Josh Groban's Growth Spurt

You don't know how to talk to people.--nothing the dowager hasn't heard before

My readers may appreciably take comfort in the fact that I have very little formal training in music, as cousin Pamela and I swap tunes as a form of moral support, to discover on my own that I know You Raise Me Up through exposure on commercial radio, and it is this Josh Groban, pitted unequivocally against Brian Greene, and by extension, Feynman:

"It doesn't seem to me that this fantastically marvelous universe...can merely be a stage so that God can watch human beings struggle for good and evil."--Richard Feynman, born 100 years ago today. pic.twitter.com/jBGq68ysWp

— Brian Greene (@bgreene) May 12, 2018

whose atheism Greene is highlighting, who wins the argument. No one can listen to Groban's trembling baritone and not be reminded of our transcendental merger with aspiration, regardless of your faith, or lack thereof. The singer might be a telescopic savant, little knowing that one of my tweets to him, for miserable Pamela's sake, was tongue in cheek, and the public face of popular physics may understand genius enough to distill it to rogues such as I, but listen to Josh, then listen to Greene, and a pathway may be found where neither personality is necessarily in dialectical opposition to the other. Musical compositions are as carefully coordinated as the Hubble telescope, in certain respects, so God may be absent and present just the same, whether in a spiritual or material worldview, as I stray further and further afield into this woman's land mines, with conscious alarm telling me to withdraw while I can, and don't, carrying this woman's pain atop of mine. I owe her mother-in-law as my father's sister, certain loyalties, while neither woman does much to give disability pride a good name, with their respective conditions forming a cesspool of self-pity, with brassy Philadelphia sparks as we wither. I, who am suicidally depressed but for my resilience against it, begin to fear my cousin's wife may kill herself, as she insulates her failing body in recrimination. I, who had a horrific medical life, see Pam's as worse, aside from the fact that sticking my nose in it, as Richard the elder would remind me, supporting Pam is just outside an immediate family concern, while for once, the paraprofessional holding himself off me, just, may find me nodding off in the machine, trying to find the space to work between his scent, and Pam's grip on me as a liferaft, to still work as a writer, taking too much of a toll. He took my hand yesterday, seized it, as no man has ever done, to indicate effect, possession? And I wonder what the hell we're doing, me, maybe 24 months off from returning to medical institutional fodder, and this former factory food processor. Oh, I've had relatively tepid sex with able-bodied men like him, wanted to see if he would be any different, and instead, we're torturing each other in this bizarre ritual where he sees me as woman enough, but it is a sad commentary that a woman of my age has to have grown so old to experience desire conjoined to such care, forging ourselves against each other. No mobile man ever seized my hand like that. It kicked me in the skull like a gulf ball, and in part led to this all nighter, while Pam and I bleached the skeleton in the closet, vibrating with such tenacious despair.

Carbon Dating

When I contend with Brian Greene and other physicists on Twitter, effeminate mind altering geeks as they are, I must come off as a blockhead. I cannot compete with them in the mathematical empiricism which illustrates the laws of nature as necessarily fixed, so why do it then? Before giving a direct answer, it may surprise viewers to learn I once did amazingly well in algebra and Euclidian geometry, and even got an A on my chemistry final dragging my sister bitch on a leash. My acumen sharpened or fogged primarily due to despair. In my home districts, I thrived. Outside of them my motivation struggled without the proper covalent bonds, but I never quite lost interest in how Einstein and those who made nuclear war possible revolutionized astronomy. I did not realize, or had serious memory lapses against what I was taught, that stars start out as frozen gas that clumps together, takes 10m to ignite or fail, accordingly, and that our solar system won the lottery with long odds, especially since brown dwarfs are popular failures which do not result in fusion, in theory. Space generates its own dynamism over extraordinarily lengthy periods through vibration, end of story. And yet, theoretical physics borders on tacky space opera in places. Matter may ultimately be a hologram. Time may be an illusion. Dark energy. Anti-matter. Four forces, weak and strong, magnetism. Are we absolutely certain we aren’t attempting to decode god? We cannot really say all that much about our self-awareness, let alone why the particles which configure life are so different from those which configure uranium, or why disease and age and so many other things generate agony, against which pleasure is fleeting. We know joy when we feel it too, but most of life processes itself irrespective of human naval gazing, which is why androids and android sex and zombies and singularities worry our collective social dynamics. I do not think the laws of nature recreates humanity in alternate universes as neatly as the equations of impaction lend themselves to in popular science. This is where my “yes but,” comes in, even if I risk being a Neanderthal, like Ron Perlman in Hand of God. Perlman is always reprising himself as a caveman, and his canceled series challenges materialism in exactly the same way I feel the need to challenge what epistemology gains through radio waves and optics. The pilot episode reveals a conspiracy through hallucinogenic delusion which, just possibly, might be divine revelation coming at a necessary price. Amazon canceled it, so we’ll never know, as its second season seems to meander in corporate evil. The actor who plays Keith (Dillahunt?) was certainly made up to look like a warrior from Judges, conquering Canaan. Going against the grain of established critics, there are things I’ve enjoyed viewing here, if only to observe, in context, why the West Coast is as fucked up as upstate New York.

My mother’s sister telephoned, since I have stopped using Facebook. We ignored my abominable attitude, and the prospect of moving into grandmother’s nursing home went in one ear, as the saying goes. Mary really thinks she is doing the right thing, oblivious to the fact that my sentience is still vital. Marie, the other aunt, accused me of whining, thus generating the enthusiasm of her former married relation, and then hung up. I have my moments, but Marie is wearying me with this constant punishment, as both she and my father contributed to this gradated wasting of my strength. A generic ten year old Quantum extended my strength, and when it blew on 10/02, I didn’t assume I’d be dead in 6 months. Unless I can move the absolute zero of Satan’s forbidding glacial majesty, exchange power chairs, relearn how to maneuver myself to restore some semblance of self-determination, it is possible, without exaggeration. The disposable underwear, the loss of my fish, coffee, toilet usage, the toll may now be too much. Trudy Richardson may not have defeated me with her illegal tactics, but as I’ve written, the stocky lupus African achieved quite a lot with her conniving, linear mindset. I have no love lost over these murders. First I thought one thing, and then said it’s a black problem, and decided not to ripple Twitter’s ions. I am not Milo, quite, but if the handwriting is on the wall, things might get more interesting still, in my quest, if not for grace, then? 

Parasomnia

"His end was not pacific."
                              --Vladimir Nabokov, The Luzhin Defense

The CI episode Consumed is another impairment hinge exploited for nefarious ends, and Wolf's writers, like the Russians, may be onto something in the suggestion of somnambulance as a kind of mass hysteria of manipulating the dolts, our strings being pulled. When my father placed me in Home of the Merciful Savior, and it was an actual institution in my day, and not the classroom shown here, I was abused by the nigger nannies then (did I shock you, using racial slurs when I know better, tsk, you have a shameless tongue spastic!) just I have been under almost constant harassment by them under my current landlord, and, nearing the end of my life, I am raising my voice for a less regimented existence too late. Lungs going, arteriosclerosis advancing, activists like Cassie James-Holdsworth are making things better for the next generation or not, according to one's point of view, but this offers me little consolation. She will be dead soon, as will Linda, and myself, and we simply cannot get it right. The medically fragile are angels, people like myself are demonized, and to really be matriculated, we have to be super human. If Brian Greene and his theoretic allies are right about the multiverse, granting his analogies give me a fucking headache, then the turmoil of cognitively advanced species essentially replicates forever. It is also a convenient rationale for why so many human civilizations conceive of an afterlife.