The Grateful Abused

However much I’m not an historian, I am much more not a psychologist. Yet, as Chesterton says at the beginning of The Everlasting Man,

As I have more than once differed from Mr. H. G. Wells in his view of history, it is the more right that I should here congratulate him on the courage and constructive imagination which carried through his vast and varied and intensely interesting work; but still more on having asserted the reasonable right of the amateur to do what he can with the facts which the specialists provide.

John Taylor Gatto said something to the effect that the greatest success of modern schooling is that no can think of doing it any other way. The colossal failure of modern schooling is so enormous, so obvious, so horrible that it is truly mind-blowing that any sane person is willing to keep doing it to themselves and their children. Yet not only are millions of parents eager to send their kids to school, they leap to its defense and complain about attempts to ease the burden on their children. Just look at the reactions of most parents when they are told that homework provides little if any benefit and should be eliminated – they freak out. No! Having their kid waste hours every night on homework is a badge of parental honor that shall not be taken away. Or something.

We’re not talking about people who reluctantly disregard their own children’s unhappiness with schooling through some misguided idea that they’re enforcing schooling for their kid’s own good, but about parents who actively (often angrily) support wasting even more of their kids time with homework, even when presented with the evidence that it doesn’t contribute meaningfully to academic success.

As we discussed in the last post, the typical American was much more literate in 1850 than in 2000 – despite? Because of? – the total professionalization of schooling. Here’s what an American 10 year old would be expected to be able to read and understand back in the 19th century:

If we postpone independence, do we mean to carry on, or to give up, the war? Do we mean to submit, and consent that we shall be ground to powder, and our country and its rights trodden down in the dust? I know we do not mean to submit. We NEVER shall submit! Do we intend to violate that most solemn obligation ever entered into by men, that plighting, before God, of our sacred honor to Washington, when, putting him forth to incur the dangers of war, as well as the political hazards of the times, we promised to adhere to him in every extremity with our fortunes and our lives? I know there is not a man here, who would not rather see a general conflagration sweep over the land, or an earthquake sink it, than one jot or tittle of that plighted faith fall to the ground. For myself, having twelve months ago, in this place, moved you that George Washington be appointed commander of the forces raised, or to be raised, for the defense of American liberty; may my righthand forget her cunning, and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if I hesitate or waver in the support I give him.

Daniel Webster, excerpt, Supposed Speech of John Adams, McGuffey’s 5th Eclectic Reader.

But mere evidence and logic stand no chance among the well-schooled. Most parents find some way to dismiss the success of homeschoolers – they’re weird, or socially stunted, or something. That homeschoolers, like those 19th century kids in their one-room schoolhouses, typically cover much more material in much less time and with much less stress can’t be allowed to contradict such parents’ need to send their kids to real school. Then when you get to the real crazies – like me – who not only didn’t send his kids to real school, but refused to bend the knee to grade level nonsense, and encouraged their children to do whatever they wanted, so long as they recognized that they were fresponsible for the outcome – well, that’s simply crazy! That our kids – and hundreds of thousands of similarly raised children – are some of the finest, brightest, kind, and thoughtful people you’ll ever meet just cannot be allowed.

We were told by family and friends that we were ruining our kids, then, when that became untenable, that our kids were just different, or that they were geniuses, that it might work for our kids, but their kids could never handle that level of freedom and responsibility. Never could it be admitted that keeping our kids out of the clutches of professional educators not only didn’t hurt them, but was a huge part in their ultimate successes.

How does one even begin to address this level of insanity? How can people be so blind as to insist that modern schooling is good and necessary (so much so that those who reject it are somehow evil) when not a shred of evidence supports that conclusion?

Here begins the psychological and evolutionary speculation.

In her book Thou Shalt Not Be Aware, German psychiatrist Alice Miller describes how an abused child follows this 11th commandment of the book’s title, and simply cannot allow himself to be aware of the abuse.

Miller trained as a traditional Freudian, and worked with troubled children. She did extensive research into Freud’s writings. She discovered that, prior to his creation of his theory of sexual repression, he had taken the possibility that his clients were sexually abused seriously. Doing so, however, put him in conflict with the people paying his bills, making him an enemy of the sort of people who send their kids and wives to psychiatrists in the first place.

Miller’s direct experience taught her that abused children of all ages are often strangely unaware of the abuse they’ve suffered. When confronted with the evidence of their having been abused, they make up excuses for their abusers. Daddy or Mommy didn’t mean it. I was asking for it. If only I hadn’t done X, nothing would have happened. And so on.

Then, the kicker: in their own adult lives, these victims will often subject their own children to the same kind of abuse. This is key: to do otherwise, they would need to own that they, themselves, were abused. But that’s too painful to endure, too disruptive of their lives and relationships. Besides, they turned out OK. What’s the big deal? It couldn’t have been as bad as all that.

Thou shalt not be aware – so, the pattern repeats itself from generation to generation. Facing their own abuse is too painful. They have built up emotional structures to fend off the hurt. Trying to get them to see it only makes them angry. That’s Miller’s account, at least.

My only contribution here: this inability to acknowledge or even see the abuse we’ve suffered is both much broader than the classically abused, and is based in harsh biological reality. We humans, especially as children, simply must belong to a group in order to survive. A child is soon dead without the care of adults. From a Darwinian survival perspective, even adults without a tribe are as good as dead- there is no reproduction without other people!

Thus, all human beings are highly motivated – at a biological level – to somehow make peace with their abusers, if those abusers are part of their family or tribe. Miller points out that, in her practice, it made all the difference if the victim had someone in his life who told him that, no, what’s being done to you is not ok. Lacking such a sympathetic witness, the victim had little chance of recovery.

Stockholm Syndrome may be a similar phenomenon. In 1974, during a botched bank robbery in Stockholm, 4 hostages quickly began to identify with and support their captor. He didn’t kill them, after all, and so, for their emotional survival, they came to see things from his point of view.

It’s much more complicated than that, of course. Not every hostage identifies with his captors. It takes time, for one thing, and the captors must be in some sense sympathetic. But in a situation where the hostage situation goes on for a while, and the captors have opportunities to be, or at least appear, kind, eventually, biological reality will kick in: I, a human organism, need to figure out how to survive in this situation. If I can’t escape, then identifying with my captors might make the most (Darwinian) sense.

I do think that underlying both Miller’s claims and Stockholm Syndrome is a basic human need to be part of a group , even to fit in when one is being threatened and abused. This need to belong is a good thing, in itself, but can easily be twisted into something evil. The simplest, most common example is people going along with whatever their crowd promotes. The truth is a small price to pay for belonging.

There is a continuum from such basic and simply conformity up through groupthink and on to real insanity. I think you, my dear readers, can come up with plenty of examples.

And so here we are: That modern schooling is an expensive, humiliating failure by any objective standards simply must not be seen, if we are to maintain our place in society and our heavily reinforced psychological defenses. If our kids complain about being bored at school, at having their time wasted, of being made to do things they don’t want to do – well, those complaints have no standing! We MUST make our children do what we did – suck it up, and do what the teacher wants. To take our children’s complaints and unhappiness seriously would undermine OUR whole world – so we just don’t do it.

This is not just a theory. I spent years having discussions about the above with parents considering enrolling their children in our Sudbury school. Even among parents willing to consider this radical unschooling approach, about half just could not pull the trigger. These parents might acknowledge many of the points above, and might acknowledge the unhappiness of their child, but simply letting go of the schooling they, themselves, went through was too much.

Among the general population of parents, those not considering such extreme unschooling, the response is what i mentioned above: we were ruining our kids! Lord of the Flies! Wasting their time! They’ll never learn discipline! And so on. Never mind that a walk through the school showed generally happy, articulate self-controlled kids comfortable with talking with adults as well as children of all ages. Never mind the success of our kids by any measure. Nope, it can’t work, because, if it did, then I have to deal with all my feelings about my schooling – and all that had better be left buried. Even if I have to bury my own children with it.

The Last 9 Days

A week ago Saturday, my mother-in-law, age 86, who had lived with us for the last 6 and a half years, died in her sleep. My wife found her around 7 in the morning. Her health had been bad for the last couple years, and, unlike prior problems, she was not bouncing back this time. As is often the case in these situations, the fundamental reaction for both my wife and me is relief. Mother- in-law had a good, long life, and leaves 11 children and 20+ grandkids and 4 great grand kids. We should all be so lucky. Please pray for the repose of her soul.

The Great Transition

My wife and I now find ourselves alone together for the first time in 33 years. Our youngest headed off to college this year, so we now live on 7 beautiful acres with a cat, a renter, and two cows. The Caboose is coming home for the summer, and our other kids and their families live within a 40 minute drive, so it’s not like we’re deserted or anything. But it is weird waking up in the morning knowing it’s just us. I’ll be 66 in a few weeks; my beloved is 5 years younger.

We spent this past Saturday planting fruit trees. 5 hours in the sun – beautiful day! – eventually ruined by swarms of mosquitos. In February. On Sunday, we all – the three local kids and their spouses and children – gathered at elder daughter’s place for brunch, then middle son and younger daughter and their families headed up to help us plant more trees. Over the course of a few weekends, got 11 in the ground: 4 peach, 3 apricot, 2 cherry and 2 pear. Have a couple little figs grown from cuttings from our awesome little fig tree in the Bay Area that we’ll plant soon, and we want some blueberries, persimmons, quince, and a couple olive trees. But – maybe not this year.

Assuming my health holds up, this should be a beautiful place in a year or two.

Circle of life, and all that.

Son-in-law takes the lawn tractor down the hill to load up the trailer at the woodchip pile.

History of Modern Schooling – Academy of Ideas Video

This is a good video. Note that it’s 6 years old, predating the Covid insanity – yet based on the premises he establishes, the official response – ‘we’ ‘experts’ hold the truth exclusively; get in line or get destroyed – are totally predictable.

As always, it’s satisfying to discover people who have reached the same conclusions I have. Nobody likes being alone, no matter how confident in conclusions. But much more important for my purposes, he points out a couple sources I wasn’t aware of. Quick overview:

• Starts with Lycurgus and the state’s presumption of the exclusive right to educate all children to the goals of the state.
• Focuses on my main man Martin Luther, and, as I believe I’ve discussed here, his insisting to the state PTB that that the state needed to impose compulsory schooling to save the little souls from the Devil, who, as anyone who has done any unstructured reading of Luther knows, has a highly personal and scatological relationship with him.
• First new source: Kaiser Wilhelm I, who started some sort of Prussian compulsory education in 1717
• second new source: Charles Sanders Peirce, with whom I was familiar from Menand’s Metaphysical Club as a sort of type specimen of the degenerate genius. He cared not about his obligations to his wife, his paid work, the morals of the universities that paid his bills – because he was simply too darn smart for all that stuff. No denying the guy was a genius. No denying he was a weasel, either. Founder of Pragmatism, he “…goes to great lengths to say Pragmatism is not merely the idea that the ends justify the means, only to have his great pragmatic successor, John Dewey, say exactly that.” Turns out he applied his vast elitist weasel intellect to defending compulsory state schooling because it renders us little people compliant and obedient. The WEF’s formulation of what life will be for those of us they allow to live could have been taken straight from Pierce.
• Last semi-new source is Ellwood Patterson Cubberley, who, as the Oracle Wikipedia would have it, was “an American educator, a eugenicist, and a pioneer in the field of education management. He spent most of his career as a professor and later served as the first dean of the Stanford University Graduate School of Education in California.” In other words, yet another elitist whack-job directing the whole compulsory school movement in America. I know I’ve got some stuff on this guy in my notes, but not as much as the video below suggests I should have.

Can’t really tell if he has the particular tidy mustache favored by a certain continental eugenicist…

Anyway, here’s the video:

He covers much of the first half of what I want to cover. But what is to me the key step is not covered: how it is the structures of compulsory state schooling that achieve Dr. Cubberley’s goals as much or more that the actual content taught. You don’t have to harp on critical race theory half so much as you would if you hadn’t already broken the students by compulsion, regimentation, bells, age segregation, contempt for their rights and wants, and just endless hours of pointless, soul-crushing drivel.

Check it out.

On Classroom Management and Not Shooting Yourself in the Foot

Couple thoughts:

Imagine a book representing a summary of all the collective wisdom of years of experience, called something like “Top Tips for Working Around a Self-Inflicted Gunshot Wound to the Foot.” This book contains a wealth of tips and tricks to help you function with that pedal wound: gadgets that help you limp around better, ways to make a game out of the inconveniences, all designed to help you be the best you you can be, given that you have a self-inflicted gunshot wound to you foot.

The one question not asked anywhere in this book, or in the vast literature on the subject- why did you shoot yourself in the foot? Maybe we should look at preventing that rather than optimizing performance given you have been made a cripple?

I’ve gotten a few books on classroom management as part of my knew career as a Headmaster. Often, the tips and strategies on how to keep the students engaged are quite good, ingenious, even. And they work! By consistently applying these tricks and strategies, a teacher can indeed maintain control of the age-segregated one-subject-at-a-time classroom for the entire period between the ringing of the bells!

But why did we shoot ourselves in the foot in the first place? What if we didn’t? If we were paying attention to our students, we might wonder why they find it so hard to sit still and focus, why they hate homework, why most studies for most kids go in one ear and out the other? Why damage the kids by segmenting their lives in a completely arbitrary way, predigesting what we want them to learn, and then grading them like lumber or eggs on how well they comply?

Versus, for example:

Or, for a more basic education, this.

One more stray thought: I am sometimes challenged to what I would do instead of the compulsory age-segregated classroom model, and have proposed a few alternatives while stating that I’d let my kids roam the streets all day rather than put them under the diabolical ministrations of the school system.

It occurred to me today: why do you ask me? Your insistence on finding another expert to tell you what to do IS THE PROBLEM. That’s the exact state of bewildered sheep-hood the schools were designed to produce: never, ever think for yourself – there are no gold stars, A+s, Honor societies, advanced placements, degrees from ‘good’ colleges, and a sinecure at a “think tank” involved for those who do not follow the herd and hate those who don’t. Instead, trust yourself enough to figure it out. People have been educating their children for as long as there have been people. There are a million ways to do it. I can make suggestions, tell you how people have done it successfully in the past, but you, a normal functioning adult, can figure it out. All that fear, uncertainty, and doubt you feel over making this kind of decision ARE WHAT YOU LEARNED IN SCHOOL.

Embrace your freedom! Recognize we have been robbed. Instead of spending our childhoods developing competence and confidence, we were systematically cowed, bullied, and patted on the head when we complied. Front-Row Kids embrace the mindless compliance, and ‘succeed’ as the sociopaths in charge define success.

The old saying applies here: The best time to plant a forest is 25 years ago; the next best time is now. Instead of living like a slave because that’s how you’ve been trained to live, say no. Right now. Get competent at something; hang out with competent people. Always ask: who benefits from expert advice? Why should I listen to them? Sometimes, in some specific situations, you will need to trust and expert – a plumber or electrician, say. Do your homework (ha! I slay me!) and then pick one. Also, the more competent you get at any area, the better judge you are likely to be about the competence of others. Over a lifetime, you grow more clear-headed and harder to fool.

But advice about life? How about asking happy people? This immediately eliminates most teachers and all but a tiny fraction of academics. Develop your pool of trusted people – these used to be known as ‘family and friends’ – and run your ideas past them. LIVE!

Choose an approach to education that helps your kids develop their relationships with their family, and take on responsibility for cultivating and supporting those relationships. Help them get competent. It can be knitting, woodworking, taking care of animals, growing plants – and Latin and Math and history. Grade-level is a fraud; getting good grades is a joke. Are your kids *competent*? A retired professor says that he could judge any of his students competence in his classes by simply talking with them over a walk across the college quad – his opinion thus formed is more grounded and valid than a letter grade. Many millions of people for whom Latin is not their native tongue have learned it, before there were any ‘classes’ in Latin – how? Can you do that?

Do not be afraid. You are already competent, at least as competent as any teacher to educate your children. You can start now getting more competent, more involved with your family, friends, church, community. Take Samwise Gamgee as your model of a properly educated man.

A Lesson Idea…

Here I talk about a story John Taylor Gatto tells about a little lesson he learned in 3rd grade, back in the 1930s. Not sure if my high school kids would get it. Here’s another approach:

Kid’s drawing, borrowed from an NPR article. My tax dollars at work.

You all are taking drawing, and this is a very good thing, but maybe not for the reasons you think. When you ask a little kid to draw Mommy, what the little kid does is draw a circle for the face, add a couple little circles for eyes, a red curve for smiling lips, and some squiggles for hair.

The kid is happy and satisfied. Mommy sees the drawing, is informed that it’s her, and is also happy.

So it is a picture of mommy. But what did the little kid actually draw? The mommy in front of him? Or rather, his idea of his mommy?

All of you, taking drawing lessons now, and no longer little kids, would not draw mommy this. No, you’ve learned not to simply draw your idea of your mom, but rather to look carefully at you mom (or whatever you are drawing).

http://hopeisthewordblog.com/category/education/science-education/page/6/

Rather than simply drawing something you ‘know’ inside, you want to look at the world outside and try to draw what’s actually there.

It’s a lot more work than just drawing what you think. You have to be prepared to study and absorb the lines, shading, and colors of real physical objects, and then work hard and practice to render those elements into a beautiful drawing.

It’s worth it, I hope. Some of you already draw fairly well, and all of you are already better than when you started a few short weeks ago. If you just stop at your idea of mommy or a horse or whatever, you’re stuck in your own head. The real world is unable to get through.

Now let’s look at an expression in English: to draw a conclusion. I propose that drawing a conclusion is very much like drawing your mommy. It’s easy, and childish, to simply reach a conclusion based on what’s already in your own head. Such conclusions might be satisfying to you; maybe even make your mommy happy – but they’re lazy and immature. You can do better. It is the business of this school to help you do better.

It’s a lot of work to try to understand an argument from outside your own head. You have to listen, puzzle it out, ask questions, think some more, maybe run a few ideas past your friends and family to see how others think. It might take a long time; sometimes, you may never reach a very firm conclusion at all! But the process of trying to understand, of exercising your mind, is how you grow outside your own head.

Here’s the big question: how do those ideas inside your own head, the ones we all tend to use to answer almost every question we face, get there in the first place? Magic? A miracle? Or something else? How do you know these ideas are true?

And here’s the hard lesson:

There are many reasons to lie to children, the Jesuit said, and these seem to be good reasons to older men. Some truth you will know by divine intuition, he told us, but for the rest you must learn what tests to apply. Even then be cautious. It is not hard to fool human intelligence.

John Taylor Gatto

Some people lie; many more people, for many different reasons, repeat lies without consciously lying themselves. And you – young people who naturally trust your friends and teachers – are the target of a LOT of lies.

The world is full of peoples who do not love you, but certainly want to use you for their own purposes. They know how to tell a lie such that children, whose defenses have not yet fully developed, are likely to absorb it without even being aware of having come to believe. The easiest way: get other children to parrot the lies, and then level criticism at anyone who dares say anything against it. You don’t believe X? Then you’re a hater, a bigot, a Nazi! And worse!

Nobody wants to be called names by their friends! So we take the easy way out, and just follow along. Pretty soon, we’re the ones calling our friends and family foul names – names we’re unlikely to even understand! We’re the ones parroting ideas we don’t understand. This is not an accident. A lot of evil intelligence has been devoted to convincing kids they believe things that they don’t even understand. Then those kids grow up to be adults who have never learned how to really work at thinking, and parrot the lie to yet more children.

This is the source of a lot of the misery in the modern world: lies told to children, who grow up into mobs willing to shout down, insult, and ostracize any who dare disagree. All over ideas they don’t really understand.

It is critically important for you, our beloved students, to learn how to examine ideas on your own. We are going to teach you how. Do not just accept what you are told, even from me! I will do my best not to tell lies, but even I – especially I! – am easy to fool!

Free Citizens and Police States

One of the bitterly funnier moment I’ve had in my life was when a long-time friend who had just recently become a Chicago judge told me in all seriousness that what the world needed was more lawsuits.

Hammer, meet nail.

He seemed to seriously (and arrogantly) think that society’s problems would get solved if only people submitted them to the adjudication of right-thinking people such as himself. No other options existed in his mind, as far as I could tell, such as a personal commitment among citizens to resolve their differences peacefully, or suck it up and take minor injustices for the team. No acknowledgement that, if the court system is what’s holding your polity together, that polity is already dead.

Or, checking in on Scripture:

Come to terms quickly with your accuser while you are on the way to court with him, or your accuser may hand you over to the judge, and the judge to the guard, and you will be thrown into prison.

Matthew 5:25

Attempting to solve more and more issues in court is not a road to social improvement, but rather a sign of an already dead society – the twitchings of a culture’s corpse.

—

The function of laws. We have long had the notion of the law-abiding citizen. That’s a person who understands that laws need to be obeyed, especially when there is no one there to enforce them. The laws work, when they work, because of a consensus of the law abiding. In a such a culture, responsibility and enforcement are ultimately personal, not a function of the enforcement arm of a legal system.

Much more important, law abiding citizens can only exist within a strong culture. Personal relationships and obligations, personal honor and virtue, must be highly valued by a large enough group such that those who do not value them are forced by social pressure to conform.

A law-abiding society is the only kind of society in which people can have any real freedom.

The alternative is the police state. A police state is here defied as a situation where laws matter only to the extent to which they are enforced.

We tend to think of totalitarian dictatorships when police state is mentioned, with official thugs lurking everywhere, but I will here contend that insofar as an individual’s relationship to the law depends merely on enforcement, police ‘states’ are ubiquitous.

These ideas came up as I discussed the state of local schools with people who have had children in them or had friends who have had children in them, or otherwise had experiences in them. It has gotten to the point, according to these folks, where it takes literal physical assault of a teacher to call down any disciplinary action on a student – and even that might not be enough. Teachers tend to get whatever percentage of the students who are interested in learning into the front few rows, and simply let chaos reign in the back rows and try to teach over it. Admin and teachers are at war – the idea that admin would take steps against the students for the teacher’s sake is laughable. The schools rules are ignored until they are enforced. Exhausted teachers have little interest in enforcing them. Any teacher who does enforce the rules is instantly an outsider, more likely to draw the ire of admin than its support.

The students in this environment divide themselves or are divided into feral tribes. In the No Rules tribes, attempts to flaunt whatever norms do exist drive behaviors. Who can wear the most scandalous prom dress? Who can utter the most filthy profanity? Who can defy the teachers most obviously? Such behaviors increase the standing of students in their tribe.

Is this all true? I don’t know, but the people telling me this are not the kind of people given to melodramatic exaggeration. I therefore assume so.

But even if reality is not quite that bad, anything like such a situation illustrates not so much the Law of the Jungle as an at least nascent police state. In the jungle, you win or you lose, there is no appeal. In a police state, you get away with whatever you can – until you can’t. In the jungle, no one is there to stop you if you try to burn it all down, while it is likely someone would try to stop you from burning the school down.

And here is the crux of the matter: what happens to the fine young arsonist in this latter case? Since all violations of the laws have been ignored so far in his young life, what does he expect to have happen? Will it be ‘fair’ in his eyes? We can easily imagine a modern principal simply letting him go due to assumed mitigating factors – and we can just as easily imagine the child (if old enough) thrown into jail. The reader can insert the variables that might influence such different outcomes.

Similarly, a student holding views unpopular with his teachers can become the target of abuse. The teachers’ vendettas become, in effect, the law – and there is nowhere within the school system for such a student to turn.

While it may seem fun, after a fashion, for young hooligans to do whatever they think they want, eventually, all boundaries have been pushed too far, and something must be done. The school system is an organism, and as such wants to live. It is a police state in which there is no real freedom and no escape – and our children are being raised in it.

Oddities, Goodness, & Harumphs. There Will Be Cake.

1 Recall that we had all three of our middle children get married within about a 19 month period: end of May, 2020 through early January 2022. 10 months ago, we welcomed our first granddaughter – The Cuteness, who I, who have seen a lot of babies and who am totally unbiased, think is quite possibly the cutest child ever born. No, really!

Now, over an 18 month period starting with the birth of The Cuteness, we will welcome our first grandson – due early November – AND our third grandchild (sex TBD) in early April, 2023.

Life is good. Three marriages followed by three babies – one each! – to three happy couples. God willing, I may still live to see my children’s children chasing chickens in the yard of our hobby farm.

2. Second week as a headmaster just completed. School was good, but reminded me of the old joke: I spent a month in Cleveland last weekend. These have been the longest two weeks I’ve had in a looooong time.

3. So, these days of light posting: write about some gripping education history book, something grueling and essential, and I’m lucky if 30 people look at it. Write about dropping a piece of avocado toast, and get 100+. Both way down from peak traffic of a couple years ago, but still.

4. I don’t know if I’m being overcautious, but I’m wary of posting anything too political or potentially controversial here these day, thinking I have an image to uphold as a headmaster of a joyful, Catholic, classical high school. ot hiding anything, just not broadcasting it here. But it’s not like there isn’t 15 years and a couple of million words of my thoughts already out there, if anyone cared to look. Thoughts?

5. Here’s a cake one of my daughters made:

In a Cabin in the Woods (not working on my manifesto – I ain’t even got one!)

Checking in, from beautiful Arnold, CA. (pop 3,288; elevation 3,999′) where the entire family is meeting up. But am working on a few things, as follows.

I’ve been working on the pulp-style space adventure from 28 years ago that I found 50 pages of when packing up to move. ‘Working on’ here means taking pictures with my iPhone, offloading them to my laptop, then using Googledocs’ OCR function to open them up as text. It kind of works! I will need another hour or two to clean up the formatting and obvious mistakes, and still need to find the penultimate chapter that somehow got separated from the other draft chapters and read it in. Still faster than retyping it, for me, anyway.

While the writing is obvious amateur first draft level, I love the ideas. I’ve got Dante in there – one of the bad guys is named Smarrita, as in:

Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,
ché la diritta via era smarrita.

In the middle of the journey of our life
I found myself in a dark wood
Where the straight way was lost

And the deal gone bad is with a race I call Selvans – our hero finds himself in a dark spot in the ‘woods’. And so on, I was being cute.

Funny: Brian Niemeier’s Soul Cycle (reviewed beginning here) is all about Dante in Space, and here I was, 28 years ago, writing a very different Dante in Space book. I would be happy to be half as good as Niemeier. Along the same lines, found a short story from back then where the premise is that explorers crash land on an Eden-like planet, only to slowly starve to death, as their bodies can’t break down the available nutrition – a variation on a theme from Michael Flynn’s Eifelheim. I’ve been obsessed with this thought for decades: that the chemistry of LAWKI is so weird and unique, with seemingly arbitrary ‘choices’ among chemicals and stereoisomers, with crazy things life-threatening prions, it would be amazing if encounters with alien life, no matter how superficially benign, didn’t kill us. I would think that the first step toward terraforming would be to nuke the planet from space, just to be sure. This is a theme in several short stories and two novels I’ve started drafting over the last 30 years or so.

Also, is anyone else bothered by the ‘enhanced’ pictures we get from the Hubble, and will no doubt soon get from the Webb? I look, and see nothing; I look, and see nothing even using fantastical modern tech. BUT – I don’t look, let that tech feed its input into spectrographs, computer algorithms, and other fancy stuff, and they produce:

Beautiful, but what is its relationship to reality? I don’t know.

This is also a ‘picture’ of the Pillars:

Also beautiful.

In what sense are either of those pictures real? Certainly, no naked eye look at the Pillars is going to look anything like either of these, even ‘naked’ eye through a powerful telescope. The question becomes: what information do we want to convey? In the old pulp draft, I have passages like these:

The small circular viewports on either side of the module cabin dimmed automatically for a moment, to protect the delicate eyes of the occupants from the brilliant flash of the cruiser disintegrating into plasma and dust. On the front viewer, a computer processed image revealed the details of the explosion, all extraneous light and radiation filtered away. On that screen, the ship neatly vanished into a gradually thinning aura. Neither man was watching,

and

The star cruiser appeared quickly, a sudden point of light, then a highly distorted image of a ship, trailed by a thousand house of mirrors reflections strung back into space-time. Then, just as suddenly, and with no apparent logic, a perfect little star cruiser was visible alone against the field of stars. Despite his predicament, Warner couldn’t help wondering how much of what he just saw was the result of the viewsys’s inadequate attempts to create a sensible image out of unknown inputs, and how much was “really” taking place. The question was nonsense, he reminded himself.

It’s a little bit like MiniTrue: somebody had to decide what is the important information, and arrange to have the ‘unimportant’ information filtered out.

Next, my beloved and I married 35 years ago on May 30; our older daughter married 2 years ago on May 30; our middle son married May 29th last year. Younger daughter married Jan 8 this year – but we let her and her husband come anyway. Joint anniversary celebration. Because 3 of our kids married over an 18 month period, it is now a running joke to remind our 18 year old son that he doesn’t need to get married anytime soon, it’s OK.

We, our 18 year old son, and our older daughter, her husband, and their 7 month old daughter are already here; the others are due in Friday morning and staying through Sunday. A rip-roaring anniversary hoedown! Elder son-in-law found a nice big cabin for us all.

It’s nice to have a family where everyone gets along. Anyway, we had lunch and a walk yesterday at White Pine Lake, a reservoir in Arnold. I walked to the dam and back:

The dam spillway

The creek flowing away from the dam.

And here’s the view from the back porch, where I sit typing this.

Temperature is sensory-deprivation-tank perfect: I was falling asleep earlier, sitting on the back porch, in shorts. Ideal.

Next next, our house is scheduled to hit the market tomorrow, if all things go well., with open houses this weekend. St. Joseph, please pray for us, that the Father may prosper the work of our hands to His glory! Meaning, of course, that we get a good offer soon, and find a good place to buy.

Starting next Tuesday, we will be staying in another very dear furnished rental in Auburn, and spending our time house hunting like mad. Not gonna look at the markets, no siree, not me, not one bit… AAAGH!

Interesting times.

End of Eras

Home stretch, as it were, of emptying our home. 27 years of stuff. Confusing thoughts and feelings about all this. But let’s not wallow in nostalgia! Or, at least, not just wallow in nostalgia…

First, the weather. As all 20 long-time readers may be aware, I’ve used this data set to track local rainfall for the last several years.

top of the page.

Our local flood control district has 32 automated rain gages set up across the county, and put up this web page with near real time automatic updates as shown. Over the past 4 or 5 years, I decided to use these numbers to get a more general idea of local rainfall, rather than just using the one local gage for Concord, CA, that seems to provide the go-to numbers for the press.

As discussed in previous posts, these numbers are both beautiful and flawed. Beautiful, in that they provide a real-world snapshot of rainfall over a couple of hundred square miles updated every 15 minutes. But, as a note on the page says:

The District does not warranty, guarantee, or certify the accuracy of the rainfall data. The data accuracy and availability can be compromised due to equipment failure, power loss, equipment defects, loss of calibration, or internet/radio communication equipment failure of equipment provided by others.

This disclaimer is on top of the inaccuracy built into the round numbers used as average annual rainfall totals per gage. Since accurate annual averages are of little use to the Flood Control District, it’s obvious they just took a guess and stuck with it. So, for example, the Ygnacio Valley Fire, Concord, station has an annual average of 17.00 inches. Exactly. They have been tracking rainfall at this station for 43 years; the annual average has not changed over the 5 or so years I have been watching it. And so on, for most of the gages.

Since the annual per gage averages are numbers I use in my fancy-pants spreadsheet to estimate total rainfall as a percentage of average, all my numbers have at least this built-in error. I also watch (this is all for my own weird obsessive amusement) how many stations hit or exceed their annual averages, and by how much. Thus, this year so far, as of this morning – and it happens to be raining at the moment, so this will change – 21 out of 32 stations have gotten at least 80% of their annual averages, while 16 have hit 90%, 7 reached 100% and 1 has even exceeded 125%.

This is where it gets stupid. Or stupider. The Mount Diablo Peak station has, in every year I’ve tracked it, had both the highest rainfall and the greatest amount and percentage over average. This year, it shows over 130% of annual average. There are several other stations that have, in terms of percentage of annual average, consistently run way ahead of the other stations. On the other hand, the Kregor Peak, Clayton, station shows under 50% of its annual average this year – and it is maybe a couple miles, and visible from, the Mount Diablo Peak station. And a number of other stations similarly have fallen ‘behind’ the overall averages each year I’ve watched them.

Such consistent inconsistencies call my whole project into doubt. I don’t blame the Flood Control District in the slightest – all they want to know is how much rain is falling how fast and where, so that they can warn people that the creek’s gonna rise. My whole project makes little sense in that context; the ‘errors’ I’m spotting, that throw my numbers into chaos, simply don’t matter much if at all to the Flood Control District.

Nail in the coffin: this year, 5 or 6 of the stations have failed more often than not to report any usable numbers. Either blank cells, or data that fails the sniff test. That Ygnacio Valley Fire, Concord, station mentioned above happens to be the one physically closest to our home. Today, it shows no rainfall at all for the last several days, while 4″ deep puddles have been forming on our patio. So, not believable.

In order to use the data in my fancy-pants spreadsheet, I have to clean it up by removing stations with bad data. Since not all stations are created equal – annual average rainfall varies from 11″ to 33.50″, in addition to the inconsistencies mentioned above – it matters which stations one removes. Removing any stations because you don’t like the data is bad science. I think we’ve reached a point where even I can’t convince myself my analysis proves anything.

That said, we’ve reached 92% of annual average rainfall! Woohoo!

Next, we had to tell our 94 year old neighbor of 27 years that we’re moving out. This old gentleman has watched our kids grow up, and has put up with our dumb former dog, and just been a great all-around neighbor. He’s the kind of guy who will keep an eye on the whole neighborhood in a friendly way, and even go have a talk with any neighbor who is maybe not being quite neighborly enough. Best neighbor we’ve ever had.

He was pretty emotional, as were we. In the last few years, his dearly beloved wife died, he had a fall and broke bones, and finally, after decades where he seemed to have hit about 60 and just stayed there, he is finally showing his age. He’s almost house-ridden these days, with trips to the doctor and daily walks with caregivers his only outside activates. This, for a man who was forever puttering in the garden and driving himself to church and so on. Please remember him in your prayers.

Next, had my pianos moved yesterday. The upright from the 1890s is sitting in storage; I bit the bullet and had my 1927 Steinway sent in for restringing. Too expensive! But now seemed the time. So, for the rest of my life, at least, there will be a truly fine piano to play in my home.

Finally, this same neighbor has 4 sons but no daughters. He fell hard for our younger daughter, who was born while we lived here. He got to see her grow up from infancy. She became, I think, the daughter he never had. Plus, she’s a cutie and the sweetest kid, and was always kind to him. Well, this daughter of ours, married just short of 4 months, is now expecting her first child. Due in November. Very hard to get my head around.

The gravitational shift of having one granddaughter living 60 miles away was huge; adding a second grandchild makes it totally irresistible. When we move, we plan to be much nearer to both.

House is almost empty; the Insane Brick Project is about 50 bricks from completion; the house will look and be in better shape than it ever was while we lived here; POD in the front drive being loaded up; a storage unit packed to the roof. While a Friday departure date seems to have been a little optimistic, we should be gone gone by Monday. 30+ years in the area, 27 in the same parish. All over.

More Mask ‘Humor’

As mentioned here previously, I occasionally attend the same morning weekday mass as the kids from the local Catholic school. I get to see first hand how this whole masking thing is working out. If it weren’t for the panic and terror used on kids to make them comply, it would be hilarious.

Today, the kiddos were again at mass. The total masking percentage seems to have fallen somewhere just under 50% Remember, the kids are no longer *required* to mask up, so what we’re seeing here is kids who either on their own initiative or at mommy’s or maybe daddy’s insistence keep masking up.

Saw a new one today – the Neck Mask. That’s a mask worn under the chin. Two kids were doing this for a while; one eventually pulled his mask back up to full upright and locked position, Later, he took it off completely. Somebody is getting mixed messages. While many still wore their masks right and proper – predominantly, the older girls, but not exclusively – others were doing all sorts of mask improve. Under the nose, chin masking, constant fiddling with it.

That last bit is the killer: not that logic or reason matter, but if in fact those masks worked at all, they’d be covered with Deadly Virus Particles, such that Rule #2, right after ‘mask up’ would be: keep you hands off them! The classic today: some little kid pulls down her mask, then does an elaborate sleeve wipe of her nose – then puts the mask back up. She’s just a kid, so OF COURSE she does the sleeve wipe.

I mean, you’re a kid. You’ve got a runny nose (It’s allergy season big time here.) It’s making the inside of your mask icky! Feels gross. So, without a moment’s thought, you take that stuff and wipe it on your sleeve (and spread it around on your face). THEN, you put the mask back up. Because… Kids gonna kid.

This, ladies and gentlemen, is SCIENCE! As I mentioned, if it weren’t for the panic, anxiety, bullying, fear mongering, and, frankly, child abuse, this would all be hilarious.