Name Change Again? - Part I

Once again this blog may be in dire need of a name change. When io got a job, I declined to update the "unemployed" part to better reflect reality. And now I'm drying out for a month, on the wagon, intentionally sober, absolutley boozeless. So i'm hardly "Crazy, Drunk and Unemployed" anymore.

So all I really have these days going for me is the "crazy" part. I guess I can always plead insanity. If you think about it, when you're crazy you have everything. If you're crazy, you can decide you're drunk all the time and enjoy yourself. When you're crazy, you can convince yourself that your job is really a special study of the bizarre intricacies of office politcs.

It's been two weeks now, and let me tell you, they have been long ones. I stopped drinking on January 5th since I had a family birthday party on the 4th and the family wanted me to drink and celebrate with them. I never thought my folks would want me to drink more.

I'm now at then point where it's not all that fun anymore. At first, staying sober seemed like fun. It was a social experiment where I could be aware of other people's reactions to my being intentionally sober. But after the first Friday evening after a stressful and long week at the office and then fighting 50 miles of traffic in the rain and NOT have a relaxing drink, the novelty wore off with a vengeance.

One realization is how easy it is to relax with a little alcohol, coupled with how much I miss such relaxation. It seems that I have almost entirely forgot how to relax without a drink in my hand. I'm always tired, irritable and rather un-fun. It seems like this modern life needs some kind lubricant.

Upon relating my situation to a Irish friend of mine, she told me that she had tried such an adventure once and quickly came to the conclusion that just is not as interesting without the joy of booze. And it occurs to me that when it comes to dealing with alcohol, one should defer to the wisdom and expertise of the Irish...

Please stay tuned for Part 2... There's lots more on this subject...

Hosting a Good Story

The classic relationship between an author and their readership is the same as the dinner party host to their guests. When a guest arrives, the host will welcome them, take their coat, give the guest the grand tour of the home and introduce them to all the people in the room.

The guest will then have some time to acquaint themselves with the characters at the party while casually sipping a cocktail and enjoying a few hors d'ovres. Eventually a delicious dinner will be served. How many courses there are is a choice left up to the host. Often, the dinner will build and build to the climax of the main course, followed by a tasty desert (or cheese plate) with an aperitif to wash the story down. The good host cares about the comfort and happiness of their guest.

Such is the classic arch of a novel, short story, movie or even a newspaper article. All too often these days we run into authors that are bad hosts. These are the kind of authors that casually throw your coat in the corner, do not kindly introduce you around and serve up a nasty meal. Al they're interested in is serving up whatever they feel with out regard to the guests. They only invite who their cronies and constantly steer the conversation towards themselves.

Sometimes you get cheap tricky authors that think they are clever by not showing all the rooms in the house and then constantly surprising you with new rooms. Or even sneakier authors that give you the grand tour but leave out a couple key rooms. This was the bread and butter of the great 19th century writers, like Charlotte Bronte or Oscar Wilde , who kept the unspeakable old lady (or, in the case of Wilde the picture) locked in the attic, only to bring them out right when the main course is served.

These days you will find many host that do not follow what would be considered the usual polite protocol. For example, you'll get a host like Hubert Selby Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn and Requiem for a Dream) that live in a burned out old warehouse, invite thieving heroin addicts to their parties to accost you and then let you fight your way out to safety.

Or perhaps you'll be invited to a Daniel Steele party who brings you to her country club and lets you hobbnob with the rich with their virulent and complex web of relationships. Stephen King (The Shining and Carrie) who invites you to his haunted mansion with psychotic and daemons for guests. Russian authors like Tolstoy or Dostoevsky will invite too many people to their party and then spend what seems like forever introducing you around. Or science fiction authors who don't even introduce you around but expect you to find a way to make sense of the bizarre cuisine that they serve.

There are many ways to host a story or article. But the most important things for any new author to remember is that a good host puts their guest first, before their own interests. If one always writes with the guests in mind, they will forever have people seeking invitations to their dinner parties.

Are we in Era Transition or are we just getting ready for One?
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Writing about the rapid change of the era in which we are now has become almost trite these days. It was 1970 (the year of this author's birth) when Alvin Toffler put his finger on the idea that people are more people behind the times than ahead of them in his book Futureshock. That was 34 years ago, and the pace of change that he was writing about is nothing compared to what has been happening since then. We all know the times are in rapid change. Fine.

A more interesting thought, is that not are we merely in the throws of all this change, but the true era change many talk about is only just approaching mankind. I would contend that what we are going through right now is merely the staging time for the era change that is about to rock the world in the next 15 to 25 years.

The reason that I write this is that we are in a time when we are starting to complete the technologies (or at least evolve them to such a level as necessary for the revolution) that enable the era change that is to come. With the abilities that we have been developing over the last 150 years, with the revolutions in metallurgy, biomedicine, communications and computational power, we are setting the stage for such things as the bio-technical and nanotech revolutions. Not only have we evolved the technology to support the coming massive leap, we are developing the mental/psychological necessities to do so.

It's been a long road. From developing a system of government, economics, security, mass production, distribution, transportation, communications, information management we can support the kinds of research that will bring sweeping revolution. We have moved beyond a time where we can only know what our god given senses limit us to. Now that we can measure the unseen, we are able to think far beyond our human condition.

The changes that we have seen to get us to this point will be, upon future reflection, small compared to how the human condition will change after the nanorevolution. The radical changes to human life will go far, far beyond the changes that we have recently seen. When achievements start rolling in from such fringe fields as biotechnology and nanotechnology, life will be almost so different as to be unrecongnizable from today. Hold on! We're just getting started!

NOTE: I must mention that much of these thoughts come from discussing these ideas with a colleague of mine Chip Young (you can see his blog site here). He put me on to a fantastic book that is the parent to many of the musings in this blog called Quantum Jump: A Survival Guide for the New Renaissance
by W.R. Clement (one of my favorite Canadian writers from Montreal).

Charles Dickens and the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal
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Not to beat a dead horse, but there are some more interesting ideas in relating current Quantum their to Charles Dickens' "A Christmas Carol". The most stimulating one is that it seems that Dickens can be seen to anticipate the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal way back in 1867 in his treatment of time in "A Christmas Carol".

Put simply, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principal (HUP) states that at a quantum level one cannot measure both the position and the momentum of a particle since the mere fact that you are measuring these items will effect the particle. In essence, the principal means that the simple act of trying to measure the characteristics of something will change that thing and lead to uncertainty.

Charles Dickens is very shrewd in his approach to time travel in that when Scrooge goes back in time and sees himself as a child and a young man, the Ghost of Christmas Past tells him that these things are simply shadows of the past. Dickens knows that time pollution (changing time lines due to traveling back in time and effecting the past) is an issue here. He skirts it by using a limitation of the Ghost's power to keep Scrooge from effecting the past. Clearly, this is not an example of Dickens and the HUP, but it is an interesting choice of the author.

What is an example of Dickens and the HUP is that Scrooge is never really allowed to precisely measure his life. He is given no answers by the Ghost of Christmas future, even at the end of his last journey when he asks the Ghost of Christmas Past if the images he saw of his life are simply shadows of what could happen or what will happen.

And now that Scrooge has had a chance to measure the current position his life and his life's momentum toward the future, he has in effect changed it. Not only has he changed his perception of his life, he then starts to effect change in his life to make himself a better person, a friend to the poor and a reveler of the Christmas Spirit.

If you look at his life as a one timeline, past, present and future the effect of his measuring his life at one point changes his life's momentum and then follows a change in his life's position. The net effect of the process that Scrooge unwillingly engages, using the power of the three Christmas Ghosts, whereby he measures the position (as a miserable miser) and momentum (towards a lonely death) of his life, he then changes his life (to be a generous, happy person).

Truly, Dickens can be seen to be thinking far ahead of Werner Heisenberg who came up with his Uncertainty Principal during his work on quantum mechanics in 1927. Or perhaps I am simply reading too much into it. Anyway, it's an interesting thought.