SRF Heavy Industries

I once read a Richard Bach book.

There’s a confession.

Okay, maybe I read a couple of them. Johnathan Livingston Seagull and Illusions: Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah and maybe a couple more.

But the stupid confession is regarding Illusions. And here’s how it goes.

In the book, there’s this thing, basically a magic spell, where the messiah-guy is trying to tell the narrator-guy how to fulfill his own wishes with some kind of New Age visualization technique. It goes like you imagine the thing that you want, surrounded by a brilliant glow, and this will magnetize you to it, and it should come barreling down on you out of the future like a ton of bricks.

I’m not telling you what it is I imagined surrounded by a brilliant glow. I’m just not. But I will tell you that since that day, what has been barreling down on me out of the future like a ton of bricks has been magnets. I must have found literally hundreds of magnets in the twenty years since then. I am magnetized for magnets.

Found another one today. A round one, taped to the inside of the bottom of some box like the type you might get an inexpensive necklace or bracelet in, under a pad of cotton.

Go ahead and laugh now. I know you want to.

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Just in case you’re having trouble telling the difference:

The real test of where you are poverty-wise is whether you can afford to have any rich-people money. There are certainly plenty of barriers to entry — the primary of which is a relatively massive lump of money you can leave lying around without needing to spend it. Here are examples:

• The minimum balance for an interest-bearing checking account
• A savings account with no service charges that would cancel out any interest earned
• A downpayment for a car or a house
• Equity (value above the remaining balance due on your mortgage) in a house or property
• A retirement account
• A trust fund

Many people, if not most, who currently have rich-people money received seed-money in a lump from a family that had enough rich-people money to be able to share some of it — and so far have managed not to squander it. Other owners of rich-people money budgeted for savings accounts and used that money to seed downpayments and minimum balances.

The largest barrier to transitioning from poor-people money to rich-people money is the ability to stop spending it all month-to-month, which is quite possibly the ultimate luxury in the current economy. The difference is really triggered by rich-people vs poor-people cash flow, i.e., the ability to pay all of your existing obligations while still putting at least ten percent of your income into a savings account — or the lack thereof.

There are very few barriers to transitioning to poor-people money from rich-people money. In fact, here are some relatively easy ways to cross the threshold downward:

• Spend or give away all of your rich-people money. (After all, it just seems like its sitting there doing nothing, right?)
• Lose your rich-people money in a financial crisis, like:
• a serious medical emergency that isn’t covered by health insurance
• a sufficiently long spell of unemployment that forces you to spend your reserves
• a crash in house values that makes your house more expensive than the cost of your mortgage (wipes out your equity)
• become a victim of theft or arson (without appropriate insurance)
• be forced to replace some destroyed large appliance, like a refrigerator, hot-water heater, central heat/AC, or a necessary vehicle
• suffer a divorce (with insufficient prenuptial armor)
• bury a loved one (who died without appropriate insurance)
• lose a law suit or have to pay a crippling fine

Given the huge number of ways it is possible to lose all of your rich-people money (if you have any) or be prevented from saving enough poor-people money to use for seed, it would seem that the biggest factor in holding onto rich-people money is good luck. Or the absence of bad luck. Or generous wealthy relatives to lend you money to help with crises. Or enough rich-people cash flow to be able to afford a huge suite of insurance premiums. However, I am routinely informed that it is a skill.

Regardless, I strongly recommend that at the first opportunity you scale back your spending and expenses to be able to afford socking away ten percent of your income into an interest-bearing savings account and put the maximum amount you can afford/legally invest (usually caps out at 15% pre-tax) into a Retirement Account. You may still have to dump it should a crisis occur, but at least you will have a cushion.

That’s all. Thank you for your attention.

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FREE FICTION!

DOWNLOAD AND READ, PRINT AND READ, OR READ ONLINE my 2002 humor/sci-fi piece titled “Nobody Here But Us…” in any of the following ultraconvenient formats:

Rich Text Format (RTF) • Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) • ePub Format (Sony eBook – ePub) • PalmDoc (Palm/Treo – PDB) • MobiPocket (PRC) • Read in a Browser (HTML)

WITH ONE CAVEAT!

Seeing as this is Breast Cancer Awareness Month, please visit my good friend Carole Edrich’s Cyclist-On-Chemo Donation Page for Cyclists Fighting Cancer. You can also follow her progress at @CyclistOnChemo on Twitter.

Chemotherapy is God-awful grueling. Doctors wouldn’t make you go through it if they didn’t think it would improve your quality of life and extend you a few years — or, in the cases of the lucky and early-diagnosed, cure you outright. Cyclists Fighting Cancer are taking an extra step to provide bikes and enablement for families for exercise-based rehabilitation for children undergoing or recovering from cancer treatments.

IF YOU ENJOY MY WRITING and think nearly 10,000 words (~30 pages in a mass-market paperback) of humorous fiction is worth a little kickback, please click the link above and give a little. If you don’t have the money right now, that’s fine, but sometime in the years ahead remember that you owe a dribble of coins to some cancer charity or other on my behalf.

ABOUT THE STORY: What happens if you actually do get contact with extraterrestrial life and can’t make out what the message is supposed to be? The best and the brightest the government has to offer, involved at the highest level, might not quite be good enough. But hell, if the aliens look tasty enough you can always just eat them…. “Nobody Here But Us…” by Laszlo Xalieri, © 2002

LICENSE: Not much of one. All the downloads are DRM-free. You’re entitled to as many copies in as many different formats as you can stomach. Hand them around, to all your friends — I don’t care. Don’t change the words, the title, or the byline, but you can feel free to send me your copy-edits for fixing typos. If you fix little formatting issues or come up with cover or inline illustrations for me to add, send ’em along to me and I’ll post the best as replacements for the versions here. Feel free to re-host or mirror these files elsewhere, but try to stay current as the files get updated AND PLEASE PROVIDE THE ABOVE INFO REGARDING @CyclistOnChemo’s CHARITY OR ELSE THIS EXERCISE IS POINTLESS. It’s probably just best to link back to this blog post at http://bit.ly/X-NHBU-COC and let me play air-traffic-control for versions, bandwidth, and incoming links.

Pass the link to here around to all of your free-fiction-lovin’ cancer-hatin’ friends and thank you kindly: http://bit.ly/X-NHBU-COC

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PS:

Because it’s a bit lost in the text above, here’s the link to Carole’s donation page nekkid: http://www.justgiving.com/Cyclist-On-Chemo/

Thanks again!

[.]

Video from the Zombie Symposium lectures and panel discussion appears to be available for those of you who missed it — or for those of you who were present who want a repeat viewing. I expect dance remixes will be available shortly on YouTube.

Here it is in it’s entirety, chopped up piecemeal for easy digestion:

Stan Woodard’s introduction: archive page | streaming video | MP4 video (15MB)

Dr. Dianne Diakite’s presentation: “Some Plausible African Antecedents of the Zombie Phenomenon in Haiti” archive page | streaming video | MP4 video (52MB)

Dr. Andrea Wood’s presentation: “Tracking the Zombie in Popular Media” archive page | streaming video | MP4 video (47MB)

My own presentation: “Fashionably Late: Zombies Among Us in Nature, Technology, and the Business World” archive page | streaming video | MP4 video (62MB) | My presentation slides in PDF format (with the correct fonts, bitches) (May later also be appearing on the archive page as I have submitted it for inclusion…)

Panel discussion/Q&A session: archive page | streaming video | MP4 video (48MB)

Share and enjoy!

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From Alexandra:

What blew my mind so much was that if you look at our universe’s beginning as a mere ripple in something larger that slowly oscillated into our Big Bang, not only are WE merely a speck in a vasty universe, but our universe is a mere speck in a much more vasty…something. I mean, whoa. And then the idea of how matter is encoded into the folds of spacetime, and how our perception of what we’re seeing in terms of time and light speed could be totally incorrect because of these folds, and how that can explain how the probe heading towards the sun is slowing down when we didn’t predict it would, because instead of traveling straight through space it’s having to navigate these folds of gravity, like a lure bobbing on the waves. I need some serious drugs to dig deeper into this.

My reply:

Different observers under different effects of accelerating forces already see such differing views of reality (with regard to distances and elapsed time, but also with regard to perceived forces on other objects [for instance, if you are traveling with two electrons and perceive them as stationary you see them repel each other, but if you see them zipping past you see them attracted to each other by the magnetic fields they generate as moving charges]) — well, we tend to (mistakenly, in my view) discount ourselves from the equations as sacks of mud propelled by self-willed spirits, but the photons and other particles that inform us also inform everything else in the universe and those things aren’t as easily confused as us. Causality itself is actually warped by the lens of warbling translucent structure and is literally physically different all the way into the past and all the way into the future as we simply walk around, just like a view into a holograph changes as you view it from different angles. Is the lion’s mouth in the image open or closed? Are the bird’s wings up or down? The image is simply undeniably different depending on where we stand, and, as consumers of light, the image is all we have to go on. That’s what holographs do.

Also our concept of gravity is permanently fucked and really needs to be discarded. Items leaving a gravity well leave under more acceleration than Newton predicted, items approaching a gravity well aren’t pulled in as strongly as predicted — there’s obviously at least one more variable. People have tried several times to explain it every time they’ve seen it — the mass/inertia-based hypercharge force, the expansion force/dark energy, gravitic “force lines”, presence or absence of dark matter — it’s exactly like when people had figured out that Ptolemy was wrong but Copernicus hadn’t come along yet to make the math all simple again by suggesting that the sun was at the center. Newton is our Ptolemy here. We love him too much to put a stake in his heart and cut his head off with a shovel, but his lurching stinking corpse is really ruining the party.

In my more mystical moments I feel it ought to be possible to push ourselves along the wall of the holograph in whatever direction we choose until the picture more resembles what we want to see. We’re already coasting along it in a time dimension at a pretty fucking huge clip (at least, all the way out on this edge of the hologram) and every choice we make and every causal interaction changes our trajectory a tiny smidge… possibly as much as a child dragging a line in the water from the deck of a cruiseliner changes its course, but sometimes a good deal more dramatically, I would think.

My point is if the collections of photons we call an image is our view of a holographic universe, than each separate collection (yours, mine, give or take another seven billion, and that’s just observers on our twirling rock) is completely, causally speaking, a completely different literal physical universe, with “uncertainty” being the quantifiable distance between my viewpoint and yours, or Heisenberg’s and his measuring device of choice. Is this the Copenhagen “many worlds” view? I still only see it as one so I don’t think of it as such….

But it does make it unimaginably big. Especially if there are more completely separate holographs. But that’s all extrapolation based on the big bang thing, which I’m not sure is the right explanation either….

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In no particular order:

• Nothing keeps you from unzipping the chest of a stranger and shoving your hands inside for a good rummage.
• Burlap may start out dirty but never gets any dirtier than it already is.
• When people go to all-out war with one another, what you really have to watch out for is runaway technology that has it in for everybody.
• It is very important to ignore the voices of authority, reason, and experience and take all your advice from the crazy artist guy. And people will follow your lead in this if you tell them they need to with a very earnest expression on your face.
• It really really sucks when people die but it’s all better as long as you see their ghosts escape to the stars, which, for some reason, is way way better than keeping them in a convenient box where you might be able to put them to use again later, even when it’s pretty well established throughout the rest of the movie that parts is parts.
• I seriously need to create my own small army of burlap-wrapped-spare-parts homonculi. I’d be running this place in no time.

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So here’s one of the current business scenarios, translated into the language of metaphor.

The boss says, “Let’s run the Iditarod.” Not my usual scene, but I’m paid as a consultant. Figure out how. That’s my job.

“Sure,” I said. “Dogs, a sled, cold weather gear, spare parts, supplies…. I’ll hire a consultant, we’ll make a list, raise some capital, and go shopping.”

“No money for that. Capital is hard to come by,” he says. “Let’s run a few races first, start small, and we’ll expand to actual huskies and a sled and a trained driver. Meanwhile, we have an old refrigerator box, some dental floss we can weave into whatever ropes it takes to tie dogs to it — whenever we can get them — and I found us some chickens.”

“Chickens.”

“Yeah. They cost less than a twentieth what a dog costs, they’re cheaper to feed, and if we tie hundreds to the sled –“

“Box.”

“–whatever, we’ll fuckin’ fly!”

“So let me get this straight. We’re going to spend the next six months weaving reins out of dental floss and making snow shoes and parkas for chickens so that in a year we’ll have won enough prize money to afford an actual sled and a dog or two?”

“Sure! And when we have a dog or two we’ll put ’em behind the chickens to make ’em run faster! But not months. Weeks. And maybe only four of them. If we don’t get the prize money rolling in fast we won’t make payroll.”

…

And six weeks pass. We’re up to our armpits in snow, pulling a cardboad box piled high with shivering chickens and ruptured and pillaged sacks of chicken feed, with ropes made out of dental floss cutting into our bodies.

“This would go a hell of a lot faster if we ditched the chickens,” I say. “And it would leave more chicken feed for us to keep up our strength.”

“We’re not ditching the chickens,” he replies. “I paid thousands of dollars for enough chickens to pull as much weight as a team of dogs. We’re not leaving them behind. We just have to find a path where the snow is shallower….”

“Have we won any prize money yet? It’s been hard for me to see anything like a finish line through the blinding glare of the absurdity of this situation.”

“Not yet. Keep pulling!”

…

Does anyone really want to see where this scenario is going to end? Because I don’t. And I’m sick to the teeth of chicken feed.

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In honor of H. P. Lovecraft’s birthday, I refer you to an article of mine from a couple of years ago from my old Letters from Heck column over at The Footnote:

Today’s sermon is taken from a passage in the Necronomicon, which translates from the Greek roughly as “The Book of Dead Names” or “An Image of the Laws of the Dead” or somesuch. Originally the text was in an Arabic-language incunabulum titled Al-Azif, which, depending on your idiom of preference and/or your emotional state, translates either as “The Sound of Wailing Djinn in the Darkness” or “The Sound of Crickets and/or Other Nighttime Noises, Probably Just the Wind.” It’s possible that azif and hatif are somehow linguistically related, as hatif means “to cry out” and also “telephone.” Al-Hatif is a telephone company in the Middle East and not much loved.

It’s probably most accurate to say none of the above matters as the book mentioned above is an artifact of fiction that originally appeared in the early twentieth-century short stories of H. P. Lovecraft. But a lot of what passes for modern religion these days has a significant basis in fiction, so I don’t care.

This is the passage:

CLICK HERE TO KEEP READING — IF YOU DARE.

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a sonnet in the Shakespearean mode by Laszlo Xalieri

Read more

Free fiction in the most annoying format on earth: first person, present tense. Also, depressing as fuck. Enjoy it if you can.

This minute was pretty much like the last one. I’m sure a connoisseur could tell you the difference, but as far as time is concerned I’m no connoisseur. I’m a gourmand.

I bite off time in huge chunks and devour it without much regard to fine detail. I have learned to prefer a good time to a bad time, but that’s all in keeping with the gourmand thing. It’s a matter of lifestyle and affordability. Gourmet time in such quantity that it is wasted on the palate, and one untrained at that. Experiences hand-crafted by an artist and a team of artisans, flung down the gullet of a glutton. That’s my diet; that’s me. I am what I eat.

I am fat with time. Fifty million minutes down my gullet so far.

Does this make me a bad man? For taking more than my share? For being temporally wealthy?

I’m not the worst in the world. There are people who have lived more.

I have spent a whole year on a luxury cruise liner. I have been beaten and raped in Calcutta and paid for the privilege. Children carrying knives have climbed me. I have sat in solitary confinement, in sensory deprivation, in vats of caustic filth. I have served as a soldier, as a nurse, as beast of burden. I have had my brain deliberately damaged to remove memories, to make room for more, like visiting a vomitorium so I could enjoy another huge meal.

Regardless, those days are over. Now I sit in meditation, the equivalent of sipping bland tea and gnawing a handful of rice for daily sustenance. I no longer remember whether I am unable or unwilling to stand. I sit in a chair with wheels. People move me around as they see fit, dress me and clean me and position me in harmony with the décor. Or so I imagine. I don’t pay attention.

A minute. Another minute. Another handful of rice, another sip of tea. Another ten strokes of the cane, another eyewatering twist of the nipple, another ten miles of diluted airline whisky, another hundred meters of dodging debris left behind by the parade, another rinse of the remaining hair, another six snores. Another algebraic solution mapped out to the satisfaction of a nun. Another pullover tried on, frowned at, and discarded. Another four bowls filled with uproarious laughter at the soup line. Another pop-fly into the stands. Another thirty-secondth of an inch in the rain barrel. Another paper bag stuffed with leaves and small branches. Another six blocks in the taxi to nowhere. Another ten sutures to the stab-wound in the thigh. Another water-balloon filled with cow urine, tied off, and handed to a child. Another marshmallow roasted and sent in a flaming arc into the deep woods. Another gurgling rattle in the throat of a dying wife. Another five exposures to the laugh-track. Another advertisement for the Saab 900S. Another stick of incense turned to cinders. Another cigarette suckled inside-out. Another minute squeezed from the throat of a woman who begged you to murder her anonymously in an alley, and another minute of her drumming her heels as you hold her. Another half-inch of tattoo. Another half-inch of skin graft. Another, another, and another. Each minute identical to the last, at least in terms of the most important detail.

Fifty million minutes, all alike. Fifty million minutes burned to the ash we mix with whisky and drink down.

Another minute of sunblock applied to the face and arms before I am wheeled into the garden and left on the path to burble to myself and leave an anonymous puddle in the growing shadows. Another minute of the smell of cherry blossoms and woodsmoke, of the feel of musty quilt, of the sound of outdoor nothing when the birds are quiet and the traffic is distant. And another. And another. Another minute of dozing. And another.

And another minute awake staring at a golf-course lawn and a dry fountain. Another minute watching an airplane cross the sky. Another minute rolling my chair in a circle. Another minute remembering how to stand and pushing my chair in front of me like a toddler with a walker. Another minute of standing in an anthill I found to better remember when I did it before as a boy. Another minute of stinging and burning, reminding my legs and calves what it means to feel fire. And another minute. And another.

One minute is pretty much like another.

The staff here, the tenders who water me and turn me so that I can grow toward the light, watch in confusion as I shuffle my way down the hall, trailing ants. Someone notices, shouts, and starts slapping the ants off my legs, lifting my pants legs to slap them off my calves and thighs.

Once they are done, I resume my journey. It takes a minute, two minutes to get to the elevator, a minute to take the elevator up and shamble down to the lobby of my floor, another minute to orient myself and locate my room. By now I have a small entourage of attendants who are marveling at me doing this for myself, hovering out of the way, ready should I slip or need assistance.

I am sorry to disappoint them, but I and my flaming legs are just going to bed. Someone helps me off with my loungewear, helps remove the last few stray ants, summons ointment for the stings. There is mindless chatter about how the ants invaded my chair perhaps and induced me to get out and walk for myself. I do not correct them. The ants are becoming heroes as they tweak and revise their fantasy. Who am I to interfere?

Another fifty million minutes pass and they are leaving me alone. I pull off my t-shirt and wave off the attempt to help me on with pajamas. I climb into bed and lie atop the bedclothes, cooling and burning from the numbed ant venom. My legs feel like heavy wood.

Fifty million minutes is a very long time to wait to be born. I am sure it will happen tomorrow.

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