i'm in des moines. i took a long walk at dusk. at 9pm, the center of downtown was absolutely deserted. four-lane main thoroughfares with maybe one car per minute. eerie.
bike is good. getting 75mpg if i go 53mph, 70mpg at 58mph. new front tire in pittsburgh. funny story. no time to tell it now.
crucial factoid i wish i had known: there is a HUGE difference between the fees at "state park" campgrounds and "national forest" campgrounds. i did suppress my nausea and pay $21 (!!!) to pitch my little tent for 12 hours in a state park outside pittsburgh tuesday night. but when one in ohio wanted $26, that was it. $26 per day = $780 per month!!! to pitch a tent!!! to charge $26 for the privilege of sleeping on the ground is such madness that i just couldn't do it. night was falling but i got on my bike and rode until midnight, then sat in a Waffle House outside of dayton for 3 hours, then rode again, dawn breaking as i crossed indiana.
national forest campgrounds are more like $10, some $5, and some places in montana are FREE. bless you, montana. and bless you, national forest service.
last night i lay down on a nice grassy rest area lawn from 11pm to 4am near peoria, illinois. the chirping pre-dawn birds woke me up.
before then i need to: BUY: socks, underwear, long-sleeved shirt (the present one is literally in tatters), corduroys, valve core tool, bungee cords, sunglasses(?), crescent wrench
INSTALL: windshield, tie-down rings, battery, slime in rear tire (why not the front tire too, rob? huh? are you really that cheap? yes. yes i am.)
i am nervous about tires. have patch kit and spare tubes and tire irons and air pump, but all signs point to a pretty arduous experience if i have to do a repair on the road. this ain't no bicycle tire. sigh.
have shelter: new york, pennsylvania, illinois, iowa.
could use shelter: nebraska/minnesota/north dakota/south dakota/wyoming/montana/saskatchewan anyone? anyone?
fortuitous timing #1: all national parks will be free to enter on sat/sun june 20/21. if only it were that whole week instead of just the weekend. 'course, presumably it means they'll be mobbed. sigh.
as if the thread of the screw which held his life together were stripped, turning uselessly in place
No matter what he thought about, he always returned to these same questions which he could not solve and yet could not cease to ask himself. It was as if the thread of the chief screw which held his life together were stripped, so that the screw could not get in or out, but went on turning uselessly in the same place.
The postmaster came in and began obsequiously to beg his excellency to wait only two hours, when, come what might, he would let his excellency have the courier horses. It was plain that he was lying and only wanted to get more money from the traveler.
"Is this good or bad?" Pierre asked himself. "It is good for me, bad for another traveler, and for himself it's unavoidable, because he needs money for food; ... and Louis XVI was executed because they considered him a criminal, and a year later they executed those who executed him--also for some reason. What is bad? What is good? What should one love and what hate? What does one live for? And what am I? What is life, and what is death? What power governs all?"
There was no answer to any of these questions, except one, and that not a logical answer and not at all a reply to them. The answer was: "You'll die and all will end. You'll die and know all, or cease asking." But dying was also dreadful.
The Torzhok peddler woman, in a whining voice, went on offering her wares, especially a pair of goatskin slippers. "I have hundreds of rubles I don't know what to do with, and she stands in her tattered cloak looking timidly at me," he thought. "And what does she want the money for? As if that money could add a hair's breadth to happiness or peace of mind. Can anything in the world make her or me less a prey to evil and death?--death which ends all and must come today or tomorrow--at any rate, in an instant as compared with eternity." And again he twisted the screw with the stripped thread, and again it turned uselessly in the same place.
... "All we can know is that we know nothing. And that's the height of human wisdom."
Everything within and around him seemed confused, senseless, and repellent. Yet in this very repugnance to all his circumstances Pierre found a kind of tantalizing satisfaction.
-War and Peace (Tolstoy), book 5, chapter 1
...THREE BOOKS LATER...
"What for? Why? What is going on in the world?" he would ask himself in perplexity several times a day, involuntarily beginning to reflect anew on the meaning of the phenomena of life; but knowing by experience that there were no answers to these questions he made haste to turn away from them, and took up a book, or hurried off to the Club or to Apollon Nikolaevich's, to exchange the gossip of the town.
"Helene [Pierre's wife], who has never cared for anything but her own body and is one of the stupidest women in the world," thought Pierre, "is regarded by people as the acme of intelligence and refinement, and they pay homage to her. Napoleon Bonaparte was despised by all as long as he was great, but now that he has become a wretched comedian the Emperor Francis wants to offer him his daughter in an illegal marriage. The Spaniards, through the Catholic clergy, offer praise to God for their victory over the French on the fourteenth of June, and the French, also through the Catholic clergy, offer praise because on that same fourteenth of June they defeated the Spaniards. My brother [Freemasons] swear by the blood that they are ready to sacrifice everything for their neighbor, but they do not give a ruble each to the collections for the poor, ... We all profess the Christian law of forgiveness of injuries and love of our neighbors, the law in honor of which we have built in Moscow forty times forty churches--but yesterday a deserter was knouted to death and a minister of that same law of love and forgiveness, a priest, gave the soldier a cross to kiss before his execution." So thought Pierre, and the whole of this general deception which everyone accepts, accustomed as he was to it, astonished him each time as if it were something new. "I understand the deception and confusion," he thought, "but how am I to tell them all that I see? I have tried, and have always found that they too in the depths of their souls understand it as I do, and only try not to see it. So it appears that it must be so! But I--what is to become of me?" thought he. He had the unfortunate capacity many men, especially Russians, have of seeing and believing in the possibility of goodness and truth, but of seeing the evil and falsehood of life too clearly to be able to take a serious part in it. Every sphere of work was connected, in his eyes, with evil and deception. Whatever he tried to be, whatever he engaged in, the evil and falsehood of it repulsed him and blocked every path of activity. Yet he had to live and to find occupation. It was too dreadful to be under the burden of these insoluble problems, so he abandoned himself to any distraction in order to forget them. He frequented every kind of society, drank much, bought pictures, engaged in building, and above all--read. He read, and read everything that came to hand. On coming home, while his valets were still taking off his things, he picked up a book and began to read. ...
Sometimes he remembered how he had heard that soldiers in war when entrenched under the enemy's fire, if they have nothing to do, try hard to find some occupation the more easily to bear the danger. To Pierre all men seemed like those soldiers, seeking refuge from life: some in ambition, some in cards, some in framing laws, some in women, some in toys, some in horses, some in politics, some in sport, some in wine, and some in governmental affairs. "Nothing is trivial, and nothing is important, it's all the same--only to save oneself from it as best one can," thought Pierre. "Only not to see it, that dreadful it!"
what is the signal-to-noise ratio? yes, yes, bad, and getting worse. as time increases, s/n is going asymptotically to zero (fast! O(c^t), c <1). but not because the signal is falling. the signal is rising exponentially, O(a^t), but the noise likewise, O(b^t), and surely b>a>1. but, thanks be to Goog, the filters are also getting better exponentially, O(d^t), d*a/b > 1. [note: anyone tried wolfram alpha yet? i'm afraid to. it might suck, which would suck, or it might deliver as promised, which would be sort of bone-chilling. thus, the obvious truth will be that it will be "good for some types of things, but so-so for most".]
well so the upshot being that we're all screwed. but not because we'll all drown in the tsunami of noise, as the babies keep screaming (noisily). rather, the screwage is due to the filter-aided tsunami of signal. by the time he was my age, montaigne had probably read every masterwork in existence. everything. now, it's hopeless. there are so many treasures. treasures without end.
this all of course inspired by the latest treasure. sitting there thinking about how amazing beethoven's final piano sonata is, search youtube to see maybe a clip of the crazy ragtime part and there is this treasure:
and haha he says he hates when people call that part a "pre-echo of a boogie-woogie, which many people seem to feel here, but i really protest... [plays] so ecstasy, yes, but boogie-woogie, no." so great.
so but ok fine that's six minutes of your life but you're not going to spend $27 for the dvd so your cheapness saves you from the tsunami of signal, right? wrong. because when you search to see whether there are any other little treasures of schiff doing masterclasses OH NO! OH CRAP! you find this page with free downloads of him doing a lecture-recital on every single one of beethoven's piano sonatas! oh man that's like twenty hours of treasures to listen to. i'm doomed. when am i going to find time to listen to it all? doomed, because they're treasures. here's a bit of the one on the final sonata, op.111 (same sonata as the video, but a bit later in the piece):
"this is where i would always like to stop in a concert. it's like this is the faustian moment where you would like to stop time, but that's the moment where you would sell your soul to the devil. so, we have to go on, but, this is [plays]...in the theme we had [plays]... and so why do i want to stop time here? because, this is [plays] ...again, the ground and the heavens, the greatest possible distance between them, and this is i think beethoven's question: where is our place as human beings, between those two levels? so, let me play [plays]... so how does he come back from that faraway land to home? [plays]..."
how sublime, to be able to share with an audience like that, asking impossible questions of the air and then answering the unanswerable questions by playing.
the one on the moonlight sonata is fantastic. now i've got them all on my hard drive (almost a gig!) and i'm just going to have to start at the beginning and plow through.
and i'll get through, obviously. i'll survive this deluge of crystal clear signal, but the larger issue remains, and grows more critical every day. if there are now a hundred lifetimes' worth of treasures available for free, and i've only got one, what the hell am i going to do? what the hell am i supposed to do? what the hell. gotta go.
when you pick up a handful of sand and you throw it with all your might, it doesn't go anywhere. instantaneous disintegration. poof.
add a spoonful of water. pack the sand together. now, hurled, the dark sphere cuts through the air, almost to the limit of your vision, becomes a speck, its impact perhaps inaudible. density, compactness, minimal surface area.
of late, i have lost some of my density, some compactness. surface area increasing. desiccation. accelerated dissipation of precious momentum. who stole my spoonful of water?
well but anyway. that's my own personal existential crisis and unrelated to the interesting and universal things i have to share with you today. over the past few weeks i saw three really remarkable documentaries. shockingly, i actually watched two of them on television. twice, i wandered through the living room just as my dad turned on a pbs documentary which caught my attention, and i sat and watched till the end because both of them were riveting.
The Released (or, Why You Are So Lucky to Have the Brain You Have.) the first was a frontline doc about the fate of mentally ill people who go through the prison system and what becomes of them afterward. "This year alone, more than 700,000 people will leave prison, more than half of them mentally ill. Typically, these offenders leave prison with a bus ticket, $75 in cash, and two weeks' worth of medication. Studies show that within 18 months, nearly two thirds of mentally ill offenders -- often poor and cut off from friends and family -- are re-arrested." i can't express how much i think everyone should watch this. (here) no, not so you can fix the System. watching this won't make you fix the System. that's impossible. but if you watch this, then anytime you ever feel like your lot in life is unfair, when you burn the turkey or your landlord raises the rent or your knee crumples, you can remember this program, and realise how incredibly lucky you are. which, mind you, does not in any way imply you ought to feel "grateful" for being so lucky. that's the worst reaction a person could have. grateful to whom? because if you decide to feel grateful for being so lucky, that means believing you were chosen to receive this extraordinary blessing, which means you weren't lucky at all. if you were chosen to be so much better off, then surely you must have deserved to be chosen. a Power that chooses to smite some and bless others would obviously choose to bless the good and smite the wicked. this would appear to be an inescapable chain of reasoning (usually confined to the penumbra of consciousness, i think). so feeling thankful for a stroke of good luck is pure hubris, the exact opposite of humility. so don't. if you absolutely must feel something about being so lucky, then feel guilty, and go loan some money on kiva. not saying you should feel guilty. you shouldn't. but it's nowhere near as bad as feeling grateful.
yes, i told you what you should and should not feel. ok, on to number two...
Wings of Defeat (or, Why You Are So Lucky to Be Living in 2009 Instead of 1939) if that one doesn't make you realise how lucky you are, this one will. well, it would if you could see it, but unfortunately, it might not be so easy to see. it was "Wings of Defeat", about the japanese kamikaze pilots at the end of world war II. it might be replayed on your pbs station this month (on the program "independent lens". check your listings. if you get the new york station WNET, it's on may 22 at 10pm). after that, i guess you'd have to buy it (i doubt it will make it to netflix) or torrent it (also doubtful). anyway, here's the trailer:
so the amazing thing being that they actually had a handful of kamikaze pilots to interview, because sometimes they would go out to die but their plane would have a mechanical failure, or they'd get into a dogfight and get shot up, and have to ditch without crashing into an american ship. so here are these 80-year-old men, talking about what it's like to have SIX DECADES of life granted to them by sheer dumb luck. most of their friends dead. their country utterly destroyed. they are next. but then, for no reason, no, they are not next. they get sixty more years.
also, it spent a lot of time talking about civilian japanese life during the war, especially towards the end, when teenage girls were sharpening bamboo spears to use against american soldiers if an invasion came. fascinating.
it hits me again and again when i learn about history - how incredibly easy life is today. so much talk these days about the current crisis, comparing it to the challenges of the 30s and 40s. absolutely absurd, comparing a crisis where people lose 40% of their 401(k) and 5% of the workforce get laid off, to a period when entire nations were immolated. cities burnt to cinders. a generation wiped out of existence. there is no comparison.
Up the Yangtze (or, Why You Are So Lucky to Be Who You Are, and Not One of the 900,000,000 Peasants of China) i'm running out of steam here. but this one is great, too. the fate of a chinese peasant girl who goes to work on a sightseeing ship while the three gorges dam project floods her family out of their home. china is endlessly fascinating. paradoxes piled upon contradictions heaped upon bitter irony. the divide between the rich and poor there is a chasm, which people who love to criticise the economic inequality in western capitalist societies would do well to study. it's on netflix. (here)
