Velcro City Tourist Board

Hmm, been quiet here again, hasn’t it? Well, I’ve been busy, y’know… and once I’d fallen behind the rest of the #egansquad crew, I decided to read it when I had the time to focus on it properly. That moment seems not to have arrived just yet. Selah.

Anyway, it’s not just been the social whirlwind of easing back into the scene of the city by the sea… though that’s been a lot of it, to be fair (and well needed it was, too). But since getting back I’ve been doing my best to crank up my writing output (a mixed success, in that it has increased, but not as much as I’d have liked), sold two news pieces to New Scientist and one to Wired, applied for that Masters course I mentioned before, had a first and fairly successful jam with what I hope will turn out to be a new band to play guitar in, and written and mumbled some words for another musical project.

That latter project is named Protein Window, and most of the noises come courtesy the one and only Rusty Sheriff (drummer in my old band Aeroplane Attack), who’s been experimenting with weirdly-tuned guitar drones and sampled loops. We’re both fans of a rather super band called Enablers, so I suggested I could knock out some spoken word material to go with his soundscapes. Here’s the results of the first attempt; coz it’s not my BandCamp page, I can’t embed the player, so just trust me and click on through, then come back. It’s OK, I’ll wait.

*twiddles thumbs*

Ah, there you are. What do you mean, “not very cheerful”? This is art, I tell you! Art has no mandate for cheerfulness!

More Protein Window new as it arrives. Come Monday, I’m off to Sheffield for a meeting about a job I’ll hopefully be starting around September time, so wish me luck. Have a good weekend!

Notes taken while reading A Visit From The Goon Squad by Jennifer Egan, which a bunch of us are gang-reading and chatting about on Twitter under the #egansquad hashtag. Decided to dump these here because I’m struggling to cram all my thoughts into 140-character bites; discussion of points will probably be more Twitter-based, but this seems to me to be an acceptable shortcut. (Plus I wanted to archive these somewhere accessible and public, becasue Goon Squad already strikes me as being an important book, even if it only turns out to be so in the context of my own reading. Selah.)

***

A

1 – Found Objects

Sasha searching for a meaning to everything, searching for something real, an authenticity she can’t really describe or even recognise until it’s there, momentarily; a transient thing, satisfaction, a fleeting emotional twinge in a wasteland of… ennui? Self-loathing?

Sense of place (and entrapment/embeddedness within such) is very powerful; that feeling of a belonging that isn’t entirely born of pleasure or meaning but inertia, a function of time. That description of the apartment accreting around her over time, like the pile of purloined bits, contextless objects stolen, made into a little heap, its meaning emergent and transient. Things fall apart, the centre cannot hold… so plug the vortex, throw in enough junk and the dam might just clog. But what is flowing away? Is there anything left to save? My old flat in Southsea felt like that, before I left.

Wild chopping of timelines, but very neatly handled; if Egan maintains this level of prestidigitation all through, this will be a fun – if brainshaking – ride.

Is there a microcosmic metaphor of the whole text going on here, maybe? I’ve heard much about how Goon Squad is a po-mo collage of styles and forms and media; is the pile of stolen items the book, Sasha the author? A Jungian reading, perhaps, but it’s very tempting, even at this early stage. The briefness of satisfaction in Sasha’s thefts is poignant – far more so than the obvious yet deft pinpointing of the story in post-9/11 New York. But how far post-9/11? Does everyone feel that absence as strongly still, or is Sasha the type to cling to the hollow pain of loss?

2 – The Gold Cure

A record exec drinking flaked gold in coffee in hope of restoring his lost sex drive; no escaping that metaphor, is there? But Bennie at least remembers a time when music still mattered to him, even though he blames the digital tsunami for killing it. So he’s in therapy too (hey, this is the fictional New York, everyone’s got to be in therapy, right?), and he’s got a hole in his soul to fill, too, just like Sasha. (But again, haven’t we all? Or is that just me?)

Navel-gazing aside, the sense of the centre and the certainties having dropped out of pretty much everything is front and centre; Bennie’s plainly adrift in a world that no longer plays by the rules he learned, and is trying his best not to blame the world for that.

“… seemed to be a fashion choice, not a costume.” Doesn’t grok that there’s no real difference that matters any more.

Ah, yes; pre-digital authenticity is the only thing Bennie has a hard-on for. But the poor guy’s totally adrift on a sea of fragmentary failures and disgraces, and the things he achieved are lurking beneath the water, Atlantean, seen most clearly in the misted memory of myth. Plenty of pathos sloshing around here… but from Bennie’s POV Sasha seems calm, composed. This is earlier than chapter one, then.

Ah, and as if on cue, here are the hints of Sasha’s developing kleptomania.

“The flakes would look the same in five years as they did now.” Again, a lust for a lost permanence. (Also could be read as a more vague metaphor for the lingering trust we have in gold, even though it doesn’t mean a whole lot in fiat currency terms any more.) Even Sasha “stopped being a girl while he wasn’t looking”. Divorced, estranged from his son, throwing money away on a quack cure, still on the sex-and-drugs rock’n'nroll roundabout long past the point where it stopped being any fun.

3 – Ask Me If I Care

First-person narrator, present tense; still some of the temporal flickering of the previous chapters, but there’s more of a coherent start, middle and end – length may help, too, but this really feels like a standalone story, and a damned fine one at that. Narrator Rhea self-effacing and insecure to the nth degree; we’re almost two thirds through before we even find out her name, and she talks about herself largely in terms of other people; diminished ego, and like the other characters so far defines herself by what she feels she lacks.

1979 or thereabouts, the culturewave of punk flooding out across the States after its initial explosion. A very believable and wrenching tale of outsider teenage confusions and passions, of innocence traded for entry to the palace of adulthood (which turns out to be the same place you were before, but with more confusing bits. But again, it’s people searching for things that they think will fix their sorrows, complete them: success, a record deal, a hot boy, a loss of freckles.

“I can’t tell if she’s actually real, or if she’s stopped caring if she’s real or not. Or is not caring what makes a person real?”

4 — Safari
i – Grass

Lou and his disaffected first-marriage kids on the afore-mentioned safari. Charlie (possible irnoic nod to father’s drug of choice?) on cusp of adolescence, just learning the bittersweet taste of rebellion against her parents. Temporal leaping again (a forward digression on the drum-playing warrior’s family-to-come), and within that a physical leap (back to NY… everything in this book seems to gravitate toward NY one way or the other, like it’s the cultural singularity point, or at least the event horizon).

Lou’s son Rolph emerging as some sort of totem of authenticity, of the empathy and centredness that all the other characters seem to lack and long for… Lou only recognises this subconsiously, even as he tries to shape R to be more like him.

Another temporal oddity: “He thinks, I’ll remember this night for the rest of my life. And he’s right.” Omniscient narration? Rolph looking backwards? (No, can’t be, because we’re getting insights into other minds; omniscient is horribly hard to do right, let alone well, but Egan seems to nhave the knack of it.)

ii – Hills

Anthrolopologist character deployed as anthropological lens thru which to observe the power dynamics of the group…

Pre-digital – proof of animal sightings must wait on development of analog film. (Also, Chronos as name of bassplayer; another nod to time as construct/creation?)

Weird feeling to this chapter, like some sort of documentary with a sotto voce commentary from the almighty. Another deep leap into the hypermediated Now (which is here an almost unknowable future); a reminder that the new ability to reconnect to one’s past doesn’t bring the sense of connection to authenticity (the incredible clash of Chronos and lion, an unkillable story) that its Skinner box set-up suggests it will.

Subtle and not-so-subtle paralleling between lion pride dynamics and the anthropology of the group dynamics around Lou. What’s interesting is that Lou seems to be the one character whose head we almost never get inside…

iii – Sand

Rolph won’t spear the fish. “I just like watching them.” After the aside that Lou resents Rolph’s mother’s (passive/pacifistic) influence over him… he wants R to be more of a lion. And in a way he is, in that he recognises and despises the alpha-maleness of his father and his desire for symbolic wins over lasting satisfaction… while Charlie is easily deceived by the surface of things, and – so we are told – will go on to suffer from such. More temporal pinball… does this signal the end of the chapter on its way?

“But we’re getting off the subject.” Authorial intrusion getting less and less subtle; the omniscient narrator is becoming a character in his/her/its own right.

In response to viewer and listener feedback received during the recently-finished football season, the BBC has decided that pundits and newscasters on all BBC media properties will be forbidden from mentioning specific details of league matches until it has been determined that everyone interested in watching or listening to the live commentary has had a chance to do so.

Barraged by complaints from viewers stuck at work or with family while crucial matches were broadcast, the Director General felt obliged to respond and address the issue. “Obviously, it’s been unfair of us to discuss major events and turnarounds in football matches – final score, goalscorers, red cards and the like – when there are still loyal fans who’ve yet to watch or listen to the game via timeshifted media. Why should they be denied the chance to enjoy our football-related programming just because there’s a chance the element of surprise might be removed from their enjoyment of their home team’s performance?”

Asked how the BBC intended to deal with the possibility of other media outlets leaking the same details while some fans remained unfulfilled, the Director General replied: “We’re planning to set up a dialogue with other venues to establish a sort of universal code of practice. It is to be hoped that rogue venues will not breach the code and race to broadcast the full detail of a match in their discussion of it; it would be very callous of them not to consider the possibility of a fan accidentally clicking through to a discussion of a game they had yet to watch. After all, it’s not the fan’s responsibility to avoid every venue where discussion might occur; that onus lies clearly on the media and the punditry, and it’s to the shame of this industry that we’ve let this run unchecked for so long.”

Faced with the suggestion that such a code of conduct would be unpolicable and tantamount to a form of censorship, the Director General asserted that it is clearly the duty of the media to forestall discussion until a point where everyone can participate in it equally. “It’s just the right thing to do, isn’t it? After all, if we told them they’d be better off avoiding football-related media until they’ve had a chance to catch up, we’d be being monstrously unfair to that minority of people. They should be able to read, listen to or watch whatever they want without fear of finding out something they’d rather not know yet, and we have to consider that desire – born as it is of a form of deferred gratification – to be more important than the inconsiderate lust for discussion of everyone else. That lust has led to pundits taking an almost sadistic glee in discussing the particulars of certain matches, especially the most important or contentious ones, and – to be frank – the sooner we quash this unpleasant thread of elitism, the better off everyone will be.”

When pressed, the DG suggested that the same protocols will eventually be rolled out into all sports programming, and finally all news content in general. But wouldn’t this mean that eventually the BBC would be completely unable to discuss anything that had happened at all, ever? “We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it, I suppose,” responded the Director General. “But I’m positive that those to whom we extend the privilege of forestalling the discussion will be grateful for not having to think about what they read or watch, and that is reward enough for everyone, I’d have thought.”

For more background on this story, click here. Unless you’re worried that clicking there might reveal an important component of the events in question that will spoil your enjoyment of the discussion as a whole, of course; after all, you shouldn’t have to make that judgement call yourself.

Well, I wasn’t expecting that. And with the exception of a very few people, nor was anyone else.

To be honest, I suspected Osama bin Laden was already either dead or decommissioned some time ago; given the increasing irrelevance of al Qaida anywhere other than the headline-generation meetings of right-wing Western media houses and political parties, it was an easy mistake to make. Whether we’ll find ourselves wishing he’d just faded away into obscurity with the passage of time remains to be seen… but we can say with certainty that he’s now achieved a sort of immortality, albeit not the one promised to mujahadiin who lose their lives in the course of a holy war.

Whosoever decided that burying the guy at sea without releasing some sort of concrete proof to the media that they got the right guy deserves a hearty slapping, however, for handing conspiracy theorists the world over a shiny new toy to play with. To clarify: I’m pretty positive that the Yanks have bagged the real bear (because claiming falsely to have done so would have been so easily disproved by a YouTube video starring one bearded nutbag and a copy of that morning’s newspaper that even Dubya wouldn’t have attempted it, though I bet he’d have liked to), and I know how Occam’s Razor works. But so does any politician or high-level covert ops planning team, I’d wager, and they also know that Josephine Average is a sucker for projecting patterns into the spaces between data-points. A few stills or seconds of video would have gone a long way to quelling some of the kneejerk questioning that’s currently ricocheting around the internetosphere; as ghoulish as it was, the “leaked” footage of an addled and burned-out looking Saddam Hussein left little doubt that they’d strung up the real McCoy. (The question of whether hanging Saddam or shooting bin Laden is the morally right thing to do is a debate for another time, but suffice to say I’m not sure it is. Democracy and the rule of law must be universally applied, no matter how repugnant or obviously guilty the accused may be, or the very concept of democracy is undermined. There’s been a lot of that in the past ten years, too.)

Repetition for the easily excited: I’m as convinced as I can be that they got their man, but I’m not surprised a lot of folk are demanding more substantive proofs of such. (Postmodernism isn’t a creed or philosophy, it’s a ubiquitous and unavoidable cultural condition; we are all hostile to metanarratives that make us feel uncomfortable and/or confused, and the notion that “[any] government [other than {my preferred government}] can be trusted” was an early casualty in all but the most easily swayed.)

It’s no mark of particular intelligence or insight on my part to say that bin Laden’s death has in no way “made the world a safer place” (in the short term, quite the opposite), ended the threat of Islamic terrorism (or any other sort), secured world peace, prevented cruelty to kittens or located Elvis. Much as the methodology jars with my own pacifism, I’m not sad to hear bin Laden is dead; he was without a doubt a very nasty shit indeed, guilty of orchestrating terrible atrocities, and I recognise the need for closure in the US; the psychic wound of 9/11 has festered for a long time, after all, and little less than a trophy head was going to stand a chance of resolving that lesion. But looking at footage of folk around the White House chanting and celebrating what – based on the effort, expense, timescale and collateral damage involved – is a deeply Pyrrhic victory, I’m put in mind of the revulsion we all felt when we saw bin Laden’s supporters doing exactly that on a certain September 12th, nearly ten years ago. As is often the case (in my universe at least), old Friedrich has wise words for the Zeitgeist:

Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster.

Probably worth mentioning that “an eye for an eye” is a tenet of Islamic law, also. The United States in particular – but by no means exclusively – has had a decade of gazing into the abyss. It’s time to step back from that ledge.

So, here I am, back in the bosom of Velcro City. The physical act of moving house went pretty well, all told, though I’ve been paying for it in aches and bruises, most of which have faded to the level of background noise by this point. Mark’s van just about managed to inhale all my worldly goods (except the sofabed, which went to the astonishingly convenient charity shop two doors down, and the better portion of my book collection, which is currently glowering from the corner of a spare room at my mother’s place in deepest darkest East Yorkshire), but there was nary a cubic inch to spare, and the poor old thing managed a peak speed of around 65mph on the journey back… downhill, with a tailwind and a certain amount of luck. Those old Transits have proper workhorse engines, though, and Mark made the very best of an extremely fortunate run of road conditions – we rolled out of central Stockport at half eleven and were pulling up in Southsea by 5pm. Kudos and many many thanks to Mark, without whom I’d have been in a much stickier situation; you’re a brother, and – once again – I owe you big-time.

Princess Katie-Jane maintained her uncanny calmness when travelling, too; apart from a half-hour of plaintive miaows at the start, she pretty much just lay sleeping in her kitty-carrier the whole way, and is now cheerfully claiming ownership of the majority of the house in which I’m crashing until something more permanent can be sorted out. Frankly, I think she’s adapted more swiftly than I have to the change of geography… but then she doesn’t have a business that depends on a stable internet connection! The good news there is that, as should be obvious, I’ve managed to kludge my way to a tentatively online state by way of the hideously-priced dial-up-paced bandwidth available from BT FON/Openworld; it’s not all that and a bag of chips, but it’ll see me through until the nice people from Virgin come next week to run some optical fibre into this household. Just in time for the R*yal W*dding, in fact, which I shall probably celebrate by going and doing something staunchly atheistic and republican, like going and seeing some loud bands murder old Sex Pistols songs. When in Rome, and all that…

For them as is wondering, yes, it feels absolutely brilliant to be back – like slipping into an old and well-worn pair of shoes and wondering why you ever replaced them. And a person couldn’t ask for more perfect weather to return to a South coast seaside town gone somewhat to seed; the last week has felt more like mid-June than late April, with hardly a cloud in the clear blue skies. Perfect weather for rolling around the backstreets on a silly bicycle, and for catching up with friends one hasn’t seen for a long time… both of which have been big features of the last five days, as I’ve eased my way back into my new old town. Summer employment is looking settled, and the long-range prospects of my life are looking better than they’ve looked in a long time; just get me a permanent address, and I can take on the world! (Well, a reasonable percentage of the world at any one given time; the whole thing would take something of a run-up, I suspect.)

So, next on the agenda is one last jag back up to Stockport to do all the final closure bits on my tenancy, which will take up tomorrow and Friday. Then it’s a weekend of vicarious digital convention snooping (would really love to be at Eastercon, but sadly not a practical option given the circumstances), vicarious holidaying in famous nuclear disaster areas (my friends do some odd stuff, which may explain why we’re friends), a first shift at the summer job… and who knows what else? The town is my seafood-intolerant oyster alternative!

Right, my stomach’s saying we’re getting near supper time, so that’s enough wordwaffle. Stay funky, folks.

OK, folks, just a quick one: yours truly is about to move house again, clambering down the country’s backbone and returning to the dubious but familiar bosom of this blog’s namesake, Velcro City.

Problem being that I’ve not yet managed to nail down a new place to live on a permanent basis. Luckily, Velcro City is full of good friends, so I’ve places to stay in the interim… but the backswing of the situation is that access to the intermatubes is going to be a little patchy for the next week, and quite possibly scarce for a few weeks following that. Which won’t make a huge difference to the admittedly patchy blogging schedule here, of course, though it’ll be more noticeable over at Futurismic (where I’ve scheduled a similar announcement for later today).

For those readers among you with whom my relationship has elements of business included, an email will be forthcoming later today explaining what’s going on.

For those readers among you wondering about where I might be found in terms of public events in meatspace: I’ll not be at Eastercon this year (have to do the final paperwork/handover stuff on this flat that weekend), but if you’re at the Clarke Awards ceremony on the 27th of this month, you’ve got a very good chance of bumping into me there.

And before I drop the shutters here for a brief period, I’ll take the opportunity to re-crow yesterday’s excellent news: I placed an essay with the Culture Lab blog at New Scientist, and I am pretty bloody stoked about it, thankyouverymuch. This year is shaping up to be full of exciting changes in my life, of which this is – I hope – just one early harbinger.

So watch this space.

Courtesy of Locus Magazine‘s short fiction critic Lois Tilton, reviewing the stories in Fables from the Fountain [preorders available now OMFG!]:

“A lot of arcane trivia in a complex tangle that isn’t too credible.”

I’m getting that printed on a T-shirt. SRSLY.

Related: the signing sheets from the hardback edition came and went earlier this week. Sign your name a few hundred times in rapid succession, and watch the resulting scrawl lose all meaning. It’s a bit like chanting a short sentence aloud over and over again; meaning dissolves in repetition, leaving only a looped pattern dissociated from its original purpose. A reminder that meaning is created on the fly. Maybe.

Via the Double-Boing, Ed Yong of Discover‘s Not Exactly Rocket Science blog presents a graphical representation of his writing process, which is so incredibly similar to my own experience of writing reviews and essays that it’s almost scary… right down to the querulous “maybe pissing around on the internet would help?” (It never has yet, but I refuse to deny it the chance.)

Well, this is… weird. It’s the first time in my life I get to see the guy in the paper awaiting sentencing and go “hey, wait, I used to work with that guy!” This link points at a Daily Hate article, and hence has been deliberately broken so as to avoid giving the bastards any pagerank; just add the two missing letters, and you’re good to go. now points to a masking proxy that makes things more convenient; cheers, Ad.

But the gist is this: Terence Brown was making money from selling CD-ROM anthologies of articles from the internet, billed as a more up-to-date version of the notorious (but perfectly legal at the time) Anarchist’s Cookbook: bombmaking, lockpicking, all that sort of stuff. Y’know, the sort of stuff that most of you reading this could probably locate within ten minutes of trying it, given a working computer with an internet connection.

Welcome to the wonders of British anti-terror legislation! Terence Brown was “convicted of seven counts of collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism under the Terrorism Act 2000, two counts of selling and distributing the information under the Terrorism Act 2006 and a further count under the Proceeds of Crime Act.”

Let’s just look again at that highlighted crime, there:

“… collecting information that could have been used to prepare or commit acts of terrorism… “

That’s a staggeringly vague thing. A good lawyer – heck, just a skint lawyer – could probably look through my hard drive and bookshelves and get me on the same charge, right now: I have books on organic chemistry, electronics and practical nuclear fission*, for instance. But Terence probably didn’t even need to buy books to do it, either. Even the Daily Fail itself says the discs “contained a vast collection of material downloaded from the internet”. So stuff that people could have just got for free, in other words, if they’d taken maybe five minutes longer than they took looking up “anarchist’s cookbook” on Google.

Is it perhaps the selling of that freely available information, for profit, that elevates Terence to the loft heights of terrorist? Daily Fail again:

“The law is clear that it is a crime to gather this information without a reasonable excuse or to disseminate material which is clearly intended to be of use to terrorists. A person’s intentions or motivation for doing this is irrelevant.“

So, selling free-to-read information that might be useful in planning a terrorist event to people who could have been terrorists, and making money from it, is a crime, regardless of the ideological reasons for doing so.

I’m assuming, then, given the legendary proportion and scale of British justice, that people who sold physical weapons and substances made for no other purpose than war or terrorism to people who were definitely terrorists, for profit, would be guilty of a far greater crime than Terence there, regardless of their reasons for doing it?

Well, of course it is.

For anyone other than the government that passed the law in question, that is.

I worked with Terence Brown for nearly three years; he was a doorman at The Wedgewood Rooms in Portsmouth where I used to do box office and other FOH stuff. He’s no thug (yeah, I know, you’re thinking of the doorman stereotype; not a thug, nor even a “hard man”), he’s no terrorist, and he’s no callous nihilist either. The most he’s guilty of here is possibly some copyright infringement, along with making a fast and easy buck selling publicly-available information to lazy idiots – and if the latter’s a crime, the Daily Fail should probably unsaddle the high horse.

His is exactly the sort of theoretical case that we were repeatedly assured the Terrorism Act would never be used for. And I’ll say it again, publicly and for the record: you could search my flat right now and pin the “collecting information” charges on me, just because of stuff lying around on my bookshelves and hard drives… not to mention the library shelves in almost every decent-sized city in Britain, and the multitudinous servers of the internet.

The Terrorism Act, used in this way, is not about terrorism. It’s about freedom of speech, and the silencing of voices that dissent, or even ones saying things you just don’t like or want heard. If you value your voice, use it today and talk to someone about the Terence Brown case.

Yes, speaking out marks me as complicit in some of the same crimes as Terence Brown. Staying silent, however, would make me complicit in the crimes of the state.

Easy choice.

J M McDermott’s heartfelt essay at SF Signal chimed with me for a number of reasons, not least of which is the fact that certain recent Life Direction Decisions™ of my own are now pointing me toward an economically wasteful Masters degree, but also because McDermott seems to share a lot of my own value systems. You should surely read the whole thing, but here’s a few favourite bits:

Be proud of me. Be proud of my economic waste. The greatest tragedy of our culture is that we have allowed the financiers to take over our young imaginations. Our brightest minds from our greatest universities flock to high paying jobs, where they try to make as much money as they can before they die. The best and brightest children our nation has to offer have all been seduced into believing that ownership of large houses is more important than the environmental footprint that our McMansions smear all over our fragile ecology. The systems of wealth culture have brainwashed our youth into believing that upward mobility is something everyone should aspire to, and that being a leader is something glorious and respectable and sexy, and everyone else is a slacker or failure, and that it is a shameful thing to be a janitor or a waiter or a truck driver or a stay-at-home mom.

We, all of us, need to stop that shit right now. The best and the brightest of our world should neither be measured by how much money they earn, nor by whether they own big houses, fancy clothes, or all the consumerist bullshit things like that. The only measure of a person that matters is how they affect other people, and how we all can find a way as individuals, communities, and continents, to contribute in a meaningful, positive fashion to the very tiny world we all share. The best and the brightest should, in fact, in a fair world, see high-paying jobs as corrupting influences on the pursuit of true value in the world.

[...]

As this experience winds down, I like to think of all these supposedly economically useless degrees, especially degrees in the creation of artistic things like poems or pottery, like getting a degree in being super heroes. By day, people with useless degrees are, most of us, working hard to keep our pantries stocked with food and our lights on. If we are lucky, our daylight work is engaging and interesting. If we are not, it is a minor inconvenience as long as there is food and light. Then, we leave our day jobs and our lives open up. We read, and analyze, and create. We engage in debate on the internet and in the magazines of our fields–for instance, at SFSignal. We continue pursuing our interests, beyond graduation, and maybe we make things or ideas that whisper out into the world, rippling chaos theory’s caribou sneezes to rend the walls of Jericho. We go out to buy groceries afterwards, and nobody knows us. We go to work, and maybe we tell one person there over lunch what happened in our esoteric pursuits. We work hard, raise families and/or pets, and most people don’t even know what we really are in the wee hours and the corners of our lives, when we pursue what interests us.

But, at night, in the corners of our lives, when no one is looking, we are superheroes.

Yes.