It's Like A Whole Other Country

The title of this post is a slogan used in Texas to promote tourism.  Basically it suggesting that Texas is different enough from the rest of the country to have some things worth seeing.  This makes some sense, if you live in Ohio I can't really see much of a reason to vacation in Michigan.  If course, they are making this marketing pitch to those Americans who don't actually want to go to another country.  At this point there is a record number of people with passports in the USA, double the amount of a decade ago.  Contrast this with the70%  in Australia.  Why do so many Americans have no interest in traveling abroad?  As far as I can tell it is either fear or a belief that the USA has everything.  Very sad, and yet very explicative.

Anyway, one of the reasons, among several, for moving to Texas was that it would be living in a different environment, like living in a different country.  For me, it is actually a foreign country, there is so much I retain from England, and I have lived only in liberal cities in the north of this country since arriving.  I have lived in a college town in the Mid-West and a very liberal small city in the North-West.  There is perhaps nowhere in the USA less like those places than Texas.

Now, don't get me wrong here, Texas isn't necessarily full of right wing, Christian cowboys in pick-up trucks, with a vast collection of guns.  The state has voted democrat more than once, and the mayor of Houston right now is a lesbian.  However, I live in the more affluent suburbs, and right wing, Christians with guns is the vastly predominant demographic.  The second largest demographic is hard-working, skilled Mexicans.  The USA would not be in trouble if the second demographic made up a majority of the population.  There are people here who wear tight jeans with a huge belt buckle, a button down shirt, cowboy boots, and a cowboy hat without any sense of irony or self-consciousness.  That's who they are, where they came from, and they are damn proud of it.

When dealing with the local public it must be very much like going abroad and being fluent in the local language.  You can talk to anyone, they immediately know that you are from somewhere else, and while initially they seem friendly you are never quite sure whether what you say will cause offense or get you into serious trouble.

Now, there are similarities with previous places I have lived.  There are paved roads, houses, paved roads, people drive, there are radio stations, you can get a McDonalds.  But this is true of almost anywhere you can travel to relatively easily.

This all struck me today as I was walking the dog.  It had rained last night so there was mist rising off the ground like steam.  There were swarms of mosquitoes fighting against the repellent I had sprayed myself with before setting out.  Cicadas filled the air with their hum.  The sound of birds singing was everywhere.  Strange and loud birdsong, more than anywhere else I have ever been.  I scanned the ground ahead for snakes and fire ants.  A sluggish, mud-filled river slunk along beside me, its sandy banks indicative of the frequent, sudden flooding from intense thunder storms. 

As I walked along I sweated through my shirt at 7am, just after dawn.  The air thick and cloying.  The grass was sodden with dew, yellow, red and blue flowers poking above the thin, spindly, decidedly foreign.  The trail was sandy, covered in places by a think layer of pine needles.  Across the river loomed a somewhat sparsely wooded jungle, overgrown with creepers and vines.

I returned to the car, loaded in my black wolf, giant, gleaming fans surrounding a lolling tongue, and set off along a neighborhood boulevard as wide as Naito Parkway, or the North Circular Road, wider than North Street.  I returned to my unnecessarily large house to drink fresh ground coffee by the pool.




At my best I remember that I am indeed a tourist in a whole other country.

Entropy

There is a fundamental law of the Universe that entropy increases (at least while the Universe is expanding, which it is and will do for long enough so that we don't need to worry about anything else.  Entropy is a misunderstood term, and I shall probably misunderstand it for you, but is commonly "translated" as "disorder."  Of course, it is actually a technical term that doesn't quite mean disorder, there's maffs involved. 

Anyway, I think of entropy in terms of these examples;  if you put a pile of sand on the floor and don't do anything to keep it there, it will become pretty evenly spread across your floor, if you heat a bit of a the air in a room and then leave it alone, all of the room will become the same temperature, if you don't put energy into an animal it will die, rot, and fall apart.  Basically, things have a spread out evenly.

With entropy being a fundamental law, it means it effects everything.  The car you drive will fall apart.  Your Jenga tower will fall over.  Your painting will fade.  However, there is an enemy to entropy, and that is energy.  If you put energy into a system you can stop something falling apart.  You can keep sweeping the sand back into the pile, you can keep heating a bit of the room, you can keep feeding the animal.  However, there is another step to entropy, the mechanism that put the energy into the system are also subject to entropy.  The brush will fall apart, the heater will break, the things that make replacement cells in the animal will stop working.

What happens then, all over the place, is the following path shown by the graph I drew.  A new system starts off and then as energy is put into the system with fresh methods it grows at increasing speeds until at some point the energy put into the system and entropy cancel each other out and the system is flat for a while until entropy has its way with a vital system and the whole thing stops working.  It dies.

The amazing thing is that this graph is true for a vast array of things.  Not only that, but the rate of increase is about the same for a huge amount of things.  It is the same for all mammals.  It is the same for companies that do one thing.  It is true of social groups.  There is an amazing confluence here.

Creatures die, and small creatures die earlier than big ones.  Businesses start off small, struggle for a while, expand rapidly.  A big hive of ants gets a bigger area, increases that area rapidly until the logistics of feeding the replacement ants breaks down and the hive dies (which is why communal insects spawn off small communities to start the process again.)

Ah, but Mr. Muser, lots of things just don't even get started.  Most businesses fail in the first year.  Most animals die when young.  Most bands don't even get started.  Very astute of you, good point.  In those situations there isn't an effective system to combat entropy.  The small business doesn't get customers.  The infant doesn't have a working heart.  The band cannot agree on how the band will work.

Why am I bringing entropy up?  Well, I am noticing it all around me.  I notice it online, where not only does every new fad/social media opportunity expand rapidly, but the excitement fades, the customers flatten out, and then suddenly no-one is interested and it dies.  AOL, Myspace, etc..  I can see it starting with facebook, people are posting less, interested in being friends less, less captivated by a social network.  I see it in friendships, you become friends with someone over a common interest or as part of a group.  You do lots of things together.  Then you just do a thing together, they become your bowling friend or your playdate friend.  eventually that reason disappears and your friendship dies.  I see it in the bands I have been in, initial excitement, bursts of creativity and fun, repetition, reduced excitement, conflict, death.  With marriage either it ends suddenly, or one of you dies first.

However, we don't think like this.  We don't go into most situations thinking that it is doomed to failure.  We think of completion, finishing, done, success.  This is very sensible if you want to have the situation in the first place.  If you know something won't work in the end, why do it?  The area under the line is the good bit, without the start you never have anything under the line.  Furthermore, the more excited you are in the beginning the larger the starting point and the bigger the area under the line.  The problem comes when the line turns from going upwards, to going horizontally.  At that point your excitement dies.  You are in a rut.  You are just doing the same ole same ole.  It's still pretty decent to go bowling with your friends, but you know what you are going to get out of it.  A party is still fun when you are 40, but it isn't as much fun as when you were 20.  you used to think your husband was superhot and you couldn't wait to get him between the sheets.  Now he's a part of the furniture, and it's pleasant when you make time, but you don't walk around thinking about it.

We are programmed to love the curve.  Learning your first song on the guitar and playing it in front of ten people is awesome.  Being a professional musician playing your 500th show is better than sitting at a bus station, but not as fun as that first show, even though you are 100 times better.  When you are learning something you really, really want to be good at it.  When you are really good at it, it becomes not interesting.

How pessimistic is this?  Either something dies off immediately, or you are doomed to find something boring eventually until you just don't care, or hate it.  There is nothing for you in this life but disappointment,

Well, there are two solutions to this problem.  The first is the Buddhist method.  Mindfulness and freedom from desire.  First you notice everything in detail.  Your starting point is larger than the average, and so the curve is bigger.  Life is more beautiful than it is for others.  Then you free yourself from desire and so the horizontal line is not a disappointment.  Bliss for Buddhists is having a nice, high line and not being disappointed.  This is fantastic for things you must do, like going to work, eating, chores.

The second is the Western method.  There is a secret to making the curve continue, it is innovation.  To get the curve to go up at all, you must ave effective methods for defeating entropy.  These will wear out eventually, but if you can replace them with a different method then you can extend the curve.  The efficacy of the method determines the shape of the new curve.  As a result of innovation we live longer lives, don't get sick as much.  Our social organizations become bigger.  We defeat Malthusian economics.  We continually have more, and different things to entertain us.  Our comfort increases enough that we notice.

What can we learn from this?  We can learn that we should expect that how we live our lives right now is going to fail to interest us at some point, but that's OK because it interests us now.  We can learn to not be disappointed when things become habitual.  We get used to living in our house, but living in our house will always be better than not living in a house.  We can take it for granted that they say that they love is, but that's better than no-one saying it at all.  it is inevitable that things will get to that flat line if we always do the same things, but that flat line is better than no line at all.

We can also learn to invest less hope in things that aren't that great to begin with.  Those first few dates will probably tell you how good your relationship as a whole will be.  When you do something, if it doesn't grab your attention right away, it probably won't ever do that.  Don't invest your time and energy into things you have started unless you get rewarded pretty quickly.

We can also learn that the way to generate excitement and joy in our lives is to innovate.  A relationship that doesn't do new things, try different things, doesn't change is going to get to that flat line.  On the other hand, a relationship that throws out everything that worked in the first place runs the risk of killing itself almost immediately.  If they fell in love with you because you were fun at parties, and then once in a relationship you decide to change them into responsible, stay at home nurturers, that relationship will probably die.  if you want the second relationship, be that from the start, but look for new ways to nurture.  If you want them to keep loving you, still go to parties, and keep looking for new and different parties.

Pretty much everything in my life has either died, or flatlined.  This is probably true for you too.  That's OK.  It's to be expected.  This doesn't mean there isn't joy in my life or there is no hope.  Those flatlines are still much better than most of the alternate lines, and I don't really expect them to die soon.  There are also so many new and interesting things to experience, and I intend to never stop looking for them (on this I need to do better).  When I find a new thing I hope I throw myself into the experience.  the more I do, the better it will be.

Malazan Book of the Fallen

My first memory of books was being read The Hobbit by my father at bedtime.  I don't know how old I was, but it was right at the beginning of the memories I still retain.  My father was a master of reading to children, I think he actually relates better with children than with adults, I might do the same.  He would convey emotion, do voices for the different characters.  It was fantastic.  Later on he also did the same thing with The Lord of the Rings.  I'm assuming everyone knows about that book.

My father tells me that when he first read The Lord of the Rings, as a teenager in the fifties, that it was an obscure book that no-one had heard about.  He told me that he borrowed the only copy from the library, and it hadn't been read in some time.  It is hard to say whether that is true, but the popularity of the book took off in the mid-60's and has sold around 150 million copies, reported as the third best selling novel of all time.

The Lord of the Rings is quite rightly considered the beginning of a new genre, that being fantasy.  While it is largely ridiculous to say that any genre sprang into being without previous influences (even science fiction came from Shelley's Frankenstein, which must have been influenced in some manner by Icarus and his failed wings), the Lord of the Rings was the first long modern work in a fantasy world, with magic, a quest, alternate races and so on.  A genre that has been established and copied with extreme, even disconcerting, faithfulness.  Tolkien was influenced by multiple sources (mostly European folklore and the Catholic church), but most of the fantasy genre has been directly, and almost solely, by Tolkien.

The fantasy genre has exploded over the last two decades until every bookstore and library has a section of fantasy books that rivals that of mystery and science fiction, and is often larger than the literature or humor sections.  This is now a big business, with new books coming out at a steady rate.  I think a very large reason for this is the spread of role playing games, started in 1974 with Dungeons and Dragons.  With Dungeons and Dragons you could essentially play in the world of The Lord of the Rings (Middle Earth), creating your own stories.  Initially played mostly played by geeky teenagers (such as myself), those geeky teenagers never lost the pleasure of reading The Lord of the Rings and playing D&D, and new generations of geeky teenagers joined the fold.  These people wanted more than a handful of books and a game, and they wrote new books, refined the game, and in the last twenty years an enormous number of video games have followed the genre, exploding its popularity.

What is this genre?  It is remarkably consistent.  Take a rather average person in an invented world (stereotypically, but almost always) a teenage boy on a farm.  A dramatic event happens that tears him away from this mundane life, and he must embark on a quest to save the/his world.  Through his travels he gains a diverse group friends, and develops the hidden powers within himself.  Against all the odds he triumphs over evil.  I think it would be hard to over-emphasize how prevalent this plot was.  What changed were characters, situations, environment, but the plot was the same.  In fantasy's defense, this is the same plot in myths around the world.  It is essentially the root story, the tale handed down within a tribe around the camp fire.

This post is about a fantasy work, The Malazan Book of the Fallen.  It has taken me five full paragraphs to get to this point.  Why is that?  it is because the Malazan Book of the Fallen can only truly be explained within, and in contrast to, the genre of fantasy fiction.  It is without doubt extremely influenced by Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons.  It is closer to the Bible than it is to James Joyce's Ulysses.  This is a work of fantasy fiction.  However, it is a work defined by it's contrast to the rest of the genre of fantasy.  This is a work that specifically takes the cliches of fantasy and writes against our expectations.

The work is vast, ten books of a thousand pages or more.  There are 3.3 million words in the series.  It is a single work larger than all of Tolkien's writing combined.  Remarkably it has been entirely written in less than twelve years, essentially the work of one man, Steven Erikson.  The scope of the work is mind-boggling.  While there is a core time (of less than ten years) the back story goes back an hundred thousand years or more.  While there is a core place (analogous to our physical world) this core includes continents, empires, deserts, seas, forests, cities, plains.  Surrounding this core place are different "planes" each with its own otherworldly characteristics and inhabitants.

The scale is vast but it is all interconnected.  There is essentially an overall plot that starts at the beginning and ends at the end.  It is astonishing that such a vast work is all part of a tapestry, almost nothing in the whole opus is irrelevant.  However, the plot is anything but the direct path of the genre.  There is not a protagonist, no hero.  The cast is enormous, perhaps hundreds of individual characters who play a role, but the book isn't really about any of them in particular.  Most of the characters are introduced as they are living their lives, with a real history and formed personality, rather than a caricature or a neophyte.  There is not a teenager who leaves to battle evil and is joined by the grizzled knight, a bluff guy with a beard, someone from faerie, a wizard, and a trusty companion.

The scale is also played out on multiple levels, from almost God, to Gods, to magic beings, to emperors and wizards, to generals, to officers, to tribal leaders, to soldiers, to priests, to beggars in the streets, to faded spirits.

Each book in the ten has multiple locations, characters, countries, tribes, religions, views, that actually conclude at a reasonable stopping place.  You could conceivably read each novel in itself with only a minimum of feeling baffled at the beginning and the end.  Steven Erikson worked as an anthropologist, and it shows.  Each culture is fully fledged, even more than a single culture in most fantasy worlds.  There are different views, religions, worldviews and histories depending on the culture.  These are also not simply Earth cultures removed to a different world, and yet their beliefs are rooted in geography, history, and technology.  This cultural richness reaches down to individual characters.  While the characters have individual personalities, those personalities are shaped by their culture, and yet these characters are not simply stereotypes of those cultures.  Your average character in this vast work is a more fully realized person than Frodo Baggins, the hero of the Lord of the Rings.

Perhaps the main contrast between these books and your fantasy staple is the lack of the pure hero, and the lack of the pure villain.  There are characters out to do pure good, but what is that pure good is extremely ambivalent.  There are characters who bring disaster through good intention.  There are dark, broken characters who either unintentionally do good, or bring good about through actions that damage themselves and the ones they love.  There is cowardice and fruitless self-sacrifice.  There are people of great evil, but they have a past that explains it.  It is explicitly intentional that almost none of the characters are simple.

The imagination of Steven Erikson is fecund beyond my capability to understand.  Consistently, day after day, hour after hour, he must have been imagining, thinking, examining, remembering, checking for error, for over a decade.  Simply in terms of the quantity of thought, this is an amazing feat.

So far this sounds like the best book ever written.  However, it is not unrelieved brilliance.  If you can read this book through the first time and not get lost a great amount of the time you are a genius.  I have actually been tempted to create a poster-sized flow chart of who is doing what and when.  The sheer number of characters, times, worlds, places, cultures and motivations makes this work nearly as challenging as Joyce's Ulysses.  This is not a book that you can casually read for fifteen minutes at night before bed a couple of times a week.  This takes commitment.  I generally read a stock fantasy novel in less than four hours.  I am halfway through this series a second time, and this time I have read the book almost daily for a month.  Unless you are a fast and voracious reader it could take you a year to read this, and to understand it fully it might take three passes through the whole thing.

The second thing about the book is that it is dark.  There are no easy answers, there is nothing achieved without sacrifice, very bad things happen to the innocent, and it is often fatalistic.  It is also rather pessimistic about the human spirit.  There is not very much of, if any, enlightened beauty in the whole thing.  Quite like Geaorge R.R. Martin's Game of Thrones.  This is a very modern direction for the genre, a movement from a rather child-like quality to a more adult sensibility.

There is also a large amount of philosophical discourse, even with many characters that it does not seem to suit.  While this philosophical discourse is at least relieved by its variation, there is a lot of it.  A substantial minority of the text is almost Shakespearean soliloquy, without really the need for it.

It also vastly influenced by Dungeons and Dragons.  For experienced players you can almost hear the dice rattling across the table, the character classes peak their heads through the curtains, and a very large amount of time is spent with people fighting each other in complex ways (although well described).  I have found myself at times thinking, "Wow, he must have a lot of hit points" or "he failed his saving throw."  On the other hand, this is consciously done, and with great affection.  There are in-jokes, subtle nods of the head etc. for those who can see them.  Basically, if you had no desire to read either The Lord of the Rings or The Odyssey, seen people play Dungeons and Dragons and decided they were morons, or cannot even understand playing a video game where you pretend to be someone, you will not get a third of the way through the first book.

Fortunately there is humor in the book, and more than one type.  However, there aren't many types, and the humor becomes more a part of the book later on in the series.  It will take you about 3,00 pages until humor becomes a consistent part of the writing.  This humor is also very much based in a small number of characters, and is dialogue-based.  The humor largely comes from an insight into the rather ridiculous workings of our minds, and the contrast between that and what we say, and even think we do.  Such humor has a touch of an edge to it.  Erikson has actually written some funny short stories, but they involve a serial killer and a necromancer as the main characters, so you can see where his sense of humor lies.

So, the Dade question.  Is this literature?  Well, it is very much about the human condition.  Whether we are flotsam on the river of fate or whether we control our destiny.  Even whether we can even control ourselves.  It considers the clash of cultures, and the inevitable destruction of some of them, and whether this is a tragedy, or a blessing, or something of both.  It examines good and evil, idealism and pragmatism, and differentiates between the two scales.  It talks about the seeming incapability of humanity to learn from its mistakes.  It talks about temptation and resignation.  It touches upon love.  However, I don't think many people would call this literature.  It doesn't have that indefinable feeling (I can't describe it but I know pornography when I see it) that we call literature.  Perhaps it is simply that it has the removal of humanity from the real world, and the primacy of plot over a self-conscious intent to examine and teach.  On the other hand perhaps all that is required for literature is age.  Dickens was pulp.

This novel is a phenomenon.  There is simply nothing else like it in terms of scale, depth, consistency and audacity.  It is ten times the length of the Lord of the Rings and yet each part of it is more complex, with greater character development, a richer history, and a more real setting.  It is well written (particularly in terms of dialogue) and never trite.  It is clearly great, and yet I can easily see why many, if not most, people would not, and should not, read it.

The final question is whether it is better than the foundation of the fantasy genre, The Lord of the Rings.  It is a far, far more sophisticated and adult book.  It is far, far less clear in terms of mythic plot, point, and moral compass.  If you read this first you would might well think The Lord of the Rings a rather quaint fairy tale.  If you read the Lord of the Rings before The Malazan Book of the Fallen you might well find this a dark, overly pragmatic, immoral, over-reaching.  The two books are different.  Different enough that they don't need to be compared.  Is Sam Spade or Miss Marple a better character?  It doesn't matter that they are both detectives, they are different enough to both be great.  I can tell you that between The Lord of the Rings and the Malazan Book of the Fallen, even while reading the latter, that I will read the second of them before the first.  If nothing else so that I can really understand everything that is going on.

Chapter 7

Ughrit put his giant boots upon a table, which promptly collapsed.  This did not improve his already foul mood.  "Where is everyone?" he boomingly whined, "I thought this was finally going to be the one.  A nice country pub in a pretty little village.  That bloody peasant promised this was a nice place even when I said I'd cut his hands off if he was lying.  I was going to put my feet up for a bit," Ughrit kicked the remains of the table in a moment of ironic pique, "have a chat with the locals, just settle down.  But they've all buggered off.  How am I supposed to become a landlord if the peasants all run off?

"I told you Ughwit, you are a bwigand, a mawauder, you inthpire fear and bwing mithewy upon all the world.  A pwopieter of a wuthtic esthtablithment you are not."  Akhbar had to stoop beneath the low ceiling, a red mark upon his forehead and the a beam still emitted maroon smoke were the results of an earlier unfortunate incident.  Akhbar was not in any better of a mood than Ughrit.  His head hurt, his robe was muddy, and he hadn't exploded anybody in over a week.

"I've heard all that Akhbar, over and over.  But this is my dream.  I need to make a change, do something different.  But this is so frustrating.  This is the fourth village now where everyone has taken everything before we have even arrived.  You can't have a pub without people."

"Perhapth it wathn't so withe to have dwagged the whole willage to that firtht pub and then burned the whole plathe down when they weren't jowwy enough,"   said Akhbar in an 'I told you so' tone only possible between people who have known each for a very long time.

"It was a mistake Akhbar, a mistake.  I got carried away.  But everyone makes mistakes, people shouldn't hold that against you.  If everyone ran off every time someone made a mistake everyone would just be running around all the time.  They hate me.  I'm never going to have a pub."  Ughrit sat down on a sturdy bench, put his head in his hands and began to sob pathetically.  In disgust Akhbar, turned, smashed his head on a beam, fell to the ground and crawled out the door.  Shortly thereafter came the sounds of repeated crackling explosions and falling masonry.

Once Ughrit had cried himself out he got himself together, smashed a hole in the wall with his axe, and exited the pub.  Outside his band of thugs, wastrels, psychopaths and arsonists were providing perhaps the densest quantity of milling that has ever been achieved.

"Alright lads, time for some brainstorming.  This isn't working and it's pissing me off."  The whole band shuddered and cringed at this news.  "All these peasants just leave before we arrive, they even take the beer with them, and you can't have a pub without people and beer.  Any ideas?"

"We could grab some people and chain them to the tables."

"How would they drink the beer then Tograt?"

"Um, we pour it down their throats?"

"Not much in the way of convivial atmosphere there Tograt."

"Oh, I don't know, sounds quite charming to me..."

"I have a cunning plan," said a small but particularly disturbing character while cleaning his fingernails with a very small knife.

"Alright, out with it then Hackduff," said Ughrit, "But it better be better than that last one, I couldn't get that stuff out of ears for weeks."

"There is an inn, known as The Inn.  It is a mythical place set upon a hill at the crossroads between Hither and Yon and There to Elsewhere.  It has always been, and always will.  It is the womb of adventure, a place of music, merriment, plots, thievery, lechery and more.  It is inconceivable that The Inn would be abandoned."

"Sounds good Hackduff, what's the catch?"

"Catch, oh Terrible One?"  Replied Hackduff from his abject yet evil slouch.

"Yes Hackduff, the catch.  There's always a catch with your plans and this time I would like to know about it before we start."

"Hmmm, well, The Inn is a large, shambling structure that possibly defies all known physical laws.  The clientele is unpredictable, there may be anything from sorcerers to demons within its walls.  At the very least it will be messy and people will get hurt."

"Sounds perfect.  That should cheer Akhbar up as well.  Right then, which way is this inn?"

Hackduff smiled, "Oh, any direction will do if we travel long enough."

Ughrit's course features, still red from his crying, split into a vast, toothy smile.  It was horrifying.  "Lads, let's saddle up.  Free rein all the way there.  We're on our holidays now."

Mahatma Candy

Mahatma Candy was the first band in which I ever played.  I've told the story before, basically I was doing the Portland hippie thing of hitting hand drums along with a guitarist (Dade, he's awesome) at a barbecue, and he ridiculously asked me to join a band he was starting.  The band was Dade, (guitar/vocals) Lori (vocals), Angry Dave (guitar), and myself (percussion).  We were a folk/rock band, basically playing rock songs on modern folk instruments.  We became like family, closer than I have been to my own family.

I think the thing of which I am proudest is that we wrote songs.  It is relatively easy to pick up some cover songs, and in most cases this is what an audience prefers.  In Texas I have only seen one band that wrote any originals.  If you want to be a working band then top forty songs from the last three decades is the way to go.  But right from the beginning we wrote songs.  It really was "we" writing the songs, a collaborative effort.  Everyone contributed to the lyrics (this was my biggest contribution to the band), Dade and Dave wrote some intricate and beautiful guitar pieces, interweaving their music together so well that it almost sounds like a single musician with other-worldly ability, Lori crafted her own vocal melodies, and I slapped the rhythm down.  It is harder to write songs than copy the work of others, but it feels to me so much more genuine, so much more rewarding.

The band ended over ten years ago ( I don't count the failed and weird attempt to continue the band after the heart and soul left) and while I still consider everyone involved my friend, time, distance and circumstance has moved us apart.  Very recently Dade sent me a link to some of our original songs and I listened to them for the first time in years.  I was expecting a flawed, amateur, but willing result.  There is no-one who can pick out an error like the person responsible for it, but I was enormously pleased to find out I underestimated that band.  Listening to the pieces again I am humbled by the talent of the people I happened to find, and proud of what we achieved.  If you want to know where and why I started playing music, go take a listen.

Writing songs, or good songs, comes from emotion.  That emotion can be almost anything, but I personally think it impossible to write a good song that doesn't come from your own personality.  One of the songs on that list is called Sleep Sighs.  I wrote the lyrics in my usual manner (rhyming couplets a la Shelley) and the actual musicians in the band set it to music.  At least I think that's how it happened, we sometimes wrote music first, and then the lyrics.  I had forgotten that this song even existed until I heard it again.  It speaks to me of what was emerging in me at the time, the beginning of my bipolar experiences.  It speaks of sadness that came to me when I was alone, without any reference point, with no particular cause.  But it also speaks of a knowledge that I was going to feel better, and that pretty soon I would feel full of joy and beauty.  I didn't know it at the time, but my songwriting knew more about me than I did.

Texas Drought

There is not much, if anything, that I hold sacred, but the closest things are books and trees.  I know why I hold books sacred, they are founts of wisdom and entertainment.  They are a friend, a piece of humanity that will never reject you, solace in loneliness.  I don't know why I hold trees sacred.  Perhaps it is growing up in a place in which humanity has carved out its place in a giant forest.  Perhaps it is that they are the oldest living things that one encounters.  Perhaps it is because they are usually the tallest thing around us.  It doesn't really matter, but a living tree is a wonder, a dying tree is a sadness, and the killing of a tree is sacrilege.  By the two houses I have owned I have planted a tree, a magnolia and a mexican lemon tree, and I will plant a tree by every house I own until I die.

When most people think of the landscape of Texas they think of bleached grass, scrub, a sparsely populated vastness.  There is a hell of a lot of that.  Texas is slightly bigger than France, the largest country in western Europe, and that landscape does predominate.  However, I was surprised to find that Houston is in a (normally) very green area.  It gets more rain per year than Portland, OR or the UK, places famous for their rain, but mostly in thunderstorms or the remains of tropical storms.  Houston has trees, in my area the most common is the loblolly pine.  Tall trees that are presently dumping vast amounts of pollen.

Last year, as I am sure most of you know, there was a major drought throughout Texas.  It was actually the worst single season of drought in Texas since rainfall measurements started to be taken.  In 2011 Houston had under 15 inches of rain in contrast to the average 54 inches.  All around us we saw the death of the natural world.  All around were dead and dying trees.  Lawns browned and died.  Streams dried up.  Dust swirled in parks.  As I would walk my dog in the autumn I would here the crash of falling trees, every day.  The result?  In the first picture every single one of those tall, straight pines is dead.

 Here is the pile of dead trees from just my local park.  A sad, sad sight.  To give a sense of scale, in the bottom picture, to the right you can see my eighty pound dog halfway along the pile.  The two pictures are two different sides to a square.

The Subtlety of Moods

Over the years I have slowly discovered some things about moods.  The first is that moods color every part of your thinking.  How you remember the past, what you predict for the future, how you feel right now.  They change your understanding of the motivations of others.  They change how you relate to others.  They change your motivation, your hopes, your dreams, your fears, who you think you are.

The thing about moods is that often you don't realize that you are in one.  Your behavior seems to you to be entirely reasonable based on the situation, and because moods affect how you view the past and the future it feels as though things have always been like this.  This can be true even in very extreme moods, like depression or euphoria.  When you are depressed it feels like there is no hope for the future, and your past is a tale of woe.  If you are euphoric then everything is beautiful and wonderful and nothing matters but right now.  I find this difference in time scale both interesting and informative, misery is about the future and the past while happiness is about right now.

I come to this subject from perhaps a weird direction.  I have been taking effective medication for my bipolar disorder since late July of last year.  While my mood has not been monotonal, it has been within a particular range, wobbling gently between a calm happiness and a mildly ruffled mundanity.  Sometime in December this went down a bit, so that I asked my psychiatrist for an increase in dose in order to get back to consistent calm happiness.  Unfortunately, at the same time the drug company decided to end their payment assistance program, meaning that the new dosage would cost me about $150 a month as a co-pay (after insurance).  There is a generic medication, and the co-pay for the same dosage is about $3, and so I naturally wanted to switch.

My psychiatrist had previously said that "generics don't work" and explained the situation with generic medications in the USA as he understood them.  For a start the requirements were set by a group of three men in Washington.  The requirements set by the FDA are essentially that there must be the same active ingredient released into the bloodstream within 80-125 percent of the original amount.  For my dose of 300mg this means that the range of legal dosage is between 240mg and 375mg, a range of nearly half the actual dosage.  According to the FDA the actual variation is usually far smaller than this, and I see no reason to think they are lying.  However, according to my psychiatrist, the actual number of people in the FDA checking to see if the standards are maintained is pitifully small, not enough to actually ensure this is true.  Moreover, the penalties if caught are not an adequate incentive to ensure standards are maintained.  Just in January of this year a company found to have not only not checked dosages themselves, but also used illegal production techniques and lied to the FDA about their actions.  Their penalty?  A suspension of production until standards were met, and the establishment of an outside auditor to ensure this happened.  According to my psychiatrist a study was performed that found the average dosage in generics was 40% of the brand name medication.

Anyway, with this generic drug, in an increased dosage (from 200 to 300mg), my symptoms have worsened.  I have had times of increased tiredness, an afternoon of twitchy excitement, and today I realized that I had a sense of world-weariness.  The 300mg of the generic is working less well than 200mg of the brand name, but it is still working.  I have an appointment next week and will ask for the greatest increase in dosage the psychiatrist will allow.  Apparently my experience with this drug (lamotrigine) is not unique.

Now I need to tie all of this together.  I had not really noticed a large change in mood during the last three months.  I knew there were some more symptoms, and I knew I wasn't at my happiest, but I thought that was about it.  After today's realization I started reviewing the last three months and started noticing some things.  I realize that I had felt that I was under a curse living in Texas, basically that anything that could go wrong would go wrong.  I realized that three months ago I was writing regular blogs, studying spanish for an hour a day, and playing music regularly.  13 posts in both November and December, 8 in January, 4 in February.  I now force myself just to study spanish a bit, think that I haven't learned anything, and often go several days between actually studying.  I have played music twice in three weeks.

Clearly there has been a pattern here of reduced mood, reduced motivation, reduced energy.  The thing is that I did not notice.  Mood is the most immediate thing in our consciousness.  It colors everything, informs everything.  However, its very omnipresence means that it can be invisible.  Slow changes are unnoticed.  Sudden changes are attributed automatically to circumstances.  I believe that our moods are the most important things in our lives, but they are subtle and hide in plain sight.

The Other Side

In my battle for optimism it can seem somewhat one-sided.  I have an opinion and I express it.  However, there are certainly a good number of people who have a very different opinion indeed.  There are intelligent, informed people who are extremely pessimistic about the future.  On any subject it is important to view both sides, and most importantly the middle, to the question.  Today I want to give the other side the floor, but of course I will argue against it.

This is a talk by an independent writer and activist Paul Gilding in which he asserts that we have "reached peak everything."  "Peak everything" is taken from the concept of "peak oil", in which it asserted that we have reached the maximum amount of oil from which we can take from the ground at an economically viable cost.  As we take oil from the ground we take it from the easiest places first, and the overall amount of oil goes down.  Demand for energy, specifically oil, is increasing at a rapid pace and so with increased expense to produce oil, increased demand, and a reduced supply, eventually a global economic system fueled by oil becomes untenable.  The result is global economic collapse.  This concept is expanded by Gilding to include water resources, agricultural land, the resources of the oceans, and so on.  The idea is that we are right at the position where our resources for food, water, and energy are at their maximum level and we are on the verge of collapse.  He doesn't say that the collapse of civilization is a certainty, only that to avoid this we need to change right now from the concept of an every expanding economy to a contracting economy that concentrates on supplying the basics.

I think he is absolutely right if you make certain assumptions.  The assumptions are that technological changes will not happen fast enough, or reach an adequate scale in time to make a difference.  Basically, if we keep doing what we are doing now there will be a series of catastrophes, economic collapse, large scale war, famine, environmental collapse.  Even if we make some technological changes that improve efficiency, if they don't happen rapidly enough we will still be doomed, just a bit later.  He is absolutely right.

 Why then do I disagree with his prediction?  Well, I think technology will move quickly enough to avoid these problems, the population will stabilize, and there are actually enough resources to avoid these problems.

Why do I think technology will move quickly enough to avoid these problems?  The first is that the most likely population predictions for the Earth suggest a maximum population.  Many actually predict a slight decrease after this point.  These predictions range from 9 billion to 11 billion.  The absolute highest population prediction for the Earth by 2100 is 14 billion, double what it is today.  The absolute lowest is 5.5 billion, a substantial reduction.  This means, at a maximum we will need to double food production over the next 100 years.

The second is that there is no shortage of materials.  In terms of energy the world is very far from a closed system.  The sun pumps vast amounts of energy into the Earth's system, 7000 times our present energy consumption.  In terms of water the planet is covered in it.  In terms of minerals the world is a giant rock.  The difficulty in supplying even the most pessimistic population predictions with a modern lifestyle isn't in the scarcity of resources, it is in altering these resources to forms in which they can be used. 

The third is the history of predictions and what has actually happened.  The most famous scientific doomsday prophet is Thomas Robert Malthus.  His theory was simple, population growth is exponential and food production growth is arithmetic.  At some point mass starvation will inevitably result.  Such maximum populations have repeatedly been predicted, one as recently as the 1970's predicted that 7 billion was the maximum sustainable number.  What has actually happened is that the increase in food production has massively outstripped population growth.  Since Malthus Europe's population has increased by four times, and its population produces a substantial food surplus.  It may surprise you to know that India has a food production surplus (but not anything like a fair distribution).

In terms of energy, wind energy is already competitive with coal energy (where wind can be used).  By 2020 the Economist estimates that solar power will be about 10 cents/kilowatt hour to coal's present 7 cents/kilowatt hour, and going down 5-8% a year.  There is also all the attempts to produce fuel from plants that I have discussed.  As fossil fuels increase in price, alternate fuels reduce their price, thus driving demand for alternate forms of energy.

In terms of water there is already a small de-salinisation device that requires 1kw/hour to produce 1000 gallons of drinking water.  With present technology a 10ft x 10ft solar panel produces 1kw/hr.  It is certain that these numbers will go down.  The deserts of Arabia may be the next fresh water producing area on Earth, the next great global resource?

So, Paul Gilding is exactly right about the terrible things that will happen if we continue to exploit the resources of the planet at our present rate, in largely the same way.  The data supports his position, and that position is terrifying in the face of the steps we have not taken to avoid future catastrophe.  However, such predictions have been made over and over again by intelligent, informed people.  The numbers have been right over and over again.  But the actual results have been the opposite of those reasonable predictions.  Technology has a 100% record of avoiding worldwide catastrophe since Malthus, and actually things keep getting better.  We all know the various methods that could be used in theory to prevent these problems, and there is a worldwide, concerted effort by the largest number of scientists and engineers to ever exist to put theory into practice.

I think it is a wonderful thing that people like Paul Gilding exist.  There is great danger in complacency.  If we do nothing we are truly doomed.  People like him provide fantastic motivation for research, design, individual action, environmental campaigns.  I think he is wrong, but in an extremely useful way.

This talk is in direct conflict with the talk I linked to in my previous post.  I don't know if anyone watches these videos from this blog.  I have not received a comment about them from any viewer of the blog online or in person.  As a result I hope that I summarizing these fascinating talks adequately.  I will keep promoting these talks from TED, so just get used to it.

Back-up on Optimism

In my late teens, as I started to develop a sense of what the world was in a greater sense than my immediate concerns, I thought of myself as an unemotional, pessimistic person.  I thought that people were not very bright, easily manipulated, unthinking sheep.  I, of course, was a rational person without those characteristics.  I had evaluated my goals for life, and they were for me to be happy.  I had little concern for others and expected to use other people, not in a deliberately harmful way, but for my own gain.  Basically I expected to be a sociopath, but not one that took pleasure in other people's pain.  I believe these people are far more common than most of us presently think.

Then I got (this seems a terrible verb for this process, but I can't think of a better one) a girlfriend, my first of a surprisingly short list, seven in all in 24 years.  I was interested and excited, but not emotionally attached.  Then I left for the United States of America, but on that last day she cried and cried in obvious pain at my leaving.  It hurt.  The emotional pain of someone else caused me emotional pain, and that changed my world.  I developed empathy and the idea that the feelings of other people were worthwhile.  Moreover, the feelings of people are intimately connected.  How we feel, to a very large extent, depends on how those around us feel.  All along I had known that the most important thing is how we feel.

In my late teens I was neither particularly happy or particularly sad.  I would say that the most powerful emotional state was fear.  Fear of humiliation, fear of violence, fear of authority.  I spent a lot of time alone, in my room or going for long walks, living in my imagination.  As I turned eighteen the darkness appeared.  I started to feel hopeless and sad from time to time.  Romantically sad, in the manner of poets and teenage idols.  In my mid-twenties a long-term girlfriend, a relationship of over four years, left me for another man.  Not through a fault of my own but through alternate interest, novelty, and the fact that he was also a very nice person.  During this period I started to work with the developmentally disabled and the mentally ill.  If you want an education in the acceptance of people, this is an excellent method.

The next few years were spent either very alone, or in a vibrant social group, and with intelligent, beautiful girlfriends scarred by their past.  I was not particularly attached, but content in their presence.  They had good qualities, and bad qualities, and the good qualities made me happy and I accepted the bad qualities.  I helped to make them happy until their self-destruction took over, and I wasn't particularly hurt when that self-destruction included me.  I expected it.  This was the first time I started having moments of transcendent joy, times of pure beauty which I attributed to my study of eastern religion/philosophy.  To a large extent I still think that is true, but something else was starting within me.

I started to have variations in my mood beyond the norm.  I started to have days that I called "fey" where I intensely wanted to feel.  I was driven in a wild way to extreme exercise, public performance, drinking and laughing in a grandiose manner.  I also started getting the feelings of darkness, of real pain, an inexplicable moments of exhaustion.  This fitted in well with my friends at the time, who were wedded to novelty, strangeness, creativity, fun.  I started to play music at this time, which suited me very well.  As I became more extreme in my moods, the people I knew became more sedate, more settled.  Both my dark moments and my wild moments became hard to deal with and those eventually friends abandoned me.  Punching yourself in the darkness is not a way to keep friends.  Keep it secret, keep it safe.  It now seems odd to me that no-one ever asked me if I was alright, or needed some help.

During this time, and over the next decade I was fortunate enough to find new friends, and a woman who became my wife.  But I also was becoming more and more prone to depression, and I started to work in a place in which awful things happened which hurt me quite badly.  However, within that experience I also found people that were just happy.  They truly lived, saw the best in things, and found life to be a wonder.  My bipolar steadily got worse, culminating last year in a truly spectacular range of emotions too great for a person to take.

Why have I written my life story in a post entitled "Back-up on Optimism?"  It is because I want people to understand that I have experienced pessimism.  I have experienced dark times.  I have been treated badly by people, been lonely, been unemployed, been poor.  I have seen political scandals, greed, disregard for life, suicide, hatred, and misery.  But I am an optimist.  I think this is the best time to be alive ever, and it is getting better.  Not only is it getting better, but it is getting better at an astonishing rate, faster and faster.

If there is anything that my writing on this blog has been about, it has been about trying to convince people of this fact.  I want to convince people for two reasons.  I really think this is true, and truth matters.  However, we are all also interconnected in terms of our attitudes, beliefs, and emotional states.  Optimism is a better way to live.  It makes you happier.  This happiness spreads.  This attitude spreads.  But people need to be convinced in the first place to spread this feeling and attitude.  So, here is Peter Diamandis, speaking at a TED conference, about a future of abundance, saying the same things as I have been saying, but from a position of success rather than a position on a couch.