Jupiter Has Fallen

Tonight we mourn the passing of Jupiter the Hamster.

The wheel is still. 

It fell upon my fatherly duties to enshrine the tiny furry body, curled as if asleep among his stores of food in his burrow, in a sarcophagus of cardboard along with a supply of his favorite seeds.

We committed the vessel tearfully to the earth, along the treeline in a place in view of the rising sun.

Jupiter brought joy to our whole family in the short time he was here.  He was much loved, and he will be greatly missed. 

Thoughts and Prayers

Typically I'm not a church goer.  I have nothing specifically against it, although I did for a while rage against it and organized religion in general during periods of my youth, in the way that only young people can needlessly rage against things.  I've since grown out of that, but still the whole thing doesn't resonate with me the way it seems to resonate elsewhere.

I'm fine with that.  I have my own set of things that I believe in, and my own understanding of what's going on with existence that makes sense to me, but that's not the point here.

My wife and I have a wonderful daughter who is now nine and curious about all things in the way that both delights and frightens me; the former in that it is so much fun to experience the world again through fresh eyes, and the latter in that much of what I know she'll experience is horrible and disappointing.  This can't be helped, of course.

My wife grew up with church in a way that I didn't, and it is important to her that our daughter learn about it.  We had a few awkward conversations about this, revolving primarily around my unwillingness to tell our daughter that what she learns in church is absolutely true, given that I don't tend to believe it myself.  I do however agree that it would be ridiculous of me to tell her that it isn't true, given that what the hell do I know.  So the two of them go, and occasionally I go too in an attempt to be supportive.

If I were really adamant about this approach to learning, I would take her to every church and really get the full picture.  I'd have to include all the various denominations of every faith though.  I don't even know what they are, only that there are a lot.  Let's just say that I already feel like I'm being a responsible dad for going to just the one church, so I'll ask that you cut me some slack on this.

So we go sometimes.  I never received first communion, so I have to awkwardly sit alone in the pews while the rest of the congregation lines up for that.  That sucks and feels a bit judgy, but maybe I'm just projecting that.  I did receive communion several times at various intervals throughout my life before learning that I wasn't allowed to.  So I screwed that up, but whaddyagonnado.

Anyway.

 I say all that to say this.

At one point the little old man up front said "Let us pray" and everybody stood up, so I stood up too.  Everybody bowed their heads and so did I, but I peeked around a little.  Some people held their hands out to the sides as if to hold hands with invisible people nearby.  Some people who had non-invisible people nearby held hands with those people. 

Together we prayed that God would look after a variety of folks who need looking after.  The guy tried to cover all the bases, the sick, the lonely, the mentally ill, those effected by war, etc. etc.

Anyway, I had my head down and was listening to the guy ask God to help out all these various groups of people, and I had an epiphany moment.  Maybe it's something that has been obvious to a lot of people this whole time, but it wasn't obvious to me until that moment.

You might say that having such a moment while in a church is evidence of God talking directly to me, or working through me, or whatever.  You might say that that's what this blog entry really is. 

You might not say that, I don't know.

What suddenly made sense to me is that praying for these things doesn't cause God to show up and fix them.  It's not God who shows up and cares for sick people, it's people.  People are who can start or stop wars, people are who can visit the lonely, bring care and comfort to others, and all that.  God isn't going to look after anything.  Either we do it, or nobody does.

Essentially I felt as though all the people praying around me were doing it wrong.

Here again I'll admit that it's entirely possible that I've just been stupid about this the entire time and that everyone but me has understood this, and weren't doing it wrong at all.  Maybe not though.

When you pray for something, it's not so much calling out to some higher power to come and fix your problems; it's calling out to your own power to fix them.  It's calling your own consciousness to focus on that problem and to do something about it.  It's drawing your attention to it, and if you're praying collectively it's drawing a collective consciousness to it.

Asking God to fix things and then expecting that they'll be fixed is  a bit of a cop-out from having to do them yourself.  That's not the point of prayer at all.  It doesn't even make sense to think about it that way, now that I consider it.  It's not like all these people are suffering out there, and God is somewhere doing nothing and just waiting for a room full of mumbling white people in New York to ask for intervention before swinging in on a vine and fixing everything.

We're it.  We're him.  He's us.   

So it's one thing to decide you're going to help someone and then physically go and do it.  The message from every church I've ever been in has included that sort of overarching theme, that you should go forth and be a do-gooder.  This is true of lots of religions, not just Christianity or Judaism or Islam or Taoism or Hinduism or whatever, they all (in my experience) seem to have a common thread of basic do-goodery embedded in them.  It's one thing to walk yourself to a place where there are people who need help, and to help them.  .

It's another thing to consider that we can effect change remotely, and to endeavor to do that.

There are lots of ways that people throughout history have described humanity's ability to effect change from a distance, including prayer, astral projection, positive vibes, you name it.  To me it seems like evidence of a universal interconnection of all things.

It begs the question:  Can focusing on something and drawing positive consciousness towards it can effect a change, despite great distance? 

Clearly we already collectively believe that it can, which is why why people send hugs, good vibrations, thoughts, prayers, etc.  We must believe that we're able to make a difference just by thinking about these things.   

With that in mind, here's something specific to think about:  How many school shootings have happened in the U.S. in the last few years?  What happens every single time?  Thoughts and prayers go out to the families and friends, to those who were killed or injured, an outpouring of love and support from the greater community as it becomes aware.  This outpouring diminishes after a while, until the next time it happens.  Then we get a whole fresh outpouring of prayers and hugs and thoughts.

What about this:  If we can in fact effect change from a distance with this or that variety of projected consciousness,  maybe right now is the time for those thoughts and prayers, and maybe we should aim them at the troubled individuals who have not yet followed through.  Right now, they're the ones who need it. 

We can't physically intervene, as we can't know who or where these tormented people are.

But we can be proactive instead of reactive.  This epidemic of school shootings is a heartrendingly frustrating problem to try to solve.  The best we can seem to come up with is to try to put obstacles in the way of those who would perpetuate these atrocities.

That leaves us with thoughts and prayers.

If we can agree that there is such a thing as universal interconnection that transcends distance and physicality,  however we choose to go about establishing that connection, isn't it worth a try?

And what's the message we should try to send?  Any thoughts on that?

Music

Part 1

Wolfgang sat motionlessly in front of his piano.  A barely discernible draft of air tickled the single dancing flame of a small oil lantern nearby, causing the shadows to slip across the worn hardwood floors and dance across the walls and high ceiling of his home in silent pendulum against the light.  Outside, the darkness permeated everything but the small globes of light from the lamp posts which kept their quiet vigil over the empty streets of Vienna.  Even more invasive than the darkness was the absolute silence which crept into even the tiniest corners of the city and took hold, daring anything to disturb it.  Nothing moved. 

At last, the hunched figure began to show signs of life.  His eyes opened, and he flexed his hand before lifting a brimming wine glass to his lips and taking a long draught.  Turning, he reached to a small table and set the glass down.  It made a small thump as it touched the table and he cringed ever so slightly at the sound.  He turned back to the piano and ran his hands carefully and slowly over the keys.  He felt the familiar touch of ivory beneath his fingertips, felt them welcome his caress.  For a long moment he sat in silence.  Then he began to play. 

The music rippled gently through the night air, making its way casually through the room, parting the awed silence as a returning hero through an adoring throng, slipping easily through thin panes of window glass and poorly insulated walls and out into the world.  Sleeping creatures in dark alleys lifted their heads and perked their ears to better witness the unexpected parade, as each note made its grand arrival, then stepped delicately back into its carriage and rolled away into the darkness. 

Two walls away, Emma Bardeau stirred in her bed.  She had been trying to fall asleep for nearly an hour but had been unable to slow the endless flow of thoughts in her head enough to do it.  The whirlwind of images had just begun to dissolve themselves into the surreal experiences of dreams when a small part of her suddenly realized that the music she heard wasn’t coming from inside her head.  The gently rising and falling melody that embraced her dreams and massaged away her worries was coming from outside the confines of her small but tidy room.  So rare and so welcome was the occasion to hear it, it was all she could do to bring herself back to the waking world, determined not to let so much as a moment of the music go unheard. 

Emma nudged the sleeping figure at her side. 

“George!” 

George, already invested in his own adventures, stirred noncommittally in his sleep. 

“Wake up George, he’s playing again!” 

“Hmm?”  George turned his head was suddenly awake. 
“Oh....” 

The pair lay quietly together in the bed, letting the gentle waves of music lap at the shores of their consciousness long into the night, until at last they allowed themselves to slip beneath it, into the most deep and restful sleep either of them had enjoyed in a long, long time. 

Part 2

Two hundred and twenty years or so later, on the other side of the Earth, I make my way carefully up the lightly creaking stairs to my room.  A fresh cup of coffee (made with a little Irish cream) threatens to overflow with each step and I keep careful control of it as I make my way to the chair and sit down.  I press a key on the keyboard and a screen flares to life, casting a steady white glow into the room.  For a while, I sit motionlessly at my desk, staring vacantly at it.  The constant hum from the fans inside my computer tower has become a part of my night, and I barely notice it.  The carpeted floors and textured paint in my small apartment are excellent noise dampeners; I can’t even make out the sound of the humidifier in the next room, humming its own hum in the dull red rhythmic pulse of the two blinking dots on the alarm clock.   Another clock in the corner of my screen reads 3:12 AM. 

With one hand, I bring the coffee cup to my lips and take a long pull.  With my other, I manipulate the small wireless optical mouse smoothly across the frayed blue mouse pad until the arrow on the screen hovers expectantly over the appropriate place.  Click click.  With a few more barely perceptible motions of my wrist, I highlight a selection on the screen.  This I drag and drop into a waiting playlist portion of my media player program.  I check the volume of my speakers, ensure I haven’t left the sound muted, double check that the green plug is in the green receptacle and put on a set of headphones.  For a second I wonder what I want to listen to. 

“Today,” I think to myself, “I’ll let fate decide.” 

I click the mouse again, this time instructing the program to play all 6000 or so songs in random order.  I never know what I’m going to get next, so each time I go through this ritual I have the opportunity to be surprised.  But I’m not surprised tonight.  Tonight a familiar beat and a familiar voice pumps its familiar melody into my ears, drowning out even the hum of the fans.  I’ve heard it before. 

I’ve heard them all before.  Music is a constant presence in my life.  The alarm clock played music to wake me up this morning.  I listened to reedy sounding music coming from the bathroom, squeaking from the waterproof shower radio and tickling my eardrums as I lay stubbornly in bed while my fiancée Jen took her morning shower.  I heard it coming up the stairs from the TV as she made her breakfast, tuned to one of the hundreds of music channels available through the cable box.  I listened to it in my jeep as I went to class.  Everywhere portable media players and stereos blast music into my head until I know all of the words to every song. 

Fast forward.  Fast forward.  No... Click... heard it... click... heard it... click... oh what’s this?  I pause, and close my eyes.  A smile creeps onto my face as I let my consciousness become flooded with the music.  I sit back in my chair with my coffee and glance at the name of the artist whose music had softly struck my mind into peaceful contemplation and tucked the rest of the night firmly out of sight.  The name scrolls across the screen and I nod my head unconsciously when I see it.  Wolfgang... Amadeus... Mozart.  I can almost see him. 

Superman

Just thinking out loud here, or whatever the online equivalent of out loud is with the written word, and by written of course I mean typed, and by typed I mean keyboarded or whatever the hell this process is called.

Superman.  He's the perfect specimen of a dude, right?  All chiseled and square-jawed and whatnot.  Here's the thing though:  Thanks to some largely glossed-over scientific reason stemming from being from a different planet and somehow drawing power from our sun, Superman is really strong.  Not like dude-can-pull-a-car-two-city-blocks-just-by-doing-kegels strong, I mean bullets-bounce-off-his-frikkin-eyeballs-and-shit strong.

Bear with me.

Try to imagine a gym where the weights are such that Superman struggles to lift them.

I find it hard to imagine, because I've seen him frost-breath a lake and then casually lift the several-acre sheet of ice and drop it on a burning chemical laboratory before it 'splodes all up in humanity's business and we go all Ark of the Covenant Nazi melty-face.

Several-acre sheets of ice are, presumably, heavy as shit.  Ol' Muscles McSmallville doesn't break a sweat.  That's just one example of many.

Here's my point:  Muscles don't get bigger if you don't challenge them, right?  That's why you gotta lift heavy things in order to build your muscles, or so I've been lead to believe.  You don't see much footage of the little Kent boy taking lessons on fitness and nutrition, much less on how to not wear undies over your tights, and you sure don't see him at the gym juggling 45 lb weights as if they were 35 lb weights and he was a slightly less rugged version of himself.

So how did he get all ripped and studly?  Even those Mr. Incredible train-car workouts would be as easy as playing inter-continental beer-pong with an inexplicably Nigerian version of the incredible Hulk using Kevlar replicas of Lou Ferrignos testicles instead of ping pong balls.

Wouldn't Superman, for lack of a challenging workout-regimen, be all noodley-armed and concave-chested like a parody of an 80's basement-nerd with a handful of 5.5" floppies?  Maybe a super-efficient vegan Superman diet is the explanation for the super-metabolism which makes him naturally Schwarzenegger-in-his-prime-esque without ever tossing back a banana and steroid protein shake or posting Facebook videos of himself doing jazzercise dance-workouts in his living-room in order to inspire his friends.

Admittedly, there's a lot of Superman footage we've never seen, like him butt-clenching a thunder wedgie right out of existence, and then gas-station-burrito-farting a ripe old fissure in his not-so-super tighty whities.  We never see him eyeball-lasering two dozen eggs over-medium from a hundred yards away for his post-workout snack, or haggling with Ace Hardware employees over the price of their industrial-strength vice-grips so he can tweeze his super-unibrow.  Nobody mentions the time he popped a zit and dented a cast iron tea kettle in a revolutionary war museum three blocks away.

Maybe it's best that we don't think about these things.

Maybe it's best not to consider that baby Clark's super-tinkles could shred an up-armored Humvee through seven layers of Martha Kent's eco-friendly washable cloth diapers, and that his teenage wet-dreams spawned a flurry of otherwise-unexplained immaculate conceptions in Eastern Sri-Lanka and the surrounding area.

Maybe.

The "Truth" about HAARP and Human Involvement in Cloud Formation

Herein I address two questions about meteorological phenomena, which are:  "How do you explain these clouds?" and "Is this weather due to HAARP?"  I offer four possible answers to the former, and one somewhat longer (and equally possible) answer to the latter.  

How do you explain these clouds?

1:  The clouds are being made in an attempt to curb the (reasonably well-documented) dwindling population of Italian honey bees.  Scientific studies show that the bees are most comfortable when not exposed to direct sunlight, so the clouds are made so as to provide them shade.  As an added bonus (and this was discovered after the fact), the honey produced by shaded vs exposed bees is stronger in its capability to curb the onset of seasonal allergies in children 11 and under.  An absence of the shade-clouds is usually the result of successful corporate lobbying by one of two major pharmaceutical companies whose financial stability is threatened by the idea of an allergy-free population. 

2:  Due to the fact that its axial rotation is prone to a slight wobble, the fluid resistance of the earth’s liquid iron core affects subtle changes in the orientation of the lines of magnetic flux between the North and South poles.  This phenomenon induces variations in Earth’s Coriolis force, which translates into uniquely striated areas of atmospheric pressure over a long enough timeline.  Consequently,  it results in some interesting cloud formations. 

3:  It is well known that the tides are the result of lunar gravitational influence.  Less widely understood is the moon’s effect on moisture particles in the atmosphere.  It was, until recently, difficult to observe gravitational effects on gaseous substances at great distances.  Now, thanks to tremendous advances in sensing equipment and rigorous adherence to the scientific method, lunar influence can now be factored into what was previously a terrestrial, and consequently somewhat limited, meteorological mindset.  The moon has been shown to cause gravitational acceleration on atmospheric molecules.  The clouds visible today are the direct result of that influence. 

4:  These clouds the result of long-term unintentional human interference, namely pet owners.  One of the key ingredients in pet shampoo is anti-fungal chlorhexidine.  This chemical, when applied in dense enough population samples, is injected into the air-stream attached to dander.  Once it mixes with the chlorofluorocarbons left over from over-use of Aqua Net in the 80s (which still continue to wreak havoc on the Antarctic ozone, causing an up-spike in cases of penguin sunburn and spurring the birth of the penguin-specific sunblock industry), it bonds into a new substance called chloroflourochlorhexcarbonidine, which acts as a condensing agent and prevents natural dissipation of water vapor.

Is this weather due to HAARP?

     Yes, although the effect is indirect and unintentional despite some of the more popular conspiratorial accusations made by a legion of what amounts to the armchair quarterbacks of meteorological science, whose basic internet savvy is, in a word, questionable.  What is actually happening is that the influence of HAARP-induced changes in the ionosphere are periodically mistaken for intercontinental ballistic missile launch signatures by long range missile defense radar systems in eastern Yakutsk. 

     Somewhat problematically, these false alarms trigger automatic responses of world-ending nuclear violence in the form of retaliatory ICBM launches.  These of course must be intercepted, and the most effective method in use to-date is the deployment of high powered lasers fired from geosynchronous satellites put in place during the second red scare in the 1950s.  The lasers burn the particles in the upper atmosphere over great distances, creating long pockets of high temperature air.  Depending on the wind speed and direction, these thermal disturbances can either dissipate or converge, trapping moisture and creating unnatural-looking clouds and nonseasonal weather. 

     Interestingly, the acronym “HAARP” (High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program) was constructed so that it would be reminiscent of the music of the angels which, as the gaze of scientific advancement turned heavenward, was deemed apropos.  It was a marked improvement over the name originally posited by the scientific community, which was Solar-Oriented Unilateral Perspective on Continental Auroral Nuances, or “SOUPCAN”. 

Know this:  No research whatsoever backs up any of my claims.