Sleep / Dream

Dream

     I slept better last night until around 6AM when my wife came home.  After I woke up, had a difficult time getting back to sleep.

     I had a dream that gave me a glimpse of how my life may have played out if I had made a different critical decision early on.

     But at least in this incarnated reality that’s not the way it went.  Still it was pleasing to have a glimpse.

     Now I just focus on what to do with what is left of this life.  Sometimes I try to make plans, and God laughs at them.

     Nine days left until I am no longer under community custody.  Can go see my father, go see the ocean again, go to public places where there are minors like the Puyallup Fair.  Not sure what I will do with this new freedom quite yet.  See where God takes me.

Tired and Hope

Tired because I woke up about every hour last night, for several reasons.  First, gas induced intestinal pain resulting from a chilli-burger with jalapeños which I ate at Beth’s the night before.  Also because I had a small gout flare-up in my left big toe.  This had started earlier in the day, and I did what I usually do which is to drink cranberry juice and also try to keep myself well hydrated.  Both the pain and the side effect of having kept myself well hydrated woke me up frequently.

Fortunately, both the after effects of the chilli and the gout flare-up have subsided today but left me sleep deprived.  I love seared animal flesh and chilli and jalapeños but sometimes they don’t love me.

And 500 million years from now there likely will not be any more chilli or jalapeños and seared animal flesh is likely to be a short commodity.  Or at least that is what is predicted.  I keep telling myself not to worry about it, neither I, nor likely any of my descendants will be here, still I can’t help but be somewhat emotionally invested.

Thinking about that time, when C3 plants won’t be able to function because it is projected carbon-dioxide levels will drop too low because of the increasing luminosity of the sun speeding up weathering of rocks, maybe they’re wrong.  The same stellar model that predicts an increased luminosity then, also suggested a much lower luminosity several billion years ago, one that even the carbon-dioxide rich atmosphere couldn’t have kept Earth’s temperature warm enough to not be frozen.  Yet, unfrozen for the most part it was.  So maybe they’re wrong.  Or maybe interstellar travel will be possible by then so if humanity survives, we will be less vested in the Earth itself.  Or maybe we’ll still be bombing each other regularly and keep the carbon dioxide levels high.

I am troubled that the powers that be managed to get a war started in Yemen as a means to reduce oil production capacity and drive costs up so the oil companies can pay their loan payments.  At least we’re not in it yet.  Still killing and maiming people for profit doesn’t appeal to me no matter who is doing it or the recipient of it.

Another 500 Million Years

     According to present day stellar models, the evolution of the Sun leaves the Earth with only approximately 500 million years left where it can sustain multi-cellular life, and perhaps another 300 million after that the last single celled organisms will perish.

     I read about this, in much more detail, and felt a serious emotional anguish at the thought that only half a billion years from now no complex life forms will remain and not long after that no life at all.

     Why should it matter to me when I and all of humanity will be gone long before that time?  Well, I think there is a resonance, until recently we thought multi-cellular life only went back 600 million years, which would make the Earth kind of middle-aged, but recent discoveries of multi-cellular life forms now push that date back 2.1 billion years, which means that the Earth is 80% through it’s multi-cellular life harbouring days.  Me, I’m 56, at least half-way through my life, and who knows maybe a lot more than half-way.  I’m adopted so I have no idea what the genetic inclinations of my parents are.

     A friend turned thirty today and she was upset about all the time that has slipped by, water under the bridge, goals not attained.  I would like to be ONLY thirty again.  A lot more water’s been under my bridge.

Yum…

     Her page about salami, for example, features company literature describing a meat glue made from the enzyme transglutaminase, blended with animal protein and vitamin B9: “Salami Dry Express B9 decreases ripening time by up to 20 per cent, creates a more… appealing colour in less time, offers improved casing peeling and… sausage aroma. Improved slicing properties reduce wastage by up to five per cent, while shorter processing and storage times also provide financial advantages.”

(this was taken from an article in New Scientist and reproduced without permission for the purposes of commentary under the Fair Use provisions of the copyright act).

     Yum!!!

     I don’t know if Cascioppo meats is still around in Ballard but they used to provide a real alternative to this chemical mush mass food processors produce.

Spring is in the Air

Spring

      It was 67°F out and almost totally clear save for a few wispy clouds when I went out to check for mail at the post office today.  Spring has most definitely sprung, a most gorgeous day.  Wish my body didn’t react like it does (allergies).  Time for the Claritin and Flonase.

Not Dragging

     Not dragging as much as I thought I would today.  Had a short period around 10:30AM during which I felt pretty drowsy but otherwise not so bad so far.  Still messing with kernel issues.  Even though when I test from here with Firebug, it consistently loads the pieces in under 200ms, Google is still seeing just over 200ms when indexing and I really want it to be consistently under 200ms because that is the threshold Google uses to determine if a site is “fast” and thus deserving of a higher ranking.

     Working on whittling down the paper stack during compiles which at present are taking around half an hour because so much unnecessary junk is being compiled.

Messy Desk

Happiness Is A Warm Gun

     Someone recently posted the Across the Universe version of Happiness is a Warm Gun (originally by The Beatles, off the Beatles White Album) on Facebook.  The Across the Universe version was an excellent rendition, actually there is absolutely nothing about that film that falls short of excellent.

     But the lyrics now stuck in my head, Mother Superior Jumped the Gun, and I Need a Fix Cause I’m Going down, made an association for me with a scene out of Trainspotting, where one of the characters says of their drug dealer, “We called him Mother Superior on account of the length of his habit”.

     I find an interesting association in as much as both habit and length have very different meanings and contexts, habit referring not to part of a nuns apparel, but rather to a drug habit, and length referring rather than to a physical dimension, one of time.

     While I was aware language plays a very big part in our thought processes, indeed, people who learn multiple languages actually have distinct personalities in each, it is interesting how the use of the same words for entirely different meanings or contexts can allow associations between those meanings or contexts that otherwise would not have happened or made sense.

     It’s my belief that in humans, and other animals that use language to any degree, that language plays a much larger role than mere communications or verbal forms of thought.  I believe it actually is a form of information compression used by the brain.  Think of an Apple for example and what comes to mind, the shape, colour, texture of the skin, and because we have words for Apple and each of these characteristics, our brains only have to store links or pointers to this information instead of the information itself for each item, saving storage space as it were.  Like stars in the sky, the estimation of the number of neurons keeps going up, currently 100 billion, but even so that’s a limited quantity for all the information we actually store.