A speculative mind

  I never expected existentialism to be so funny. Service Model by Adrian Tchaikovsky is about a robot’s search for meaning. Or maybe it is about a robot who doesn’t know he is searching for meaning, but he is nonetheless. He also doesn’t know he is going on a quest, but he is as sure as if his name were Bilbo. His name is not Bilbo. His name is Uncharles (long story). Uncharles is a is a robot valet. A gentleman’s gentleman (or rather a gentleman’s gentlerobot). The human society is crumbling and does not have much need for valets anymore. But Uncharles only knows what his programming is telling him, and that is that he needs to serve, and specifically to serve humans. That is going to be rather difficult as there aren’t many humans left alive in this broken world. Being a robot, he has to follow his instructions, his task list. If those tasks are now impossible to do now, then he has to get creative about fulfilling his tasks. The first task is to find out what is wrong wi...

  William of Occam or Ockham was a 14 th Century philosopher and theologian. He is credited with coming up with a concept which has come to be known as “Occam’s razor.” Simply put, Occam’s razor states that when you are trying to find an explanation to something you observe, the simplest explanation is usually the correct one. For example: you walk into a room that is supposed to have a dog and a bird in it. The dog is there, but not the bird, though pasted to the dog’s mouth are some bloody feathers. Now, you could come up with all kinds of theories about what happened to the bird. Matter displacement, some spy came in and stole the bird, you were lied to about the bird in the first place, or maybe it is the first case of an object turning invisible. But the simplest explanation (the dog ate the bird) is the most likely to be correct. Scientists and mathematicians use Occam’s razor as part of their basic guidelines (No, I am not sure where the "razor" part comes from) . ...

  Lucid dreaming is where a dreaming person is aware that they are dreaming, and may be able to influence the direction of the dream. (Cue Silent Lucidity by Queensryche) In the course of my life, I have not had many lucid dreams. Most of them were very minor affairs when I sort of had the impression that I was dreaming right before I woke up. But one time –just once-- I had a spectacularly successful lucid dream. I was very young, maybe four or five years old. Intermittently, I had been having a nightmare where a skeleton man was chasing me. It was terrifying. I would be in some fantasy or other and then this skeleton would appear. The hideous toothy grin pointed at me. My heart would race. I would run and scream. Afraid to look back because the skeleton man might be gaining on me. Any moment I would feel his cold skeleton fingers touching the back of my throat. Then I would wake up, panting, with my heart racing. My dark room with shadow upon shadow concealing who knew what, d...

  I was rather alone. I had just travelled across the country to eastern Idaho to go to college. I had been given a partial track scholarship, so I knew the track coach (sort of), but I knew no one else in the city. My parents had helped me move into an apartment and had left to return to the Oregon Coast. I was alone. But I had my music. My recently acquired Pat Benatar album kept me company. Pat, And Tom Petty, and Pink Floyd, they were all my friends and helped me while away the time and made me forget that I was alone. Soon I would start attending classes, start getting together with my fellow track team members, and start my part-time job in the cafeteria, but until then, the hours were empty. I had scarcely been there a day, my stereo blasting away, when I heard a knock at the door. It was a pretty, dark-haired woman with a kind smile. She explained that she lived directly upstairs and the previous tenants had been known to play their music at all hours of the night, and co...

  What was it like to grow up as a child in the 90s? How about the 1940’s? Thinking about a child growing up in each different decade, conjures up images in my mind. But that is all they are: images. I was a child in the 1960’s. I can tell you what it felt like to be growing up in the 60’s and 70’s, but what it felt like to me is not what the history books remember. History will tell you the 60’s was about the Viet Nam War, civil rights, and the space race. The 70’s was Disco and Watergate. I remember being aware of all of those things, but to me this era was about finding time to play with my friends, something I probably share with a child of any decade. It was about navigating the social intricacies of school.   It was about the Beatles, Three Dog Night, The Moody Blues, The Animals, Jefferson Airplane. It was Bullwinkle, the Wonderful World of Color, and Ed Sullivan. There are things that a kid pays attention to that the grown-ups don’t. Then there are things the adults ...

  I enjoy doing community theater, but with Covid and other life events, it has been five years since I have been on stage. That is about to change as I am in a production of The Tempest in October. I love Shakespeare, so it was a good one with which to get back on the train. But I had some niggling concerns going in. It has been five years, and I am five years older. Would my older brain still be able to memorize lines as easily as I had in the past? Was my voice up to the challenge of projecting on stage? The memorization has gone okay, but the voice has been an issue. The voice must be trained. Like an athlete that trains their body for a sport, the voice needs practice. The muscles have to get in shape, in particular, the muscles of the diaphragm, which are not used as much in normal speech. My director keeps telling me, “louder” and he is right. My voice is not quite there yet, but it is getting there. The character I play is Gonzalo, and I have a confession to make. Despit...