Yeah, I’m throwing another one of these at you this soon. So what? You got a problem with that? Only 3/4 of you even opened the last one so I don’t even feel bad about it. I wrote most of this the other day, not today, but it is an accurate guide to my headspace when I’m not feeling like doing anything, which happens.

This is what I write when I don’t want to write. I’m writing this and sharing it with you, which will probably result in a bunch of you unsubscribing. There’s nothing offensive or objectionable under this paragraph, but it might not be what you want in your inbox. This isn’t about you, anyway. This is about me.

Anyway, this is what I write when I don’t want to write.

I am writing this completely against my will. I don’t want to be here, I don’t want to be in this chair, I don’t want to be typing this, I don’t want to be worried that my butt crack might be visible in this chair in this coffee shop (it probably is), I don’t want to be drinking this DECAF flat white in this Starbucks because I’m old and if I drink caffeine after a nonspecific hour I will spin around in bed all night, I don’t want to be creative, I don’t want to have to write this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this, I don’t want to do this.

I don’t want to be writing and listening to my music and it’s making me sad. It’s making me angry, too, and I’m hardly ever angry. I have a headache, probably because I fell asleep on the couch avoiding doing anything and now I’m angry that the afternoon nap will probably make me have trouble sleeping tonight, too. I need sleep. I get a lot of sleep, because I don’t set an alarm and I don’t have any reason to get up at any specific hour. I got a lot of sleep when I do have a reason to get up at a specific hour, but not having something to wake up for means I get extra sleep I probably don’t need. Getting enough sleep is important for your health, but getting too much sleep is bad. You have to get the right amount. This is true for everything in life. Too much of anything is bad. Too much oxygen will kill you. Too much water will kill you. Too much sleep will eventually kill you, maybe. As suicide goes, it’s not the most expeditious route.

I bet BJ Novak could get this published.

The reason why I don’t want to write is because I have to. I am forcing myself. I sometimes have to force myself to do things. I don’t simply mean that I have to do things I don’t want to do but that I feel a push and pull occurring in my mind. My need to feel productive, my need to not waste the day, my need to feel valuable, grasp my motivation by the shoulder straps and pull as hard as they can but my motivation, digs its heels down and pushes against the forces pulling at it. It wants to go back to bed. It wants to lie down. Once deployed, my motivation can do really cool stuff, but sometimes getting it to move takes effort. Sometimes that effort comes from external expectations. When I have to motivate myself, well, that’s a whole thing.

I imagine my motivated self wearing overalls because it works hard and overalls are what workers wear. I imagine those needs (to feel productive, to feel valuable, etc.) as weaker. They can’t do much on their own but if I get enough of them involved, they can move my motivation. It is big and blocky, like it’s made out of cement. It scrapes along the ground. Set to rolling, my motivation is a powerful force. The corners fly off and it turns into a ball, and it’s hard to stop. But sometimes it doesn’t want to move.

I blame a book I can’t remember for making me think of my mental processes with such vivid pictures. The book was about Grover, or at least featured Grover, and it depicted various bodily functions as factory-like stations, depending on its function.

No, that’s wrong. I’m combining two different memories. The factory-bodily- functions thing is from a cartoon and the Grover book is this one.

I distracted myself from writing by researching the world of Grover books. There are a lot. The one most people know is The Monster at the End of This Book, which one published novelist wrote about. He wrote more about that Grover book than anyone has ever written about anything I’ve written, but I didn’t write anything as brilliant as The Monster at the End of This Book, so it’s okay. I’m in an okay mood. Not great, not terrible.

I imagine my mood as a light just over my right shoulder, a few feet back. It is clouded and dingey, like an old street lamp. The color of that lamp reflects my mood. It’s different all the time. I turn my mind’s eye to that lamp to see how I feel. When somebody asks me how I am, I check that light. The color has nothing to do with the mood. I look at it and it tells me what my mood is, but not with words. I just know.

This is another weird visualization that I experience, but there are a lot.

Another one is the calendar. I just tweeted about this (another great way to not write). When I was in kindergarten, the calendar was displayed over the chalk board. We spent most of our day sitting in front of that calendar and that chalk board. It is seared into my brain. This calendar begins with September on one side and August on the other. It’s a feature of my mind’s landscape, a monument to the easy permanence of childhood experience. If I think about it too long, my interactions with children are paralyzed, because I don’t want to say something that they will inexplicably remember when they’re 42 years old and not writing.

Did you ever think of what is behind your eyes? I mean, it’s just brains and bone but sometimes I imagine it’s a huge apparatus that stretches into the sky. How do I know that I don’t have one? Of course it disappears in mirrors and photographs. Maybe we all have them, in the sideways universe that sits just beside our own.

This is what I write when I don’t want to write.

⚡️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.

THE RECOMMENDATAE

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

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

⚡️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.

• I used one of his comics up above, and I recommend Drew’s Toothpaste For Dinner. He’s hilarious and he wrote a song about his dog.

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/

⚡️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.

⚡️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 FOUR: “LOVE”

The word “love” can mean a lot of things, but there’s not enough room in this little letter to cover more than a few, or even more than one: the feeling of great affection between two individuals. That’s my definition, not a dictionary’s.

THE EXTEMPORANEUM

Romantic love

Love is a material event. It is the collusion of chemicals, neurons and glands. Its purpose is to drop a person’s emotional defenses and push that person toward a different person. Ideally, this target of affection experiences a concurrent material event in their bodies, and this shared experience makes them want to do things like rub their excretory organs together.

If you can keep your hormones out of it, then you can imagine how objectively disgusting the act of sexual intercourse is. Just take a moment and imagine yourself as an alien observing humans having sex. It’s gross. It’s messy. In our western culture, where even the sight of a female nipple is off-putting, we are willing to take huge personal risks (social, cultural, physical) to toss all of that social conditioning aside and throw our naked bodies at each other.

The many risks in allowing ourselves to be so vulnerable to another person are mitigated somewhat by a vetting process called “dating,” and it is terrible. Every human who has reached his 39th year, like your humble author, without a permanent partner has contemplated arranged marriages with the whimsy that people in arranged marriages probably have for the freedom to date anybody they like.

First, you have to find somebody and then you have to impress them and then you have to keep impressing them until your neurotransmitters velcro together and it hurts more to lose each other than it does to keep the other around. If that reads as cynical to you, you’ve never dated in your late 30s, on the internet.

Internet dating

Back when I started internet dating, there weren’t many options. The big name was Match.com, but that’s where all the old people went. Savvy people like me had The Onion personal ads [archive.org], which didn’t have anything to do with the satirical news site but was part of a larger personal ad network with footprints on edgier websites like nerve.com. People my age who have been married and missed out on the joys of internet dating might not even be aware of the subtle rules and mores that have emerged from that ecosystem, so here are a couple:

• Cultural norms are alive and well. Although there are many exceptions, the general rules of in-person dating are the same. One might imagine that the internet is the great equalizer, with men and women connecting in equal measure. This is not the case. Men cast wide nets and send messages to many women at once, and women have to pick through the morass and choose the men they’ll write back to. The onus is still on the man to make first moves. The result of this is the title of my future book on internet dating, You’re Not the One He Picked, You’re the One Who Said Yes. A real world equivalent would be a man going to every woman in a crowded bar and asking for her number until one of them says yes. Maybe he’ll get lucky and his first choice will express interest. This is very unlikely. He will then go down his list of most desirable women in the bar and ask for their numbers until one of them says yes. She wasn’t his first choice, she was the one who said yes.

• One photo is all that matters. You can write a bunch of paragraphs about how great you are, but nobody will read them. Okay, somebody might read them, but not until they’ve looked at your photo and decided that you’re attractive enough to investigate more. You’ve probably heard of Tinder — it’s the mainstay of modern internet dating. It only gives you one photograph of a person, a name, an age, and a snippet of information. Rejecting or accepting a person is as easy as swiping their photographs in one direction or the other (left for no, right for yes). Imagine swiping right on every person you see and having no matches. That means nobody swiped right on you. For an already fragile self-image, Tinder is an unforgiving wasteland.

There are innumerable factors that go into whether people are attracted to each other. With higher cognition comes higher awareness comes higher standards. Women are fully aware of the risks of allowing a man into their intimate areas (both emotional and physical), so they have to be picky. One species that doesn’t have to worry about so many variables in their desirability has a different romantic burden: they have to be good artists.

Bowerbirds

Birds are weird, man. Science fiction has speculated (it must have been a person making those speculations, but I can’t remember his or her name) that birds could develop human-like intelligence if given free evolutionary reign and a dozen or so more million more years. They’re constantly surprising us with their intelligence and guile, two traits that would likely increase as the pressures of natural selection winnowed the dumb from the less-dumb. The ascendence of humans are evidence enough of this evolutionary preference. See, also: birds are bipedal, dextrous, and already show a penchant for tool use. Evolution has made stranger things than smart birds, it also made birds that do this:

That’s a male bowerbird’s bower, constructed for only one purpose: to attract females. Everything you see there was picked by the bird who built it and not one of those choices was random. Lest you think every bower looks the same, look at this diversity:

Each item is placed with intent and precision and every single bower is unique. Different species of bowerbird make different kinds of bowers. The dome-type, above, and the “avenue” type, below:

Each species prefers different kinds and colors of objects, but some have been observed tailoring their bowers to the preferences of the females they’re trying to attract.

This isn’t just a mating ritual, this is art.

There is no concrete consensus about why bowerbirds do this, but some speculate that it’s an externalization of display plumage. While peacocks, for instance, use their massive, colorful feathers to attract mates, bowerbirds evolved the same predilection to attract females using colorful displays but build them instead of grow them.

Not all art has a purpose. Some definitions of art include its inherent lack of functional usefulness, but maybe we can learn something from the bowerbirds. Some artists are in it for the sex (this is especially true if we include musicians), but self-expression is a way of displaying plumage we make rather than plumage we grow. There’s no point to making art that nobody sees. We make art to announce ourselves, to plant our flag into the ground and claim this space, this time, for us. I made this, now look at it.

Bowerbirds don’t just make bowers to attract females. Some species just use the bower as an enticement for the real act: a dance [youtube.com]. Dancing is something humans do, too, and it sucks.

THE ANECDOTUS

I don’t dance but I still go to a dancing-based party every month called In Bed By Ten [facebook.com], which is run by my friends Matt and Kelly. It’s a great time, even though I don’t dance. I get to hang out with other people who aren’t dancing, and lots of my friends go. It’s a chance to see them and socialize. I also can’t go without getting flak about my not dancing. People try to get me to dance, and have been trying to get me to dance for my entire life, but it just isn’t going to happen. It’s not some game I play to get attention (which is a fair accusation). It’s not really even a choice. I don’t dance because I’m terrified of looking ridiculous and let’s face it, everybody looks ridiculous when they’re dancing (except maybe the professionals).

This fear of looking ridiculous has manifested itself my whole life in lots of unpleasant ways. Social anxiety is, ultimately, a fear of ridicule, and I’ve struggled with that since I was very young. I’m happy that I’ve been able to conquer most of my social anxiety, but the dancing thing remains. I just can’t let go of myself enough to dance.

THE RECOMMENDATAE

I don’t know what to recommend with this issue, so instead I’ll give you a link to my internet dating profile, which you can read at your own risk. Warning: sincerity.

Thank you for reading, my loves.