The open boxes stand as a daily reminder that every period in residence is a period, not a residence. The lid of an opened suitcase leans against the couch, the clothes in it laundered, unworn, like piles of micro-organization nested in macro chaos.

Ten times a year now I shake things up, down from ten times that—a far distant once-upon-a-time when my world was much further from equilibrium.

Two thousand kilometers away, a hurricane spins away over the central Atlantic. Computer models say it might touch Bermuda, but not us, with 95% probability; now we even know how likely we are to not know what we don’t know.

What we do know for sure (we who are so interested in how many calories are in a half-cup of cubed peaches, which we can never really know, nor how many half-cups of peaches equal a Cobb salad made with the leanest chicken cubes never to have been produced by a chicken), is that the ocean between America and Europe and the space between Earth and sky, clear and shiny between vacuum-separating hurricanes, are stirred up.

Thermodynamics is about equilibrium, the nature’s desire to be smooth, uniform, and tranquil. Equilibrium eliminates gradients, differences of temperature, of velocity, of density, of charge, of stress, of chemical potential. In exchange for allowing nature to reach her beloved and elusive equilibrium, we charge her an energy tax. That tax turns our shafts and our wheels and pushes airplanes and rockets and photons through space.

We even provide energy rebates to nature. We provide work in exchange for her allowing us to maintain a gradient we want, so that the inside of a freezer remains cold on a hot day is paid for by the work of a compressor—a tax rebate of sorts.

Driven by a gradient of ideas, of what I want, and by the difference between what is and what could be, by what we could create out of what we are, I pack.

]]> http://rfleeter.wordpress.com/2011/11/23/seeking-equilibrium-random-thoughts-on-thermodynamics-and-packing/feed/ 0 rfleeter http://rfleeter.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/travel-is-hell-food-eating-%e2%80%94-or-not/ http://rfleeter.wordpress.com/2011/10/05/travel-is-hell-food-eating-%e2%80%94-or-not/#comments Wed, 05 Oct 2011 13:00:15 +0000 Rick Fleeter http://rfleeter.wordpress.com/?p=172 ]]>

… after many years of being open to new experiences, I’ve come around to the philosophy of not.

Below are some more of  the 119 little inconveniences I’ve experienced as a Road Warrior. This category of The Travel Is Hell (TIH) Series investigates human digestions and the various ramifications thereof:

20. Find out how many calories are in those Starbucks Green Tea Frappes you’ve been rewarding yourself with every business day you’ve been in Tokyo.

21. 0730 Air Force breakfast briefing catered with acrid coffee and popcorn.

22. Squish beautiful, world-class persimmon in backpack (Note: next time, get uncrushable, mealy apple).

23. Arrive Vienna after full day working and traveling on flights too short for meal service. All food shops and restaurants closed ’till Sunday noon.

24. Durian. Any time, anywhere. No.

25. Traditional Korean elegant dining. Nubile, well-dressed, but otherwise completely uninteresting woman sits in lap. Stuffs each spoonful of food into my mouth as if I were 16 months old. (Vroom, vroom! Open hangar; here comes the plane!)

26. Très expensive fancy dinner. Clients demonstrate appreciation of my work. Honor successful vegetarian contractor at restaurant featuring rattlesnake, venison and mutton.

27. Korean BBQ in Darwin, Australia.

28. It’s 11:30 p.m., almost dinnertime in Buenos Aires. Pick one: steak or roast beef. Get up at 6:00 for flight to Bariloche, Patagonia.

29. Eat — or actually, just look at — plate of fish, still wiggling.

30. Yet another lavish dinner in beautiful continental restaurant with wonderful Scandinavian wood furnishings, candlelight, classical live piano, exquisite food, stunning service. Perfect for romantic dinner with girlfriend.  Instead, endured with three chain-smoking, Vodka -inhaling Russian entrepreneurs.

31. Eating light: make dinner out of half-roll of wintergreen Certs and some tiny foil bags of airline pretzels.

32. Four days in Russia surviving on apples and oranges stuffed into suitcase before departing New York. Offend hosts four times per day by refusing vodka at breakfast, lunch, dinner, and dessert.

Namaste,

Rick Fleeter

author, Travels of a Thermodynamicist

(A Note to Readers: If you’ve had similarly unique and discomfiting travel experiences you’d like to share—and that have helped you toward a Buddhist appreciation of travel as inevitable suffering, from which you have returned a better, wiser person—feel free to share.)

The German Embassy is a big concrete building left over from the Fascist era, which somehow seems fitting (though so are most of the elementary schools in Rome since that was a project of Mussolini). Like the American Embassy and every other embassy in the world (including the Italian one in DC), the moment you walk in you are on their territory, in this case, German soil. They speak some Italian—the guards, for instance—but everybody there are Germans, as were the two embassy staff who checked my passport, did my fingerprints, helped me with some other forms, and congratulated me on becoming a German citizen.

Well, in the sense that life is an adventure, that was a little one, painless (for a change) and no risk of any bone breaks.

Having been born an American without giving it much thought since, all at once I sort of realized that becoming a citizen of a county is a serious thing. It’s not like applying for a grant or filling out a health club membership. It’s hard to describe. At the embassy they all speak German; they dress and act German more than Italian; they’ve got the German flag there and the big eagle symbol on everything. All of a sudden, that’s your heimatland. The embassy staff even reminded me it was my responsibility to ensure that I wouldn’t lose my American citizenship by becoming a German citizen. I had already checked that so it’s not a problem, but it’s another sign that formally becoming a citizen of a county is not quite like joining the local pool.

Informally, they asked what my family story was, how old my mother was when she came over, about where my other relatives were. They even wondered how my family felt about my becoming German. The question alone was a little unsettling, but as I said, it’s an adventure, this chapter of which I’m a German, at least here in Europe. The embassy woman in charge of my case asked if my mother had considered also getting a German citizenship, but she understood that if she is an American and only visits for an occasional vacation to Europe, maybe it doesn’t pay.

She said they get a lot of applications, but virtually none in Italy. I think that’s because Italians are already EU citizens, so there’s no motive for them to get a German citizenship. Plus, how many German Jews are in Italy? Very few. (For those leaving in 1939, I don’t think Italy was a great choice of refuge.)

Then we talked about places in Germany. The staff were very personable, and they really made me feel like they were glad I took the trouble to do the application and show up for the naturalization. I did not expect that from the German Embassy, since everyone operates from behind an inch of glass (though in the paranoia department, Americans are by far the leaders, with the Brits not far behind).

The German embassy is on a regular street and people actually drive up and park in front of it. A fence surrounds the American embassy, and the sidewalk around that is closed on all four sides. You have to cross the street constantly to get around all the detours, with no help from the American guards who just stare at you like you probably have a bomb in your backpack. Friendly, those Americans. Nothing like that for the Germans. Just a nice, neat, large concrete building a few doors down from the HQ of La Gazzetta dello Sport (the pink (in color only) national sports newspaper that founded the Giro d’italia—a long-distance bike race—103 years ago).

Unlike bank tellers, the Germans came out from behind their glass and met me in a waiting room to do my naturalization across a table. Also, the Germans work by appointment. In the US Embassy, you show up before they open and a line forms around the block, like you’re buying tickets to see The Rolling Stones. (Another reason I am glad to not have to deal with American visas.) If anything at all goes wrong, you spend the day in that line.

The nice passport photos we all labored to get here for me were annehmbar nicht (not acceptable)! Because they use digital image recognition, the pictures have to be just so. You can smile, but your mouth can’t be open more than a tiny amount. My agent told me hers were rejected for the same reason. (It’s the same in the US if you get a new passport, btw.) So she told me to do what she had done: walk to the local metro station two blocks away and pay 5€ to get photos in a machine for passports, which helps you get your head just the right size, etc. The metro machine photos were nice. The machine prints them on real photo stock, which is also better. I could have saved a lot of trouble for me and you at Moto. Sorry about that.

There is a strange feeling doing something so normal, like searching for a 5-euro note in your wallet while seated in one of those little cabinets in a metro station—something you see other people do and think you would never find yourself doing—the tiny details. The photo repair guy was there to service the machines. We talked a little, and I thought, here I am speaking to an Italian photo repair guy as a tiny step in becoming a German citizen at an embassy two blocks from the Castro Pretorio metro stop, which happens to have these machines in it next to the ticket dispensers. Nobody could write that script. He advised me to use the second cabinet. “The photos work better and there’s more room; it’s more comfortable,” he said.

My passport will come in four weeks. When these guys say four weeks, they don’t mean 29 days, they mean 4.0 weeks. The embassy woman said if I don’t hear from her to email or call. But it’s a done deal. I paid the 59€ passport fee and the 21€ for the shipping of my papers from Germany and from Boston, and it all got signed and stamped for printing, with even the photo glued onto the original passport page. Then it gets bound into the passport book with the blank pages, I think in Cologne again.

Well, it was a little scary, but I’m really glad I did it. It’s a big advantage to have EU citizenship if you are all over the world like I am. Practically speaking, this means I can get paid here and not have to bill through a US company. And I have barely adhered to the visa laws for the last three years, always making sure I don’t stay 91 days, and using my visiting professor status to avoid having to get a real visa. The bureaucracy of a German passport is nothing—nothing!—compared to getting an Italian visa. And the German citizenship is for life. The visa you have to do for every single 90-day stay, and it has to be done less than 60 days in advance, and half the time it doesn’t come through on time anyway. It’s crazy as only Italians can be. So now I never have to deal with that again, which is a problem for every American working here lacking Eu cittadinanza, as they call it.

Today on Italian radio they happen to be playing all the songs from Mary Poppins as it was done here in Italy. A spoonful of sugar translates to: Basta un poco di zucchero e la pillola va giù.

P.S. For more about my travels, see Travels of a Thermodynamicist.

… we don’t always sleep on planes.  When there’s no overnight flight, the privilege of paying inevitably buys an opportunity for brushing up on Asceticism.

Below are a few of  the 119 little inconveniences I’ve experienced as a Road Warrior. This category of The Travel Is Hell (TIH) Series covers hotels. Even in the chains, no two are alike:

1. Person in front of me in coach puts seat ALL way back, necessitating balancing Mac laptop against my sternum for three hours until plane change in Atlanta.

2. Trapped in hotel in northern Norway for four days, awaiting break in weather. No pool, no bike, no walkable street.

3. Hermetically sealed Cocoa Beach Holiday Inn room. Lubrication-starved A/C motor with bad case of fan misalignment scrapes on housing, locks out caressing zephyr off Atlantic. Blue-green fluorescent walkway lights shine menacingly through sealed plate-glass window.

4. Hotel blocks 800 numbers. Use direct dial; pay extortionist fees.

5. Share last hotel room at long-gone-to-seed Cambridge HoJo with total stranger who happened to be just behind me in 45-minute-long Logan United customer (lack of) service line during freak April blizzard.

6. FYI: Seat 5A on United Dulles to Logan commuter narrower than laptop. Earplugs mandatory.

7. Mercury vapor street lamp posted virtually inside quaint Olde Englishe hotel room.

8. Drag girlfriend to beautiful spot you finally got contract in. It rains entire week.

9. The third electronic key that won’t open hotel room door.

10. Luggage turns up. At 3:00 a.m. They phone from lobby in case anything in it is urgently needed before I wake up.

Namaste,

Rick Fleeter

author, Travels of a Thermodynamicist

(A Note to Readers: If you’ve had similarly unique and discomfiting travel experiences you’d like to share—and that have helped you toward a Buddhist appreciation of travel as inevitable suffering, from which you have returned a better, wiser person—feel free to share.)

… proving that the only thing worse than no accommodations for either is the opposite.

Below are a few more of  the 119 little inconveniences I’ve experienced as a Road Warrior. This category of The Travel Is Hell (TIH) Series covers the ever-elusive pursuit of happiness:

11. Hamburg’s 20m x 20m x 1.5m deep, warmish pool. No lane lines.

12. Continuous rolling waves as housewives and grandparents breast-stroke heads up—to keep hearing aids, makeup, and hair-dos dry.

13. Sixteen hours of 300-baud, verb-free English punctuated by refreshments consisting of straight Scotch and vacuum-packed plastic bags of dried dead things.

14. For one week, only Middle Eastern and Indian chant on all (3) radio stations.

15. Pathetic gratitude upon hearing “Bus Stop” (The Hollies, 1966) on AM taxi radio.

16. Locked inside chain link fence surrounding 50m outdoor pool in Darwin.

17. Pay phone just outside above chain link fence is just outside of arm’s reach. Next swim session shows up—90 minutes later.

18. Accidentally jump into unheated, and hence 12C (53°F), outdoor pool at 6:00 a.m.

19. Jakarta hotel gym: Climb service stairs from ground to tenth floor 100 times. Avoid squashing large bugs (corpses very messy).

Namaste,

Rick Fleeter

author, Travels of a Thermodynamicist

(A Note to Readers: If you’ve had similarly unique and discomfiting travel experiences you’d like to share—and that have helped you toward a Buddhist appreciation of travel as inevitable suffering, from which you have returned a better, wiser person—feel free to share.)

Buddhists accept that the brief interval in which our souls exist isolated within mortal biological vessel, must, by its nature, imply suffering, and life proceeds from that premise. This is why sensible Japanese eschew Buddhism for weddings, preferring Christian or, more often, Shinto ceremonies, but console themselves about the deaths of their loved ones by going to Buddhist temples. Given the assumption of inevitable suffering throughout life implies—it must be a relief to die.

As a fully licensed road warrior, a professional who carries a pocketful of frequent flier and car rental cards, I spent my company’s accumulated wealth as I saw fit (while realizing a lot of my expenses might not ever be reimbursed) when I was a CEO.  Now, still a road warrior, but traveling for business mostly on my own account, I depart a Shinto and come home a Buddhist.

A deep sense of relief infuses my body as it enters a cab to Dulles or Logan or Fiumicino airports for the beginning of its next immersion into life as an aerospace missionary. Cut from the umbilical of the clothes in my closet, the toilet articles in my bathroom, and the electronic gadgetry on my writing desk (which has no room for writing covered as it is by equipment, wires, and the power supplies and connectors necessary to make them all cooperate), I am my own universe.

I will survive in nature as a component within the air transportation system. I’ll sleep, not under the stars next to a whitewater river with rafts dragged on shore for the evening and embers slowly dying in a campfire, and not even in a building, but rather—inside giant machines, their turbine engines whining and their seat belt signs turning ever on and off, always accompanied by a Pavlovian bell that induces even a soundly sleeping soul to unconsciously check the long-ago-fastened metal buckles.

Life becomes simpler. Whatever I don’t have, I’ll live without or buy or improvise. This simple life has in fact itself been purchased by contracts that are large compared with my actual salary, or by invitations to be that special speaker who comes right after the keynote speaker, that old guy whom they bring in to say something intelligent. Combined with the nth round-the-world airline ticket, 40 nights in overpriced hotels, several weeks of rental cars, Shinkansen tickets, and elegant meals with inelegant people—within the sea of that banality, a pearl of divinity must exist. Somewhere.

Whatever prep work I didn’t do will get done in a plane, a taxi, or a waiting room. Two shirts and two pairs of pants yield only four possible sartorial combinations. Dressing simply, I’ll live among the natural elements and commune with their spirits, for instance the aroma of Jet-A (aka jet fuel fumes). I won’t be alone; Eurodiesel exhaust mixed with a 6:00 a.m. cold mist will waft through the Parisian streets and alleys and red-light district and path along the Seine with me. I’ll experience life with them, and through them.

When I try to get the defroster to work, the rented red Chevy Cavalier sprays tobacco ashes on me. But it doesn’t matter. Life wasn’t designed to be comfortable. It was designed to pique the senses and test the mind, and that is what nature will do for me and to me for the next one, two, three, four, five, six, ten weeks.

Buddhists love life. They love it through its discomforts, its disappointments, its raw bitterness. The life of the itinerant traveler, lugging laptop, palm top, batteries, cell phones, cigarette chargers, wall charger, thumb drives, brochures, business cards, ear plugs, wallet, passport, tickets, books, magazines, pens and pencils, Ray-Bans, and maybe an emergency ration of Diet 7-Up, all in the eternal blue JanSport backpack, wasn’t built for comfort, or convenience, or sleep maintenance, or great eating, or perfect biking and swimming opportunities.

That life deprives you of those things whenever it can. At home we do not give thanks for an electrical outlet. But the occasional rate AC plug next to an unoccupied seat near the gate of my next flight is the day’s gift, my friend, my soulmate. A yogurt stand with sugar-free walnut flavor is my kill. An empty middle seat is my bed at night.

The struggle against the entropy of the universe seen at an average sustained speed of 60 mph, 24/7, maintained for weeks, with the occasional brilliant victory addict me. Cable TV, which I don’t have at home (actually, I don’t have any TV at home), catalyzes the metamorphosis from Shinto to Buddhist: tuning in to CNN Sports Summary on Flamingo Hotel cable in Solna, just north of Stockholm, watching that one golfer on that one hole, where she sinks the 58-foot putt, is meaningless if you haven’t watched all her missed gimmes. The tie-breaking homer in the bottom of the 13th is just another sailing baseball if you haven’t lived the inning-after-inning-after-inning monotony of a 1:1 deadlock through a steady Pittsburgh drizzle.

That’s the lure of travel, not the friendship of the carpet upon which I sit because the power plug isn’t near a seat by my gate at the airport. The white-hot heat of success is thermodynamically powerful only when coupled with the cold dimness of its frustrations, a few, in fact 90119, of which I’ve collected.

A few preliminary examples: an 80°F, 25m, non-turbulent pool with marked but empty lanes that’ll be open for the next 75 minutes is an everyday occurrence for me in Rhode Island. But I score that victory in Colombo, or Graz, or Kuala Lumpur, and it’s an event worthy of a nine-dollar phone call home. Hey! I swam 60 beautiful minutes in a real pool! The girlfriend, or my dad, thinks: For this he flew 10,000 km and disappeared for a month?

I plan to convene a road veteran’s conference for the purpose of canonizing and agreeing on the numbering of these inconveniences that create the freezing, entropyless cosmic background of travel against which our daily lives are pitted. Then, when we brush past each other in the stairwell of the 16-story hotel whose elevators, all two of them, kicked a breaker and died during the 8:00 a.m. rush to check out, we won’t need to say any more than “18? 15 for me yesterday — in Sydney — can you believe it?” And we’ll nod and trudge ever downward.

In the next few weeks I’ll present all 119 of these little inconveniences. Perhaps you’ve encountered the same or similar ones. Maybe your red Chevy Cavalier was a Toyota something-or-other, or a fellow traveler was saturating your aisle with ear spray from open-style headphones in economy, not plus,instead of changing their kid’s diaper in public.

If you’ve had unique and discomfiting travel experiences you’d like to share—and that have helped you toward a Buddhist appreciation of travel as inevitable suffering, from which you have returned a better, wiser person—feel free to share.

Namaste!

Rick Fleeter

author, Travels of a Thermodynamicist

Whether philosophy matters is a subject of talk shows.  Most of us fear our kids will become philo majors and end up using their ivy league diplomas to sell shoes and work in fast food.  Philosophers will tell you it was philosophy that first realized the existence of atoms – an idea absconded with by chemistry, along with the idea of a gas, and by the way the idea of flotation in fluids.  A lot of physics is really philosophy, when you get to extrapolating back to the beginning of the universe and the question of parallel universes and a cyclic re-collapse and big bang.  Even arguing about whether human space is worth doing given its huge cost, its risks and its absence of science return, versus robotic exploration, is at its essence philosophical.  Is exploration exploration if the explorers are humans remotely controlling rovers on Mars.  Have “we” landed on mars already?

To kill an animal, but feel it is wrong to kill a human, you have to have a special philosophy that animals can be killed if humans (or other animals) want to, but humans can not be killed by humans nor by animals.   And why that would be considered correct and acceptable behavior – sanctioned killing of anything non-human, is philosophical.  It is a belief that animals, like the universe, like the earth, lack a soul.

We as a culture have decided, have codified in the Bible, that only humans have souls, experience love, loss, joy, sorrow, create art in all its forms, invent things, strive to improve ourselves.  After millions of years of evolution flies are still getting trapped in spider webs, but we people feel to have improved our lot.  Scientists can tell you that these emotions emanate from a thinking mechanism that is highly complex that you are not going to find in a glass of water.  But if you don’t think a glass of water is complex, how about the whole universe, which includes us – isn’t it by definition much more complex than us?  If complexity is the measure, a deer or a bear is just not complex enough?  They do some pretty amazing things those animals, like living without clothing or shelter through a rhode island winter on the food they can find, including reproducing themselves, winter, spring, summer and fall, brutal as the weather may be.  Just how do they do that, these not quite complex enough animals?  Instinct is our one word dismissal.

Ergo we are special and being special give ourselves the right to exploit everything else, and strip it of the soul.  Historically people have done this to other people – to Jews, to Blacks, to Serbs, to women, to the old, to the disabled.  But we now consider that wrong.  The line is officially drawn at our species.  Each member of which has the right to live, at least formally though we not do much to ensure that possibility is realized, whereas the earth and its other inhabitants are only justifiably preserved if we need them for our survival or pleasure.   Is it impossible our current state of enlightenment will never change?  It changed so much in the last 50 years.  A billion years from now that line will still be drawn around humans – but what will that mean in a billion years – we will have evolved, and so will the bears and the deer and the birds.  Who will be inside the line, who outside?

At least as a thought experiment (thank you Einsten for that degree of freedom) it’s worth imagining the crazy idea that in fact everything has a soul, or is a member of a system that has a soul.  OK, you might argue a pebble on the beach does not have a soul, and I’m with you on that one, but if you look at it as a component of the beach, which is a component of the sea-land interface, which is a critical element of the ocean, which accounts for a huge part of the earth’s surface area and biomass and without which the rest of us would not be here, what about that system?

What about the moods of the sea, the patterns of the clouds reflected in a salt pond at dawn in pink and grey and orange, what about the singing of birds on a background of waves reaching the pebbles and sand, what about the clarity of the air on a mountaintop above the clouds, the sad look in your dog’s eyes when she realizes you are leaving for work and faces a day alone in the house, even if you let her sleep on your nice new sofa?

Nature doesn’t create art, you can say staring up at the milky way, at the tiny crescent of the moon following the sun to the horizon on a juicy summer evening through a red atmosphere dripping with water showing off all three of its phases?  Native Americans believed the earth was their mother, giving them all they needed to survive, space, nourishment, warmth, shelter, and the animals and the trees were all parts of that great soul.  They would not harm one bit of her.  We don’t believe that, nor the similar beliefs of the Shinto, now similarly out of fashion in Japan, nor the aborigine, marginalized in Australia and living on their reservations.

Scientists mostly don’t believe in UFOs, and if they do, they are marginalized like the aborigine.  What about Einstein?  What about the speed of light?  If they are so smart, why are they not talking with us – why are they sneaking around our solar system?   Scientists have a science to explain why UFO believers are wrong and not scientists and humans have a philosophy of the soul to marginalize every other element of the entire universe.  Neat.  But right?

I have a philosophical belief that to paraphrase Arthur Clarke, when techies say something is possible, they are usually right, but when they say something is impossible, usually wrong.  He was told that geosynchronous communications satellites were impossible about 25 years before they were in common use carrying our television and radio broadcasts and our phone conversations all around the globe instantly.  Nobody called him back and said “hey guy, sorry about that”.

Einstein is still going to be The Man 100, 1,000, 10,000 years from now?  No loopholes in the speed of light thing?   I claim the least scientific people are those scientists who believe we now have it figured out.  How depressing.  Nobody is going to upset the Grand Order?  There is no use for young people except they can work in little microniches and figure out the energy balance of a cosmic jet or the lifetime of some exotic atom or particle, the thermal conductivity of helium-neon mixtures.  But nobody is ever going to change physics, UFOs are impossible, the world and its limits as we know them will never change.  After a few billion years, we have thought seriously about these things for a couple hundred years and now we can consider the case closed and everything worth knowing is known then.  That’s not comforting to me.  We used to think Newton had mechanics worked out… now we have lasers and semiconductors and curved space time and GPS satellites with clocks corrected for relativistic effects and Einstein, so we are done.

And philosophically we will never change our minds about whether that system which accompanies our world with clouds and waves and rain and plants and birds and the beauty of every day, which evolved everything including us, is not complex enough to have what we have, but instead is merely a sort of chemistry experiment in a large test tube,  unthinking, cold and soul less.   Soul can only be in humans, and much as a deer or a cow may suffer seeing its young child taken from it and killed, that is just the illusion of a soul because only humans are licensed to have them.  Please ignore that man behind the curtain, for I am the Wizard of Oz.

The end of life is the end, time is irreversible – even Einstein did not believe that.  He believed time was a dimension just like the other three, but we so far lacked the ability to traverse it freely at any speed in any direction.  Those lost to us are according to the cold sleek science of 2011 gone forever.  That idea is never going to change either?  The past is gone, the future is the future, all that exists is the present.  But the present is infinitely small.  It leaves very little room for those souls we claim we have.

Descartes advised hedging on the side of belief, since there’s little downside.  If we act  like all these things are soul less and abuse them for our ends, what if it turns out we were wrong.  We can claim we didn’t get the memo?   Our own courts say ignorance of the law is no defense.  Walking softly you risk the rest of humans thinking you an idiot, a pacifist, a child, naïve, burdensome.  The alternative is to act in ways most people will find acceptable.  And what got learned and discovered, what horizons were opened – the idea of the atom,the idea of a spherical earth, the idea of the earth orbiting the sun, the idea of evolution instead of creation, the idea of microorganisms, of extremophyles, geosynchronous satellites, microsatellites, cell phones, personal computers, accepting all the preconceptions and philosophies that ensure you won’t be exiled like the aborigine?

If enough of us become exiles, the exilers will one day find themselves the exiled.  That’s my philosophy.

Space is empty, they told us, hence black and cold, but with the advantage one can travel through it at incredible speed – no air resistance, nothing to bump into, no gravity.  A very modern philosophy – space was useful, fast, sleek, efficient, but cold and soul less.

Considering that we have plenty of leaves available for close examination, and we swim inside the ocean of space, how to explain how completely wrong we were about them?  And wrong in ways that reflect so neatly our view of the world – the obligation since expulsion from Eden to cover ourselves so long as we live, and that to become modern we shed the baggage of warmth, love and soul so that we can travel light and fast and everywhere instantly.  Photons travel at the speed of light and they never age.  Unless they slow down, exit the vacuum and travel outside it (in air or water) or encounter an absorbing atom, they are immortal.  I want that.

But what I hope is we now have leaves right – green chlorophyl is useless in winter’s weak sunlight, better to build other chemicals to protect the plant during its hibernation, chemicals that are brown, orange, red, not our stereotypical color-of-life green.  Before their death, leaves provide something else, not life, not nourishment, they have a final critical role in the survival of the plant beyond death.  in death they ensure the life of the whole world.

Faced with my own vacuum, I filled it, unable to live up to that ‘60s sleek ideal of aluminum jets and V8s, of cold efficient vacuum.  With energy – writing, racing, commuting between my two countries 6 times a year, teaching, studying Italian, even breaking bones is a sort of welcome distraction.  Like priming a pump with water, pain pushes pain away.  And space?  Apparently also the vacuum doesn’t love a vacuum.  It fills itself with energy, with massless particles rushing around at the speed of light, with pulsating electromagnetic fields.  People talk about harnessing the energy of the vacuum.  Maybe we’ll never make gold from that lead, but lead is not nothing.  There’s a lot less of that vacuum than we thought – all of a sudden 90%, maybe 95% of the entire universe, that thing we are immersed in and which surrounds us all our lives and we see when we stare up and when we look down, that we call space implying that it is empty space, has 20 times more stuff in it than we thought a few years ago – mostly dark matter and invisible energy.

If it works for the cosmos, it works for me.  A vacuum is the absence of everything.  I imagine, still when I stare up at the black winter Rhode Island sky with its diffuse dust of stars punctuating the expanse of apparent nothingness, Nancy existing among that black cold vast emptiness.   The idea scares me and makes my psyche shiver in synch with my freezing body.  I want to be surrounded by the warm wet atmosphere of the earth, with warm sunshine, wind, salt air, sounds of birds and cars and people.  Summertime at the beach.  That she is now a part of this infinitude of absolute zero is impossible to reconcile.

Now we know, and I hope we’re right this time: that imposing infinity of space is vulnerable.  Because a vacuum is the absence of everything, the tiniest amount of energy fills it, the efforts even of one person fills infinity and destroys that vacuum.

The idea is not new – energy and dark matter did the heavy lifting for the cosmos, leaving me to fill my own personal vacuum with my own personal energy.  Three years later, summoning energy, launching myself into the world to fill my vacuum has become a habit.  Is our role to repair the world, Tikkun olam?  That’s what religious school taught me, when the lack-of-religion school taught me that colored leaves lacked chlorophyl and space was empty.  Or is the business of life to fill vacuums with energy?

We don’t mostly die of teeth, except of Boredom.  To make a long story short, tomorrow is the last of 5 appointments to replace the 50 year old fillings with cool new techie ones that are really beautiful and work better (who knew the old ones worked worse) and they say will outlive me (there’s something to think about – the party my teeth will have once the king is dead!  Oh, they’ll miss me when I’m gone…).  Plus two trips to the oral surgeon for a problem on my soft tissue much like on my head and probably from the same crash two years ago – that they found during the other 5 appointments (or was it 6 including one in Rome)…  First was yesterday.   This really doesn’t end.  It occurs that in the world with the best transportation ever known to humankind, we spend more time traveling than the ancients would have dreamed of.  Two hours commuting per day in the car, 7 hours each way to LA, a total of 15 to get from home version RI to home V.Rome.  And with the best medical care ever, more time in doctor’s offices.  But, our teeth are immortal!

Which brings me to TV.  That clever graph of what humans can do at each age with its eery symmetry (I did not forward to friends – too depressing) omitted one key human activity achieved at a very early age and maintained to the absolute bitter end if not beyond (plenty of it going on at shiva sitting occasions).  According to Radio Italia Uno, after sleeping and working, what humans of the West (them and us) do most is watch TV.  God that is depressing.  What did your boss do with his heartbeats while you were working for his teeth, little high tech life after death fillings?  Oh, he watched TV.   The Bible talks about (on pesach) that god cried when his creations, the Egyptians were tortured by the plagues and killed by them and by the Red Sea.  Won’t he cry that all we do is eat sleep and watch TV?    This fantastic medical infrastructure that keeps us alive, this fantastic tech infrastructure that transports us around the world allows us to spend our lives, extended and comfortable as they are, watching TV.

Back to the God and Travel fronts, this weekend is Easter, the biggest religious weekend of the year in Italy, and unlike idiot christmas with a habit of falling on a Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday, Easter is reliably Sunday (though not reliably which) and the Monday after is a full national holiday in Italy where Friday isn’t (I thought Catholicism had this hierarchical structure with Pope at top  to avoid ending up like us Jews where everybody has a different idea what the religion is, but apparently not?).  It is such a big deal it changes (and not for the better) even the hiking which is all easy family-friendly hikes (did I ever make a claim to family friendliness?) to mountain chapels where the wonders of the church’s omnipresence can be adequately amazing to all.  Which the girlfriend,  confirmed fallen (she would say risen) but is it neutral to say non catholic, cannot handle both because easy hikes with families rates with dental appointments, and there is the religious overtone.  Not to say motive and theme.

So I called Jackie, Travel Agent Par Exc. who was home waiting for the plumber and hence reached Julia, but with same title, and said “do they have  last minute tickets, like on Broadway?” and she said “in your dreams rick, but i’ll check” and then she called back and said that British, after a series of strikes, had an easter weekend full of empty planes and sales, and I got a round trip for the low low price of $800.  OK, not to brag, you’re thinking?  But my ticket bought months in advance for May (granted non-stop) is $1240.  Easter weekend was $1450.  So by female shopping logic, I didn’t spend $800, I saved $650.   Do I have that math right?  My dad says I should stick to stock timing and not gamble on those airlines.  It is true that I have never slept on the floor thanks to a stock…

Off to grading and then what passes for work – 8 straight hours with  students.   And they say teaching keeps you young?

- (in case you wondered why they keep me locked up in an isolated and largely undisclosed location somewhere in rural Rhode Island)