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Hayabusa is the Japanese word for peregrine falcon.

There is a lovely, sweet movie - I had to order the DVD from Japan - about the probe named Hayabusa.

Hayabusa was the first probe to return particles from an asteroid to Earth for study. It was a great achievement for Japan.

It had all kinds of problems. A solar storm knocked out some of its solar panels en route, restricting what could be done during the mission. It lost two of its reaction wheels it used to maintain orientation and had to use thrusters (jets that expel gas) to compensate. It suffered computer problems at crucial moments. The transmitted command from Earth to release its tiny mini-lander MINERVA arrived at a moment when Hayabusa happened to be rising to maintain altitude over the asteroid, so the lander flew away into space. There was a long, uneasy loss of communication during its return to Earth. People thought it might have been lost.

Yes, I have just become aware that I am actually subconsciously typing an ad for the movie mentioned above. Why not?

But really I want to say that space is hard and that long-range space probes are long, long, lonely, hopeful bets with trouble and with chance. Bets of care and brain against all that.

Hayabusa was launched in 2003. It made rendezvous with the asteroid Itokawa in 2005. Its re-entry capsule came down in South Australia in 2010.

The same solar storm that took out the solar panels, or other storms, may have been responsible for the failure of Hayabusa's reaction wheels. Reaction wheels have been failing impressively *all over the place* for years - the space telescope Kepler's wheels, for example - with earthbound engineers figuring out clever workarounds to continue to get results out of their ailing craft anyway. Now, with analysis of timing of failures versus solar activity, there is a strong suspicion that solar storms may have been responsible, causing arcing across the gaps between the housings and the ball bearings, creating pitting and burrs. New reaction wheels are increasingly made with ceramic bearings, so the problem may have been on its way out even if this theory had continued to escape us. But the thing is, nobody knew.

If a potential problem is figured out while your probe is still on its way . . . well, you've already sent the probe. The lander Cannae that dropped from the spacecraft Rosetta was supposed to fire harpoons to make sure it didn't just bounce off Comet 67P, but the harpoons failed to fire. The harpoons were supposed to be propelled by exploding nitrocellulose. This happened in 2014. But a test by a Danish aerospace concern had already found that nitrocellulose didn't explode as expected in vacuum - in 2013. And it didn't matter, because Rosetta had been launched all the way back in 2004.

All you can do is learn from past mistakes, build as well as you can, persuade the people who control the funding that your voyage of discovery is worth it - not necessarily in that order . . . and then make another long, slow, daring bet with the unknown.

People bet their whole careers on these long, slow gambles.

And now the Japanese space agency JAXA has Hayabusa's successor, Hayabusa 2, out at an asteroid about the shape of a ten-sided D&D die, a little asteroid named Ryugu. Hayabusa 2 was launched in 2014 . . .

. . . and so far it appears that the Japanese engineers have learned their lessons very well indeed. :-)

At this moment, two very small rovers are on Ryugu. Hayabusa 2 dropped them from 55 meters up two days ago. The rovers are 18 cm across and 7 cm tall. They look like little flat cylinders. They *are* little flat cylinders. They have no wheels. Wheels wouldn't work on Ryugu; they'd only nudge themselves out of contact with the ground. When one of these rovers wants to hop, it spins up an internal flywheel and then, clang!, stops the flywheel cold, and this jolts the cylinder over - sending it sailing through space for maybe fifteen minutes to a new position many meters away. The rovers don't hop like rabbits, they hop like boxes with rabbits in them.

Ryugu is a single kilometer across, or slightly less, and Ryugu's equatorial surface gravity is 1/80th of Earth gravity. Escape velocity for Ryugu is thirty centimeters per second - about one kilometer per hour. The gravity is so low that . . . well, I've been puzzledly trying to find out whether Hayabusa 2, which has been keeping a distance of 20 km since its arrival in late June and will continue to do so between its approaches on different errands, *is even in an orbit around Ryugu at all*. I mean, you might as well; it's a way to stay without using fuel. (Normally there'd be absolutely no question, because otherwise either you're leaving or you're landing.) But the gravity is so weak, the speed involved in an orbit so very slow, and the orbital stability so relatively minor compared to disrupting influences from far away, that I am tempted to take at face value the odd descriptions I keep seeing of Hayabusa 2 maintaining a "hovering distance". Hayabusa uses an ion drive; it ionizes atoms of xenon and magnetically repels the atoms. An ion drive produces a very slow acceleration but can do so for very long periods before it uses up its propellant. The force it exerts is measured in millinewtons. But, with Ryugu, using an ion drive *to hover* might even make sense. I'm just reluctant to accept it because I'd think they'd want to conserve the xenon to use for velocity changes.

Hayabusa 2 will descend to Ryugu a few times over the next few months. It has yet another rover to drop, and also a slightly larger European-built lander. It will dip very, very close indeed to the asteroid - the first Hayabusa actually made a full landing, somewhat inadvertently - so it can shoot a projectile at the asteroid and then catch part of the resulting puff of debris. Then it will use a large copper impactor to make a brand new crater - and then it will descend again to shoot a projectile into the bottom of that new crater to collect samples of dust from there.

It is going to be attending Ryugu as a bumblebee attends a sunflower.

And what I want to remember to do here is try to capture just how and why attempts in space - and successes in space - lift my spirits so.

It's because people spend themselves on such exacting technical tasks - and for the sake of pure curiosity, of sheer knowledge . . .

And because people are

trying

some

thing.

This against a backdrop of - well. You know. The most amazing rumpled hatefulness-tinged ingrown human foolery. Even the constructive things are obscured by it, turned into political games by it. Delayed decades by it. Everything subordinated by tides of inertia and billows of lack of interest. The accustomed colors. With a sprinkling of the special politicians . . . Well.

One can find inspiration in the work of scientists and technicians on Earth, yes. One can find them. One can pore through what they're doing. And some of the things they're working on on Earth are very important indeed. But - no, we'll skip my speech about how important things relevant to those vital concerns may come from space too if we try, if we start filling in all the missing horseshoe nails. What I *do* want to say is that - in space - particularly well away from Earth - there's no "*game*" yet, in the *The Wire* sense. There's only pure knowledge, pure frontier, and the vast gulfs and the unknowns and the discovery and the great difficulties and the long, daring bets and the sheer dreaming human will. Even the most Earth-based parts where the ingenious devices are conceived and debated and researched and built; even when it's a matter of the delivery systems themselves, of trying to get a new thing out of the atmosphere in the first place. That too.

And I'm failing to say it right, and I knew I would. I knew I wouldn't get it.

But yes. In space, toward space, separate from all our bullshit, people are

doing

some

thing,

trying

some

thing.

Something *new*. Some*where* new.

People spend themselves. They bet themselves.

And sometimes they fail, and learn. And sometimes they succeed, and learn more. *We* learn.

And that's human beings doing that, being that.

And it is beautiful.

(Yes, I know the thing to do would have been to extend this to a final section about what it was like seeing New Horizons' pictures of Pluto and *where the hell are the craters?!?*, but the fact is I'm tired. You remember. Fill that in yourself.) :-)

The summer dawn is long and sweet. Far away across this unpretentious district of town, the birds are waking up.

We are just off a three-day plant sale. A nice, pleasant time of talking with customers, of philosophizing about what might work as a houseplant, of explaining what your attitude should be about that super-hot pepper plant you're considering buying (do you have any blowhard cousins you want to humble? if your boyfriend is the one who wants to try this, do you know where the nearest ice cream store is, and can you make a note to be the one who drives, because he'll be insane?). A middle-of-the-road sale, this June sale was. Not the amazing ravenous table-clearing fooraw April and May were because everyone was crazy for it to be true spring. This one had peaceful interludes.

People, especially nervous beginning gardeners, are always far too daunted by the way our bounteous (chaotic) yard turned out. They say, "I could never plan something like this." We ourselves didn't. We made plans, yes, you do, and you implement them, but what you see in the end are the remnants of the last five plans, each plan an attempt to get something out of the ruins of the previous wildly different plan. In this way the bones build up. "Overplant. Drive trails through it. Repeat," I tell them. You also do have to have a certain tolerance for chaos, with having *much* or *some* the garden under control at any given time. At least at our size of lot, there are always the Forgotten Frontiers or the Territories in Rebellion. Or the Overrun Lands, with that damned wild clematis and that other thing with the running root-stems that break in segments like they're made of Legos. (The bindweed that I used to battle is somehow long gone. I don't think I did it. It met meaner barbarians.) And even if everything else goes right, the plants that are exactly the ones you wanted, in exactly the places you wanted, will *keep growing* and mess up your plan. You can have a completely artistic and controlled garden if your garden is very small or if you employ a staff to maintain it. Not otherwise.

I wish I could store the garden as it is right now, the way you can never store days to dive into whole when you need to in another, bleaker season. The greenery at peak, not beaten down by the sun the way it will be in another couple of months of this. The single unidentifiable insects that are seen once. My cat sprawled, rolling, sunning her belly. The spots of fiery color, violet, red, white; the flower spills.

I had a triumph of art. We are still transplanted New Mexicans (I am, at least, and Mom kept the liking for chile), so we've needed the Anaheim-type peppers, the "chiles with an 'e' " that are the signature fruit of that blessed region, the ones you have to sear black on the gas stove and then pop into a plastic bag to steam themselves so that you can then slip the thick waxy skins off. And we've been putting bags of them in the freezer each year, but we always run out long before the next harvest season - sometimes even by midwinter. And you want to feel free to put a *lot* of chiles in your enchiladas rather than having to settle for "checking the box". It really pays off. (You can just buy them at the store, but where's the fun in that?) We have I think twenty-five large black pots in the back yard, along the front of the vegetable patch and down both sides of the path that leads to the north fence, and we dedicate those to pepper plants, but those are a full variety of the kinds of peppers we may need - sweet peppers, scotch bonnets or the much hotter bhut jolokias that are oddly even gentler than the scotch bonnets, miscellaneous new ones that we want to try, etc., and only a few of the Anaheim/Joe Parker/Big Jim type. We needed a lot more of that type. A lot.

So we batted it around and eventually decided to impose order on a weedy area in the front yard, between our front door area and the dahlia sales "showroom", that at one point was our chipper-shredder work area but then we fell behind and it became our brushpile area which then decomposed into rotten-wood mulch which fed vinca and etc., etc. "Impose order", after weeding, and after you decide that repeated weed-whacking won't be enough and will look bad, means a nice woven-black-plastic fabric that you can unroll, that lets water through to some extent. We've stabilized a few work areas around the yard that way. Pegged down, it is a good mostly-final answer that - we think - doesn't starve far-running roots. (And it has widely-spaced bright green stripes on it, I think to help you in rolling it out parallel with previous passes, that I think look really snazzy.) Then I collected fifteen large empty pots that were scattered in various places around the back yard . . . then my mother and I argued about whether the pots I gathered were the right shape, and I yelled, "Mom?! You never properly delegate!", but I in the end of course acceded to her preference and got some different ones . . . and then I began fretting over how to minimize the degree to which the plants would be shaded by the forward extension of the house on one side and our giant intractible quince on the other, and also how to minimize loss of productivity from the grown plants shading each other. Mom and I theorized over east-west rows vs. north-south rows, disagreeing of course. I began to think of arranging the pots in curves or something . . .

. . . and then, in the final day, everything I had been thinking coalesced into a walking spiral that would (I think) minimize shading from any direction and that would allow me to stroll through and harvest all the plants easily, almost half of them from more than one side, while being able to connect up a drip irrigation system in one simple curving line that will never be a trip hazard.

It looked beautiful, in a sort of Japanese-style simply-right way, and it looks even better now with the growing peppers in them. It pleases my eye. (My sole regret this sale is that, against my expectations, although it is in plain view from the eastward extension of the sales area where people browse for dahlias and daylilies and Oriental lilies, not a single customer exclaimed over the arrangement. The private tragedy of false self-deprecating modesty denied!)

Anyway. All our other summer vegetables - the other peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, yacon - are finally planted too in the back yard, although we took our time about it; other things kept getting in the way. With the sale over, today I will sketch out the final way in which I will extend automatic irrigation to all of them, as well as to a new area under the arms of our largest paw-paw tree where we have put forty paw-paw seedlings, paw-paws needing shade for the first couple of years of life. Our present arrangements effectively split our original back-yard faucet into two different ones, but it always gets complicated after that multiplying them from there (done fresh each time because the vegetable layout changes) and now I have this new factor to add in, all the way on the far side.

(The baby paw-paws are My Advice to Mom, in a way that will remain less than completely comfortable - I argued for them, even though the wholesaler sold them in large blocs - "the only temperate member of a tropical family, banana-custard-tasting fruit, there are traditional rhymes, we love ours, and hardly anyone sells them!" Mom did spend the substantial amount of money but thinks they are one of My Boondoggles. I think the outcome will be in the middle. They *will* add one more ort of exotic variety to our driveway full of plants - an atmospheric factor that *does* act to sell more plants that are not the paw-paws - and I do think the paw-paws will all be sold profitably over the next few years . . . but I think they will sell slowly enough that I will Not Quite Be Vindicated. They will not be removed from Mom's vividly remembered list of My Boondoggles. Which is capacious.)

Our back-yard garden patch, with its three rows of white PVC-over-rebar-holding-netting permanent trellises (each year one row cucumbers, one tomatoes, and one virtuously left fallow with my marijuana pots sitting in the space), has the most beautiful developed garden soil. Originally the deep sand base of an above-ground swimming pool when Mom bought the place. Then it was a compost heap. Then I double-dug the results and got even more rocks out, and it became a vegetable garden, which we mulch every year with straw or dismembered cardboard boxes or both, which the worms steadily munch up and incorporate into the soil to the full depth of their perambulations. That is terrific garden dirt.

And it faces invaders. Not (just) the usual weed seeds, but, as of this year, titanic intrusions by the far-reaching roots of our slowly spreading black bamboo, which (as is its wont, we have learned) behaved like an oversized *clumping* bamboo for years, minding its own business, until years of our combined activity and neglect improved conditions around it and it began to take an interest in its surroundings. Then the black bamboo reaches out - not with the usual single free-flowing zig-zags of running bamboo roots, I have found, but with perhaps three huge roots *branching out* from the last place it put up a culm. It's like unearthing a tyrannosaur foot. At one-to-one scale.

There are two or three pretty good stories I should tell here, that I will pass by for now. Suffice it to say that it is my fate to battle this stuff, and ideally actually somehow harry it back toward its core - not merely by severing connections to the main body and breaking off the shoots, which will starve its excursions, but by actually digging the new outlying culms up intact so that we can pot them up, wait for them to stabilize in the pots, and sell them. Digging them up is extremely arduous work that takes a very long time in most of the perimeter, requiring day allocations, even with the new tools I have (one or two of the stories). Bamboo roots are hardwood, and the dirt they're embedded in is filled with rubble-rocks thanks to a series of Ice Age megafloods and in summer is hard and dry besides.

But, happily, this problem does not apply to the vegetable garden! I can't blame the black bamboo for reaching deep into that - it's a deep, incredibly rich, moisture-holding paradise. I believe, though the evidence is circumstantial, that the two monstrous bamboo roots I found (and I'm not certain that another won't reveal itself) only began reaching into the vegetable garden since the beginning of this year . . . and in that time they traveled seven and nine feet into the bed respectively. I have been dismally dreading an incursion; the slow, hard-to-reverse march of the outliers not far away has made the possibility clear. But bamboo roots stay within a foot of the surface, and what I found is that, once I discovered the roots (one while I was digging a hole for one of the tomatoes and the shovel stopped jarringly, the other by seeing a sudden brazen cluster of shoots actually slightly *past* the midpoint of the vegetable garden), I could simply pull them out of the earth by hand once I got a handhold, heavy though they were with delicious loam. (Oh, I wish you could have seen them.) Hand over hand, giant clods rising up and toppling, I could work them back to the edge of the bed and then chop them where the dirt turned uncooperative. So, the area I was the most worried about is actually easier to defend than anywhere else.

The black bamboo clump/incipent grove itself is looking better than ever. Probably due to water and nutrient supply from its invisibly widening roots. This year, in addition to the few outlying new appearances, it surprised me by sending up a picket fence of huge, muscular shoots in along the perimeter of the original core clump - shoots wider in diameter than any of the stalks near them. Actually wide enough to begin to justify black bamboo's status as a *timber* bamboo (although for true timber-bamboo sizes we'd need a larger, open grove). And now, when I look at the clump from the corner of the garage . . .

There has up to now, for the last couple of years, been a single tuft of terminal bamboo leaves perhaps four feet higher than the mass of the rest of the tops, perhaps twenty-seven feet to their twenty-three or -four. That single tuft is now surrounded by spear tips. I don't know that any are going to go more than an inch or so higher than that tuft, I can see signs that the spears are starting to think about leafing out, but the real height of our bamboo clump has definitely increased.

It's a stark, dramatic sight against the blue. Like a city skyline that is suddenly full of construction cranes.

Anyway.

This ought to have been enough of an obtuse garden ramble to shake off any attempted readers; I'm probably writing in private now. Hee hee. I can say ANYTHING. But I love this yard, in short. The squirrels do too, especially because I keep replenishing the peanut supply.

I did not quite escape energy drinks this sale. I drink them during plant sales, well, for the original caffeine reason, but also because they have a particular effect on me, atypical for me - they make me social, responsive, talkative, and sort of *vapid*, actually; it's as though my internal landscape has been shallowed. Perfect sale-host state of being. I don't mind it at the time (see under vapidity), but when the metabolic letdown/crash arrives at the end of the day the inner sparseness becomes depressing. I'm not as schmart in the ways I like, or in the ways I enjoy.

I say that I did not *quite* escape because I thought for a while I might manage it. I still have some of that gram (a couple of small buds) of the Durban Poison I tried. I *told* you I smoke very little. I tried it instead for the first day - and it was much better than the energy drink! Just as energetic and engaged, no social anxiety - and my arithmetic worked perfectly - and I was generally happier, with none of the shallowing of back-mind. And there isn't any crash . . . and this particular strain is startlingly long-lasting. "Wow, I'm still in a good mood at 8 p.m."

. . . But reality has angles.

I was sitting at the sale table by the front gate - and I found myself talking to this woman who liked to talk . . . and who told me about mountain huckleberries . . . and how they're much tastier than the evergreen huckleberries we have . . . and how you have to go up in the hills to collect them . . . and she said it's probably illegal to save the seeds(?) . . . and I nodded . . . and she had a somewhat anxious expression on her face, and she started in to tell me the same thing all over again . . . there are mountain huckleberries . . . and they're in the hills . . . and you have to go find them . . .

. . . and I reached for the jumbo blue energy drink can that I had brought out with me just in case. Wrong gear. When you are representing a sale and you are listening to an extremely tedious person, prattling brightly in a vapid state is much better than wondering (clear though your mind may be) whether you have a good expression on your face or whether it's starting to deteriorate.

The sole escape that really works,

the only thing that's sweet:

a megrim of involved concern,

a fully-formed conceit.

I plumb the contours of the thing,

I puzzle myself gaily,

and while I am therewith consumed

I am not in the melee.

My spirit is not torn by dogs

while it is still my own.

And while I warp and weave and weird

I am not overthrown.

The poverty of That Man's dreams

('Midst gold! Loved by poor men!)

is nothing against my poor dreams;

they make me whole again.

The puddling tilt is not my own,

or surely not just mine.

It's not the thing, or no one thing;

there is no saving line.

Sometimes it's gone - my eyes too clear,

too open to despair.

But in my books - my thoughts - my sleep -

in questions hard - in thickets deep -

in faerie tower and phantom keep,

I find it everywhere.

And then, though That Man is still here,

though it's so hard to persevere,

while some damn thing is still not clear

I almost do not care.

If I were a better man, and if it were earlier in the day, and if I were stoked with coffee, I would write a great deal. But for now I will say only that I am a great fan of Ta-Nehisi Coates, and I will continue to be.

I will say also that when you are accused of having ignored a long list of subjects, and you respond very politely with a list of links to essays in which you have written about many of those things, *that is the perfect way to answer*; it is what should be done. It should make a difference.

(If you have also always said that you were not an expert on everything, and if you have not gone deep into some things giving that as a reason, this should also count for something.)

If having given such an answer makes no difference in how things play out, what hope is there for any of us? That way of answering is the best way to answer. Examination of the answer, which of course no one could do instantly, would be the, I want to say the natural, but at any rate the proper response.

And beyond that: Any of us, no matter what we think, or what we say or write, could be hacked to pieces rhetorically by detractors because we *haven't* talked about some things. None of us has talked at length about everything important in the world, or even talked at length about all the things we do ourselves think are important. If such a theoretical hacking apart by detractors did in fact happen on this ground, with maximum moral contempt, who among us could survive?

A set of rules in which this could happen is one that privileges the ravenously righteous detractor. It is not one in which people can take the writer's or speaker's role, and talk as well as they can about their chosen topics, and be judged, fairly or unfairly, but at least on what they did say.

And when the denunciation for this is both immoderate and careless of strict accuracy - and when the group that pays attention to the initial denunciation branches out into weird accusations of an endless evil lust for adulation, on the part of one who has shown few if any signs of this, who is only, undeniably, prominent and well-known... Envy can be a force of human nature. Hate the tall poppy. Among the people who hunger for justice - which is sometimes any of us, in good ways and in ill - there can be demons that say that anyone big is another oppressor.

It would appear that Ta-Nehisi Coates was very taken back by the attack from someone I believe (to judge by his answer) he respected greatly, Cornel West - and by the sheer breadth and vigor of the assent to West's condemnation.
(On his old blog, for years, he was exemplary for listening and engaging with criticism and contrary views. It was a great comments section. But I don't blame him from choosing to disengage from what he found coming down on him yesterday.)

Though I looked at all of them, there was not time to open and read all of the article links that Coates posted in his answer, although I had read many of the articles before. His answer is no longer available. But when West says, for example, that Coates never criticized President Obama, or that Coates has ignored drone strikes, when Coates *has in fact written about both* - I say that having gone over to The Atlantic and done some reading, which was not hard to find at all - this was not merely a disagreement about opinion or attitude. This was a hatchet job without regard for truth or for anything but the injury of the target.

The way this played out yesterday has really depressed me. There was a savagery and indecency to it that I wish had remained a missing note in things.
And a right response done the right way should count.
And Ta-Nehisi Coates as a person has stood out for me as a person who tries to do a certain category of things right.

I suppose now that if it were earlier in the day I still wouldn't have done much better than this, really.

I'll stop by saying that Coates is worth reading. In fact, he's worth seeking out - his books and his articles at The Atlantic.

Crap. I just found out I'm going to be ≈$1,000 poorer than I thought, distributed from now through mid/late April.

That's money for equipment emergencies, wiggle room, and a few scattered nice moments that I won't have. 

And some February website fees, that have to be paid, that are now dangling.
It's a good thing this didn't fall on me a month ago.  I'm not in an emotional valley.

Just to note it down - this is a good answer, that I didn't have as such before. Heck, at all. I didn't know the basic 8", let alone have a grip on the difference he explained.

https://www.quora.com/On-Mount-Everest-an-observer-sees-the-horizon-roughly-230-miles-away-The-Earth-should-curve-35-000-feet-Why-doesnt-the-observer-see-the-curvature/answer/Curt-Thurston

He's a bit unkind with his last two sentences. The original person didn't know, and he asked in good faith... and speaking for myself, not only couldn't I have explained that well, you wouldn't believe the number of elementary things I haven't got the word about.

(It's actually most of reality.)

(And no, my ego wouldn't be eager to compare with anyone else, whoever they are.) (Sorry. It's an ego. They pettily prickily do what they pettily prickily do.)

I'm going to be busy the next couple of days, but I've just discovered something astounding.

Robert Zubrin has been a theorist of space exploration and a practical designer of the means to do it. A couple of days ago I saw that he has recently made a new breakthrough in the ability to make rocket fuel out of the Martian atmosphere. He is someone who should, on these topics, be read and understood.

But I have just found out that he believes that environmentalism and modern liberalism are part of an anti-human philosophy that needs false crisis in order to justify control and restriction. He links the belief in limits to such things as letting Ireland starve, the concern with population growth, and Hitler's murderous desire for Lebensraum.

He believes that global warming will in fact be good (he puts great weight on the fact that plant growth is increasing in accordance with the increase in atmospheric CO2) - but the real foundation for his standpoint is my old nemesis, Julian Simon. Simon believed in a world in which human intelligence, spurred through economic incentives, will always expand the amount of resources we have, inventing new extraction methods and entirely new substitutes and technology with different needs and so on . . . forever. There are problems with this "forever", at the extremes, but more immediately there is a problem with the certainty. Any environmental caution is evil. There is no reason to fear.

I give Zubrin some credit for perhaps having been driven mad with frustration over concerned Greens who rejected nuclear power as vehemently as they insisted that global warming was a terrible threat. This is a problem. But Zubrin hallucinates his opposition. Environmentalists don't want the worry forever so that they can have their nice safe limited regulated world; they want an end to the worry. They've been celebrating the ramping up of solar tech. They could use a new ambitiously technophilic approach, with heavy emphasis on science funding and R&D, in fact over near where Zubrin is, but Zubrin is much more wrong than they are. (And apparently somewhat carelessly. He's blaming Malthus for ruthless lifeboat economics and Charles Darwin for social Darwinism and perhaps Hitler, which is ridiculous.)

And the heck of it is, I cannot relegate Zubrin to the crank pile. We need him! His writings on space exploration and expansion should be read! Our actual space trajectory has been in a coma by comparison. We don't really have a replacement for Robert Zubrin. He's only a moonbat from the outer atmosphere on down. His ideas need to be salvaged.

The thing that strikes me is - I know this territory. I had hoped (and somewhat regretted - our path has not been an optimal one) that the old conflict of ideas between Herman Daly and Julian Simon had become simply a dusty section of my bookshelf. But the matter is evidently alive. It certainly is if it lives on in Zubrin, who is lamenting, for example, that targets of the environmentalists still think that they are under attack for separate reasons, instead of realizing that they are simply facing a unified proto-totalitarian anti-humanism.

Damn, man, this is all fully reconcilable. The path of hope is. Why does Zubrin have to be going off in this direction? The bastard's written a book "revealing" everything. I guess it's like running into your heroes on Twitter and discovering that they are big-egoed argumentative contrarians, which probably explains how they got to be your heroes, but damn.

This is tangent to two different lines of concern and hope.

Yeah, I'll be busy the next couple of days, but my head will be fully occupied.

Dream.

In a house that never was, in a situation we were never in, I got a hug from Gwen herself. And I marveled to myself, in a calm, happy bath of dazed relief, at how my worries could have so deluded me, while she sat on the toilet and told me the news of the death of Khomeini (which would have happened when she was 11). Good hug. It was her, her arms, the feel of her. Real. And as I straightened up I thought about it too much and I snapped my sleep like a stick.

Still good to see her. It's a spot of sunshine (not just metaphorically; there was golden sun pouring in the bathroom window, and before when I was outside, when - she told me - she'd hid behind the garage door and listened to me talking to the Mexican workers who were helping me move some flower pots about my plans).

I have a capacious funhouse. There is room for you, dear.

Unfortunately it is necessary for me to say something about some states before I can say anything about moving beyond them...
Quickly, then.
The bout of extreme SAD, or sudden depression, seems to have substantially gone, and, fortunately, even more so with that bizarre encounter with the call of the void.

It wasn't just "about" one thing, it was about three different things or more, in semi-sequence, but with each thing it wanted to enlist my mind and tell me that that one thing was indeed the thing, and was the solid basis, and that that was all-encompassing. Whether I should simply call it depression or blame S.A.D. even more than I have, it was a general collapse or catastrophe of the spirit.

One early jolt that helped begin to break (blast!) me out of it in a big way was the unexpected compound misunderstanding with Christy and some strangenesses in it, in particular my too-literal wrong reading of the word "clingy" and astonishment at some things. I wouldn't have wished that on anyone - let alone me or her - but... it is reconfirmed that nothing seems as antithetical to depression as unexpected straightforward anger.

For me real surprise piss-off is rare and shocking (my clashes with Mom are too accustomed to have this effect) - and, for me, it was like unexpectedly sneezing through a part of my brain that I'd almost forgotten and feeling/remembering that that part of my brain was there. Like suddenly remembering I had nasal passages. And I can't be depressed while furious. Whole different state of consciousness! - which, as it fades, leaves the fortunately broken spell, because depression tries to tell you that it is the only state that there is.

But this is only an acute fix. (And it is undesirable.) (And it only disrupted the trajectory, though probably the disruption was decisive.) I think the real thing... which is not precisely useful, or not directly, because when you're actually in the pit of despond you cannot steer toward it, but it's a good thing if you happen to find yourself there... is that, in increasing the distance between you and the pit, it's a good thing to remember that when I'm depressed I'm thinking too much about myself. I'm what's for breakfast and lunch and dinner.

So if I want to avoid depression, or avoid a relapse into it, I should for God's sake think about things that aren't me.

And Donald Trump doesn't do it, because, if there is a recipe for ending up focused on my own helpless agony and et cetera, it is that blowhole in a long tie.

And I'll use him as shorthand for so much right now that does the same thing. Long story. Too long.

So.

People. Certain people.

I wouldn't be so disappointed about people in general if I didn't like people so much. I am the weirdest anti-social person in history, if that's even what I am. I dig people. Almost all particular people. I even dig the people who put my brain in the microwave - other things about them, and people have lots of things about them. But part of what keeps me sane and liking people, and also keeps me able to have multiple mental/personality-ish coats to put on, is thinking in depth about people I find really interesting.

Who am I thinking about right now? By accident, but not quite by accident, it is Russell Kirk, that crusty, pocket-watch-wearing near-inventor of American conservatism as a thing in the '50s (who knows what he would think of his children now) who wrote those wonderful ghost stories. And a step further - I am thinking about Edmund Burke, that nineteenth-century British conservative about whom Kirk wrote a biography.

I would like to read more of both of them. I actually have a collection of Burke, and - is a book of Kirk's hiding around here somewhere?

Not because I see things the way they do. I don't. But there is a combination of ... I always find ways to mutate my own sentence structure. Two things. The very remarkable differences from me are part of why I would like to read them right now. And at the same time - something about them does not seem extraordinarily different at all. The specific way in which they seemed sometimes to grapple with things seems familiar to me. To my own grappling attempts at the question: How do you be a person? What do you do with this life thing going forward? How do you look at it?

And, damn, I would like to start delving into examples - Burke's statement to the crowd about being a representative, the Hastings thing, an amazing appalling error he made when thinking about humane treatment for slaves - but it's too soon; I need a refresher on him and I need to read more of him! This is just the crackle of interest. Same with Kirk. I can't even put what I'd want to say about Kirk into a box.

How to be a man, yes, that's a rephrasing that should come up with these two; one predates feminism and one was probably no member at all. I struggled over whether to say "probably" there - that didn't seem quite right - because these are odd ducks; I feel sure that they would both be thoroughly traditional in completely untraditional ways. Which is hard to pin down. But to some degree "how to be a man" would generalize to how to be a person. And/but...

And, for that matter, what women would I add to the stack of these interesting people I would like to go and spend time with? Curious instant ping - I thought of Flannery O'Connor right away. Is it just that I saw her referred to recently? (Did I?) And another is that - oh, that's just annoying, that female mathematics professor-without-official-standing, the one who Einstein said had game. Not only do I have to somehow identify her (I can't even remember the country), there is the question of how much about her I could really understand. I'm not a mathematician. But she stuck in my craw for some reason.

Doris Lessing's too good and too fresh; I've already read her, and I'm not going to get a bigger imprint. And I've already read that wonderful old biddy in the Philadelphia cemetery, although she'd be easy to reread.

It's hard for books I've already read to have the full impact, which means to turn my whole head on for the full mind-meld with them as speakers and them as subjects. That history of the Second World War I got in Seattle was amazing - a terrific encounter with the particular players' struggles with the history-pervading problem of inexperience and lost knowledge and errors. But it wouldn't have the same hit if I opened it now. I have antibodies. Or something. (Should I relate this to how psychedelics eventually seem to have trouble jogging you out of your ruts as much? I have no idea.)

And I'd like to read The History of the Peloponnesian Wars. It's just been lying there waiting. (Too bad I've already run into filthy smartass Martial.)

God, I remember reading that Joseph Conrad omnibus. I was stunned. The mind on him - I thought at the time, that strangely modern voice and eye! But mind has always been modern. (To think otherwise is lazily parochial and just unkind - as borked as (some) people in 17th century England thinking the "native" "savages" had to be guided or else they'd just wander around and try to eat rocks.)

Yeah. Time to encounter a new very old conversation. Tonight I'll try to find one of those damn collections. I wish they were all the size of A Conrad Argosy. I'd have no trouble.

There's a sense in which I'm hoping Russell and Burke will help lead me back to a larger general focus - but that's two or three steps down the road.

Here's to old new voices.

Ow. There's a giant dressing piled up on my forehead that I can't take off until 11 a.m. tomorrow, and underneath it is a line of dissolvable stitches covering absolute carnage. There were the same sharp burning smells that I remember from my vasectomy - electric cautery in action. Three sets of sizzles: the first slice, the second slice, and when I went in before the stitches. They had me well-numbed, but during the stitching it felt as if they were pulling my whole forehead around like a rubber sheet.

It hurts, and when I got home I had some ibuprofen (very rare for me), I thought as instructed, but now I see in the after-care instructions that I'm not supposed to have ibuprofen and really it was supposed to be Tylenol. This might add up to a little extra bruising under there. More of a show for when I take the bandage off tomorrow. (Low comedy: And now Mom keeps suggesting that I should take some of my own pain pills - which is awkward, because I deliberately misled Catherine so that she wouldn't know I retained any tempting pain pills. I told Mom this at the time, but Mom has forgotten. This is right in front of Catherine. So far I have answered with little head-shakes and muttered "no"s, which Mom, baffled, has twice told me is just dumb. So far I don't think Catherine has picked up on it.)

During the second slice, with me lying there with a cloth over my eyes against the light, the subject of Christmas music and Christmas movies came up and I ended up recommending the Finnish movie Rare Exports, with its skinny monstrous Santas and then the great big one.

One thing was funny that an old guy in the waiting room thought was funny too: They had a little bookshelf in the waiting room - and in the bookshelf was a Robin Cook novel! There are hospital murderers in every Robin Cook novel! Some med-center waiting room food! But when I mentioned it to the nurses and doctors they just blinked and smiled in a way that suggested they didn't get the joke.

So, I'd been told to expect about six hours, but it turned out to be a little over three. Two slices, with long spells in the waiting room after each, and then the stitch-up.

Afterward I stepped out into the gray city - it was an extension south of downtown, at the base of the sky-tram that goes up the hill to the OHSU campus proper... and it was weird... I have sometimes been not all that fond of life going on, but I've never had suicidal thoughts that I can remember - but for the first time I had an intense rush of suicidal ideation. Apropos of nothing, but absolutely full-formed and pressing. Just, the gray light hit me as I came out, and as I'm going over to the streetcar station by the building there's this obsessive crazy self-talk in my head going why not, what's the use of not, if you wait and then you do it anyway it's only going to be all the more pathetic that you waited...

A totally dismal, hopeless vision. S.A.D. combined with several different things and longtime demoralizations, all in a rush. For just a little while I was halfway into suicide-note composition. What the hell? I don't know. I hadn't had breakfast before getting out the door to rush to the clinic. And I hadn't been able to locate my boots either soon enough, so I was there in flip-flops in the rain. That seemed to feed it. Which sounds ridiculous, but it did.

My head, my enemy. I'll try not to make a habit of it. (There's no danger; I can't get around to anything, let alone that.) (... Which in fact is taking me down a little again.)

As soon as the hole in my forehead heals I'll be able to take in the note and sell my plasma again and I'll be able to pick what I do a little. So there's that.

Writing made the forehead pain go away. I get too far into my head to notice my head.

I spoke too soon.

Well, it's not exactly new writing, but it's been on the to-do list. I've been making individual dream reports in Facebook, but I only think of them one at a time.

What would they look like all together? Say, only the ones from 2017 (well, so far)?

Let's see... (doing a keyword search, pasting in)

(finished) Well, now. This is slightly more informative than I expected - which is almost more irritating. It seems to confirm a vague prejudice I have about summer being a relatively dead zone as far as dreams... except it doesn't mean anything, because I haven't had a consistent policy about noting my dreams in Facebook, these were purely impulsive posts, and I just don't know why I didn't write anything in summer.

And the main mystery I've wanted to get a look at - it just hangs there, confirmed but inscrutable, and I can't even find a good word for it. I keep mumbling the word "recursive", but the word doesn't quite point at it. I mean the way in which (here is where I get in trouble) the way in which the dreams, or successive stretches of a dream, change, or operate on the basis of, previous stretches of the same dream . . . in a way that isn't like just morphing the furniture. It often seems to be based on an actual understanding of the elements of the dream - one that I do not have at all when I'm dreaming the dream. And on . . . something I'm going slower on, which is the nature of the activity. This series of dream-mentions does incorporate some star cases of the weird, but the snapshots don't nail it. Sometimes it actually seems as if the dreams are built deliberately artistically on some level... and at other times it seems instead as if there's no such entirely witting arrangement, but as if there's a parallel awareness to mine that is "innocently" experiencing things completely separately from my own. Do I split? The dream is not a mindless situation. I want to know what I'm doing when I'm dreaming.

Frak. The "recursive" changes are pervasively exampled, anyway. (Maybe I should have gone back further.) (I've always been able to pick out apparent patterns, the unreliable kind. Never go back to the same hotel room in a dream, has seemed to be one. You won't get what you want. One way or another.)

Jan. 8, 2017:

Dreams over the last couple of nights:

The events of some sort of vacation on a South American mountainside, a hotel on/along the slope, turned out to be a recapitulation or resolution of some religion I cannot identify.

It was a good dream. Things turned out happily. I woke feeling - briefly - that I understood what the whole thing was about uncommonly well. It left a glow. I don't know why; all the bits have gone.

... Another dream I woke up from almost snickering about, already disparaging it(!), because of the already emerging picky consciousness of just how many ways it didn't make sense, but also relieved at being released from a picture visually beautiful but otherwise pretty horrible. (I wish I'd forgotten more of this one and less of the other.)

A travel agent for a gas giant's beautiful moons found that a hated ex of his had booked a trip there. (No, I wasn't particularly seeing this from his point of view.) He allocated her a campsite on one of the moons, calculating the spot very carefully, on the basis of knowledge of a quirk of the orbits that was about to happen. Two of the moons were about to come so close that they would actually barely touch. And, as this woman he hated slept, the other moon bellied slowly down and smushed her in her sleeping bag.

Feb. 3, 2017:

Dream:

There was a narrationless music-and-media-montage documentary looking back on the Trump Administration - in the manner of Brother, Can You Spare A Dime? about the Great Depression, or another one I think I hazily remember about the late '60s. The title of the thing was Yammer Gong.

Feb. 13, 2017:

Dreamed of a female Australian equivalent of Indiana Jones, Oodnadatta Watkins. She was quite short, and her hat was AMAZING.

Feb. 17, 2017:

Dream:

Stuck at my editing work, I was unable to attend a massive costumed gathering of my high school friends and could only see video clips of the event erratically posted through the night. I remember Don McCoy as the Tin Woodman - an *awesome* Tin Woodman - and Carol Carruthers Owensby as a combination of Glinda and the Scarecrow (big gauzy blue arm-puffs, tiara, and wand, with overalls). An intermittent news feed kept breaking in across the top of my screen, informing me that Donald Trump was holding a competing event at another venue and lying about the size of the crowd.

Mar 1, 2017:

Two dreams:

The first a nightmare, my first in many years. There had been a fragmentary dream before it of an unfamiliar cousin who was a secret agent of some sort and who had taken me on a road trip.

But now I was waking up in my own bed, everything was clear and concrete, and the cousin had entered my room and was just picking up one of the pillows. I prevented him from pushing it onto my face, but somehow he got it round my neck and was twisting it savagely. I kept fighting, but I could feel the anoxia weakening me, and I knew it was robbing me of the strength to stop him. His face was intent - eager - interested. I knew that if he killed me he would go to Mom next. I woke up with a yell and my cat came over and curled up next to my face. The feeling of anoxia vanished instantly as I came awake.

The second was a dream of being a kid who had just moved into a house on a quiet street. I had fun roaming around the neighborhood, meeting other kids, picking berries. There was a really big house across the way from ours, four stories or maybe even more. What I slowly discovered was that the back half was a ruin and that inside the shell - mostly sleeping, or drowsing - sat Godzilla himself, the secret adoptee of the deceased old lady who had lived there, next to a stuffed teddy bear of equal size. It was an uneasy dream of discreet playing and trying to be quiet, with various angles sometimes giving me a view of that huge eye, sometimes slightly open to various degrees.

Mar. 19, 2017:

Dream:

A tangled, loud circa-1960 political controversy around technical issues and mishaps at NASA, experienced montage-ish, during which one of the clips that played was of Barry Goldwater (who had at least one friend who was an astronaut and had informed him): "Our space program does indeed have its problems, but not because of tanks settling, which always happens..."

(This had been a core of the uproar.)

I have no memory of any technical problems with rockets or with the early space program that had to do with tanks settling, and (awake) I have no general impression of such a situation. I'm not sure what fuel or fuel mix (or what?) this would apply to, or why. l'm not well-informed, let alone actually conversant with this stuff, but it's not an unimpressioned area, and, from my memory of random reading and notably the book Ignition! by John D. Clark, my first (and I think my first four) vague or spitballed guesses about a problem with rocket fuels would have been along different lines.

I'm often struck by how many levels back my dreams seem to start in knitting things afresh.

(Or, if that one did come from a dreamer, it seems like it would have originated with *some other dreamer than me* and drifted across. :-) Which... longtime suspicion. But, really, there may have *been* some real seed of this, that maybe should even be obvious, but if there was I'm unaware that I know it.)

Mar. 27, 2017:

This morning I was spending some time contemplatively floating three feet off the floor - drawing my knees up and wrapping my arms around them, bobbing slightly in midair. Sunbeams washed the room as I drifted.

It occurred to me that I usually assumed I could only do this while dreaming.

I thought about this.

Weight crashed suddenly back, as if I had fallen. I was lying on my side in my untidy bed.

There's no temptation more insidious than overthinking.

Apr. 1, 2017:

Dreams:

1. One of those annoying ones with a complexity that cannot be brought back, except for the clear theme that, in many unexpected ways, the ability to cast spells would be bad for relationships. I'm making a note.

2. An unpleasant office boss (who looked just like David Suchet's Hercule Poirot) had gone insane. (Not unassisted - I think it was with the aid of hostile agents using strange drugs and hypnotism, to further an agenda of their own.) There was a long scene of him, in slow motion, getting off the elevator and making his way among the desks toward his private office - with a strange cheek-straining savage ecstasy on his face... because he believed he was surrounded by a group of duplicates of himself who were armed with shotguns and assault rifles, under his orders, and methodically murdering all of his terrified employees and gang-raping the women first. Only he could see them, and no one particularly noticed the boss as he strolled with this fixed grin through the office, nodding slightly at this employee or that. At the door to his sanctum he shot his executive assistant with his finger - he believed he had used a revolver and blown the man's head off, but the man thought it was a jocular gesture and, after the boss had gone in, said "Hell of a job!" and made it with a wink to his secretary, who returned it without a pause.

In his private office he looked out through the Venetian blinds for a few minutes - at delusional scenes of rings of his duplicates surrounding and attacking helpless pedestrians down on the street, while MIRVs drew branching lines in the sky and great white bursts of light bloomed on the horizon. Then he sat down at his desk, his grin growing even more hysterically wide, while he believed that he had taken a magnificent jeweled crown out of his desk drawer, shining with diamonds, and was now lowering the crown slowly, slowly onto his head - drawing out the triumphant moment endlessly - when in fact he had taken a real revolver out of the drawer, cocked it, and was putting it just as slowly to his temple.

Apr. 5, 2017:

Died in a dream. Was skiing in fast circles, not slowing down - and there was a flat broad spur of white rock, I don't think ice, sticking out into the snowfield. I came closer and closer to it in my fast circles. Giddy, I paid it no mind. Then I actually ran into it but the snow at its edge must have worked as a ramp and I jumped over it by what must have been millimeters. I came around again -

Then I was in violet-gray emptiness, looking at the words of my own grave marker hanging in front of me.

Then I woke up in bed, but I couldn't get my eyes to open - even when, frantic, I used my fingers to try to pry at my eyelids. If I couldn't get back to the world of sight I hadn't yet gotten away from the dream death -

Then I woke up again.

Sep. 4, 2017:

Night before last, as I was dozing off, one of those off-dream phenomena: an oddly muted report, like a gunshot but as if I'd only heard part of it. It was associated with a precise circular spot, the diameter of a pencil, just forward of the line above my right ear. It woke me up.

I've been touching that spot ever since.

Contextless wondering. Did someone get shot there? Did I get shot there? Am I going to be shot there?

As always, I don't expect answers to be forthcoming.

Oct. 5, 2017:

The palpably busy unremembered dreaming of the last few nights broke the surface...

It was (that I recall) my first delusional state inside a dream. During the quietly disastrous end of a semester in college (I don't think I've ever dreamed a final-exams period that wasn't like a ghost ship), I became obsessed with the awareness of impending death. Then I went along on a sort of holiday retreat of two or three days, just before the last week - and at a certain point I became convinced, absolutely certain, that I was actually dead. My heart had stopped, a little after I had arrived, and, though I continued to move and speak and eat and so on, I was just going along like a person with extreme insomnia or jet lag; this was a strange biochemical tag-end, and at any moment, any second, it would end and the lights would go out.

I mentioned it to people. They were either in a very mellow holiday mood or they humored me. And I wasn't panicked or worried; I mean, the worst was already true. It was an epilogue. I was just bemusedly watching my limbs carry me around - for a while.

I only came out of it after I returned home. I was on campus trying to buy a burrito before class and the food-cart cook told me that it was later in the day than I thought and the class was actually over. Then I realized I was alive. I think my reactions balanced themselves out there too.

Oct. 7, 2017:

Second remembered dream in a few days that referenced death - and the first that's left me snarled in a roiling neurotic internal controversy:

I had been kidnapped or captured by sociopathic criminals of some sort. In some sort of cave, naked, tied up, cold, and afraid, I was about to be murdered by a bullshit-improvised firing squad.

Leader, with a sadistic smile: "Any last words?"

Me: "Toodles."

A sizeable part of my ego is *very* unhappy about this valediction - *horrified*. "Good grief, after everything, at the end of everything, that was *it*?"

BUT -

Lifetime high point for aplomb, in *or* out of dreams.

Oct. 21, 2017:

I don't understand voices you can't understand in dreams.

(To win a minor lottery-like arrangement in a supermarket, I had to call a phone number, but I got a recorded response that I couldn't make out, although I know what the indistinct sentences sounded like.)

A dream is not a deliberate fictional puppet-show proposition. No one is writing "INDECIPHERABLE SPEECH" into a script. From the specific sound, it was apparent that some intent organized the sounds; it *was* some actual string of words said. So, if there was an intended meaning - generated by my head, therefore in my head - and if my listening point of view was also in my head, what garble in between could there have been that prevented me from hearing/understanding it?

There are always too many layers in dreams. They warrant a look...

... which it is completely impossible to take.

Oct. 24, 2017:

Between yesterday's hopeful, harried email and this morning's letdown, I had a peculiar dream. I remember much more of it than usual. The dreams where I’ve retained more than usual have tended to be on the uncomfortable side. This one fit the pattern. It was . . . stressful.
To look at, grossly, it shouldn't have been like that. It was beautiful.
In a way.
I should mention that it's quite rare that in a dream I am distinctly and identifiably my specific self, Alex Russell. Usually I'm a much more generalized identity, or I am a definitely different person, or more than one, or there may not even be a clear personal viewpoint. But this time I was the person who is typing this now.
I sort of paid for it.
The basic concept seemed to be a perfect match with, or to be outright lifted from, the miniseries The Lost Room.
(But a motel room wasn't involved.)
In the dream, I had somehow discovered that, at will, I could open any door and step through it into a particular place, the same place. 
(And I think, though it didn’t come up, that when I left I could emerge through any door I wished in the normal world, as in The Lost Room.)
No one else was ever there.
It was a vast sandstone complex, under a sky like a blazing blue dome. It always seemed to be day there. I think it was surrounded by level sand to the horizon, but I can't remember actually looking beyond the outer boundary.
Great walled courtyards. Mighty vaulted interior spaces like the largest cathedrals - numerous spaces of such size. Unbelievable expanses of floor, of tile or baked brick - the kind of place that makes you feel like a gnat. Most of the doors and archways could have accommodated the kaijus from Pacific Rim, or it seemed like they could have. 
And . . . herein the problem . . .
It seemed to be a temple complex.
And the temple was apparently (no, more than apparently; evidently; plainly) dedicated to - me.
Me.
I was everywhere. Gigantic murals, mosaics, carved friezes, and statues were in every space - you couldn't get away from them. All showing me, suspiciously better-looking than I've ever been, doing heroic things not a single one of which I've actually done. 
There was one titanic statue in dark stone that seemed to defy gravity, showing me, top-hatted, locked in wrestling battle with something very like a dragon, both of us twisted together in spiral fashion, my left foot the only part touching the floor.
What was this dream like? (Maybe anyone who will understand this will already understand by this point.)
It was a dream of fretting. 
Horribly awkward, uncomfortable, embarrassed, agonized fretting.
I remember telling myself to shrug it off and roll with things, but it didn't stick, even for a few steps.
What did I do?
Well, obviously I had to move some of my stuff into this omni-accessible space, so that I could get it no matter where I happened to be. You don’t ignore something like that!
But what I did was - everything I brought I jammed into one tiny space, that was almost the only small room I found. It was about the size of a college dorm, or smaller, maybe like a broom closet. It was inconveniently distant (distant) from the spot where I always appeared when I entered, and with all my stuff packed in there it became as abysmally cramped and messy as anywhere I've ever inhabited, which is saying something . . . but I think it only had one little frieze, which got buried in my stuff. And it had a door that could be closed. That was the point.
I had a mattress in that room, and when I slept there the door was always closed. It had to be. I needed it closed. It didn't have a lock, and I wished it had a lock (for no reason that made any sense; I had no thought that the complex wouldn’t always be as uninhabited as I had found it), and I remember an intense neurotic tussle with myself over whether to go and buy a chain I could put on the door. I felt if I actually did that it would be some sort of confession of non-coping insanity. 
So I didn't get the chain, and most of the time when I was in the magic place longer than briefly I stayed in that tiny, cramped cesspool of a room, hiding from the rest of my vast egotistical temple behind that non-locking door.
Egotistical. Vain. That was the problem. It was Trumpian out there. Ravingly Trumpian. Me Trumpian. Not in luxury but in grandeur and scale.
It was horrifying. 
And the core obsession I had, that was not even rooted in this situation or in anything real - my mad fixation - I was continuously thinking about this, whether I was there or I was here at home or walking around in the normal world - the horrid thought that made no sense but kept returning, that nagged me, that haunted me:
What if there was some kind of disaster?
A cataclysm? Nuclear war, or a cometary strike, I didn't even know what, killer bees, just ANYTHING . . .
. . . specifically where my friends and family and loved ones (including some people reading here) were in immediate and terrible danger?

And where the only way I could save them would be to evacuate them out of the normal world into this mysterious place?
And of course I’d have to do it.
They’d see.
They'd SEE.
They'd KNOW.
And they'd NEVER BELIEVE THAT I HAD NOTHING TO DO WITH IT.
NO.
Mysteriously gifted with this power or with this place, a palace, a refuge, and an incredible sorcerous travel advantage . . . and this dream was mostly a dream in which I walked in neurotic fear and horror that never left me alone. Even the wonder of the varied art, of which I still retain traces, was tinged with this appallment when I first saw it . . . and then I was wracked, and wracked, and wracked with this quiet social-horror panic all the way to waking.
End notes:
We wear unusual hats in dreams, and I sort of hope I over-spoke when I said I was the exact same Alex Russell who's typing. :-) Maybe I did over-speak; that may have been a really extrapolatory Alexian. As I take my own temperature now, I don’t think that I'm that horrificated by the thought of my . . . what? self-fondness? . . . showing somewhat. Or I hope I would @#$%& deal. I hope the real me has a sense of humor that gives me enough flexibility to evade that degree of trapped-in-a-corner emotional obsession.
But I do have my tender spots. Some exquisitely social in nature. And my rigidities. And I have to admit that my reaction to the situation in the dream felt natural.
You can take my telling you about this flattering-iconography dream of mine (yes, doing so is a bit uncomfortable) as me voting not to be @$%&* controlled by that sort of thing. 
The only other thing: Possibly in context with surrounding circumstances . . .
Have you ever had the suspicion that a dream might have been heckling you?

Nov. 7, 2017:

Dream:

1. A sunny roomful of semi- or non-ambulatory cannibal mutant people, all with a clear family resemblance, all big smiles, none speaking, festooned with bandages and gauze-covered stumps and brightly eyeing their visitor's extremities!

(It seems they had been being bred for years to derive some sort of contraceptive. If you want to affect human systems, go to the source, I guess. Their discoverer, a young woman, afterward figured out that she was herself part of the family, and she decided that reproduction might be a bad idea going forward... using a strange brown hormonal goop to make sure of this, that I think was the result of the research.)

2. A city bus made a clever detour through a couple of buildings, navigating strange hallways and inching through narrow store aisles, in order to beat a knot of street congestion. I tend to think this sort of thing is safer with trains.
I was a rider at first, but when I tried to grab some groceries (for someone?) I managed to get myself left behind, despite my arrangement with the driver.

Nov. 8, 2017:

Dream:

A lawmaker who had been staunchly opposed to relations with non-human civilizations was forced to admit, on camera, that a hostile force had just carried out a series of savage attacks in several star systems - a progression clearly leading directly to our own - and that the only resistance, that had saved some planets and that might have successfully blunted the advance, had been provided at great cost by the extraterrestrial groups she had so distrusted. (We had no space forces of our own - really just some penny-pinching tinkertoy NASA/ESA/JAXA stuff, barely uplifted by a primitive hyperdrive.)

On waking, what I was concerned with was reaching for the laptop and Googling to make sure her "beehive hairdo" is a real thing and was not just a dream concoction.
(A voice in the back of my head is saying "Typical.") (Look, it's an outlandish thing, and I couldn't immediately remember!)

Nov. 9, 2017:

HA. This never happens: I woke from a dream, reached straight for my laptop, and got down "live notes" that kept much more than usual:

________________________

Dream:

a group of people, especially the ladies, was inadvertently trancelike-involved with altar-like place in a river cave (open cave, big overhang). the altar-like spot was just a particular place where you could stand on the sloping rock over a pool, but it had strange significance.
initial uses give powers/gifts, but the influence over you is gradually increased.
if one resists (a man did, the viewpoint man), it seems to offend the cave, and a force keeps trying to cloud your thoughts and get you to make speech like an apology and then commit suicide in pool in cave.

manages to resist, group eventually gets clear

when they extricated selves from control and left, they were met by a police person they'd talked to before, who had been inquisitive - but who was now oddly incurious about their long absence, and who talked mostly about the very recent discovery of endless crypts discovered right along the bank of the river. a boat took them along the river, where they could see all the freshly uncovered buried brick crypts, almost a continuous string of them just above the waterline, on all manner of properties, some dismantled. some very old, others (perhaps) much more recent.

one of them, the man, was taken straight to another river cave, with a strange pink window in one side with a small odd auditorium-like space visible behind it. In the cave, a strange older man talked to ____, explaining that things were different now, that society was now at peace.
(implied: the strange man somehow knew they were new to all this, that they'd missed whatever had happened - this was puzzling at the time)

then they just entered their new lives.

like a telepathic This Perfect Day. no money. everyone just constantly, calmly knew where to move and what to do. the newcomers experienced constant nudges like everyone else.

nature/identity of universal mental control never known.

but they were slightly more conscious than everyone else. and there were strange *covert* nudges too, or inklings. different tone, like from a child/a friend who was trying to stay hidden.

this source of the inklings could also *briefly* conceal them from the larger control, as when they were acting on the inklings, or (much less certain) guardedly/quickly talking about them with each other.

the mind-guided society had geographic outsiders/foes outside the territory/along the river (saw them take a boat like a tugboat, literally lift it out of the water somehow, w/crying citizen who didn't want to be taken) (maybe competing mind-controlled society? was never clear),but the inklings weren't from outside.

inklings - two plots.

1. the viewpoint man yelled at another of the exception-folks in frustration in a narrow corridor that the needed details of an inkling clue could be anything, they could be *his own* home town and hair color. he realized later that maybe that was the actual answer.
he used those details, plugging them into another clue, and the result guided him to an obscure museum (or tourist attraction?). he was admitted, and found that a little elevator took him to one of the rooms - a small pink auditorium facing a familiar window looking out into a cave. the modernistic room had a sign inset in the sloping carpeted floor that read in glowing pink letters:
"... and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time."
he did not find the strange older man who had spoken to him before (though for a moment he expected to), and an angry martial artist came, with cohorts - mute? not speaking English? i think mute - and gave him to understand, through interpreters, that he was not supposed to be there.
Met the martial arts guy later on the street - guy indicated it was okay. (hadn't detected full strangeness, cover not blown.)

2. three of the people got an inkling clue (I THINK first half is right): "if any is only, does aunt need uncle?"
there was the viewpoint man, and another man, and the third was kerri, who was a gay woman.
they were talking about the secret inklings - and one of them suggested the first half of that clue meant the answer to the second half of it was "not necessarily". they rushed to some old video arcade games, which they'd also been cued to. a couple of them didn't know how the old video games worked, but they all got into different ones in the row. the arcade games were fully enclosed kinds. bafflement from one person at first, nothing happened, and viewpoint man yelled to try having the door closed. once the doors were closed so that they were "private" in the chair chambers, the viewpoint man touched the coin slot and a vision came...

thought of "Does aunt need uncle? Not necessarily." led to two different visions of a man-less woman dealing with child:
FACT:
A FEMALE CRAZY KILLER HAD FIXATED ON A CHILD AND HAD GONE UP TO THEIR APARTMENT ON THE FOURTH FLOOR AND HAD MURDERED THE PARENTS AND WAS STILL THERE.
(the universal mind control hadn't prevented this)
also there was a a secondary, uncertain?possible? vision in which an unknown woman ended up taking care of the child. and somehow this woman was the girlfriend of kerri lesbian. but that was only a dream/thing that might be, the reality was the CRAZY KILLER WOMAN IN THE APARTMENT RIGHT NOW, THE. CHILD TRAPPED WITH HER.

viewpoint man rushed to the building, rushed up the stairs, busted in, BIG fight, and ended up smashing the crazy woman through the window 4 stories up. child still OK, though parents dead. knew he had to run immediately to escape lest the mysterious rogue inklings be revealed. ran downstairs. **strange doubling/changing flash.** outside on street, met kerri lesbian - who asked "where have you been?" kerri didn't know anything about last batch(?) of inklings. kerri leads viewpoint character away from the building, and they pass someone she knows. kerri says flirtatiously "I'm talking mr. butterfield to get his hair cut." But "mr. butterfield" is facetious name, doesn't refer to a man. Original character realizes that he's been transmogrified/body-shifted into the woman he saw in vision who ended up taking care of the child.

(woke upon deciphering joke/realizing situation)

[I need to note the special relevant weirdness about this one inline. What seems evident to me now - but it wasn't at all at the time - is that the two similar river-caves are the same cave. (Or else at minimum it makes a WHOLE lot of sense.) There's been a time lapse (imperceptible to the escapees) that happened as they left, and that odd pink SLOPING mini-auditorium has been built over that sloping rock face with the altar-like spot! I suppose the original weak ghost-entity and its mind control has strengthened and expanded to run the society outside.
And what kills me: I had NO sense or suspicion of this during the dream - it's only a reviewing-the-notes thought... but that damn bright-lit quotation in the auditorium reads like a specific on-the-nose "this is the case" nod about it!
(While I didn't think of ANY interpretations of the line during the dreams. Or even try.)

You see what that would require. What the hell?! I didn't understand the dream, but the dream understood *itself*?]

Nov. 17, 2017:

One of those gigantic busy dreams that make my brain feel relaxed and refurbished and then spool away leaving few traces.
There was a gaming environment with a list of amazing rules. Gwen and I read them together, I think.
But one fragment nags at me.
There was an insane bridge saboteur. Creepy fellow. Varied his methods from subtle to crude depending on the bridge. Frighteningly ruthless toward anyone nearby.
I thought I *recognized* him *from more than one previous dream*. I don't mean other dreams the same night; I mean *going back*.
I saw his home address and it seemed to be a match with previous dreams.
And evidently he knew me too, and he tried to eliminate me (possibly with success on one turn - you know how it is).
And I tried very hard to hang on to that address and bring it back with me, I kept saying it over to myself, but I've lost it now, and that strikes me as a bit sub-optimal.
As long as he didn't have better luck.

(Which has nothing to do with anything except C.S. Lewis, but it comes to mind by analogy.)

There's this ridiculous entry that I've almost written - several times this year.

You cannot pay attention to Donald Trump's administration and the other bizarre things for all your free time. The times bear watching - and need news-spreading, and general awareness, and incipient activism - but you will go crazy.

You have to turn to the things that maintain you, to the things that divert you, to the things that recharge you.

You have to undulate.

Which is a good general personal subject to take up. So I happily tap away about the things that I occupy my head with, the strange projects through the year, work matters (which certainly count as an obsession), and suchlike.

Each topic is fun, slightly absurd, engaging. It goes well.

But each time - probably it's me - I find myself freaked out by the developing total. Each recharging occupation comes through clearly and happily - but when they are collected together in a single presentation, when I am looking at them as at a row of book-spines in a set, my eyes start seeing just how much in need I have been of diversion. And it is not a thing of which I like to be reminded, and the array starts to look hectic and alarming to me, and the undercurrent of obsession I applied to each particular thing becomes an overcurrent, and... and I leave off finishing the entry.

Again. Perhaps four or five times now?

And I am not sure that a reader would even notice anything out of place. :-)

What's wrong with all this? There shouldn't be anything. Really the major roadblock is an impulse to be encyclopedic - which makes a large objective in the first place, and which in this case creates whole new problems. There is absolutely nothing wrong with writing about little individual subjects. I usually have.

But a larger problem is that my connection with my writing side has become attenuated enough that it can be prey to these weird little problems, or others.

There's no denying it.

Look at what I've written in here. A couple of old light entries - and then all there have been are two entries that were driven out of me by special extreme personal low points, one of which I kept private, the other of which I've just now made private because public lamenting is demoralizing to the lamenter and would have an unpleasant effect on anyone else. Low points are very articulate, but it's not really a good idea. But the point is: I shouldn't need to be driven to write. I never used to.

I should beat the path wide again.

The constant background irritation: I need to find work more frequently. (The accompanying reduction in, not exactly free time, but unclassified time will go down just great these days.) But I need to add another pressing irritation. I need to write regularly again, whether or not I feel like it.

Here? Somewhere.

My old Open Diary file should prod me. And some of my Prosebox entries here and there. I should do some re-reading for inspiration. I used to be better than this, and I don't remember having a stroke. And, when I've looked over some of my OD entries... it's struck me that I used to do some bad writing back then. Just, ouch, that needed another pass. I should see how I do now.

Finding paid work ought to help immensely. Writing in inadequate chinks of time always seemed to ease things.

Darn you, Mom, don't pipe up bemoaning my shortcomings! I'm ending on an up note here.

Oh. Back to the title. Undulation is natural, in every area. But it's about time I undulated back the other way.

Skit that's been going in my head in the shower for years, off and on:

A street festival. An identifiable American tourist is walking around gawking. Three very German men in lederhosen walk up to him.

One of the Germans says: "Hello. Vould you like some bier?"

In huge white glowing letters, the word "BIER" appears.

The American tourist looks down at the spelled-out word. He smiles and answer, trying to match the accent: "Heh heh. Ja! I *would* like some bier!"

Cut to:

Dusk. Atop of a cliff over the sea. The grim faces of the three Germans are lit by a roaring pyre, from which screams can be heard - "Aaaaaa! Aaaaaaaaaa! Aaaaaaa!"

The end message appears in glowing white letters:

"SPELLING IS A WEAPON"

***

Heh. The previous entry. I was reminded of Age of Empires III by my writer, who really liked a strategic idea I mentioned while I was editing a passage in his book. I answered that I could claim I got it from reading books on military strategy, but really I just got it from playing Age of Empires. (Mostly true. I've read some military history, but mostly I've just read people who've read a lot of it.)

So I remembered that one game session, and then I played the game a few times, for the first time in years. And I did piece together exactly what I had done in that one strange battle to pull off the miracle (I may add it in a comment under this), but mainly what I realized is that... I don't play in that way at all.

When I learned to really play, I learned in a different way. I don't play with a focus on tactics. I play with a focus on strategy. I almost try to be bored, the way I play. I learned to play so that I would probably win no matter what happened, no matter how each individual fight went, no matter what surprises showed up. I focus only on that. A very slow-heart-rate kind of play. I half-ignore the battles while I go on focusing on the grand plan. When I win, it's typically a situation where I basically won a half hour ago.

Which is totally different than the drama! the terror! of when I began playing. I could play like that, I suppose, deep in figuring out how to win each particular battle. And I'd enjoy it - but really I'd only start doing it if I were in an Age of Empires III class where I had to do it for class exercises for a grade. What I do naturally is more like Moltke's "brilliant and lazy" officer.

But I like the exciting kind of play! And I remember that one game session years later!

But that's not the way my mind naturally tends.

***

***

(Meanwhile I'm much surer that the lessons I'd learn from the exciting tactical kind of play would be... transferable. My strategic sense? Honed against a really stupid, predictable AI. After years of playing the computer, I figure if I ever tried to play a human being I'd just blink in confusion as I immediately got stabbed. For this reason I have absolutely no ego-pretensions about my strategy focus.) :-)

***

When I finish editing this book I am going to try a flotation tank, I swear.

***

A kind of cucumber I grew last year has disappeared! Or maybe we ordered our cucumber seeds too late. Satsuki Midori. Named after a Japanese actress. Never caught on commercially in the U.S. in the '60s because of the unusual Asian style and a short shelf life, but absolutely delicious in the home garden. And I just couldn't find the seeds.

I did find mentions that it was "very rare". Which makes me nervous. Very rare strains can still blurp out of sight and be lost. If I'd known it was very rare, I could have been growing it to save the seeds!

Dang. Gotta try to find it next year.

A very long time ago, when I was playing Age of Empires III and it was new to me, I... well, I've rarely ever tried fancy things with the troops. I usually play on the level of a brutal numbers game, and I sort of clumsily get my little soldiers to where they need to be.
But this one time, I was trying to be more clever. I moved my cavalry and my light infantry and my heavy infantry separately. Different formations.
And this game was one where I was eventually crushed. This was before I learned the brutal-numbers-game tricks that mean I usually win against a really dumb computer enemy.
But there was a moment in that game...

My triumphant attack on the enemy township had just been obliterated. The most dramatic obliteration I've ever seen. (Was it only back then that such extraordinary things happened in that game, back in the youth of the world?)
I'd been about to bring down the hammer. Secure in the sense that I had just wiped out the enemy's army and left it, for the moment, poor in defenses, I was marching my main force up the grassy rise toward the unseen place where I knew the enemy city was.
And at the top of the hill - I saw cannons roll into place. The first cannons I'd seen in that contest... and more of them at once than I'd seen ever. And they rolled into place in a way I'd never seen - they weren't in train, they were in a long line, shoulder to shoulder, all along the crest. I think there were thirteen of them.
And, as I saw this, a ridiculous flood of cavalry poured down the hill past them... and ringed my forces. There was a big red-ring-around-blue bullseye on the mini-map.
My balance of forces was such that I could have defeated the cavalry in itself, regardless... in less than thirty seconds. Maybe less than twenty.
Except at this moment it meant that I couldn't get at that long line of cannons - every one of which was, at that moment, sighting in...
I was like a bug in pine sap.
And then - in the blink of an eye or nearly so - the big red ring was empty.

So the enemy had just wiped out my grand army with virtually no losses... which brings me to the happy load of reinforcements that I had just dispatched from my town to head over to the enemy town, which should have been merrily burning by then.
A body of mixed reinforcements - nothing like the army it was intended to support - that was wholly inadequate to fend off the massive cavalry charge that I knew was headed toward them.
And they were too far along to get back behind my city walls in time. (I still used walls, then. I was not far enough along in tower-line theory yet.) They were going to be caught in the open by the enemy cavalry.
I had just a few seconds to scroll to them, and take stock...
And then the enemy cavalry swept in.

This is where I would love to be able to insert an exact account of brilliant generalship, but, if that's what it really was, I virtually missed it. I was so busy that I have no idea what I did.
With the "rock, paper, scissors" of the different kinds of troops whirling in my head, somehow I did this insane dance that kept pulling one block of troops, then another block of troops, then another block of troops out of the jaws of hell. Somehow I juggled that gigantic flood of cavalry at arms length, with nothing to juggle them with, all the way back, until I got the last of my people inside the defenses, and I don't think I lost five units. It made perfect intent sense in my head while I was doing it, and I'd never be able to do it again.
And then...

NAPOLEON GAVE ME A COMPLIMENT.

And I've never been able to remember the exact wording; I was just so surprised. It amounted to "that was a really nice job!"
Understand:
To my knowledge, the computerized enemy generals in Age of Empires III don't ever do that. They just either taunt you or say passive-aggressive sulky things. I've never heard anything like that again. Of course, the simplest explanation is that I've never played that well again, but I've never seen a reference to anyone else running into this either!
And how would the computer program know anyway?! The computer enemies in Age of Empires III play really crudely. At the hardest level they just start sending armies with more soldiers. They don't DO fancy-schmancy stuff. How would the program recognize fancy-schmancy stuff?
It makes me wonder. Were there originally more involved plans for the program? Did some programmer hide some extraordinary vestige in there, that spoke up?

To finish the story, after that point I never got the chance to leave my town in force again, beyond desperate "firefighting" sallies. I lost the game through a series of hurried rebuildings of my defenses after warding off cannon-heavy attacks, until the time I didn't quite make it and the enemy poured in. It was a classic early-Alex defeat.
But that compliment has stuck with me. It felt really good... and it was really strange.
I don't suppose I'll ever have an answer.

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Flugendorf

September 2018

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Page Summary

On Hayabusa, Hayabusa 2, and the people who would do such things
Garden sales and garden smiles
INTEREST IN THE TIME OF THE ORANGE-COIFFED BLUNTSKULL
Words written over on Facebook about Ta-Nehisi Coates
Okay, briefly money was nice.
An actual good Quora question and good Quora answer
Oh, Good Grief, I Found My Topic
Gwen, alive
The voices in the library
Head with a hole
The dream log for 2017
The Law of Undulation
Satsuki Midori and bier
Once Upon A Time In Fake New England

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