Our culture is in love with the idea of something for nothing. ‘Absolutely FREE! Hurry in! Supplies are limited!’ Or – just take this pill, watch this video, buy this miracle exercise equipment and your problems will all be over. Faster, cheaper, easier than ever!

            Hogwash. Here’s a little wake-up call for you: There ain’t no such thing as a free lunch.

            Anything that is worth having is worth the price you pay for it. So, by extension, the more something is worth, the more it’ll cost you. I think most people are okay with that rule. But have you considered what it entails? For instance, what is worth more – a new wardrobe or a slim and healthy body? A big promotion, or your kid’s success? Or, perhaps trickiest of all – the respect and admiration of people you don’t really know and don’t care about, or healthy self-respect? Hard to put a solid price on some of that stuff, isn’t it? And don’t try to fool yourself into believing that any of those things are free, because you know they’re not. However, we have left the realm of dollars and cents behind, haven’t we? This is a different kind of cost. Now we’re talking pain.

            I’m not talking about Big Pain – getting in a car wreck, losing a job, a broken marriage. I don’t even mean the deep pain of things like mental illness or poverty. These kinds of pain are often unavoidable and simply have to be lived through. I mean the avoidable types of pain – going on a diet, taking a required (boring) class in school, rolling out of bed rather than hitting the snooze button. Because they’re avoidable, we tend to do exactly that – avoid them. But then we get fat, flunk out of school, roll in to work late one too many times and get fired. So, a greater pain follows the avoidance of a lesser pain. See where I’m going with this? At some point or another, you need to learn to embrace the pain.

            Small pains are good for you. Reasonable levels of pain can teach you things that comfort and ease never can. Running a marathon, for instance. Many people, especially young people, find that they can run a 5K race, possibly even a 10K without training too hard – not much pain. No one can run a marathon without a lot of very painful, directed training. But if you submit to the training, if you embrace the pain, you will amaze yourself at what you can accomplish.

            This same principle applies in so many different areas. Couch potatoes need to learn to embrace the pain of getting outside and moving their bodies. People struggling with money problems need to learn to budget and live within their means. Those struggling with weight and health issues need to embrace the pain of deep lifestyle changes – because the alternative in each case is to just give up and go on as before, knowing that only destruction awaits. People say, “there has to be a better way!” There is – and this is it. Embrace the pain.

            I know this is not a popular train of thought, but consider – when have you ever gotten anything worth having without going through a little pain? Showing up to those worthless classes in order to get a diploma. Dating all the wrong types and all the losers before you found one person you could happily live with. How many times did you fall off the bike before learning to ride? How many falls does a baby take before learning to walk? And then, the ultimate in pain/reward – how much pain does a woman go through to have a baby? So you see, pain – at least in limited amounts – is absolutely necessary to get to the good in life. Why are we afraid of it? I can understand avoiding the big, nasty stuff, but if you avoid all pain, that means you never risk anything. And if you never risk anything, of course you avoid failure (pain!!), but you also cancel out any possibility of success. You see, there is no easy answer, no pain-free way of living a life which transcends the mediocre. And if you live a mediocre life, all you will be left with at the end will be regrets – why didn’t I do this, why didn’t I say that to her, what might my life have been like if only…?

            Don’t let your life go by without taking risks, you’ll be happier if you do, no matter whether you succeed or fail – I guarantee it. I personally did one of those things that everybody (at least in this country) swears they’re gonna do ‘someday’ – I started my own business. I became my own boss. I kept the business going for almost eight years, but it finally failed. That’s right, I am a failed businessman. Cool. I don’t regret a single bit of it (at least where it wasn’t my fault), and in fact I learned a lot. I earned some money, learned a lot about finances, the legal side of business, and just how unprepared I really was. But I did that – I ran a business. Ever since then, I have been able to put ‘entrepreneur’ on my resume.  I do regret being a clueless schmuck while running my business, but I do not regret starting it. Do you see? I took a chance, and while the outcome wasn’t what I expected, I’m glad I did it. (Oh, and by the way, I also ran a marathon – at the age of 48!)

            Take risks, get your hands dirty, your nose a little bloody – do what the other people in your life tell you that you can’t do. Or as Eleanor Roosevelt put it: “Do one thing every day that scares you.” By the by – that doesn’t mean jump off buildings without a parachute and a plan. Take risks but educated ones. Your heart will thump just as loud, I promise. And remember, all risk involves pain at some level – but risk you choose is worth the pain. Embrace the pain.

TGC

            Okay, that was awful. I kept a very complete calorie journal for a week. I did not alter my usual habits in an attempt to make myself look better, and we had two meals out during the week. The results are in, and they’re not pretty. First, a benchmark –

            Age: 64           Height: 5’ 8”      Current wgt: 240#        Activity lvl: moderate

            Daily calories to:         maintain wgt – 2,715              mild wgt loss – 2,465

            Weight loss – 2,215         extreme wgt loss – 1,715     (numbers per Calculator.com)

            Starting from there, I added up everything I ate and drank for 7 days: 22,051 cal. Divided by 7 = 3,150 cal per day, average. Yikes. That means I was 435 calories OVER maintenance level every day. Which means I should have put on at least one more pound this week. Ick.

            I have already generated a couple of sample meals for breakfast and lunch, all between 500 and 600 calories. This should leave me around 1000 calories for dinner. I mostly have to knock back on bread and sweets (surprise, surprise) and keep the scotch to a minimum. I am also going to cut out all the in-between snacks and restrict eating out to once a week. The trick is to make this kind of eating into a habit. If I simply try to restrict myself away from everything ‘bad’ for me, I will inevitably fail. I have a long track record of doing exactly that. But if I can create a series of ‘painless’ little habits – (and yes, I realize that calorie restriction is painful – more on that later), I run a good chance of being able to sustain these behaviors, then get comfortable doing things in the new way, and then finally accept the new habits as my normal M.O. I know that this format works for me, because this is how I learned to get to the gym regularly.

            I go to the gym about twice a week – to lift weights, to jog a mile and maybe hit the jacuzzi afterwards. We also try to play racquetball at least once a week. Another benchmark:

            Current walk/run time – 14:30 (not terrific for a mile)

            Bench press – 185#        Deadlift – 225#        Weighted squats – 135#

Those are just general indications of my level of fitness. I have been running on and off since 1982, ran one marathon in 2006. Otherwise, I’m pretty lazy.

            Additional note: I spent part of today cleaning out my closet and stuffing a 33 gal yard waste bag full of clothes I won’t wear anymore. I’ll take them by Goodwill sometime soon. My wife and I also played racquetball twice this week (unusual), three games instead of two each time (unheard-of) and pushed each other pretty hard. Now that I would consider a work-out.

            So saying, I am pursuing my stated goals of losing weight, getting in better shape and changing up my wardrobe. We’ll see how this goes.

bcd

            What does it mean to build a world? Can everyone build a world? Do even all writers build worlds? Actually, very few people have been true world-builders, and they have generally only worked in the fields of fantasy and science-fiction. So far.

            J.R.R. Tolkien was not the first world-architect, but he is probably the best known, certainly in fantasy literature. Other authors, myself included, have followed his lead over the years. Gene Roddenberry, Frank Herbert and George Lucas have made big impressions with their star-spanning empires, but are they really any more impressive than Madeleine L’Engle’s Multiverse or Heinlein’s Future History? Hell, are they as well developed as A.A. Milne’s Hundred Acre Wood? You can probably come up with your own examples. But can just anyone build their own universe? The answer is a solid ‘maybe’.

            It takes more than a map to design Middle-Earth. What it really takes is an assortment of tools in your mental toolbox, to include: a fertile imagination, a solid grounding in science (physics is especially helpful), personal experience with vastly different geologies and weather patterns, an understanding of cultures and histories other than your own and a dash of mysticism. From that position of readiness, you make a few important assumptions and then get to work.

            You need more than a map, but it turns out that’s a good place to start. Getting a solid feel for the geography and the geology of your world gives you a solid base to work from. Follow that up with flora and fauna, a bit of the local astronomy if applicable, and a simple history (to start). A good idea of where your story begins and where you expect it to end up is good, but not sufficient. I find that I work best from small to large and then back again. To explain: every time I’ve started out to create a new world, I start with a single village or even a single idea. From there, I start to people the local area, setting up races and their interactions, local governments and local characters. When working from a single idea, I first try to see if it will fit in our own world, and if not, what kind of world it would fit in. But almost from the beginning, the world needs conflict.

            A world without something to struggle against might make for a peaceful life, but it makes a lousy story. Whether it’s an Evil Empire (done to death!) or a nasty little money-grubbing man named Potter, it’s usually best to make your villain as scary and powerful as you can without overwhelming the story. If the villain is too powerful, only an all-powerful Hero can challenge him – and frankly, I have no interest in writing comic books. At least, not that type. Once you have the Boss, you can start designing the minions to suit. See where I work from large to small? Something else to remember – no evil person ever thinks of themselves as evil. Once in a great while they may consider themselves ruthless, but always in a good cause.

            By this point, you may finally have a good idea of what sort of story you have, and what kind of world you’re building. There are so many different types of story setting now, that to try to talk of Fantasy or Science Fiction in anything like pure terms is nearly impossible. However, if you need a line of demarcation, here it is: if the plot depends on some sort of mystical force or magic, it’s Fantasy; if the plot revolves on some point of actual science, or even reasonably extrapolated science, then your story is Science Fiction. After that, things get seriously muddy. Then you just need to settle on one of the seven (some say nine) plots that make up all of fiction. Hold on, you say – surely there are more than just nine plots in all of literature! Nope. I’ll cover that little bit of wonderfulness in a later essay. But you need a narrative in order to breathe life into your precious, fragile, lethal little world. And that’s just the world-story – I haven’t even touched on characters, yet. Have fun with it.

            This is just the start of the work you’ll do as an Apprentice World-Builder. Read the Masters, see how they do it, follow their lead. It will take many worlds and many years to become proficient in this admittedly grandiose skill, but the result is worth all the toil, I promise. As we go through this Primer, I will work in finer detail, but the Grand Scheme is what makes for a grand world. Never lose sight of the Big Picture. And welcome to the Drudge’s Guild.

bcd

            It’s increasingly obvious to me that I’m no longer young and skinny. Since I’ve topped 200 pounds since before my son was born, and he’s nearly 30, you’d think I would have figured this out before now. Well, sometimes I’m a little slow. It also took me a far more than reasonable time to realize that my wardrobe and grooming could use an upgrade. Scruffy face and hair, t-shirts and blue jeans was all well and good in my twenties, but I’m over 60 now. Maybe I should do something about this, you think?

Total beauty, huh?

            Obviously, regrowing hair and removing wrinkles are completely out of the realm of likelihood – anyone who thinks otherwise needs a reality check – and I’m not vain enough to color my hair in an attempt to regain lost youth. However, pretty much everything else is on the table. I’m already in better-than-average shape for someone my age, and I already go to the gym on a semi-regular basis. However, my diet and wardrobe can obviously use an upgrade. In fact, I have been so fat for so long that it’s finally begun to affect my health. The doctors keep waving Type 2 Diabetes in my face. And at least one has told me I’m beginning to get cirrhosis of the liver. If I’m going to keep writing for any reasonable amount of time, I’ll have to fix this. So saying, I will be going through my intended action plan in detail over the next week or so, and post updates as necessary. What follows are my initial thoughts on the subject.

            First, I have to establish a baseline – you can’t measure progress if you have nothing to measure against. Weight, current workout routine, meal planning, total calories consumed to start. Every diet I’ve ever gone on (there have been dozens over the years) requires the same set of starting numbers. My total intake has changed over the years – I doubt if I’m still packing away 3000 calories per day… well, I used to. But if I’m remembering correctly, my maintenance calories per day for my weight is around 2000. Possibly higher – I need to check on that, too. And I need to add in absolutely everything that goes in my mouth – no cheating.

            After that, it’s mostly a question of dropping the total intake by somewhere between 200 and 500 calories per day, establishing a consistent eating pattern and stepping up my workout. Adjust the calorie level as necessary. I currently do two, occasionally three workouts per week: a walk/run of a mile or more, weightlifting and some relaxation time in the jacuzzi. My wife and I play racquetball whenever we can, as well.

            This blog post is intentionally short. I just don’t have enough info yet to establish the baseline, and I don’t have a standardized breakfast and lunch figured out, yet. I’m going to withhold any move toward Intermittent Fasting until I see what I’m up against. (I’ve done IF before, it’s really no problem for me.) No plans yet to curtail scotch or cigars. Here we go.

bcd

            Wait … process? I have a process? Is it named after me? If not, what good is it?

            It’s said that every artist has a process, assumed to be as distinct as they are. I suppose that’s true, but what of those like myself who engage in all different forms of art? Is there a different process for each type of art? Do they overlap? The short answer is ‘uh, maybe?’ It should be obvious by this point that even I’m not sure what the hallmarks of my process are. But as there can be no art without a process to work through, I will now attempt to sketch out that process here. Please be patient, I will probably wander a bit.

            I started drawing when I was four years old. I started singing in public in the eighth grade and started acting at 16. Painting, sculpture, drafting and mechanical design all wedged themselves in there around these times, with architectural design last of all. I don’t actually recall when I started writing stories down, although somewhere between 13 and 20 seems most likely. I’ve been making up stories of various kinds for most of my life. In all cases and at all times (except for performance arts), the inspiration to do any particular project or write any story has always come to me without warning from some source that I cannot point to directly. This source has never stopped throwing ideas into my head. At different points, it could be as many as three or four great ideas a day, completely unlooked-for. However, they were rarely the kinds of ideas my teachers wanted me to have. I was a bright student in school, but the educational establishment couldn’t tolerate any idea they hadn’t put in a kid’s head, so they tried to erase them. Thankfully, they were unable to drive out my creative source, no matter how they tried. I’m afraid I caused no end of frustration to my teachers because of this. To those who have never experienced this kind of non-local idea synthesis, I can only say I’m sorry. It’s exhilarating and wonderful, but I do understand that it’s also quite unusual. Once my head gets a spark of an idea, it runs with it, creating a full narrative as it goes. This is where my process begins with all my arts – they diverge rapidly from there.

            When it comes to drawing and painting, I will usually get a single image, tantalizing but static. That’s usually my less-than-fully-thought-out cue that I’m looking at a visual art project. Mechanical and architectural designs will often also look this way, but will obviously be about machinery or buildings, not animals, landscapes or people. Mechanical designs will often move in my thoughts, demonstrating their use. They will also often play out in my mind as exploded drawings. From the point where an idea is fully formed in my head, it’s time to put it on paper, vellum or canvas. Very often, I will edit and expand the work as I create it. The process of visual creation is always quite fluid, at least in the early going, only setting up as various elements find their proper places. Once the work is complete and has had a full checkup, it’s usually finished.

            Acting and singing is mostly about the rehearsal process and getting everything correct and in the right order. I don’t read music, so I take a little longer to learn some things, but once I have it – it’s set in stone. I can still recall many songs from my youth – every word. I often tell people that my acting process is a matter of finding out what the other characters think of my character (often expressly written) and then intuiting what my character thinks of himself. (I don’t get cast for female characters – I look horrible in a dress. It’s the beard.) My next step is to find a resonant note inside me – some aspect of my weird, wacked-out personality that echoes in the character – and then expand on that aspect to flesh out the person. All the other little tricks – makeup, costume, character voice, physical movement – get layered on top of the raw character to make up the final effect.

            Writing is a long and convoluted process for me. Again, coming up with ideas for stories and blogs is a snap, and usually happens without my prompting. Then I sit down and start thinking about the piece. As often as not, an entire narrative line will suggest itself to me, largely unbidden. I just have to be fast enough to write down (sketch out, really) the high points and maybe one or two short conversations between characters. Very often I will see the story roll past me like a movie or a play, more or less complete. Then I pick a spot in the narrative as close to the end as possible and start writing. As you can tell, my writing owes a lot to my theatrical training.

            Some people are plotters – they must have every bit of the story outlined and subdivided, ready for filling in. These are the authors who need to know what the last line in the book will be before they can write the first. Some authors are ‘pantsers’, as in ‘seat-of-the-pants’ writers. They don’t want to know how it will end; they just want to follow the story as it meanders out of their skulls onto the page. When it seems pretty well done, they finish it. Their attitude is, ‘I can fix it in the edit’. I’m somewhere in the middle – I’m what’s sometimes called a ‘plantser’, meaning I do both things as needed. I have a pretty good idea where the story is going before I start, I even sometimes write out a very sketchy outline. Then I just write, following the story wherever it wants to go, outline or no outline. I sometimes feel like a bloodhound, following the switchbacks in the elusive trail the story leaves behind. If I get stuck or can’t find my way out of a rabbit hole I’ve gotten into, I sometimes put together a brief outline of the next immediate steps in the narrative, and off I go again. Once in a while, a completely new and usually outlandish twist will occur to me in the middle of this planning, and everything goes out the window as I follow this new scent. I have almost never been disappointed by this kind of serendipitous writing. I don’t pad the work – there’s usually plenty of stuff to look at along the road, but the action will not be denied. Also – I’m a firm believer that character is more important than plot. Characters create plot. Or as Ray Bradbury put it: “Plot is no more than footprints left in the snow after your characters have run by on their way to incredible destinations.” Perfectly stated.

            I hope this little digression gives you some snippet of insight into what can generously be called ‘my process’. It’s wacky, it’s random, but it’s a whole lot of fun. And it’s far too late to change me.

bcd

            As I have stated before, I reserve the right to publish openly religious blogs from time to time. This is one of them. If this sort of thing offends you, leave now. If not, buckle up – I also refuse to pull any punches.

            When I was a kid, there was no fire in faith. Religion was a cut-and-dried, socially acceptable family activity. If you didn’t belong to a church (it didn’t matter whether or not you attended), you were seen as an outsider – a social misfit. Dutiful parents marched their squirming, resentful children into the pews every Sunday, so they could be seen as well as see who was there. It was a country club, really, but with lousy music and no alcohol. There was no faith to speak of – faith was worse than dead, it was passé. Then the Sixties happened.

            It was a time of ferment, of revolution, the breaking of old ideas and the growing of new ones. Among Christians, it was also a time of renewal and shaking off the stiff thought patterns we were used to. It was a violent and turbulent time – most older people were frightened, but the youth of the world were energized and empowered like never before. The Sixties saw the beginnings of the ecology movement, a step forward in the rights of women, the birth of Rock and Roll. In Christian circles, we saw the advent of Christian rock music, the beginnings of the Charismatic Movement, the creation of the first mega-churches, televangelism (a good thing at the beginning). It seemed real change was on the way, and anything was possible.

            But as the Sixties turned into the Seventies and the Seventies turned into the Eighties, the movement stalled, and then fell in on itself, like a loaf of bread that rises too quickly, only to collapse before it’s done. The student radicals of the Sixties became the disillusioned druggies of the Seventies. The wide-eyed children of the Seventies became the sly-eyed Yuppies of the Eighties. In Christian circles, the Charismatic Movement was quickly subsumed by the older Pentecostal church – with all its attendant rules and incantations. Televangelism quickly turned sour, producing some of the most vilified characters of that period. Christian rock was dumbed down until it became mere pabulum, leaving social and religious commentary in the dust. It became more important that believers ‘feel good about themselves’ than standing up for the Gospel. Rock music turned into Big Money music, turned (briefly) into Disco, then into Big Hair, Grunge, Alternative…and fractured into a thousand insignificant little pieces. Those of us who lived through these times were deeply disappointed by them, but feeling powerless to oppose the forces at work, slipped off individually to our own little worlds, there to lick our wounds and try to keep the big dreams alive, if only in memory.

            Now we find ourselves on the cusp of a revolution of such epic proportions that it literally takes the breath away, and dwarfs the narcotic-laced dreams of the Sixties. We now live in an era where the people can topple a consumer empire or a tyrannical government using just their cell phones – where musical and artistic tastes have a shelf life measured in minutes – a world where, contrary to the Big Brotherism fears of the Sixties, the individual is more powerful and more important than the State. Information technology has become so all-pervasive that it begins to be entirely invisible. Companies and governments rise and fall with the tides. The most important, powerful and far-reaching programs in existence are crowd-funded, open-sourced, and staffed largely by volunteers. Individuals with a good idea, a modest bankroll and a few hard-working friends are turning out the products that we will all be buying in the near future, usually from an online store. Mega-stores crumble and shopping malls stand empty, yet the economy improves. Contrary to public belief, there is more safety, more democracy, more spirituality and more literacy than ever before. But still, the unthinking, unknowing populace quakes in fear at the cyclone of change and looks to anyone who promises to ‘bring back the good old days’. How quickly they forget that the good old days sucked.

            We cannot and will not return to a world that holds human life cheap, that exaggerates our differences to keep us separate, to keep us powerless. A world dominated by unresponsive government oversight and corporate greed is no longer tolerable. We are rushing headlong into a world where the overwhelming concern is freedom of choice, where diversity and acceptance are law, where mediocrity is no longer celebrated, but discarded as useless. The Company Man is dead, because the corporation he served no longer exists. Change is now the only constant, and even change is changing rapidly.

            This, of course, frightens the living hell out of many people. ISIS, the Tea Party, fundamentalists of all flavors, the various neo-Luddite groups that are popping up like mushrooms on the rotting trunk of the Industrial Age, all indicate the panic reactions of those who cannot or will not accept change. We have news for you – there are no ‘Good Old Days’ to return to. Like it or not, Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock has come true with a vengeance. We cannot even slow the pace of change – we have not left ourselves that choice. But panic and despair are not the only options open to you. In fact, they are not even the best options.

            The power is in your hands, at last. Never before in the history of the planet have so many been connected, empowered, and unshackled as now. Go out and change the world – we need you to do so. Not to try to return to some half-remembered ‘America the Great’ (a country which never existed, by the way), but to create a New America – an America where everyone gets the chance to live in peace and freedom, safely beyond the hatred, the poverty and the wasted lives produced by the old regimes. Make this country, this world, into the beacon of life and hope it can be. Best of luck, because you’ll need help.

            Transforming the world starts with transformed people. And the only power I’ve encountered that can transform broken people is Christ. But not the Christ we have had shoved down our throats for all these years, the meek and mild skinny white man – the real Jesus Christ, the passionate radical who set out to turn the world upside down, and succeeded. He was brown, by the way – probably had a big nose, too. He was a Jew, after all. And not skinny. He was a carpenter in an age where the chief tools of the trade were a mallet, a chisel and an adze. Not a trade for wimps. It’s this driven, powerful, peaceful yet confrontational person we must all meet and follow. His words are the words of change, of healing that our damaged and confused humanity needs. And it was his death and resurrection that transformed the world, and made it possible for us to be healed of our brokenness. By the way, Christ actually began the transformation in society which resulted in our Western civilization. Granted, it’s gone horribly wrong in many ways, but the change he began continues to inform and change the world around us. It’s more than past time for his followers to pick up where he left off, and rather than fret and fume over their little problems, try to bring about the Kingdom he desired – not a hierarchy of religious stricture and blind obedience, but a wide-open world where everyone is loving and loved, where everyone is cared for. But up ‘til now, that is not the religion we’ve been handed. The words, deeds and vision of Christ have been consistently ignored by his own followers, and that, above all, must cease.

            We must have an end to ‘no-know-um’ Christianity. To the endless series of heated, sometimes violent clashes between members of the same faith over mere words – words that neither side truly understands. An end to magic and superstition dressed up as faith. An end of the bastardization of what was supposed to be a gospel of hope and acceptance into a rigid collection of rules and thinly veiled prejudices which support and protect the intolerant bigots that promulgate it. And finally, we must have an end to the ‘happy-happy’ crap which is shoveled out to the masses as a substitute for real joy. I call for nothing less than a complete housecleaning for the Christian Church – a tossing out of everything we have invented over the centuries to hide or ‘soften’ the Gospel, all the stage dressing we have put in place to hide the Truth – which is what we are truly scared of, isn’t it? This must happen now.

pax et ama

bcd

            So, here’s an interesting question: which artform is more creative – writing or acting? Painting or architecture? Dance or musical performance? Physics or math?

            Whoa, stop! Physics? MATH?!? What do those have to do with art? Actually, a lot more than you’ve been taught to believe. Science requires (from its best practitioners) an amazing range of creativity and intuition. Einstein is famously quoted as saying, “Imagination is more important than knowledge.” He arrived at some of his most important theories through imagination, and only set about to apply logic later. Even Newton, who created physics by insisting that every observable consequence of mechanics followed simple mathematical laws, utilized his imagination constantly. His greatest contribution to math, the calculus, requires the use of ‘vanishingly small changes’ in the equations he was trying to solve, endlessly piled on top of one another. If that doesn’t smell of imagination, what does? Sure, it also requires some very clever mathematics to make it work – but again, after the fact. Is calculus worthwhile? Consider that none of our bridges and damn few of our buildings would stand up without it. Imagination holds up and gives structure to your world.

            Pure mathematicians – the guys and gals who create new forms of math just for the sake of the math – almost universally consider their work to be an art form. And why wouldn’t they? They are constantly in search of ‘the most beautiful’ theories and formulas. Sounds like an art, doesn’t it? They’re also very often dismayed when one of their ‘beautiful’ results is commandeered by engineers and technologists to solve real world problems. Art is very often useful as well as beautiful. Sculptors create automobiles. Writers set political agendas. Scientists are often musicians as well. Actors run for public office. So, tell me why are the STEM disciplines the only creative endeavors worth teaching and subsidizing? Visual arts, music, theatre and dance are just as important to our modern world as mathematics, science and engineering. Engineering may give us the latest cell phone, but art is what we do with it.

            So, if you can – define ‘creative’. What does it mean? What is it good for? Is there only one truly useful form of creativity? Two? A dozen, a thousand? And who gets to decide that this art form is useful, but this other is not? Is it the job of artists to decide this? Politicians? Business owners? Accountants? A number of years ago, BBC Science Correspondent James Burke created a book and a TV series titled Connections. His thesis was that progress in the sciences and technology is not nearly as linear as most people believe. Sometimes you find what you’re looking for, sometimes you look for one thing and find something else, sometimes it just seems to drop out of the sky, and so on. I would consider that a good summary of the way creativity works. Unfortunately, Burke’s position was that art, theatre and literature is nice and all, but doesn’t really move humanity forward. There, I think he’s dead wrong. There is good reason to believe that the invention of gunpowder was very important to the human race, but I don’t agree that it’s more important than the development of two-point perspective in painting.

            Some theorists and psychologists would like to say that creativity is simply the process of finding a solution, a working-out of the differences between two disparate but overlapping fields of human endeavor. I would agree that creativity can use those overlaps to find solutions, but that is not the only driving mechanism. Sometimes answers come when you’re looking in one direction, only to come randomly popping out in another. It seems to me that those who would like to define creativity as a complex working of a societal impulse or an evolutionary process in the brain are similar to those who want to explain away genius as simply a learned behavior, raised to a high efficiency. That is not at all what it is, and simply points up the fact that these experts simply don’t understand creativity or genius because they are neither. Not everyone is creative – you were lied to, get over it. Anyone can learn to use creative thinking and creative techniques to come up with non-standard answers, and I think they should. But true creatives have been that way for as long as they can remember, usually. Some (maybe even most) tend to get squashed by the modern educational system, and a few of those can re-discover their talents at a later date. Some never do. This is one of the great crimes and tragedies of our modern world. We need creatives to do what they do best.

            If I had to define creativity, I would say it’s a way of seeing, thinking, feeling and acting which tends to find solutions to problems or put forward new ways of thinking and seeing which have value for the community at large. Painting, in its best form, is not merely decorative, any more than engineering at its best simply provides more goods and services for sale. Business is not the sole form of useful human endeavor – thank goodness. And finally, there can never be a legitimate final arbiter as to the usefulness or importance of any particular art form or individual work of art. Every true work is the child of the creator’s soul, every work finds its truest audience. The popularity of any given piece of work is no indication of its importance.

            Economist Richard Florida put forward the idea of ‘the Creative Class’ a few years ago. His thesis was that those who can create new content, new ideas and solve important problems are going to drive the economy of the future, post-industrial era. His theories have been controversial and have moved in and out of favor. To some extent, I believe he’s right – creatives will be the movers and shakers for the foreseeable future, but we must be cautious. We can create any number of wonderful worlds in our imaginations, but not all of them are good for all or even for most people. We all tend to favor people like ourselves, but we must not leave the rest of the world out in the cold. The takeover of the world by the creatives must be as egalitarian and bloodless as we can manage. Long live the artists and inventors! Vive la Revolution!

TGC

            Every few weeks a new article comes out in certain press streams – on the Right, it’s more venom about how the Left is ruining the country and wants to turn our sacred Democracy into a godless Socialist state. From the Left it’s usually a clarion call against human trafficking or an angry, wailing rant about how Big Business and various cartels are destroying the blessed Environment.

            How ridiculous, the whole sordid comedy. Most people have such tiny brains – they think too small.

            What far too many people don’t really understand is that the problems we face as a group, a nation or even a species are insignificant – not at all important in the grand scheme of things. We’re so used to seeing things from the perspective of tiny individuals with short life spans and even shorter attention spans, that the largest percentage of people find it nearly impossible to comprehend the distances and time to travel within the solar system, let alone trying to reach our nearest stellar neighbors. How are they going to deal with actual aliens when we actually meet them? What are they going to do when they are finally shown that the fleeting concerns, loves, hates and fears of the human race don’t even register within the galactic community? We’re just not very important. What happens to the planet isn’t important – on the galactic scale.

            No one is going to come down from the stars and save us from ourselves. Even the Second Coming the evangelicals harp on about is basically an invasion, a winding up of the ugly mess we’ve made for ourselves. If we want to continue as a race, we need to understand that we have to work to save ourselves. The good news is, it’s really not as hard as all that – we just need to let the best and brightest problem-solvers do what they do best and support them as they do it. (If anyone is actually reading this, I’ve probably offended and lost over three-quarters of my audience by now. Here’s where I lose most of the rest of you…) Now, when I say the best and the brightest, I of course mean billionaire entrepreneurs. They are literally our best hope for survival.

            I told you early in this website to buckle up – if you haven’t done so, now’s the time when you get thrown around the cabin. I warned you. Here comes the ugliness.

            Everything that is wrong with your life, your world and your head is on you. Oh, you may have been aided and abetted by outside forces from time to time, but most of the damage to you comes from you. Don’t think so? How about these:

            1. You don’t understand how finances work – so you remain poor. It is NOT the government’s fault, it is NOT the fault of big corporations, and it is NOT just your ‘bad luck’. There’s no such thing as luck, get over it. Big corporations don’t want to keep you poor, they want to keep you buying their stuff. If you’re poor, they can’t do that. Wake up. And the government’s only real concern is maintaining the ‘status quo’. They don’t have the time or manpower to keep you down. The only one who’s holding you down is you.

            2. You are not important. No one is. Think about this: if you died today, who would attend the funeral? How many of those would even remember your name in ten years? Here’s the truth: unless you are a direct descendant of a royal family (still in power, by the way), you were not born special, and no one gives a damn about you outside your immediate family. I don’t care what your annual income is, or what degrees you’ve got, or who you ‘know’ – none of that makes you important. And pride? Please… the only thing your pride is good for is getting you killed. Dump it. The one thing that makes you important is what you do and have done for other people. Period. Live in service to others and you become important – no other way.

            3. You are invisible – just a face in the crowd. The only people who are really worth a damn – the only people to know – are those who are solving problems for other people. The bigger the problem they solve, the more important they become, and by extension, the richer they become. So, logically, billionaire entrepreneurs are the most important people, not because they have lots ‘o money, but because they’re solving bigger problems than anyone else. You want to be rich and important? Forget the flashy clothes and fancy cars – solve big problems.

            Minor historical note: I have a kind of love/hate relationship with Elon Musk. All of the stuff he’s doing now – space flight, electric cars, boring tunnels to relieve traffic problems, I was dreaming up back in the 80s and 90s. So, good on you, Musk – go, go, Go! And at the same time – curse you, Elon, you beat me to the punch. (My fault – insanity is a bitch.)

            4. The very small percentage of your personal problems that are NOT imaginary, aren’t all that tough to solve. A vanishingly small percentage of the population (a great deal less than 1%, so – probably not you) actually have mental or physical problems that we still can’t overcome with modern medicine. Don’t get me wrong – if you have serious mental or physical issues, there’s lots of help available – get some. But – trauma because you were picked on in grade school? Never pretty enough to be chosen Prom Queen? Big deal. The rest of us have gone through the same shit, Cinderella. Get a life and stop whining. Even insanity can be lived with – I functioned semi-normally for twenty years while suffering crippling delusions. Try that on for size, I dare ya. Oddly enough, there is increasing proof that certain kinds of mania (psychopathy, for one) may actually increase your chances of becoming rich and powerful. So, hike up your panties and get to work.

            So, what’s the take-away, here? Simply put – you’re not an important person unless you’re helping a lot of people by solving big problems. But before you can even get to that point, you have to try to fix your own life. Take a good, hard look at the things you do and think, and figure out which ones help you and which ones don’t. Get rid of the things in your life that don’t help you – this is going to be a very painful step, fair warning. Then get in there and build up the things that help you. Add a few more as they present themselves. Get educated – no, I don’t mean school. By law, you have to stay in school until you turn 18, after that you get to decide if further formal education is going to help you do what you want. If not, don’t bother. Instead, read everything you can get your hands on in your favorite subject. Then find a way to do it. Find other people who can help you do it. Informed action is where the magic happens.

            In future, I will try to get more specific about steps you should take to turn your life into a success story. For now, I’ve kind of beaten this thread to death. If anyone is still reading this drivel, my hat is off to you – you are either smart enough to begin real changes, or severely masochistic. Sit down with a nice, warm cup of tea and try to stop the shaking. Until next time.

pax et ama

TGC

            In 1976, a professor of economic history at the University of California, Berkeley, Carlo M. Cipolla, published an essay outlining the fundamental laws of a force he perceived as humanity’s greatest existential threat: Stupidity. You can find the book on Amazon.

            These are Cipolla’s five basic laws of human stupidity:

Law 1: Always and inevitably everyone underestimates the number of stupid individuals in circulation.

I kinda feel like Cipolla was being unnecessarily generous with this one.

Law 2: The probability that a certain person be stupid is independent of any other characteristic of that person.

This explains so much. For instance, how a person you might expect to be smart, such as a doctor or a lawyer, can turn out to be monumentally stupid. And not simply because we disagree with their point of view – that can actually be a very good indicator that we are stupid.

Law 3. A stupid person is a person who causes losses to another person or to a group of persons while himself deriving no gain and even possibly incurring losses.

Cipolla called this one the Golden Law of stupidity. I would consider it more of a definition. The more unconscious or even unintentional the losses are, the stupider the person is. Anyone is capable of gross negligence – stupid people practically make a religion of it.

Law 4: Non-stupid people always underestimate the damaging power of stupid individuals. In particular non-stupid people constantly forget that at all times and places and under any circumstances to deal and/or associate with stupid people always turns out to be a costly mistake.

This is possibly the most painful truth amongst these laws. Intelligent people go about trying to help stupid people improve, to help them become ‘functional members of society’. This is usually a huge mistake unless you are a very special kind of person. People who go into Social Services can tell you the full truth of this. After a while it just feels like trying to push water uphill. Many do want to change, to improve. Many do not. Of those who do want to change, their stupid family members or friends simply wear them down until they quit.

Law 5: A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person.

And its corollary:

A stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit.

You see, a bandit will try to do harm to others while improving himself. So, some actual improvement is happening. Just not much, and only for the bandit. Helpless people, on the other hand, are always trying to improve other people’s situations, while ignoring their own worsening condition. They seem to consider it selfish to tend to their own needs as well, I suppose. So, some improvement is being done, just at the expense of the improver. An intelligent person, by contrast, will improve the lives of others while improving their own position as well. But a stupid person will wreck other people’s situations and their own at the same time, and never see the stupidity. No one profits from the actions of a stupid person. Worse yet, intelligent persons cannot help the stupid, because the intelligent are not able to understand the illogic of the stupid, and the stupid will simply soak up the proffered help and continue their stupid ways.

            Cipolla posits that the difference between advancing societies and declining societies can be reduced to the percentage of intelligent people to stupid people. This actually boils down to the total number of intelligent people, as the percentage of stupid people in any society tends to remain the same. The intelligent people in any society have to work twice as hard at improving the society in order to overcome stupid people’s downward drag on the society. This only becomes a lighter burden as the total percentage of intelligent people increases. One way to do this is to attempt to enlist the helpless people into the ranks of intelligent people and frustrate the bandits. Do not try to make the stupids less stupid – ever.

            It does not follow that creating a new society with only intelligent people (perhaps cutting the stupids loose to flounder and die) would actually work for any conceivable length of time. Stupid people would appear, as if by magic, in the ‘smart person’ society, and it might take a long while for them to be spotted as stupids. They would immediately set about their destructive ways, unnoticed by the others around them, because the attitude ‘that can’t happen here’ would be too pervasive. Hence, a perfect ‘workers’ society’, or even Roddenberry’s wide-eyed socialist future, is impossible. Hubris is a horrible thing.

            So, what’s the answer here? Can we reverse the trend toward the world of Idiocracy, back into a more enlightened society, or are we doomed to be pulled under the foaming waters of history by the weight of the stupids? I would love to be able to point to a period in history – any period – where a society learned to keep its stupids under control and agreed to be led by the intelligent people. There isn’t one. If you look closely, you might find some periods that did better than others, where great strides in knowledge and in the rights of individuals were made. But there’s always evidence of the rampage of the stupids. For instance: the Italian Renaissance, with all its wonderful arts and the beginnings of science was still rife with ridiculous wars between countries and city-states simply to ease the boredom. And let’s not forget the Rationalist Period, where it was actually popular to appear well-read and intelligent. Revolutions in thought, in science, medicine and technology started to make a real difference in the lives of the common people. It also produced the French Revolution – one of the worst bloodbaths in history.

            So, it seems the best we can hope to do as a society is to steer people back toward scientific thought, and toward literacy (not just reading ability). Also, to show up ‘throw-away’ culture and the constant hunger for glitz and the worship of celebrity as the ridiculous wastes of time and energy that they are. However, that doesn’t look like the way things are trending. We are marketing and advertising ourselves into oblivion, because those bulwarks of rapacious capitalism are aimed directly at the lowest common denominator in society – the stupids. It has gotten so bad, that the stupids are now running the country – every country – from both sides of the aisle. Our water is not drinkable, our food is not nourishing, our jobs are soul-crushing. Even our arts and entertainment are insipid and pointless – because they’re non-threatening, non-challenging, just the way the stupids like it. We are strangling ourselves and our civilization is crumbling, because somewhere along the line, we decided “if you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em”. We are working overtime to make all of us stupid. I wish I had a more positive way to wrap up this blog, but the truth is just overwhelming. Nobody has an answer for this. Stupid R Us.

May God have mercy on our souls.

TGC

            **A quick note – this is another one of those snarled rants that I published in a different place several years ago. Attentive readers will notice that it shares themes in common with another rant published here, “The Problem of Prediction”. This is not mere happenstance – futurism, science and especially spaceflight, are always at the forefront of my thoughts. So saying, you can expect other rants concerning these subjects to show up from time to time. I am a science-fiction author, after all. To proceed…**

            I have a marked tendency to growl and mutter darkly about humans and their future – how about a little sunshine instead? Before the ‘bunnies and kitties’ coalition get their little pink sparkle hearts in a dither (you know who you are – ‘fess up!), I’m not going to talk about cute animals, babies or even clean air and water – except by accident. This is about space.

            You know…space? That black, airless void out there beyond the sky? Where the sun, the moon and stars call home? Ringing any bells? It needs to, because space, or as I prefer to call it, the cosmos, is the real future of mankind. Without it, we don’t have a future. Let me explain…no, there is too much, let me sum up.

            The Earth is just one tiny, damp rock in the great sea of the cosmos. There are a huge number of other places we can go, both in this solar system, and in other star systems. Most will be uninhabited (we think), all will contain raw materials we can use. And we need to go. As the last century or two has proven, mankind is outgrowing the planet. The Earth is an amazing womb, but a child who refuses to leave the womb threatens the life of both himself and his mother. So let’s not hear any more of this ‘oh, there’s nothing out there’, or even ‘Earth is the only true home of mankind’ crap. It just ain’t so. End of sermon.

            Several things need to happen in the next fifty years or so, and I believe they will.

1. Mass access to space is required – we must move beyond the concept of an elite astronaut corps doing all the work, and not just scientists, either.
2. Access to orbit must be as cheap, ubiquitous and pollution-free as we can make it – this should be an obvious criterion – once in orbit, all bets are off.
3. Space-based mining and manufacturing must replace earth-bound heavy industry – the reason is simple: it just costs less in the long run – think gravity.
4. Space-based farming must become a viable industry – not just to supply food to the people who live up there, but also to send some back to the home planet.
5. People must learn how to live and work off-planet – and not for a month or a year, but multiple years or even lifetimes.
6. There must be a profit motive involved in space – few people and ZERO companies will do this for free – fortunes should be, indeed must be, made off-planet.
7. By contrast, there should no longer be any large government involvement in spaceflight, except in a regulatory capacity – Earth-bound governments should have no imperialist rights to any property off-planet.
8. Every effort must be made to take the lessons learned in space – terraforming, total recycling, energy systems, etc – and apply them to life on Earth; and finally-
9. There must be a long-range plan, that all participants agree to implicitly – the idea is to eventually make humanity a star-faring race, and that won’t happen overnight.

To you Trekkies out there (and I know you’re listening), I’m sorry, but Gene’s wide-eyed socialist world is not actually workable, any more than Communism was. My ideas for how the economy should work will have to wait for another blog but suffice to say that it will look both different and similar to our own.

            My submission for the title of Long-Range Plan for Space is as follows – it comes in the form of a Manifesto:

WHEREAS: the human race is not only capable, but willing to venture into the interplanetary space-lanes, and from thence, the cosmos at large; and

WHEREAS: the elected and commercial interests of the human race are focused almost exclusively only on those technologies and those frontiers which will further their political power (limited to the surface of Earth) or those products and services which are most easily gotten and delivered to their primary customer base (resident on the surface of Earth); and

WHEREAS: it has been historically shown that great progress in the arts, sciences and the advancement of the freedom of individuals tends to slow or even stall in the absence of a viable frontier or suitable challenge to society as a whole; and

WHEREAS: the overcrowding of Earth with humans is shown to be deleterious to societies, cultures, other animal species and the environment in general; and

WHEREAS: because of their aforementioned reluctance to expand out into the cosmos when there is no obvious and immediate gain to be had, the nations and planet-bound corporate entities of Earth are not well suited to lead the migration into the cosmos; and

WHEREAS: it is no longer out of the realm of financial possibility for motivated corporations or even well financed public groups or individuals to achieve Earth orbit, and from thence to proceed out to the planets, and even someday the stars;

THEREFORE, BE IT RESOLVED that it behooves those corporations, groups and individuals so motivated, to strike out by any means possible to gain a foothold in the cosmos, the next frontier, and become the pilgrims and pioneers of this frontier; and

ALSO BE IT RESOLVED that those groups, corporations and national entities opposed to or disinterested in this frontier would do well not to hinder or oppose those groups or individuals whose only offense to them is their participation in this exodus, lest they suffer the judgment of history.

            So…clear enough?

            **P.S. – I will probably include this manifesto in one of my science-fiction novels, final dispensation not yet determined.**

pax et ama

TGC