072718 Anything that’s not “PURE” nonsense, she said. CONCEPTUAL, or NOTIONAL nonsense is still OK. What is it about words? why are some of them dry and some of them wet? Are they like molecules. You take the same basic items—your hydrogen, your carbon, your oxygen, etc, etc—and the different ways—sometimes the very SLIGHTLY different ways—you stick ’em together results in VERY different substances. Like, shift ONE word or ONE atom just ONE connection over, and suddenly you have caustic deadly acid instead of a bumbling sweet nothingness, you know? Rotate a central hub a few degrees and all of a sudden you have a water hotel instead of a martian desert. Or dessert. Martian dessert is the bomb. And speaking of bombs, you can get one of those by using the right words or atoms, too. It’s weird that there’s so much power in patterns and connections. Also where does power come from? Is it, too, notional, like nonsense? If you’re playing a game, and the difference between life or death is defined by the placement of a few electrons, or better yet just by the logical connections between bits, whose representation is made possible to your monkey brain by barely detectable—well, actually undetectable by you—pulses of some weird force your monkey brain couldn’t possibly begin to actually UNDERSTAND, even if you can be trained to push the buttons that seem reliably enough to make it occur, then are life and death really materially different from one another? In Conway’s game of life, wriggling motion and twitching stasis are separated by the tiniest NOTIONAL shifts in initial NUMBER patterns, and we all know NUMBERS don’t “exist” as such—do they? Are they somewhere you could go and touch? Can you stand up and NUMBER three times? Could you fly your spaceship over to the NUMBER planet and land there, and walk around, breathe the air, drink the water, eat the dessert and shit out more NUMBERS? I guess you could if your spaceship were a game of life spaceship. Otherwise? I don’t think so. Which makes the sophomoric discussion of whether or not “WE” are “ALL” “JUST” “in” a “computer” “SIMULATION” pretty esoterically meaningless, yeah? All we’re doing is arguing about terminology. Should we call this deterministic pattern of processing black and white squares “LIFE” or should we call it “SIMULATION”? Since we ARE just that pattern, and the fact of its procession is something the pattern itself made up, it truly doesn’t matter. We could just call it GLIBZORK and be done with it. GLIBZORK. Now there’s a planet I’d love to visit. I hear they have a VERY EXCELLENT cherries jubilee. But you only need a little bit! Or a bit more. But any more than that would be redundant. Speaking of the Scottish lady that strung together a bunch of words into a pattern that equals *Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine,* a novel is a generous gift, no? Even just the pains she went to to make sure the strings of words that are supposed to equal Eleanor’s speech are consistently and hilariously distinguishable from the strings of words that equal basically everybody else’s speech—even her Mummy’s, which is distinguishable yet again from everybody *else’s*—just the same but different enough from Eleanor’s so that you couldn’t confuse the two, but you *can* experience the visceral discomfort of that *particular* mother-daughter relationship—just the concentration it took to do just that is very admirable, and unless you’re some kind of TV-chewing boor, you have to feel a bit grateful that someone in this fucked up monkey world decided to take the time and effort to make those connections, string up those lights, build that water hotel. Also how she strings you along with tiny clues of information about the past, about “the incident—”. You learn bits and pieces about what the hell happened to Eleanor the same way you would if you were learning about a person in real life, but weren’t willing or able to ask (or she wasn’t willing or able to offer straight, complete answers) straight out what exactly, and be thorough now, happened to you? So you have to be patient and get to know the person, and you are willing to do that because even though she’s weird, and at first you thought fluffy but the more you get to know her you realize a certain darkness, a sinister foreboding even, but you’re pretty sure it’s not her fault, and you don’t feel JUST pity; you feel a common bond of resistance to something you’ve always sensed but couldn’t articulate is just brain-gapingly dangerous and neutral and killingly absurd about the “universe”—and so you’re naturally drawn to be on her side, even though at times it seems she’s going to extreme lengths to make it difficult to be. Somehow you can tell she’s not. Her strings of words, her caustic connections somehow enter your notional ears and make you understand something about yourself; they curdle the sweet buttermilk of your pretty picture of yourself and of “life,” and remind you that things aren’t as perfect as you’re supposed to pretend not to have to be constantly pretending they are. That’s what school’s for, after all, right Gatto? to learn how to shun people like Eleanor because they go around stringing together words and atoms in ways that are unforgettable and uncomfortable, ways that move entire planets and planetary bodies into weird gravitational lenses that let us see, if for an instant, around the massive corners of our own blindness, and glimpse how fucking huge this notion of a “universe” we presume to have invented really is. Hint: it’s so huge, we can’t possibly understand the entire pattern at once. That’s why we have to make little games out of little squares, and watch the little patterns unfold, and be amused and amazed that little wriggles and spins and spaceships can happen at all. And that that’s what we are. For whatever that’s worth, and because school teaches us that that, by itself, isn’t worth anything, or is worth all kinds of elevated fancy shit that only effete poets need to know and is all just “metaphorical” or “artistic” or something and is therefore the province of only the extremely lazy, the homosexual, or the charismatically disaffected, and definitely doesn’t need the funding that, say, football needs, or chopping down trees needs, then that right there is a clue that maybe it’s actually way more important than we’re supposed to think. I’m not suggesting you should not-believe EVERYTHING school tells you, or believe everything it tells you not to, on a one-to-one basis—because that would be too predictable. As my dad pointed out, if you do EVERYTHING someone tells you NOT to do, you’re just as controlled by them as if you did EVERYTHING.... But still. There are clues, and there are clues. So basically, thanks Scottish lady, for stringing together Eleanor’s patterns and reminding us of the hyperintelligence of Alice in Wonderland. Any time we’re reduced to the incoherence of the extreme awkwardness of youth is a time we’re liable to actually learn something. And what use is all this life if we’re not learning something? It’s just a pseudo-random haze of someone else’s game of black and white squares, spasming meaninglessly in the non-existent dark. After all. Remind me to tell you more about the water hotel. It was super cool.