Alphabetical Sentence

Found among things, probably from 1994 or so:

After
Being
Carried
Down
Eight
Flights,
Groggy,
Hair
In
Jumble,
Katherine
Looked
Menacingly
Near
Our
Poodle,
Quietly
Retreating,
Seeing
Things
Undone,
Very
Well -
Xerox
Your
Zodiac!

Paragraphical preface

The thirty or so recent posts in here were written as a paragraph-a-day writing exercise in September 2019. Sometimes, there were more paragraphs than one in a day!

Thanks to Prof. Teresa Senft! http://www.terrisenft.net/119-2/

Miami

I recently read a listicle article about best places to retire, and the top choice was Miami and Florida in general. This article seems to ignore the fact that Miami and Florida in general is going to be one of the hardest places to live in coming years. Its not just that it's in the direct path of more frequent, slow moving hurricanes, but these storms don't even have to make landfall to cause tremendous damage, damage that will not be able to be repaired before the next hurricane. The earth itself is porous, and higher amounts of water, both from the ocean and the rains, work to undermine the strength of these ground itself. Similar, earlier disasters in the Caribbean will force emigration to Florida as the logical place to go for those displaced people. 

Social services will be strained. Retirees expecting a comfortable,  improving economy will instead find an exasperated municipality dealing with infrastructure failure and social upheaval.

Foam

A bubble is a visualization of the tension of the difference between the air pressure inside it and the air pressure outside it. It's in an uneasy balance. The wobble and shimmer of a bubble  demonstrates the equalization of the forces. The bubble skin thins out unequally as well, making ephemeral lenses that bend light into swaths of color.  After some time, the bubble stabilizes. Heating it slightly will make the bubble float, as the density of the air inside it is less than that outside it. And so the bubble floats off. The action of movement disrupts the equilibrium, sending ripples of air currents internal to the bubble which need to be stabilized again. The skin defines the bubble, but also visualizes the struggle of forces both internal and external. When two or bubbles collide, the equation changes, and a flat surface appears between them as they merge, which is bent toward the bubble with the lower internal pressure. The act of merging sets off another chain of wobbly motion. Clusters of conjoined bubbles form a foam, which as a byproduct of the forces previously mentioned, and builds a highly resilient structure where all the forces strive toward balance. It is said that the structure of the universe, the placement of galaxies, is that of a foam. This would be the side effect of simultaneous gravitational forces acting as air pressure does. 

Building a school

It's the day before the first day of school, so it's a good thing I closed on the property yesterday. I walked out this morning at 5:30 and started building it. Digging the foundation took until 9:00. I poured concrete and framed the first floor by 10:00. Next I set the central rafter and roughed out the roof. I took a half-hour break at noon for lunch. Then, feeling rain in the air, I finished up the roof. Back on the ground at 2:30, I wrapped the sides and brought in the window casements. With a little bit of protection, I went in and installed the plumbing and electrical wiring. By 4:00, I was done with the doors and and had almost finished the shingle siding. At 5:00, I started paving the driveway so the truck with the desks and books could get in at 5:15. I power washed the whole place and  was done at 6:30. Students and teachers should start coming tomorrow at 8:30.

How to force laughter

I remember learning how to force a laugh. 

The first part of that lesson is to determine when a forced laugh is appropriate. It's something you can actually practice by yourself. If you see something during your day that seems a little funny, but not really, you can vocalize an exasperated nose snort into a nasalized "hmpf."  Start doing this often. Soon, you'll be opening your mouth a little, and trilling your vocal chords, working up the a cautious laugh, the progenitor of the fake laugh. 

With this technique firmly established, you now need to take it into the public sphere. The best place is away from friends, because strangers often need to be laughed with.  You will note that many of these strangers will themselves be fake laughing around what is known in social media as "an influencer".  An influencer can laugh about anything, usually, animals' or other peoples' misfortunes. They especially enjoy a laugh when they are the witting cause of this misfortune. 

So as you can see, a fake laugh is easy to practice as a complement to an evil laugh. As you express your fake assent for the miserable state of the world, you can at least enjoy a drink or two for a few hours. I know I did.

Where is my food?

Every once in a while, I undergo a ritual I name "Voyage to the Bottom of the Fridge". This cooled pantry device is nearly unorganizable, and having a vague memory of an item placed therein turns into a treasure hunt. Last month, I knew there was a leftover eggplant that I had put in there the week before. After my unsuccessful search, and the purging of other foods way past their sell-by dates -  now food for microbes -  I gave up in my search, and subsequent to doing so, I bonked my head on the freezer door, which I had left open in an ancillary search operation. Blood was drawn, pain incurred. I hied to the emergency room, and after only a few hours of waiting, had the wound repaired with some dissolving stitches.  And that's where my story truly begins.

The stitches did their job well enough, and after about a week, they stopped itching. The area around them was still tender, which is what I expected.  Soft, like an inflatable pool toy. I thought little of it, but a week later, the stitches were as tight as ever, while the area near them was much softer, and flexible like a fontanelle. The plates of my skull were softening and separating. It was getting hard to keep my eyes open, and the skin started getting smooth and saggy. Still, with a hat on, I could go through the actions of the day. This morning, though, I had crossed a threshold. The hat now squeezed my head into something of a peanut shape, and it was clear it was not the stitches that were dissolving, but my skull. It's a little grotesque. I hope my face still matches my driver's license. 

Hermas

As a kid, I grew up in a small city sacred to the god Hermes. 

The major industries there were tourism, messaging, health care, sports equipment, and a suitcase factory. Scattered around town were a number of hermas, which were just part of our landscape. Once in a while, we'd remember to place a sacrifice by them, usually something simple like fresh cut wild flowers or some baseball cards, or a plastic, candy filled caduceus from a nearby bodega.  

Each herma was sculpted by a different artist, and they were erected and maintained over a series of hundreds of years. We got familiar with them, assigning each an epithet, like "Hermes, speedy trickster", "Hermes the Border Guard", "Hermes,  3 and 2 in the 7th inning", and so on, based on the style and facial expression each displayed. 

Over time, many of their erect phalluses had been broken off, and sometimes there was an offering of dildos at their bases. Their noses also suffered, especially during Christian administrations, so some were given nose jobs with pug noses. 

The hermas are still there today, protected in tiny local historic districts, so, for instance, when the Mall was built, some of them were emasculated and incorporated into its walls as atlantes. 

Having so many iconic phalluses in daily consciousness made our town a little more "dress casual" or "dress optional" than neighboring towns. Since we were a seaside resort as well, this helped immensely with tourism. Hermas figure prominently in local industry branding, and every fourth day of the month, we'd have a little fest where we'd dress up as Hermes or a herma and hang out in the town square gazebo. 

There are a few other towns this devoted to their patron god or goddess (Apollo in Delphi comes to mind), but none quite so charming as ours.

Reweaving

Yesterday's clothing typically gets unwoven at night, cleaned, and rewoven by morning. This is because modern clothing is created out of a few continuous carbon fibers. Carbon fibers are immensely strong, light, and flexible. The fabric created by weaving it can have different properties of lightness, stiffness, air and water permeability, continuously variable within the same garment. Coloring it can be done by manipulating nano scale microgrooves, the same way butterfly wings are colored. Some clothing companies have agreed to international standards, allowing interoperability between home reweaving machines optimized for particular garments from different manufacturers. This technology allows for perfectly fitting clothing for different purposes: layered, quilted clothing for the winter, loose and light clothing for the summer. People's bodies change every day and freshly woven clothes insure a perfect fit every time. Design elements not previously possible, for instance, feather-like textures, micro pleating, air-filled pockets for cushioning, are new kinds of fashion vocabulary that can now be exploited.  

Leather

I like leathercraft. You prepare the piece of skin and lightly sketch in the design. With specialized knives, you carve the skin into calligraphic lines and geometric shapes. You can then color it with dyes and further accessorize it with grommets and brads. You can join pieces of leather with strong thread or long laces of leather itself. Skin is surprisingly strong and flexible. It's naturally stiff after the host animal has died. Inuit women spend days chewing on reindeer and seal skins to soften them enough to be used for clothing, shoes,  and kayaks. It's something that we do by machine now: giant steel jaws equipped with salivary glands emitting tanning fluids massage the skins of recently living ungulates. Some of these machines are integrated in the slaughterhouses directly: Cattle in this end, hamburger, gelatin, horn products and leather out the other end. 

Alarmed

I'm just going to sit here and find out how long I can listen to the phone buzz and ring without looking at it. Message alarms are now filling my life. A single text rings on four devices in my proximity, and were It set up, it would flash the lights and vibrate my chair. One of my phones is now dedicated to receiving calls from script reading agents in a call center, so that one is definitely not getting answered. The phone's message center is filled with expired one-time codes. 

My doorbell is idle. I hear the insistent buzz and bump of a wasp at the window, perplexed by the glass preventing her from escaping the room. And on the stove, a tea kettle has reached whistling temperature. The smoke detector is more of a toast detector, and thank goodness, I've not heard from the geiger counter lately. My radio regularly burps a tattoo representing an emergency signal. Outside, whoops of an EMS truck shift in accordance to the Doppler effect. And beneath it all, the cicadas, in synch and out of synch in the August night air. 

What is probability?

This morning, when I did my coin flipping, I got 49 heads and one edge. While this is not impossible, it's very improbable. 

There's always a struggle to interpret the fall of the coins accurately. So many decisions. The edge flip was particularly disturbing, in that it rolled for quite a while before stopping, neither falling to the head or to the tail. 

Usually, in unusual situations like this, the explanation is simple: obviously the coin isn't fair, or something is amiss with the surface it's being flipped onto, or the flipping process itself is biased, like a pitcher choosing what kind of fastball to throw. 

Moreover, there's an implicit trust in the laws of probability - is there a way they could have been suspended? Can we be sure the head and tail side of the coin remained so between the flip and the fall? Was I misreading the side it fell on when I recorded the state of the flip, adding a consciousness of Heisenbergian uncertainty in the measuring process? 

49  heads - what if I had kept going ? Would tails have come up or were they impossible? Or were they replaced with another head - magic shops sell two-headed coins after all. This isn't one of them, I checked. I'll check again. 

Charm

A goldfinch just flew by, followed closely by another goldfinch. Following those goldfinches are three more goldfinches. They fly swiftly, and seem to bounce off the field grasses like flying fish. They are headed for a small tree, where they  evidently are nesting. From the eastern corner of the field, eight more goldfinches are approaching. I would say there's enough collected in that tree now to call them a "charm." Wherever a charm congregates, there is sure to be a lot of chattering and flashes of gold. Their late-hatching fledgelings just add to the charm. They perch and circle, making a living mist. In the neighboring trees, other charms are now gathering. Approaching the equinox, the birds are stocking up on seeds, building strength, and training for their migration south. 

The Story of the Earth

All our concerns disappear just a few hundred feet below the surface of the earth. The variety of life, the interactions of wind, earth, and water, glorious rainforests, continents of ice, burned desert soil, all are confined to a tiny skin atop the 4000 mile deep depth of the earth. Today, we venture below the surface, deeper than the wells and experimental Mohorovičić discontinuity explorations, to get to the mantle, where the Earth is molten. In the unimaginably deep sea of liquid rock, the petty concerns of nations, rainforests, and glaciers  burn off and are dispersed in to the underlying flow. There they push against the surface, breaking though rarely, but pushing the continents around like the skin on boiled milk. The surface, even the atmosphere, complex as it is,  is not the story of the Earth. 

Tree climbing class

Today's tree climb is going to be exceptionally difficult. We've covered basic aspects or arboreal assessment and hugging techniques, but this particular assignment has an unique twist. In my hand is a maple seed. Today we are going to plant that seed and wait for the tree to grow to its full height before scaling it. This way, we'll be able to experience the progression of its life, see its context in the soil and companion plants, fungi, and animals that  contribute to that growth. Today's lesson is patience. We'll do the best we can, as we're only assigned an 80-year slot for this class, but there is a lot to learn and see. Three essays will account for 75% of your grade, and a successful ascent and descent at the end of the term will count as the final quarter. 

Change of Seasons

 I turned on the tap this morning and was greeted with a coughing stream of brown and rust specked water. "Ahh!" I thought "Fall is approaching!" It's that exciting time of the year when change overtakes the environment. Grasses burst and brown, leaves take on color and drop with the first cold night. And it's also the time when my pipes shed their summer linings and prepare for the winter. It may take a few hours for the water to run clear again, but it brings to mind the season of hibernation and rebirth. Swarms of ladybugs will appear soon, replacing the cicadas of summer. All leading to the day when winter will truly begin, the first spurts of air from my bleeding radiator. 

Shoe boiling

Do you boil your shoes every morning to get the bugs out? You probably shouldn't! This is an old wives' tale from 17th century Italy. Shoes back then were much more edible, unlike the steel and plastic shoes of today. Boiling them made them softer in the morning, and helped them break in. Unlike today, when people change shoes every hour, those unfortunates had to wear them all day. Imaging wearing your 11 o'clock shoes at tea time! Boiling your shoes is an unnecessary time waster in today's world. Besides, many of us have figured out that a microwave does the job faster. 

Life documents

Nobody's life had ever been so completely documented: A sheaf of legal documents and contracts at the fertility clinic, receipts from the day of insemination and follow up visits, video leading up to and upon the day of birth, a vial containing the umbilical stump and some vernix, a lock of natal hair, blood, colostrum-laced sputum, the birth certificate with its footprint, the hospital-issued striped baby blanket, videos and diaries of a few days of recovery, continuous monitoring during breast feeding and diaper changing, sleep monitors recordings, notes from doctors and followup midwife visits. One week, so far. So much time to go!

Molar

I'm here to complain about my dentist. 

Last week I had a little twinge in the back of my mouth, so I thought I'd better take care of it. I booked an emergency visit to Dr. Frost, who is usually really hard to get an appointment with, so I was surprised to find there was one open right that afternoon. 

I went in on Tuesday, and he saw me right away and told me I had to get a molar out. "Fine," I thought. So he went into the next room and came back with two hygienists as assistance.

"Hey where's Ruth?" I asked. 

"Ruth left in May," he said. 

"I'm Sally Ann" said the one on the right. 

The one on the left didn't introduce herself. She didn't even have a name pin on.  

All this time, I was wondering where the other patients were. 

He gave me a shot and talked about golf for about five minutes because, as you know, last week was the PGA. He got out his tools and the unnamed hygienist held me down as he grabbed onto something inside my mouth. He pulled. It was not forthcoming. Ruth grabbed onto my head and held it back while Dr. Frost yanked away. I felt a loosening. He pulled some more and I saw the pliers come out of my mouth, but in its jaws was a small, beating bloody blob. 

It looked like a tadpole. It squirmed and wriggled and wrapped itself around the jaw of the pliers. Dr. Frost handed the pliers to the unnamed hygienist who actually had a jar ready for it. He took out a sprayer and rinsed out my mouth. 

"All done," he said.

"What about my molar?" I asked. 

"It's fine. This little guy", he shook the glass jar, "ate it."  

So, I'm wondering if this is legal, and what's going on in that office. Also, if this is covered by my dental insurance.

ESP test

First, make sure there is plenty of room available, then tie a string to a beam or pipe up near the ceiling. About six inches from the floor, tie a weight, like a coffee mug, to the string and cut it off so it just hangs there. The mug should not be moving at all. Concentrate on the mug. The nature of a pendulum is that small movements will phase correlate and work to increase the amplitude of the swing. If there's anything to this "telekinesis", this simple device will pick it up. Just keep concentrating, observing closely. Is that a little movement? Does it work better when you get closer? What about if you think of different ways for it to move, like twisting? Have you compensated for crosswinds, the shaking of the building from passing trucks,  and other environmental sources of movement? Is it swinging now? How about now? Nothing? Maybe reading this paragraph is keeping it from working.