James Hazlett Foreman

Author: jim

  • Routines

    Author’s note: I really enjoy this opportunity to share my thoughts with you. I have a journal (that I’m not very good at keeping, to be honest) but this is a good outlet for me. Thank you for reading it.

    I am unemployed. A day job provides a reliable routine, around which one can construct a life that suits them, and I have decided that I am one of those people who needs a routine. Without it, I am set adrift. My mind becomes a Raft of the Medusa, which is terrifying to consider but also startlingly accurate: my thoughts feel like they’re eating each other and I am paralyzed.

    This is leading me to a tangent so skip to the part where I say it’s over if you just want to read about me.

    This is a tangent about art

    The image I used, above, is not a photograph of the famous painting by Théodore Géricault, which would have been the obvious choice. Instead, I used a photograph of people re-enacting the photograph for a video project in 2009. Rather than restate what is on the artist’s website I’m just going to paste it:

    In late 2008 Adad Hannah received a telephone call from an old friend in British Columbia. Gus Horn, a rancher, community activist, and art collector, wanted to stage a version of Théodore Géricault’s monumental painting The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) in 100 Mile House, a community of 2000 people in central BC. Although Hannah initially tried to talk Horn out of pursuing the project, explaining that it would be difficult and expensive, the details for remounting this tragic scene were finally worked out in early 2009 and Hannah flew to BC to get started on the project.

    The full details are at the above link, but it boils down to this: the whole dang community got together to make sure this project happened. It sounds like a Christopher Guest movie. They posed in front of an audience, in front of a painted backdrop, with props they all created, staying mostly still for up to ten minutes at a time. Snippets of the video are at the link.

    The original painting was a representation of an actual event: the tragedy of a ship called the Medusa. 150 survivors from the wrecked ship piled onto a raft and, two weeks later, 15 people were left. Cannibalism happened, along with other assorted horrors.

    Géricault painted the Raft of the Medusa right after the actual event, and he did a ton of research, even going as far as viewing bodies of dead people to get the colors right and interviewing two of the survivors. Although the work has been interpreted as a contemporary critique of the people in charge (the wreck of the Medusa was likely the fault of the captain of the vessel, who was a political appointee and apparently incompetent), I’m more inclined to see it as the 19th century version of a True Crime podcast.

    Here’s why: Géricault painted it at the age of 27, and it is enormous, clocking in at 16 by 23 feet. He debuted it at the Paris Salon, a vastly popular show of art where every inch of wall space at the Louvre was covered with art. Young Géricault intentionally painted a well-known and salacious tragedy in an unconventional style as big as he could make it in the biggest art show in the world, to attract the most attention possible. He knew exactly what he was doing, and it worked. The painting was a smashing success for Géricault, who nevertheless died only a few years later of tuberculosis. The story of the painting of the Raft of the Medusa is a saga itself, involving insane asylums, severed heads stored on roofs, rotting limbs nicked from hospitals, and other assorted misadventures.

    How is Géricault painting the Raft of the Medusa like a true crime podcast? Ask Sarah Koenig.

    Back to the image of the video of the recreation of the painting of the Raft of the Medusa: I have no idea why they did it, but that’s the great thing about art. Who needs a reason? The point of art is only itself. It doesn’t serve a purpose, though it can. It doesn’t have to be useful, but sometimes it is. It doesn’t even have to be pretty.

    End of digression

    I have developed a roughshod routine that serves me well, most of the time. It is vulnerable to the joyful vicissitudes of life with a kindergartener and his mother, the love of my life, but it serves me nonetheless.

    I begin each morning in the morning, which is important. As a person who lives with depression, I could easily spend an entire morning and most of an afternoon in bed, should the mood strike me. Part of the purpose of this routine is to keep such moods as far away as possible, and routines are good for that.

    What time I get out of bed differs, but it’s always around 9, which is the best possible time for me to get out of bed. Being unemployed means I’m not making any money, but it also means I get to stay in bed exactly as long as I want.

    Shyloh, the previously mentioned love of my life, has usually already risen and made coffee. Sometimes she is still there, sometimes she is not. Sometimes her son is there, sometimes he is not. What I do next is wholly predictable and is unaffected by who might still be around: I drink coffee.

    The joy I derive from coffee cannot be overstated. I like my roasts light and my coffee black. I relish each of the two or three mugs I drink over the course of the remainder of the morning. It clears my mind and gets it moving, so I can do the next things as well as possible, because they are important.

    I spend a portion of each morning on the job hunt, usually while drinking coffee. Sometimes this can take the whole day, sometimes it only takes a few minutes — it depends entirely on the opportunities available to apply to. A good opportunity isn’t posted every day, but I’m highly prepared for ones that are. This is a task that historically generates the most anxiety of anything else in my experience, so I address it each day immediately and with verve.

    Let me be clear: applying to a job I am perfectly appropriate for is the most stressful activity in my life. This is not a sensible thing to be anxious about! I have spent hours dissecting this anxiety with my therapist, so I have a pretty good idea where it comes from. As such, I know how to navigate it. What’s funny about this process is that the actual things that make people the most anxious in job searches generates little to no anxiety in me at all. Interviews are fun! I love talking to people. I love being the center of attention. I love talking about things that interest me (and, luckily, what I do for work is extremely interesting to me). In fact, the ease with which I slide into interview mode is a hard point upon which I attach a rare piton of self-confidence (navigating anxiety is often as simple as finding enough things to attach good feelings to and using them to swing through the hard parts).

    What happens after the coffee and job search activity is highly variable (see vicissitudes, above). Some days, I drive somewhere to get things or to get people, or take things to people, or take people to things. There are destinations and objects and people and they are always configured in different and exciting ways. This makes me feel that I have purpose, which is also good for staving off the unwanted moods.

    Usually before or after the above, I use the energy derived from successfully conquering my anxiety by completing job search activities and drinking two to three mugs of coffee to do house work. This can be laundry, dishes, dusting, cleaning up after the cat, cleaning up after the kindergartener, cleaning up after myself, etc. It is work that must be done and it, like the transportation I provide, makes me feel useful, and without a job to give me the daily affirmation of purpose, I like doing it. That’s not true. I don’t enjoy doing the laundry, but I very much enjoy having done the laundry.

    As the day draws to a close, I usually make dinner. We have been using services like Sun Basket, which ship a week’s worth of ingredients and instructions and I do the requisite tasks to turn them into edible food. I also find myself enjoying this far more than I ever expected, though I also equally enjoy not having done it, so it’s not like I would, given the choice, cook a meal every day instead of having the meal made for me. I am not insane! I like cooking, but I also like it when someone else cooks. On days that nobody quite feels like making food, we order food from a place that will, with unpredictable levels of accuracy, bring ready-made food of our choice to our door.

    above: an actual photo of food being cooked by me

    One thing missing from the above list that might jump out at you is this: writing. I gotta do it, and I do it every day. Sometimes I do it at great length, sometimes I only have time for a little. Sometimes I don’t feel like writing at all, which is when I make sure to write something, even if it’s just a few sentences. I don’t know if my favorite things to write, book-length things, will ever be read or distributed to wide audiences, but I’m trying! That’s all I can ever do.

    If you read the last issue, you know that’s a step in the right direction for me!

    A final digression about writers

    Writers are a good source of historical information because they tend to write things down. Writers are people just like any other, so it’s a good bet that their favorite subject will be themselves. Because of this, there’s a lot of information about their routines, just as I’ve provided information about my own.

    One commonality in nearly all of them is that they spend some portion of their day writing. Another one is the ungodly early hour that they ply their trade (writing). I mean, it’s ridiculous. Hemmingway always started “before dawn” so that’s kind of a moving target. Maya Angelou began around 7. W.H. Auden started at 6am. Kurt Vonnegut started writing at 5:30am. Haruki Murakami and Barbara Kingsolver start at 4! FOUR! What insanity!

    I need my sleep, man. I don’t think I have it in me to get up at 4. Neither did Hunter S. Thompson, who woke up at 3 and immediately started doing cocaine, drinking Chivas, and wrote for 8 hours starting around midnight. I don’t like drugs, so that’s out. I guess I’ll stick to my own routine of writing when I can, as often as I can.

    This is the last digression, I’m serious

    My friend Elicia died between me starting this and now, over the weekend. It was sudden and unexpected and accidental. I hate it when people post about somebody dying and don’t mention how they died, but in this case it’s very boring and medical, so it doesn’t merit details. Everybody is still stunned. It’s a weird thing that happens when someone young dies suddenly. You know that scene where Obi-Wan has to sit down because Alderaan exploded and he felt it through the force? It’s like that. You get whacked by the news and and then you keep going and rescue the princess anyway because life is like that. Life keeps going and that person is back from where you just came from. If time is a river, they dropped anchor and waved goodbye as you went around the bend. She’s gone, now. She’s back there.

    I’m only mentioning her here because she was a big fan of this dumb little newsletter, and she would have hated me mentioning her. She was always encouraging me to write in general and this specifically. Steinbeck’s writing advice included the encouragement that I’ve taken to heart for years: you can’t write for everyone — that is a paralyzing thought. Instead, imagine one person and write to them. Elicia is the person I wrote for. This one’s for her.

    Elicia Parkinson was the best of us. She will live forever in my heart, and I will always be thankful that I got to know her.

    Here’s proof that she would also hate me sharing:



    That’s it. I’m done for now. Thank you for reading!

  • That Was a Close One!

    How I almost stopped writing. Forever!

    I tweeted this:

    I have invented many ways to torture myself. I am an expert at destroying my own self worth. In the span of one short afternoon, I can go from stellar mood to debilitating self-criticism. I am my own worst everything (enemy, critic, etc.).

    THE PARAGRAPH THAT WASN’T

    I nearly began writing the list all of the things I am punishing myself for, but I deleted the first sentence and thought better of it, and wrote this paragraph instead. I was excited that I was able to work in a reference to Pushing Daisies, too — I started it with “The facts were these,” which is a line the narrator would deliver at the beginning of every murder mystery. This paragraph is better than the one I was going to write because it is not a list of everything I haven’t accomplished, which is what this paragraph was going to be when I started writing it. This one turned out better. That paragraph-that-never-was began with a Pushing Daisies reference, a show about solving murders, and would have contained all the ways in which I was going to murder my self esteem. It would have been a bloodbath!

    THE LIST OF THINGS I HAVE NOT ACCOMPLISHED IS INFINITE

    …so what’s the point in picking out a few and hitting myself with them?

    This is true for everyone who has accomplished anything, even those who have accomplished the things I want to have accomplished, also. The feeling that There Is More I Could Do haunts all creative people. I remember an interview with Chris Rock, the comedian. He is incredibly successful and influential, admired by his peers, loved by his fans. And yet he is not immune to this Ghost of Feeling Like a Failure — he looks up from his palatial estate and sees Eddie Murphy’s. He’s Chris Rock, but he’s no Eddie Murphy. The Ghost haunts even him.

    My list of things I want to accomplish is very small.

    I WANT TO PUBLISH A BOOK

    More specifically, I want to publish a book of fiction. I’ve already written one, and I have sent it to agents for their consideration, which is what one does with a novel and one does not have representation. I also want to publish an essay, or even a book, about my experience with brain tumors. If I accomplish these two things (or even just one of them), I would be very happy. Note that I did not say “I would be rich” or “I would be famous” or “I would have no more problems” because none of those are true. All I would have accomplished is that I would have written a book that was published. There are also a million other little, tiny things I could accomplish that would make me feel like I had accomplished something. I am not hard to please.

    I had an appointment today with my therapist, who told me to recall my most important writing teacher. That person was Miss Hofreuter, my junior high English teacher. Before her encouragement, I had never considered writing. It was something I had to do, and I never really enjoyed it. I’m not sure I enjoy it now! I feel like it’s something I should do, because I am good at it.

    BUT IS HE REALLY?

    There is no objective measure of good writing. I can find out if I’m a good runner. I can find out if I’m a good golfer. I can find out if I’m a good cook. The proof is in the running, golfing, or pudding. There are benchmarks. What is the benchmark for good writing?

    This might surprise you, but it’s not “getting published.” If bad writing never got published, I would never have considered writing anything longer than a to-do list. A great book gets me excited about good writing, but a bad book gets me excited about MY writing. I don’t know if I’m a good writer, but I know I’m better than a lot of the stuff I read from the science fiction and fantasy shelves. If you were to look at my Amazon book purchase history and compare it to my Goodreads (which lists the books I actually read), you would see that I only actually finish 1/4 of the books I start. I simply can’t finish a bad book. I don’t read very fast, so it’s a decision that reverberates down through my life for weeks. Why waste those precious weeks on bad writing?

    A SMALL VICTORY

    When Twitter recently used a tweet of mine in its ad campaign at the Union Square subway station, in New York City, I didn’t get a lot of followers. A couple of people tweeted to tell me it was there, or that they agreed with the sentiment, but that was the extent of my exposure. I didn’t expect more than that. I’ve had tweets go somewhat viral before. I’ve had people more famous than me encourage other people to follow me. None of it has ever really translated into anything substantial. I say that with zero regret or surprise. I never used Twitter as anything but a place for me to write little things. I met a bunch of people I’m happy to call my friends (good ones!) but after 12 years on the service, I’m pretty comfortable in my place. My enjoyment of twitter is not diminished or enhanced by the number of followers I have or how many likes or retweets I get. All you must do is look at the popular twitterers to know that popularity is not the reward for quality.

    But it was still pretty awesome to see one of my tweets printed out to super size and glued to a wall. Somebody at Twitter read what I wrote and liked it enough to make it part of their ad campaign. That’s a very long way from having a book published, but it’s a benchmark. I have to collect my benchmarks.

    MY NEMESIS

    My partner, Shyloh, says that everybody needs a nemesis. A nemesis is not an enemy, per se, but somebody who is doing what you want to be doing. You can even be friends with your nemesis, and you probably have more than one. Who is your nemesis? Mine is a writer named Dana Schwartz.

    First of all, she’s a great writer. I don’t know if my writing is any good (it depends on the day), but hers is great. She’s a journalist, a fiction writer, memoirist and podcaster. Her new podcast about royal scandals is already hugely popular. She’s written three books: a novel, a memoir, and a nonfiction. She’s also 27 years old.

    I have not accomplished those things, but I would like to hit at least one of those milestones. Again, and I cannot say this often enough, the list of things I have not accomplished is infinite.

    THIS IS NOT GOING TO BE UPLIFTING

    Some people would end this with a hopeful wink. Some people would list all of the people who accomplished great things in their middle age (like Susanna Clarke, who published one of my favorite books when she was 45). Some people would reassure themselves, by reassuring their audience, that life is about more than accomplishments or meeting career goals or reaching some arbitrary pinnacle. Maybe I’ll publish a book. Maybe I won’t. It doesn’t matter.

    What matters is the friends we make along the way. I want to live a life I’m proud of, and create good things, and make the lives around me better. That’s all that matters. That’s all I want.

    That’s not true.

    I want to publish a fucking book.

  • And Now, We Pivot

    And Now, We Pivot

    I’m sorry if you like the old version of this newsletter. It’s dead and it’s not coming back. I did ten of them! That’s perfect. The Amazing Electric Ephemera lives on in archive form.

    I’m shifting this into something more personal, focused, and shorter, but also still entertaining. I have another one I’ve written and it’s ready to go, so I’ll probably send it out next week? I don’t know. I don’t want to give anybody any unrealistic expectations.

    Check out the end of this newsletter for information you might find exciting.

    I didn’t meet my favorite writer.

    Let’s Start with Mickey Spillane

    I saw an interview with Mickey Spillane once. He was old and gnarled and scrunched up, like my dad’s baseball glove. He was talking about being angry about something someone else said to him once.

    Why was he angry? Someone had called him an author. He wasn’t an author. An author makes books. Mickey Spillane was a writer, goddamnit. Writers are, authors do. Writers write, authors make books. There’s a difference there if you think about it.

    I bet he said “goddamnit” a lot, all one word. GODDAMNIT. It feels good to say it when you’re frustrated and you need a word that bounces out of you.

    My favorite writer (he’s not just an author) is Neal Stephenson. He is, I think, good at writing exactly what I enjoy reading, and what I want to write. I got to hear him talk to a group of people that was 1/4 the size of the crowd I saw Roxane Gay speak to, which I find interesting to consider.

    Who Shows Up?

    Neal Stephenson is a mega-writer. His books sell millions of copies. His audience is enormous. Roxanne Gay is accomplished and widely read but I suspect the sales of her books are small in comparison to Stephenson’s. Stephenson rarely makes public appearances, while I think Gay is more accessible. How is it that an arguably more famous author is relegated to the small Carnegie Library Lecture Hall while Gay was able to fill the Music Hall to capacity (the former seats 600, though I estimate only half that number attended, while the Music Hall seats 1900)?

    Roxane Gay is active on twitter and is an accessible person. If you tweet at her, she’ll probably respond (if it interests her). Also, her audience trends younger and I think young people are more likely to seek out these kinds of things whereas old people like me would rather stay home. Also, I think that Stephenson’s reputation works against him.

    Not a Luddite, But Looks Like One

    Neal Stephenson was briefly famous for something other than his novels, kind of. It was a weird modern kind of experience where someone whose work you enjoy and whose name you know does something that brings them into the larger zeitgeist and everybody knows about them for a little while. It’s like finding out one of your friends went to school with your brother and you never knew. It just never came up.

    Neal Stephenson would not answer emails. He didn’t do interviews. Social media didn’t exist yet, but there were things on the internet that kind of resembled them, and he was not interested in any of them. He believed, and still does, that his primary mode of communication with his audience was through his novels. If he spent time doing these other things, he would never have time to write his novels, which is what these folks were wanting to communicate with him about. In a time when everybody who could connect was suddenly connecting, and the internet was growing, the people who wrote about what it might look like in the future were the people you‘d think most likely to participate (like Neal Stephenson, whose cyberpunky Snow Crash was like the flashy little brother of William Gibson’s less accessible Neuromancer). But here was a guy whose major contribution to pop culture was a book that half took place in the internet, and he refused to use it! He had a website where he spelled this out and used a phrase that stuck in my head: slabs of time. He needed great slabs of uninterrupted time in order to work on his novels, so don’t expect to communicate with him. This is the Neal Stephenson I know about, which makes it even stranger that I had an opportunity to speak to him and for some reason elected not to.

    There are a few factors involved here, so watch me as I unpack them and dissect myself:

    Reason 1: I don’t like bothering people.

    I know Neal Stephenson is uncomfortable with communicating with his audience. I’m making that up. His reason for not emailing has nothing to do with comfort. I’ve decided that it is true because it justifies my decision to not bother him by asking him to personalize my book (it was already signed). The purpose of personalizing a book is 1/5 to acquire a book that is personalized and 4/5 to have a personal interaction with the author. I saw a photo of Neal Stephenson shaking hands with someone on Facebook and immediately regretted my decision.

    This led me to put myself in his situation, and I would absolutely not be bothered to meet a succession of people who liked my writing so much that they would spend money on a book of mine they hadn’t read yet. I would be touched by every single person. I would be thankful that they came to see me and happily exchange a few words and a handshake with them, not because I wasn’t interested in longer conversation but because it would only be fair to the rest of the people in line to keep it short.

    You can see where this is going.

    Reason 2: My breath was bad from not having eaten all day.

    Reason 3: I didn’t have anything interesting to say.

    So what? He wasn’t going to remember me. I look like the statistically average person who likes Neal Stephenson, and anything I said would have been pretty close to the statistically average words someone like me would say to him: I love your work, it means a lot to me. That’s pretty much all I would have to say to him, and then I would regret not saying more, or not saying something more meaningful, despite not having much more meaningful things to say.

    His writing did not lift me out of depression or “save my life” as I’ve heard people say about writers they particularly like. His writing consistently gives me great pleasure, and has done so since I was very young. I don’t think anything I said would have been meaningful enough to make him remember me.

    Reason 4: I don’t like waiting in lines.

    This is true and unavoidable. I have likely missed out on a few pleasurable or interesting experiences because I saw the line of people going into it and said “forget it.” Actually, I probably just thought that and what I said was “ugh.” Lines are not just inconvenient, they are also fraught with social danger. What if I’m stuck with someone intolerable? What if they have bad breath and won’t shut up? What if that person is me? What if they want to talk about Neal Stephenson? That’s probably what they’d want to talk about, and I would gladly talk about Neal Stephenson in any context other than a Neal Stephenson reading. It’s like wearing the band’s t-shirt to see the band. It’s obvious. I don’t like being obvious, either.

    These reasons all add up to one final conclusion: I never was going to line up to mutter a few words at my favorite writer and shake his hand. I saw a photograph of a friend’s teenage son shaking Neal’s hand. He looked thrilled. Neal wasn’t sitting behind a table, he was standing behind it, and had his sleeves rolled up, sharpie in hand, clearly enjoying himself. I immediately regretted all of those stupid reasons and wished I had stood in that damn line.

    —

    I love writing about things that aren’t me and the Electric Ephemera thing was a fun way to do that. I want to make more things like that, so I’m working on a new project called The Hazlett Histories. I’m going to use Substack.com for that (Substack is popular currently for its monetization, but I’m not monetizing any time soon – I just like its editing tools). It’s under my new pen name, Hazlett Foreman (which isn’t really a pen name since it’s my actual name). It’s going to be about the history of the Pittsburgh region, but told from the corners. There are so many interesting facts about Western Pennsylvania/Eastern Ohio/Northern West Virginia that I want to tell you about!

    If you get this newsletter, you’ll get an invite to the new thing, so look out for that. Subscribe if you want. I don’t do this for you, I do it for me! I’m still working on what it will look like, but it’ll be a lot like the Electric Ephemera. I want to have a bunch of them ready to go before I launch it, so it might take me a couple of months. Anyway, here’s a link: The Hazlett Histories

    Thank you for reading!

  • Pamphlet 10: “Name”

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER 10: NAME


    In modern American culture, names are assigned by our parents shortly after we’re born. We don’t get a say in it at first, but we can always change it later. A name defines us, if we let it.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas.

    Lots of people have just one name and everybody calls them that one name. Most people have a nickname, maybe a different one for every circle of friends or acquaintances.

    My given name is James, the latinization of the classic Hebrew name Jacob (Iacomus). My name is জেমস in Bengali, Kimo in Hawaiian, and जेम्स in Hindi. It’s the most common name of American presidents. It was in the top 5 most common names for boys in English-speaking countries during the 20th century. Lately, it’s fallen into the top 20. James just isn’t as popular as it used to be. There are many diminutive variations of my name, and I’ve heard most of them. Did you know Jay Leno’s name is James? Jay! That’s one I don’t hear very often but I do once in a while.

    Here are some of my names.

    Brojay, Seamus: this is what my mom called her late brother, also James, and I kind of remind her of him. She calls me this occasionally.

    JamesForeman: the whole thing, both words. Some very dear friends call me this, because they know me from social media, where I am universally known as James Foreman. They see both words together when they think of me, and that’s great!

    Foreman: some people call me by my last name. I used to hate it, because it reminded me of the middle school and high school, the locus of many of my worst memories, and I don’t like being reminded of things that remind me of my worst memories. But people I love very much started calling me that and middle school was 30 years ago, so I got over it.

    JF (JayEff): people who know me from social media but don’t want to say the whole thing often call me this.

    James: those who know me from social media will sometimes call me James. People who knew of my name before they met me via an in-person introduction tend to call me James. This includes a lot of people I know from school or work. I went through a period of preferring to be called James because I was watching Top Gear a lot and it sounded so much cooler and more British. This is a pretty good guide to whether or not the person addressing me knows me informally, like a solicitor or person from a doctor’s office.

    Jim: This is what most people call me. It’s the standard American name for people named James. It’s what Spock and Bones called Kirk, when they were being informal or insistent.

    Video: Every time Spock says “Jim”

    Jimmy: This is my Real Name. This is what I grew up being called, and what I prefer. My siblings still call me this, and any friends I have from before high school. Most of the people I meet through my siblings use this, too. If you call me Jimmy, I automatically like you. I can’t help it.

    Among the other names I’ve heard include Jimmy Jimmy Co-Co Pop (Linsly Day Camp c. 1987), Jee-um (WVU c. 1995-2000), and Mister James (2018-present).

    “I call everyone ‘Darling’ because I can’t remember their names.” — Zsa Zsa Gabor

    Fake Names

    I’ve decided to rebrand myself, because my name is no longer an SEO slam-dunk. It used to be! When you searched for James Foreman, I was always the top result. But then Google got smarter, and started correcting our spelling mistakes, and most people who are looking for James Foreman are actually looking for James Forman, a famous civil rights hero who died in 2005. If you’re not looking for James Forman, you’re looking for his son, James Forman Jr., a legal scholar and prolific writer.

    Other James Foremans who are more famous than me include a Nova Scotian businessman and a British YouTuber who really, really wants to be famous https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC9O8_OjSAnKGJxQBFs1Sj-w. My search stopped there, because I’m the fourth result when you tell Google that you are really, actually, trying to search for James Foreman and not James Forman (but even then, Google thinks you’re really actually looking for the Civil Rights leader, which you probably are). The result goes to a thing I wrote in 2004, for McSweeney’s and one of my proudest moments as a creative person. It’s not a big accomplishment but it’s mine.

    Call me a Pollyanna but I still think I might one day publish a book, so I’ve started signing my writing as Hazlett Foreman. It’s still my name, but it’s not James. Hazlett isn’t a first name, but it’s my middle name, my mother’s maiden name, and the surname of a vast quantity of cousins. It’s a good name. If you’re from Pittsburgh, you probably know it, because there’s a street called Hazlett and a theater, too.

    Hazlett

    Those things are named after Theodore Lyle Hazlett, who died at age 60 but was a champion of the arts under Mayor David Lawrence (there’s a convention center named after him). I don’t know how closely I’m related to him, but not close enough that his descendants show up at my family reunions, and I had never heard of him before looking up the theater. I have heard that Hazletts who are occasionally seen in the vicinity of the Hazlett Theater are descendants of Theodore and rightly correct people on the pronunciation of the name: Haze-let, not Hazz-let.

    Previous to my research, I thought the theater was named for Charles Hazlett, a Lieutenant during Gettysburg, commanding artillery on Little Round Top and being pretty ineffectual because they were getting peppered with sniper fire and it’s hard to load, aim and fire cannons when Johnny Reb is picking off your men with squirrel rifles. Charles himself was killed by a sniper, probably because he was wearing a colorful hat that everybody told him to stop wearing because it made him a target to the confederate snipers who fatally wounded his General before taking Hazlett out.

    Artillery

    My grandfather was also a James Hazlett, and he was a world-renowned expert on Civil War artillery. He wrote a book about it. He probably got interested in artillery because of the family history, but I can’t be sure about that (he’s not alive anymore or I’d ask him). The artillery commanded by our relative, Charles Hazlett, consisted of six 10-pounder Parrot rifles. But I thought rifles were things you held in your hand! And they look like they weigh a lot more than 10 pounds! Well, you’d be right. These guns were made out of iron and weighed a lot more than 10 pounds. It was the ammunition that weighed ten pounds, and a rifle is any weapon with a “rifled” barrel, or one that has ridges carved on the inside. Those ridges spin the projectile, like a football, making it more accurate. I have one of those projectiles in my closet. It’s not dangerous. They aren’t bombs that explode, they’re just big bullets. Well, some of them exploded, but I don’t have any of those.

    The point of any weapon of war is to kill people or destroy their stuff. War is a grim, disgusting business. The inert, heavy ball of metal in my closet, when thrown out of the muzzle of a cannon at 440 meters per second, destroyed any life it encountered. It also does an excellent job holding down the papers on my desk when the wind picks up.

    Recommendatus

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment

    Before Hamilton, there was another musical about the founding of the country: 1776. It was huge at the time of its initial run, which was right around the bicentennial. My favorite song from it is this one, a simple little song from the point of view of an American soldier guiding his mother to find his dead body under a tree. Because so many great things are also about something else, it’s a powerful indictment of Vietnam which means it also works as a powerful indictment of war in general.

    Anecdotus

    There is a tantalizing note in Charles Hazlett’s Wikipedia entry about a court martial while he was at West Point (he graduated anyway), but I haven’t read the book that mentions it. My uncle and fellow James C. Hazlett namesake, my mother’s brother, was famously misbehaved in college, too. The family legend is that he was the inspiration for a number of characters in Animal House, as he went to Cornell with one or more of the filmmakers. I don’t know enough of them to ask if the story is true.

    Anecdotus Continuat Personalis

    I, too, was almost kicked out of college. My freshman roommate brought a water balloon launcher, which was just a big slingshot that one person held on each side while the person in the middle pulled the water balloon back and let it fly. We took the screen out of our window and launched some watery artillery of our own. We were on the seventh floor of Bennett Tower, with a perfect angle to the main entrance, between Braxton and Brooke Towers, where the taxis let off the drunks. We made the mistake of doing this in the middle of the day, and some kids across the way in Braxton saw us, and fired an empty airsoft gun in our direction. Lunch ladies taking a smoke break saw the gun, called the police, the kids in Braxton ratted us out and the police came looking for us. I went to class, but my roommate was there to take the heat. He got expelled. I had to write an essay for the Tower newsletter about how dangerous water balloons are. I was told very clearly that I was nearly expelled, too, even though all I did was hold one side of the slingshot. As a person who rarely misbehaves, this incident made people Worry About What College Was Doing to me. Their fears were unfounded, because I behaved very well after that.

    Sources

    Wikipedia entry for Charles Hazlett: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_E._Hazlett

    NY Times Obituary for Theodore Lyle Hazlett: https://www.nytimes.com/1979/07/10/archives/theodore-lyle-hazlett-jr-at-60-was-head-of-aw-mellon-trust.html

    A small group of large men in Civil War garb firing a gun like the ones commanded by Charles Hazlett: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=AOH_BF6V5qQ

    Colophon

    composed electronically at coffee shops.

  • Pamphlet 9: "The Moon"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER 9: THE MOON


    The moon is a big, gray disk in the night sky that gets smaller and smaller until it looks like a clipped toenail right before disappearing completely. It comes back gradually, growing from splinter to disk again, and starts the process over.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas.

    Asteroids

    Space is mostly empty. For every cubic centimeter of nothing, space has about 1 atom of hydrogen. Sometimes space has more than that. A whole lot of cubic centimeters of minerals is called an asteroid, and they’re flying through space, minding their own business, until gravity shows up and sends them toward us. Thankfully, earthlings are protected from most by a complex defense grid, a wholly accidental, happenstance pinball board of gravity wells and eccentric orbits known as the solar system. The moon is part of that defense grid. More good news for us: an asteroid with earth’s name on it has to hit a very small target in a very big field — 49 billion square miles. On its way to our little planet, it is tossed and spun among our big buddies Jupiter and his gassy pals named after other gods from the Greek pantheon, and then, if it makes it that close to us without being diverted, encounters our moon.

    Luna, the Greek goddess’s name that we picked for our own moon (to distinguish it from all of the other 180 moons in the solar system), is our second-to-last line of defense. Its gravity diverts some of that space debris, which is why it’s so battered and bruised. It takes the hits so we don’t have to.

    Our final defense against asteroids is our dense and oxygen-rich atmosphere which is so thick it causes a lot of friction with objects that approach it too fast. I also create a lot of friction when people approach me too fast, but this part isn’t about me. Things that are too big to burn completely up get through, and when they hit the surface cause things like mass extinctions, insane YouTube videos, and mysterious Siberian explosions.

    Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. — Carl Sagan


    The Tunguska Event

    One thing that got through that defense grid was the comet that struck Siberia in 1908, near an area called Tunguska. Luckily for us humans, it only killed wildlife. Unluckily for trees, it flattened about 80 million of them. The conservative estimate for how strong the explosion was is 15 megatons of TNT, which would make it 1,000 times stronger than the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. Humans weren’t able to match that destructive power until the US detonated a bomb with roughly the same strength in 1952. These are just abstract numbers on a screen, but let’s examine it in more human terms.


    The Tunguska Event covered 770 square miles. Even a glancing blow on any major metropolitan area would vaporize millions of people. Humans had to invent bombs that use nuclear fission to match the frisson of a comet strike.

    The impact of a comet on a planet is so common it’s not even worth mentioning, galactically speaking. Something much more interesting happened in the wilderness of Russia, and it’s very spooky.

    The Dyatlov Pass Incident

    In 1959, Igor Dyatlov asked 9 other students from Ural Polytechnical Institute to join him for a bit of a skiing expedition, a common pastime for people living in the Ural Mountains, where there isn’t much to do that doesn’t involve a) the mountains and b) snow. They were all experienced hikers and familiar with the rugged, rocky, snowy terrain. Upon returning from this expedition, they would each become Grade III mountaineers, the highest possible rating. That would put each of them in the highest skill tier of anybody in the Soviet Union. In other words, and this is important, they knew what they were doing. They also knew how grumpy the weather in the Ural Mountains could get in February, so absolutely none of what happened to them should have happened.


    The facts are these: all 9 people (the tenth went back home after unrelated health issues flared up) on this routine skiing expedition died under mysterious circumstances, probably all within 24 hours of each other.

    They started on their trek and were making great progress through an unnamed pass in the mountains when the weather got bad enough to make them lose their way for a bit. They realized this error and decided to just stop where they were, on the mountainside, and set up camp there. They had gained some altitude and, since that was kind of the point of the exercise, the leader of the group (after whom the pass was later named, Dyatlov), decided to stop where they were rather retreat into a wooded area 1.5km away that offered better protection against the elements. These were experienced outdoorspeople (two of them were women). They weren’t new to any of this.

    The only reason we know anything about their expedition at all is because they had diaries and cameras. This is the last photo on the camera found with the bodies and, well, it’s creepy:


    There’s no record of what happened to them or how they died, but 5 bodies were found after the families insisted on a search a month after they were due to arrive at their intended destination. There was one tent in the campsite, which they all shared. There was a hole cut in the tent from within, and two bodies were found a short distance away with the remains of an attempt at creating a fire. Between those bodies, under a tree, and the tent, they found three more bodies. Everybody was severely underdressed for the weather (a couple of them didn’t even have shoes on). The theory was this: something happened that made them all lose their damn minds, cut their way out of the tent, and run into the wilderness. One group of five hid under a tree and tried to make a fire. Three of that group tried to get back to the tent, but collapsed on the way. The little fire wasn’t enough to keep the other two alive and they died, too.

    But wait, that’s only five! What happened to the other four? They found those bodies two months later (there was a lot of snow), at the bottom of a nearby ravine. Three of them had massive injuries consistent with a car crash or other force. These folks seem to have lived a bit longer, as some were wearing the clothes of the others, leading naturally to the theory that some had died before the others and the survivors took their clothes in a futile attempt to stay warm.

    So what happened? Nobody knows! There are theories. Some of those theories are more plausible than others, but even the most plausible ones seem extremely implausible because of the very nature of the disaster. Here are some theories that have been disproved:

    • Yeti attack. Besides the fact that yetis aren’t real, there’s no evidence of any animal activity in the area at all.

    • killed by the local natives, the Mansi. They’re peaceful and there’s no evidence that anybody else was there.

    • killed each other after a romantic dispute. Nah. They were friends, and the massive wounds were not caused by human hands. That also doesn’t explain why they fled the tent in their underwear.

    I invite you to read more about the incident (or, like me, read everything you can about the incident) and come up with your own theories. The one that makes the most sense to me is this:

    The Soviet military was known to be testing parachute bombs in the area. That scared the living crap out of them, and they ran for their lives in a blind panic. One of the bombs got too close and the blast mortally injured the three who ended up in the ravine. The survivors in that group didn’t survive long, but long enough to put on some of their clothes in a futile attempt to warm up.

    If that weren’t spooky enough, investigators recently exhumed the remains of one of the victims, Semyon Zolotarev (also the oldest of the group, at 38). As records from the Soviet era are unreliable, they confirmed that his wounds were consistent with a big concussive force (like a parachute bomb) and that he shared no DNA relationship with Zolotarev’s known surviving relatives. That means the person who lived in the Ural Mountains area of the USSR and was going by the name Semyon Zolotarev was not that guy at all and had, at some point, replaced him. The leading theory on that mystery is that Fake Semyon knew the real Semyon during the war and stole his identity. VERY SPOOKY.

    My people, we stay indoors. We have keyboards. We have darkness. It’s quiet. — Neil Gaiman


    Anastasia Romanov

    In 1918, the Bolsheviks won a very short civil war and took over the Russian government. Because nobody ever accused the Russians of doing anything halfway, they didn’t just kill the C(t)zar, they murdered his whole family. Well, maybe.

    There were immediately rumors that one of them had survived: the youngest daughter, Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna. That is, until DNA tests on a mass grave known to have the remains of the royal family was tested in 2007 and conclusively proved that she was in there.


    Ten women claimed to be Anastasia over the years, the most famous of whom was Anna Anderson. She had a lot of time to claim to be Anastasia, toiling in the German courts from 1938 to 1970, though they eventually decided that she didn’t have enough evidence to prove her claim — that one of the Reds who shot up and stabbed her family noticed she was still alive, took pity on her, and smuggled her out of the area.

    The story of Anna Anderson isn’t spooky, it’s just sad. She was hospitalized for a suicide attempt in 1922, and her claims to be Anastasia came after. Nobody who knew the real Anastasia was convinced that Anna was her. As early as 1927, the dead Tsarina’s brother (Anastasia’s uncle) funded an investigation that concluded that this Anastasia was actually a polish factory worker named Franziska Schanzkowska.

    Anna died in 1984, never backing down from her claim and supported financially off and on during the intervening years by people who believed her, including her eventual husband, a history professor known as “Charlottesville’s best-loved eccentric.”

    DNA won the day again, proving that Anna’s mitochondrial DNA matched that of a relative of Franziska Schanzkowska, and making a lot of people feel pretty dumb about it.

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    One person fascinated by the story of Anna Anderson was known goddess Tori Amos, who wrote and recorded an awesome song about it that you don’t haver to listen to but you should anyway:



    Is it because of Steven Spielberg that I love the mixture of suburban simplicity and High Weirdness or did our mutual upbringing in suburban environments foster a love for it in both of us? Who can know? I only know that this love also extends to a man named Simon Stâlenhag, a Swedish painter who combines weirdness and suburbia in his paintings and whose book, The Electric State, is a joy. Joy is good.

    COLOPHON

    Composed entirely on a notebook computer, often in coffee shops, but finished at home.

    Sources:
    The Kuiper belt [Wikipedia]
    The Tunguska Event [Wikipedia]
    The Dyatlov Pass Incident [Vice]
    Grand Duchess Anastasia Nikolaevna of Russia [Wikipedia]

    This week was the anniversary of my brain tumor diagnosis. I am happy to be able to write this for you, unfettered by headaches or tumors. <3

  • Pamphlet 8: "Brain"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER SEVEN: BRAIN

    If you know me, you know why I picked this noun to begin my first pamphlet in almost exactly a year (the last pamphlet was distributed on July 30th, 2017). On the week of Thanksgiving in 2017, I had surgery to remove an ependymoma from my brain stem. Ependymomas are considered cancerous because they can metastasize into other areas of the brain and spinal column, though they are not usually deadly. They are extraordinarily rare in people my age. Lucky me.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas Trepanning

    I had two brain surgeries (fun fact — I keep misspelling “surgeries” as “sugaries”). Tumor surgeries are not typically emergencies, but mine was. I spent four days in the hospital leading up to my operation because the neurosurgeon only does operations on Mondays and I went to the emergency room on a day that was not a Monday. This lag time also allowed my body to absorb roughly a billion gallons of strong steroids that shrank various structures in my brain to reduce the swelling from the backed-up cerebrospinal fluid. This kind of swelling often kills people when it comes on too quickly.

    This might be one of the reasons why we occasionally find skulls up to 7,000 years old with big holes in them. The tumor on my brain stem caused a backup in the flow of fluid in my ventricles, which swelled up and got bigger, causing a condition called hydrocephaly. The pressure caused “intractable” headaches (the hospital’s word, not mine), which had become so debilitating that I nearly fell unconscious from the blinding pain. It was that incident that made me go to the emergency room the final time.



    Had I been alive in 6000 BCE instead of our current age of miracles, I would have happily submitted myself to the intrepid protodoctor who thought, correctly, that a feeling of pressure in my head would be relieved by releasing some of that pressure.

    The origin of the word “trepanning” is not, as I thought, from “tree panning,” or the practice of hacking open a hole in a tree and letting the sap run out, which is not even called that. I don’t know where that connection in my head came from, but there is a word for using words wrong.

    Malaportmanteau

    I just made that word up. “Malaportmanteau” is itself portmanteau that combines “malapropism” and “portmanteau.” A portmanteau is a word that combines two things to make up a new word (“cheeseburger,” for instance) while a malapropism is a word that is and sounds like another word, except used incorrectly and usually used humorously. Malapropisms are fertile ground for puns, so I love them and hate them.

    Trepanning is not even a portmanteau, as I thought, thus my new portmanteau, which means “a word confidently mistaken for a portmanteau.” The word “trepan,” the root of “trepanation,” is apparently derived from the greek word for boring, like this newsletter.

    That was a pun based on a homonym, which is not a malapropism. Homonyms are a variety of homophone — two words that are spelled and pronounced the same but mean two different things. Another kind of homophone is a heterograph like “to, too, and two,” or words that are spelled differently, and mean different things but sound the same. English can be confusing.

    The Most Difficult Language To Learn

    Don’t get too excited, it’s not english, which isn’t that difficult. This, according to linguists and other professionals who know such things. I’ve only learned one language, though I took three semesters of Russian in college, in a powerful case of Past Jim overestimating how much schooling depressed and anxious Future Jim would be willing to tolerate (thank you, Lena, for passing me when I most definitely didn’t deserve it). Thus, you could say that the most difficult language for ME to learn was Russian.

    But the answer to the question is: it depends. For people who speak Standard Average English (or “unaccented” American english), the answer would be different from someone who grew up speaking Estonian, which has 14 verb cases. Bora, a language from Peru, has 350 noun genders.

    The concept of gender in languages is confusing, as noted most famously by Mark Twain, who wrote this about German, which only has three:

    Every noun has a gender, and there is no sense or system in the distribution; so the gender of each must be learned separately and by heart. There is no other way. To do this one has to have a memory like a memorandum-book. In German, a young lady has no sex, while a turnip has. Think what overwrought reverence that shows for the turnip, and what callous disrespect for the girl.

    This is true, if one thinks of gender in language as a biological sex thing, when it’s not that at all — it’s closer to the concept of genre, with nouns of similar shape or size or whatever occupying the same linguistic noun classification. Language is a living and moving thing so some languages have different classifications. My favorite is Dyirbal, which is spoken in Australia, and has a genre of nouns that includes “women, fire and dangerous things.” Brother, tell me about it.

    The answer to the question was answered by The Economist, in an article from which much of the above was derived (you didn’t think I actually knew all this, did you?), is a language used by a dwindling number of people (it was about 1000 people in 2008): Tuyuca, spoken in the Amazon. I’ll let them explain why we would have so much trouble with it:

    Tuyuca requires verb-endings on statements to show how the speaker knows something. Diga ape-wi means that “the boy played soccer (I know because I saw him)”, while diga ape-hiyi means “the boy played soccer (I assume)”. English can provide such information, but for Tuyuca that is an obligatory ending on the verb.

    The Economist article ends with a sobering reminder that one consequence of our age of technological miracles and globalization is the gradual disappearance of languages as people drift toward a common tongue. Different languages make one think in different ways, and that kind of diversity of thought is something worth saving. Language is culture, too — if we lose one, we lose the other.

    Hot Snakes

    It’s one thing to learn a language, it’s another thing to speak it. Metaphors are fraught and all too common. If I were to tell a person who’s just learning english that I wasn’t feeling well and I had “the hot snakes,” they would probably be extremely confused. That’s a bad example, because it confuses lifelong english speakers, too, as in this memorable outtake from Parks & Recreation, which you’ll have to watch if you want to know what hot snakes mean (if you haven’t figured it out on your own already).

    生肖

    Speaking of hot snakes, I was born in the year of the snake, according to the Chinese zodiac. Specifically, the year of the fire snake. According to one website, this is what being a snake-person means:

    In Chinese culture, the Snake is the most enigmatic animal among the twelve zodiac animals. People born in a year of the Snake are supposed to be the most intuitive.

    Snakes tend to act according to their own judgments, even while remaining the most private and reticent. They are determined to accomplish their goals and hate to fail.

    Snakes represent the symbol of wisdom. They are intelligent and wise. They are good at communication but say little. Snakes are usually regarded as great thinkers.

    Snakes are materialistic and love keeping up with the Joneses. They love to posses the best of everything, but they have no patience for shopping.

    Snake people prefer to work alone, therefore they are easily stressed. If they seem unusually stressed, it is best to allow them their own space and time to return to normal.

    In other words, it’s nonsense. The above could describe anybody. Having spent many years in school with people who were born in the same year as me, which is how the Chinese zodiac is determined, I can confidently say that lots of people don’t have all of those characteristics.

    As somebody who knows about these things will surely want me to know, the Chinese restaurant menu version of the Chinese zodiac that I’ve cited is merely scratching the surface. The true Chinese zodiac goes much deeper, going from months, to days, to hours (which are called your “secret animals,” which is awesome). It’s still meaningless.

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    James Randi on Nova

    Early Jim lived in the dark ages before the internet (people often forget that on-demand video is an extremely new phenomenon), so he derived entertainment from shows like Nova. The best episode of that show probably ever concerned The Amazing Randi, a magician turned professional skeptic. It was because of that, and Carl Sagan’s books, that I am so annoyingly skeptical. This segment, specifically, inspired the person who wrote that stuff about the Chinese zodiac you just read.


    Snowmelt by Zoë Keating

    I wrote this on Facebook so I’m just going to repost it here: Zoë Keating, whose husband died of cancer that began in his brain, released this EP recently. They were together for 16 years. She calls it “four songs from the end of a long winter.” It’s such a gift to be able to follow an artist through these emotional tribulations. The song Possible, for example, has a note of hopefulness enveloped in melancholy and I can’t stop listening to it.

    COLOPHON

    Composed on a computer, distributed to the internet via wifi at a coffee shop. The typesetting always gets extremely wonky with TinyLetter, so if parts of it look weird, it’s the platform’s fault.

    jim v3.0 is still compiling

  • Pamphlet 7: "Coffee"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER SIX: COFFEE

    The most important beverage in my life is one that I am also very addicted to. I get cranky headaches if I don’t have it. I’m grumpy before I drink it. I’m drinking it right now (I just took a sip). It’s a cultural artifact of American life that we can’t live without: coffee.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas Africa: Cradle of Civilization

    We can trace coffee’s origins go back to Ethiopia, where the legend of the goats-eating-berries was born. The crux of that legend is that a Christian monk got the idea to make a drink for humans out of the berries that made a bunch of goats jump around like lunatics. The drink propagated throughout Africa and the Middle East and it became a staple of the Arab diet long before it got to Europe. Coffee: invented by Christians, perfected by Arabs. In all the controversy and dispute between the west and the Middle East, it’s good to remind ourselves of the times we worked together to make the world a beautiful place, and there are fewer things more beautiful than a steaming mug of black coffee.



    Aristocratic Performance Rituals

    Coffee was the dominant hot-and-stimulating drink of England, until tea came along in the 17th century and wealthy aristocrats made it a more desirable beverage to the lower classes who wanted to be fancy, too. A common trend in European history is this: fancy aristocrats invent elaborate social performances and then measure each other based on how fancy their peers’ performances are. The finicky and elaborate nature of making a good pot of tea provided the perfect opportunity to create one of those rituals. The poor wanted to be fancy, too. Thanks to the evergreen laws of supply and demand, higher demand led to higher supply, which led to lower prices. Suddenly, poor people could drink tea, too. I used the word “fancy” four times in the above paragraph, but I’m not sure it’s enough.

    The aristos weren’t happy about that, but at least they had their fancy and extraordinarily expensive vessels! You can’t just grow more teapots — those had to be made, by hand, and the best stuff cost around $600 for just one tea cup. Good luck affording a so-white-it’s-translucent ceramic tea cup from China, plebs!

    English “china”

    Proper English tea has milk in it. Adding milk after you’ve poured the tea is the English way, at least for high-nosed toffs. Working class people put the milk in first. The reason for this, so the story goes, is because the clunky, cheap porcelain made in England would shatter at contact with boiling water. Chinese porcelain didn’t do that. It was the good stuff. It was strong, lightweight, translucent and durable. The European knock-offs weren’t.


    Chinese porcelain was so expensive that the introduction of tea sparked a porcelain arms race all over Europe. Alchemists, potters, sculptors, and artisans worked together from France to Germany to England in little skunkworks to crack the Chinese recipe. They churned out a lot of almost-theres with varying levels of success.

    This allegedly changed when a man with the extremely working-class British name Ben Lund added “Cornish soapstone” to the mixture. The humble powder of talc was all it took to keep his recipe for porcelain from shattering. His factory was bought by what is now Royal Worcester, the oldest (or maybe second-oldest) operating porcelain manufacturer in England.

    Eventually, the cost of Chinese porcelain came down, too (supply and demand, baby), but not before England had flooded the market with bad copies and had the audacity to call the stuff “china.”

    “Coffee – the favorite drink of the civilized world.” – Thomas Jefferson


    Tea

    Tea is the most versatile word in the English language (except, maybe, that word). It can refer to

    ⁃ a plant, Camellia sinensis
    ⁃ a small meal between lunch and supper
    ⁃ a drink, drunk at tea time, but not necessarily made of the plant called tea
    ⁃ gossip, as in “the tea,” the telling of which is called “spilling”
    ⁃ a river in Brazil

    Revolution

    Americans don’t drink tea the same way our English friends do because, well, they’re English. We’re Americans. We share a lot of cultural DNA with our English founders, but the big divergence put an end to that (the American Revolution, you might have heard of it). We rejected tea as our National Hot Drink and embraced the hardscrabble, hard-hitting, tar-black working man’s drink. We didn’t have to go without the meal called tea, though, because it didn’t exist yet — that didn’t come about until, you guessed it, a rich English Duchess invented it in 1850, because English aristocratic women had two jobs: socialize with other aristocrats and, most importantly, make male babies. If you’re like me, you can’t even mention making male babies without thinking of the most famous Male Baby Wanter in history, the irascible Henry Tudor.

    Anne Boleyn

    The only wife Henry truly loved was Jane Seymour, because she gave him a son. There’s no reason to doubt that his love was real, because he was a petulant bully who only really cared about himself and his legacy, and the Queen who eventually gave him a male heir was a dream come true. In case you doubt his true love for her, he had himself buried next to her at Windsor, which is the highest honor any dead king can give to a dead queen. Henry Tudor is known for executing his wives, but he didn’t have time to get bored with and subsequently get rid of Jane — she died two weeks after giving birth to Edward, an unremarkable monarch whose only laudable act was to die young and hasten the ascension of his half sister, Queen Elizabeth I.

    The Queen right before Jane was the most famous of Henry’s wives, Anne Boleyn, who was executed on largely fictional charges of treason and incest. The method of her execution is just as noteworthy as the rest of her life — the executioner used a sword to do it (most people got the axe, as it were). This is often cited as a sudden and uncharacteristic honor on behalf of Anne’s royal mien and upbringing in France (where all executed monarchs get a sword).

    But count me among the Anne Apologists, because I say that Henry decided to have a sword swing end her life because of his obsession with the British monarchy that he was so desperately trying to continue in his own image. More specifically, he was really, really into the Arthurian legends and chivalry and all that (French is the language of chivalry, and he wrote some embarrassing love letters to Anne in that language). He even had a big replica of the Round Table with himself in Arthur’s seat. The prime symbol of Arthuriana is the sword, and a monarch executing a traitorous queen with a sword was the ultimate act of Proper English Retribution. Like everything else in Henry’s life, Anne’s execution was about Henry.



    While on the subject of Anne, she’s just about as close as we can get to a feminist icon in Tudor England. She knew what she wanted, and maneuvered herself and the people around her to get it. She was also an intellectual who argued with Henry and won. She refused to have sex with Henry until he made her Queen, which Horny Henry respected. She’s almost certainly innocent of the crimes she was executed for, not only because Henry wanted her out of his life and was capable of doing anything in order to make that happen, but because of what she did while waiting for her death in the Tower — she summoned the Archbishop of Canterbury to her cell and confessed everything to him.

    Confession

    During this confessional with the Archbishop, Anne Boleyn doubled-down on her innocence. For an observant Catholic, this is the Ultimate Truth Zone. If you lie during a confession, you’re heading straight to Hell when you die. You gotta hand it to Catholicism — there is no better way to keep tabs on a the politics of a parish than by a) forcing everybody to tell you every bad thing they did and b) damning them to hell if they don’t. This not only gave a priest leverage and protection (even if the implied, icky bad juju of doing social or physical harm to clergy weren’t enough), it put a lot of power in the hands of a powerful, educated minority. If you’re suspicious of large, pervasive organizations having too much power, maybe you would have been one of those guys throwing tea into Boston Harbor, too.


    Recommendatae

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

    How To Make a Proper Cup of Tea

    Boil water. Put a tea bag in a cup. Pour the boiling water into the cup. Let it steep for as long as you like. Remove the bag, add whatever you like to it (milk, honey, lemon, whiskey). There are a lot of fussy rules, if you want to be fussy (Americans are notoriously non-fussy). I suggest you look elsewhere for those. Like here, for example: http://www.vogue.com/article/english-teatime-etiquette-how-to

    The Hot Jimmy

    One of my favorite fall/winter drinks is a variation of a hot toddy that I’m calling the Hot Jimmy. (I didn’t know what a hot toddy was until after I had invented my version – thanks, Lisa!). I make a cup of herbal tea (which has no tea in it) — lemon ginger is my favorite — add a bit of honey and throw in a shot of Wigle hopped whiskey (which you can’t buy right now). It’s perfect for a damp, dark autumn evening.

    ADDENDUM APPROPRIATUS


    Catherine of Aragon

    I said Anne Boleyn was a feminist icon, but I don’t want to ignore her predecessor, Catherine. She was probably Henry’s true love, despite the way he treated her (annulment, banishment, forced estrangement from her daughter). He left her in charge while he went to fight the French, during which time she fought off an attempted invasion by the King of Scotland. She rallied her troops while in full armor and extremely pregnant, and got super pissed when the English military, fearing for her delicate nature, brought his clothes as proof of King James’s death rather than his actual dead body.

    COLOPHON

    Composed on a computer, distributed to the internet via wifi at a coffee shop. The typesetting always gets extremely wonky with TinyLetter, so if parts of it look weird, it’s the platform’s fault.

    keep the coffee comin’

  • Pamphlet 6: Food

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
    than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER SIX: FOOD

    This is the first issue of the new year, the sixth issue total and the first in a new series. I’m going to be trying some new things (see the COLOPHON, below, for details). But enough of all that, let’s get into the object of our acts of culinary consumption: FOOD.


    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal editorial; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

    Mayflies

    Here’s a workable definition of life: Life is the acquisition of adequate calories before reproduction. I offer you the mayfly as an example. It hatches underwater as a nymph, with a big digestive system and little else. The nymph eats as much as possible, sometimes for years, only to ascend into the air as a winged imago, its final form. The imago has a mouth, but it’s nonfunctional. It can’t eat. It doesn’t want to eat. It wants to get hella laid. The mayfly lives a day or two. It mates, lays its eggs, and drops dead. The eggs settle on the bottom of a pond and the cycle continues. The eggs hatch, and the hungry nymph starts collecting calories.

    Calories

    I often wonder what humans of the past would think of humans of the now. Drop one of our early human ancestors into our lives and he would be stunned by a whole bunch of things we take for granted. We live in the safest age of human history. We run for fun, not to save ourselves from marauding enemy tribes or hungry megafauna. We have so much food to eat for such little cost that the leading causes of death in humans arise directly from our diets. Losing weight is actually easy, mathematically speaking, for the baseline human (with “normal” bodies not beset by disease, hereditary flaw or misadventure): consume fewer calories than you use.


    Our bodies are made to prefer high calorie foods. This instinctual drive to eat the lowest possible volume with the highest possible calorie content made Americans the fattest people in the world, but it also made us come up with some pretty amazing innovations.

    “My doctor told me I had to stop throwing intimate dinners for four unless there are three other people.” – Orson Welles


    Preparation

    The human life cycle is slightly different, with the same pieces rearranged. We get our calories from food we pick up and put in our mouths. This is true for most animals, but humans developed a unique twist that probably made us who we are today: we prepared it before putting it our mouths.

    You thought I was going to say “we cooked it!” We did! But that came later. We evolved smaller teeth, smaller guts (see below) and smaller faces long before we ever cooked anything. Our ancestors used stone tools to tenderize meat and cut it up into smaller pieces. That’s some pre-human ingenuity!

    The beauty of meat as a food source is that it lets some other poor animal collect the calories for us. Cows spend their lives eating and digesting because they have to. They eat plants, and plants have such a small calorie count for their volume that cows need a four-segmented stomach to get the most nutrition they can out. A cow converts those calories into big muscles that it needs in order to carry around all those big stomachs full of digesting grass, and then a human comes along and skips the boring part and eats the high-calorie muscles.

    This all begins with the most efficient energy-creating system in the natural world, photosynthesis, which lets that crunchy grass grow into tasty food for a cow just by being in the right place at the right time to absorb the energy and carbon created when sunlight snaps ambient carbon dioxide molecules in half.

    The grass uses the sunlight to make itself food for the cow, which uses the grass to make itself food for a human. Every animal takes the work of another to make itself.

    After our pre-human ancestors discovered fire, they figured out how to use it to make their food better. Because meat is the easiest solution to the maximum calories for minimal effort problem, cooking meat was probably what catapulted those proto-humans into the big-brained dummies we are today.

    By cooking meat, you make it easier to chew. You can eat more of it in less time. That little innovation made us who we are.

    Vegetarianism

    We eat meat because we always did. From fish to bison, meat was the high-calorie rocket fuel in our cognitive development. But that was a few thousand years ago.

    As my morality and my politics begin to coalesce and align into a Do No Harm kind of lazy pacifism, I find the act of eating a dead animal less and less justifiable.

    You might have noticed my interest in human evolution (this is the last issue to dwell on the subject). There’s no question that vegetarianism (or, dear god, veganism) in protohumans would have been disastrous. Eating cooked meat was a key to human survival over the last few bottlenecks, migrations and ice ages. But just because it was important then doesn’t make it important now.

    Most of us don’t have to eat meat to survive (note: iron deficiencies and other medical issues still require many people to eat meat, bless them). My sessile, first world life makes me need fewer calories than my ancestors, and I have access to so many high-calorie, low-effort food sources that I probably wouldn’t even lose a single pound if I stopped eating meat (let alone starve).

    I eat meat because I’m lazy and unsophisticated. I like hamburgers. I like hot dogs.

    I believe that our species will one day look upon eating meat as a necessary evil that they will also have grown out of.

    “If more of us valued food and cheer and song above hoarded gold, it would be a merrier world.” – J.R.R. Tolkien


    Broccoli

    When I was in grade school and was asked what my favorite food was, I said “broccoli.” I will defend this choice to the grave. It’s still my favorite. I prefer it raw, but I’ll eat it any way I can get it. I don’t put salt on it. I don’t put cheese on it. I just eat it. I would not pass up a pizza for a bowl of brocc, but that doesn’t mean pizza is my favorite food. They are not contrary ideas.


    Broccoli was created by the ancient Romans, proving that people who are against genetically-modified foods can’t even be consistent in the foods they purposelessly fear. Broccoli didn’t become popular in the US until the 1920s. It only took broccoli 2500 years to go from a cultivated offshoot of cabbage in northern Italy to a staple food in America, though, be fair, America didn’t exist for most of that time.

    Fractals

    There’s a type of broccoli less popular than the kind you find in most stores here. It’s called “Romanesco,” also called “roman broccoli” (image above). It differs from the other varieties of broccoli in a few significant ways (it has a nutty flavor), but it is best known for its geometric fractal growth pattern.

    You’ve probably heard the term “fractal” but maybe not know what it is. The geometric fractals are easiest to understand, so I’ll make it simple: a little piece of a fractal form looks just like the biggest piece. A fractal triangle would be a triangle made out of smaller triangles, where are also made out of triangles, etc. There’a also a lot of math involved in fractals, which you can see at the link at the bottom of this pamphlet, if you’re into that sort of thing.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

    • A lot of kids know the word “fractal” because it’s a word in the song from Frozen, “Let it Go.” Elsa refers to her powers as creating “frozen fractals” and snowflakes kind of look like fractal patterns. Also, it’s a great song with a great message, but saying the message would just be restating the title.


    COLOPHON

    Composed entirely by James Foreman on a notebook computer with additional edits via telephone.

    I wrote five issues last year, so I think that’s how I’m going to continue doing it. Volume 1 was five issues, and Vol. 2 will also be five. I don’t know how much time will be between Volumes, but hopefully not as long as last time. I’ve toyed with the idea of formatting the previous issues for print, maybe with little illustrations instead of photos scrounged from the internet.

    LINKS

    http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/why-fire-makes-us-human-72989884/

    http://fractalfoundation.org/resources/what-are-fractals/

  • BROADSIDE: "An Anniversary of Being Born"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    BROADSIDE: AN ANNIVERSARY OF BEING BORN


    The term “broadside,” in the context of printing, comes from the pre-newspaper method of delivering information to the public. News was printed on a single side of a thin piece of paper. A common use for them was to attack rivals or to make the case for a political point, which is why the word is often used to describe the same tactic in modern times. This is a BROADSIDE because its only concern is a single topic, and not because its content is inflammatory or political (because it isn’t).


    This weekend — the first weekend after Martin Luther King Jr. Day — is a momentous one. It’s when I discarded an old life for a new one. Eleven years ago, my marriage ended. I can’t believe it’s been that long, until I look in a mirror. I don’t mind getting older, but it’s not easy to watch it happen.

    When I learned to embrace the things I can’t change, my life got a lot better. I’m a pathetic sucker for inspirational quotes, and my favorite inspirational quotes are about how we can’t change things:
    We cannot control the wind, but we can adjust our sails. – anonymous
    Weather, wind, time, gravity — there are so many things in this wild universe that can’t be altered by our actions, though sometimes we can nudge them around. We can’t avoid death, but we can hasten it. We can’t make time slow down, but we can enjoy the moment. We can make somebody hate us, but we sure can’t make them love us.

    Divorce is probably as painful as death. – William Shatner


    Yesterday: I knew when my marriage had ended, but not the year. I’ve used the same email address for years. When my memory stumbles, gmail is there to catch it. A quick search revealed that, shortly after the events that led up to the end of the marriage, I wrote a narrative of those events. It’s not easy to read. I won’t let you read it because it’s full of names, and I don’t name names. My memories of some of the events still make me wince, even if the wounds have healed.

    My marriage only lasted for 6 months. The relationship before it was only 3.5 years. When viewed objectively, my pain should not be as great as a person who was married for longer or had more to lose. Nobody has ever made me feel that way by comparing their divorce to mine — it’s shame, self-imposed, felt only by me.

    Allow me to contextualize:

    • She was my first love

    That’s all. That’s enough.
    Cameron has never been in love – at least, nobody’s ever been in love with him. If things don’t change for him, he’s gonna marry the first girl he lays, and she’s gonna treat him like shit, because she will have given him what he has built up in his mind as the end-all, be-all of human existence. She won’t respect him, ’cause you can’t respect somebody who kisses your ass. It just doesn’t work. – Ferris Bueller’s Day Off


    It is recommended that you make every effort not to accept animals that are in an injured or disabled condition. – Guide to Animal Handling


    Animals in pain will bite people trying to help them. Some people know that and touch them anyway. They know the danger. They see a creature in pain and they have to help. Some of those people reached out to me, and they stayed even after I bit them. The very least I can do is reach out to some wounded dogs. I can pass along that generosity of heart by helping people who need it, too. I’ve done that, and I’ve been bitten. It was always worth it.

    A wounded deer leaps the highest – Emily Dickinson


    Taken out of its context, the above quote appears inspirational: wounded people are better for having been wounded. But that wasn’t her point. The high leap of a wounded deer is a cover, a fake. “I’m fine. I’m not hurt at all. Sorry if I bleed on you. It’s nothing.” After my marriage was over, I jumped into dating again, and I jumped high. I wasn’t ready. A relationship can only succeed when the pieces match, if the positive parts of one person can fit into the negative spaces in the other. I had a big empty space that drank every ounce of emotional support poured into it, but I couldn’t give any of it back.

    In the same poem, Emily Dickinson wrote “Mirth is the mail of anguish.” I was extremely mirthful. I was brimming with mirth. I didn’t know I was setting a trap. That’s when I did most of my wounding.

    It’s called “wounded,” Peanut. “Injured” is when you fall out of a tree or something. – Band of Brothers


    A wound is inflicted, an injury is suffered. You can read a lot between the lines when I make an effort to use the words I choose. Let me be clear: the time for blame is long past and ridiculous anyway. The person who wounded me isn’t the same person she was when it happened. Like the enemy soldier who becomes a friend later in life, after the war and its reasons are long resolved, the historical facts are immutable. I healed a long time ago, but I can still contemplate the scars.

    My sun sets to rise again. – Robert Browning


    The slow upswing isn’t as interesting as the sudden drop. A shattered glass is more interesting than an intact one, which isn’t as interesting as watching it break. Would you rather watch a building implode or watch them build the new one? That’s why this section isn’t as long.

    I got better! I was reborn. The wounds made me stronger, better, faster. I had my heart broken and it took a while, but it healed up nicely, thanks to a lot of patience and work and therapy and help. I’m more consistently happy now than I was then. The memories that have lasted are the happy ones. We had a lot of fun and I learned a lot from her. My sun rose and it’s still rising. But there’s still work to be done.

    My thirties were a time of great abundance, but nothing stuck. I shouldn’t say nothing, because they were people, but, in the words of Taylor Swift, I couldn’t make ’em stay. Actually, it was more like I couldn’t make myself stay. In the eleven years since my first relationship ended, no relationship of mine has lasted more than a year. I’ve done most of the dumping, rather than having been dumped. Why? Did I run away when things got tough? Did I get bored when things got safe? Did I pick the wrong relationships?

    We are afraid to care too much, for fear that the other person does not care at all. – Eleanor Roosevelt


    Confession: in times like now, January of 2017, I’m not very hopeful for the future. Messages on dating websites go unanswered. My photos on dating apps go swiped in the wrong direction. Efforts to move acquaintances into dates bear no fruit. The signs we look for when somebody is interested in us are absent from every encounter. There’s nobody on my mind. I have no crushes, and there are no crushes on me. Is it a dry spell or a desert?

    My confidence is like a soldier without a war, and it starts fighting itself. Am I unlovable? Am I unbearable? Am I unattractive, unlikable? I’m too fat for anybody to be interested. I’m too ugly to catch a second look.

    The negative thoughts don’t stay forever, but they never really go away.

    The last wounds to heal are the ones I’ve inflicted on myself. I don’t think I’ll be completely better until I let those wounds heal, too.

  • Pamphlet 5: "Fire"

    ⚡️Mr. Foreman’s Amazing Electric Ephemera⚡️

    “Guaranteed to take no longer to be read
    than takes a single cup of coffee to be drunk.”

    PAMPHLET NUMBER FIVE: FIRE

    Burn a log in a fireplace. The light and heat is a mirror of the activity on the surface of the sun. Energized oxygen locks into place with the dormant carbon atoms in the wood and the sunlight used to separate oxygen from carbon during photosynthesis comes bursting back out. That’s what a fire is, but it’s not everything a fire can be.

    THE EXTEMPORANEUM

    a thoughtful exploration of interesting topics enhanced by personal experience and opinion; topics begin at the Theme and, like growing trees, sprout branches into unpredictable areas

    The Sun

    The sun is a mass of incandescent gas, a gigantic nuclear furnace
    Where hydrogen is built into helium at a temperature of millions of degrees

    That’s an old children’s song made famous by They Might Be Giants [youtube.com] and it’s all around exactly right. Without a giant, heavy, dense, ball of gas in the middle of our solar system for earth to orbit, we most definitely would never have evolved.

    The sun is also a star, and stars are the source of all matter in the universe. A star is dense and that density increases as it ages, crunching atoms closer and closer together and pushing the resulting elements into its core, piling them on as it burns. When that star one day explodes, as they often do, it sends all those complex elements into space. When enough of that stuff gets in one spot and cools down, those elements clump together and spin around and, eventually, you get planets.

    It’s such a weird, beautiful concept that I want to state it in the plainest terms: we’re made out of stars. The Big Bang threw all that radiation into space, where it cooled off and came together and got close enough to start slamming hydrogen atoms together, which made helium, etc. That’s the source of every single atom, even the ones in your body.

    It’s tempting to get really deep into the science here, because it’s really, really awesome. For instance, the “necessities” of life seem less and less necessary as we learn more about our universe. We know that sunlight isn’t necessary for life (just look up a little thing called chemosynthesis [wikipedia.org]). Now we’re not even sure a stable orbit around a star is necessary. There is ample theoretical basis for an internally-heatedplanet (by decaying uranium, for instance) that could conceivably sustain an ecology of creatures that have never seen any kind of light at all, on planets drifting silently between stars. But as Richard Feynman says, I have to stop somewhere.

    When you die, you can get cremated, and superheated oxygen collides with the carbon in your body, and the beautiful, glimmering sunlight that triggered the photosynthesis in the plants eaten by you and the animals you ate and then encorporated into the cells of your body splits open in a blaze of subatomic particles and rejoins the thermodynamia of the universe.

    Or you can be buried, and then slowly consumed by tiny organisms that eat the carbon in your body and feed larger organisms that are eaten by even larger organisms that themselves die and on and on until the matter that made you makes a whole lot of things that aren’t you.

    If you’re lucky, all this happens after the miraculous collection of carbon and atomic forces that came together to make you had a grand old time and the people left over on earth can console each other by saying “well, that’s was a good long life.”

    Long Lives

    World records are premised on the ability to document the achievement. The fastest living man could be Usain Bolt, but there’s no way to know without measuring the running speed of every human on earth, which is impossible. Just so, there’s no way to know how old the oldest living person is without a precise measurement of every human life, so we have to trust birth records in foreign countries to tell us who the oldest (verified) person is.

    The oldest (verified) living human being is Emma Morana, an Italian woman who just turned a 117 years old in November. As far as ancient humans go, she doesn’t look quite as corpse-like as some of her fellow Oldest People:

    The oldest (verified) person ever is Jeane Calment, a French woman who died in 1997 at the age of 122 years and 164 days. She had one daughter who died at age 36 of pneumonia, who had one son who also died at the age of 36, in a car accident. Jeane lived in the same small town in France for the entirety of those 122 years.
    Don’t let the cigarette picture fool you — she smoked only one or two of them a day, showing a moderation that defined her lifestyle of consistent exercise and clean living. She claimed to have never been sick, and she almost burned her apartment down at the age of 110 because of poor eyesight.

    The list of Most Long-Lived (Verified) Humans shows that death has a clear preference for men: an overwhelming 94 of the 100 oldest (verified) people are women. There’s no consensus as to why women tend to live longer than men or why there are so few ancient men compared to ancient women (85% of centenarians are women).

    One leading explanation puts the blame squarely on the lack of menstruation in men. Women have less iron in their bodies than men because blood and other iron-heavy stuff (I’m not a doctor) is lost at a reliable rate of once per month. More iron means a higher risk for cardiovascular disease, which is one reason why red meat isn’t very good for you and why vegetarians tend to be healthier than the omnivorous among us. Male and female iron levels eventually equal out, later in life, but women have those 50 years or so of a head start.

    If you had to live in the same town and, for most of it, the same apartment for the entire duration, would you want to live to be 122? For some people, a long lifespan spent in one place is no life at all. It’s not how much time you spend on earth, it’s how you spend it. Besides, there’s really no such thing as linear time.

    Nonlinear Time

    Everything that ever happened has already happened, from the beginning of the universe to its end. We experience time at a rate of 60 seconds per minute. Life is a series of now moments strung together — those that haven’t happened yet are purely theoretical and we call them “the future” while nows that have passed are called “the past.” We can only perceive one now at a time.

    I say the future is theoretical because there’s no way to know it will happen. We expect it to happen because of all the nows that preceded it. We’re all natural scientists, hypothesizing that the nows to come will resemble all the nows that came before, because those nows fit a certain pattern. Finding and anticipating patterns is also called “learning” and we immediately start doing it when we’re born. A baby who drops his toy on the floor over and over again is testing his environment (and his parents) and learning about gravity.

    It’s not an easy concept to internalize until you use the flatland thought experiment. Since time is the fourth dimension, we can use the other three dimensions in the illustration.

    Imagine a species of 2-dimensional creatures. They have no height, only length and width. They’re squares or circles or triangles but they’re all living side-by-side. The concept of “above” might exist in the minds of their scientists, but they’re incapable of perceiving it.
    But not us. We’re 3D. We can look down on those poor 2D creatures and see their entire world spread out before us. We can even see inside their 2D bodies and their 2D buildings. No walls they made could keep us out — we could, at a whim, pick any one of them up at any time and take it on the ride of its life.

    Now, add a dimension on top of that one. We’re the flatlanders, now, and some mysterious 4D creatures look at our poor, feeble 3D lives and pity us. We can’t perceive time but it effects us, just as the 3rd dimension effect the flatlanders. Those 4D beings perceive time just as we perceive the third dimension. They see time not as a linear progression of nows but as a set string of nows that they can see all at once.

    It might feel like predestination, but it really isn’t. If you don’t know what’s going to happen, then how can you say what was supposed to happen? It’s not a curse, but a blessing, to not know how things are going to turn out.

    THE RECOMMENDATAE

    A selection of delights both digital and physical, curated for your enjoyment.

    Many of you already know me and already know that my nephew, Miles, died in the summer of 2014. He should be turning 20 next week, but he isn’t. His work lives on, frozen in time, and we can all still enjoy it. In honor of his birthday, I recommend you spend some time with him.

    My other suggestion is to watch this video of Richard Feynman describing the chemical process of fire. He was a genius and a fantastic storyteller and a great bongo player.

    THE ANECDOTUS

    a memory retrieved from the depths of my mind’s ocean by bathysphere; or, a thing that happened recently

    I have never liked the sun. I’ve won every Who’s More Pale contest I’ve ever entered, by clear margins. I burn easily. I’ve never had a tan. The sun stings my skin and hurts my eyes and heats everything up (the only thing I hate more than direct sunlight is too much heat). This is not revisionism based on present biases, and I offer photographic proof:
    Yep, that’s me, hating the sun.


    You light up my life, my sweet reader.