A Rambling Discourse On Future Posts

Note to the Reader: I almost chucked this post, having realized the extent to which it rambles all over the place. (Aside from endings being everything, so is structure, insofar as you can separate the two. Meaning this: you will never find a narrative with a good ending but which has poor over all structure. It’s almost logically impossible.)

Shit, see what I mean? I can’t even keep a ‘Note to the Reader’ (itself redundant, i.e., whom else would a note be to?) from rambling. On the other hand (I’m thinking), there are a few set ups needed, which, structurally speaking, will not fit in the upcoming project, the series of essays I’m contemplating (more to come). So maybe just stick ‘em in here?

Plus, as my old friend Lesley would say, I need to do some ‘throat clearing’ before jumping headlong into the Big Question (yep, more to come). Also please keep in mind that, like my surfing aplomb, my writing ain’t what it used to be. Some readerly patience would appreciated, as I continue my ramble:

As many of you will remember, a few months back I bought a houseboat with the goal of doing The Great Loop around the inland waterways of the eastern U.S. (a total of 6,000 miles of the East Coast and somehow winding up in the Great Lakes), and how things went sour and now Gus and I are back in the goddamn mountains somewhere.

Well, I’m stretching myself as thin as it gets, financially: I’m having the boat shipped to a marina in Virginia Beach, where it will be put in dry storage until next May, when, assuming all goes well, Gus and I will maaaaybe be back living afloat and maaaybe doing the Loop. I’ve talked to a dog expert who met Gus and who thinks I can get her used to living on a boat; as you may recall, she would jump overboard whenever I started the engine. It’s a matter of patient yet no-nonsense training, the dog-person assured me.

We’ll see on that. (As I write, Gus is stink-eyeing me from under the picnic table.) But in order to pull this off financially (I’m as low on funds as ever in my sorry ass life), I’ll have to not spend money between now and May. I mean hardly any, aside from the various insurances and other monthly expenses, like this blog and the $150 a month it costs to stay online and mobile, plus about $300 monthly for boat storage. So I’ve bought a year pass to New Mexico state parks, meaning I can use their campgrounds (sans electric and water but no biggie) until next spring at no added expense. (If this all sounds like a back door, sneaky-ass plea for donations, I can only say it isn’t. I’m just rambling. However, if it works as such, what the fuck?)

I’ve got a year’s worth of freeze dried food (part of my ‘armageddon contingency’) that I’ll be digging into, in order to avoid supermarket check outs, and will be moving from park to park every couple weeks – two being the limit at any one park, although you can return after a week absence. So far I’ve sojourned at a half dozen of them and they’ve all been great, notwithstanding some Internet-connectivity issues. The way I’m doing it is to gradually descend from the high elevation parks to the lowers, so as to keep climatically comfortable. (Right now at 8,000 feet it’s ideal but in a month or so the white stuff will commence its fall.)

One expense I may go for is a cell phone booster antennae ($300, ouch), the better to stay in touch with you all and of course for research. (Nope, not a plea. Just rambling.)

Addendum: With all the money I made as a writer, how I’m in this pitiful financial state – relying on monthly pension/SS checks plus dribs from my still-in print books (plus an occasional check for like $3.52 from the Writer’s Guild because a Miami Vice I wrote played in Botswana) – is a sad (if you’re me) yet ridiculous tale. Perhaps some day I’ll write that aspect of being me, given some of the unbelievable turns the tale has taken, and the sheer number of dishonest/destructive humans I’ve managed to come across (a reliable source of drama, and occasional humor).

 By the way, the bouts of depression I (often) go through have nothing to do with my distressing/ridiculous personal circumstances. For example, when I find myself fantasizing that I didn’t make Allan’s Big Mistake – selling my farm in Costa Rica – I know that I’d be just as depressed if I were still down there in paradise. And likewise I don’t think the depression is related to my continuing discoveries of how dishonest/destructive most of my fellow humans are, let alone the drift of ‘history.’ Truth is I have no idea what the problem is.

 On the bright side, with a bit of luck I’ll wind up my final years as a traveler both on land and over the water, a guy with a marginally comfy if dilapidated motor home and a houseboat, and nothing stopping me from doing what I want. Plus, absent full-blown dementia (as opposed to my current degree of it) I’ll still be a person who knows things very few others know (some of which I’ve tried to share here).

 That’d be great, no?

 Back on track: So I have an upcoming seven months of limited travel (to save on gas money) and outback living in various wilderness parks. Question is, What to do with the time? Seven months. I have to produce something worthwhile, no? I could continue writing this blog, dealing with subjects inspired by world events or whatever might impinge upon my otherwise unsound reflections, but it might be better to set a more specific goal, thematically.

Another note to the reader: This post originally started with the following, but it… well, it fizzled… so I moved it around until it ended up here. (Structure!):

I was lolling in my hammock yesterday, listening to the audio version of Richard Dawkins’s The Blind Watchmaker, and having jotted down a half dozen examples of Dawkins’s failure to examine how things would really go if evolution was completely undirected, it occurred to me that I should continue to write about the lies we’re told regarding human origins. (As you’ll see, this thought would expand; it would flower.)

Addendum: I was still in the preface when I realized that Dawkins had misdirected his readers right from the get-go, from the title he’d chosen, The Blind Watchmaker. Dawkins informs his reader right up front how metaphorically important the adjective blind is regarding the meaning of his book. (The idea of a watch and a watchmaker is historically relevant in the Darwinism/Intelligent Design imbroglio, as emblematic of an object that is planned, as opposed to randomly appearing for no purpose, like… well, us, for example.) It would be difficult to find the as-written passage in an audio book so I’ll paraphrase: Dawkins, as ‘Darwin’s new bulldog’ (T.H. Huxley was the original), assures us (over and over) that the most important aspect of evolution – and indeed the brilliance behind Darwin’s theory — is that the biological change it brings about is unplanned. Nature has no foresight. Again, and I say this having done my homework, the ‘brilliance’ behind what has been referred to as ‘The single greatest idea anyone has ever had’, i.e., Darwin’s doozy that the history of life on earth is based on some ultimate crap shoot falls apart with only a modicum of critical thought. But more, much more, on this to come (although maybe not today).

 Well, I’m thinking, what does blind have to do with foresight? With planning something? In point of fact, a watchmaker who happens to be blind would have to employ extra planning. He’d have to know, i.e., plan, exactly where his tools would be laid out, for example; otherwise he’d be helpless, and unable to ply his trade. He’d no longer be a watchmaker, would he? Then where would Dawkins’s dumb-ass title be?

If you think I’m nit-picking, say this aloud and see if it rings true: ‘Nature has no foresight, just like a blind watchmaker.’ What?

 It’s perhaps not coincidental that one of Dawkins’s favorite subjects is the eye, i.e., vision and how the ‘blind’ forces of random mutation/natural selection developed it. This reminded me of a blog post of mine from a year or so ago, and without even going back and reading it, I realized that I’d made a level of argument against Darwinism that no one had hitherto done. (No need to go back and read it; I’ll bring it up in a future post.)

 By the way, Intelligent Design (I.D.) — if ‘Darwinism’ deserves capitalization, I figure so does its opposite number — has nothing to do with the sort of ‘Creationism’ inspired by various religious texts. Notwithstanding this, and notwithstanding how fucking very smart the I.D. people are, they have made some dumb mistakes over the years (yes, more on this…)

So I’m swaying in my hammock yesterday, thinking about Richard Dawkins, evolution (as Darwin defined it), and the problems I have with Intelligent Design as currently presented – problems that likewise I don’t believe have been elucidated elsewhere, thinking I maybe should write about it all, along with still more about how ‘science’ has so profoundly misdirected and deceived the rest of us.

But how to launch a discourse of this complexity, importance, and congruence with ‘the queen of the sciences,’ cosmology? (Need I explain how biological evolution conflates with the cosmological Big Picture, especially regarding the conflict between randomness and design? Surely not.) As it turns out, a few days ago (meaning prior to my hammock swaying), I’d started a post that… well, also fizzled, but which might, like the other one, bear resurrection here. Let’s give it a try and see if some sense can be made:

Back around 1982, in my early 30s (wow, am I old now!) I wrote a novel based on this question: What the fuck does it all mean? I’d just made a ridiculous segue in my real life – from high flying international criminal to ‘Hollywood screen writer’ and… well, there you have it; need I say more in terms of the provenance of the query?

Fittingly, perhaps, when I started writing the book, whose title ended up Cosmic Banditos; A Contrabandista’s Quest for the Mean of Life, I had no idea what the story would be or anything about it other than it would start with the main character on the run from the law, and that a dog would be his sidekick.

In those days I wrote long hand and I can still picture the loose leaf notebook in front of me (up in Topanga Canyon, near one of Manson’s old hideouts) and the first words: ‘I am very poor right now.’ (I recall that I’d just read somewhere that the best way to start writing something you’re not sure about is to pen a ‘simple declarative sentence’ and then ‘see where it goes.’ I thought, Okay, I’ll give that a shot.)

Addendum: I’m thinking that in some larger sense – maybe in one of Superman’s Bizarro Worlds — this rambling essay might be considered a version of  ‘a simple declarative sentence.’ That is, if one had the foolhardy courage of diving deep into my sorry ass psyche.

Those first words of Cosmic Banditos told me that I’d be writing in first person, present tense. As the writing progressed, I would end up all over the place in tenses and points of view, but the important upshot was that I had my first sentence and was off and running. I recall that that first writing session set up the whole story, although I had no idea at the time that this was so. I was truly winging it. I have never written anything before or since wherein I knew so little about where the story was going, and strongly advise against anyone else trying this technique. (In a sense, though, I’m doing it again, here.)

Well now, wait. Keep in mind that back in 1982 (it might have been ‘83) I did know what the story would be about, in the Bizarro World, lunatic larger sense (related to the above addendum?), i.e., What the fuck does it all mean? Cosmic Banditos ended up very successful and is still my favorite piece of writing. (The sumbitch is still in print and making me a buck – and I’m talking since 1986 – has been translated into a dozen languages, and is even in audio book.) I mean in terms of fun to write. See, writing it was very much like reading a book, for the first time, a book that hooks you from the get-go. I’d keep on writing, sometimes deep into the night, just to see what happens next.

Addendum: I would sometimes quit a session on a ‘cliff hanger’ so I’d have something to look forward to the next day. The best example of this was in that first session when I wrote a scene wherein the main character’s bandito buddy José (like everything else, the José character ‘came out of nowhere’) mugs a family of American tourists at the Santa Marta airport (in northern Colombia, and which I’d used for smuggling runs). As a detail I’d added that part of their spoils were physics texts, which ‘I’ (as the narrator) assumed belonged to the father. Mmmm, I was thinking — ‘I’ meaning the real me, the writer-me — why this detail? I really wanted to know. As it turned out, this ‘detail’ was the first domino in a chain of events that led to my answer to the What the fuck does it all mean? question.

This series of essays, if I go with it, will be different, though, very different. See, it will be nonfiction. (Whoa! Meaning I can’t make up stuff? Maybe not so much fun…) Also, unfortunately, this time I’m pretty serious, as opposed to back in ’82, when I took very little seriously.

Why so serious now? Because between 1982 and now I’ve come to see just how nasty this world really is. I’ve come to understand how innately and profoundly dishonest the vast majority of my fellow humans really are. (Believe it or not, I didn’t find this out while in the international crime business.) Even you (the personal you, you); odds are that you’re innately and profoundly dishonest, although you would (and probably are) vehemently deny(ing) it.

 Having said that (and having managed to alienate most of my readers from the get-go) there are exceptions to the innately and profoundly dishonest rule. It’s for these rare folks, plus myself, that I would write these What the fuck does it all mean? (WTFDIAM) essays. (I’d add words to the effect of you know who you are except that odds are you don’t.)

[Strike-throughs are my compromise when I don’t like something but can’t bring myself to delete it. When you come across strikethroughs, read on at your own risk; I’ll listen to no complaints about it.]

Given the above distressing backstory, I’ve come to understand that if I want to know… anything, let alone how we humans came to be here, let alone the origin of the cosmos, let alone WTFDIAM?, I’m going to have to find out for myself, from the bottom up, in terms of data and cause and effect.

 So, hokay. What the fuck does it all mean? Let’s get to it.

#

I’m back from the above ramble, parts of which, as I say, were written at different times and didn’t seem to be relevant to anything, i.e., they fizzled. I’m hoping that now, with the added stuff about evolution, Richard fucking Dawkins, cosmological conflations, seemingly irrelevant stuff about writing Cosmic Banditos, and so forth, this shit makes more sense, or at least some sense. (I also got the feeling that I’d written some of the Cosmic Banditos stuff before, in some dim past of this blog. So if you experienced an annoying sense of déjà vu… well, me too.)

Also consider it… all of the above… a foreshadowing, and a warning, of what’s to come.

Allan

If you’ve gotten this far in this post, my heartfelt thanks for your patience and curiosity. You have my word that future posts will be more coherent.

A Whoopie! of an Addendum: A couple hours after having finished this post, I was swaying in my hammock (again) and something occurred to me, popped into my head out of no where (theoretically). I asked myself, why, under the circumstances of this post – related as it is to the conflict in ideas between randomness and design in evolution – did I add all that stuff about my inner life in writing Cosmic Banditos? What does that stuff have to do with evolution/intelligent design? 

Everything! is what I realized. Hang in here for a minute and imagine: ‘I am very poor right now.’ That is all I had in starting the book, right? And when I had José mug a family of American tourists and bring back to the exiled narrator a bunch of physics texts, I was looking forward to finding out Why this had happened, right? As I wrote a couple hours ago: “As it turned out, this ‘detail’ [the mugging] was the first domino in a chain of events that led to my answer to the What the fuck does it all mean? question.’ 

Do you see where I’m going?

Another quote from earlier: ‘I recall that that first writing session set up the whole story, although I had no idea at the time that this was so.’

The way I wrote that book (and this has never happened before or since), for me as a writer, was… random. Or seemingly so. The events apparently  ‘came out of no where.’ But do we — you and I — really believe this? That everything just happened to fit together? 

The story, somehow, from beginning to end, was already in my head when I started writing. It just had to… unfold. But it was… designed. Meaning that the foresight, the planning, was there from the get-go. As you will see if you hang in with these posts, the animal eye (or any body organ, plan or species) was there from the get-go in the same sense as the story was there from the get-go; my ignorance being irrelevant.

No, this anecdote does not prove that there is design in nature, but it is a spot on metaphor for that design, mysterious (non-‘material’) and unseen as it may be in any given ‘present.’ 

And, I would submit, the above is why the seemingly irrelevant anecdote about how I wrote Cosmic Banditos made it into this rambling discourse in the ‘first place.’ We’re talking double whammy design!

So there!