So apparently I’ve had this song sitting on my iPod for years, literally, and Sunday was the first time I ever heard it.

And sometimes just driving down a two-laned highway in the middle of the mountains, without a soul in sight, is enough. That moment was enough.

I’m trying to keep my shit together. To learn how to let go when I’m in danger of ripping things to shreds. To learn how to hang on when things are about to fly away from me.

Give and take. So simple, and yet so excruciatingly difficult for a guy with perfectionist tendencies.

iv

the way is the Vacuum, used, but never used up
incomprehensible source of the 10,000 things
edges blur
strings untie
dark energy
virtual particles
undetectable but always there
we do not know where all this came from
perhaps it was here even before the Big Bang

III

don’t shout out loud that something you like is “the best ever!” if you want to keep things peaceful.
don’t put carry around expensive things if you don’t want to get robbed.
don’t keep looking at things that you want (but probably don’t really need) if you want to keep your mind clear.

smart leaders make things happen by keeping their people from ruminating over random things in their mind, and by keep them well-fed
they distract them from their personal wants, but strengthen their muscles and bones.
even if they don’t know things, but they don’t want things either,
then the smart-asses and the pointy-haired bosses won’t get involved.
through active inaction, and watchful waiting, things will go well.

Now the world has gone to bed,
Darkness won’t engulf my head,
I can see by infrared,
How I hate the night.
Now I lay me down to sleep,
Try to count electric sheep,
Sweet dream wishes you can keep,
How I hate the night.
—Marvin the Paranoid Android from The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

I’m not sure what came over me last night. Like I said, I didn’t really do much work. The night was spectacularly quiet, and my black cloud failed to manifest itself. Either that, or my pager had decided to fail, but I woke up once or twice in the middle of the night to make sure it was really still working.

Instead, I surfed the internet, hearkening back to those long ago days when I was an intern, flailing around as night float, doing nothing but sitting in front of the puter, occasionally running in a panic to put out a fire.

And while I kept myself occupied by trying to restart my blog, nonetheless a seeping loneliness crept upon me, and I just felt forlorn.

Maybe it’s just my depression relapsing.

Times like these, it’s hard to remember the Art of Not Wanting. Interestingly, despite being anti-consumerist and anti-capitalist, this sentiment nonetheless has managed to seep into the mainstream.

If you love someone, set them free

This actually echoes the Taoist sentiment that to hold onto something or someone, you must let them go. Or there’s always good ol’ JC, in Luke 9:24, “For those who want to save their life will lose it, and those who lose their life for my sake will save it.”

And there’s this verse that S. texted me once, which pretty much sums up what unconditional love is:

Even after all this time
The sun never says to the earth,
“You owe Me.”
Look what happens with a love like that.
It lights the whole sky.
—Hafiz

I seem to have a penchant for unrequited love. Now, Br. long ago deconstructed this flaw in my character. It’s simply a manifestation of my avoidant personality. Since I know that the situation is impossible, it’s safe. Since I know from the start that I’m going to fail, I don’t have to worry about anything.

It’s a perfect scam. It’s too bad that there’s actually a part of me that wants to be loved in return.

I didn’t run into Don Quixote de la Mancha until I was a senior in high school, primarily through the musical “Man of La Mancha”, but afterwards, through the brilliant novel by Cervantes. I never did finish it in its entirety, though.

I’ve never been called “quixotic” to my face, by I’m sure it must’ve crossed the minds of some of my friends and acquaintances.

But naturally, I grew obsessed with the song “The Impossible Dream”:

This is my quest:
To follow that star,
no matter how hopeless,
no matter how far;

to fight for the right
without question or pause;
to be willing to march into Hell
for a heavenly cause.

And I know if I’ll only be true
to this glorious quest,
that my heart will lie peaceful and calm
when I’m laid to my rest.

And the world will be better for this,
that one man, scorned and covered with scars,
still strove with his last ounce of courage
to reach the unreachable star.

Looks like I’m still looking for Dulcinea, doomed to forever love pure and chaste from afar.

After work, though, I grabbed a large cup of coffee and sat in my car by the beach, watching the crashing waves and the surfers who braved them. For some reason—possibly entirely pharmacologically-mediated by the caffeine—my mood lifted up as I drove home. The morning always looks better after some coffee.

Later today, I found myself thinking: there’s got to be an orthogonal solution to this. There’s got to be a way for me to beat my fear of rejection and be able to tell people how I feel about them, without hoping for anything in return.

And I recognize very acutely that if I can’t take care of myself, if I can’t love myself, there’s no way in hell that I can actually love another person. It’s just logistically impossible. If I don’t have all my shit together, how can I possibly be any good for anyone?

And at last, it comes full circle. If I learn to love the world and the people and things in it for who/what they are, and not for what I wish them to be, no matter how fucked up everything is, no matter how evil people can be, unconditionally, whole-heartedly, without expecting anything in return, then maybe I can learn to love myself for what I am, even knowing that I am badly broken and horrendously imperfect. To put it in terms of Darwinism, the only options are to grow, change, or die, and despite how I feel some days, I really don’t want to die. At least not quite yet.

I finally recognize, perhaps years and maybe decades too late, that life is impossible without love. And even if no one in the world loves me, I’ve got to at least love myself. I’ve got to believe that there’s a seed of something great inside of me, it just needs to germinate and take root.

Seeing the world in this light, sure it’s fucked up, beyond belief, and possibly beyond repair, but, to use a contemporary, hackishly trite phrase, it is what it is.

R has often quoted “Buckaroo Banzai” to me: No matter where you go, there you are.

This is not about resting on my laurels. This is, ultimately, about believing that, even though there are a lot of things wrong with me now, I can get better. Slowly, maybe imperceptibly so, but if I make the effort, given enough time, there will be a change. There’s no reason why every day has to be like every other day, fraught with total insanity, mind-crushing depression, and abject desperation. Change will be excruciatingly painful in the beginning, but what have I got to lose if I’m already hurting this bad?

Change for the better is possible. And I can make it happen. If I just keep believing this—and I see no good reason why I shouldn’t—then one day I might actually make something of myself. Not just a guy with a title, with a few pieces of paper that all say I’m over-educated. More than that. It’s possible that some day, I can be a person that’s worth falling in love with.

P.S. anytime I start feeling sorry for myself again, please remind me that I wrote this.

While I had stay at work all night until the morning, I really didn’t do much besides get Mephisto up and running again. This all started because I got sick of the Scribbish theme (which is, nonetheless, a great theme—I dig the hAtom support). I tried to install the Clarity-Orange theme but because Safari irritatingly always decompresses files, I ended up with a folder instead of zip file.

So I try to recompress it, but since I’ve forgotten what switches to set so that things get zipped recursively, and because I was too lazy to RTFM, I ended up uploading a borked file.

But instead of realizing that the recompressed file was borked, I ended up surmising that my version of Mephisto was too old (close, but not quite, 0.8) and tried to upgrade.

In reality, the upgrade went without a hitch. Because Hosting Rails has a git client installed, all I needed to do was follow Patrick Lenz’s directions on how to setup a local git repository to simplify upgrades to Mephisto.

Unfortunately, I had forgotten there was some funkiness with getting Image Science to work as a thumbnailer. A tweak to config/environment.rb may be the solution, but I’m too exasperated to try it right now. I ended up disabling thumbnailing instead.

The last thing to do was restore my database, which I had accidentally deleted during this fiasco. Luckily, I had the foresight to back it up before messing around with anything. Unfortunately, I couldn’t do it from work since it’s sitting on my system here at home. Fun times!

I accidentally nuked my blog, so it’ll be a while before I get back up and running again. Stay tuned!

J™ reminds me of this classic chestnut, one the great theme songs of unrequited love.

A man’s maturity consists in having found again the seriousness one had as a child, at play. — Friedrich Nietzsche

Both Br. and R have given me this advice at various times in my life, in their own words. I still haven’t figured out how to put it into action, though.

II

On this world, because we overvalue beauty, there is ugliness
Because we think we can judge what is good, there is evil

matter and anti-matter arise together,
what is hard and what is easy depends on experience
what is long and what is short depends on your velocity
what is high and what is low depends where on the potential energy curve you lie
a note played on an instrument can harmonize with the human voice
before and after depend on your position in space-time

So the wise make things happen without doing anything,
and they teach by showing, and not telling

Every particle is a wave and neither matter nor energy can be created nor destroyed—
So create, but do not bind your creation to you
Toil without expecting thanks
Concentrate your effort in the moment, and never keep score—
when you let go of everything, you can appreciate how the universe is eternal

Driving from work. Nothing as wearying as watching the sunrise, as you’re pining for your own bed.

This song somehow captured the slow, uncertain thawing of my heart over the past few weeks. The sound of trickling water as the spring time sun rises over head. Already, I am older, the minutes and hours wearing me down imperceptibly, until entire years sit upon my shoulders. It is only that distant horizon that reminds me that even the earth is finite.

I toy with the idea of somehow capturing this perfect moment in crystal, as the gentle dawn streams upon my bloodshot eyes, and I remember with regret that you can’t stop the clock, already it’s ancient history, and whatever I say or do will be an imperfect reminder.

A year from now, will I understand what it is that I have written here? Will the feelings that I have coursing through my veins have faded into nothingness by then, the song of a desert stream turned to silent dust?

Looking for the patterns in static,
they start to make sense the longer I’m at it.

Oh, instincts are misleading.
You shouldn’t think what you’re feeling.
They don’t tell you what you know you should want. —”Lightness” by Death Cab for Cutie, covered by Björn Kleinhenz.

I reached inside myself and found
nothing there to ease the pressure of my ever worried mind.
All my powers waste away.
I fear the crazed and lonely looks the mirror’s sending me these days.

Please don’t ask me to defend
the shameful lowlands of the way I’m drifting gloomily through time.
I reached inside myself today
thinking there’s got to be some way to keep my troubles distant.
—”The Sun Always Shines on TV” by a-ha

The irony is, I’m terrible with details. I can’t figure out the right threshold, the right setting. Either I actively ignore the minutiae and pretend they don’t exist at all, or I end up mired in the trivial, and I end up taking hours when it should’ve taken minutes, and every task becomes a variation of Zeno’s Paradox, getting halfway there, then halfway again, then halfway again of that, but still no closer to the finish line. This leaves me extraordinarily tired and frustrated, with a bunch of half-finished or maybe three-quarters finished projects lying around.

So what ends up happening is that I give up and procrastinate.

I’m not sure where this obsessive/compulsive focus on perfection came from. As far as I can tell, neither of my parents are really perfectionists. My mother comes close to being one, and yet she isn’t exactly the epitome of organization and order. My father can live with whatever is good enough.

But everyone knows perfection is impossible, and yet most people are able to live their lives without this paralyzing fear of always fucking things up. In retrospect, it becomes clear why nothing ever happens in my life. I’ve actively tried to avoid it.

You tried your best and failed miserably. The lesson is never try.
—Homer J Simpson

Trying is the first step to failure
—Homer J Simpson

Aim low, kids. Aim so low that no one will even care if you succeed
—Marge Simpson

In the past month, I’ve managed to pull my head above the water. I certainly didn’t do it on my own. Nothing would’ve ever happened if I didn’t have help from my friends. In particular, S, but also J and D. And I realize, if I don’t keep trying, I’m just going to sink back down into the endless depths of that cold, dark sea. That raw thought actually terrifies me. I’d almost rather drown in loneliness and despair than have to actually take a risk and actually aim for a little happiness.

I think some part of me was horrifically stunted some time during adolescence. Deep down inside, I’m still that 13 year old kid grappling with a hostile world, both at school and at home, never learning how to trust anyone.

And, oh man, I can see that chasm. It’s wide, and I can’t see the bottom of it. But I also see you on the other side, ready to catch me, and maybe if I get a good running start….

But it ain’t gonna happen. Not unless something inside me changes dramatically. Somehow I’ve got to re-experience the years of my life where I’ve actively avoided doing anything of consequence and never truly shared the depths of my heart with anyone, either romantically or even just as friends. Maybe if I actually tried once or twice, maybe things would’ve turned out drastically different. I guess that, no matter how much I protest, Ela. is right, and has got the force of an aphorism to prove it. It’s better to have love and lost than to never have loved at all. So, instead, all I’ve got is a pocketful of what-ifs and missed chances. I’m not sure what’ll get me off of this cliff that I seem to be eternally perched on. Somehow, I’m gonna have to actually try and jump.

XVII

the best leaders, no one has ever heard of them, they are scarcely known
while those who end up with the mantle of leadership may be famous and loved by all,
or probably feared,
or probably despised.

if you can’t trust, then you can’t be trusted

when things get done
without the pundits and the critics exchanging empty words
the ordinary people will look back and say, “We did it.”

I

The way which I can tell you about is not the unending way
The name which I can utter is not the permanent name
the universe began without a name
the names we devised split the universe into objects, creating the multiplicity of things before you
if you desire nothing, you will understand what is hidden
with desire, you can only see what is rendered
it seems like two things coming from the same source
so we named each thing separately
and the unified source remains a mystery
a mystery wrapped in a mystery
which itself is just a doorway to all mysteries

There is nothing external to yourself that can tell you about the future, because you already know what’s going to happen. And if you don’t know it now, you’ll never know it.

that which you seek to perfect
fussing and worrying over
will come to ruin
too much force
and the thing will break
too much care
and you will wear it thin
and all you’re left with are the little pieces
useless debris, detritus

so if you wish for things to turn out well
abandon artifice
let go of regret
the thing you care about
if it truly is worth caring about
is no mere tool
but an entity unto itself
it too has a soul
and souls are most perfect
when they are tranquil and still

and in stillness, what must happen will happen
the wave shall lift you up, then drop you down
and even still, you will find yourself
moving to where you need to be

Grasp him tightly, try to carry him
and he will squirm and struggle
snap and bite and cry out
trying to get free

But untether him, and let him wander
and let him play
among the shade of trees and the dew-lined grass
and he will follow you willingly
all the days of his life

If I could guarantee the happiness of a certain someone whom I think is the coolest person in the world at this point, I would sell my soul at a pinch. No matter how much misery I must endure, if I know that she is happy, then whatever I suffer will be bearable.

The water that falls upon the arid plain
was once the water that flowed in waves upon the deep dark sea
the water from the well that you drink with great thirst
the water that flows through the river, rushing down rapids swirling in eddies
the water that is your perspiration, that are your tears
and blood is made up mostly of water, and so is urine and bile

The water locked into the glacial mountain tops
The water crystallized into snow flakes
ice floating upon the deep water of the placid lake
in the dark of December
the icebergs that crash through the narrow straits
upon which the great ships founder
the avalanche, as deadly as a tsunami
and in the void
blown away from the streaming sunlight
glittering in the comet’s tail,
and in the distant unfathomable clouds
where stars are born, deep in that near-infinite void
beyond all human’s ken

So sunlight and starlight
like impossible furnaces
that burn all the things under heaven
that ignite all the things above the earth
the epitome of the hells
of errant superstition
and yet without their blazing fire
that melts and breaks apart all manner of substance
even metal, even separating the elements of air itself
and without stars fading and dying
exploding cataclysmically
searing all things with light that cannot be seen
the fire of life would not be kindled
we, the children of this universe
are made of stardust

The trackless depths,
even when light no longer illuminates
the human eye
still we can hear the echoes
like waves from the distant past
each peak farther and farther away
each trough deeper and deeper
we can apprehend
the beginning that is perhaps no beginning
the beginning that is perhaps also the ending
though the beginning cannot exist
for all these things to be

For the beginning that we see
cannot be the true beginning
as the setting sun that we watch
has already sunk below the horizon
as when I hear the words that you utter
from your mountaintop
across the valley
you have already started to climb down
is not the echo the thing itself, attenuated?
and if the echo and the thing itself superimpose,
how can you say which is the thing, and which is the echo?

As all the thrumming of a single guitar string
are separate notes that are the same note
as one voice can sing many songs
and many voices can sing as one voice
Isn’t the song also as real as the voices?
For the song must be sung by voices, and
every voice, however hoarse and tuneless, still has its song
and even the mute and the deaf
are not excused from the cacophony
that is the crash and the echo
of the universe in evolution

To find the way, you must search for it
but you cannot search for it without losing it first
and how can you lose the way if you have never found it?

The way is what is
we are born to it without knowing
when we know is when we go astray
and there is no turning backwards
whichever direction you face is always forward,
and every beginning is an ending
though the way has neither beginning nor end.

Isn’t the branch still part of the tree?
but can you say it is a tree if it has no branches?
the head is only one part of the body,
but can the body live without the head,
or the head without the body?
and the wheel is but a part of the chariot,
and yet without the wheel, the chariot cannot go forward
and yet the wheel alone is a poor conveyance
So each small way is still part of the great way
for the way could not be great
if the small ways did not exist

What is going through my head?

It’s 1:30 in the morning and I have to go to work tomorrow, and madness spins through my brain, like a whirlwind of deranged birds.

Hope. You can’t eat hope, is the problem. Hope doesn’t pay the bills. It doesn’t keep you warm in the middle of the night when the gas company shuts your heat off. Hope won’t make you smarter, stronger, wiser, faster.

And, yet, the possibilities are exponential.

Can I just hang on to this random scintillating spark of hope? Can I continue to wish uninterrupted, and dream of impossibilities?

Maybe not in this life, nor the next, but at least let me pretend?

This song always makes me go a little teary-eyed.

Part of it is the fact that the first time I heard it, it was in the trailer for the movie “Children of Men” starring Clive Owen, which posits a dystopian future where the world is struck with a plague of infertility, and Clive Owen finds himself guiding the first pregnant woman in 20 years to a faint hope known as the Human Project. Amidst the explosions, the gunfire, the angry mobs, the refugee camps, this song surges forth, making me think of an almost impossible spark of hope being ignited into a blazing fire that will change the world.

But “Hoppipolla” also happens to translate into ”jumping into puddles”, and the song evokes the simplicity and unfettered joy of being a kid.

And I realize that this is what I’ve been looking for all this time—joy without limits, mirth without bound. Happiness is not something that can be acquired and displayed in a trophy case. It isn’t something that can be won. It’s not some kind of treasure or prize. It simply isn’t something static and well-defined. Happiness is an action, a state of active being. Happiness is living.

Sometimes I’m shocked by the things that I used to know, but keep forgetting for some reason.

You’ve got to make time in your life to play.

The answer is as simple, and as bewilderingly complex, as that.

Oh man, I let myself get burned. Despite my brown skin, even I am not immune to the effects of the California sun.

Geeky fact of the day: I just realized that seawater is essentially 3% saline, the same concentration that we use for infusions in cases of increased intracranial pressure and in cases of severe hyponatremia requiring rapid correction.

He gazed expectantly at the breaking wall of water, shimmering green and blue in the sparkling sun. The wave slapped him around, stinging him with its icy chill. He kept at it, turning again to face the on-coming torrent crashing against him. On and on he met them head-on, some bizarre Quixote-like figure tilting at the crests and the breakers, until his skin tingled, as if prickling needles ran up and down his spine. Eventually, the chill made him clench his teeth, and his jaw ached, nearly bringing tears to his eyes.

The ocean always makes me realize just how numb I’ve become. Like blood suddenly pulsing through tightly constricted limbs, the first thing you feel is excruciating pain. It’s true what they say, pain is a sign that you’re still alive, that the tissue can be salvaged. It’s when you’re numb that you’re at highest risk for losing a limb, or damaging your joints, or getting an infection.

Despite the itching discomfort and the flushing redness, making me glow lobster-red, I don’t regret it one bit.

Torrey Pines State Beach is pretty much my favorite beach here in S.D.

Despite being entirely in the city limits of San Diego, it feels like its way out there, out in the wilderness. I suppose this is how New Yorkers tend to think of the deep interior of Central Park. If you’re coming down from La Jolla, it’s easy to just speed past this place and find yourself in Del Mar without so much as a blink.

I used to hang out here a lot in July and August of 2006, hiking up to the trails and watching the sun set. But once the days got short again, it was too difficult to actually make it up there before closing time. Still, whenever the days would get me all wound up and full of madness, sometimes I would just pull out to the side of the road and watch the waves come crashing upon that precarious piece of shore.

It is, however, quite a popular place, so finding a parking space requires some modicum of planning. Even on weekdays.

So I’m driving around 45 to 50 mph, doubting that I would actually find a spot, when, lo and behold, a spot lies open right next to a Winnebago. I slam the brakes and turn rather precipitously into the spot. Success!

It has been nearly a year and a half since I last played amongst the waves and I felt compelled to brave the icy cold waters. The problem with the Eastern Pacific is that the water is freakin’ freezing and the cold seriously sucked the breath out of my lungs. And by the time I arrived, the wind had shifted. The warm summer-like air began mixing with the frigid Alaskan water, giving off an obscuring fog that made it difficult to see the shore from where I stood, knee deep in the brine. I stayed in the water until arms started going numb, then made for the shore and crashed out for a little while. By the time I woke up again, the sun had burned through the mist, leaving behind nothing but miles and miles of blue sky. The water shimmered green and blue, the clearest I’d ever seen in California, and perhaps anywhere I’ve ever been, except for maybe Borocay.

Since I am a masochist, I jumped back into the water. The waves were picking up. One of these days, I’m going to have to get a surf board, I guess. Although I’ve resisted thus far. The problem is that to be practical, you’ve really got to have a wet suit.

By 3pm I was pretty tired and not a little peckish, so I ended up driving down to Ocean Beach. Remembering something Chr recommended to me some time ago, I finally had a burger at Hodad’s.

But I think my lack of sleep is finally getting to me, and I’m probably gonna crash out pretty soon. But first, I’ve got to drive home.

Even as I grow torpid and still, I remember that I promised myself that I would see the ocean today, come hell or high water. The temptation to just crash out on my bed is immense, but I know I will be a lesser person if I give in.

Last night was not an awful call night, but it was certainly not a restful one. For some reason the poor nurse couldn’t get that damned NG tube to point downwards instead of straight up at the gastroesophageal junction. Not exactly what you want in a guy who had just barely avoided intubation after aspirating. So we shot three x-rays (thank God he’s 86 and I don’t really have to worry about the malignancy risk) before the nurse finally just pulled out the old one and stuck in a new one. Fun times.

I wish they would put a PACS machine near the call rooms.

But then again, that’s probably a moot point, because, unless I’m extraordinarily unlucky and get called-in to cross-cover, I won’t have to take call at this particular hospital again.

There are all sorts of whirling, swirling thoughts coalescing within my fevered brain, just aching to be written down. Things that I can’t simply blog about in order to do them justice. I just need to sit somewhere and think long and hard about what I want from this life and write it in ink.

It’s difficult. There is only one thing I’ve ever accomplished so far, and I’ve relied heavily on incredibly good luck, on the generosity and saint-like patience of my parents, aunts, uncles, siblings, and friends, and on whatever unfair advantages that God decided to equip me with at birth to get where I’ve gotten.

So success is not something I can aim at in a calculated fashion. It is somewhat bewildering to dissect out when exactly my desire became my destiny. It was never an issue of wanting it badly enough. There are lots of things that I’ve wanted so badly I thought I would die when they didn’t come to fruition, where I thought I would die just with the aching desire of them.

It was never an issue of doing my best either. There were a lot of times I functioned in a peremptory, half-assed manner, with my heart not in it at all, and I still somehow survived.

Sometimes I wonder if that’s all a man is entitled to: that single massive accomplishment that took half-a-lifetime to achieve. Maybe it’s all downhill from here, for all I know.

I was going to use all this free time to try and fix the awful disaster area that is my apartment, but the sun is shining…

Sun is shining, the weather is sweet
Make you wanna move your dancing feet
To the rescue, here I am…
—Bob Marley

my heart misgives me
and yet this vigil I must keep
through the long dark night alone I gaze upon the stars

the thought of you causes my heart to stir
my pulse like cresting waves crashing upon the rocky shore
I had seen the paths,
the crisscrossing threads of the skein of Fate
intricate and subtle
bewildering and mesmerizing
not believing where they would lead
beyond the labyrinthine twistings and turnings
through the tangled knots and whorls

I am lost, have always been lost
though you are like a beacon, a brilliant star
the light guiding me home in the misty darkness
in my desperate searches, I found a glimmer
fearing yet another false hope
a phantom of the lonely sea
but the light grew brighter, until it were like sunlight
dazzling, blazing, and I thought I might even feel your warm embrace

Still I drift listlessly in the windless sea
with only the low rumble of the waves around me
the air is warm and thick
and I dream of summers long gone
the hours and the days wasted
wandering hidden lands and lost kingdoms
searching but never finding

I know that you are not mine to keep
your light is for the world to see
I drink but lightly of your waters
and breathe but a single breath, inhaling your sweet fragrance
as Springtime belongs to no man,
and Summer has no master

Still my wonder does not abate
that you should smile on me even once
and a sweet longing grows in my heart
that may always yearn, never to be fulfilled

To know that you are there
shimmering, glittering like a star
gives comfort to my soul, and chases my nightmares away,
though I drift upon this endless sea,
never to find landfall.

For some reason, old songs I haven’t thought of for a while suddenly sprang forth from my memory.

There were promises made in the darkness
Promises you made in your sleep
Promises the gods demand you keep
—Papa Ge from “Once on this Island”

Sometimes even fairy tales don’t have fairy tale endings. There are “happily ever after”s for some people, just not for who you hoped for, and maybe it’s not such a bad thing to dissolve into foam, or be resurrected into a tree. I guess.

The answer—the immensity of it all looms overhead—and the old doubts creep in, despite knowing that God never challenges you beyond your abilities. Like life itself, these things are possible, though perhaps astronomically improbable.

I’d rather run the other way than stay and see
The smoke and who’s still standing when it clears
—”Over Your Head (Cable Car)” by the Fray

There is no averting this course. If the tracks lead me directly into a brick wall, I say, full steam ahead.

Do or not do. There is no try.
—Yoda from “The Empire Strikes Back”

This does nothing for the butterflies in my stomach, though, as I anticipate things that are not going to happen (even though a part of me that I’m trying to keep locked up in its cage keeps wishing that it would. Well, that part isn’t in my hands now, is it?)

Everyone knows I’m in
over my head,
over my head,
with eight seconds left in overtime,
she’s on your mind,
she’s on your mind.
—”Over Your Head (Cable Car)” by the Fray

In that moment, as I leaned on the railing and watched them all dancing, the unasked questions buoyed my heart, lifted it up with the tide, and I smiled, knowing for that one moment the answer.

The sense of certainty, of inevitability was profound.

But I said it before: it doesn’t mean it’s going to be some fairy tale ending. I only know what my answer was in that brief moment, knowing that I would give that answer no matter what happens next, even if I only get to creep in the shadows, flitting through the bright, electron-infested interstices of the Internet, hoping for some hint, some passing mention of her.

Just to know that she exists in this world is enough. And where I go from there is clear.

To love, pure and chaste from afar if that’s the way it’s got to be. Although I wish that wasn’t all there was to be, what is, is, and that will always be enough.

This article in the Washington Post tries to argue that prevention is more expensive than intervention. The only problem is that they deliberately ignore two preventative measures that have clearly been demonstrated to decrease costs: immunizations, and colon cancer screening.

But even the idea that tight control of LDL using a statin is more expensive than performing urgent/emergent PCI or CABG is suspect. The argument is that giving people statins will cost approximately $160k/year of life in men and $240k/year of life, if you count lab tests and physician’s visits, and according to an old article in JAMA, the number needed to treat in order to prevent one death is somewhere between 163-639/year, depending on which statin and which dose you actually use. (For a back of the envelope calculation, we can use data from drugstore.com. A month supply of simvastatin 40 mg costs $27.99. A month supply of pravastatin 40 mg is $20.99. [These are the prices for the generic formulations.] So we’re really talking about somewhere between $41,056/year to $214,627/year to save a life, which, if you put it that way, doesn’t really sound like much, now, does it? I mean, I’d like to think that a life is worth more than $214k, you know?) And, in theory, you really don’t need to see your physician more often than normal. It makes no sense to check lipids more than every 6 months—and certainly no more frequently than every 3 months at the most. And you only really need to check LFTs a couple of times before you know whether or not they’re going to cause transaminitis. Once you’re stabilized and at goal, you can let it ride, pretty much.

Now compare this to an emergent ambulance transport to the emergency room, the activation of the cath lab, the GpIIb-IIIa receptor blockers, the fluoro time, and, God help you, the clopidogrel (a 30 day supply costs $135.99, and if you end up with a drug-eluting stent, we’re talking at least one year of this stuff, and sometimes, we’re talking a lifetime of Plavix.) Or maybe you need to get CABG’ed, so we’re talking about OR time, bypass time, probable ICU time +/- balloon pump, and I’m thinking that we’re easily talking about comparable costs, particularly when you add in the incidence of complications. And it’s a hell of a lot less convenient to have an MI than it is to take a pill for the rest of your life, if you ask me.

But we’re not even looking at opportunity cost: think about all the productivity that gets lost when someone has an MI in their 50s. I mean, we’re talking possibly up to a decade and a half of reduced productivity (and maybe more if we keep pushing the retirement age back.)

So, yeah, it’s going to be pretty damn hard to get me to believe that intervention is more expensive than prevention. Sure, we shouldn’t just put beta-blockers and SSRIs in the water to prevent MIs and major depression. You’ve still got to rationally target your preventions. And if you add in the cost to society in terms of opportunity cost, you’re bound to eventually start coming out ahead.

So talking to S has inspired me. And reminded me of all the things that I’ve given up to follow this path that I’m on.

Was it more than a year ago when E came out to S.D.? We sort of had the same conversation back then, about how the sacrifices demanded by the practice of medicine have really constrained the ability to be creative.

Except for this damned blog, I don’t really write any more. Oh, I manage to scribble something now and again into that Moleskin journal that I carry around with me. But it’s been a year, and I still haven’t made much progress.

I don’t take pictures any more either. And I don’t believe the idea that I may have just gotten sick of all the sunrises and sunsets, all the mountains and valleys and rivers and beaches here in So Cal.

My soul is dry.

The other thing I miss dearly is music. Oh, I’ve been making my iTunes Library fat, and I’m constantly running out of hard drive space. But I don’t remember the last time I sang. Or the last time I played on my keyboard, or strummed a tune on my guitar.

The question isn’t whether or not I need to do these things. The question isn’t how to balance things with work. The question is: what do I really want out of life? The Word, and the Song, have never been just activities for my amusement. They give my life another dimension, another way to express who I am. And when I’m caught up in the moment of creation, of participation, I feel alive in a way that is vastly different from how I feel when treating people in the clinic or on the wards. I’m not trying to say one is better than the other, only that one is not enough.

But medicine is a harsh mistress. For this art, must I sacrifice all other arts?

So how does it all fit in? How do I make one art give meaning to the other arts? In the same way it makes no sense to keep people you love dearly in separate spheres, never to meet or shake hands, it just doesn’t make sense to keep all these things strictly delineated.

Medicine isn’t called an art just for nothing. There is a creative dimension to it, a nurturing, a fostering aspect. In the same way that I can obsess over a stanza or a paragraph, in the same way that I practice the sequences of chords or work on the melody, there is something transcendent in healing someone (or, I guess, more realistically, optimizing them so that their body—and spirit, too—can heal.)

Oh, make no mistake. There’s plenty of science in medicine. Without it, medicine would just be empty ritual. Like the priests of Ba’al cutting themselves around the stone altar to try and coax their god to work some magic.

But for some reason, we insist on this artificial separation of science and creativity. Even when the dominant narrative of science—from Galileo to Newton to Einstein, and beyond—has been one of effusive creativity, fraught with the awe of the beauty of the intricate universe.

Advances in neuroscience that make it very clear that the brain is not a digital computer, but an emotion-based pattern recognition machine. Rather than being anathema to our reasoning processes, emotionality has always been a selective advantage. Our emotions are finely tuned over the millions of years of evolution to respond adequately to our natural environment, and while our unnatural environment sometimes wreaks havoc on our souls, we’ve adapted pretty well to that emergent behavior known as civilization.

One can interpret urbanization as a complete break from nature, but decades of the study of cities has demonstrated that city-building is not so different from other natural processes, in terms of accretion and destruction, of spread and retreat. The fractal patterns that arise from settlement and gentrification aren’t too different from those that instruct how trees form their branches and their leaves, how mountains and shorelines and rivers evolve, how neurons ramify and synapse and prune, how blood vessels grow to feed and drain parts of the body. As much as we try to deny it, we humans are children of this world, and everything we do is evidence of it.

Creativity is the basis of civilization, and to deny this makes us less than human.

So my trip down memory lane keeps going:

Spandau Ballet “True”

New Order “Bizarre Love Triangle”

Psychedelic Furs “The Ghost in You”

Alphaville “Forever Young”

The La’s “There She Goes”

Tears for Fears “Head over Heels”

The Cure “Just Like Heaven”

The Smiths “Ask”

My iPod took me back, way back, on the drive home from work today:

I could say something snarky about the passing of the legendary Charlton Heston. (On Twitter, I saw someone ask if we could finally take his guns.) I still find myself highly amused by his lines from ”Ben-Hur” about being peace-loving and some such.

But what I find remarkable is Heston’s great impact on mainstreaming Science Fiction. “The Planet of the Apes”. “Soylent Green” (from which the title of this blog post is taken from.) “Omega Man” (which is a rendition of “I Am Legend”) “The Ten Commandments” (OK, maybe this is technically fantasy, but whatever.)

They don’t have actors like him anymore, and that’s probably why most of what comes out of Hollywood these days is bilge.

(I would’ve so watched a “Planet of the Apes” musical. Yes, I know I’m disturbed.)

This song by Wyclef Jean, Akon, L’il Wayne, and Niia seems pretty straight-forward: it’s about a girl who seemed to have it all together in high school: all the guys dug her, she was in sports, and did well in school. But she ends up having to become a prostitute, in order that she and her kid can survive.

But the original video makes the matter more complicated. Set in a refugee camp (recalling Wyclef’s affiliation with the Fugees), it features a woman who is awaiting deportation to her home country. And it got me thinking about all those women who longed to escape the land of their birth because of patriarchal tyranny, or straight-up abuse. About all the women who got sold the American Dream. Who made it to these shores and found out the hard way that “cash rules everything around me.”

And how global capitalism has reduced everything into dollars and cents, even things like the value of human life, or the importance of family, or even pieces of irreplaceable culture.

More interesting, I can reinterpret the song as a cautionary tale. As the American economy slides head-long into the toilet, and as the vaunted “dollar, dollar bill” becomes more and more worthless, it becomes a metaphor for the devaluation of things that weren’t ever measured in dollars and cents. The refugee camps reminds me of the raging immigration debate, as xenophobes seek to shut the gates and wall off the borders, with the effect of further devaluing human life. The fact that it’s “cash” (and not, say, Visa or American Express) that rules everything makes me think of the rising pre-eminence of the underground economy, trafficking in drugs and sex. And it makes me wonder if this is the bleak future W and his cronies is leaving the new generations of Americans, where turning tricks becomes an economic necessity in order to survive.

I haven’t made up my mind if I’m going to stay or if I’m going to go. The reasons for going are obvious. The reasons for staying are not so clear, but in brief moments, they are incredibly compelling.

How shall I go in peace and without sorrow? Nay, not without a wound in the spirit shall I leave this city.

Long were the days of pain I have spent within its walls, and long were the nights of aloneness; and who can depart from his pain and his aloneness without regret?

Too many fragments of the spirit have I scattered in these streets, and too many are the children of my longing that walk naked among these hills, and I cannot withdraw from them without a burden and an ache.

It is not a garment I cast off this day, but a skin that I tear with my own hands.

— Kahlil Gibran The Prophet

… with longing and wistful hopelessness, he parted from her reluctantly, out into the cold darkness. The bejeweled stars of Orion dipped headlong into the sea, and the night air made him shiver. Sometimes, the right song plays at the right moment, crystallizing a brief memory, forever remembered half-wrong and askew. But he remembers her smile.

And through the rest of his life he carried that memory with him in his heart, though he never saw her again, nor heard from her, not knowing if she had found that happiness she sought, or if she was even still alive. But that moment stayed with him…

You have suffered enough
And warred with yourself
It’s time that you won

As I finish off my residency, I realize that no matter how awful some of the remaining hours and the minutes can be, this experience is finite and bounded. My senior resident on my very first in-patient intern month took a sardonic aphorism from the seminal medical novel “The House of God” and added a hopeful corollary which has become something of an unspoken mantra. “They can always hurt you more, but they can’t stop the clock.”

Pages from the Emergency Department that I would’ve reacted to with an apoplectic fit have started to become surreally ludicrous. Take one of the consults they had me see the other night while I held the neurology service’s pager. I am beginning to appreciate just how much insanity and ridiculousness the neuro service probably shields the medicine service from . They don’t necessarily diminish the number of painful, nonsensical (I think the technical term is “cockamamie”) admits we have to take, but they at least get the ER or surgery resident to focus and come up with a coherent reason as to why we should take the patient.

Still, it was with some trepidation and loathing that I walked into the resuscitation room down in that madhouse. One of the worst chief complaints we learn to dread is “patient found down”, because generally it means that we have absolutely no past medical history to go on.

Worse, their neuro exam was not very hopeful. Pupils fixed and dilated. Unresponsive to noxious stimuli. Serious badness.

Then again, the patient had just received massive amounts of sedative/hypnotics, with paralytics on top of that, for the alleged purpose of airway protection. Before I could even muster my sentiment of incredulity at having to perform a neurological assessment on someone who had just been drugged out of their mind, they were already apologetic. “I know the neuro exam isn’t going to be very illuminating, but we just wanted you on board.”

As I assessed the patient, I couldn’t help but sigh in resignation. They weren’t kidding about the fixed and dilated pupils. I couldn’t elicit a doll’s eyes reflex, either. I poked at her eyes with cotton swabs and got nothing.

I know it’s ridiculously early in my career, but I think the death and destruction is starting to get to me.

It occurred to me just how much pain and suffering occurs in the hospital. Me and the hem-onc fellow were bantering about the different levels of emotional damage that results from watching people die, ranking experiences according to how horrific they were. We never decided whether it was more awful to watch a baby die versus a young adult on the verge of attaining their goals and dreams. That’s when a “Code Blue” got called.

I think that it suffices to say that there is probably something wrong with you when you decide to go to a code because you don’t have anything better to do. So despite the fact that I wasn’t on the medicine service, I tagged along anyway.

It was with some horror when I realized that the patient who was getting chest compressions was a very sweet old lady whom I had admitted a few months ago. The family was in the ICU, weeping silently, and I grew painfully aware of the fact that it was a good 20 minutes before anyone went up to them to explain what was going on. I was tempted to do it myself, but they didn’t recognize me, and it seemed odd to be coming from an entirely unrelated service not at all involved in her current care.

I wouldn’t blame the ICU resident from wanting to kill us, though. As he got massacred by the sheer number of intubated people coming up from the emergency department, me and the back-up resident (who performs factotum duties between 1 am and 7 am) were shooting the shit about the recent study that showed that the concept of relative adrenal insufficiency is probably a farce, staying up until the ungodly hour of 3 am for no good reason. To be fair, the back-up resident did help him with putting in a central line.

The reason why I was loathe to go to sleep, though, was that housekeeping had neglected to fix the call room I was staying in. I ended up sleeping on top of the covers but that didn’t stop me from waking up feeling itchy all over. The thing that worries me and grosses me out is the fact that there’s some kind of lice infestation on the general medicine wards. They kept talking about this guy who was completely infested with lice, and the notion just gives me the heebie-jeebies.

And entirely unrelated to all this madness, this song kept popping up in my head last night:

No blinding light or tunnels to gates of white
Just our hands clasped so tight
Waiting for the hint of a spark
If Heaven and Hell decide
That they both are satisfied
Illuminate the NOs on their vacancy signs

“What is Real?” asked the Rabbit one day, when they were lying side by side near the nursery fender, before Nana came to tidy the room. “Does it mean having things that buzz inside you and a stick-out handle?”

“Real isn’t how you are made,” said the Skin Horse. “It’s a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but really loves you, then you become Real.”

“Does it hurt?” asked the Rabbit.

“Sometimes,” said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. “When you are Real you don’t mind being hurt.”

“Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,” he asked, “or bit by bit?”

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.” — Margery Williams The Velveteen Rabbit

I dreamt that I was trapped on a planet in a colony star system that had sort of descended into barbarism. Magic was real, and one of the main centers of government was the School of Magic, highly reminiscent of Hogwarts, without the forest around it. I believe there was an alternative community that opposed the magicians, and that relied on old 20th century technology.

Imprisoned in the School of Magic was a powerful wizard who happens to be played by Alan Rickman, who had caused the destruction of the moon that orbited this colony world. Unfortunately, this moon happened to be likewise inhabited, and lots of its inhabitants were killed in the aforementioned destruction. Some, however, managed to escape, and they live as refugees on the main world, while others have managed to subsist in the resultant asteroid fields in the Lagrange Points, depending on interstellar piracy as their main source of income.

In this dream, I think I may have been a Terran who had someone gotten stranded on this backwards planet, and I kept hoping for a ship to rescue me. Eventually one comes, which leads to all sorts of turmoil and upheaval.

I think the aforementioned powerful wizard destroyed the satellite world in a misguided bid to impress a woman he loved. This naturally does not yield the expected results.

I have this fantasy that if I hold my breath and Valsalva real hard, that nothing will come in through the emergency department that they’ll call me about.

Saying this, however, I know I’ve already jinxed myself.

Twitter is an exercise in simulating Brownian motion in a network. It’s kind of like the example of the drunkard trying to find his way from the bar by choosing a random direction at each intersection he crosses. Or, technically, I guess, it’s a random walk on a graph, where instead of merely choosing cardinal directions, you could just as easily choose walking through a tunnel, down a diagonal, or up a freeway on-ramp.

There is no path to truth. Truth must be discovered, but there is no formula for its discovery. What is formulated is not true. You must set out on the uncharted sea, and the uncharted sea is yourself. You must set out to discover yourself, but not according to any plan or pattern, for then there is no discovery. — J. Krishnamurti

(discovered on ”Creating Outside the Box” on Crossroads Dispatches, thence derived from Whiskey River)

Now I see why most people are apt to think of art and science as completely dichotomous. But I think most people don’t really understand science. While most people probably don’t understand art either, that never stops them from their conjectures.

One might imagine that the whole purpose of science is to predict that which has not yet happened. We’ve taken Newton’s Laws of Motion and calculated launch trajectories to the moon, and figured out how to steal some gravitational energy from the Sun and from Jupiter in order to visit Uranus and Neptune with great success. We’ve taken Einstein’s beautifully simple equation of E=mc² and created both horrific havoc (in the form of nuclear explosions) and closely guarded hope (despite Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, I still think the only way we can gain independence from hydrocarbon fuel is to pursue more research in the safety of fission-based nuclear power plants, and to finally figure out how to build a working fusion-based reactor, which would be orders of magnitude safer.)

But the path to these truths do* have a lot in common with art. The *discovery of the theories of gravity and of relativity were certainly not predictable, and their stories are very human stories, guided by intuition, instinct, and the desire to find beauty and grace in the universe.

Interestingly, one of the landmark theories (or set of theories) of mathematics, and particularly of information theory, formulated by Gödel and reapplied by Turing, proves that you cannot intentionally predict nor calculate that which has not yet been discovered. If your current system of knowledge and mathematics does not contain the axiom you’re looking for, you can’t just plug in parameters to an existing equation to try to derive such an axiom. The only way to obtain new knowledge is to venture out in the unverifiable wilderness, and see if what you find is actually self-consistent with what you already know. And as the history of the scientific endeavor has shown us, sometimes what you find out in the wilderness forces you to recognize that what you thought you knew is actually much stranger, much more subtle, much more intricate than you first thought.

So the path to truth cannot be calculated, but it can be found, by rough approximations, skilled and shrewd guesses, courage, patience, and, most of all, unquenchable curiosity about this universe of ours.

And thus, Krishnamurti poetically restates Gödel’s Incompleteness Theorems.

If you are in a relationship, and it is “doing absolutly[sic] nothing” for you, makes you feel bad about yourself or situations, just causing unessesary[sic] drama, and ruining things that you may actually care about…why would you want that in your life?? you need to surround yourself with the people that make you feel good, and that will help you get to that next step in your life. that is what a relationship is all about…growing and moving forward. Surround yourself around people that are making moves, and doing what “they want and love” with their lives, positive energy…thats what life is all about…living. Because if you dont, misery loves company, they will only try to bring you down with them…but the question is, are you strong enough, to not let that happen? Its hard to see if you let it get to that point… …and then from all those answers you have to decide if that person is worthy of being a part of “your” life….because it is your life, your show…you decide who you want the characters to be…not the other way around. Every person is different, every person has their voice…can you recognize your voice, listen to it, and stick up for it??

(discovered on Tumbldown: a metaphysical mashup, from the Myspace blog of Ashley Alexandra Dupré, of whom much ink has been consumed in describing her illicit client-provider relationship with erstwhile-but-no-longer Governor Spitz.)

I suppose this just goes to show, that to be good at anything, even relationships, you’ve got to experience as many as you possibly can. Practice, practice, practice. Preferably with strong financial backing.

On the other hand, when you’ve only got one X chromosome (and I’m not talking about women with Turner’s Syndrome), I think it becomes a lot harder to pick and choose just exactly who you want to be with (especially if you expect them to pay you $5,000 an hour!) I’m not a big fan of binary thinking, but sometimes, the choice is often her way, or the highway. And let me tell you, I’ve got plenty of experience driving the lonely interstate highways of this great nation of ours.

Thank goodness for fool’s hope.

Apparently, I’m a foul-mouthed bastard.

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Philip K Dick coined the phrase “black iron prison” to describe the illusory world that we are trapped in, forever living and reliving the first century anno domini. It is an instrument of the tyrannical Empire, initially identified with Rome but also identified with any wielder of imperialist power descended from Rome, culminating with the tyrannical elements that rule the United States. Dick identified Richard Nixon as the apex of this tyranny. (God only knows what Dick would’ve thought of George W Bush and Dick Cheney.)

The Black Iron Prison was one of the revelations that came to Dick in his “pink laser ray” incident, of which he writes a semi-autobiographical account in his book “Valis”. The incident has been alternately and sometimes simultaneously interpreted as a true vision, the product of a psychotic breakdown, or an extraordinarily skillfully, subtly wrought allegory a la John of Patmos’ Book of Revelation.

Interestingly, the Black Iron Prison has become a standard trope of science fiction, and has in fact penetrated into popular culture, with the eminence of the movie “The Matrix”, which is essentially a technological implementation of the Black Iron Prison.

Philip K Dick was also well-versed with Christian Gnosticism, and basically identifies the Gospel regarding Jesus Christ as the antidote to imperialistic tyranny, and as the way out of the Black Iron Prison. Indeed, his recurring image of salvation from the Prison is that of early Christians from the first century A.D. destroying the prison from the outside. Dick weaves Christianity in with cryptic tales describing an ancient extraterrestrial culture that has been watching over humanity and a life force made entirely of information, which he dubbed “plasmates”, which again seems to anticipate much of early 21st century science fiction, which in turn anticipates the so-called Vingean Singularity, in which human beings find a way to “upload” themselves as pure information.

Using this paradigm, the gods of early human culture can be reimagined as extremely distributed, telekinetic Artificial Intelligences. (The most explicit example of such in early 21st century SF is The Eschaton, which is a pan-galactic AI in a series of novels written by Charlie Stross. However, Wintermute/Neuromancer from William Gibson’s writing certainly prefigures this.)

Naturally, many people have reinterpreted the Black Iron Prison more generally. Some have taken it to actually mean the material existence of their body—we are trapped in decaying flesh, and escape from the Black Iron Prison means transcending the Singularity. However, this is fraught with Manichaeistic ideas. While such dualism is pervasive in Gnostic Christianity, it is not clear that Dick subscribed to a simplistic paradigm where good equals spirit and evil equals flesh.

Others interpret it as the socially constructed reality that pervades early 21st century life, woven from the barrage of information assailing us from printed material, the TV, and through the Internet. This interpretation of the Prison is partially rooted in George Orwell’s nightmarish vision in 1984. Whereas Orwell envisioned that the Government would have supreme control of all information flow, our current world finds its information flow in the hands of multinational corporations. Still, it all amounts to the same thing. The media actively creates our reality. (See the definitions for Reality-based Community and Truthiness if you want to understand what I mean.)

Dick writes about this quite a bit. In our rapidly globalizing, capitalistic society, the majority of information is dedicated to the purpose of getting people to buy things they don’t need. The media’s reliance on truthiness is due to the fact that most people are interested in what they believe is true, not what is actually true. And audience interest generates ratings (and page views). And ratings and page views attract advertisers. No wonder actual facts have fallen to the way-side. Facts just don’t sell cars and game consoles.

This, more than anything else, is probably the reason why the American economy of the early 21st century is now collapsing under the weight of truthiness. As one would say it in the obsolete slang of the late 20th century, “Reality bites.”

Another school of thought, however, equates the Prison with individual perception. In other words, the walls of the prison are your qualia. In this scenario, there is no real escape from the Prison.

Well, except Death.

And I got to thinking about how J.R.R. Tolkien saw Death as a Gift from God. Whether or not there is an afterlife, dying is a surefire way to exit the Prison.

And I remember the last scene from Terry Gilliam’s brilliant movie “Brazil” in which, despite being captured and having his brain invaded, the protagonist still manages to escape his torturers.

*Mr. Helpmann* He’s got away from us, Jack. *Jack Lint* ‘Fraid you’re right, Mr. Helpmann. He’s gone.

But even qualia can be circumvented at least temporarily without having to die, if you’re willing to use pharmacologic agents, which I suppose was a major trope of the 1960s era. As we learn more about neurobiology and neurochemistry, it becomes readily apparent that the functioning brain is really a complex filter implemented as a Turing Machine that prioritizes the information flooding your sensory inputs. And, strangely, even early 21st century physics seems to have imbibed from Dick’s well. Renowned scientists such as Gerard ‘t Hooft, Leonard Susskind, and John Wheeler have theorized that perhaps our three-dimensional universe (four-dimensional if you include time) is in fact a holographic projection of the underlying 11-dimensional reality posited by String Theory.

The problem that Dick realized, and the problem that the Wachowski Brothers makes explicit in their “Matrix” Trilogy, is that most people don’t actually want to escape the Black Iron Prison. This is the fundamental conflict of human society. People can be quite happy living in an illusion. The problem is that it’s hard to keep an illusion intact when the people you interact with refuse to believe in this illusion as well. I’m not saying that stripping away illusions is a bad thing, though. You have no right to impose your illusion on others. And like Galileo once said, “I do not feel obliged to believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason, and intellect has intended us to forgo their use.” This is, I suppose, the fatal flaw of capitalism. At some point, everyone comes to realize that the lifestyle of the consumer is merely a version of the Myth of Sisyphus. While money can buy a good illusion, money still can’t buy happiness, and the realization that everything is ultimately futile makes it exceedingly difficult to fallback on one’s illusions.

So is it actually possible to be happy while accepting the reality that entropy wins in the end? (And even if it doesn’t you and I certainly won’t be around to survive the impending Big Crash, and extremely distributed hyperintelligences probably won’t make it through either.)

I think so. Sure, this is probably yet another illusion. Like the fugitive from the Black Iron Prison who finds himself trapped within an even bigger prison, or the escapee from the Matrix who finds herself in yet another simulated reality, pure unfiltered reality is simply not an option for the mind that has not been doped up with NMDA antagonists (which is a class of drugs that happen to include things like dextromethorphan, ketamine, and PCP, but also prescription drugs like Namenda® for the treatment of Alzheimer’s Disease and ALS. Hmmm. Maybe that’s why Stephen Hawking can see all 11-dimensions.) But some prisons are more luxurious than others. Dick once said that reality is whatever doesn’t go away when he stops believing in it. I guess reality is simply whatever illusions I’m left with when I finally get tired of trying to escape them.