Just watching raindrops slapping leaves
is better than anything requiring electricity
including fame and posterity. Monday
morning I walk over to the art museum
stand before Homer. I'm imagining
life in ancient Greece, the land largely
deforested to build a navy, white as bone,
a tourist attraction. The sea too being
denuded of its fish, super-efficient fishery
fleets, and every human wanting a healthy
dose of omega 3. O my God, omega!

the 24th and last letter of his alphabet,
which means great and has a value of 800,
often used to denote the last, the end, the
ultimate limit of a set, as in I am the alpha
and the omega (which was omitted
from the oldest manuscripts). In physics,
ohm is a unit of electrical resistance,
in chemistry, oxygen-18, a stable isotope,
in statistical mechanics, it represents multiplicity
(the number of microstates) in a system.
In astronomy, the density of the universe
(density parameter), the ranking of a star’s
brightness in a constellation, and the orbital
elements: the longitude of the ascending node
and the designation of the argument
of periapsis of an orbit.

Also the solid angle or rate of precession
in a gyroscope. In particle physics,
omega baryons. In complex analysis,
the Omega constant, a solution to Lambert's
W-function. In calculus, a variable
for a 2-dimensional region, usually
corresponding to the domain of a double
integral. In topos theory, the codomain
of the subobject classifier of an elementary
space. In combinatory logic,
the looping combinator. In group theory,
the omega and agemo subgroups of a p-group.
In Big O notation, the asymptotic behavior
of functions. Chaitin's uncomputable constant.

Omega watches, badge of the Supreme Court,
last mission of the Space Shuttle program,
God of War, Heroes of Olympus, Pokemon's
Omega Ruby, Sonic the Hedgehog's E-123.
Symbol of resistance to the Vietnam War draft.
Year of date of death. Lowest-ranked wolf.

In molecular biology, a two-point crossover.
The lower case omega denotes the carbon atom
furthest from the carboxyl group of a fatty acid.
One of the RNA polymerase subunits.
The dihedral angle associated with the peptide group.
A measure of evolution at the protein level.
In dynamics, angular velocity or angular frequency.
In computational fluid dynamics, the specific
turbulence dissipation rate. In meteorology,
the Lagrangian time rate of change of pressure
for a parcel of air. Natural frequency
in circuit analysis and signal processing.
The omega meson.
NULL, a missing or inappropriate value.

The first transfinite ordinal number.
The first uncountable ordinal number.
The complex cube roots of 1.
The Wright Omega function. A general differential form.
The number of distinct prime divisors of n.
An arithmetic function. The self-application combinator.

The elasticity of financial options.
The tracking error of an investment manager.
In linguistics, the phonological word.
The archetype of a manuscript tradition.
In eschatology, the symbol for the end of everything.

The beginning of my first week without tv.
No more movies. If I have nothing to do
or I'm too bored to do anything, I'll just sit still
see what happens. Be like weather.
Be under the weather, with the weather,
in weather. Watch weather from the window.
Wait for change, in me and the weather.
How will I change? This is life and not life.
In 15 years or so I'll be gone from the earth,
bones whitening on some mountain
or rotting in the lowlands river or estuary I lived near,
flesh to sweat flesh with the population, dead.

This death, consciousness of which should give
this life's activities perspective, except for the red
sunset which remains untouched by atomic IQ;
and dead, laying open to the blue sky and dry leaves
one autumn like last autumn, or the autumn
I realized my insignificance.

The four fundamental forces:
Zeus, Aphrodite, Ares (or Mars), and Adam and Eve.

                            <<0>>                                          >> 0 <<

             Electric field induced by             Electric field induced by
            a positive electric charge            a negative electric charge

"Deutsch thinks that such 'jumps to universality' must occur not only in the capacity to calculate things, but also in the capacity to understand things, and in the closely related capacity to make things happen. And he thinks that it was precisely such a threshold that was crossed with the invention of the scientific method. There were plenty of things we humans could do, of course, prior to the invention of that method: agriculture, or the domestication of animals, or the design of sundials, or the construction of pyramids. But all of a sudden, with the introduction of that particular method of concocting and evaluating new hypotheses, there was a sense in which we could do anything. The capacities of a community that has mastered that method to survive, to learn, and to remake the world according to its inclinations are (in the long run) literally, mathematically, infinite. And Deutsch is convinced that the tendency of the world to give rise to such communities, more than, say, the force of gravitation, or the second law of thermodynamics, or even the phenomenon of death, is what ultimately gives the world its shape, and what constitutes the genuine essence of nature. 'In all cases,' he writes, 'the class of transformations that could happen spontaneously--in the absence of knowledge--is negligibly small compared with the class that could be effected artificially by intelligent beings who wanted those transformations to happen. So the explanations of almost all physically possible phenomena are about how knowledge would be applied to bring those phenomena about.' And there is a beautiful and almost mystical irony in all this: that it was precisely by means of the Scientific Revolution, it was precisely by means of accepting that we are not the center of the universe, that we became the center of the universe."

Danger comes from the root bad brakes and bald tires. Chain saws
      and wildfires. Poisonous
ideologies, housecleaning chemicals and toiletries. Powerful
      industrialists, alcoholic fathers.
Invasive species, illegal immigrants. Concentration camps, attention
      deficit disorder.
Performance phobia, identity enhancements. Pleasure, applause.
      Quiet moments, walking and
talking war buddies. Electoral politics, marriage and divorce. Pest
      exterminator, Yeats seminar.
Love affair, pencil sharpener. Whatever, matter. Ionic and covalent
      bonds, republican hairstyle.
Events in their mere chronology.

"What is a typical place in the universe like? Let me assume that you are reading this on Earth. In your mind's eye travel straight upwards a few hundred kilometers. Now you are in the slightly more typical environment of space. But you are still being heated and illuminated by the sun, and half your field of view is still taken up by the solids, liquids and **** of the Earth. A typical location has none of those features. So, travel a few trillion kilometers further in the same direction. You are now so far away that the sun looks like other stars. You are at a much colder, darker and emptier place, with no **** in sight. But it is not yet typical: you are still inside the Milky Way galaxy, and most places in the universe are not in any galaxy. Continue until you are clear outside the galaxy--say, a hundred thousand light years from Earth. At this distance you could not glimpse the Earth even if you used the most powerful telescope that humans have yet built. But the Milky Way still fills much of your sky. To get to a typical place in the universe, you have to imagine yourself at least a thousand times as far out as that, deep in intergalactic space. What is it like there? Imagine the whole of space notionally divided into cubes the size of our solar system. If you were observing from a typical one of them, the sky would be pitch black. The nearest star would be so far away that if it were to explode as a supernova, and you were staring directly at it when its light reached you, you would not even see a glimmer. That is how big and dark the universe is. And it is cold: it is at that background temperature of 217 Kelvin, which is cold enough to freeze every known substance except helium. And it is empty: the density of atoms out there is below one per cubic meter. That is a million times sparser than atoms in the space between the stars, and those atoms are themselves sparser than in the best vacuum that human technology has yet achieved. Almost all the atoms in intergalactic space are hydrogen or helium, so there is no chemistry. No life could have evolved there, nor any intelligence. Nothing changes there. Nothing happens. The same is true of the next cube and the next, and if you were to examine a million consecutive cubes in any direction the story would be the same."

The 5 colors of sadness:
disappointed, didn't get what was wanted
confused, don't know what to do next, where to go
lonely, no one to love or be loved by
sorry, unable to help or change what happened
depressed, can't get out of bed, want to **** self

"Unless a society is expecting its own future choices to be better than its present ones, it will strive to make its present policies and institutions as immutable as possible. Therefore Popper's criterion can be met only by societies that expect their knowledge to grow -- and to grow unpredictably. And, further, they are expecting that if it did grow, that would help. This expectation is what I call optimism, and I can state it, in its most general form, thus: The Principle of Optimism -- All evils are caused by insufficient knowledge. Optimism is, in the first instance, a way of explaining failure, not prophesying success. It says that there is no fundamental barrier, no law of nature or supernatural decree, preventing progress. Whenever we try to improve things and fail, it is not because the spiteful (or unfathomably benevolent) gods are thwarting us or punishing us for trying, or because we have reached a limit on the capacity of reason to make improvements, or because it is best that we fail, but always because we did not know enough, in time. But optimism is also a stance towards the future, because nearly all failures, and nearly all successes, are yet to come.

As I think of things to do I do them.
Thing by thing I get things done.
That's how my father and his father did things.
I guess my mother and her mother did things that way too.

Sometimes I'm driving and I think how my father and his father drove
      too.
There was weather and they had problems. There is weather and I
      have problems.
Time exists only in the human mind. But if the mind exists, time exists.
Joy everywhere. Joy at birth. Joy at death. All joy, all times.

Anyone who wants to fight me all the time
committee meetings, board meetings.
Facing death was how they knew they were alive
or was it more about allocating resources
like yr Dad said.
It's hard to step outside what yr DNA tells you to do.
Nice ****.
Family farm, fight club. It's all one yet distinctions are
what separates the librarian, reflective man, from the road and bridge
      crew.
That's a class statement. Us guys love
our children and will, circumstances dictating, fight for you.

                                 --------------------------------------

Anyone who wants to fight me all the time
is more important to me than my wife. But there is no one left to fight
and no one knows me and I know no one well. That's good,
there is more space between people than I'd ever dared to hope.
I'm confused.
Meditator or gunfighter. Either could come to know himself,
flat abs, clear sight
with patience and discipline.
What's this:
know yourself?
Once yr knee or neck is smashed there's no getting up to fight.

                                 --------------------------------------

Anyone who wants to fight me all the time
will grow old alone once I'm in the ground. He will live
with the question what was our purpose? He was managed by
the molecules we're made of, proteins, enzymes, amino acids, DNA.
******* DNA.
I'd rather be a rock.
But the rock is subject to
its elements. Thus, the periodic table and particle physics,
meiosis and mitosis and yes, democracy and self-governance,
all the colors of anthropology and ecology, windmills and sundials,
fission and fusion for evil and light
and the devil who exists to carry the load when we misbehave and
      fight
among ourselves.

                                 --------------------------------------

Anyone who wants to fight me all the time
is how I know who I am.
Because the truth is always changing, depending on the meeting.
What's good.
Service to others is a safe bet. That service
may take many forms: fighting, meeting, teaching, making.
The fighting may be part of holding community together. Limited
      scope, defensive posture.
How broadly we define community says everything. So,
we come to Mexico, a violent border and an unhappy history.
Or Gaza and Israel. Or Russia and just about everybody.
How can a people become a nation without resorting to violence or
      incurring violent reaction?
Does it matter? Accept violence like any EMT and devote yourself
      to
what, beauty?
Why do I write about violence, I've almost never
had to fight.

                                 --------------------------------------

Anyone who wants to fight me all the time
is nothing compared to the ocean which can take your children any
      time.
The Nazis or janjaweed.
In peace we have our meetings.
When violence comes to the neighborhood the hierarchy of
      communicants will hold or fold
it is then the peace work proves relevant.
Hold your clod of land.
Give way to the waves.
All I do not know.
I admire the writer who penetrates the unknown by describing that
      which
is not himself.
His enemy,
anyone who wants to fight him all the time
helps him live outside himself.

We should have gone outside instead of watching one
of the sillier, senseless, meaningless movies it is possible
to rent or buy. Winter or not the fields and woods
are at least real, commensal and understandable if
you know the genus and species. Know the genome
and biome. Learn the physics and music.

But this much reality requires an escape, hence
bad movie. A bad book is better than a bad movie.
A good movie trumps a bad book, but a good book is best
and a great poem trumps all. Will my son Zach be one
who applies the scientific method? Can Aaron explain
God's intentions to the people? Their mother and I will wait.

Quantum physics scares the **** out of me
Well it’s not really just quantum physics
It’s everything that stands in between its letters
It’s both the solutions and the questions that frighten me most
I was 12 when I first had a panic attack about eternity
I was in the shower, writing thoughts in steam
When all of a sudden
I was suffocating on forever
And showered with thoughts of before time
The all around terrifying notion of timelessness
Caused shivers that felt like our heater had gone out again
Tears rushed down my face
Faster than the speed of light
Not that I knew what it was
But it felt like lightening filled my body
From that moment,
I learned my truest fear of unanswerable questions
As I grew and grew wary
I took less showers in hopes
I wouldn’t find my fears
Swirling in around my ankles
Clogging up the drain
Lingering there
As the only thing that I could
Never wash off of me,
Never flush away

As time moved on with
A sureness I could never have
I floated amongst the thoughts of
Others so as not to drown in my own
But as night comes
So others rest
And as others rest
The Fearful attempt to count sheep
But even the sheep begin to wonder
About the unfathomable
And before I know it
I’m screaming into my pillow
Blaming the sheep for my restless nights
Insisting I’m not crazy
Insisting that wool blankets are the problem
Picking problems to bring me to now
Problems that make the present
Matter more to this masochistic brain
Than the questions that I should never have asked

Unanswerable, I’d repeat
I’d resolve
I’d allow myself to toy the word around,
Flick it around in my mouth,
As if to keep it too busy to ask more,
But also to make the original questions taste so sweet
That I never wanted them to leave my mouth
So I swallowed them
As if to indulge my taste buds just a little longer
But they sat in my stomach like seeds
With time they grew up my throat,
Watered with theological and scientific discussions alike
The first time I was told that my questions, could have a solution,
My stomach lurched into my throat
Now was the time
The questions were uprooting, ready to grow out in this world
But my jaw was taut
And refused to let others be haunted
So the vines
With no where else to go
Moved with intention
Past my mouth,
Behind my eyes
Into my brain
It had taken over
I became my questions
Rooted in the pit of my stomach
Paralyzed by the pain of
Wooden rigidity
Each move dictated by the unbending will
Of an oak tree caged by iron
Questions acting as a fungus
Rotting out happiness,
Killing the mind
That had formed the seed in the first place
I was immobile in my fear and
Planted in my questions
Unwilling to explore
And so the tree stayed
And I saw the world through
Shaded light
Always careful not to climb
Too far up
Too far in
Thankful for the fact
That not many aspire to
Plant seeds
Let alone
Climb trees

By the time I first saw you
Many rings had formed
You were passing through crowds
Like you walk through forests
Letting things be
What they were
And
Watching people act as they may
Imagine my intrigue
As I saw the callous on your hands
Smelled sap on your breath
I felt a friendly fear
In your eyes
But your hands
Did not look pained
Only worn
Still with care
Only when you spoke
Did I feel the logic in your branches
The whips of your leaves that
I had refused to grow
You were questions fully blossomed
You had leaves made of
Wormholes
And
Budding flowers of dark matter
And as I drew my trunk back,
Insisting I was allergic
I got lost in your bark
I found possibilities
Buried amongst your ridges
I soon found a taste so sweet,
It brought shame on my appeasing mantra
Without control
Like forces of nature tend to be
I grew into you
Yet still,
It was not the color of your leaves
Nor the feel of your vines that took me
It was your ability to blossom
Your permission of exploration
The blossoms, though pleasing to the eye,
Grew through your watering and sunlight

As if by some evolutionary revelation,
I turned my face upward
And found the warmth of the sun
Didn’t have to burn me
I opened my body up
And felt a comfort in the waters that
I had once felt would drown me.
The budding flowers I had let wilt
For so long
Arose from my branches,
Now growing toward the stars
With a few more rings
Of sunlight and starlight,
You’re much better at blooming than I,
But with questions now being watered,
My trunk grows with possibility
I may never grow to such great heights
Or fully know the universe beyond
But I do know, that no matter
The truth
If the wormholes
And multiverses
Are as real as
The Redwoods
And
Cherry Blossoms
I’m infinitely pleased
That I’m in this universe,
Sharing starlight,
And questions,
With you.

Sometimes I think about
the structure of atoms
and how difficult it can be
to tell the difference between me
and the cantaloupe I just ate
and where I end
and the sunlight begins.
And I wonder
if maybe when you kiss me
you leave behind pieces of yourself
on my tongue
and that’s why I remember
exactly how you taste
no matter how long it’s been.

Sometimes I think about
quantum entanglement
and how two different particles
can be inextricably and inexplicably
tied to each other
no matter their physical distance.
And I wonder
if maybe a tiny piece of your left iris
is entangled with an atom
in the muscle of my cheek
and that’s why
I can’t help but smile
when you look at me.

Sometimes I think about
our understanding of DNA
and how so much of it we call “junk”
because we don’t know what it does.
And I wonder
if maybe years from now
they’ll be able to read my base pairs
like a novel
and some scientist
will be able to look at them and say
“This,
just here,
this is how we know
the subject fell in love.”

Our world is in bits;
Hawking has it flipped.
There isn't a theory
Of everything,
Everything has
Its theory.

He was a good runner;
And one hell of a stunner;
Your stop-glass picture for a lightning vision;
And a start-pass winner, a stunting gold finisher;
A heart cold hunter, he was my knock-out hitter;
He was a K.O. Rider--
He was a collider: on one collect collision course;
Of course, the beginning was when it began:
Between the specific sheet of force
With a good measure...
Had me landing on all fours,
Reveling in it again;
To rev up was the plan.

my rhymes, they're supremacy, while they need consistency, yours the are unwanted clemency, mine requires ability;tremendously, you rhymes, low volume low density, D=m/v, ***** that, im all about chemistry, chemistry between the bonds of my melody, while yours are useless discrepancy, perform reverse polarity, while you're searching for popularity and keeping your rhymes up breathlessly. hey, i'll give you a break; temporarily. i'll come back later; sequentially.