My application was accepted. My membership is official. I was assigned an alphanumeric ID and instructed not to lose it. I may commit it as a tattoo. I’ll need it for the rest of my life. I’ve been ensnared in the Safety Net. Made party to the Social Contract. It’s the feeling of being annexed, like Greenland. I also feel a bit like an apostate. I will explain.

Over thirty years ago I was dogearing the pages of von Mises’ Socialism. Highlighting whole paragraphs of Road To Serfdom. Reading and re-reading Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience. I gorged on all of it, and a lot more. More than I now can recall, short of taking inventory of the many books archived on my shelves, sagging beneath their weight. It felt to me at the time I couldn’t read enough. I would stand inside bookstores and experience anxiety, flummoxed by all those titles staring back at me, overwhelmed to the point of not knowing where to begin. I was wide-eyed and young. Someone online – and here I’m talking early 90s online, when going online was preceded by that burst of blinking lights and carnival sounds, a prescient alert to the user that you are about to enter a realm where not everything you read is necessarily true – got me jump-started to reading Ayn Rand, The Russian Radical. Most people first discover Rand in high school. I’d never heard of her. Not surprising, I suppose, given I’d attended a religious high school where the assignment to write a report on a book written by an atheist would have been anathema to the Christian curriculum. I was probably thirty-five when I devoured The Virtues of Selfishness on a beach in Kona. Finally, I thought, someone gets me! I don’t recall it as a religious-adjacent experience or anything like that, it was more an ah-ha moment for me, an epiphany without the supernatural baggage. As if I had just learned something true about the real world I had never known before, never been exposed to before. I subsequently slogged my way through The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged (AS). Hard to explain, but the books humbled me in a way. True, I thought, I was no Howard Roark or Dagny Taggart, but then again who was? And Who is John Galt? For anyone who’s read AS, that was the one true mystery in the novel, posited in the very first sentence, revealed at the end of the novel by way of a prolix soliloquy by The Mystery himself. For starters, John was no Republican, certainly not a Democrat. Because it is of course impossible to read Rand and not intuit the political implications of her ethical prescription for an individual to lead a virtuous life, which is really what those two books are about. AS and Fountainhead are not economic treatises pandering to capitalism, even as Rand left no doubt in the reader’s mind that she despises socialism and communism. To get to the United States, she had to sneak out of Russia in the dark of night by bribing a Lithuanian border guard. When she eventually arrived in New York (ninety-nine years ago now), a beacon in the west, it must of felt to her like she’d just entered a candy store. The answer to the mystery then, Who is John Galt?, is not, He was a Capitalist. No, John Galt was Rand’s ethical avatar, the apotheosis of the virtuous man. As was the more down-to-earth architect, Howard Roark, in The Fountainhead. At least that was my take, and in that way, as I had tirelessly argued in those 90’s online forums devoted to Rand’s philosophy (Objectivisim), AS is an allegory. Just as Animal Farm was an allegory, except John Galt was human (a gifted engineer). Allegory or not, though, it all made sense to me, the message got through: Man good, Government bad. Although to be fair, Rand would concede in her non-fiction that a proper Government was an inescapable necessity to protect even rational and virtuous men when and where their better angels failed them. Rand was no Utopian; she was also not an Anarchist. But just to be sure, at some point I read Nozick’s tome: Anarchy, State and Utopia. It must have left a mark on me because sometime later a close friend remarked to me during a night of carousing, “You are too much of an anarchist to get married again.” All these books I’d read, they were published decades earlier. Why weren’t people convinced by them as I was? Was I getting sucked into a cult of crackpot beliefs? I concluded I wasn’t. I wasn’t in need of an intervention. This wasn’t philosophical Mumbo-Jumbo I was reading. It wasn’t new age woo-woo either, certainly not a self-help handbook. I wasn’t in need of psychological help, I certainly didn’t need to be fixed in any sense. Rand’s arguments for Rational Egoism were unassailable – an ethical prescription for a real person living in the real world. A kind of over-the-counter medicine for anyone who wanted to live a virtuous and happy life, period. Plus her arguments had the feature of parsimony, in that they were derived from just a few self-evident truths about our nature as human beings. One or two genetic determinists I argued with way back then claimed Rand didn’t understand biology, therefore her premise that a man’s ultimate purpose in life is survival, was wrong. As any biologist knows, they claimed, reproductive success, not survival, is Man’s ultimate purpose in life. Just as it is for every other living organism on earth. And so all her arguments downstream of that premise were flawed as well, they claimed. So much for their counterfactual, we now know DNA influences but does not determine human behavior. Rand’s premise is safe. Here. A man’s purpose in life is not to be found in the genome. In any case, ever since Rand, the negative connotations of selfishness (all there were at the time) would need to step aside and make room for virtue. And, without a great deal of arm-waving involved, the advocacy to lead a rationally selfish individual life could scale nicely to a society of millions of individuals, with the addition of one simple maxim: Your natural rights end where my virtuous nose begins. What more to it was there than that?

Quite a lot it turns out. The messiness of the real world has a way of defeating the idealized notions of how its inhabitants ought to behave. In all that time that I was reading, my pay-stubs showed a deduction that went to the government to pay for the Social Safety Net. What a positively unselfish program! And coercive to boot. I have a very dim memory of placing a call to the payroll department where I worked at the time, demanding they stop this larceny at once. Uh huh. Thank for your concern, employee. Now move along.

Years passed. Attitudes softened. The safety net extended. Acquiescence happened. Nowadays, when I go online I no longer care to debate or argue with people over the virtue of selfishness. It almost seems like a quaint notion to me now. What’s the point in shaking your fist at the rain? Maybe it Ought not be raining, but it Is raining; suck it up, Boomer. Living selfishly may be a virtue, but it sure ain’t practical, not in the real world we live in. C’est la vie.

Why, even The Russian Radical herself was eventually enrolled in medicare. Talk about your apostasy!

I disturbed the Sandpipers.

Earlier in the day, HW had phoned me at home to say that on the way to the store she saw hundreds gathered at the shore near the bridge over California Creek. She thought they were Plovers. More likely Sandpipers. Undisturbed, their phenotype is to forage the shoreline, piping their beaks into the sand in search of food. They don’t brook onlookers. Which is why HW said I should have my camera ready, you might catch them in a swoosh! What a spellbinding display that is to observe, never mind photograph. Because the thing is, if you get close, and these birds startle, they rise up suddenly in a disorganized frenzy and fly away. But then, as if there were a gene for group behavior, they rapidly self-organize out over the water. The swarm comes together into a cohesive avian object, a murmuration, the alternating pattern of brown wings and white breasts flares as it surges and swooshes, left and right, back and forth, up and down, daring the water’s surface, drawing evanescent lines in the air. It was magical to see. Until, that is, the magic turned to fury, and like I were living a Hitchcockian nightmare, it headed straight for me. Maybe still pissed at me for disturbing their forage, the swarm did a fly-by, coming within mere feet of my cowering self before turning a final time and flying away, as if to flip me off.

It was the best hour of my day. Parking the car, prowling the beach, sneaking up on a group of them. I was dressed in jeans, kneeling in an emulsion of mud and sand still wet from the outgoing tide. I had the camera in my right hand, steadying it on my left arm, which I’d formed into a makeshift support by gripping my right shoulder. (Internet pro-tip for field photographers). I couldn’t have been more than ten feet from the closest birds. Why haven’t they spooked yet? Surely they’ve sensed me by now. With no small stones within arms reach, I stood up and gently stepped closer. In a second they were off. I pointed the lens in the center of the confusion and pressed the shutter. Back at home I lightly cropped the photo, brought up the shadows and added some vibrancy. Click (or tap) the photo above, and then zoom, you’ll see there’s no evidence of order among those fifty or more birds in flight. It looks chaotic, each bird for himself – it’s remarkable enough they don’t collide in air. But I’m telling you, to stand there and watch, in mere seconds you’d witness the murmuration emerge

There’s a math that describes self-organized order in nature. But there’s no math I’m aware of that accounts for its immediate cause. Just as there’s no math to explain beauty in nature. What we have from biologists are not much more than just-so stories. My intuition is that disorganized chaos, not collected order, should be more difficult for predators to target. I mean, c’mon, the Sandpiper predator would only need to fly headlong into the swarm with its maw and talons wide open. Easy pickins. Compare that to the effort of fixing a bead on a single bird and chasing after it, possibly unproductively. Wasted effort.^* True, there can be safety in numbers, but as every biologist will admit, one’s genetic endowment does not code for group behavior. Where order obtains in nature, it comes for free.

The plan for next time is to have HW and I coordinate, her on one end of the shore near the birds to startle them, while I’m down the beach steady and prepared to capture the magic as it swooshes by me.

* To be fair, note the diving bird (peregrine falcon?) at thirteen seconds; targeting a stray? Even so, every bird’s a stray absent a swarm.

I got a new camera. It takes good pictures. Click (or tap) to embiggen, you might agree. While out for a walk with The Dog the other day I captured her (the girls are larger than the boys), hunting. Probably not an area where you’d want to walk an especially small dog. Just sayin’. During the next couple months I want to get well practiced using this rig, in preparation for a bucket-list adventure overseas we’ve signed up for, which promises intimate photo ops of wildlife and other natural wonders aplenty. At sea and on land. No, we have no interest in going on a cruise. For the 50+ of you who received our annual newsletter (The Nibblet), you know where.

…

I would say Je Suis Los Angeles if I felt I had a deeper feeling of solidarity with the place, as HW and I felt we had with the idyll that was Lahaina. I have no words for the scale of the tragedy going down in LA. We have close friends who live in the high desert, well north of the fires. We chatted the other day. They are out of harms way and safe – for now. Beyond that, and being honest, I feel about LA like I feel about any other area of the world and its people devastated by natural disaster, numb and helpless. A charitable contribution may help salve the conscience, but not much more. The World Wide Web has connected all the people of the world now, but for all its promise to do so, it has served to deliver exactly the opposite experience for many people, loneliness and despair. No geography is forever safe from nature. And if what happened in LA was not “natural” but instead caused by an arsonist, then look away when justice is meted, it will be ugly to watch. Even where we live now, with our above average annual rainfall and proximity to the ocean, the ubiquity of water can lull one into a sense of complacency regarding the threat of devastating fires. Yet, we are surrounded by fuel. One hundred year old Western Cedar trees and Douglas Fir trees are magical, yes, until the forest floor ignites. Pacific Palisades was on the ocean, too, although I read they haven’t seen a drop of rain in over eight months. So water is protective, but it matters where, precisely, it resides. And just as soon as you become cozy with ocean waves gently lapping the shore outside your VRBO beach house, unbeknownst to you a deep sea quake occurs, and minutes later you’re facing an unimaginable wall of water coming ashore. Savior turns murderer. The earth is dynamic, mother nature has been fouling her own nest for hundreds of millions of years. The rest of the natural world shrugs, “Get used to it humans, your recent existence has only made things worse.”

Happy New Year! Next year I’ll be wishing you happy second quarter (of the century). Will we make it to see the start of the third quarter? Dunno, the future is unknown to the present. Although, according to Gemini, the latest research indicates that moderate coffee consumption is associated with longer life, via a reduction in the risk of cardiovascular disease. Unfortunately, high coffee consumption is associated with increased risk. So what’s an espresso lover to do?

If someone were to guarantee me I’d live one full year longer if I quit coffee today, I don’t think I’d stop. Two years longer? I dunno, maybe. Maybe in that case I’d reduce my consumption by half or something, thinking that a 50% reduction might buy me an additional year. But suppose the guarantor couldn’t tell you the precise year of your death, only that you’re certain to live one more year if you quit coffee. Then that’s a tough one. Because if I’m destined to die at 69, say (with coffee), then hell ya, I’ll stop if I’m certain to get to 70. But if I’m destined to die at 89 (with coffee), then quitting coffee now, just to become a nonagenarian twenty-five years hence, wouldn’t feel worth it to me. The opportunity to live twenty-five more years, versus twenty-four more, doesn’t seem like a rational basis for quitting something I really enjoy, every single morning. But somehow the guarantee of five more years versus four more does. I think behavioral economists call this time discounting. In any case, nobody can give me a guarantee like that, so I intend to keep on keeping on with my morning routine, til death do us part.

Last week Sunday and Monday, I cried, episodically. Altogether, for an hour or more, probably more than I’ve cried in the past ten years, combined.

The Friday before, we got Chloe comfortable in the backseat and drove south five-hundred miles to attend a celebration of life. One nice thing about having relocated from Alaska to the lower 48, is that we’re back on the road system, no need to fly to most places we want to go to now. We over-nighted somewhere about halfway to our destination, got up early the next day, exercised Chloe at a nearby dog park in the rain, then we all piled back into the car and drove the rest of the way. It had stopped raining by the time we arrived at our destination and checked in to the hotel. I didn’t sleep well that night (no fault of the hotel).

The next day HW was up early to feed Chloe. After that they were out the door, descending three flights of antique wooden stairs together into the lobby, where Chloe, I’m sure, paused to revel in the fawning remarks of many hotel guests (she gets that a lot), and from there the two of ’em ventured outside into the sub-freezing morning. Chilly yes, but sunny at least. Chloe preferred the urban oasis of green grass by the Wells Fargo bank to do her business. A couple hours later it was probably pushing fifty degrees. By then Chloe and HW had set out again for a long walk to explore the town. I finished a second Americano, put on a coat, slid my phone into my rear pants pocket, left the room and closed the door behind me. I avoided the elevator and took the stairs to the lobby. Outside the hotel, I phone-navigated to the venue. Turned out it was only a few blocks away.

It was there where we would gather the next day, with others, for the celebration of life. For the wife, soulmate really, of perhaps the only real mentor I’d had coming up as a young (and very green) professional in big oil, almost forty years ago. He had e-mailed me a month earlier to say she died suddenly after a short illness, and to invite us to a celebration of her life, which he’d arranged to be held at her favorite brewery in town. Beer and pizza will be provided, and please come prepared to share whatever memories of her life you care to. Reading that the first time, I cried, so I should probably add that to the tears total. I didn’t think twice; I was going. When I shared the news with HW, she said she wanted to be there with me. In the ensuing days I began to consider what story I might like to share. More tears flowed.

I’ve stayed in touch with these two all the years since we last worked together (his very talented wife also worked at the company), mostly via e-mail and holiday cards, though we hadn’t seen each other in over two decades now. As I shared with HW, it feels strange to me in a way that I could still feel so close to both of them, as you do with friends you frequently spend time with, even as we were separated by thousands of miles all the time I’d lived in Alaska, then in Cleveland, and then back in Alaska. Pretty clearly the connection I feel with these two was undiminished by time and distance. It’s because they were more than just friends and colleagues all those years ago; whether they knew it or not at the time, I looked up to them, because character matters to me, and as I said to my friend just yesterday in a follow-up email after our trip there, you two had it in spades.

After I confirmed the location of the venue, I continued walking about town, checking things out. I’d never been there before. I stopped at a bar and had a martini. The place had your ordinary local bar vibe. I imagined how many times my friends might have sat there on those very bar stools. Planning their next camping trip, or maybe pondering a meandering drive down the west coast (they enjoyed their road trips and munching sunflower seeds), or whatever else two irrepressibly-in-love retirees talk about when the sky’s the limit. And my god she could laugh. A thunderous laugh. And swim; she’d been a tireless, and at times, competitive swimmer much of her life. Loved her Coors Light, too. Also smart as a whip, a widely acknowledged good geophysicist. And in a flash, long before her light was out, this cold and uncaring world took her from us. My friend’s soulmate.

HW and I split a Ribeye dinner and a bottle of Cabernet that night at a really good steakhouse in town. I think I drank most of the bottle. I knew it later when I tried to get to sleep but couldn’t. A bad headache kept me up most of the night. I’m not a frequent sufferer of headaches anymore, and HW asked me more than once in the middle of the night if this one was the worst I’d ever experienced (a common symptom of someone with a brain tumor), to which I answered, No. Then I thought back to that martini, plus the wine, and the high elevation of the town, and knew it must be one of those low-pressure, dehydration headaches I’d suffered in the past. HW made me drink a ton of water. I finally drifted off. The next day I was better.

We attended the celebration in the late afternoon. I didn’t know if I’d recognize my friend after twenty plus years. But there he was, looking no worse for his years, standing among a small gathering of folks who’d come to celebrate his wife’s life. He was unmistakable. And, evidently, I to him. We instantly locked eyes and walked toward each other. I threw my arms around him and started to cry. He did too. Imagine: two “mathy, techy” guys all their lives, in a bear hug, bawling their eyes out. When the time came, I stood up, went to the front of the room, and shared a little story about the first time I met his wife, at the company. I nearly made it to the end of the story when I turned to look at him sitting at the table with HW, tears streaming down his face. And then it was my turn, again. All the while hundreds of photos of her, living her vibrant life of sixty-seven years, cycled across an overhead screen.

The next morning before heading back home we had breakfast together, at a local diner my friend had said had great biscuits and gravy. More sharing and crying at the table, but with a side of hope and an offering of good will. We hugged again outside the restaurant, and yes, cried some more. Finally, with Chloe settled in the back seat, we were off. I cannot get the memory of the look of grief and despair on his face out of my mind. And maybe I shouldn’t even try.

…

Her Highness, showing off at a rest stop between here and there.

Like the new byline?! It’s a hat tip to all the doggos who’ve companion-ed me over the past four decades, and in doing so have in a way I’m sure I don’t entirely understand shaped my worldview and inner monologue. Therapeutically speaking, they’ve been the curbs I’ve needed to stay centered in my lane. In this way, all dogs are service dogs. You cannot spend tens of thousands of hours in the company of dogs, walk, run and ride with them for thousands of miles, and be left unchanged by their company in a very important way. You can’t avoid learning something about yourself. And dogs’ company is one hundred percent judgement free, a feature rarely if ever observed even in relationships with our conspecifics. No matter how good or awful you’ve been, when you walk in the door the tail wags all the same.

Not saying dogs are unique in this way – equine therapy also offers real benefits for a lot of people. And like dogs, horses also are judgement free in their relation to us. Think about Mister Ed. That hapless and klutzy Wilbur was the only one in the world who heard and understood that rapscallion Palomino speak. But even a child knows horses can’t talk. And even if they could, they’d speak horse thoughts. Because “Of course, of course, a horse is a horse.” I think the real genius of Mister Ed may have been the use of a domestic animal to give voice to one of the two voices in Wilbur’s head, an entertaining device to share with the audience the tragicomedy of Wilbur’s ongoing inner dialogue. Mister Ed isn’t about a talking horse, that’s just a gag. It’s really a story about Wilbur’s inner struggle, at times his feelings of low self-esteem and self-consciousness over how others perceive him, as goofy. Because just as a horse is a horse, so a man is a man – we all engage an inner dialog with ourselves. It’s a feature of the human condition. Which can be absurdly funny sometimes! Would the show have been as successful with a talking dog? Probably not. Though a talking Lama Alpaca might’ve worked. Lamas Alpacas have a look of wisdom and erudition about them, like Lydia up there. On the way home we like to drive by the local farm to check in on her. This day she was out patrolling the fence line with an Emu. We usually roll down the window to say “Hi.” Never once have we heard her say Hi back. Not that nobody has.

Ever attended a standup comedy show? The Jokester is on stage with a mic in hand. She’s pacing back and forth, eyes cast downward, maybe shooting a furtive glance at the teleprompter, or otherwise trying to conjure the next lines of her delivery all on her own. Either way, when eventually that next Funny Thing enters her brain, the first thing that happens is a constellation of motor neurons fire. This causes her mouth and tongue and vocal chords to activate in a just-so way, producing a sound wave in air, which is detected by the eardrum of the listener, there converted into a mechanical impulse, followed by conversion in the cochlea to an electrical impulse, which is conducted along the auditory nerve to the brain stem (initial processing), and from there relayed through the thalamus and on to the temporal lobe where it is finally – finally! – converted into the meaning of the Funny Thing spoken. Phew! I bet you thought hearing was simple.

What happens next? Pop quiz

A. You cry
B. You laugh
C. You cheer, like when your team scores a point
D. You experience a profound feeling of dread
E. None of the above

The correct answer of course is B. When someone tells a joke, unless you don’t find it funny, or don’t get it, you laugh (or chuckle, whatever, depending on the concentration of the Funny Thing. Because let’s face it, just like Love, Comedy is a drug). Hold this thought.

Now let’s turn our focus to an apologist for tRump. Say he accepts an invitation to participate on a prime time CNN news show, to give his take on the show’s topic du jour, namely: An assessment of presidential readiness for office. He’s joined on this panel by five hostile pundits, all of whom are all ideologically opposed to tRump (and by association, to our apologist as well). In this context, we’ll call the apologist the token republican punching bag. Feel free to imagine his appearance however you’d like. He and the five pundits are seated around a long and wide, boomerang-shaped, see-through glass table. Seated at one end of the table is a middle-aged, attractive black woman, necklaced in a plain string of pearls, who holds a law degree from a credible college and has professional creds working as a DA in under-served communities in Louisiana, and is said to have modeled her career on the same of VP Harris’ in California; seated next to her is another woman, white, also attractive, freshly primped in makeup, a young up-and-comer in the punditry circuit who’s cut her teeth as an embedded reporter to the Assad atrocities in northern Syria, so she’s come to understand the importance of a clear-eyed commander in chief in matters of foreign policy; next to her we have the roly-poly boomer, now a lecturer in academia, who’s old enough to recall he served as an advisor to an advisor to the Clinton administration, oh, and he’s also co-authored some bestsellers about politics; next to him we have the show’s lead, an attractive, high-cheek-boned news anchor, recently promoted to the role for her uncanny ability to cut to the heart of any issue and bring out the best of her guests through bitingly challenging questions – she’s dressed professionally in a blouse, jacket and skirt, with her stocking’d legs strategically crossed and visible through the glass tabletop, where she can be seen distractedly dangling a stylish nude pump; to her right is a retired military general wearing the jacket of his rank, replete with insignias running the length of his arm, staring directly at the camera, steely-eyed and humorless; and lastly, to his right, as if exiled from the discussion, our republican punching bag. Having a two-hundred-fifty pound, retired, four-star general who’d served multiple tours of duty in Afghanistan and Iraq, seated between the punching bag and the show’s lead is seen as no coincidence.

This is all made up by the way. You should not have the impression I’ve described a real CNN panel of pundits and guests. OK, with the table set, let’s move on.

After a commercial break the camera focuses on the lead. After she issues the boilerplate caution to viewers – that some viewers may be disturbed… – she queues several clips taken from tRump’s recent stump speeches. The panel turns to watch the clips on the studio monitor, the same thing TV viewers watch. Once the clips finish, focus returns back to the studio where all five pundits are aghast, their heads bowed and shaking in disgust. The punching bag is unmoved, stoic. The lead finally raises her head and turns to face the punching bag, and puts the questions to him, “Are you not horrified by this misogynistic bile that tRump spews at his rallies? Do you really think this is consistent with the character we want our president, the commander in chief, to possess?“

The punching bag straightens in his chair, casts a disappointed glance at each of the pundits, pauses briefly, then turns again to look at the lead. He smirks and says, He was joking!

You instantly see the problem with that answer, right? We’ve just reviewed the basic biology of a Joke as it passes from one brain into another, and the typical emotional response the average hearer of said joke would have. And the answer was not C. (cheer). And yet, when tRump spews at his rallies – I love women! Why I’m going to be the Bestest Protector of Women Ever. I’m going to protect them good and hard (whether they like or not) – how did His Followers respond? Like it was a joke? No, they cheered, uproariously they cheered. So unless His Followers are biologically atypical human beings, and I’ve no reason to presume they are atypical human beings in terms of their basic biology, then tRump could not possibly have been joking there. An audience doesn’t cheer when they hear a joke. To hear tRump’s promise that he’ll be the Grand Protector of women – like it or not! – and respond by cheering, that is consistent with approval of a point tRump scored, not the feeling of amusement. Cheering and laughter have very different emotional activators. And that’s a statement of biology, not prejudice.

But our (hypothetical) panel of very serious pundits at CNN didn’t swing when slow-pitched a softball. Why not? When the republican punching bag declared tRump was merely joking about what he spewed about women, a couple of them may have rolled their eyes, sure, but that was it. Why on earth did no one on that panel quickly respond as I did here? Why acquiesce like that when, surely to a one, each of their bullshit detectors was pegging? I hope it wasn’t due to a misplaced nod of collegial respect for a fellow pundit. Good grief, the man made a claim that was unequivocally false! That’s professional misconduct undeserving of anyone’s respect. He makes a fool of you, and all you do is abide it with a disapproving eye roll. Seriously, that’s it? You wouldn’t see the liberal punching bag on FOX’s The Five skate by unmocked were she to dismiss as a joke some Democratic candidate’s nonsense. No, to a one they’d be champing at the bit to have their turn with her. I am not a fan of allowing others’ putrid ethics guide my own, but for chrissake in a battle of wits try arming yourself next time CNN.

I recently heard what sounded like a credible report that the Joe Rogan Experience podcast has more subscribers than CNN & FOX combined. In addition to podcasting, Joe Rogan is also a comedian. Joe’s jokes make comedy club audiences laugh. I’ve personally watched only a couple of those performances online, though I feel confident that not once has his audience ever cheered when he cracked a joke. Whereas his breezy interview style on his podacst has gained him a gazillion likes, the online equivalent of a cheer of approval. Audiences respond differently to Joe depending on the context of his performance. On his podcast he is respectful of his guests, some say to a fault. Yet when he hosted tRump and challenged tRump’s belief that he won the last election, Joe laughed at tRump. He laughed because tRump is joke. I did not laugh when later Joe endorsed tRump. I also did not cheer. The human emotion of anger has different triggers entirely.

Oh, do tell, from here, we go
unknown, the wilds, in time
will tell
lead, or follow, where friend be foe?
come to us, wisdom
let us know, for now
we wither, the past, undone
the folly, yet sewn, has-
not won

What do you do when you have no relevant life experiences to inform the stories you want to write? Stories that readers will want to read?

Asking for a friend.

Make it up!

Sounds good, except you can travel only so far outside your own mind crafting a story. Science fiction writers travel the furthest. I read Zelazny, Spinrad, Heinlein, Asimov, Niven & Pournelle, and many others when I was young. Possibly because I wasn’t a very patient reader back then, most Sci-Fi stories didn’t grab and hold my attention. Some were ok, good enough that I finished the book, but overall, meh. I read a lot of science fiction, many of the titles were recommended to me by friends who absolutely devoured Sci-Fi books. I didn’t much care for the writing style, though, it too often felt stilted to me. Too much telling. As a reader, I want to experience the character’s thoughts, not the author’s. And even more than that, I want what I read to express… big word alert… verisimilitude. For me a story needs to feel true or real. I want one that shows me something about the authentic human condition, preferably a condition foreign to me before I picked up the book. That’s mostly why I read fiction.

Millions of very fine readers loved the Hobbit series. Many more the same for Harry Potter. I’ve read neither, but I get it. I’m in awe of writers who travel far outside their own life experiences, fantasize while aboard a delayed London train and craft a story with the power to hold millions of readers rapt for hundreds of pages, and maybe hundreds more in sequels. If you enjoy reading stories about human-like creatures, or worlds of magic, carry on, enjoy your book. I am not some member of the gatekeeper’s guild of superior fiction here to tell you what you ought to be reading. Or to diminish Sci-Fi and other genres (e.g.romance novels) by saying they are to “literary writing” what food trucks are to Haute cuisine. Although even within genre there are so-so writers (storytellers) and really good writers, it’s not a flat distribution. Peruse the shelves of “best sellers” at an airport bookstore next time you’re there, read the first few pages of some of those books, you’ll see the difference. The quality of a novel (or short story) is not entirely subjective, is all I’m saying.

Back to my query about writing outside your experiences – research is one way. Especially useful for the writer of historical fiction, of course. These days as a writer you gotta be careful what sort of people and places you invite to your fiction. You don’t want to be accused of “cultural appropriation.” Or imagine a male author writing a story from a female point of view. Gender appropriation! Naive rebel that I am, I’m actually working on such a story, told from a female, first-person point of view. I’ve never existed as a female, never had female experiences, so I’m left trying to conjure the “voice” of a woman. She may not survive revision, or maybe the story won’t end up being about what I now think it might be. Which is a nice and flexible feature of the creative process, especially edition – you can’t necessarily predict (and good advice has it you shouldn’t try) which parts will stay and which will go, or even where the story will end up. The science guy in me resists proceeding without intention, or a plan, but little by little I’m engaging the right half of my brain.

Moral: Write what compels you, advantage life experiences where relevant, do some research, and creatively make the rest up. Write well, revise, revise, revise, and it will all come together in the end. Keep at it.

To have lived an ordinary life is to have existed insignificantly in this world. Put another way, my irrelevance is widely known. If this is your predicament, think about trying to write your way out of it. And the better trained you are the more likely you’ll succeed.

One writer who did succeed, a guy I’d never heard of until last week, in eloquent prose held forth on his Substack blog about a neat trick he believes can avoid the pathology of a xenophobic mind – Read. And not just any old thing. Compile a list of the great works of western culture, he said, and get started. (His post began with the strong encouragement to not die before reading Anna Karenina – “It’s not worth it,” he said. (Note to self: Better get going then!)) He seemed confident that by reading the great works of literature written in the western tradition by very smart and insightful people, that that would open the reader to a permanent transformation of her worldview. I believe this is true. I also believe it is true that regardless of the endeavor we set ourselves to, we stand on the shoulders of the giants who’ve preceded us. So if you want to write well, start by looking back, reading the works of the great writers who’ve come before you. My only caveat to that advice would be to look back, yes, but don’t stare.

What I mean by don’t stare is this (stay with me): In the language of mathematical modelling there’s a concept referred to as “over-training.” Say you’ve conceived a model to detect cancer based on genes. First, you’d “train” your model on all the genes measured in an independent set of samples (biopsies) taken from real cancer patients. You can think of this training phase as saying to your model, See here, this is what cancer looks like, got it? Roger that, your model replies, and it studies the samples very closely to produce a list (ideally small) of only those genes required to accurately sniff out cancer. Lastly, in order to find out if your model is any good – to see how well it’s learned – you’d challenge it with a new sample, one that was not in the training set, and then prompt it, Hey model, does this patient have cancer?

Over-trained models are notorious for getting the answer wrong. When a new cancer sample doesn’t reveal a gene pattern “mathematically close” to any of those it trained on, and it miscalls the sample – maybe it replies, nope that ain’t cancer (when it really was) – and it’s wrong too many times, then we’d say that model is likely over-trained. The most common cause of an over-trained model is “staring at the training data for too long.” By analogy, if you train your brain on the great works of literature, fine, but if your goal in reading is to gain a wider, more nuanced worldview (i.e. a better model of the world), and not have your worldview “over-trained” on only the great works in the western tradition, maybe put some modern works of literature on your list and/or in other ways read around more (i.e. expand your training set).

Days later, after considering that blogger’s advice, I streamed a discussion (podcast) with Ta-Nehisi Coates. Wherein he said a lot of things. There was one thing, though, that he was emphatic about that caught my attention – Write. More specifically, he paid forward the advice he’d gotten from a writing mentor shortly after he’d entered Brown University, which was that if you want to write well, then get out in the world and experience as many things as you can, directly, then write about those experiences, concisely. Or to quote George Orwell: the great enemy of clear language is insincerity. Right about then Chloe was tugging at the leash, eager to introduce herself to a passerby who’d snuck up behind me (I was streaming the podcast on my earbuds). Earlier in the walk, Chloe had done the very same thing to another woman who I’d spotted walking toward us. This time I permitted her enough leash to greet the woman, so it was all good, and as I had paused the podcast when I saw her approach, I was able to hear her say her name, and that she knew HW, and then…”I enjoy your blog.” And that just made my day.

Anyway, an interesting kind of yinyang thing that writing well and reading well are dependent on each other. Writing involves reading your own mind, and translating it to the page, whereas reading is just training your brain on the experiences of others, via their writing, which is nothing more than the result of them reading their own brains! Either way, the point is the more variety you admit to your training set, the better your model of the real world will be, and in turn the better your own writing will be? That sounds about right to me.