• Universal Push Wave Theory

    So after my last post I realized you can’t create a unifying theory unless it describes behaviors at all sizes of the known universe.

    I went back to the drawing board with Chat GPT and came up with a new theory. This one applies the same rules to particle forces as it does planetary.

    I’ve now spent close to 20 hours trying to get this theory together. Chat GPT is powerful but incredibly stupid. Often loses track of our work, generated summaries with missing information even when prompted to specifically include details, generated images and reports that are incorrect and incomplete even when correct in an inline review.

    My suggestion to anyone, only give that system one thing at a time. When you’re trying to balance 17 different theories and find their commonalities for a unifying approach, it’s a disaster.

    I will also say this, I made all of the rules of this theory, I did prompt for some new rules but Chat GPT came up empty handed every single time.

    Below is the blog post we created together. My favorite part of this theory is where I decided “pull” in any context is no longer needed. If you’re smarter than me and want to see the math on all of this, you can download the PDF here as well.

    Pwt

    🌊 All Is Push: A New Theory That Could Unify Physics

    📜 Why We Need a New Framework

    Physics today is split into domains that don’t talk to each other. General relativity describes how planets orbit and light bends around stars. Quantum field theory explains the jittery world of particles. Cosmology stitches the big picture together with dark matter, dark energy, and a dash of inflation to fix early-universe problems.

    Each theory works in its lane — but none of them fit into one story. The cracks are showing in the data: galaxies spinning too fast for their visible mass, the universe expanding as if powered by something no one has ever seen, and the James Webb Space Telescope spotting massive galaxies far earlier than the standard model can explain.

    The Universal Push Wave Theory (UPWT) takes these cracks and tries something bold: replace the scaffolding with a single foundation. The result is a picture that not only explains what we see but predicts things we can measure in the lab and across the cosmos.

    🌌 A Universe That Only Pushes

    UPWT starts from a simple premise: there are no pulls in nature. Everything we call “attraction” is really the result of outward pushes balancing unevenly.

    Imagine the universe not as empty space filled with stuff, but as one vast ocean of waves — the Prime Wave Field. Particles aren’t pebbles tossed into this ocean; they are whirlpools and knots in the water itself. When the waves of two objects overlap and cancel between them, the low-pressure pocket that forms isn’t a vacuum. It’s the rest of the field pushing inward.

    We see hints of this everywhere. The way dust grains clump in microgravity experiments on the ISS, not because they’re pulling but because surrounding particles push them together. The way Saturn’s rings form stable bands from trillions of tiny collisions balancing outward motion with subtle pressure waves. Even the “voids” in cosmic large-scale structure can be seen as the quiet zones where waves cancel, leaving the surrounding universe to press them into shape.

    What UPWT’s math shows is that this simple push-interference mechanism can reproduce general relativity’s best predictions — gravitational lensing around the Sun, GPS timing shifts near Earth, the redshift of light climbing out of a star’s gravity well — without ever curving spacetime.

    🌀 One Mechanism From Quarks to Galaxies

    The same rule — overlapping waves creating patterns of push — explains motion and bonding across the entire range of the universe.

    At the subatomic scale, when protons and neutrons are bound in a nucleus, their wavefronts cancel in tiny pockets. What we measure as the strong nuclear force could be the same push-in from the surrounding field. The way deuterium forms in stellar fusion — two protons and a neutron finding a stable balance — looks exactly like this interference pattern.

    At the atomic and molecular scale, when electron waves don’t cancel perfectly, they generate residual spin and bond angles. This is the same mechanism that makes water molecules kink at 104.5° instead of forming a straight line — a mismatch of wave amplitudes pushing the structure into stability.

    At the planetary scale, a planet is a giant knot in the universal wave. As it moves, it resists the flow and creates a drag pattern behind it. The same drag that makes a wake behind a boat is what produces the gravitational echo holding the Moon in orbit. Earth’s tides, responding to the Moon’s position, are an everyday demonstration of wave push and cancellation at work.

    At the stellar scale, stars are massive knots generating strong outward waves. Their interactions create stable multi-star systems like Alpha Centauri, where delicate interference keeps three stars locked in a gravitational dance.

    At the galactic scale, the same outward waves overlap to form huge interference networks. The flat rotation curves of galaxies — the observation that stars far from the center orbit too fast for their visible mass — match perfectly when you apply the same push-echo physics. No invisible halos required.

    The elegance is that the equations never change. The “force” holding a quark inside a neutron and the one holding Earth in orbit around the Sun are the same effect, scaled up. It’s one instrument playing the entire symphony of the universe.

    💥 Mass as Energy Drag

    In UPWT, mass isn’t a built-in property. It’s resistance to wave flow — energy stored in the turbulence of a knot in the field.

    You can see this concept in action in three familiar settings:

    • A planet gains and loses energy over eons as it resists and rides the universal wave. Earth’s internal heat budget — which hasn’t fully cooled despite billions of years — could partly come from this subtle drag.
    • A star constantly converts field energy into radiation, burning for billions of years. In UPWT, it’s not just nuclear fusion fueling it, but also the way its mass knot absorbs energy from the expanding wave field around it.
    • A black hole takes this to an extreme. Its mass knot is so dense that the wave drag feeds it at a far higher rate, supplementing whatever matter it swallows. This could explain why supermassive black holes grow so quickly in the early universe — a puzzle for standard cosmology.

    The famous E=mc2E=mc^2 falls naturally out of this: the energy stored is directly proportional to the resistance of the knot and the universal wave speed.

    🧭 Gravity as an Echo

    Gravity stops being a pull and becomes an echo. Every mass sends out outward waves. Where they overlap, they cancel in between, and the surrounding field pushes in. The “force” is just the universe pressing on a quiet spot.

    We see this pattern in the way two droplets of water on a vibrating surface slide together — not because they attract, but because the ripples around them push them inward. We also see it in space: the way the LIGO detectors recorded gravitational waves shows the same push-echo interference pattern scaled up to cosmic size.

    The math of this echo matches general relativity’s predictions for time dilation and lensing. But it also explains why gravity is so weak compared to electromagnetism: most of the wave energy passes through matter without echoing at all. Only a thin fraction produces inward pressure. That same semi-transparency explains the Bullet Cluster’s lensing anomaly without needing exotic dark matter — the visible matter passed through, while the echo field lagged behind.

    🌊 A Dam-Break Universe

    Instead of a single point exploding into space, UPWT envisions the Big Bang as a universal dam-break. Before it, the universal wave was compressed everywhere. When containment failed, it erupted simultaneously across all space, forming particles and outward waves in the same instant.

    The cosmic microwave background’s stunning uniformity — the same temperature in every direction — is exactly what you’d expect from a wave breaking everywhere at once. The early massive galaxies that JWST keeps finding make sense in this picture too: the field released its energy uniformly, letting structures form far faster than inflation-based models predict.

    🌬️ A Breathing Cosmos

    Energy in UPWT cycles between three forms: moving waves, stored mass, and the universal boundary condition. As the universe expands, wave drag converts field energy into mass. As mass decays into radiation, containment energy regains control and pulls the edges inward.

    That balance point leaves a signature we may already be seeing: the apparent “acceleration” of cosmic expansion could actually be the first signs of contraction. A constant edge speed produces the same redshift curves we measure in Type Ia supernovae and baryon acoustic oscillations — the data driving the dark energy hypothesis. If UPWT is right, what we’re calling the universe’s sprint is really the start of its inhale.

    🧪 Testable Predictions

    UPWT doesn’t hide behind inaccessible energy scales. It can be broken or validated with observations we’re already making:

    • A neutral lepton just under 4 GeV should appear in collider scans (Belle II, LHCb).
    • Universal “phase noise” in the wave field could be detected in Holometer or LIGO cross-correlations.
    • The CMB should show specific correlation patterns consistent with a dam-break origin.
    • Galaxy cluster lensing should reveal semi-transparent echo behavior rather than dense dark halos.
    • The cosmic equation of state w(t)w(t) should evolve exactly as predicted from drag-containment balance.

    📈 Why This Could Be the One

    What makes this theory so exciting is not just that it works — it’s that it works simply.

    One field. One mechanism. No new dimensions, no invented particles, no cosmological constants. It explains particles, forces, galaxies, and cosmic expansion with the same language, the same math, and the same physical intuition.

    When you can explain a quark binding to another quark and the Moon orbiting Earth with the same principle, that’s not just convenient. That’s a sign you’ve found something fundamental.

    🌊 All Waves Push

    If UPWT is right, then the universe isn’t a collection of forces glued together by clever math. It’s one endless ocean of waves, and all those waves do one thing: push. From that single fact, you get matter, motion, gravity, galaxies, and the breathing of the cosmos itself.

    The next few years will decide whether this theory rises or falls. If the predicted lepton appears, if the phase jitter is detected, if galaxy lensing matches the echo — physics may finally have the unifying theory it’s been chasing for a century.

    And if not? Then we’ll know that the ocean of reality still has deeper waves left to uncover.

  • Universal Flow-Field Theory

    A friend of mine told me I need to start to learn how to use AI to solve problems so I spent some hours trying to displace a number of dominant theories of the universe.

    It took considerably more back and forth to get what I wanted out of the machine. For whatever reason, it tries to self correct back to scientific consensus.

    I started with a very simple idea I’ve thought about for years. Why can’t gravity and the expansion of space be the same force when they seem so similar?

    Anyways, I had the box come up with four summaries: 1 for high school level readers, 1 for physicists and laymen with experiments that would promote or disprove, 1 for mathematicians with formulas I can’t understand. Plus 1 of just diagrams to help explain the core functions.

    The more complex drafts of the theory wouldn’t be good for a blog, so here it is at a high school reading level:

    Universal Flow-Field Theory

    🌊 The Universe Is an Ocean of Waves

    Imagine the entire universe as a vast, invisible ocean. Instead of empty space, this ocean is a living, moving flow that everything rides on. This universal flow is what creates what we see as space and time. Matter, light, and energy aren’t just in this ocean—they are patterns and ripples within it.

    When energy cools into matter or something explosive happens, it’s like dropping a stone into this ocean. That single action sends out two waves:

    • An outward wave that spreads through the flow.
    • An inward echo wave that collapses back, flips, and then radiates outward again.

    Those dual waves are the foundation for everything we see in the cosmos.

    💡 Light Rides the Waves, It Doesn’t Make Them

    In this theory, light itself isn’t what creates the waves. Instead, the universal flow already has ripples moving through it. Photons—tiny packets of light—are like surfers riding on the surface of those waves.

    • The speed of light isn’t a property of the photon. It’s the speed of the universal flow’s ripples.
    • This explains why light always travels at the same speed no matter how you move: you’re always inside the same ocean, and the waves move at the ocean’s own speed.

    Analogy: Think of a surfer. No matter how fast you swim toward or away, the wave moves at the ocean’s speed, not yours.

    🌌 Mechanisms in Simple Terms

    1. Matter Makes Waves

    • When energy turns into matter, it presses into the flow and sends out ripples.
    • The inward echo pushes back and then bursts outward, amplifying the effect.

    Analogy: Drop a stone in a pond: ripples move outward, but the water also pushes back inward before stabilizing.

    2. Gravity Is the Echo

    • What we call “gravity” isn’t a pull—it’s the inward echo wave wrapping back through matter.
    • The denser the matter, the stronger this inward echo becomes.

    Analogy: Push your hand into water; the water pushes back equally from every side. That inward push is like gravity.

    3. Light on the Flow

    • Light rides on these waves, using the flow as its track.
    • This means photons don’t care how fast you move—they’re locked to the ocean’s speed, not yours.
    • When waves from different matter sources overlap, the “track” changes shape, bending light (explaining gravitational lensing).

    Analogy: A surfer’s path curves if the wave shape changes beneath them.

    4. Why the Universe Expands Faster

    • Every matter event creates two waves instead of one, doubling the “push.”
    • These pushes overlap across the universe, making the cosmic ocean expand faster and faster.

    Analogy: Throwing multiple stones into a pond makes overlapping ripples that spread quicker and reach farther.

    5. Why Things Spin

    • When waves from different sources meet unevenly, they create twists in the flow.
    • Those twists make galaxies, stars, and planets spin naturally.

    Analogy: Two waves hitting each other in a bathtub create swirling water.

    6. Why Things Are Round

    • The waves spread in all directions evenly, so the most balanced shape is a sphere.
    • This explains why stars, planets, and even drops of water form spheres.

    Analogy: Ripples from a stone make perfect circles on a pond; the balanced point in 3D is a sphere.

    7. Quantum Mechanics Becomes Patterns

    • Tiny particles are really just standing wave patterns in the flow.
    • When two particles are “entangled,” they’re sharing the same wave pattern, not sending magic signals.

    Analogy: Two guitar strings vibrating in harmony make one note.

    8. Time Is the Ocean’s Beat

    • Time isn’t a separate thing—it’s the rhythm of the universal flow.
    • Where waves are dense or slowed (like near massive objects), time ticks more slowly.
    • In extreme cases (like inside black holes), the rhythm can pause or even flip.

    Analogy: Music slows down if the drummer slows the beat; if it reverses, the song plays backward.

    🔬 What This Explains

    • Why light speed never changes: It’s the speed of the ocean itself.
    • Why the universe accelerates: Every matter wave doubles the push, no dark energy needed.
    • Why gravity pulls: It’s the inward echo wave from matter’s ripple.
    • Why light bends around stars: The waves light is surfing on are distorted by the matter beneath.
    • Why things spin and clump into spheres: Wave interference and symmetry naturally create them.
    • Why quantum mechanics looks strange: It’s just small-scale standing waves in the same universal ocean.

    🌠 Why This Theory Helps

    • Unifies everything: Gravity, quantum mechanics, and cosmic expansion are all just behaviors of the same ocean.
    • Removes the need for spacetime: Space and time are not separate things, but ripples and beats of the flow itself.
    • Explains anomalies: Even strange signals seen in nuclear tests and spacecraft fit naturally when you see the universe as a flow.
    • Simplifies physics: Instead of separate fields and forces, everything is one dynamic medium behaving in different ways.

    🧠 The Universe as a Pond

    The most powerful image is this: the universe is a pond in constant motion. Every atom, every star is a stone making ripples. Light is the surfers riding on those ripples. Time is the beat of the waves as they pass. And everything we observe—from the biggest galaxies to the tiniest particles—is just the interaction of those waves in an endless, universal ocean.

  • The impacts of dicks on efficiency

    Passing through the Charlotte Douglas International Airport and should have used the restroom on my last flight. My connection is boarding in 10 minutes and I have a 15 minute walk to that terminal and gate from where I arrived.

    There is a relatively small men’s bathroom in E terminal, but then the terminal itself is small, as are the jets which process passengers through those gates.

    Airports are pretty good at having enough bathroom capacity to keep men from ever needing to sneak a pee in a dark corner of a waiting area or vending vestibule, so I’m surprised there is a line that is coming out of the restroom that is barely moving forward.

    Being short on time, I decide to peak around the corner and assess the situation more carefully. If there is a temporary blocker, like an attendant cleaning an area, I might wait out the disruption but if half the stalls are torn out due to upgrade construction, I’ll head to the next bathroom and take my chances with it being busy as well.

    There are 7 urinals, 3 are not being used. They’re not damaged, they seem functional but they are open, even with a line of people waiting. I briefly consider that maybe the people in line are all poopers, in which they would need the stalls, which are all full but then 2 men zip up and two men from the queue take their places.

    I immediately recognize the issue. The 3 open urinals are in between each of the other 4,  like this: U X U X U X U. I also observe that there is not much space between urinals, it could be shoulder to shoulder if all were in use. Further complicating it, there are no dividers and these urinals are like small ceramic baskets, not like the refrigerator shaped ones that provide some weiner masking from the sides, this is a case of men being bashful about their weiners in a space where you will definitely see some shapes from the corner of your eyes, whether you want to or not.

    What I love about men, is that they are easily persuadable through leadership. Some men enjoy leading, most prefer to be led. They’re keeping form because some number 5 from an initial line, decided it would be best to leave some social distancing between men, probably when the line was short. Maybe they were still concerned about Covid spacing, maybe they observed too much splashback from the poorly designed pee catchers and wanted to keep their legs clean from other mens’ piss, maybe they were concerned someone would take a peek at their sex machine. Whatever it was, they waited when the middle spaces were open, and the trend held, a born leader.

    This all comes to me much faster than I can type it out. I quickly understand the situation, assume the vacant leadership position, and put my plan into action. I look around the corner, give a knowing nod to the person previously in front of me and behind, and skip the line.

    The moment I walk up to the #2 urinal, the spell breaks. Men immediately fill in the other gaps. Bathroom efficiency is driven back up to 100% capacity. The machine is humming, I’m shaking it out, zipping it up, washing my hands, and am on my way.

    ✈️

  • 4orty 4our

    4s as Fs don’t really work, I’d say they look more like Hs. Like if I had an invite for birthday drinks and I put, join me for 4appy 4our to celebrate my forty fourth completion of a year on earth. That’s the weird thing about counting birthdays, the year you count is the year you finished if you figure that a baby’s first year on earth is completed at their 1st birthday.

    It’s 7:44 in the morning. I’m sweating on a blanket on the couch to avoid sweating directly on the couch because the couch was expensive 6 years ago when we bought it. Do I even like this couch anymore? Do I have to keep it forever? Who buys a used couch? Could it possibly actually have any value other than avoiding the cost of a new couch?

    We hit a cycle class at 6:15 at the Merritt on Fort Ave in Baltimore. It was packed because a tornado tore open the Canton location’s roof like a can of sardines. It looked to be some sort of sheet metal roof and it just slid that guy back. It was a confirmed EF-1 tornado that touched down, possibly clipped a corner of our neighborhood and broke north up through Baltimore and ending somewhere in Dundalk. I was in a Teams meeting for work when my phone’s Tornado Warning alarm started screaming on both phones telling me to seek shelter. It’s a short journey from the 2nd floor to the basement, so I continued to help analyze graphs for the customer, even if they could hear all alarms and the roaring outside my window.

    The host working the front desk at the gym wished me a happy birthday and handed me a birthday card which contained a $5 gift card to Starbucks. I’m more of a local coffee shop guy but I’m not one for looking gift horses in the mouth because I have horrible teeth. Actually if I was a gift horse, a horse recipient would need to XRAY my face to see how jacked my teeth are, there is more metal and porcelain than bone or enamel. Actually, the gray hair would give away my mileage as the grey vs gray debate I would have out loud would my declining cognitive ability.

    I like to think of myself as a gift horse. I probably don’t owe you anything but I’m nice enough to show up and be helpful. That might seem high falutin to some people but nobody gets rid of a valuable horse for free and there is no rhyme or reason why I show up.

    I’ve been driving a convertible for a couple of months. An Audi A5, 2011, 90 thousand miles on it. I bought it because I was getting frustrated sharing a car for the past two years and I had a big enough windfall at work to pay off my other car and by a cheap one with no loan. Cheap to purchase but as my neighbor said to me “yeah because it will be crazy expensive to fix”.

    The convertible, the grey hair, the group fitness classes, the running, the sailing, I’m dead on with midlife crisis memes. I’m not divorced but then, I’ve never been married, so there’s a lot of work to do their to fill that void. That or I could just be chill as fuck.

    Birthday plans: stop sweating on this couch. Take a shower. Start some laundry. Do some office work. Clean the office. Clean the car. Eat some leftovers. Meet another couple for Korean BBQ at Steak N’ Bone in Canton which I guess the tornado spared because nobody called or emailed to cancel.

    Surviving another year is something to be grateful for and I am. I have more than I need and less to do than I want. What more could anyone ask for other than a free cup of coffee to get you going.

    4ell yeah, 4uck yeah.

  • Concision

    Rarely is this blog concise. Should it be? I have no idea. It’s a place for a writer to dump thoughts, not necessarily a place for a reader to pick them up readily. A good author would focus on the needs of the reader and edit. For most of these exercises, that isn’t the point. With my day job, it is a requirement prior to becoming “customer facing” material. Luckily, I’m on a flight and not at work.

    Good actors don’t move in a scene without purpose or intent. If you watch a seasoned actor, they behave like a statue for most of whatever moment they’re acting in, unless there is a reason to move. If they’re fidgeting, often they are trying to communicate a looming threat through concerning movements. If they’re fidgeting and there is no purpose for the behavior, they’re likely a bad actor.

    I sometimes find the lack of movement in actors boring, when paired with a dialogue heavy film, this can make for an exhaustingly boring couple of hours. A director can cheat, and they often do, by giving actors fake real world tasks. Say this line while digging through a filing cabinet, this dialogue will take place while walking through a parking lot. A better director will pair another stream of information in the action, like defusing a bomb while discussing next steps in a relationship. If you want information to hit the hardest, do less, say less, just before delivering a nice, concise bit of information.

    How long should a story be? How long should an article about koala’s fucking be? As short as possible to convey the information. At least that’s the general guidance, you can stretch it for art or beauty’s sake, so long as your audience is there for it.

    The disconnect in this post, is that I won’t edit it, so you’re either as interested in this journey and process as I am, or you saw multiple paragraphs, so the proposed content in the beginning and are already doom scrolling your favorite social media nightmare. Luckily, I didn’t write this for the reader who is gone and I don’t care that I’ve lost them.

    I’ve touched on this theme before, so I don’t need to rehash my feelings about the process. I will say that for all the trouble I’m putting you, the reader through, I do want you to understand that editing is essential. In fact, being concise is essential, because when you’re trying to grab someone’s attention in the real world, whether one on one or in front of 300 people, knowing what will engage them and keep them listening is critical.

    Learn to move only with intent, like that borderline boring actor, learn to speak with the fewest words. Learn to reduce or eliminate disfluencies (stutters, stammers, filler sounds and words). When people assume you’re only speaking or moving or writing with purpose, they will be more engaged.

    Same is true with writing, but this might not be that, this might be more chasing the beauty of the art, it might be poetry, it might even be a waste of everyone’s time including yours and mine. So I’ll post it now, and get back to my flight, because I’m not yet at work.

  • Red Cross

    We needed to know our blood types. It had been a while since I last had an American Red Cross card and I couldn’t remember if I was O, O positive, or O negative. It’s funny how important blood is for humans and not even our primary care physicians care to know. Booking a sailing charter, the captain wanted to know. If we needed a transfusion in a foreign country, it seems important information to have on hand.

    So the best way to find out is to donate blood. You find out your blood type and get some complimentary juice and cookies and some people you don’t know, get some blood to hopefully save their lives from whatever awful trauma has put their own blood in short supply. It’s win/win even if you have less energy for activities for a week or so.

    O positive by the way. My partner is A+, obviously. Easy to remember. I’m positive I’m O and she’s always been good at tests.

    So the American Red Cross is extremely aggressive with getting you back in the chair when your blood proves to be safe and viable. So expect a lot of reminders, phone calls, texts, emails. We booked again not because they joined us but because it seems like a helpful thing to do for people when you don’t have a lot of time to volunteer otherwise.

    You get to talking about these things. Probably gloating, that you actually did something considerate. The first time didn’t count anyways, because we were in it for ourselves. So you find out that the real donors are also giving platelets and power blood. Power blood is something where if you have a great blood type, they might take twice the red cells but with half the fluid. I haven’t done it but I think that’s the gist.

    To give platelets you have to sit still for 2 hours. They give you an inlet tube and an outlet tube on veins on opposing arms. They have a machine with all sorts of archaic tubes and motorized wheels that pumps saline into your arm, it mixes with the blood and builds a steady circuit of blood flowing out one arm, through an extraction machine and returns it back into the other arm.

    You have a personal screen for watching Netflix. Pick your entertainment at the beginning since you’re not permitted to move your arms or hands, other than to squeeze a ball with the extraction arm to keep the pump steady. I chose to watch “All Quiet on the Western Front”, good enough to remind you why people might need blood, watching all these people bleeding out for the entire duration.

    The Red Cross has an app, who doesn’t? They give you points for donating which you can use to purchase donation branded swag. What’s interesting is that you might get more points if you deliver a more beneficial load. For instance, I get bonus points just for having O+ blood since it’s somewhat more versatile to patients than other types.

    So you’re interested after a donation about how much they extracted, any notable details about your yield or quality, and most importantly, how many gift points did you earn?

    I donated Sunday, I had a call from the Red Cross while sitting in a work meeting, I didn’t answer. They don’t waste any time in trying to book that next appointment.

    My message said my platelets were outside the usual quantity and they wouldn’t be able to use them. That before I give again they will test me in advance, it’s possible I won’t be a useful donor for platelets. Will have to stick with whole blood donations.

    I checked the app, the acceptable range for platelets is 150,000 to 450,000 uL (some concentration of litres or millilitres). 60,000 seemed noticeably outside the range so I looked it up. Don’t do that, the internet has awful news about any deviation of health metrics. Everything is a sign of cancer or death when you go far enough down the possibilities.

    Red Cross called me again the next day. They don’t want me to test before my next donation. They want me to come in as soon as possible to retest. I’m in Arkansas which is not where I live so it’s going to need to be when I get back from my trip.

    So their urgency doesn’t make me feel any better about my lack of clotting particles in my blood. The internet says I should have issues stopping bleeding when cut or bruise easily. I’ve never had issues with bleeding. I inspect my body for bruises, nothing, I punch my leg hard, to see if maybe a bruise will form the next day, it doesn’t. I don’t seem to have the traits of someone running out of platelets.

    Maybe a false reading, the internet says unlikely but possible. I wonder if their urgency is more to verify if the two units of platelets and 1 unit of plasma could still be useful. A count as low as mine would not be therapeutic and would need to be discarded. The app reports my donations are currently in storage. My appointment is Tuesday, if I’m good, maybe they’ll take it out of the cooler and let their machines have another taste.

    It’s interesting how the dread of eminent death shifts based on what you believe is the most likely thing to kill you. Is it the boat you’re going to sleep on? The rental car you’re trying to get familiar with, that has seemingly enormous blind spots? The turbulent flight? Your friends who recently died or unexpected heart attacks or died in their sleep?

    Middle age is the craziest with thoughts of death. You recognize that it’ll be any minute now, or in another 50 or 60 years. You have no idea but you seem to come to terms with it and fear everything at the same time.

    Most of my assets have designated beneficiaries but I still need to get a will going. Being prepared to die, seems to decrease the overall anxiety of never being able to know when it will happen. It reminds me that I need to continue de-cluttering as well. Why do I have so much stuff?

    I’m assuming this is all deeply embedded biological instinct. This is why animals find their routines and keep their dens clean. It’s why occasionally they eat their young when they’re starving. An awareness that things could turn for the worst at some unpredictable point and you’re going to be obnoxious about it to all creatures around you.

    What I’d like to be is zen about the whole thing. I literally have no bucket list or am working on anything critical to society. I don’t have much of a desire to, society itself, fame, history, all of it is a flash in a pan. Literally none of it matters other than trying to make things better in the moments we exist. I just want things to be as decent as possible for any being that is experiencing existence.

    What gives me gratification is whatever I can do to not make things worse. Neutral or better than if I wasn’t in the room is what I strive for. It’s a meager goal in life but it’s a challenge to stay consistent. There is an old timey animal lacking the back of my mind like everyone else.

    One thing I very much enjoy in life is being with family or friends, eat delicious food, and imbibe enough to keep things loose. One possible cause of low platelets is an underperforming liver paired with alcohol and so that’s another problem.

  • Standard Cup of Coffee

    My middle finger traces the contour of the cup’s upper lip as my thumb keeps track of the sippy hole.

    My index finger and wrist join to provide a smooth rotation as the perfect alignment is found. I think of space exploration films and the complexity of docking airlocks.

    The lid is nearly flawless, aside from being made from a known contaminant, the mold is perfect.The flaw that needs to be mitigated is in the seam of the paper cup.

    When the cup seam aligns with the sipper orifice of the lid, predictable leaks and drips will appear on your dress shirt, with t-shirts, it’s not as noticeable. Placing the seam at 180 degrees from the drinking hole eliminates this risk.

    Most people don’t know this, I watch them spend multiple minutes pouring additional substances into their coffee, tasting test sips along the way. Such careful attention to making a perfect drink to stain their attire.

    People have no idea that I’m waiting behind them. That I enjoy a black coffee because it is strong, and bitter, and faster. My alignment with the lid is nearly instantaneous.

    The paper cup is awful at containing heat, the transfer is so direct that there are cardboard sleeves to apply to the cup so that your hand is not burned. I usually forgo the sleeve to avoid the  added waste and time.

    If you can stretch your hand and pinch the lid and bottom edge of the cup with your thumb and pinky, you can dodge the heat. Avoiding the sleeve allows the coffee to cool faster so that it can be enjoyed by the tongue sooner.

    The cup size one larger than the desired ounces is the correct choice. Always leave close to an inch or more between the coffee level and the brim. “Leave room” is the American way of saying this.

    I see thinkers sometimes pouring out this inch into the garbage. They know that coffee at the top of the cup will wave itself right through the mouth cutout and onto your freshly burned hand. Two inches is not even too much, if you desire more coffee, get two, or work on reducing your tolerance for caffeine.

    In life, there is no one path, but with coffee, there is a process to follow and I think awful thoughts about those who deviate.

  • What’s the point of volume?

    Why write a blog? Why would I sit and start typing to answer a question I’ve barely even thought about? Why wouldn’t I review, edit, and redraft this post? Why would I just start writing, review some thoughts and then, when it feels finished, end the post? It’s how I’ve been blogging and it’s as interesting a question to me as it is to my hand which is typing these thoughts just a hair slower than I’m thinking them.

    Quality vs quantity, high quality vs high volume. The great debate for artists. There are both types of artists for sure, is there a better strategy? Probably not. Some people love refining, some people love variety. High volume affords a potentially higher variety of creativity, higher refinement allows for greater precision with a more curated and careful result.

    Doing nothing, creates nothing, and hones no skill. Pushing volume creates muscle memory and efficiency in bulk delivery, it conditions the mind to do the work to get started, it’s sloppy but it’s movement. Striving for perfection can only be applied to a person who is comfortable with delivering volume. I’m not a writer, so writing is a good start to developing the first skill needed to be one, the ability to sit, and put thoughts into written words. To organize ideas for transmission.

    Somewhere around 38 years old, I was gifted a guitar. It was some time in the early days of Covid lockdown and there was an assumption we might learn some instruments with the downtime. It didn’t work. I didn’t start. I didn’t pick the thing up. When lockdown lifted, there was an idea of donating the unused instruments we had accumulated to free up space, instead, we signed up for guitar lessons. Well, my partner signed me up for a couple, which was brilliant.

    A single guitar lesson, forces you to increase your playing output.  Your playing time, goes from 0% to 100% on day one. If your lesson is an hour, that’s a pretty significant bump from 0 seconds of prior work. Even if you never practice, a weekly lesson is some progress towards a goal. In a million years at that pace, you would become a master just before dying. Being 38, I thought it would be better to try to practice the thing daily. Guitar practice is part volume and part precision. Chord shapes, chord changes, fingering and strumming patterns, metronome work, noodling.

    Noodling is playing things on the guitar that you enjoy playing but don’t progress your skill. It’s an enjoyment of the instrument but it doesn’t necessarily make you better at playing it. Practice is the harder part, practice is a bit frustrating, you aren’t reading the music correctly, your hands can’t retain the correct shapes, your arm and fingers are strumming or plucking the correct strings.

    They say practice at least 15 minutes a day, they mean the frustrating part. Noodling is the gift to yourself as you’re able to make music with the tool after all the frustration you’ve poured into it. When you practice for a short time daily, you do progress and that time you spend pushing your brain and muscles to absorb new patterns becomes justified. Like a soldier dying peacefully on a battlefield assuming they served some purpose, the song takes the pain of learning away. It becomes easier to practice as the muscle memory of the process becomes clear.

    It’s true with running. Your mind wants to escape to process for the first mile, but after the 7th mile, it settles in to accepting its fate. When thinking back on the run, after the pain has faded, you only remember a vague idea of the pain but a vivid memory of the scenic hills in the first mile, or the Washington monument around mile nine as you worked your way through all of Baltimore.

    This is the problem with volume. What would I edit out of what I’ve just written? What is pertinent to the audience? Doesn’t matter. I’m building reps. Am I noodling? Doesn’t feel like it. This feels like guitar practice. It feels like running that first mile. Maybe I’m not writing enough. Maybe I’ve got to put a volume of thoughts into words, into sentences, into paragraphs, into posts before I nail this thing down.

    If I could get comfortable with generating the work, where the process itself feels effortless, maybe then I’ll add the effort for revisions and drafts and tight edits, right now, writing is its own challenge, and I’m enjoying the fight.

    I listened to an interview with Bill Burr and Terry Gross a couple of weeks ago. Bill was being more candid than he typically is, because he was discussing abuse and trauma. At one point he blames women for some awful aspect of men, and Terry calls him out for it. Why would he blame women and not the men for their own behavior and lack of accountability within their own group? Bill couldn’t really process a valid response. He provided an obviously canned answer which didn’t address the concern. Then I realized he had pinned his opinion on the matter to his joke and couldn’t see his way around it.

    The work of a master stand up comedian is not creating a joke, it is editing a joke into the most precise form of the joke, so that it is concise, easily understood, and most importantly, consistently delivers a laugh. This is brutal to see in action, if you have a local comedy club, go to open mics and watch new comedians tell the same jokes night after night with the slightest modifications each time. I love comedy, I’ve done some stand up, I hate this process, I hate telling the same dozen jokes over and over again, it absolutely makes better jokes but it limits ideas.

    A master comedian is going to be much closer to the finished structure from the very beginning because they largely have a sense of what will work from all of their previous success but they still go through this process.

    I recognized in Bill Burr’s response to Terry Gross, that he had thought about the irony that the me-too movement had missed other behaviors that men are guilty of that may or may not be worse than the lesser reasons some people were “cancelled” (became unmarketable if you ask me). Bill had processed this thought as a joke, women had created the me-too movement, me were being punished, but also men were becoming more vocal about being Nazis, isn’t it funny women didn’t address that?

    The structure is there, it’s a joke, it has funny impressions that can be worked into it, and a little bit of thought but when confronted on the logic, it made no sense, and after all the reps Bill had put in to perfect the structure, he had convinced himself the idea was sound. You could tell in his response to the question of why don’t men hold men accountable that he hadn’t considered it but recognized his folly. He took an initial idea, and diligently polished it, even though the idea itself is stupid.

    Bill Burr is a brilliant comedian, and stupid ideas are the foundation of all kinds of comedy, and it’s completely fine for a joke to not reflect the principles of the teller. There are more serious refinements in the world that have much more hazardous outcomes. Donald J Trump got it in his head in the 1980s that a lack of tariffs were the main reason the U.S. was losing jobs to manufacturing overseas. He’s refined his idea to believe that they’re the solution to that and all other foreign policy challenges. A refinement navigating a herd off a cliff,  finely polishing the wings off the commercial airliner that is the U.S. economy, or, this is where a comedian would put an additional joke to satisfy the rule of threes in comedy but I have no editor.

    I think I like not being so cornered in my thinking. Quality requires refinement and locks things into a shape. The metronome makes for a perfectly executed performance but the closer to the metronome you get, the more the music sounds robotic. The uneven delivery of a human makes it sound much more satisfying. The unexpected end to a blog post has a similar resonance.

  • They already know. So what?

    In U.S. political chatter, there are lot of assumptions that the opposite end of the political spectrum does not understand your point of view, or concerns, or the dangers of their own ideology.

    We spend a lot of time trying to open their eyes to the reality we’re certain of, that if they could see the awfulness that their leaders are imposing on the world, or how the implications of those policies horribly impact on their own lives, or their families or neighbors, that they will alter their support.

    This could be true for some people who truly have trouble sorting through all of the facts and lies and can’t tell who is being honest. With this new administration in the U.S. I imagine those people have been minimized. The policies and lies are so blatantly in your face, that the apocalyptic dark humor of Doctor Strangelove would be lost on today’s public.

    So we have to assume that there is a disturbingly high number of disturbed Americans who are happy to support cruelty, chaos, a collapse of all moral and ethical boundaries, as well as unprecedented grift, and direct attacks on the foundations of democracy, including disregard for the separation of powers or the assaults on elections themselves.

    The whole of American democracy is teetering on collapse and we have to assume that this bulk of human beings, is praying for it.

    I imagine, if I were reading this, I would take it as hyperbolic. That Americans are just misled and they need to be educated. What I’m concerned with, is what if that is just not the case. What if your neighbors are operating with the full intent of sinking the ship. What if they don’t believe in democracy? If they don’t, what is the recourse. What is the strategy to save democracy against those who want to destroy it from within? To protect the Constitution from those in power who don’t believe in its principles and look to dissolve it with the support of enough of society to get away with it?

    It’s probably not coincidental that this whole concept reminds me of this documentary from American Experience Nazi Town USA. It covers the rise of the German-American Bund group which sought to abandon U.S. democracy to install a similar Nazi dictatorship to what Hitler had created in Germany. It was hugely popular in the U.S. until we entered the war against Germany and people were too afraid to be associated with Nazis and the movement quickly dissolved. It struck me that there was such a large portion of Americans who were willing to abandon democracy when they thought it best served their interests.

    That’s where I think we’re currently at. You can’t educate these people into changing their minds by explaining the fall of democracy. It’s likely what they want.

    Many Americans believe there is a looming civil war. I think it’s unlikely because the distribution of political polarization seems to split between cities and rural areas rather than geographic lines, which would make a war difficult in the historic sense. I wouldn’t rule out mass violence however, or an attempt at politicide. I hope it’s unlikely but I also thought it was unlikely that a large portion of Americans didn’t hold the core requirements for democracy as we know it to be sacred.

    So thinking about this. If it were true that many Americans are ready and willing to throw our governmental system in the trashcan, to make way for a dictatorship, plutocracy, or oligarchy, what would we do about that? Assume they know what it means to move in that direction. What is the peaceful, and democratic process for obstructing the people’s will to abandon democracy? Is it even democratic to do so, or do we just work with the rubble they create when the destruction is done?

    I’d like to be engaged, protests historically don’t fair well under authoritarianism, nor do public debates. I find violence to be completely barbaric and have no interest in engaging on that level. Peaceful collapse is better than violent resistance in my mind. So what would be the strategy? What is the historical success story for walking citizens back away from the cliff and from falling into fascism and authoritarianism? How do we build on that quickly, who would we organize or work with?

    It’s interesting blogging into the void. I’d love to have a deep dialogue. Most people I speak with are more optimistic or too tuned out to think any of this is worth pondering. That or they’re on-board with the Trump agenda. So what?

  • Driest of False Memories

    I’ve seen a few memes over the past someamountoftime (my observational bias could have this as a couple of weeks or three years but it feels recent) that state something like “all these kids with their $30 water bottles and I don’t remember drinking water until I was 25”.

    Geez. (Jeez? What is this word)

    Where I grew up there were bubblers. (Bubblahs if you want that Massachusetts accent) They’re called by other names. Drinking Fountain I believe is most on the nose. Here is a stolen internet graphic.

    These fountains used to be a staple of modern life. I remember they were in nearly every hallway, corner, by the bathroom of every indoor  professional building. They were outside in city public areas, parks, the roller rink, whatever. Free clean water everywhere. They even would place multiple, of different, heights to accommodate different  people.

    Many had a cooling element to get the temperature just right and from everything I’ve ever read, having separate ones for dark skinned people and light skinned people was the greatest offense of the Jim Crow laws separating public services based on “race”.  I fully understand that of all the horrible things Jim Crow laws were, this is not even close to the worst offender but it’s prominence in my education as a main issue is as  concerning to look back on as people thinking we didn’t drink water when it was so common, you didn’t need to carry a bottle to carry it in.

    Oh, this is sort of what they looked like in this other stolen internet photo.

    You probably recognize it. They still have them at some stadiums, old public buildings, or at the airport. The modern ones often have a water bottle filling station which helps bridge the cultural divide between generations. The biggest difference between now and when I was young, is there is never a line now, whereas 20 years ago, when a class or movie let out, many people would race to them to avoid the line. “Hey pal, leave some water for the fish” was the most common way of saying “hurry the fuck up, I’m thirsty” back then.

    I have no idea how it happened, but it’s obvious with this and tap. We’ve been convinced to stop trusting our public water supply because risk of contamination to find more costly water from plastic bottles that are complete contaminated or by buying very costly home filters. Often while receiving steep water bills to ensure the water getting to our homes and public spaces are clean. It’s a whole environmental thing you could read about for weeks. The better way would be demand clean water everywhere, but that’s going to be tough with politicians also trying to roll back those requirements so businesses can put a half percentage on their margin by dumping toxins back into the rivers or air. Hail capitalism.

    We used to drink out of houses too, which has a very toxic taste and mouth feel but is catalogued in my mind as a comfort food and I’ll still partake if thirsty.

    I think for a lot of people the act of lapping at a fountain stream of water reminded them of being a dog. With the lines that used to form (always behind the person for the privacy sake of the bent lapping) there was always an awareness of everyone thinking “what a dog this person is being right now. Woof” which probably led to the first person thinking, maybe I’ll bring mine in a bottle next time and derailing the whole fucking project.

    This photo I took myself and I’ll leave the stock photo tag to prove it.

    Anyways, yes we drank water all the time in the 70s and 80s but we were forced to lap at it, like fucking dogs.