Echoes in a Hollow Space

2 Jul
A literal rat race: two competitors chasing each other across the eaves of the porch. Rats endemic to most L.A. neighborhoods, even nice 1s.

27 Jun
There’s a research assistant here that sounds uncannily like Tobey Maguire. I want to say, “Spidey, is that you?”

25 Jun
The sleek young mother in the park with the ponytail halfway down her back bouncing her toddler on her knee while he laughed and looked.

He looked quite dapper in his navy and gray striped jumpsuit. I don’t know why I assumed he was male, I just did.

24 Jun
If a cat barfs in an out of the way place that no one will see or step on, do you still have to clean it up? A purely rhetorical question.

23 Jun
I used to have an encyclopedic memory & now it’s complete dreck. Ou sont les nieges downtown?

23 Jun
Life is what teaches you about your soul. Trying to withdraw from it only teaches you about the echo chamber inside.

10 Jun
The irony is not lost on me: my bookmark for The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is my CWA membership card.

I haven’t been union for years but am proud I once was.

9 Jun
Never meet the eye of the little old lady in the cat food aisle unless you want a half hour conversation about her poobers. 1/2

I expect to be that lady someday soon but for now I’m keeping my head down.

8 Jun
I’d sing “Hope I die before I get old” but it’s too late for that.

7 Jun
Global warming is a fact, but I sometimes think even scientists occasionally fall prey to millennialism. Millennialism is also a fact.

7 Jun
So, are “scientific” predictions of the end to be taken more seriously than loony Mayan predictions?

Jun6
The middle-aged woman at the vet’s office with so much collagen she could barely speak.

Mirrored from Better Than Dead.

Predictions of our imminent demise have been greatly exaggerated.

Repeatedly and throughout history.

I watched a show last night on the History Channel about the various predictions that the world will end in 2012. December 21, 2012, if you follow the Mayan calendar. This show's gig was all about showing how various prophets of doom from many different cultures . . . all predicted that 2012 is the year!

Of course, a certain amount of stretching and manipulation were involved to make these predictions One Size Fits All—but then, that's sort of the Prophecy of Doom game, isn't it? The late Terence McKenna apparently came up with some mathematical formula for the I Ching . . . that no one in history had ever noticed before! He concluded from this that the Mayans were right and 2012 is . . . The End!

The TV show dusted off the Prophecies of Merlin (Myrddin) from the 11th century, the fake prophecies of Mother Shipton from the early 16th century (actually written by some guy in the 17th, I think), John of Patmos (Mr. Revelations) who was actually writing about Emperor Nero and the political situation in first century Rome, and just to bring it home to the internet and technology . . . the Web Bot Predictions!

They all agree. We're all going to die . . . and soon!

You know, I'm a student of history and science so it's not like I don't know that sweeping and catastrophic changes can swamp a society and end it; that catastrophic planetary or interplanetary events can squish us like bugs. We are vulnerable and fragile creatures sitting on a vulnerable and fragile planet. Doom is infinitely possible. Probable, really, if you look at the BIG picture.

I realize all that and more can happen to us. I just don't believe any human being or group of human beings has a lock on predicting the future. I mistrust our fascination with predicting doom and with becoming mesmerized with patterns and twisting them to confirm our preconceived prejudices. We are very clever monkeys used to picking out and seeing patterns in nature. Sometimes that's our salvation and sometimes that our, well, yes, doom—at least our psychological doom.

(And just as I am writing this Asteroid 4179 - Toutatis from Holst's The Planets came up on iTunes. Funny iTunes! It must be a sign!)

Don't get me wrong: I believe a great many silly things. All my life I've had a cynic on one shoulder and a true believer on the other. As a for instance, the only thing that has sufficiently explained to me this psychological duality is that my Sun in Virgo is in perfect opposition to my Moon in Pisces. Many people find that a silly belief, I find it a fact of life.

But I don't, I just don't, buy into Predictions of Doom. Or more precisely, Predictors of Doom. The future is a mystery and infinitely changeable, depending on what we do with our individual lives at any given moment and how those individual lives effect the society at large.

Unless the Singularity or the Asteroid or the pandemic creeps out of the closet one night and mugs us in our beds. I guess we'll all know on December 21, 2012.

Quote of the day:

"You can only predict things after they have happened."

—Eugene Ionesco


Writing palaver of the day:

Yesterday was a good writing day, a real good writing day. I didn't get much actual writing done, maybe a page, but it loomed large anyway. You see, I resolved a plot issue that had been haunting me for weeks (a separate issue from the plotting-by-stupidity one and a much larger hole in the ground). The really good writing day part is that I didn't just come up with a patch that got me through the first draft and would have to be completely restitched in later drafts. I actually came up with something that worked and had resonance with what came before. And I did it by finally letting go of my worry and telling myself, "This is only a first draft. You're allowed to suck in first drafts. You have the luxury of rewrites." Giving myself that permission freed something up in the ol' whim-wham machine of my brain.

Now, writing friends of mine had been telling me not to sweat the first draft—and having been down this novel writing road a few times before I knew they were correct—but I wasn't really taking it to heart. It floated in the intellectual soup, but I didn't internalize it until I'd thoroughly beaten myself up about it first. *sigh* I wish I wasn't such a masochist about these things, but I am and such is life.

And I am so close to finishing the 1968 timeline. There's still a chunk to go in the 6th century and 1976, but I'm making good progress there, too. It'll be interesting to see if I write faster now that I've fixed the grande plot problem. I'm not placing any bets, mind you, but we'll see.

Today's session was fruitful, though. Even though my villains twirled their moustaches so hard they ripped them off, grew new ones, and started twirling those, too—all that is infinitely fixable. In Draft the Second.