushed ribs or broken pelvis, bleeding out internally from bone-punctured organs.

That hardly ever happened back then.

This one time this entire town was buried under a river of ice, solid ice fifty feet high, forced to flow under its own weight like slow-poured pancake batter spreading in a seasoned cast-iron skillet on a puddle of butter. Tragedy had no meaning then, except maybe to the glacier itself, as running streams tunneled through and cut blue blue blue channels and cave systems, leaving unimaginable frozen beauty unappreciated, pleasure-domes of frosted glass lit throughout by an infant sun, unexplored eternally trickling caves of ice uninhabited.

This one time this town was buried under another river of ice. And another. And another.

This one time this entire town was buried by a hundreds of feet of salty water, midnight blue, a living bloom of alien shapes of soft bodies and spines and tiny, tiny creatures that would be hard-pressed to declare definitively as either animal or vegetable or mineral. Intricate ceramics of calcites and glass were sculpted and carried like treasures and discarded like trash and littered the ocean’s bottom until it became the ocean’s bottom, covering igneous paving in countless tons. Tragedy then was unnoticed intricacies stomped down by tons and tons of other unnoticed intricacies. Tragedy was colonial confections of salps and jellies, creatures of iterative complexities, extrapolations of proteins and goo, tugged apart by tides and currents and, eventually, the teeth of giants.

This one time this town was a convective confection of magma, pummeled to churning liquid by the incandescent heat of meteoric infall — if that’s what you can call nameless planets colliding in a billiard-ball dance. Tragedy is the loss of a single burning drop at the peak of the splashed crown, spinning flat at the peak of an arc that will never, ever fall. Tragedy is losing all of your inner incandescent shine as you cool to dead rock, leaving you to do nothing but reflect, reflect, reflect. Tragedy is losing your spinning dance to tidal locking. Tragedy is being cold and dead and escaping at the rate of a quarter inch per year, backing away into oblivion, never able to make a clean break.

And then, this one time, it rained for a thousand years.

A single strike from a single cosmic grain of sand could bring the past back. Again. And again. And again. Sometimes, when tragedy strikes, I pray for that. Who wouldn’t want a fresh start?

It seems that we can only go forward by building our towns on the bones of tragedies, large and small.

This one time I pulled the sheet back up to cover the broken body of a delicate fawn. And then I patted the belly where the next one grew.

[*]

This one time, just after the close of a recitation on stage, the stadium was roaring and flashing with applause. I had been half-concentrating on the show — my spawn was down there on the stage — but also distracted, in the way that I get sometimes when I think too much, by how the world shrinks to just the tiny part in your view that is changing. The stage was so far away, despite my relationship to one of the performers — I had arrived late — but in a darkened theater, as in other places and situations, what you see fills your being instead of your eye. The overwhelming surrounding darkness fades to insignificance. The light expands to fill everything.

That’s the magic of attention. It’s a magnifying glass, a microscope, a telescope. It zooms in to the boundaries of the action. Which was why, when the applause started, it was like the world exploded. Suddenly the world was full of action and movement and flashing lights. As I reeled I pulled back in my imagination, and pictured all the tiny actions in this theater as it would be from a giant’s perspective — a tiny box full of excitement in the murky darkness and quiet of night in this town, hardly noticeable in the woven trails of light in the main thoroughfares. And from farther still, this whole city would be a quiet glimmer on a background of nothing, and even our giants would be invisible.

I had been working hard all day. My arms were raw and sore and throbbing, and I was wrecked. Maybe that was why I was wandering, having trouble maintaining focus. The crowd had settled down, the theater was dark, and the next piece had begun. And I was lost, staring at the end of my arm as if it were a foreign thing — foreign the way a word or phrase turns to gibberish when it’s repeated too many times. My arms, overused and abused, were long floppy noodles, barely able to lift and twitch the fan on a stick we had all been issued at the door so we could keep from suffocating in the heat in the upper rows, from breathing one another’s exhaust.

There was a pocket of cool underneath my perch, where I’d placed my bag. I reached under as far as I could to carry out as much as the coolness in my bloodstream as possible. I crouched further to put skin in contact with the stone floor. After a moment I could feel it begin to revive me.

And that’s when the vision struck in full. At the end of my arm was a broad pad that branched out into five more tentacles, like someone had nailed on a starfish. The tentacle-armlets moved strangely, bending only in fixed places — like a slender crab was inside me, wearing my flesh and skin. The only thing that kept the growing panic at bay was that the crab felt like it was asleep inside me and I was still in control of my motion and volition.

I was covered in fine cilia. I was truncated. The internal dead-crab structure that would prevent me getting through the passage into my home, unless I could shed it somehow, apparently replaced half of my arms. I felt my top, and it was like I was covered up there in a fine-stranded jellyfish, dead and fibrous. All of the suckers on my arms were gone, even the stretched and torn ones from the day’s work. I couldn’t beat back the terror anymore. I flushed red and bright with distress and slumped to the cool stone floor beneath my perch.

When I regained consciousness, some kind people had stretched me out across a number of seats so I could lay down. I noted that someone had taken care to arrange my skirt for proper coverage and modesty. Someone was going through my purse, looking for my wallet and driver’s license, but I didn’t care. I could feel an enormous nausea retreating. All I could think of was that was my daughter down there on the stage, giving her recital, and I had shown up late and sick and apparently was ruining her show.

But then I noticed that the lights had never come up, and that was her unmistakable masterful attack on the violin below on the stage. I gestured for my purse, and when the man gave it to me, I clutched it to my chest in my hands and breathed as deep as I could, enormously relieved, feeling the rest of the nausea washing away.

[*]

This one time I was on this date thing with someone I had met through a friend-of-a-friend scenario. All things considered, it was less of an actual date and more of an interview over coffee to see if an actual date was something either of us wanted to do. And let me point out that these things are terrifying. Worse than job interviews. In a job interview you never have to worry about hurting the company’s feelings. If it’s not right, you just walk away. You don’t worry about whether the company thought you were a jerk, whether it laughs about you when it talks to its friends, whether it shed any tears over why you never called it back.

I have a couple of female friends, mostly women I wanted to date but things never worked out that way, one of whom likes to take me under her wing for some reason. She just says all I have to do is be honest and polite and respectful. And she says it just as if those last two things weren’t a contradiction to the first. And she says it just as if people aren’t constantly expecting lies out of each other’s mouths 24/7, trying to wheedle them into doing whatever it is they want them to do.

I like people, mostly. But I hate that people use words like tools, like hammers and chisels and lube and duct tape and try to shape other people with them like they were made of wood or stone, not actually dealing with a person with a mind, but dealing with a shape and a substance that they want to fit into a particular blank spot in their plans. People use little lies to do that all the time, like it’s acceptable or something, when you really shouldn’t even do that with the truth. If you really have any respect for someone, you should just present the facts and let them use their own brains, their judgment, to decide what to do.

Instead, you have to worry about the fact that they expect you to spin a web of little half-truths and lies to make them feel however it would be beneficial to you for them to feel and then get away before you get caught. If you tell them something harsh or even just unexpected, they build a wall of distrust and wonder what unexpected thing you are trying to get out of them.

I hate playing that game. I have a little of the Quixote in me, the self-deluded would-be knight that lives in an idealized world in his head and has a crisis when other people won’t join him in there. And I’m whining. That’s unmanly. The only right thing is to demand the best from myself and expect the best from others and know I’m strong enough to take it when I get a slap instead of a handshake, a punch instead of a kiss.

Anyway, I’m on this coffee-interview thing, and the woman in front of me is beautiful, if not the sort of thing you’d expect on the cover of a magazine. She is petite and curvy. Her face is framed by dark and wavy curls. She has laugh lines, and that is never a bad thing. I’ve already seen a dazzling smile, but there is sadness and weariness in her posture. And she has worn a beautiful dress for me — not the sort of thing one would usually wear to work, and she has had time to change.

There are a few pleasant words. We ask about each other’s day, exchange complaints about the weather and public transit. And then she asks me, in a clinical and neutral tone, this question: “Why are you alive?”

Of course this is an interview. This is a test. A shock like that, she’s already read who I am off of my face. Did I take it as an accusation, the way I asked it of myself after my daughter died? Did I see it as an opportunity to explain my purpose in life? Did the shock unseat me, like a lance-blow, and land me on my ass in the dust? Was I offended to be examined so directly, that I had lost the upper hand in directing the flow of conversation?

I am not a fast thinker. All of my thoughts show up on my face. I read them from the muscles in my forehead, my cheeks, my jaw, from the corners of my eyes at about the same time as anyone in front of me. And frankly, I am proud to do so. It is far more honest than the words in my head that reflexively try to shield my ego. But I am strong. I can withstand this test.

“It is a mystery,” I reply. “There were plenty of opportunities for it to have been otherwise, from illness or accident or what I can only call lapses in judgment in hindsight.” I laughed a little. “Regardless, I try to do what I can to show that I am grateful to still be here, after everything, and not waste any future opportunities.”

She gave me her smile, but I couldn’t tell if it was a true one. “Aren’t you going to ask me the same thing? To return the favor? I can see that stung a bit….”

“Ha,” I returned. “What would the point of that be? You have been through all of this in your head, or maybe someone has already put you through that. You must already have an answer.”

I watched her face over a sip of con leche, smiling. I did appreciate her stratagem, that she had thought to bring one, and that it was so direct. After a moment, composing myself, I spoke again.

“Here is your test, lovely woman. Fill an uncomfortable silence however you see fit, and I will judge how well you do. And maybe after that, if I feel you have bested me again, maybe we will arm-wrestle and see if I can save my ego on some front or other.”

And she laughed, and I laughed, and she told me how she loved to dance.

[*]

This one time, after cleaning out the recently vacated jellyfish tank, I was faced with the realization of the sheer number of pet deaths I had fostered while the little things were in my care. Things tended, for the most part, to have a decent run compared to their normal span of years. I had a cat make it to fifteen or so, and a couple of dogs that were several years old by the time I got them lived another decade with me as caretaker and companion. But I had kept a number of more exotic pets, exotic in a perfectly mundane sort of way, nothing I needed to have a permit for or wear special clothing to protect myself from. Brine shrimp. A number of fishtanks, both fresh an salt. An ant farm or two. Hermit crabs. A pair of salamanders. A ferret. The occasional miscellaneous rodent handed over by family friends and neighbors when their children lost interest or showed themselves too young for the responsibility.

People mentioned my name and St. Francis in the same sentence, and maybe there was something there. A nearly equivalent patience for handling animal waste and a quick suppression of the urge to twist a little head off of its body when, from fear or mistrust or defense of territory or property or sheer mean-spiritedness, it had applied teeth or claws or beak or pincers or what have you to some portion of my anatomy to make some point or other, I assume, or soiled or broken something beyond the scope of cleansers or superglue. Sainthood isn’t a magical power. It’s an ordinary human skill cranked up to maximum and a documented impeccable track record.

Even so, I was no St. Francis. I was on good terms with animals in terms of points mentioned previously and made a point to live in harmony with the wildlife that came to visit my property, to the point of enforcing a truce between the  birds and squirrels over the contents of the feeder and handling pest control in a way that was conscientious of the health of the animals that would remain. And I never killed a bee or a spider except by accident while trying to relocate them. But that’s as far as it ever went. I couldn’t heal them with a touch or speak their languages beyond a basic understanding of their needs. And the wildlife pretty much never sought out my company in preference to their own.

And I had buried hundreds, if not thousands, of the little things — particularly if you counted ants and Sea-Monkeys as individuals. It was attention-getting.

I know a lot of animal rights advocates are against keeping pets altogether, as this extracts an animal out of its natural habitat and forces it to live in unnatural circumstances for which it was never cut out. I think that’s a weirdly ironic comment coming from a primate extracted from the savanna, placed under the unnatural stresses of modern crowded human life and denied full use of the fight-or-flight reflex (and supportive casual grooming from neighbors) until parasites and disease and thrombosis takes us all to an early grave. Also, the typical pet has a lifestyle far in excess of what nature would have handed it, and sometimes a higher lifestyle that its owners.

Sometimes I feel I still eat meat out of petty revenge. Jealousy over the lifestyle thing. And a dozen ineffectually steam-cleaned carpets.

But these are animals. Like ourselves. We can’t give them long lifespans. The best we can do is give them a fighting chance at every opportunity and a series of  moments, one more or less after another, during which they might take pleasure if circumstances do not conspire to prevent it. We learn from them. We learn more about ourselves by watching them and helping one another deal with the days. Even the ones that aren’t so cuddly.

Where the activists fail is by the assumption that humanity, with our buildings and pavements and technology and money and entertainment and all of the associated bullshit, is unnatural. We aren’t so damn special, either angels or devils, changers of rules and landscapes. The first crop of life on earth poisoned most of the rest of it off by producing huge toxic quantities of free oxygen, leaving behind nothing that couldn’t either withstand or eventually require the consumption of its wastes. A single family of beavers can flood a million acres, causing localized extinctions far in excess of the construction of a subdivision. Huge numbers of species are so adapted to humanity that they would die without our bodies, our houses, our technology, and our cities. In turn, we are so adapted to our parasites, internal or external, that we would die without them, too.

We make a worse mistake than ever by pretending we are apart from nature, either above it or beneath it or merely bystanders. We have to know where we truly stand before we can act with foresight and intelligence with respect to our place here.

And sometime that place is in the backyard, with a shovel.

We are gods to these things. I have to ask, all joking pretenses to sainthood aside, is this where God stands with respect to us?

[*]

This one time the lethargy was pretty strong and I was having trouble finding the motivation to do anything. I could tell it was out of the ordinary, worse than usual, because there was a man behind me with his elbow around my neck and a knife poking around in the vicinity of one of my floating ribs, and there I was, wondering if I really ought to bother. There was a lot of pressure on my windpipe and whoever this guy was was starting to impinge a bit on my brain’s blood supply. He was saying something and I wasn’t making it out, probably some sort of language barrier thing.

And it all just felt … tedious.

I wasn’t even sure of where I was or how I’d gotten there. My body felt strange, like a size too large or too small, and not entirely under my control. Like I was wearing a heavy sack. I remember that I wondered whether I had been drugged, but the lethargy felt so similar to the crushing depressions I felt after Len left for the Peace Corps. After Grammy died. A couple of other times where I couldn’t really work out what was wrong, but my ass dragged for weeks. I remember that I felt fat even though my clothes were loose.

I have no idea why this man was so upset. He seemed strong and healthy, with a bit of a pudge of the sort that nobody really cares about. He smelled nice, but not in any kind of expensive way. He smelled like he’d been eating steak. He spoke to me as if he was angry about something. Or trying to be intimidating. Quiet, but harsh. I think I remember the word “whore”, but I couldn’t tell you in what language.

I just wanted to lie down and go to sleep. Maybe that was why he was angry. I’d had fights about that before. Or had people angry with me about it before. It’s hard to have a fight with only one person with the energy to be angry. You can have a beating, though.

I don’t know why. Maybe it was just out of habit, something triggered by his smell or the tired fighting. I could barely feel his arm around my neck or the poking in my side anymore. But I reached around behind me, righthanded, and fumblehandedly undid his beltbuckle, popped open the button on his waistband, and half-tugged his zipper down. He shoved me away, spinning us both, and when we stopped, he had my right wrist in his left hand, having dropped the knife.

The lethargy was gone, but I could see its gray iciness hovering behind the guy, like someone had turned down the volume, the temperature, the brightness on a small chunk of the world. He was angry, confused. I didn’t recognize him.

But for the first time in a long time, I felt awake and alive. There were things to do. Air that needed breathing. Suddenly I weighed nothing.

He was braced against me pulling away, so I stepped forward instead and put my hand on his chest. Slowly, gently, I pushed him back into the lethargy he had snatched me out of. I watched his chest cave as he deflated. I watched his eyebrows drop and his eyelids start to droop. One of his hands was still extended forward, the one that had held my wrist.

I took off one of my earrings, a zircon stud given to me by the boyfriend I most recently drove away with my depression. I pinched up some skin in the web between his thumb and forefinger on his outstretched hand and firmly pushed it all the way through. It was a little slick with a drop of his blood, but I managed to get the back to snap on so he wouldn’t lose it.

And then I walked away. I haven’t seen the lethargy since.

[*]

This one time all of us dead people were hanging around on the streets of a city most of us remembered, even though many of us had never been there in life. It was confusing. Particularly for me, as I had never really believed in a soul. I was gratified a little to know that none of the myths had quite gotten it right, and the few consciousness-mystics who seemed to be close weren’t really the sort to be smug, knowing they had gotten there via paths of ignorance and good guessing.

Hear the pride in my voice. I must have the strongest ego ever among the dead. But I had studied everything I studied so that I would know what the hell is going on, because if you know, you can predict and, if technology keeps up, control. I dedicated my life to getting a handle on things, to at least lay the groundwork for the repair of some of God’s worst mistakes — injustice, tragedy, fear, and misery: the four actual horsemen of the perpetual and ongoing apocalypse that is life.

Here’s a take on the events of Genesis that is at least true in a poetic sense — something that helped me get some perspective despite the fact of its mythic nature. This is the true value of such things, wiggly concepts of truth and facts aside. In this take, God had spent six days on the act of creation, exactly as documented. It was obvious, when you look at it from this view, that God wasn’t finished, and this is the evidence: God had a Garden where everything was perfect. Which means that everything outside the garden was still a bit haphazard.

The purpose of a garden is cultivation. It’s a test-bed for tweaking, for finding the balance points. A place that serves as a perfected microcosm. When humankind — glossing over the irrelevancies of blame-shifting and gender politics — opted to have the knowledge of God and to become gods themselves, God, who was still on his break, gave people the other half of the gift: the responsibility to finish, if not the whole of Creation, their own perfected Garden outside the walls of his own. Because, you know, too many cooks and so forth.

You’ll never be happy in someone else’s garden when you think you can do better in your own.

In this version, I am the summation of the worst element of mankind, the sin of Pride personified, internally rationalized and justified by the overwhelming sense of the responsibility to fix every impossible last detail that causes human misery, from unfair allocation of space and resources on an individual level to weather and tectonic drift. That’s my leptonic charge that keeps me from sinking into the bosonic condensate that is the unified ground state of being dead, at rest and at peace, at one with God and the rest of Creation.

Being dead is a complicated state. Elsewhere I am alive, in infinite combinations and variations along the paths of the labyrinth of superimposed possibilities where everything that is permitted is actually mandatory. Outside of the walls of the connected paths, in the parts of the labyrinth where there are no exits and no entrances, are the versions of me that never were and never will be. A larger infinity, as it were. If you are a student of infinities, you will know that some infinities are larger than others and you will understand what I am saying. Otherwise, I suggest you take it on faith, because it is a necessary truth for true understanding.

Here in this city, the unquiet dead gather to enjoy the smell of rain on pavement and the sound of the wind that delivers it. A heartbeat away is the reality that once lived here and will live here again on the other side of the ripple that broke the surface, the stone that shattered the self-healing mirror, symmetrical to the last tiny detail. Here in the shattered, suspended world, the last real child on earth scuffs the new off the tip of his sneakers kicking at the last sun-bright yellow dandelion flower, milk bleeding from its broken green stalk, and vanishes into the clouded lake we swim in without a detectable ripple.

In this disturbed state, it is not possible that humans ever existed. All of the paths in the labyrinth are closed off to us, living and dead, and the city incandesces and fades, a sandcastle without wind and waves to have constructed it, without wind and waves to eventually take it apart. It joins us and lends its probability to ours, with its rain and wet pavement and promise of eventual sunshine and the perfect kite-flying weather. The boy never noticed his transition. Nor did the dandelion.

The ghost pavement is once again solid under my feet. The wet wind is in my hair. I don’t know how much time I have to build a kite and fly it, but I have no other goal right now, none more important, than buckling down and getting to work on putting paper and wood and string to the wind while I have the chance.

And if I fail, so be it. Somewhere, somewhen, I will succeed, and the world will be perfect.

[*]

This one time I had the breeder reactor going full blast, which basically means I was producing U-233 slightly faster than I was producing lead. The neutron gun was good. The beryllium target was in good shape and the layers of foil for slowing the neutrons was doing its job. The heat output was a bit much, but that was what it was all about, right? Cheap energy?

Okay, and maybe not leaving a huge amount of radioactive poison lying around for the neighborhood kids to eat.

But the Stirling engine had been running for days straight on the heat output, and the cold side was staying colder thanks to the laser fluorescent cooling rig that was being run off a portion of the dynamo’s own output. I was down from 5 watts to 3, but it would run continuously with no degradation from heat build-up, so I called it a win. I was also generating a tiny amount of extra juice by firing the alpha particles into the target through a tight coil of maybe a couple thousand windings from a tiny radio tuner and collecting the extra juice into a flywheel I could tap, theoretically, if I needed to take the Stirling offline for tweaking.

I was wondering if I could isolate the beryllium target in vacuum, suspended in a bulb by an insulator, and tap the current from the extra electrons that were stacking up on it with no place to go, seeing as not every single one of them was producing neutrons. It would increase efficiency a bit to catch them coming and going, as it were, though, realistically, it was only a trickle compared to the kinetic heat from fission.

I was breaking an awful lot of tiny little rubber bands holding these little atoms together. Much of the danger to living creatures was based on the pieces that got away. If I could catch every last bit and put it to work, I’d be golden. Oh, and also in possession of a tiny handful of very toxic poisonous garbage.

But that was part of the charm. I needed something to put through the centrifuge, after all. To concentrate down, layer by layer, the truly harsh, truly toxic, phenomenally radioactive crap. So I could leave my little present.

So maybe you can tell by now I’m not a very nice guy. Too smart for my own good, people have said. Antisocial. Psychopath. Sociopath. And it’s all true. You should learn how to use your special abilities for good, they said.

I took the advice to heart.

There’s a lot of the world that I like. I don’t have much need for people, as such, but I genuinely like most of them. They’re selfish and short-sighted, sometimes a little gullible and slow, but really all they want is to be less miserable. To be protected from their fears. To feel connected and appreciated and needed. To feel like there’s a chance for love and happiness. And they have hope for all of this despite everything that’s happened.

They want to know that good things happen to good people and bad things happen to bad people. That’s the tough one. There’s no force in heaven, hell, or earth that makes that happen. People care about that sort of thing. Physics doesn’t. God doesn’t. So people have invented ways to make it possible, and acceptable, to cause misery to the deserving. People have invented ways to make people who have done beneficial things feel happy.

That’s the thing that gives me hope. For every super-selfish asshole who wants it all for himself, who thinks he deserves everything, deserves to be on top of the pile with all the money and power and sex and beautiful things that everyone wants, there are a million people who would cheer to see that guy die from something humiliating. These are the same people that barely have enough cash to make ends meet but still hand over a fiver to a beggar who probably, at the end of the day, takes home more money from “work” than they do.

I love every last one of those bastards. I don’t want to touch them or be touched by them, but I love them.

And for them, just for them, I’m refining a scheme for efficient energy from low, low input nuclear power. And while I’m at it, I’m very very carefully collecting this material which promises a slow, lingering death for the next duly elected Most Evil Person in the World.

I already have part one of the scenario in place — an encrypted package with every last detail of how I’ve done everything, even with a few extra safeguards to prevent unnecessary buildup of the radioactive waste I’m collected. I’ve also detailed a recycling program that processes the waste into more alpha-source for the breeder end until it is truly spent and can be packaged for disposal. It’s already online in a thousand different places, ready for the URLs and passwords to be distributed when I’m captured and incarcerated and don’t have access to the site I have to contact every two weeks to keep it from posting the release keys.

As for the radioactive poison and the Most Evil Person in the World? Hell, as far as I know, that’s me. In all actuality. I intend to get caught on my way to an “assassination” with the poison on me in a leaded envelope. That will let people know that the system is still working. It will give them an exciting story to discuss at the water cooler, and I’ll be the demon, the monster they can revile.

But all of the evil people? They can wonder where the next person who figured out the recipe is coming from. And how many of them there might be out there, following my inspiration.

And I’ll get my time in prison, which can’t be any worse in there than it’s been out here. And it might only be a handful of years appealing death sentences and such, but it will be peaceful, and predictable, and, if I play my cards right and earn my way into solitary, I’ll finally be left alone.

And if you want to know why, dear God, why, you can blame, as the last straw, those cheerful, friendly people in black suits that kept ringing my doorbell at ten AM every Saturday morning who seemed to be so concerned for my soul.

[*]