Micah 1:8

Therefore I will wail and howl, I will go stripped and naked: I will make a wailing like the dragons, and mourning as the owls.

(KJB)

I've always liked this bible quote because it sounds like something said at the start of a great party.   People asure me I take it out of context.  I've read it in context and do not remember anything particularly interesting about the context.  I submit therefore that I do not take it from context; that I liberate it willingly from the confines of context.  freed thusly it speaks more of the awesomeness of life.

 I ran along the beach last week and felt like my breath, labored and raw as running makes it, was the whistling of mythical beasts.  How I would like to hear them wail and howl at the sky.  Dogs cry the moon to earth and taunt the tuneless crooner in the same voice.

I ran into several things that would make great starts for a metephorical discusion. two of them:

1) I found a dead possum.  It was laid beside the road, half under a bush.  On top of it were laid some bunches of rough yellow flowers.  Each bunch was the size a child's hand could gather.

2)  I developed a blister on my insole while running.  In order to run the next day I put a "medicated" bandaid on the blister.  The medication fused with the raw blistered skin ripping it off and leaving a oozing sore when it was removed.

Two things happened that pleased me to the point of giggles.

1) Someone uploaded an old poem of mine into wikipedia and I found it quite by accident.

2) I moved some emotional detritus from a corner of my mind and found a dear friend.

Some people say that to be an atheist is to pull yourself from the flow.  Some would demand that feelings are logic-ed away in the same breath that dispels an awkward god.

We are made of the stuff of stars and we shine.  Our lives that create love are made of the stuff and we move like massless particles.

I looked for the green flash again.  I have yet to convincingly see it.  However, in looking, I have seen things like this:

Yes Santa there is no snow

Every-time I even think about southern California I get a feeling of crushing loneliness.

I don't have a good reason for this. 

My memories of the place are filled with all night conversations
and coffee jitters till dawn. 
Of uncompromising love
and a strange season-less beauty. 
Of salt and sand and sunburns and scents.

When I landed for my week here it was raining.  The 405 and 101 were moving at about 15MPH and the trip to Oxnard took hours.  The world beyond my tunnel of vision and the taillights of the car in front of me was gone.  I was alone, surrounded by people in cars.  What better way to re-connect with the feelings of alone and unwanted and unloved and other un-ness.  It is easy to hate LA and its environs.  It gives a name and substance to the source of my feelings, however inaccurate the identification is. 

One thing about knowing the plans for the future is that I can make coincidental plans.  This time in soCal I was going to make things different.  This time I had a plan. 

Like many of my plans most of it fell through.  First I tried to contact old frineds from LB but those I could find had moved and others I could not find or could not meet me half way (it is a really long way from south Orange County to Ventura).  I also tried contacting a couple of friends who had moved to LA.  Of course contacting people you have not spoken to in 20+ years is more of an affront than a pleasant surprise. 

The next phase was to convert the landscape into a more personal terrain.  If you have ever driven in LA you know that the world changes when you leave the freeways.  Locally they call the non-freeway streets "surface streets" as if you are coming in from an extra-planetary orbit when you exit onto them.    My plan was not to just leave the freeways and tool around on planet LA but to come into intimate contact with the planet's surface.  I was going to do this by running, specifically a race, along the streets of an unfamiliar city. 

The race that co-incided with my schedule was the "Santa to the Sea" half marathon. 

To me, as an atheist, there is something intriguingly sublime about the Santa concept.  The concept is steeped in the terminology of belief.  People even sport "I believe" buttons at this time of year.  There are long-winded stories and movies and songs about believing in Santa.  But even the people who most fervently identify with the believe in Santa verbiage in no way actually believe in Santa.  I think this is cool.  I also think it is a subtle way that society exposes how people can express belief in something like a theist god without believing at all.

At the last minute I reconsidered running in the VFF and used my "regular" shoes.  The race went very well.  I finished in the top 90% and ran a PR.  This 68 year old man with a T-shirt that said "100 marathon club" passed me in the last mile.  I would STRONGLY recommend taking up running if you do not now, especially if you are significantly slower than I am.

The ultimate purpose, that of emotional grounding, was exceptionally well achieved.  There are elements of being human that can be manipulated to make life more enjoyable.  I have often looked at things and asked myself "what is really going on here (WIRGOH pronounced and sometimes spelled WeirGo or WierdGo)"?  Luckily I have not succumb to the engineering disease, but I do bear scars from it.

In the past few years I have more aggressively applied the WierdGo principal to life.  Many times this principle works better for life issues than for things.

Period three implies chaos

Today I went into AOD's school and did a short presentation on Chaos. I've always liked chaos as a concept.

Chaos passes through the times in life where the unstable mixture of frustration and confusion and rage have been ignited by a spark of love. The devastation left by this conflagration leaves tiny fragments of life, each of which bears a similarity to the whole. The deeper you look the greater the number of similar patterns emerge. As you zoom out to try and take in the whole the patterns fit together in a jumbled superpatern with familiar resemblance to each piece. Because the fragments fit together it is not as if the world has broken; more like a veil has been removed and detail beyond the powers of human resolution are revealed.

Of course in going in to talk to AOD's advanced Jr. high math-class I take a slightly less maudlin approach to the subject. I also wanted to avoid the use of complex numbers. So I found a really cool little program and rewrote it cludgily (word?) to run on Linux and printed up a giant multi-page Mandelbrot poster. I am too embarrassed of my own code to post it, but here is a link to the original coder. Perhaps I'll post a picture of the poster if I go back to school before it gets destroyed. Something about being in a Jr. High at all that makes my skin crawl. All I really know about Jr. High is how to engage in trouble so profound the very mental state of the delinquents is eroded. Often we must not teach from our own experiences, but instead from the things we read in books.

The Mandelbrot set is such an easy concept considering it is infinity complex. The way I presented it was by 1^st going over the Koch curve, Menger sponge, a few nature fractals and then the logistic equation. I then presented the following equations:

Which I described as iterative functions. I presented the output generated by iterating from a couple of closely spaced points (carefully chosen so one of them was in the Mandelbrot set and the other was outside). The picture looked like this:

I explained that I would put a black dot where the starting point of the spiraling-in iterative path began. “This black dot” I said “is IN the Mandelbrot set”.

I had this projected on the wall, so instead of going into the Pythagorean distance formula to determine the deviation from the starting point I picked up a meter stick and began to measure the distances right on the wall. This created a dramatic pause, filled only with mad gesticulations by a middle aged man. Then I exhaled the statement “when these measurements exceed two we count the number of iterations it took to get here”. I turned to the audience and changed the slide to a spectral rainbow with a scale of integers beside it. “I then look up the number of iterations on this arbitrary color scale and color in the dot.”

“The”

I paused

“result”

I changed the slide.

“of filling in all the dots outside the Mandelbrot set on the Cartesian coordinate system is this”

“...and if we zoom in here”

I pointed to a small box on the slide

“we get this”

and I put up this slide.

“And if we zoom again we get this.”

“Again and this”

“and this”

“again”

“again...”

I thought it went over OK. Perhaps I get a little to theatrical for a third period Jr. High math-class. Of course “period three implies chaos”.