A devil's advocate argument for Intelligent Design

At ConCarolina's last weekend, I was on a panel to discuss Creationism/Intelligent Design vs Evolution. I had a hunch the panel would be dominated by the evolution side. I dislike lopsided debates, so I wanted to come in with the strongest argument for Intelligent Design I could muster.

This wasn't easy, since most of Intelligent Design arguments boil down to three unconvincing ideas:

1. We know things are designed because they look designed.
2.  Many biological systems are irreducibly complex. There's no point in developing half a wing, the argument goes, and random gradual mutation couldn't get you from wingless to winged in a single generation.
3. The universe is fine tuned. Change the physical variants even slightly and none of existence is possible. The odds of such a finely tuned universe randomly coming into existence are very close to infinity to one against it.

You can Google the various refutations of these arguments. They've been pretty thoroughly shredded by more powerful thinkers than me.

So, I wanted to go into the panel with an argument that didn't have premade counterarguments. This is it:

It seems irrefutable that the intelligent design of organisms goes on around us every day. Broccoli, poodles, and corn wouldn't exist in their present configurations without the intervention of human intelligence. On a more advanced level, we're now manipulating living things genetically, creating disease resistant fruits and vegetables, and cows that have certain valuable proteins in their milk. And, for some reason, glow in the dark mice. Because, why not?

We also are fluent in generating artificial worlds within computers, complete with simulated ecosystems. There are games where creatures designed by users evolve over time in a process mimicking natural selection. But creatures with computers for brains aren't just found on our laptops and smartphones. We'll soon own self driving cars. Robots will likely build those cars. They already vacuum floors, make coffee, serve as bank tellers and fly long distances autonomously. Fifty years from now, the idea that human hands once performed surgery will seem like barbarism.

Many, many very smart people believe that we are only a decade or two from designing artificial intelligences capable of self awareness. It's also commonly believed that, once these digital intelligences come into existence, they'll be capable of designing a next generation that's even smarter, and after that, a generation even smarter, in a runaway process that creates beings we aren't even capable of imagining.

But, let's say that there's some physical law we're unaware of that prevents etched silicone from ever gaining self awareness, and only biological entities prove capable of intelligence. I would argue that, as we understand the human genetic code in finer and finer detail, we will be unable to resist the temptation to design better, smarter, stronger humans, humans who are immortal perhaps, or humans blended with machines that make them capable of surviving in environments that would kill us today. Our great-great-great-great-great-grandchildren may flit around on Mars on wings of flesh, drawing power from sunlight through photosynthesis. Or, if we don't want to alter ourselves that radically, nothing in the laws of physics prevents us from changing Mars to our liking. We could capture comets to bring Mars water, use enormous nuclear generators to provide a particle shield to protect the atmosphere from the solar wind, and seed the barren soil with microbes designed to turn Mars into an Eden over the course of a few million years. Such time scales seem absurd and impractical to us now, but what if we're capable of bioengineering immortality? We'll need extravagant hobbies to fill up the eons, and lots and lots of room to sprawl.

Natural selection is a pretty good method of making organisms. But, even its biggest proponents admit the raw material for the process consist of a lot of random variables. Turning a blue green algae into a multi-celled ape-like organism capable of understanding its past involves a lot of long odds and good luck. But, assuming we don't destroy ourselves in the near future, we are almost on the verge of a self-sustaining process where every future generation of intelligent beings comes about through careful, deliberate design. Our world is the only one in our solar system showing evidence of life, but check back in a million years, and probably every solid surface from here to Pluto will contain some sort of biosphere designed by our descendants to exploit and tame now hostile environments.

Assuming this vision of the future is accurate, then intelligent design will be the dominating force crafting organisms and worlds moving forward, from tomorrow until the last star winks out of the sky. If this is true (and, yes, that's a big if), then there will only one intelligent life form that comes about as a result of natural selection, and a near infinity of offspring designed to fit their environments. Thus, by simple math, we can see that intelligent design will be the primary cause of intelligent life in the total universe, while randomly evolved intelligence is such a rarity that, statistically, we may as well say it's impossible.

As far as I'm aware, my argument violates no laws of physics, biology, or cosmology. Intelligent design is how the inhabited universe will eventually be put together.

If there's a hole in my argument, I'm eager to hear it.

Now, let me add this: Even if my argument proves accurate a billion years from today, would I want it taught in classrooms today? No. What I'm engaged in here is speculation. Speculation is not science. Just because something is plausible doesn't mean it's proven. What I'm presenting here isn't a scientific theory, it's mere daydreaming, simple what ifs built on a foundation of what we know, but, at its heart, just a lot of guesswork held together with a lot of hand-waving. Do I believe it? Kind of. I don't think we're the products of intelligent design, but far, far in the future, a child may ask, "Where did we come from?" and his parent will say, "From the designer." And the kid will ask, "and who designed the designer?" The answer will be, "an earlier designer." "And who designed him?" The parent will shrug. "Kid, it's designers all the way down."

Even if they aren't scientific, daydreams and guesses have their own value. I'd even say that these are important foundations of human intelligence, and probably the biggest barrier to developing artificial intelligences. A machine that believed things that have no factual basis would be frightening driving your car or operating on your heart. But a human who believed in unproven things would hold the potential for creating new worlds.

JamesMaxey.net launches!

So, it turns out this world wide web thing might not be a fad after all. Despite having two blogs and a Facebook page, I've never taken the time to actually set up a website devoted to my writing. I'm happy to announce that changes today. With the help of my friend Jesse Bernier, I'm launching a site that will consolidate both my blog feeds, provide a handy billboard for upcoming events, and give a more organized way of finding out information on all my books. Right now, there are links to buy the books, both physically and electronically, from various retailers. Soon, we'll have ecommerce set up so you can purchase books directly from me, including signed copies of the print books.

There's also still plenty of formatting and tweaking to be done. Right now we're trying to figure out why my blogs feed in with red text. So far, GoDaddy's tech support hasn't been very helpful on this. Still, small snags like that are no reason not to go live.

We've also got a nifty quote generator set up with rotating quotes from some of my books and stories, though I really need to add to the collection, since I've only got about ten set up so far. If anyone out there has a favorite line from one of my books, let me know and I'll add it to the rotation.

Oh! It would probably help to mention the name of the website: JAMESMAXEY.NET.

Because we're insane... 100 miles in 3 days. Plus, thoughts on body/mind duality.

Cheryl and I are constantly thinking about what our next physical challenge should be. A fifty mile bike ride? Been there, done that. Hiking to all 5 peaks in Hanging Rock on the same day? Checked off the list. Run in 5ks? Done it, have the t-shirts. Ocean kayaking all around Murrells Inlet? Not nearly as tough as we thought it might be.

Now, because we're insane, in about an hour we'll be leaving the house with the goal of biking 100 miles in three days. The weather this weekend is pretty much perfect for the challenge. Hot, but not yet dangerously hot, with clear skies forecast every day. The goal is to break it down as a 40 mile ride today and tomorrow, with a 20 mile ride on Monday. None of the individual distances worry us, but how we'll handle it without long recovery periods afterwards is where the difficulty lies. Honestly, I think there's a genuine possibility this could be beyond our grasp. Today's 40, no problem at all. And I'm sure we'll be able to get on the bike's tomorrow. It's how far we make it tomorrow before our bodies start insisting that we have better things to do that I'm most worried about.

When we started all this exercise, the goal was primarily to lose weight. Then the focus gradually shifted to overall fitness. Our waistlines didn't matter as much as the fact that we were healthy enough to do things that had once seemed out of our reach.

Now, there's yet another benefit to the exercise I've discovered. Many people think of humans as a sort of trinity. There's a body, a mind, and a spirit, existing in harmony but somehow independent of one another. As an atheist, I throw out the spirit part of the equation, and tend to think of humans in a dualistic way. We're part body, part mind. For the most part, I put these into two separate mental boxes. I bike and avoid soft drinks to improve my body. I read books and write to improve my mind.

But, on a deeper level, the duality is an illusion. There is only body. Mind might appear to be a separate entity, but in reality its only a function of the body. The evidence is pretty simple. If mind weren't a function of body, you wouldn't be able to get drunk. Anesthesia wouldn't be able to switch off your mind for surgery. Mind is only a persistent illusion, an important illusion, a necessary one even. But since I believe it is only an outgrowth of your physical form, it logically follows that, if you want to improve your mind, it helps to improve your body.

I used to think I didn't have time to exercise. What I really meant when I said this was that I was giving priority to mental activities, like writing books or (more frequently) hanging out on the internet talking about stuff. Exercise seemed boring, purely physical, a low priority to the brainier stuff I enjoyed. What I've since discovered is that making my body healthier has made my mind healthier. I'm less prone to depression, less haunted by doubts. I'm able to handle stress better. And, my imagination is more active than ever. Getting outside on a bike for three or four hours gets me away from computers and TV and even off my cell phone. I might pause to take pictures and post to instagram, but when I'm peddling, I'm peddling, and thinking.

Can exercise solve every problem you have in life? Definitely not. But if you ever feel stuck in a rut, unable to grow intellectually, give it a shot. Improved physical health definitely leads to improved mental health. And, if you happen to believe you have a spirit, I suspect it gets a boost as well.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance

I read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance by Robert Pirsig when I was in college. At the time, it had a big impact of my thinking. I think that, even today, I'm able to see solutions to problems that others get hung up on because of attitudes I found in this book. In a key scene, a friend's handle bars are slipping and the author offers to shim them tight with a sliver of old beer can. The friend is appalled; he's driving an expensive motorcycle, and the author is proposing to "fix" it with a piece of discarded trash. The key lesson of the scene is not to get hung up on the labels attached to things, but to look beyond to see the underlying forms and functions. His friend saw a piece of trash, but the discarded beer can was actually a sheet of thin aluminum, oxidized to resist further corrosion, of exactly the right thickness, and soft enough to be cut to the right shape with a pocket knife. It was the perfect solution, once you could see the thing for what it was, not merely as what it was called.

I've had plenty of chances to put this way of looking at things to the test. Once, my radiator hose burst right where it joined with the radiator. I had no tools but a screwdriver, and this was in the days before cell phones, and I was fifty miles from the nearest person I knew.

Fortunately, there was a broken beer bottle on the side of the road. And, one inch down, the radiator hose was still intact. It was only where it clamped on that it had ruptured. So, I used the broken bottle to cut off the last inch of busted hose, used the screwdriver to clamp it back on, filled up the radiator with water I was lucky enough to have on hand and drove back home.

At work, I'm well known as a troubleshooter, willing to try new things, to see outside the "correct" channels of doing stuff in order to see the path that will actually get the job done. I don't know that the book gets full credit for this. I had a tinkering nature even from childhood. But, Zen and the Art did resonate with me, made me feel that my way of looking at the world was worth nurturing.

The last few weeks, I've been rereading the book. Alas, from my perspective as a 50 year old, the philosophy no longer looks quite as clever as it did when I was 20. In the book, the narrator argues that quality is the primary generator of reality, existing both outside the object and the observer. He states that quality can't be defined, but everyone knows what it is, at least if they have eyes to see it. He laments that too often we get fooled into thinking that style is quality. Cars are built with attractive curves and fancy features, but are mechanically lemons, for instance. He goes on to argue that quality can't be defined because it's all encompassing. It's almost like God. Any attempt to describe it must by definition fail, since the concept is just to big and omnipresent to ever be contained in mere words.

To quote Orwell, some ideas are so stupid only an intellectual can believe them.

Pirsig's failure to define quality is based mainly on his unwillingness to accept that quality is completely subjective. Also, while insisting quality can't be defined, he continually attempts to define it as one big concept that covers everything.

He completely overlooks the following possibilities.

First, there is no universal standard of quality that applies equally to writing, motorcycles, and architecture. The things that make a book good have pretty much nothing to do with what makes a good hamburger. Instead of a universal ideal, we have a zillion ideals based on the things being judged.

Second, Pirsig rejects the notion that quality is purely subjective. As evidence, he has his class judge writing samples. As a group, they tend to agree on which writing samples are best. He takes this as evidence that there's a universal standard they're keyed into, even if they can't define it.

He overlooks that he's in a class of people very close in age, ethnicity, and educational background. He's teaching  a college class, after all. By the time this class has got to him, they've had years to be taught what's good writing and what's bad writing. The class is also connected by the culture of their era. Pirsig is a child of the 50s, and uses quite a bit of "beat" vocabulary, like calling some people "square." While he doesn't state it, he probably admires the writing of Alan Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac. Indeed, he's writing a novel about being On the Road, full of observations about the people and towns he sees. It's difficult for me not to think that he didn't regard Jack Kerouac's writing as being high in quality. But, if so, I think he's mistaking quality for fashion. Kerouac's writing had its moment, but if the same novel first appeared today, would it have any kind of cultural impact at all? The good writing of 1950 isn't quite like the good writing of 1850, and the writing of 2150 will be judged by factors we can't even guess at. Quality changes with cultural context.

Think of food. I ate lunch at a Thai restaurant today. The primary condiment of Thai cuisine is a fermented fish sauce. To most American tongues, the stuff is foul. Who the hell wants to eat the run off juice of fermented fish? Or think about kim chi in Korean cooking. It's spoiled cabbage spiced to the point that many people find it inedible. Yet, in their own cultures, in the right context, these foods are of the highest quality.

Does that mean that quality is completely subjective? Not necessarily. From an evolutionary perspective, we probably all have built in receptors to find certain things attractive. Most of us like fatty, sweet foods because they are high in calories. In today's world of abundance, this leads to obesity, but in our ancestors world of scarcity these taste receptors helped us survive. Similarly, while our distant ancestors weren't expressing themselves as much in writing as we do today, I'm guessing there was a sexual selection bias that made people who could express themselves clearly and confidently attractive to the opposite sex. A gift for eloquence was a clue that the mate had good intelligence and could pass on good genes. That's why us writers get all the action.

My point is that there can be underlying biological urges driving us toward finding certain objects, actions, and appearances pleasing. These get overlaid with culture; if your Dad liked country music, you have a better chance of liking country music. If he listened to opera, you have better odds of liking opera. What's considered quality varies from socio-economic class and geography. At the risk of stereotyping my own state, many men from my neck of the woods and from my economic strata probably find NASCAR racing to be an art form. Give them tickets to a Broadway musical, however, and they'd feel a deep, deep dread at the thought that they might actually have to go.

Back to Zen: Strip away this core concept of universal quality, and it would seem like the book should fall apart. It doesn't. It's still an excellent narrative about a long road trip, and a touching story about a father trying to save his son from mental illness.

That's one of the weird things about quality literature. It doesn't have to make a damn bit of sense to still be good.

Old Boots: A Health and Weight Update

Notice the toes of the boots in the picture above. I bought these hiking boots in the fall of 2012 when I started my campaign to lose weight and improve my fitness. Less than two years later, I've walked the toes out of them. I'm certain that part of the problem comes from not spending enough on a better brand of boots. I bought these mainly because they weren't garish and they cost under $50. They kept my feet dry in snow and creeks and I've hiked several hundred miles in them without a single blister, so they weren't that bad. I feel like I got my money out of them.

Last year, I posted a lot of updates about my weight. It was right at a year ago I finally got my weight down to 224 from a starting weight of 284. I was confident I could keep it off.

Now, I'm starting to wonder. I've gained back close to half of what I lost. My weight is now hovering around 250. It's been disconcerting to see the numbers on the scale get higher month by month.

However, my body composition at my current 250 is way, way different than it was the last time I was at this weight, coming down from a higher number. I've been doing strength training for months and a significant chunk of my rising weight is almost certainly muscle. Today, I was doing 220# reps on the fly machine. When I started going to the gym last fall, I could only do 120#, maybe 150# if I really strained.

Alas, I still can't do a @&$#! unassisted chin up. That was a big goal for me when I started this, and I thought that I could reach it in six months. Oh well, maybe in another six.

More evidence that my weight gain isn't mostly fat coming back is that most of my pants from last year still fit. I do have a pair of 34" waist jeans that were the tightest jeans I got into at my lowest weight that I can't wear comfortably any more, but all the 36" waistbands still fit, and some are even loose. When I started my weight loss plan, I had a 42" waistline.

I'm wondering what it would take for me to get my weight moving in a different direction while at the same time continuing my strength training. Now that I'm 50, the number of years I have left to increase my strength are probably limited, so I feel like I should keep pushing myself to add muscle mass while I can. I'm hoping the effort will pay off when I'm 70, or even 80. On the other hand, I really, really want to get rid of the last band of fat around my gut. I feel like I could do it with a more calorie restrictive diet, but that type of diet is counterproductive for adding muscle.

Oh well. I guess it's something to think about the next time I go hiking. In new boots, of course. The old ones are just sad. So why do I feel happy when I look at them?

Shamocracy

American politics seems to be in stasis. It's not quite gridlock, where nothing gets done at all. Instead, its government by autopilot. The bureaucracy continues to spit out rules, budgets continue to grow via continuing resolutions, and our foreign policy seems locked into a pattern of daily reminding us that the rest of the world is going to do whatever the hell it wants to do and we have no good options for changing that.

I'm of mixed minds about our current political drift. On the one hand, my libertarian side feels that, if our legislators are unable to band together to write new laws, whew. Most new laws always nibble away at freedom in some fashion, either by increasing the cost of government or the complexity of our lives. Having spent much of February and March slogging through my taxes, the last thing I need is for the government to pass some new "fix" to the tax laws that adds more bookkeeping to my life.

On the other hand, my biggest libertarian fear is that, if congress and the senate are no longer capable of governing, they abdicate power to the executive branch, which is then free to claim more and more power, more and more authority, without having the fear of restraint by elected officials. Not to pick on Obama, but it does feel like every other day he's altering the implementation of the ACA without bothering to seek the congressional authority to do so.  It's a devilishly complicated law that was poorly written and passed by legislators who hadn't read it, and couldn't have comprehended it if they had. I don't see this as some dark scheme to crush our current healthcare system, or implement socialism. It's just what happens when politicians do their jobs in a half-ass fashion.

What I do fear is that once congress steps back and allows the executive branch the freedom to alter the implementation of laws without seeking changes in the letter of the law, the possibility arises that this will become the new normal. Congress can devote it's real energy to doing what it does best, getting reelected, and let all the fine tuning of actual government be handled by the executive branch. They will never have to pass difficult legislation that could actually put them in danger of getting voted out by their constituents. They can pass feel good legislation without fear that it will ever become actual implemented law.

In the end, the only person with any authority who will have to answer to voters will be the president. Only, the president won't actually be running the government, since his appointments will all grind to a halt in the senate. But, it's not as if the bureaucracies will shut down if there's no politically appointed head. They'll just grind on, with the bureaucrats not really accountable to anyone. There will be no political head to crack down on them, and the money to run the bureaucracy will keep coming in as congress passes continuing resolutions year after year.

What's the name for this system of government? Where we still get to vote for our leaders, but they increasingly have no actual role in governing? If there isn't a word already, might I suggest shamocracy? Or maybe shameocracy? Because if government's become a sham, it should be our collective shame.

Where I want to be at 60

I wasn't happy with my life when I turned 30. I was divorced, stuck in a job I hated, had too much debt, no savings to speak of, hadn't published a book or even a story, was living in an apartment with two roommates, and generally felt like I hadn't accomplished much. Curiously, I was really angry with my 20 year old self for doing so much to ruin 30 year old me. The younger James hadn't made any wise choices, and had been almost oblivious to the future. The things I wanted in life... I could have had them at 30 if I'd make better choices when I was 20. But, of course, when I was 20, I didn't really know what I wanted.

But, the smartest thing that 30 year old James did was to realize that all his regrets were actually goals. All the things I wish I'd had at 30? It was time to shape my life so I could have them at 40. And, for the most part, my master plan worked out pretty well. I did have one book and a couple of stories published when I was 40. I still hadn't made enough to quit my day job, but at least I'd ditched the horrible job I'd had when I turned 30 for a much less soul crushing job. I'd also saved a decent sum of money during the decade since I'd participated in my new job's 401k. I owned a house. I was in relatively good health, thanks to drugs that had my allergies and asthma under control. Alas, I was divorced again. I apparently hadn't learned the right lessons from failed marriage #1. And because of the divorce, I couldn't afford the house I owned, and wound up selling it for a loss that wiped out a big chunk of my 401k. Still, while things weren't perfect, I was happier at 40 than I had been at thirty. The stuff I wasn't happy about once more became my goals for the next decade.

I wanted to publish ten books by the time I was 50, and to be free of a day job. I wanted to finally have a good relationship, and own a house that wasn't a huge money pit. I really, really wanted to be completely debt free except for a mortgage. And, I wanted to be physically fit. I'd only discovered the joy of physical activity while being able to breath freely in my late 30s. I really wanted to build on that and see what was possible.

On the last goal, I started off by backsliding, partly thanks to my first goal. Writing a lot of books means sitting in front of a computer a lot of hours. I never have been able to shed myself of my day job, so I felt like I really didn't have time to exercise. My weight exploded, and by the time I was 48 I was nearly 300 pounds. Luckily, I woke up to the stupidity of what I was doing to my body and turned things around. I lost a lot of weight and carved out time to exercise. Now, I can run a 5k and yesterday did a 50 mile bike ride. I can say with some confidence I'm in better shape at 50 than I was at 30.

A big part of this is because of my wife Cheryl. She's completely on board with my fitness kick and has made it part of her own life, so she's right there beside me on my bike rides and my runs, and her awesome organizational skills play a big role in planning our meals out so our calorie intake is sensible. She's my perfect partner physically, mentally, emotionally. It took me over four decades to find her, but, wow, was she worth the wait.

Financially, sheesh. I'm in more debt than ever, after being on the verge of complete debt freedom only a few years ago. Our new house is terrific, but we had to buy a new furnace and put a lot of work into the interior. Then, on Cheryl's old house, the furnace blew, the plumbing failed, and it sat empty for months and months while we paid two mortgages before we finally broke down and rented it. Oh, and did I mention the transmission exploding in my car? Or the power steering failing? I had vowed to drive that car until the wheels fell off, but finally had to break down and buy a new car.

Luckily, my 401k has recovered nicely from the hit it took ten years back, and from losing over a third of its value when the housing market crashed in 2008. Between our 401ks and the value of our real estate, our assets add up to more than our debts, so I guess we're ahead.

Still, goal one for when I'm 60? This time, seriously, debt free, except possibly for a mortgage.

Goal two: A lot more books. I'm hesitant to set a numerical goal. I'd like to write 20 books over the next ten years, and think that's a not unreasonable goal. But, part of me is intrigued with the thought of finding a book with a big idea that takes a long time to write correctly. What could I produce if I really focused on one book for a full year? Two years? Five? I pride myself on writing fast, but I also pride myself on trying new things. So, no numeric goal for the number of books I'll have published in the next decade, but when I tell people ten years from now how many books I've written, I want them to say, "Wow. That's a lot of books."

Goal three: I want to read another 260 novels. This is a novel every two weeks for the next decade. A modest goal; I know people who read a hundred books or more in a year. But, I want to keep developing my brain as well as my body. I seriously slacked off on reading novels for most of my 40s, and didn't really pick up the habit again until just last year. I don't intend to lose my momentum now.

Goal four: Body. I don't want yesterday's 50 mile bike ride to be the most impressive thing I do with my body in my 50s. On the other hand, I've been so focused on it, I haven't really given a lot of thought as to what my next goal will be. 100 miles in a day seems like it might be beyond my practical limits. Now that I can run 5k, I know I want to build to 10k, but I don't know if I want to build to full marathon distances. I can only say that there will be a next goal.

Okay, 60 year old James, here you go. My promises to you. Hope they serve you well.

Snow days

When I was a kid, I looked forward to a snow so I could stay home and play. Now, I keep my fingers crossed for a snow day so I can stay home and work.

I finished the third draft of my latest novel Friday, pretty much two weeks ahead of my personal schedule because I had a day off two weeks ago due to snow, then two days this week. I normally squeeze in an hour or two in the evenings to write. Getting three whole days to focus on the book gave me momentum. Nothing makes a thousand words flow out of you better than having written a thousand words preceding them. Momentum matters.

I did take a few walks in the snow, and helped Cheryl build a snowman. But, as I reach the verge of fifty, I'm finally realizing a fundamental truth about life: Work is more satisfying than play.

It's fun to go play in the snow. It's fun to go to concerts and movies, fun to watch television or read comic books, fun to hang out with friends at bars and just shoot the breeze.

And having fun is important! It's good for the brain, and, in the case of my hiking and biking and running, good for my body.

Work, on the other hand, isn't fun. Even the creative stuff, like writing, can turn into a slog. On Thursday, I kept making bargains with myself to sit in the chair for one more hour, to make sure I got to the end of the chapter I was working on. Then I'd move the goalpost and tell myself, nope, after the next chapter, then you can stop... and then I'd keep going. My back ached from sitting in the same spot for hours. My brain felt limp in the aftermath. And yet... yeah! I've written another book! Endorphin rush!

The entertainment value of watching television is like chocolate. A little here and there is nice. A steady diet of it will leave you sick and fat. Sitting at a keyboard for five hours and trying to make sentences go in the proper order is tedious and exhausting. But, when you're done, you have the satisfaction of knowing you've accomplished something. It really is a feeling like nothing else in the world.

500 days on My Fitness Pal

Today marks my 500th day on My Fitness Pal. Cheryl and I ran 5k on the Al Beuhler Trail in Durham, the first time we've done 5k on hilly terrain. Our previous runs of this length have been done on the Ocanneechee Speedway, which is completely flat. The hills didn't really affect my time. I still made the run in a little over 50 minutes, though it certainly felt a lot longer than running the equal distance on a flat track.

Came home and did 80 seconds of planking. Cheryl and I have been doing planks every day for the last few weeks. They look like they'd be easy. Essentially, they're a pushup where you don't go up or down, just hold your body perfectly straight, supported only by your toes and forearms. But, ten seconds in, you discover just how difficult it is to hold you body straight like that. It's supposed to strengthen your core, and so far it seems to be working. According to the program we're using, I'm supposed to be doing 5 minutes of planking each day by the end of the month. We'll see.

When I'm hiking, I like listening to audio books, but when I'm running I don't feel like I can follow the narrative. Nor do I want just any random music. So, I've been listening to favorite albums as I run, which works out really well, since most albums mesh well with my 50 minute pace. Today, I listened to U2's Achtung Baby. I really consider this to be U2 at their artistic peak. It's stylistically much more daring than Joshua Tree, flows nicely from song to song, and is really unbeatable lyrically, with tracks like One, the Fly, and So Cruel. The next time I run, I might listen to a Radiohead album, or maybe the Coroner's Gambit by the Mountain Goats. The latter might be a little short for the run, but listening to a collection of songs about death will certainly provide some motivation to keep moving.

5k Achieved!

So, when I said Cheryl and I would be building up to run 5k, I didn't think I'd hit the goal before the end of the first week of the new year. But, we decided just to go for it this morning, and, holy cow, we did it!

I'm again struck by similarities between the skills I've developed as a novel writer and skills I'm now using to become more fit. Novel writing requires lots of small, incremental steps in order to build to one large whole. To get to the 100,000 words requires lots of small sessions where you only get out 1000 words, or even 100. But, it all adds up. Progress that seems tiny gets you closer to your goal.

The same has proven true of our fitness quest. When we started almost a year and a half ago, we couldn't run 5 minutes without stopping, let alone 50 minutes. But, we got  here by running one minute, then walking one minute, then running one minute, repeat. Then, once that was comfortable, we moved up to two minute runs, then four minute runs. It was only a few months ago I finally managed to run a full mile without stopping, and not that much longer after that I made it to two miles.

My writing motto is, little by little, the work gets done. It turns out to be true for running as well. I guess, with the 5k under my belt, I'll need to start looking for more ambitious goals. I mean, is a 10k possible this year? Or am I out of my mind?

1001-A Fitness Update

As of today's hike on the Eno with Cheryl, I have logged 1001 miles of physical activity in Endomondo. About 450 is biking, another 450 is hiking and walking, and the rest is stuff like kayaking and running.

Next year will have a lot more running. Cheryl and I are building up to being able to run an entire 5k distance. Right now, I can go about 3k, with 1k of walking at the beginning and another 1k at the end.

Also next year, I'm planning a 50 mile bike ride to celebrate my 50th birthday.

I'm now faithfully attending a gym near my work, and starting to get my upper body into shape, since most of my activity to date has mainly strengthened my legs. My goal is to be able to do an actual unassisted chin up by my 50th birthday. I've never in my life been able to do one; I was kind of a scrawny kid, alas. But, I'm using the weight assisted machine to do them at the moment, and feel confident that I can get to the point I can do at least one or two within the next three months.

I feel like I should have something profound to say, on the occasion of having hiked (etc.) a thousand miles in a year. But, having worked out Monday, ran yesterday, and hiked today, all I can really say is: Man, am I going to sleep good tonight.

The Storyteller's Gift

Earlier this month, I was invited to take part in an event at the main branch of the Orange County Library called The Storyteller's Gift, where local authors discussed important books they'd received as gifts. This was my essay:

My grandfather Sid loved to read. His house was of full of books they'd spilled out to shelves on the front porch, where paperbacks soaked in the humidity of southern summers. There was no logic to the organization. Cookbooks would be mixed in with histories and random single volumes from encyclopedias. The books were purchased in bulk at flea markets and thrift stores, an eclectic collection of dime store romances, lurid non-fiction, and pulp detective tales. National Geographics accumulated in every corner, as well as Watchtower magazines, and numerous children’s books filled with Bible stories.

My grandfather never went to college. He’d grown up poor in coal mining country and worked most of his life in a factory. Reading helped him find a larger world beyond Appalachia. None of his children inherited his love of reading. I never saw my father with a book in hand, only the occasional woodworking magazine. The houses of my aunts and uncles had a book or two, but none showed an inclination toward building a library as grand as their father’s.

Then I came along. I was a kid more interested in books than toys. When I went to his house, I risked life and limb digging out National Geographics from tottering stacks taller than I was. The first science fiction anthology I ever read was pried from one of his porch shelves. I loved all the books about ancient astronauts and Bigfoot and alien abductions.

If I ever had a relative who should have given me a book for Christmas, it was my grandfather. But, he was a Jehovah’s Witness and didn’t celebrate holidays. While he was generous in letting me take home books I found on is porch, I can’t recall him ever giving me a book as a gift.

Like a lot of bookworms, he was a quiet person. Our only conversation I recall was him telling me how one day cars would run on hydrogen and we’d fill up our tanks with water.

He died when I was eleven. My grandmother survived him by over thirty years. The collection of books never changed after he passed away. They just kept rotting on the front porch, or collecting cobwebs in their stacks along the walls. She never got rid of the books, but never read anything other than the Watchtowers. For three decades, I never saw any new books show up on the shelves.
When she passed away a few years ago, her children had the task of emptying out the house. Silverfish and mold had ravaged the books on the porch. Cheap paper and decades of southern heat had reduced the books inside to fragile yellow pages that fell apart as you turned them.

I never went to her house after her funeral. It was the task of my aunts to settle her estate. I was told that the books had been hauled off to the dump, with a few of the more intact ones going to Goodwill. They’d save me a National Geographic from March of the year I was born. I was happy to have it, thinking this was the only link I’d ever have to that childhood library.

Two years ago, I went to my mother’s house the weekend before Christmas. I don’t celebrate the holiday myself, but my Mother and siblings do. I attend seasonal events with the firm rule that I don’t take part in gift exchanges.

My mother was almost apologetic when she came out of the back bedroom with a cardboard box for me. It wasn’t wrapped. It was just a bunch of random objects, all of them old. There was an ancient Kodak camera, an old conch shell, a few yellowed photos, a frozen watch. And, at the bottom of the box, books.

She’d saved these things while helping clean out my grandmother’s house and thought I might want them. My grandfather had one bookshelf in a back bedroom that had glass doors, so that the books inside had been in decent condition. She’d saved me a few science fiction and adventure novels.
I dug through the box and discovered that my grandfather had been a fan of Edgar Rice Burroughs. There were a couple of Barsoom novels and a few Tarzan books, including a reasonably intact hardcover of Tarzan of the Apes.

I flipped to the copyright page. A. C. McClurg & Co., 1914.
I was no expert, but 1914 had to be darn close to the date Tarzan was first published.
I pulled out my phone.

Tarzan was originally published by A. C. McClurg & Co., 1914. First editions were worth $65,000, with dust jackets; jacketless editions like the one I held went for a mere $3000. Everything about my book matched the pictures on the internet, save for one small detail: While the copyright page listed the publisher as McClurg, the spine was stamped A. C. Burt.

Further research revealed the truth. A. C. Burt had reprinted the Tarzan books in the U.S. using the original British printing plates, including the copyright page. In perfect condition, they might be worth $50.

It didn’t matter. If it had been a first edition, I couldn’t imagine selling it. Flipping through the pages, the smell that washed over me was the exact scent of my grandfather’s porch. Even now, it takes me back to childhood.
This year, I finally read Tarzan. To say the novel hasn’t aged well is an understatement. The style is lurid. The plot is built on one implausible coincidence after another. There’s cringe-inducing racism. Tarzan, an abandoned white baby in a dark jungle, rises above the savage natives due to his superior intellect and fine breeding.

Toward the end of the book, the plot strains to tick the boxes of every imaginable adventure scenario, as Tarzan comes to America and races a car through a forest fire to rescue Jane and… I’m not making that up. Tarzan knew how to drive, because, why not? At this point, I was enjoying the book as an unintentional farce.

I reached the final scene, knowing that Tarzan and Jane confess their undying love and go back to the jungle… only that’s not how the book ends at all. In defiance of every Hollywood  adaptation, after crossing an ocean to find Jane, Tarzan realizes that, if he tells her he loves her, she’ll come back to Africa. But he also realizes she’ll never fit in there, any more than he belongs in the civilized world. The book closes with a perfect final sentence, one of the most satisfying closing lines I’ve ever read, as Tarzan throws away his chance of happiness in order to ensure Jane will have a better life. In an instant, a novel I hadn’t liked very much became a classic I wanted to talk with people about.

But who could I talk to? I didn’t know anyone who enjoyed old pulp novels. 
Except, of course, I did. He was gone now, but the fact he had a whole collection of Tarzan books told me a lot about his reading tastes. For the first time, I understood that it wasn’t just chance I’d found science fiction on my grandfather’s porch, or books about UFO’s piled under his coffee table. The books he’d chosen to preserve in his glass case were the ancestors of the books I now write.
It took me almost four decades to figure out that my grandfather had been a nerd. He’d lived in rural Virginia with no one around who shared his geeky interests. He didn’t talk much, but I bet he wanted to talk about those books.

I hope, by reading his books now, I’m doing my part to carry on the conversation. 

Thinking about books, thinking about Greg....

"All over the States I wandered, and into Canada and Mexico .  The same story everywhere.  If you want bread you’ve got to get in harness, get in lock step.  Over all the earth a gray desert, a carpet of steel and cement.  Production!  More nuts and bolts, more barbed wire, more dog biscuits, more lawn mowers, more ball bearings, more high explosives, more tanks, more poison gas, more soap, more toothpaste, more newspapers, more education, more churches, more libraries, more museums.  Forward!"
--Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer

My best friend Greg Hungerford passed away four years ago two days before Christmas. Of course, the holiday reminds me of him, but this year I've had a lot of other reminders as well. As I've been going back and rereading classic novels I either skipped or failed to appreciate in my school years, I keep running into books that remind me of Greg.

For instance, I would love to have read the Island of Dr. Moreau while Greg was still alive and harassed him until he read it as well (though, for all I know, he had read it, and it was my ignorance of the book alone that prevented a discussion). I think Greg would have really appreciated the religious undertones of the book, and the way the lines between man and animal get blurred. Greg and I talked a lot about books, but, curiously, we seldom read the same books. He was a big fan of biographies. I tended to lean toward science. He loved big, dense novels by writers like Faulkner. I loved tight little tales like the Grifters. But, while our tastes didn't overlap, the important thing was we were both readers. We both kept filling our heads with ideas, and used the other to test out those ideas through long, meandering arguments.

One thing we both loved were humorous authors. We'd swap books by Dave Barry, and both quoted extensively from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Whenever Dave Barry would publish his "Year in Review" column, it was something of a tradition for us to read it together. Greg usually did the actual reading out loud. He had a wonderful reading voice, and could manage to make it through most of the sentences without helplessly cracking up, as I was prone to do. No matter what he read out loud, he sounded like he'd practiced the material a dozen times, even if it was his first time glimpsing it. He just had the ear and the timing to translate the written word into poetic sound.

Of course, the single most perfect memory I have of Greg and a book comes from when I went to visit him in Athens Georgia. We were driving to get something to eat. As we pulled up to a stoplight, he suddenly threw open the car door and ran into the intersection. It was only then that I noticed a paperback book on the pavement. He snatched up the book and made it back to the driver's seat before the light changed.

"You really wanted that book," I said.

"It was on the road," he said.

"I saw."

"No," he said. "It was On the Road." He held up the Jack Kerouac classic. That's a coincidence even I find hard to believe, and I was there!

This year, I read On the Road again. I hated it. Behavior I was oblivious to when I read it in college now left me wondering how anyone could admire the book. Dean Moriarty, the most interesting character in the book, is a horrible slacker who can't hold a job. He runs around the country making babies with women, then abandoning them.

I encountered this same attitude in Tropic of Cancer, which I just finished last week. The book denounces honest work as a kind of slavery, and ends when the narrator convinces a man to leave his pregnant girlfriend because settling down with her is going to be the end of his freedom and happiness. The man agrees, but, feeling at least some twinge of guilt, he gives the narrator all the money he has on him to take to the woman to help her out, at least a little. The narrator sees his friend off, then keeps the money, because he's been broke the whole book and feels like he could use a little break from crushing poverty.

I can tell you that Greg's attitude toward jobs was similar to the Henry Miller quote at the top of this column. In the years I knew him, he probably had twenty or thirty different jobs. Only a few lasted more than a month or two. He wasn't lazy... he worked hard as hell when he found something that interested him, like repairing computers or rebuilding a carburetor. But, he was someone who was more suited to working his own hours and being his own boss. He didn't take kindly to the harness. He never quite fell into lock step.

Despite his years of drifting, and despite his deep seated desire not to get stuck in a steady job, Greg broke the mold of so many of the characters I've been reading about. Unlike Dean Moriarty, unlike Henry Miller, when Greg finally had a child, there was never, ever, even once, any thought of abandoning her. It didn't trap him to settle down and raise his daughter. He finally put down roots, and found that people, like trees, drawn nourishment from such structures.

Miller and Kerouac sang the praises of men who behaved badly. Greg didn't listen to their songs. The world needs more books written about men like him.

The Five Most Overrated Classics (and Five that Deserve the Label)

On my Dragon Prophet blog, I've been chronically my reading for 2013, when I was trying to focus on reading classic novels that I'd somehow managed to skip in my reading to date. Some of these books left me stunned by how wonderful they were, the sort of books I wanted to run out and immediately start telling my friends about. But, because human nature is perverse, the books I usually wound up telling my friends about were the truly wretched ones, the books that turned out to be tedious, pointless slogs. In the end, I read 36 classics. Here are the five best, and five worst:

The Five Classics I read this year that I loved the most:

The Island of Dr. Moreau, H.G. Wells--An absolutely stunning book that explores man's relationship with God and tries to fix the line between what is human and what is beast, and just how thin that line may be. Beautiful writing, fascinating characters.

Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte--Of the romances I read this year, this one was my clear favorite. Jane has dignity and self sufficiency. She has to support herself, and has goals beyond just getting married. In contrast to, say, Pride and Prejudice, the obstacles to her happiness are genuine and not trivial. The lovers in Pride and Prejudice are kept apart by misunderstandings and class barriers that didn't resonate with me. The man Jane loves, on the other hand, is already married and hiding his deranged murderous spouse in the attic! That, my friends, is a barrier to romance. Alas, the book does fall apart a bit near the end, when the Jane's fortunes improve mostly through strokes of good luck instead of actions that she takes. Still, for truly deep, complicated characters, this book is hard to beat.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey--Holy moly! The language of this book is lyrical and evocative, written from a distorted point of view that misunderstands reality in a way that illuminates it. The plot and pacing are terrific, there's several characters you wind up caring for, and there are thought provoking explorations of how far society will let you go as an individual before you enter the zone of crazy. The one flaw is cringe-inducing misogyny. Every female in the book is a castrating bitch or a saintly whore, and the female antagonist is finally "put in her place" by a sexual assault. That said... wow!

Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut--Daring story structure, writing that is both plain and simple and poetic and surreal. A must read for those who think of WWII as the "good war." A beautiful tragedy.

Catch-22, Joseph Heller--Yeah, another WWII novel. Easily the funniest book I read this year, built around the most agonizing tragedy you can imagine. The way the story keeps building up layer after layer, from a dozen different character's perspectives, is a real high-wire act that leaves me amazed at how well it's pulled off.

Speaking of classics that left me amazed...

The Five Classics that I can't believe are considered classics:

The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Robert Louis Stevenson--A good premise smothered by the author doing everything in his power not to actually show us much of Dr. Jekyll or Mr. Hyde. Stuffy writing, the barest imaginable plot, made all the more bewildering since Treasure Island by the same author is such an wonderful, fast paced, tightly written book.

Journey to the Center of the Earth, Jules Verne--Oh god, I can't believe I slogged all the way through this boring pile of words. The most shallow characters you can imagine, for no particular reason other than "just because," decide to go wander around in a really big cave. Lots and lots and lots of pages of characters looking at rocks. And, while I'm forgiving of outdated science in older SF, even when this book was written the whole notion that there were forests in the center of the earth had to be built around pure wishful thinking rather than any sort of evidence. The book's one virtue: It kept 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea off this list!

Dracula, Bram Stoker--This book is still famous today based on four or five awesome chapters at the beginning of the book, really some of the best horror ever written. And then... it feels like a different writer steps in to crank out the rest of the book. The hunt for the vampire is mostly a committee meeting. Seriously, there are chapters--chapters!--devoted to Mina typing up and organizing notes. Every time Van Helsing spoke, my eyes glazed over. And, the final climax is just about as anticlimactic as it could possibly be. Still, the first few chapters almost kept it off the list.

Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift--I admit, there's some funny stuff in here about the absurdity of how humans organize their societies. But, reaching the ten funny paragraphs requires wading through chapter after chapter of Swift bleeding his premises completely dry. We get it, Jon! These guys are really small! Or big! The real weakness of the book is that it's utterly plotless. It's just a record of weird stuff that just happens due to good luck or bad luck. And Gulliver himself is a complete non-entity, devoid of personality or goals, just a tourist in his own life.

On the Road, Jack Kerouac--Probably my most controversial pick on this list, since it's influenced so many writers. But it suffers from the same flaws as Gulliver's Travels. There's no plot, and the characters are all surface. Sal Moriarty is supposedly a fascinating, well drawn character, but, Jesus, if you met this guy in real life, you wouldn't want to spend five minutes in his company. He's a deadbeat who impregnates women and abandons them and tries to distract you from all the damage he's causing by talking about the beauty and mystery of life. I liked this book when I read it years ago, but, now I know children abandoned by their fathers, I know people who consider themselves too concerned with the life of the mind to be bothered with holding down a job, and I have no patience for a book that tries so hard to explain why such behavior is beautiful.

If someone wants to make a case for any of these five books, I'd love to hear what you found good about them. I know tastes vary, and my own prejudices can sometimes blind me to the charm of art that other people adore.

The Bible for Non-Believers

As readers of my other blog know, I've been focusing on reading (and sometimes rereading) classic literature this year. As the end of the year approaches, I've decided to close out by reading some books of the Bible.

I've read a fair amount of the Bible thanks to my religious upbringing and continue to use a lot of Biblical learning in my writing. My Bitterwood novels are rife with Biblical allusions, not to mention direct quotes. Coming soon, I've got a short story called "Fall of Babylon" appearing in an anthology of kaiju stories where I draw heavily upon the Book of Revelation for inspiration.

But, at Capclave last month, I was talking about the book of Job on a panel with James Morrow and he basically said I didn't understand the lesson of that story. He's an author who's built a career out of building novels around Biblical concepts, so I'm taking his admonition seriously. It's been over 30 years since I've been to Sunday school and actually had homework assignments to read sections of the Bible. I have trouble remembering books I wrote just a year ago, so it's certainly possible that my memory of some of the Bible isn't as crisp as it needs to be.

Which, of course, invites the question: Why should I even want to know the Bible. I'm an atheist. Have been since my late teens. Why bother slogging through a book that's got almost nothing to do with my life these days?

I've got four answers:

1. The Bible is still the foundation of a vast body of English literature. Last month I read Jane Eyre, and all through the book she makes references to Biblical myths. While certainly our culture today is increasingly secular, and I'm sure you could watch a hundred episodes of "Three and a Half Men" without knowing a single scripture and not miss a thing, I still feel like many great books would be less satisfying if I was unaware of the religious text underpinning the works.

2. The Bible is actually pretty amazing reading... in parts. Look, I won't pretend that the average reader is going to get a damn thing out of trying to slog through Numbers or Leviticus or the cluster or minor prophets at the end of the Old Testament. But Job, Ecclesiastes, and Revelations are definitely worth mining for their poetry and imagery, and there's a lot of Biblical myths that a writer is going to be a hell of a lot poorer for not knowing. David versus Goliath, David and Bathsheba, the creation myth of Genesis, the Flood, Sodom and Gomorrah, the parables of Christ, Jacob wrestling an angle, Moses parting the Red Sea then wandering in the wilderness for forty years, the Ten Commandments.... it's worth knowing these things for the same reason it's worth knowing Greek mythology or Norse mythology.  Only, more so, since no one takes Greek and Norse myths as literal truth, while we live in a nation where there are people... often people in with great political power... who do take these myths seriously.

3. It's important to know what's in the Bible because so many, many people think they know what's in it when they don't. I don't want to start a political discussion in this particular article, but lets just say that the Bible and Jesus get invoked a lot by both the right and left in contexts that bewilder me. I have a hard time figuring out how some people read the Bible and come away knowing Jesus's position of, say, the capital gains tax or EPA regulations. Knowing what's actually in the book so many people reference incorrectly is a useful tool for making yourself disliked in heated dinner conversations, if such is your goal in life.

4. It's important to know myself.  I was taught the Bible starting from the time I actually acquired language. I still remember some of the terror I felt in church being warned about the fires of hell. I remember the awe and wonder I felt thinking about armies of angels swarming down from a sky cracking open on Judgment Day. I remember my confusion about how the hell Noah got so many animals on the ark, and just what the heck any of this had to do with dinosaurs. I got a little cryptozoological thrill by being assured that giants and ghosts and witches and dragons were all real creatures, because the Bible said they were real.

There are still values and assumptions I hold without giving them much thought that no doubt arise from some of those early Sunday school lessons. Digging deeper into the book that gave birth to them might yet open unknown doors in my brain that lead me to discover the terra incognita within me.

So, next up... rereading Job.

Letting go of Superman

Last weekend I was a guest at Capclave, a speculative fiction convention in Maryland. I wound up on two panels about superheroes, one about superhero novels and one about superheroes with lame powers, like Stone Boy or Color Kid.

Neither was explicitly about the current state of the comic book industry, but both panels produced similar comments from the audience. Everyone who spoke up hated the comic books being published today, and quite a few people told me that they had finally quit reading DC comics. Attitudes toward Marvel were slightly less bitter, until, interestingly, we reached the topic of the Avengers and lots of people confessed to hating what had happened to the team in comic books while still being thrilled with the movie.

Even the people I talked to who still felt enthusiastic about modern comics admitted they've stopped buying the monthly titles and now wait and read only the collected graphic novels, since the monthly comics are seldom a complete story.

To me, the underlying problem is that, when comic books started gearing themselves toward adult buyers in the 80s, they found a much smaller audience, but an audience with much more money. When I was a kid, I had to ask my mom for a quarter if I wanted to buy a comic book. If I wanted a Superman toy, it was something I had to plead for an hope it might turn up at Christmas or a birthday. Now, you have adults willing to shell out fifty or sixty dollars for an action figure they will never take out of a box. When a new first issue of a title appears, there are comic book fans who will willingly buy three different variant covers, two copies each... since they need a copy to put into a poly bag and without ever actually opening it.

Because of all these adults with the shopping impulses of spoiled rich kids, Superman and other iconic characters have stopped being characters and started being properties. All that matters now is that new product get churned out month after month.

This isn't to say that no good stories are being told with these characters. But, because of the monthly need for new product, any good story is quickly washed away. Suppose that a creative team lands on a comic and takes the title in an exciting new direction; Grant Morrison and Richard Case on Doom Patrol in the 90s, for example. A brilliant run of edgy stories that made the book a hot property. But, Morrison and Case can't write the book forever. So, DC is left with two choices: Find a copycat writer artist team who will continue telling stories just like the popular ones. This was actually tried for a while and the results were fairly lame, because you can't imitate your way to originality. Eventually, the stories get so muddled and messy that readers drift away. But, the title can't be allowed to die an honorable death. Since it's a commodity with a proven market value, it now face the second option: The dreaded reboot. A new creative team comes aboard and wipes away everything that was done before, starting with a blank slate to tell fresh stories. Sometimes, this produces interesting results; after all, that was mostly how Grant Morrison and Richard Cases run had it's start (though they didn't completely wipe away all previous continuity). But, even if the reboot is successful, it hits the same wall: the creative team can only keep the new stuff going for so long, then the title goes back into stagnation or reboot. Eventually, fans get burned out and bitter.

I'm not saying that DC should never publish new Superman stories. But.... maybe it's time for the monthly comic book to pass away. Stop the treadmill of having to churn out stories month after month, year after year. Let time pass between new releases, and use strong editorial discretion to make sure the new releases are actually, you know, good. Take time to get it right.

It's really all up to us geeks. In the end, to save the characters we love... we must walk away from them, and grant our favorite monthly titles the right to die.

Drive-by Diplomacy

The debate among pundits seems to be that President Obama's handling of the situation in Syria was merely incompetent or outright idiocy. A few extreme right pundits have gone so far as to argue that the President has deliberately schemed to weaken America, while a few far left cheerleaders have proclaimed that the President was a Machiavellian genius who snookered Putin into getting exactly what he wanted all along.

I told a friend this week that Obama's performance had left me a little nostalgic for George W. Bush. I might not have agreed with Bush's choices, but you have to admit that he wasn't decisive. He might not have been the world's most gifted speaker, but when he took a position he and his underlings were prepared to defend that position to both the public, to congress, and to the rest of the world. Obama didn't seem ready to make the case even to himself. There's a show on Comedy Central called Drunk History where speakers narrate stories while intoxicated, getting their facts muddy, their narration meandering to odd places, until the speakers inevitably fall out of their chairs. Watching the stuff coming out of the White House, I detected the same sort of staggering, stumbling unsteadiness. Drunk diplomacy.

Yet, I have to admit, the end result is almost certainly the best possible case scenario. Obama managed to stumble himself right out of the hole he'd been digging for himself. The situation in Syria wasn't something we were going to solve by throwing drones at it. Obama is a one trick pony when it comes to military force--bomb bad guys, see what happens. I'm not certain it's effective, and I'm extremely certain it's not moral. Colin Powell famously invoked the (fallaciously named) "Pottery Barn" doctrine: You break it, you buy it. Until Obama, with a few exceptions like Reagan's bombing of Libya, the presumption was that, if we used military force against a nation, we than had an obligation to go in and provide security. Germany, Japan, Iraq, even Afghanistan... the stated goal was to leave these nations in better hands than they were when we decided to act against them. Anarchy was never an acceptable goal.

The only goal Obama seemed to have for Syria was anarchy. Punishing Assad only helped the rebels, and the rebels don't exactly strike me as nation building patriots. Bombing chemical weapon sites would have left big craters filled with dangerous substances at best, or wound up unleashing clouds of toxic materials to spread for miles at worst. Of course, you could not target the chemical weapons, just weaken Syria's infrastructure by taking out some power stations or bridges. But, this seems like an attack against the people of Syria, who have enough problems to deal with without us providing this kind of assistance. Our last option was to target Assad's troops and weapons, leaving him weakened. In this case, the rebels might overthrow him, and suddenly they are the ones controlling the chemical arsenals. Won't we all sleep better after that?

In the end, the only ethical choices before us were a full scale Iraq style invasion where we went in and stabilized the situation on the ground and took command of the chemical weapon stockpiles, or... we do nothing. The world is full of atrocities. We cannot intervene to stop them all. Attempting to do so would require us to conquer nation after nation, in a never ending quest to impose order.

Some people worry the world will become a more dangerous place if America isn't there to act as the world's policeman. Quite possibly. But I would argue that we help make the world a more dangerous place if our only course of action is to lob bombs onto foreign soil and hope for the best. That's not the behavior of the word's policeman. It's drive-by shooting diplomacy. Let us be done with it.

Day 365: Year one of living better

It was 365 days ago that I downloaded MyFitnessPal on my smartphone and made the choice to turn my life around. I put in my weight that first day at 284 pounds. I just weighed myself a few minutes ago, and I now weigh 228 pounds. Not only have I been able to lose about 20% of my body weight, I've now kept it off since I hit my major milestone of 224 pounds back in May.

 

Alas, I never reached the goal of hitting 220. So close, but it eluded me. I'm still hoping that I'll get there eventually. My weight started going the other way in May when the days started getting longer for a very good reason: I began moving my body through space at distances I couldn't have even dreamed of last year. Below is a chart generated by Endomondo, the program I use to keep track of how far I walk, hike, bike, run, and kayak. I started using the app last December. As you can see, I got a little obsessive about keeping my total distance always just a little bit higher than the month before, I trend I managed until August. But, in fairness, I had weeks of vacation in June and July where I had the time to do more long bike rides. The fact I got as far as I did in August while holding down a full time job is a pretty good accomplishment.

 



So, while I've gained a few pounds, I'm pretty sure most of the gain has come from adding muscle to my legs. Since we added biking to our workout schedule, it really uses a very different set of muscles than hiking. We've gone from sweating and panting our way through six mile bike rides to managing 30 mile rides, with plans for longer ones.

Alas, some of the few pounds I've added back might be fat. One paradox of all the exercise I've done this summer is that it's kept me eating ridiculously high calorie loads. Over the course of a week, I might burn an extra 8000 calories from exercise, but all the working out leaves me famished, so I can't stop snacking, and feel justified eating larger portions of everything. I'm still avoiding soda, but confess I've gone back to eating pizza after mostly staying away from it last winter.

Of course, weight isn't the only important number when it comes to health. I gave blood last night and my blood pressure was terrific and my resting pulse was only 68. My resting pulse used to be in the high 80s or low 90s. I used to have pretty frequent back pain, and now I go whole days without noticing a twinge. And, I'm still fitting into the 34" waistband pants I bought back in the spring. All in all, I'm probably more fit than I've ever been in my life.

Cheryl and I have moved ourselves through space under our own power a little over 750 miles so far this year.  We plan to make it to 1000 miles before years end, though it does get a little tougher in the winter since it's harder to get in long hikes or rides after work when it gets dark 30 minutes after Cheryl gets home. Still, I think we'll make it.

The major milestone I'm shooting for now is to bike 50 miles on my 50th birthday. That's in early March, so weather might complicate that. Obviously, if it's snowing or raining hard, I'll have to reschedule. Still, it's something to look forward to, and something I could barely dream of when I started this last year.

A few rambling thoughts on wealth disparity.

I read a lot these days about wealth disparity. One frequently sighted statistic is that the top 10% of households control 75% of the total wealth in the US. Dig even deeper, and the to 1% control 35% of the total wealth in the US. I have no reason to dispute these numbers.

A billionaire has roughly 10,000 times as much money as I have. But, does that make him 10,000 times better off? Can he buy 10,000 times as much health care? Perhaps he can afford 10,000 cars; good luck driving all of them. Is his television 10,000 times as large as mine? Does he have 10,000 times as much food? As much clothing? It seems to me that there is a point where extra wealth runs up against the wall of practical reality. He probably could buy his wife a wedding ring 10,000 times more expensive than the one I bought Cheryl, and maybe he could own some rare painting worth more than all the houses combined in the small town I live in. But, rings and paintings have value mainly because of subjective cultural factors. Practical things you need to live, like food, can be extremely expensive, but, from a nutritional standpoint, your body burns steak and potatoes from a high dollar restaurant exactly the same as it burns a taco from a food truck.

A billionaire and I have access to exactly the same books, movies, and music, at least what's recorded. I suppose people with a lot of wealth can hire their favorite musicians to play their children's birthday parties.

It is true that wealth can purchase experiences beyond my income. A billionaire could travel around the world on his or her private plane whenever the whim struck; I can barely afford a couple of trips a year to a beach in the next state. It's not just the money I can't afford, but the time. Working for an employer, I'm allowed only a certain number of days off each year, and these have to be approved in advance. Of all the things I envy most about great wealth, it would be the freedom to do what you wish with your time without asking permission. But, even the free time produced by wealth runs into some limits. We all get the same number of hours in a day and days in a year. I might chafe at the constraints placed upon me by holding down a steady job, but I'm sure wealthy individuals have their own headaches and hassles and wonder where all their time goes.

So, if there's a point where wealth has brought an individual pretty much everything that's available to own or experience in the world, does it make sense to allow a small sliver of the population to keep accumulating wealth? Or, would it be more beneficial to spread some of that wealth around?

Maybe I've been listening to too many Billy Bragg songs, but there is something appealing to the notion of taking a billionaire's wealth and dividing it up among, say, 100,000 families. An extra 10 grand for most families would be a pretty significant windfall. But, would it be moral to just take the money? What exactly is the ethical principal that says it's okay to take someone's property against their will and give it to someone else, even if the person you give it to really, really needs it? If I had bad kidneys, and there was a compatible donor who didn't want to give up one of his, would it be ethical for a doctor just to go ahead and take the involuntary donor's kidney anyway because it will save my life without causing permanent harm to his? One could argue there's a huge difference between body parts and money, but, I don't know. The money I have I've paid for by exchanging lots and lots of hours of my life, countless heartbeats and breath, lots of sore muscles and burned out brain cells. Taking my money is kind of stealing my body.

But, maybe it's all just a matter of what analogy you choose to use. Suppose there was a huge fire at my neighbor's house, and I had a swimming pool in my back yard, and the fire truck started pumping my pool dry, despite my protests of, hey, that's my water! I think only the most hardened libertarian would say that the firemen were in the wrong.

One last rambling thought: Is our wealth disparity possibly protecting the environment? While so few people control so much wealth, there are practical caps on how much they can consume. That billionaire can't realistically drive the 10,000 cars he could afford. But, divide up his wealth among 10,000 poor people, and suddenly they might all be able to afford cars, and bigger televisions, and find themselves eating higher up the food chain, consuming more meat and fewer backyard tomatoes. Distributed wealth would inevitably result in increased consumption. We don't notice a lot of the environmental harm our consumer society produces because we've outsourced a lot of our pollution. Not many American cities still have smokestacks, but China puts out enough smoke and dust you can see it from space. Could we survive even a hundredfold increase in our consumption? My gut instinct tells me we'd muddle through. It also tells me I'll probably never find out, since there's zero evidence that the wealth accumulation trends are going to change anytime soon.

Our Economic Future: Ecclesiastes 1:9

On Friday, I was given my annual performance appraisal. It was pretty positive all around, with high marks for my troubleshooting prowess and my ability to innovate and improve. Our center led the company in a lot of areas, and the appraisal gave me credit for figuring out a way to utilize our machines more profitably, credit I fully deserved. If the whole network adopts my idea, it will probably save the company tens of thousands of dollars a month.

I should have come out of that performance appraisal feeling pretty good about myself and my role in the company. Instead, my review was intensely bittersweet--I was being given a performance appraisal for a job I no longer had, written by a boss who no longer had his job either, since higher ups in the company had closed down our workplace in an effort to streamline the production network. The fact that our location consistently was at the top of rankings for various quality and profitability measures couldn't save us from the fact that, on a map, we were a bit too close to a few other production centers to justify renewing out lease.

Luckily, I was able to find another position inside the company, with a small cut in pay, and doubling of commute time. But, at least I still have a full time position that qualifies for benefits. Most of the positions being advertised these days in my company are part time. Which, if you read any economic news at all, you'll recognize as part of a larger economic trend, as a sizable majority of jobs being created these days are for part time positions.

I was tempted to just take the severance package and try to make a living solely by writing. But, writing income is lumpy; I get some monthly income from Amazon, but a sizeable chunk of my income still arrives as advances, and often these advance payments are months late. For instance, I was due an advance in April that didn't arrive until near the beginning of July. Unfortunately, my bills arrive every month.

Yet, I still might have been tempted, if not for health insurance. Going onto my wife's plan was a huge expense to lump on top of a loss of a steady income, and securing my own insurance was an even greater expense. I'm almost fifty and I've watched friends younger than myself battle with cancer and heart disease and seen some of the resulting bills, so, even though I'm in excellent health at the moment, I know that getting sick without health insurance would have the potential to wipe out every dime I've ever saved.

Our health care system has become a sort of giant reverse lottery. One day, your number comes up, and, boom, you have a $100,000 disease. If you don't have health insurance, you're bankrupt. If you do have health insurance... sadly, you're probably part of the reason health costs keep climbing. We've built a system where the person who purchases the services isn't the person who pays for them. So, most of us don't really pay attention to our hospital bills, we just let our insurance companies deal with it and pay whatever we're told to pay. When our insurance costs keep rising year after year, we blame the greedy insurance companies, not the rising health care expenses.

In reality, while I'm taking a reduction in my wages to stay with my company, next year I'll probably cost them a little more than I did this year because they'll be paying more for my insurance. According to statistics you can google for yourself, large employers like the one I work for are going to see an increase in premiums of about 6.3%. A little of that will be passed on to me, but, on total, the company will still be paying more to keep me employed next year than they did this year. My wages have been grown at a rather lackluster rate for most of the last decade. A 3% raise was a good year; some years, I got nothing. But, every full time employee was getting invisible raises in the form of the company paying ever more for our health insurance.

Knowing that insurance is going to be an ever growing expense, it makes sense for a large employer to look for every way they can to reduce the number of people they have to insure. The location I now work at was once staffed by over twenty people. Now, there are under ten. Small things we used to do like ringing people up have been replaced by automated pay stations that operate with a credit card. Big things we used to do like long, involved consultations to coordinate large projects have pretty much been eliminated. A lot of the document creation work that used to be done on site is now done by a separate company with a staff mostly located overseas. When I look around, I think, well, they can't cut the staffing any further. But, of course, they can. There are a half dozen branches within a twenty mile radius. Trimming one or two of these locations could probably be justified. Within the branch, a lot of time is spent shipping packages, with an employee standing at a station typing in the shipping information. How long before the computer gets turned around and it's the customer typing in their own information?

Think your industry is safe? There are technologies and social changes in the pipeline that can disrupt nearly every industry imaginable. Walmart makes a lot of dough selling us stuff cheaply; but in twenty years, 3d printing might be so advanced and so cheap, there's no point in going to the store to buy a new toothbrush; you can just print a new one at home. The masses of people working in factories overseas to supply us with toothbrushes and blue jeans and cell phones will one day look back at todays era as the golden age of jobs, the way people in Detroit fondly recall previous decades.

Even if technology doesn't wipe out an industry, there's always cultural changes. There was once a time when you couldn't drive through North Carolina in the summer without passing miles and miles of tobacco fields. This year, we noticed a tobacco crop while we were driving through South Carolina and marveled at how long it had been since we'd seen anyone growing the plant. Coca Cola still sells billions of gallons, but sooner or later the war on sugary drinks will move from being championed by a big city mayor or a first lady and be a major line item on a presidential agenda, and we'll see that industry humbled.

Right now, there's an energy revolution thanks to fracking, with plentiful oil and gas projected out for decades. But, we also have tons of coal; we just don't burn as much as we used to do to changing environmental regulations. Within a decade or so, someone will engineer a superefficient battery that lets an electric car cruise for a thousand miles between charges and gas stations will disappear. Or maybe a solar panel will be improved to be a hundred times more efficient than what's available today. Suddenly, digging energy out of the ground will be a quaint, obsolete technology, something that a caveman might do.

Even the health care industry, with it's ever rising profit margins--one day, someone is actually going to figure out a cure for cancer. You'll swallow one custom printed pill that will have an eye-popping price tag, but, after that, you're cured. You don't have to go to the hospital every week for chemo. You don't have years and years of scans and blood work looking for recurrence. It will be one and done, and the legions of people currently handling the paperwork required for billing all the thousand little expenses incurred in caring for you will suddenly be surplus employees.

Or, before a cure is found, people get so disgusted with the status quo that they just accept a single player health care plan, and the legions of people who currently work in the health insurance industry find that they're out of work, though at least they don't have to worry about losing their health insurance.

All of this sounds negative, perhaps even a little scary. But, I predict we'll like the world to come. As an author, I hate driving past places that used to be bookstores and seeing them vacant. As a reader, I like laying in bed and downloading a free novel to my kindle. I'm reading easily two or three times as many books as I did just a few years ago because there's no longer any real barrier between thinking about a book I'd like to read and acquiring it. The same is true of music; I buy more music today than ever, obscure bands like Beruit and Neutral Milk Hotel whose CDs would never have been stocked at my local record stores, back when there were local record stores. Beyond a few elitist audiophiles, does anyone really miss actual records? I'm told that the music I stream on Spotify has a lower sound quality, but I grew up in an era where I listened to music on distant FM radio stations, or through a tape deck in the dash. I suppose if I only listened to music in a dark room wearing headphones, I might detect some subtle difference in the quality, but under real world listening conditions, I honestly can't tell the difference. 

The air will be cleaner. The streets will be quieter. You won't have to deal with crowded parking lots or long lines at stores. Younger workers growing up in this new economy will probably like their jobs. Electric bills will be a thing of the past, as most homes will produce their own power. Even the dreaded ever growing cable bill will probably vanish, as everyone starts streaming only the shows they actually want to watch, probably at some trivial fee. Instead of huge media companies raking in all the profits, small indy media will carve out profitable little micro niches, where a few thousand fans can provide enough income to make a project worthwhile.

The challenge will be for people of my era. I'm way too young to retire, but old enough that returning to school and learning a new career where I'd have the skill levels of a twenty something intern as I'm launching a new career in my mid-fifties seems daunting. Ah well. I imagine wagon drivers had much the same worries the first time they saw a locomotive chugging down tracks. A few decades later, passenger train engineers must have gazed up at the airplanes high overhead and felt a gnawing sense of that their days were numbered.

Ah well.

What has been will be again,
    what has been done will be done again;
    there is nothing new under the sun.