May Snow

Mt Collins Shelter
Mile 199.3

The mercury has plummeted here above the 6000' contour, and we got about two inches of snow. Daytime temps are parked at around 30-40 degrees Farenheit in the shade. The snow-loaded treetops drop icy loads of slush on hikers throughout the day, as the sun hits the treetops, causing an awful lot of profanity.

Walking uphill in these temperatures is a real pleasure, as it is the only time during the trip I am not sweating like a rented horse.

A Visit from Prometheus

Mollie's Ridge Shelter
Mile 174.1

Do you remember fire?
I had forgotten it. In fact, I had forgotten it so utterly that I denied its existence. Its remnants were ephemera, brilliant little mayflies that would not survive the next day at the office. Moments alone with Monica. Little sparkles in the gym that made me think, "That was a good workout". Writing a tight essay, or doing an especially good animation. Fire, I had determined, was something stupid and young.

Climbing these mountains and thinking about where my life is going to lead, I can see how incredibly wrong I was. Massively, horribly wrong. Fire is all there is. If what you are doing does not burn a great fire in your belly then something is seriously wrong. Time without purpose is worse than being dead, because you suck all the same resources as you did when you were alive. Eating, sleeping, but unfeeling, undead and unaware.

If there is one word of advice the trail has for me today, and for the rest of my days, it's this:

Burn.

The Samurai Hillbillies

May 9, 2006 (I think . . Last post must have been dated later than it was)
Mile 163, "The Fontana Hilton"

There's a family hiking the AT this year, at least to Harper's Ferry. At first known as "The Family of Six", they have since taken the group name "The Samurai Hillbillies". The name stems from the fact that 1)the lady of the household (with subsequent spawn) are asiatic, and 2) there are practically zero minorities on the trail- an African-American person hiking the trail would probably also get an ethnic sobriquet, something equally sensitive to stereotypes, like "Runnin Home Joe" (southbound) or "Watermelon Lad".

I've run into TSH a few times now. The last time at Cable Gap was not so pleasant. A thru-hiker companion was pretty incensed that TSH made no attempt to make room in the shelter in the pouring rain. He got confrontational; I set up my tent and had a cold supper. I can see the argument from both viewpoints. On the one hand, you ALWAYS make room in a shelter in the rain, even if you have to sleep back to stomach with strangers. On the other hand, I'm not sure I would want a bunch of hairy, exceptionally stinky strangers rubbing up against my wife and kids.

All in all I like them. They have some sort of home schooling thing with the kids where they are taught courses on the trail. If they're anything like asian kids anywhere, the teachers are probably glad to be rid of grade schoolers who need college level textbooks and who actually listen.

They're taking to the outdoors well. Dynamite and The Asian Lady head such characters as Supersnack, Anti-Cat (so named because she always lands on her back), Firecracker, and another rugrat whose trail name escapes me. They're all good people, but I'm glad they're leaving this shelter after I do. Shelter space in the Smokies is at a premium without The Samurai Hillbillies.

Fontana Village

May 9, 2006
Mile 161

Taking a near-zero day tomorrow, spending the night tonight at the very nice Village Inn at Fontana Village. Thru-hikers get a swank 2 bed room for 35 bucks. Stretch and I are sharing a room, and enjoying the wifi internet, cable, heated pool and other amenities. As much as I like the NOC, this place takes the cake as a place to spend a zero day before the Smokies.

Tomorrow night I am spending at the Fontana shelter, then I am going into the Smokies with about eight days of food. More rain forecast for this week, but that's alright. I had a hiking epiphany day before yesterday, and I am ready for anything.

Looking forward to doing touristy things around the dam tomorrow. It's pretty amazing how a four-hundred and eighty foot pile of concrete can be so interesting.

Mash

Looks like my trail name is Mash. The origin of the name was me bitching something like, "I realize that instant mashed potatoes are something like the perfect trail food, but I swear to Christ on a burning cross I am going to beat someone to death with these sticks (I gesture with hiking poles) if I have to eat another bag of mashed!"

It was also agreed that the name suited my hiking style. I am very slow on the downhills but rather quick on the uphills- when poling uphill I supposedly "mash" violently with my arms. Probably trying to make some use of my upper body.

Anyway . . . Mash it is.

Wesser, NC

May 5, 2006
Mile 134

This is my second visit to the Nanatahala Outdoor Center (NOC) in Wesser, and I am glad it is under better circumstances. During my 2004 section hike, I holed up here after blowing out my left knee. Now, thirty pounds lighter and properly equipped and braced, my knees are a hundred percent. I'll need them for the climb tomorrow.

A few folks I've gotten to know have dropped out since Dick's Creek. HaHaFun (I think), Dave (no trail name), and a pair whose name escapes my mind at the moment. Sometimes it's tricky to say who's dropped out and who hasn't. Some folks take weeks of zero days to heal knees, blisters, fevers. Some people never leave. I've heard of more than one through hiker that settled down in some trail town. Luckily I have life and love off the AT.

Before I began this hike, I resolved to write only interesting, witty things in my trail blog. I'm not sure this is possible. While many fascinating things occur to me while climbing mountains, I am far too busy fighting for breath to write them down. By the time I come to rest, I've forgotten them.

Or perhaps they were never that clever- they just seemed very clever to someone who is using most of his blood oxygen walking. So please do not be disappointed if there are fewer intelligent things in the record. In the meantime, I promise to make freezing rain, bad food, and endless climbing as amusing as possible.

And it is amusing to complain, because this is one of the most beautiful experiences of my entire life. I always thought Heaven would be a bit like this.

The Scene

May 2, 2006
Mile 103: Rock Gap Shelter

Even at this relatively late date, the trail is an intensely social activity. Here at Rock Gasp, there are 10 through-hikers. Some of them I met on my southbound leg I did with Monica. We greeted each other like old friends.

North Carolina, like raw corn whiskey, grows on the northbound through-hiker, Albert Mountain nonwithstanding. Albert had some sections that, while not technical climbs, were still hand-and-foot affairs, where I was glad for my arboreal ancestry. The remainder of the climbs and descents have been very civil. Either that or I am growing stronger.

At lower elevations, the trees are a bit more full of green. Here at Rock Gap, it seems less like a dry spring and more like the Appalachians I know. Two springs feed a creek running down below the shelter. The rhododendrons, while not blooming, are teasing with tiny buds. It is somewhat troubling that I have not yet passed a healthy adult rhododendron. They all seem to have something gnawing big chunks out of their leaves. Many are down . . Unusual.

Ah, it's time now for me to stop typing. I should talk now with these people whose experience I share.

Fwd: Whistlin dixie

May 2, 2006

Waking up here in my tent at Carter Gap, mile 90.7. It's my second night on the trail without Monica. I miss her. I have to get up very soon, before the forecast rains roll in. Notable mentions from the past two days:
>>The AT in Georgia brings to mind Southern hospitality, mint juleps, and gospel music. The first few miles of the AT in North Carolina brings to mind homicidal moonshiners maddened by day old whiskey.
>>I had never before yesterday encountered sleet. Sleet, meet John. John, meet sleet.
>>I also met a fellow Novo Collegian- Elmer from the class of '81. We chatted for a bit just past Bly Gap (the GA/NC state line)

Backwards Walking

Mile 67: Dick's Creek Gap to Neel's Gap


I started the Appalachian Trail with my wonderful girlfriend this past week, walking backwards into Georgia from the GA/NC border. As previously mentioned, I am skipping the Springer-Neel's section, as I had hiked it in 2003.

With the exception of a few days, we had wonderful weather. The interesting part was watching the terrain get milder and milder the further into Georgia we went. By the end of the hike we could see well into the Piedmont.

Tray Mountain was fantastic, and Blue Mountain Shelter (although cold, as everyone mentions) had a fantastic view.

We met a stray dog at Deep Gap shelter. It followed us out in the morning for about a mile, then tore off after something in the woods. We heard barking, then growling, then yipping. The stray tore back to the shelter. Apparently it met a critter that didn't feel like playing. It's no mystery how this pup got lost. We hope Bubba from Tampa or another northbounder got him to Hiawassee.

Monica picks her way over some rocks.







I'm sort of wet in this picture.

Tomorrow Monica drops me off at Dick's Creek Gap to continue north. I return to walking. Tomorrow will be very hard.

Test

This is a test entry using my Palm and the collapsible keyboard it uses. It is a fairly small 4 row keyboard and takes some getting used to.

Battery life on the unit is supposedly good, though, and you can get used to any keyboard in a few days. I thought I'd never get used to a laptop keyboard, but now it seems pretty natural.

Being There

Athens, GA, April 21, 2006

I left home for the last time yesterday, and am spending three days in Athens for my girlfriend's sister's wedding. On the long drive I wondered, what makes me be here? In this car, heading up to the trailhead via a wedding? Why am I not, say, in the star-realm of Kosmexx, where macrointelligences manipulate superclusters of galaxies into big-bang- defying shapes? The reason I am here and not there can be summed up in one word: bandwidth.

An entity's location (defined in any number of dimensions; spatial, temporal, or probabilistic) may be practically defined by where the majority of its information comes from. I am pretty sure that I am an entity (forgive me Gautama Buddha), and, as it turns out, the fattest pipe for this me-entity comes through my body's senses. My body exists in a pretty narrow range of probability: you can't change much about the world without changing yourself beyond all recognition. So my mind tends to like these senses because it's the best data provider.

Nothing is actually tied down to one possible universe, however. Time is not a line. I actually can be in Kosmexx, or, with the help of a computer, wander off to be a superhero, or an Orc, or what-have you. Our minds are not as limited as our bodies in this sense. But our data rates to and from these alternate universes is an inestimably small fraction of the data rates we get from our senses in this world. We creative types need to remind ourselves of this occasionally. Focusing too much on the possible cuts you off from the real. And there ain't nothing like the real thing.

As technology advances, however, and the bandwidth of the senses is matched by our artifice, we may find ourselves living in a different kind of universe. Just as the aircraft opened up the third spatial dimension, and written language opened up the temporal fourth dimension, hacking the senses may open the gates to parallel universes. It's not that farfetched. You're reading this. You're already there.

Enplaned goes dark

Enplaned, my favorite airline news site, has gone dark. Blogger says the site can not be found. I hope he hasn't been fired or killed by rabid airline CEOs gone mad from board meetings and tiny little liquor bottles.

Whoever he was, he was a great analyst and a funny writer.

We'll miss you, Enplaned.

Ultrastructures

Why is there a drive in the universe towards order? The most simple explanation is that if there wasn't, I wouldn't be able to be writing this. This argument smacks of solipsism, and solipsism does not make for good science. The fact remains that the current cosmology tends towards order- but does it do so regardless of the sophonts' ability to record it? Is there order without the observer?

In short, yes. In the multiple-universe interpretation of quantum physics, it makes sense for named entities to get as big and complex as possible. The more particles and complexity soemthing has, the more possible universes it may occupy. It's got a world -multiple worlds- open to it, and can choose the one it sees fit. Complex universes win.

Other possible universes, say, where fermions never glued together, would have no entity larger than a ray of light. Heat death on methamphetamines. So the entities from these universes don't have a very large span into other possible world. Massless, they can draw nothing to themselves, sort of like existentialism.

But this is, to some extent, rot. When you make everything out of photons the scale of complexity gets very small and very fast; compare, for example, the electric impulse to the neuron's action potential. A creature made out of photons and gravitons would see a rapid heat death universe as marvelously complex, or, would be horrified by the spectre of a solar mass. Only recently have we stopped making the same assumptions ourselves. My old anthro texts always declared base-10 mathematics as the stepping stone to civilization, when all it means is "I have 10 fingers and 10 toes". The perception of order is dependent on the existence of an internal order within the observer. Our inhabitants of the photonic universe live faster and smaller, but they may achieve greater levels of complexity due to the ease of information transfer from entity to entity.

So the drive to complexity remains somewhat mysterious. It's built into the fabric of four and five dimentional space. How did it happen? Or, taking this a step further, what if someone, somewhere in the future, had made sure that all possible universes had a tendency towards order, so that all possible universes would be knowable by the mysterious someone in Dimension X.

What if the organizing principle of the multiverse were somehow predicate on the existence of sophonts?

It's not that farfetched. Imagine you are an incredibly advanced civilization in a very distant possible universe, separated by incredible amounts of probability. Photonic unicorn land. You've built systems that span solar systems and galaxies or their equivalent. You've noticed, though, that the universe has a chronological end. It stops at some point. What do you do? Maybe you start experimenting on the fabric of space outside of the temporal dimension. What if, you think, I can modify myself so that I don't only exist here, but in all possible worlds?

Come get me now, Big Crunch.

To some extent everything exists in a number of multiple worlds. The bigger it is the more inevitable it is. Black holes exist in all possible universes from the moment of their creation. Primordial black holes exist in all possible universes for the duration of the universe. They are everywhere possible. It would be interesting to see a map of them, and perhaps divine the existence of structure and ultrastructure.

A Modest Experiment

For legal reasons, I've decided to reveal a modest experiment being run by some of my "friends", so I am not indefinitely detained by the not-at-all merciless iron fist of the GWOT. It's painfully post-modern, so it will tickle some of my friends while irritating others. I'm just enough of a self-hating liberal that I can find this concept amusing, though I still avoid seminars like "Washing the Laundry: Examining Subtexts in Early 20th Century Feminism".

The idea was that these "friends" would read my real trail journal (this one), then post another journal, ostensibly by me, on a myspace site. A sort of metajournal, roughly corresponding to my real adventures but deviating in some very particular and unforgettable ways. We went over a couple of these but frankly I don't remember the whole exchange.

Examples:

Real Journal Entry: Beautiful Sunrise on Roan Mountain
Metajournal Entry: Rain Death and Fire on the Cities of the Infidel

Real Journal Entry: Girlfriend visiting tomorrow!
Metajournal Entry: Forced Sodomy and Canoists: A Guide

Real Journal Entry: First Bear Sighting
Metajournal Entry: Herr Goebbels is my Spirit Shaman

So, if "I" take "credit" for anything "terrible" that "happens" on my through-hike myspace journal, it's probably just my drunk friends trying to get me sent to Gitmo. It's good to have friends.

Journalizer

With the combined might of six Best Buy gift cards, I purchased my journal gizmo for the trip: a Palm Tungsten T|X. So far so good, for the two hours I've spent familiarizing myself with Garnet. Worth noting:
>>The 802.11b receiver interface is much snappier than the one in Windows CE. It finds networks faster than even my laptop does.
>>"HotSync" like it's 1996! Sheesh. Why not a file system explorer, so I can see how much space is left on the device? Or, say, so I can delete all the unwanted crap from my scant 128MB? Doc2Go is an especially terrible abortion of software.
>>VersaMail works seamlessly with gmail's POP3 interface. I can mail and journal away at the AYCE (hiker jargon for All-You-Can-Eat) restaurant using gmail and blogger's email-to-journal functionality. Provided there's a network around, of course.
>>The browser is extremely limited HTML only, but at 5.1 oz, I wasn't expecting too much browser.
>>Standard DC converter coupling? Not on our platform mister! This is such a common sin with manufacturers that it's hardly seen as sin anymore.
>>It seems to like my CSV databooks and my ALDHA PDFs, which is good. Saves me about five ounces of paper.
>>Bluetooth sucks insane amounts of power. Turned off.

Misheard Lyrics Part I: Tori Amos

It's no secret that I work out much, much harder when I'm about to cry. So I listen to music that makes me feel sad. Then I shake like a crazy junkie which means it was a good workout.

Johnny Cash's rendition of NiN's Hurt, Big Country's Big Country, Dave Matthew's Crash, and, of course, most Tori Amos does the trick. The problem with Tori is that the sad songs I have in my head seldom match what is actually on the lyric sheet. If I knew the original lyrics I wouldn't find the songs nearly as compelling. Let's make up a little quiz to illustrate:

1) In the "Great Expectations" anthem "Siren", the lyric:
"Almost brave almost pregnant almost in love . . "
is followed by what?
a) "He ain't in love"
b) "Vanilla"
c) "Be naked, ah"
d) "Caramello"

2) What Star Trek character is referred to at least once in Tori Amos lyrics?
a) Kirk
b) Spock
c) Bones
d) Scotty
e) Sulu
f) KHAAAAAANN!

3) In Ms. Amos' collaboration with electronica artist Brian Transeau, "Blue Skies", the lyric:
"And I'm walking and crawling and"
is followed by what?
a) "So tired I'm insane"
b) "Steel belted, guaranteed"
c) "I tire of this tirade"
d) "Get off my lawn! Amscray!"

4) In "Talula", he's chasing what?
a) "Tomatoes"
b) "Placeboes"
c) "Galvados"
d) "Tornadoes"
e) "Chipotles"

5) In "Caught a Lite Sneeze", the lyric:
"Called my name but there's no way in"
is followed by what?
a) "Lucifer"
b) "Use that fame"
c) "Jumping Danes"
d) "Aslan's Mane"
e) "Easy lay"


ANSWERS
1)b;2)e;3)a;4)d;5)b

Ghawar Field

Sometime around five hundred million years ago, some trillions of tons of biota decided to die and be buried underneath the oceans of the world. Layers of rock built up around them, cooking the organic substances down to hydrocarbons. The vast majority of the liquids escaped and volatized. They did so because in those places the world cracked and changed, whether by glacier, volcano, meteorite- what have you. The places that have escaped change had trapped the most of this strange liquid hydrocarbon. Petroleum loves the dead places of the world.

The 21st century will revolve around the most dead geological formation in the human world: the Arabian plate. As petroleum is sucked out of the plate by machines and fed to our machines to move us humans from machine to machine (ostensibly to make money, which is mostly used to gather more machines), we have to wonder: what are our machines thinking?

They are thinking the same thing we were thinking when we cleared the first land to create the first farm. They want a place that looks like food. Our cars conspire: let us make this place of life into a dead place, like that desolation which feeds us.

When America looks like an asphalt version of the Ghawar field, then perhaps our machines will be happy, and let us rest.

Travis and the Women

John D. Macdonald is one of those writers whose prolificacy is underlined by an intimidating quality. No earth-shaking moral breakthroughs or historical impacts, mind you, he just effortlessly writes books that are really damn readable, which happens to be the hardest thing to do as a fiction writer. The serial character, Travis McGee, is put into a "noir" classification by sexless critics, a genre Travis jumps from whenever he gets a few paragraphs of monologue. He's a happy gumshoe- with demons, sure, and a bit cynical about the tackiness of Florida- but still a guy who loves the act of living, unlike the oversexed sadsacks that pass for noir these days. He's not naturally prone to violence, statutory rape, or any of the dark crimes that usually set apart noir protagonists. No, his integrity is what sets him apart from the "real" world. Travis would counter that it's the "real" world that's useless, with its unreal mortgages and its massive, mysterious salaries. Considering I'm about to disapper from the civilized world for six months, it's not too difficult to figure out who I sympathize with.

If there's one thing that Travis does noir it's his women. When our hero runs into that mysterious gender, they're what we would call "maidens". A pretty broad stroke I'll grant, considering he runs into some that double-cross him, but still maidens. As maidens, they have never brushed paths with home and hearth, or, if they have, their families were taken from them with such brutality that they revert to voiceless children. Travis is with them for a time and then they move on either as whore or as crone. The mother and her panacea for all violence is left behind, not really because Travis avoids mothers but because violence makes for a much more exciting story.

The great thing about Macdonald is that he knows it too. His character knows it, and as Travis grows older this void in his life gets too big to scab over. Life can very quickly get too exciting. Pushing forty, Travis eventually does find his issue, the consequences of a life spent avoiding mothers, and makes good with her. It's too bad he missed a tender period, but as he was stuck in a mystery serial it's not something you could reasonably expect him to go back and correct. You can almost see Travis smirking at both the noir and the "real" world. He's avoided both on a shortcut to what really matters.

Estimates

Estimated Date	Town
3-May-06	Wesser, NC (The NOC)
15-May-06	Hot Springs, NC
21-May-06	Erwin, TN
6-Jun-06	Bastian, Va
15-Jun-06	Daleville, Va
24-Jun-06	Waynesboro, Va
5-Jul-06	Harpers Ferry VA
9-Jul-06	South Mountain, Pa
16-Jul-06	Pine Grove, Pa
19-Jul-06	Palmerton, Pa
24-Jul-06	Glenwood, NJ
2-Aug-06	Kent, Conn
7-Aug-06	Sheffield, Mass
23-Aug-06	Hanover, NH
26-Aug-06	Wentworth, NH
27-Aug-06	Glencliff, NH
29-Aug-06	North Woodstock, NH
19-Sep-06	Stratton, Maine
23-Sep-06	Caratunk, Maine
26-Sep-06	Monson, Maine
7-Oct-06	Baxter Peak (Katahdin), Maine

Appalachian Trail- the Video Game

I am a pretty amazing dork. By "dork", I mean that I still play pencil-and-paper Dungeons and Dragons at the age of 31. To be honest, the "dork" assessment needs review, as there are legions of older "dorks" on EverQuest, World of Warcraft, EVE Online, and, oh, see here . The difference between me and them is that they use software to help imagine that they are a Cajun Aquatic Elf, and I do not. In this sense, a "dork" is simply someone who finds it easier to suspend disbelief in the unreal world. On the savannah, such an ability would indeed prove fatal in short order. So I am a dork, but so were the first priests so many tens of thousands of years ago. Not such bad company, although it'd be nice if roleplayers built up an ideology more long-lasting than that of Gary Gygax, which seemed to revolve around polearms.

To be honest, the "roleplaying" part of gaming never appealed to me overmuch. I preferred the part where we reduce the world to a series of statistics. It's no accident that the first researchers of the personal computer were also Tolkein fetishists and, to a large extent, pencil and paper gamers. Information science is all about reducing the world to a series of numbers and simple themes. Gamers seek to reduce experience to a set of statistics and easily remembered themes. We reduced the world for our machines, and found that the machine's way of looking at the world was a lot more fun than ours. Now more than a million people around the world live through machines, run forests that exist only in the machines, hunt orcs in the machine, buy, sell, love, and die as people that exist only in the minds of our machines. Sometimes it's hard to tell if the world of online role-playing games is a sugary heaven or a sexy hell.

To keep in the spirit of this thing I propose an Appalachian Trail Role Playing Game. Character creation can use all six of the classic statistics- Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Wisdom, Intelligence, and Charisma. Starting money could be a derived statistic of Intelligence and Charisma, representing the level of income you had when your fake person decided to quit his or her life to start the appalachian trail. Mileage per day (MPD) would be the most important derived statistic. Constitution would be a core determinant of MPD, but Wisdom represents the willpower to resist spending days in town motels. Roll a Will saving throw versus pizza! Oh, no, another day in town for you! A ratio of strength to pack weight (LOAD) would also go toward the MPD- and provide a use for higher income, as super high tech lighweight gear would cost a lot (even if you make it yourself, that still represents high INT, so to some extent the income statistic does not represent a cash salary but a level of resources). Complicate the MPD by throwing in a Chance of Injury Per Day (CIPD), which would be some factor based on MPD, Dexterity, and LOAD. Injury is bad, it would do point damage to Wisdom, as well as taking multiple zero days, and you have to check Wisdom every time you leave town, or face a particularly bad stretch of terrain and/or weather, or phone your girlfriend. Wisdom also allows you to spot objects, like the bear and her cubs in the middle of the trail fifty feet away. So losing wisdom can easily lead to losing more wisdom. Charisma is a grease statistic, increasing chances of hitches into town, reducing prices in town, and generally serving as a "luck" statistic, as well as contributing to your starting income. And . . . and . . intelligence . . you know what? This is ridiculous. Anyone looking for "AT: the MMORPG" can, well, go take a hike.

Grace

For a period after my motorcycle accident, I had seriously contemplated the priesthood. I was raised Roman Catholic, and after going through the standard period of rebellion, had come to some respect -even awe- at the Church's accomplishments in human history. The nostalgia I had felt at hearing the Nicene Creed again, dragged into church again with my useless left arm, was replaced by a mounting sense of the document's enormity. Every single sentence represented the end product of a separate centuries-long theological debate. Behind every word lay thousands dead, displaced, or otherwise silenced.

In studying the Church at college, I could safely separate myself from its majesty and power. Rational religion was supposedly buried by the Enlightenment, all true believers had supposedly gone into the grips of the charismatic churches. At Mass, I saw how wrong I was. This juggernaut of history lived on, and, furthermore, had the intellectual capacity to absorb everything learned from the Modern period. Ad majorem Dei gloriam. The sciences, literature, and the human mind are all part of the path to revelation of the Divine Mind. Like our Creator, we have universes within us.

Unfortunately for me (or, depending on your viewpoint, the Latin Church) I have no will to grace. Basically, I reject some key doctrines, like the Eternal Soul. Our brains are us, I'm afraid, which is a much less frightening notion than the various doctrines of the afterlife. Imagine: you die and are buried. Then, at some point in the future, you are restored to your flesh, somewhat confused, at which point you burst from the earth to terrify your descendents. Alternately, you die, then your soul- bodiless- is shifted into a state so close to the divine that it can have a conversation with it on a quiet day. This new soul has less to do with you than the e.coli living in your guts. In fact, since the perfect soul is in contact with the Divine, and we creatures of matter are an infinite distance from the Divine, our new souls would be about as different from us as something could be and still be something.

For similar reasons I reject the Resurrection, although it seems possible that Christ was an emanation of the Divine. One of the high points of humanity, you might say. This makes me a heretic of a very old order, in league with the writer of the Gospel of Thomas. For this, though, I can blame the Church. It is a central Catholic teaching that you- and I mean every one of you- can do what Christ did. We can, but we don't. We reject the Divine in us, and in each other, and we fall. There is no reason for it. We play with mortal toys, like clockwork men walking in addled circles, when we have worlds within us. When we reach inside of ourselves, inside of others, we touch the Eternal, as did Christ, or Buddha, or Shakespeare, or Einstein. In touching it, it touches us. There is no reason to return to flesh and be hoovered up by the sky. Our reaching for Truth- this is true Grace.

This is also heresy. Note I never went for the priesthood.

On Reactionaries

Intellectual history, at its core, measures the effect of thought on the larger affairs of humanity. It is a field in crisis. At best, the pursuit of ideological causes in history is seen as endearing. At worst the historicist outlook is portrayed as dangerously naïve, a debutante wandering about in a room full of materialist realities. Economics, demographics, geology, climatology: in functionalism they form the wave of the phenomenological world. The wave is widely regarded as the sole source of dynamism in human events. In this weltanschauung there is no action but reaction; there are no crises but circumstance. With this in mind, it is unsurprising that intellectual history has likewise declined in importance. The mind has been discarded in favor of the wave.

This assumes that our ability to comprehend the world around us has remained unchanged for fifty thousand years. This assumption is false. Humans do not interpret the environment objectively; they do so through a complex filter that defines as it records. If our surfer - our historical actor- judges his course by the shape of the wave, the shape of the wave is in turn described by the net experience of countless minds. This is why ideas are so important when gauging the rise and fall of complex societies. Intellectual history is the measure of this comprehensive power, the capability of ideas to shape the destinies of peoples and nations.

Myriad power groups in human history have consciously tried to seize this power so as to improve their lot. Controlling ideas is an extraordinarily efficient way to control resources, as the distribution cost of information is always lower than capital. For this reason it is also unpredictable, as anyone with a new information distribution technology can overthrow the existing order. Unsurprisingly, this leads to the pitting of one group of intelligentsia against the other. Visionaries on both sides fall to cynicism and violence with increasing frequency. Progressives become militant, and the authorities turn into reactionaries.

The Hobbesian establishment of a reactionary force signals the end of culture. True believers split away, the established struggle to maintain the status quo; the young polarize and begin arming themselves. Old friends turn on each other with an easy viciousness born from decades of association and unconscious rivalry. The lives of such men are often at the crux of history. The Kangxi in China, Tlaxcalan in Mexico, Cosimo II in Venice- each has tried to change his or her culture at the very pivot of history. Their counterparts- Confucian, Aztec, or Catholic- were no less impressive in their defense of tradition and what they saw as right. They maintained the old world in the face of the new, and tore their universes apart.

This must not happen here.

Darkness Remembered Brightly

One of the things most do not realize about the Third Reich is its unhinged flakiness. Leni Riefenstahl, and, by way of imitation, the entire motion picture industry, have successfully persuaded us of authoritarianism's elegance, rationality, and inevitable power. It's a pity, because the writings at the intellectual core of the Nazi regime are some of the most humorous in the historical record. People like Lanz von Liebenfels and his Electric Aryan Bugaloo from Aldebaran simply do not fit into our preconceived notion of "Nazi". We make ourselves feel better by ignoring him, and other key architects of the Nazi Völkisch, but it doesn't make authoritarianism pretty, rational, or elegant. Its intellectual basis was bankrupt; Mein Kampf steered more by self-pity than self-discipline. The trains didn't actually run on time, they just killed anyone who noticed that the trains were running late. They didn't play Wagner at Auschwitz. They played polka.

Something to remember in these troubled times, when authoritarianism is undergoing something of a revival.

Shadowboxing

What in the world is the consumer price index based on? No one can truly say. 2005 annual increases are around ten percent for food, thirty percent for energy, and . . . the CPI at negative point eight of a percent? How is it possible? The quick answer is, it's not.

The CPI is calculated using some advanced economics, more than a bit of wishful thinking, and a dash of syncretic voodoo. One of the fantastic ways they can keep CPI low (if they want) is by separating products into feature sets. For example, let's say last year's DVD player cost a hundred bucks. This year's DVD player costs one hundred fifty. Holy God, you might say, that's an increase of fifty percent! In saying so, you reveal your lack of economic sophistication (as well as your lack of friends in the Bureau of Labor Statistics). In reality, this year's DVD player can answer emails, play video games, and record television programs. The BLS essentially separates one product into three (or more). To get last year's "price" for your "DVD player" it sums up last year's costs for a computer, a game console, a VHS tape recorder, and a DVD player. It's remarkable that the figures aren't even more ridiculous, but we can take it as a given that the BLS is only performing this snake dance for a select few generous lobbyists.

They might think they're quite clever at first: all the technologies are pretty close to free, and they can keep milking the DVD franchise. Then something happens like HD-DVD (or Blu-Ray, depending on where your loyalties lie). All the staff moved from the DVD department is busy chunking out another piece of email bloatware, or working on some useless game, or downloading midget porn, while the competition comes out with a media that not only plays movies but allows the audience to sniff the actress' panties.

What happens then is you are sunk. By adding false value to your stagnant products you have basically boxed your resources into the corner, and are a sitting duck for the oncoming technology that has a grip on what the market wants. Lessons? The consumer, not the CPI, is what determines value.

The Void

Thursday Afternoon Dao

Thirty spokes will converge
In the hub of a wheel;
But the use of the cart
Will depend on the part
Of the hub that is void.

With a wall all around A clay bowl is molded;
But the use of the bowl
Will depend on the part
Of the bowl that is void.

Cut out windows and doors
In the house as you build;
But the use of the house
Will depend on the space
In the walls that is void.

So advantage is had
From whatever is there;
But usefulness rises
From whatever is not.

Neel's Gap

Given the late date of my 2006 departure, I decided to bite the bullet and start where I left off in 2003: the Walasi-yi center at Neel's Gap. It'll trim the first four or five days from my AT attempt. I'll need every day I can get to make Katahdin by October 15, when Baxter State Park closes for the winter. Technically speaking, this makes my through-hike just a really long section hike, but you know what? Who cares. As long as I am standing on that big rock come October.

If things go really slowly on the way to Maine, I suppose flip-flopping is always an option, as well.

Gear List

Here it is, the standard gear list posted by all AT hopefuls. Hopefully it will help others looking for only moderately overpriced backpacking equipment.

Keep in mind I went extra cheap on the real cold weather gear, since I am looking at a late April departure.

Wght(oz)    Item
21    Tent-Dancing Light Gear Ultralight Brawny 9ft
11    Insulated Jacket-USAARM M-65 Jacket Liner
10    Insulated Pants-USAARM M-65 Pants liners
36    Sleeping bag-Campmor Campor-20
12    Rain Jacket-Marmot Precip Jacket
6    Rain Pants-Marmot Precip Pants
7    Thermals-Bodysensor Bodysensor long tee
7    Thermals-Bodysensor Bodysensor tights
56    Pack-Granite Gear Nimbus Ozone
1    shorts-asics shorts
1    bike shorts-generic underarmor
1    Hat-generic hat
13    Thermarest-thermarest sleeping pad
2    Tent pegs-Vargo Titanium Tent Stakes (6-pack)
2    Insect spritz-generic deet
4    Water treatment-aquamira water treatment
1    Pepsi can stove-me stove
6    Fuel-alcohol alcohol
1    Food bag, line-gorilla 80lb test braided monofilament
1    Kettle-MSR kettle
1    Headlamp-generic Red LED
1    Camp shoes-me slippers
4    Water bottle-camelbak hydration pack
2    Bear spray-generic capaiscin
1    Spray holster-me holster
6    Book-whatever whatever
9    Camera-sony cybershot
8    Notepad-generic sketch pad
3    Toilet-generic unmentionables
234    TOTAL DRY PACK WEIGHT(OZ)
14.625    TOTAL DRY PACK WEIGHT(LB)

Dead Man Walking

It's a matter of months now, soon weeks. I will walk more than two thousand miles to Maine, funds and health permitting. It has all the pleasant aspects of being under a death sentence. Every experience, every sensory object in this life is suddenly a feast of self-examination. The way that I interact with the world is about to come to an end, and what are we, really, other than interactions, information filters, condensates of a computative quantum ether? The people in my life, work, my strange relationship with a dysfunctional Company . . . I am looking at them from a new perspective, realizing that everything is about to pass far from me, into rock, shadow, and fog.

So I soon shall end. Something else will proceed, as the zebra carcass goes about its business in the body of the lion, or, for those of a spiritual bent, as the soul goes about its business in the Wherever. What will the trail shit me out as? Am I nutrient, virus, or angel? I have absolutely no idea.

Wildebeest

As mentioned in a previous post, Carbon, I believe it is self-evident that superior systems emerge from lower-level systems. I believe this makes things better, in a general sort of way, by binding entropy in complexity and in systems. Call me an optimist. Parasitic or predatory systems (forgive me for being unable to differentiate the two) do manage to bosh the process occasionally with oversuccess.

The optimal predator/parasite's energy needs are equivalent to the prey system's energy loss due to entropy. A large system, say, a thousand wildebeest, manage to lose track of five calves in a month, due to loss of information among the system's members. Well evolved lions adjust their behavior and population so that they eat five calves a month. Any less and they starve, any more and the energy gained in extra wildebeest is made up for in angry wildebeest. Predators do not want an epic stuggle, and they don't particularly want angry prey. We enjoy watching Epic Struggles not because we admire the drama, but because it means someone else is doing the struggling. Oh, my king and my hero! Lead me to battle, and stay well ahead of me!

Back to our wildebeest and our hungry lions. Imagine now that the lions are symbiote with a neural parasite that makes wildebeest deaf, but not lions, and that it is waterborne, passing easily between lions and wildebeest. The parasite increases entropy in the wildebeest herd by limiting information transfer between members, and the lions get fatter without being kicked or gored.

This would be incredibly nifty for the lions, but it would rarely happen in the natural world. It takes a lot of time and a lot of randomness, factors that favor the prey animal. With more wildebeest than lions, it is more likely that the wildebeest have evolved something that promotes feline tooth decay or something along those lines, like feline leukemia virus (FeLV). But let us assume that the lions have somehow gotten the upper hand in the epidemiological war. The relationship is seriously busted now, as the prey system grows smaller, its ability to evolve resistance to sickness weakens, their health slumps, entropy increases, lions get fatter (and there's probably a lot more of them). Sudden crisis for prey, not-too-distant crisis for predator.

What happens if one lion population hosts the deaf wildebeest virus and another does not? It raises interesting questions. I leave it to the reader to find analogies in the business world.

Carbon

All good systems seek to maintain themselves. If they do not, they cease to be systems, so any behavior that it not self-maintaining is, by definition, bad. At the same time, the system maintenance must be able to change quickly enough so that the environment does not destroy it. An atom is a system, and a darned good one, as it has generally worked quite well for many billions of years, depending on how you tell time in Riemannian space. It fails in places like singularities, but as Reason itself breaks down around singularities, that's really not much of a failing. The reason for the success of the atom is that it is tightly bound to the environment. Its appendages into the environment, electrons, are small enough that they can hear raised voices from the Planck distance, the most basic unit in the reality grid. In other words, if change is occurring, it's hard to make a change so small that an atom can't hear it. Furthermore, being so small itself, the atom does not neet Project Managers to communicate the change to all its parts, although occasionally there are spin-offs and mergers.

The electrons themselves are sensitive to probability. If the fourth dimension is time, and probability is a sort of ill-defined fifth dimension, then things like electrons and gravitons are the movers and shakers in this odd sphere. Mass is concentrated probability, and it slowly gathers things to it, forming suns and planets. Chemicals bind the escaping energy of the cosmos into stuctures that hold that energy in a pattern, gathering more probability as the universe wonders exactly how that energy is going to get out, like an audience at a Jenga game. The structures grow into systems, and eventually systems like you and me can begin wondering about how these structures came to be in the first place. We do this because we can see the "might-have-beens", the crucial fifth dimension that allows us to navigate around things like trying to commute past high schools with nothing but a two lane access road.

So our system, life, has seen itself in the mirror. Congratulations. Science can now continue, but life's next step is a bit more difficult, as it involves organizing systems into the extremely contentious supersystem we call "society", or "culture", or whatever it is they are calling it in this year's intro to anthro textbooks. We need to think about this because, as anyone who witnessed the twentieth century can tell you, the work done in this area has been lacking in rigor.

Living systems are the best analogy we have for society's integration of complex systems (humans). We can start with the rise of genetic material from mobs of mere molecules 3,800 million years ago. It is important to realize that there were an Enron-sized pile of fuck-ups even at this early date. Even after a life system was established, wild imbalances in the system resulted in environmental destruction unmatched even today (see "Oxygen Catastrophe"). Unlike carbon atoms, however, we supposedly have an information exchange between human beings that is capable of correct the larger supersystem and the behavior of the subsystems, i.e., you and me. Also unlike carbon atoms, we have ideology, religion, and the Heritage Foundation. Humans win by default, as we have not yet destroyed all life with poisonous gas. Nuclear weapons are far prettier, in any case, and the only art carbon atoms are interested in is jewelry.

Since we've established that human beings have at least the capacity to be smarter than carbon atoms, let's move up a level, to another established system. The human brain is, arguably, a self-correcting system (most of the time) that can get most of its ducks in a row when the environment changes - without destroying its internal structure (almost more than half the time). It does this via a host of control mechanisms, most of which are located, stupidly enough, in the same office block as those housing our Mortal Sins. When your hypothalamus is trying to route hemispheres occupied with the Ontological Argument for the Existence of God, it is going through that one time in fifth grade that Lesia let you put your hand up her skirt. The reason for this is that your brain's first priority is your system first, and your supersystem second (although current research indicates that some folks are preselected for sacrifice in a human population, it is not the norm).

Being a free carbon atom is nice and all, but the supply of information reaching you is negligible in comparison to the information flow your friends are getting on the quantum highway inside their huge RNA molecule. It doesn't make sense to be a carbon atom. You abandon being an atom because you see much bigger things in your future (literally) as part of a system. The body did the same thing with its neurons, via cell specialization, the hypothalamus and assorted control mechanisms. Human society has done it with a successive grouping of social constructs so myriad that I am not going to google them all. It doesn't even matter what they are all called. What does matter is that the supersystem must be able to navigate five-dimensional space in a symbolic fashion, and dodge the symbolic semi running a red light.

So human society needs better information exchange and a new hypothalamus or organizing structure, but that means saying things about religion and ideology that I really don't want to get into here. We're already well down the road on the information exchange part, but a rigid control will make a rigid supersystem, unable to make timely changes. We traditionally haven't had to worry about information and reactionaries in the same space, but suffice to say we've seen a new sort of religious fundamentalism, one that isn't afraid of the internet, electronic survellance and ID tags. I don't want Dr. James Dobson to write the hypothalamus of 21st century humanity, because 1) I think it would be a suffocating world, and 2) I don't think his ilk have the vision of a carbon atom, much less that of blue-green algae.