Late Boomer's Den

  • It’s Halloween. Let’s listen to some scary songs

    Nigel says Happy Halloween

    I’ve loved Halloween ever since I can remember. I think I enjoy it even more than Christmas. There’s something about the creativity and imagination it inspires. I also get a kick out of that little chill that comes from being scared of something you don’t really have to be afraid of. It’s cathartic.

    Bauhaus – Hollow Hills

    Thinking back on Halloween makes me feel like a kid again, when I guessed the number of pumpkin seeds in a jar at school and won the jack-o-lantern, went trick-or-treating dressed as a pirate, came home and ate candied apples, went through the haunted house and felt the dead man’s eyes and guts (grapes and macaroni).

    Plastic vampire teeth and those little wax harmonicas that used to drive my dad batty. Sitting in the dark with my best friend and a flashlight, telling ghost stories.

    Roky Erickson – Creature With the Atom Brain

    Now that I’ve grown up it isn’t quite the same. I don’t dress up for Halloween the way I did as a kid. My wife went to a Halloween party the other night dressed as a princess. I wore a T-shirt that looks like there’s a frog inside, trying to get out. I think that confuses the fairy tale a little, but nobody noticed.

    I mainly just get in the mood by playing really cool scary songs and there’s a lot to choose from It seems to bring out the best in so many musicians.

    Here’s a YouTube playlist of stuff I like to listen to on Halloween, things I really like. No “Monster Mash” here. I like things a little darker.

    Halloween Playlist

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  • I’m not Morpheus

    Here’s a puzzle to think about before you go to sleep tonight. Who are you, who experiences dreams? And who are you, who WRITES dreams? Who’s in charge of your inner world when you’re asleep?

    I had a dream the other night that has me pondering those questions.

    I was talking to a group of people and one of them said, “Did you know that you’re God?”

    “No I’m not,” I said, because I didn’t believe it and the idea made me uncomfortable.

    But then I began to wonder, was I God to these people? Where did they come from? It was my dream wasn’t it? At that point I was in a lucid dream, on a knife’s edge between sleep and the waking world.

    I thought, “reality is emanating from me.” I free-associated a few important-sounding but meaningless phrases. “Shocking blue paisley.” “Reality is in superposition.” “The structure of the world is the skeleton of the dream.” “Geometry geography.” “Perspective and personality.”

    I remembered a previous lucid dream where I was in the kitchen of my childhood home looking at a scarab and noticed ice cubes in the toaster, letting me know I was free to walk around a bit.

    I thought, there’s proof. I’m not God even in my dreams, because even in a lucid dream, where I’m free to walk around, I still don’t make the environment. It would not occur to me to put ice cubes in the toaster.

    Oh and, after a little Googling, it seems that my dream people are courtesy of Morpheus and the ice cubes in the toaster were apparently Phantasos‘ idea.

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  • Where is my mind?

    Pixies – Where Is My Mind?

    Where are you? I mean, you as in your mind. I feel like I’m about in the center of my head most of the time. I understand some people feel their consciousness in their chest.

    Once on an edible I felt like I was floating around 12 inches above my right shoulder. Weird sensation. I wondered if I could fly to the corner store and back, but I was afraid I wouldn’t let me back in.

    That phenomenon, along with Carl Jung’s theory of shadow projection have got me thinking about the nature of the mind. Are we all body or is part of us spirit? I know that question bugs everyone, even atheists. I think it’s both.

    My current model: the brain is an extremely complex projector and consciousness is its self-aware projection. Virtual reality that thinks and interacts with itself.

    Light and noise come into your eyeballs and ear holes, they get interpreted, you project your meaning on your best guess at reality. The better you are at interpreting, the closer to the real thing you get.

    And some way or another, the brain projects something like a self onto a space: in your head, your chest, or in rare cases, over your left shoulder.

    I don’t believe we’re in a computer simulation, but I do believe we live in that form of virtual reality. Everyone sees a slightly different Pokemon. I’ve been an atheist for a long time at this point, but I’m trying to decide how you couldn’t call my model spiritual.

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  • Just a little rant about Reality TV

    It just occurred to me that Reality TV doesn’t get enough credit for its role in destroying civilization. It doesn’t affect my life in any major way. I watch streaming services or find entertainment on YouTube. It’s like bad pop – easily avoidable.

    But I really do think it’s hurt our society. I wish I could talk to David Foster Wallace about it he saw the danger of entertainment addiction before anybody.

    I feel like Reality TV gave us all the idea we ought to care what other people thought about us by making stars out of regular folks. People who work in show biz know pretending to be who you’re not can make you crazy.

    Now we do it on social media all day long and no surprise, we’re all nuts.

    I’m not sure when I first became aware of Reality TV as a concept. Probably with The Real World on MTV my last two years of college, ’88 and ’89 I think. I remember liking Jon. I just thought it was another type of game show.

    The craze for these shows started when I wasn’t paying attention. I was a busy reporter and too busy for much TV. I mostly had cable when I had it because I couldn’t have it when I was a kid. Missed the coolest MTV years.

    Reality TV slowly started to creep into my awareness. I heard it was proliferating because it was cheap to make. I started to notice a few. I started watching junk TV to kill time when I got off work.

    I was mesmerized for a while. My guilty pleasures were world’s biggest explosion videos and car chases. I was like, run bad guy! Make ’em work for it! I could feel my IQ dropping, but I could go on like that for hours.

    Before long Reality TV just became what TV was. I didn’t really mind. They were easy entertainment. It didn’t matter if you missed episodes I watched Ice Road Truckers, Orange County Choppers, The Deadliest Catch.

    If I knew the narratives and personalities were fake, but I wouldn’t have said wrong. It was only entertainment. I rolled my eyes at some of the “plots” but thought, eh, it’s just entertainment. Doesn’t hurt anybody. Now I’m not so sure.

    I watched John & Kate Plus 8 for a while until it turned out their happy family was actually kind of a mess. That taught me a lesson, I had convinced myself I kinda knew the people, when of course I didn’t. The show told me who they were and I accepted that as real.

    Now we’ve had scandals involving some “Reality Star” or other. I barely pay attention. The Quiverful family thing going bad seemed like karma.

    This kind of cheap entertainment was probably inevitable when we started having so many channels on cable, and now streaming services, YouTube and multiplayer games to compete with for eyeballs.

    I think it really messed up the average American’s bullshit detector. People identify with these characters and believe they’re friends. All because of scripts that somebody wrote. It’s no wonder a charismatic Reality Star convinced so many people he could run the country.

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  • Utopian, but not too utopian

    I’ve come to the conclusion that all political movements are utopian, whether they think they are or not. It was a strange thought, but the more I chewed on it, the more right it seemed.

    I used to associate utopianism with Marxism or hippies living in the woods. But now I realize I’ve had my own versions of utopianism, with varying degrees of commitment. I’m in between at the moment, but I’ve had at least three.

    Combustible Edison – Utopia

    Damien Walter, a very interesting sci fi critic, got me thinking along these lines when he stated “Space Opera is the mythos of liberal democracy.” It surprised me, but I can’t really argue. It applies to most space operas I can think of: Star Wars, Peter Hamilton’s Commonwealth series.

    He published a video essay about science fiction writer Ursula K. LeGuin’s vision, which is clearly utopian from a left-leaning direction. I avoided her books when I was young, because I suspected as much.

    He made a similar essay about Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series is about pursuit of utopia. Asimov, my childhood hero, promoter of reason and science. I never would’ve thought of him that way. But you don’t make an empire, real or imaginary, without giving it a vision.

    Without realizing it, I developed two related versions of utopianism as a young man: liberal (science reason and Enlightenment values will get us there) and libertarian (science, industry and bold men will get us there).

    Both of those competed for space with the utopian visions I got from my religion, all of which amounted to Jesus comes back, gets rid of evil and fixes everything. Heaven on earth or heaven in heaven. I could go either way.

    America and Utopia

    America was settled by a wide variety of utopian movements, most of them religious or quasi-religious. “Yay! A blank slate where we can establish God’s kingdom on earth away from all those corrupt kings and queens and popes.” (Blank slate except for natives, of course) .

    Nationalist visions like the American Dream and Manifest Destiny kept those cats in something like a herd for a while. The problem is, they depended on the frontier.

    Now that the frontier is gone there’s no place to run when someone else’s utopian vision threatens to eliminate yours. Now no one can agree on what the hell America even is, least of all us Americans.

    The Eagles – The Last Resort. I know we’re supposed to hate the fucking Eagles because of The Dude, but this song and in fact the entire album Hotel California is a great study of the disillusionment people are beginning to feel after “manifesting destiny” only to realize paradise never arrived.

    What’s wrong with utopianism?

    I’m not utopian anymore, or maybe it’s a matter of degree – I still come across ideas that make me feel hopeful and others that make me feel less so. I want to believe in a better world, but I’m not so quick to attach my identity to any of them. I’m not about cults or gurus.

    What do I think about utopianism in general? There’s a positive side. They’re great at motivating people. Everyone wants to be part of something larger than themselves. They can give us multigenerational projects like pyramids and cathedrals and potentially, saving humanity from itself.

    Utopianism’s power also makes it dangerous. That’s kind of the story of the 20th century isn’t it? Nations and empires trying to impose their utopian visions on the world. The suffering was immense.

    The main problem with utopian projects is they depend on getting rid of people – or at the least, disempowering them. People are in the way and people who aren’t invited. Because you can’t make a utopia for everyone, when resources are limited.

    How’s your world gonna be perfect if you let everybody in? Make your utopia small enough and you can almost pull it off. Versailles was a utopia for the people inside it – until it wasn’t.

    That’s what dystopia is: being on the losing end of someone else’s utopia.

    There will always be people getting in the way. Get rid of the so-called bad guys in big batches or one at a time, but sooner or later you’ll be the one in utopia’s way.

    Why we need utopian thinkers

    Changing the status quo involves risk. But we still need the passion that comes from those idealistic visions. There are too many problems for any of those already-failed ideas to fix without at least integrating some fresh ones.

    If everyone becomes a doomer and decides to just take what he can get till the world blows up, the world will blow up. Maybe the human race can find some better stories to tell about itself, ones that will make us work together for a change.

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  • Eclipse should be an annular event

    Just saw one of those bucket list things. Went to Albuquerque to see an annular eclipse at 100 percent. Extremely cool, seeing the ring of fire. BTW, why is it annular if it’s not every year? (Just kidding.)

    Courtesy of NASA. No way I took that one.

    Took this when it was close to 100 percent. Interesting how the crescents in the tree shadow look almost like rings.

    I also went to see the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta on Sunday morning, but I froze my tits off at 5 a.m. for no reason. Bad weather apparently.

    Still worth it for the eclipse – and one other thing: people watching. I like humanity a little better after this weekend.

    Pink Floyd – Eclipse

    We watched the eclipse from the parking lot of a casino in Isleta. We had the mirrored glasses so I got to look directly at it this time around. We got 90 percent during the 2017 eclipse in Austin, but the best I could do was the pinhole thing.

    Johnny Cash – Ring of Fire

    When it got close to totality, we played Eclipse from Dark Side of the Moon, of course, followed by Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash and Corona by the Minutemen.

    Next morning was a pain in the ass in some ways. Rode in a bus to get to the fairgrounds, rented a scooter because of my bad heel, waited around in the cold for nothing. But like I said, the people watching was interesting, same as with the eclipse.

    Minutemen – Corona

    People on neutral ground, doing what they love forget to argue and become human. They get friendly. People offered eclipse glasses to people who wanted to look. At the fairgrounds, people ate funnel cake and talked to strangers.

    I wasn’t able to photograph the eclipse, but my brother-in-law did. But it was enough for me to see it in person.

    Me, stylin’. Maybe I should wear those all the time?

    My wife and her friend went to the Baloon Fiesta at the beginning and had much better luck seeing the balloons actually go up.

    One of my favorite critters. I like the weird balloons. Gotta go back next year and stay for longer.

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  • What would make a god turn evil?

    Edward Ka Spel – “O From the Great Sea.” What’s Ka Spel telling us? It’s obviously a horror story from the point of view of the monster. But what kind of monster? “Go back to the mirror, look again!”

    A while back I wrote about the Angry God as an answer to the problem of evil. But I proposed a worse answer to why bad things happen to good people: there’s an all-powerfu god and he’s being cruel on purpose.

    Which immediately made me think of the Edward Ka Spel song “O From the Great Sea,” about a god that dishes out suffering and seems contemptuous of the pitiful humans who can’t figure out why it’s so cruel. “Go back to the mirror, look again!”

    Obviously a horror story from the monster’s point of view, but as long as we’re doing that, what if you were that monster? What would make you behave like “O”? What would put you in that mental state if you were something as powerful as a god? I want to go with nihilism.

    As civilizations evolve, people kill and revive and alter their gods, merge them or separate them into parts, put words in their mouths. What if these entities have been running on our meatware for so long, they’ve become self-aware? The original AI?

    Maybe “O” is what happens to a society that thinks it killed god, but only pushed him to the corner, where he reassembled himself like Tom Cruise in Interview with the Vampire.

    Maybe “O” figured out what he is and resents his lot. Maybe he lashes out from revenge or disgust. Maybe he feels he’s been around too long and he’s bored. He’s like a kid torturing bugs: nothing personal.

    Maybe “O” is having an existential crisis. He ‘s seen this civilization thing run its course just too many times and can’t take one more cycle. Maybe he’s suicidal. Maybe he’s teaching those people cruelty so they’ll kill each other off and he won’t be resurrected.

    Or maybe he just really wants us to look in the mirror.

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  • Spending time in White Sands

    Needed to get a little nature to improve my mood today, so I spent a little time with my wife and her friend at White Sands National Park. The park, with its snow white gypsum sand, has become one of my favorite places lately.

    My wife’s friend of hers is into cosplay and makes costumes for characters I never heard of that apparently win contests. It’s a whole world I know nothing about, but I appreciate it. It’s creative.

    While they took photos I mostly concerned myself with nature. It’s so cool to see how dunes work, how they move, how plants have adapted to stabilize them.

    View of the dunes in White Sands National Park, just at sunrise. Looks a lot like snow at first.

    I’m almost surprised that anything grows in the dunes, but there’s an ecosyste there. Desert plants, holes leading to burrowing critters of one kind or another.

    This was from a couple of weeks ago or whenever the full moon was. They had an event celebrating the full moon, with music from a jazz band. It was so bright on that white sand.

    I really liked the subtle colors in this one, pointing the camera away from the moon, showing a bit of city glow in the distance.

    My wife being a sand mermaid, or something. She and her friend had a whole cosplay thing going. I just tagged along.

    My wife’s friend showing off a costume she made for some character in a game I think. Looked cool, whatever it was.

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  • How an angry god can seem like a loving one

    Legendary Pink Dots – A Message From Our Sponsor. Pondering the problem of evil and the possibility that God doesn’t interfere because of his personal ethics.

    How God’s punishment can feel like love: It’s an old principle. God destroyed the Israelites periodically to teach them a lesson but he still loved them and they were still his people.

    Jesus loved me because he I loved everyone I’d been singing “Jesus loves me” since I was four. But God? I was not so sure. God to me meant God the Father, the vengeful angry one. but he loved us too in his way.

    It seemed to make sense. Why would God bother punishing you if he’d already cut you loose? He might destroy you but he wouldn’t punish you. It’s really a kind of Stockholm Syndrome but it worked on me for a very long time.

    Julian Cope – St. Julian. Another answer to the problem of evil: Maybe God doesn’t fix things because he’s oblivious or maybe incompetent?

    But it is one answer to the problem of evil. Why do bad things happen to good people? Maybe it’s a form of discipline. Of a person or of a nation.

    Bad times will come as bad things do. Maybe you know why you deserved it and maybe you don’t. But if he could do that, maybe he could do the opposite if you followed the path, send something good your way, or maybe it served some larger purpose.

    God still loved David after what he did, after all. Didn’t work out too well for his baby with Bathsheba, but it was something. We got a Solomon out of it. I believed that for a while when I was a young Christian.

    When I did something I knew was wrong, the next bad thing that happened to me had to be payback. If things went OK for too long I got nervous. When was the other shoe going to drop? How much trouble was I in?

    So the disaster was a relief when it came. I paid a high price, but I’m still on the path. I was terrified of leaving the path.

    But when you can’t see a pattern anymore, “The Lord works in mysterious ways” stops sounding like a good excuse. Sometimes there’s no possible lesson that would make sense, punishment is out of proportion or it’s indescriminate.

    Then you look for reasons. You don’t want to be an atheist and piss off Mom and Dad, plus thaat would REALLY piss off God. Pascal’s Wager, you know.

    God isn’t real is the theory of last resort.

    Could be you settle on Deism. So there is a God who set it all in motion, but he doesn’t intervene. God makes the machine and lets it run. I could live with that, kinda. At least I didn’t have to claim the “A-word” as an identity. But it wasn’t very satisfying, plus, what the hell kind of fucked up machine is this?

    It occurs to me there’s a worse possibility. Maybe there is a Supreme Being, but he’s essentially the Joker in space. Maybe he’s active in the world, but considers us play things. Maybe you had a tragedy because God just has a more complicated sense of humor than you do.

    If there’s an all powerful god who makes us suffer for his own amusement, that would be the worst case scenario wouldn’t it?

    What would this look like from that cruel god’s point of view? There is a song by Legendary Pink Dots singer and songwriter Edward Ka Spel that got me thinking on this topic. I’ll get into that in the next post. Good topic for Halloween season.

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  • Freedom’s waiting for us to define it

    Negativland – Freedom is Waiting. This conveys an interesting message. Are we letting corporations define our most important words?

    Speaking of important words, you think you know the meaning of until you try to define them, what the hell is freedom? We all throw the word around like its meaning is obvious, but is it really?

    There are so many definitions. Free as in you don’t have to pay for it. Free as in nobody can tell you know. Free as in not in prison. Free as in not subject to a hostile power. Free to think and express yourself…

    And questions: Which of the above can you lose and still call yourself “free”? Should a corporation be free in the same way a person is free?

    Billy Strings – Watch It Fall. “Don’t you love the things that you got used to, when you used to feel so free” kinda hits home.

    Does power equate to freedom, and not having it, it’s impossible? Ability to accumulate wealth at the expense of others, is that freedom? Could you be happy in heaven while your brother was in hell? Does believing you could make you free?

    Is defining social norms to your specifications count as freedom? Or is it freedom to be able to reject those norms?

    What is freedom? Maybe we should follow Socrates’ example and mull it over a bit before we go around advertising for it.

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