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binsofchaos · 5 years

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‘I Believe in Love’: Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Final Year, In Her Own Words

Introduction by Garance Franke-Ruta. Jump to the start of Elizabeth Wurtzel’s essay here.

The late Elizabeth Wurtzel was best known for her memoirs and essays, especially Prozac Nation and Bitch: In Praise of Difficult Women, but after attending Yale Law School in her late 30s she also enjoyed having a voice in the political arena. She was as much an original there as everywhere else, and between 2010 and 2012 she wrote a series of pieces for me at The Atlantic.

A feminist and a New Yorker who had really lived, she looked at the world in a different way from all the boys on the bus in Washington. And she was funny. She would send long text messages written on her smartphone while she was walking through Washington Square Park, an emissary from a more vivid and creative world than the boxy K Street buildings I would pass en route to my office in the Watergate. Sometimes her stories would come in like that too, texted in graf by graf, and I’d knit the passages together in what seemed like the right order and ask for some connective language. The thoughts were always razor-sharp; the understanding of human nature acute.

Over time our editing relationship moved into a long-distance friendship. We met for dinner at a restaurant in Chelsea, outside of course so her dog could be nestled at her feet. She had somehow managed to find a lipstick with my name on it — Guerlain’s Garance — and purchased us two tubes encased in elegant silver that sat heavy in the hand. She wore hers to dinner, and when I went to the restroom, I changed my color too, making us lipstick twins. It was how she was and in many ways the secret to her success: In addition to being wildly talented, she overcompensated for being so difficult and never totally in control by being astonishingly thoughtful, and kind, and, well, seductive. She was a seductive personality; hard not to love even as she could be hard to be close to.

When I started working at GEN this fall and living in New York full time, I reached out to her. “I’m in remission!” she’d said brightly when we first reconnected, three years after last seeing each other and nearly five years after she first learned she had the BRCA gene and breast cancer. We drank red wine on her balcony overlooking a giant earthen pit in the ground: The future NY offices of Netflix. We went to dinner at Il Buco on Bond Street (her suggestion); I could feel she was lonely. She and her husband Jim Freed had separated and were in the process of divorcing, a not so happy ending to the happily ever after story she had been astonished to stumble into in 2015, and something she was still figuring out how to write about. She started sending me things she had written as we talked about her writing a piece about Gen X politics and the 2020 race.

“I am intimate with the dirt,” she wrote of the Netflix pit. “It has infiltrated everything. It is all over me and under me. It is Love Canal, sewage from the Mississippi, cigarette butts, marijuana ash, slave remains, rats, mice, Three Mile Island, Mount Etna, Mount Saint Helen, Dust Bowl, Adam, Eve, serpent, Satan, Chernobyl, Berlin Wall, acid rain, asbestos, uranium, geraniums, 9/11, 7/11, Donner Party, bird beaks, pigeon claws, squirrel tails, gerbil puke, hamster wheels, insulation, Saran Wrap, Mason Pearson bristles, dental floss, Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Mafia hits washed up from the East River, syringes, works, the residue at the bottom of the empty bag of dope, coal waste, cookie crumbs, broken bottles, rusty nails, Bataan Death March, Manila massacre, Boston Tea Party, frog legs, goldfish, mutant ninja turtles, alligators from Florida, red algae, yellow fever, Agent Orange, bubonic plague, gold teeth, silver spoons, copper wires, iron ore, Crest with fluoride, whitening strips, stripper tips, dollar bills, twenties laced with cocaine, subway tokens, expired MetroCards with unused fare, tickets to see Star Wars in 1976, bicentennial souvenirs, gutta-percha, cat guts, doll parts, golf balls, tennis racket strings, cashmere socks, polyester, rayon, pylon, nylon, Mylar, warped vinyl, scratched CDs, crispy leaves, shredded lettuce, tarnished keys, queen bees, xerox paper, pepper spray, Prozac pills, poppers, pooper scoopers, hula hoops, leis, fecal matter, aborted fetuses, snot, rot, cots, bots, shot glass shards, broken windows, chimney smoke, dice, playing cards, poker chips, lollipop sticks, toothpicks, used tissues, dirty handkerchiefs, bandanna threads, kite pine needles, kite strings, toilet water, wolf fangs, sunburn peel, hangnails, cavities, skin, scabs, split ends, fur balls, chicken bones, dissected cadavers, wisdom teeth, crash test dummies, Big Bang, Little Miss Muffet, Humpty Dumpty, Rip Van Winkle, bog wood, petrified forest, oyster shells, freshwater pearls, blood diamonds, Star rubies, asteroids, primordial ooze, love letters, promises kept and broken.”

Very soon the piece she’d wanted to write about Gen X politics started to slip. The cancer was back. There were so many tests and scans to undergo. I told her not to worry about writing it and was surprised when she filed. She said it was a good distraction from having cancer. She badly wanted to interview Beto O’Rourke, but by the time he arrived in New York City where they might have had a face-to-face — the Gen X skate-punk candidate and the Gen X icon — he was already getting ready to drop out of the race.

She sent me a long piece about her past year, about her impending divorce and her marriage and her mother and Donald Trump. It was from something longer she was working on, she said.

We talked about her writing an additional passage when she recovered from brain surgery and running the piece on Medium. “I suppose I have to add something about this, since so much of the piece is about cancer,” she texted. “You know, of all my failures of imagination, I never wondered what a brain tumor is like. So I could not have guessed it was this atrocious, the dizziness and the pain.”

Her recoveries from the relentless march of the disease during her final, dreadful month would prove to be brief.

After her first brain surgery — she had two to cope with her metastatic breast cancer and subsequent complications — which she described as a “brain resection,” she was astonishingly herself. She was funny and poetic and articulate and in good spirits. Still dizzy and unstable — the tumor had impacted her balance center and left her clutching the furniture as she walked during her last night in her own home — but also still herself. She laughed with her mother, who took video and pictures of her in the hospital and helped coordinate, along with Jim and some of her oldest friends from college, a parade of sun-up to way past winter sundown visitors so that she would never feel alone.

And the night before the surgery, Jim was the one she stayed with. He was the one who took care of Alistair, her dog, and her black cat, Arabella. When I saw him in the hospital, he was entirely attuned to her and what she might need so that she could recover and have, in the unspoken best-case scenario, another year.

“I can’t get over how great my husband has been with this. He has made it possible for me to get better and not worry about anything,” she wrote in mid-December, after the surgery. “He loves you so much it’s clear,” I texted back, thinking of how attentive he had been, how he was arranging visits with so many people, that look on his face that you cannot fake. “I think so,” she texted back. “It’s good you see. I love him so much.”

But the past year had been a hard one. This is what she had written about it. She had shown it to Jim too, and he agreed, as did a number of her oldest friends, that she’d want it published. She loved to be published.

I Believe in Love

By Elizabeth Wurtzel

Greetings from the chaotic land of marriage come undone.

The caravansary is dismantling, toothpicks flying everywhere, the bubblegum that held it together is unstuck.

Everything is falling.

My husband moved out at the end of December [2018], as the calendar flipped from last year to this [2019], while I was in Miami Beach, strolling the walkways in the shocking morning sun and under the nighttime Van Gogh sky, away from it all.

I knew he was moving out, but still: I was surprised.

I did not see that the game was over. I did not know the clock was running. I never lose, but I do run out of time. It turns out this was basketball and not baseball.

While I looked away, my marriage fell apart.

I fell off my keel. I lost my kilter. I was a kite without a string.

Maybe it’s better.

It is a peaceful purple without him here. But psychedelic with disarray.

Marriage is an organizing principle. It is flow. It is coffee in the morning. It is who walks the dog. It is HBO at night.

And love. Don’t forget that.

Now I am an ombré mess of a person. I am missed appointments and canceled meetings. I am the thing I forgot to do. I am hanging on by a strand of Drybar dry-shampooed hair.

All day long I have to ask people to forgive me, I am flailing and failing at it all. Forgive me, I beg, as I hope my untweezed eyebrows will. Maybe soon, I will even tug at a few strays.

Or maybe wild is the way.

🖤🖤🖤

I still think of Jim as this sweet person I married. He is my trust fall. He is my emergency contact. He is my next of kin. He is my valentine. He is my birthday dinner. He is my secret sharer. He is my husband.

I do not know him anymore so I do not know myself. Who are my friends? Where is my family? I have fallen into a crevasse of nobody nowhere.

I am estranged and strange, strangled up in blue.

I do not want to feel this way. I am going through the five stages of grief all at once, which Reddit strings have no doubt turned into 523. They are a collision course, a Robert Moses plan, a metropolitan traffic system of figuring it out.

I feel bad and mad and sad.

Is this a festival of insight or a clusterfuck of stupid? I change my mind all the time about this and about everything else.

I got married because I was done with crazy. But here it is, back again, the revenant I cannot shake. I feel like it’s 1993, when my heart had a black eye all the time.

26 is a boxing match of the soul.

I did not expect bruises at 52.

🖤🖤🖤

I have blamed myself. I have blamed my husband. I have blamed cancer. I have blamed marijuana. I have blamed sexism. I have blamed Charlottesville. I have blamed my in-laws. I have blamed several men named David. I have blamed my mother who lied to me my whole life about who my father is.

Who would I be if I did not blame Donald Trump?

I am angry all the time since the election of 2016, like it happened to me, like I was gang-raped by Michigan. I don’t want to be angry, but so there, I am.

Who don’t I hate?

Who won’t I blame?

If you are standing there, I blame you.

It is not conservative against liberal.

It is everybody against everyone. Here we are, in it together, alone.

The problem is not arguments I have with people who voted for Trump, who I don’t know anyway. The trouble is the way all of us who agree about everything are bickering. Oh, the narcissism of small differences.

I remember not that long ago when the world was not political. I was part of landmark litigation that was all about a team of Republicans and Democrats working together. I loved everybody. We were all on the same side.

What Alamo did I not forgive? What Masada did I not get over?

Now there is no microaggression too small for me to scream about so the next four neighborhoods can hear.

My husband does something and I am affronted like it matters.

I am sure he does not know how I feel.

And maybe he doesn’t.

But what does any of this have to do with why we got married? We got married to be in it together. Polarization has even invaded love.

I have anger fatigue. I am sick of sick. Like everyone.

The emotional toll of the world we live in is going to do all of us in.

But politics is not about conflict.

Politics is about making the world a better place.

🖤🖤🖤

How could my mother keep a secret for 50 years? What makes someone do that?

She buried herself in it. She grew a wild Victorian garden with thorny bushes of rose and purple larkspur and red snapdragon. There was a lush meadow of lavender that gave a whiff of Aix-en-Provence en été. The dandelions ran rampant and the daffodils glowed yellow like Big Bird.

But underneath it all, beneath the lilies of the valley and the rows of geranium, there is dirt.

There is a secret.

I am a bastard. I am her bastard daughter.

There are things that come along that are a shock.

I believed something for nearly half a century. It was a lie.

I was conned.

I was wrong about myself.

I did not know who I am.

My mother told no one.

It was a lie she told for so long it became true and the secret faded to no-memory. She misremembered who my father was. She did not think it mattered.

When it all came out in 2016, not long after I got married, just after my real father died, my mother could not see what my hysteria was about. She did not understand why I was stunned.

All the while I was trying not to feel the worst way ever, trying not to be overwhelmed by the explosion, my mother could not figure out what was bothering me.

After all, she is the nuclear physicist.

My mother is like everyone else. She thinks she is normal. She is sure her behavior makes sense. She believes she does the right thing. Since she cannot imagine that this is not the case, she is surprised to find out that, yes, she makes bombs.

I scream at my mother, “What’s wrong with you?!”

I do that and she does not know what I mean.

She says, “Oh get over it.”

Her eyes widen until they look like goggles on an herbivore. She is put upon. She cannot believe we have to discuss this yet again.

“Omigod yet again!”

When will I quit badgering her?

I say, “You lied to me.”

She says, “It wasn’t a lie.”

“Then what?”

“It was a decision!”

Any relationship founded on a lie is doomed. Or not a lie, according to her, which is another lie, a lie about a lie.

That is how it is between us. We are living in the doom.

And yet, we are still at it. My mother and I refuse to give up. She is my only parent. She is all I have.

She made sure of that.

This is the most painful thing ever.

She has made so many inexplicable decisions over the years that I know about, and now I see the ones I did not know.

And yet I love her more than anyone else in the world.

She is it for me. She is in the way of everything. I should be interested in my husband, but how can he compete with how much I want to figure out the Once that started all that is upon a time?

🖤🖤🖤

I was a welter of emotions.

I was so emotional.

When I found out that my father is not my father, that my mother lied to me my whole life, that there was so much I did not know, a bomb dropped in my life. Bombs, really, aerial bombardment. It was the Battle of Manila: bazookas, flamethrowers, grenades, tanks, cannons, howitzers, banzai charges, kamikaze tactics, I was shocked and stunned with feeling.

I did not know what to do.

I became a raging lunatic.

I was a mettle of rage.

My rage is my retinue. My rage is a filthy velveteen train I drag around with me, carelessly. It is my ruby tiara. It is my rainbow and my pot of gold.

My rage is cream. It makes Chock Full O’ Nuts coffee that my grandmother brewed in a percolator on the breakfront in the dining room taste not half bad.

It is the coloratura harmony to my singsong days.

My rage is my conscience. I insist on my right to feel.

But I got caught in a Möbius strip of emotion. I was gone round the bend of scream.

It was stuplimity.

🖤🖤🖤

My marriage is crushed beneath the weight of so much. It is delicate, like all relationships. It is not one of those fine elms that blows with the gusts and does not snap.

We are a scattering of branches on the lawn. We are deadwood.

Oh, there is a lot that holds us together, the love and the hours. We got married during chemotherapy. We are bound.

But my husband is not who he was.

Yes, I know: It is always like that. The sorrow of unraveling is the stranger you are facing. What happened? I want to scream. Where did you go?

My husband had a softness. I will not compare it to the feel of cotton balls or the touch of silk charmeuse, because it is better. He was new to love. I could tell. I could see. He was surprised. He did not see me coming. He did not know I was interested. He was alone in a room. His life was small. He had the same six friends he always had. He was shy. He was not brave. He had no expectations.

He was lovely.

The beginning is always like honey, liquid and sweet.

But he was open.

He was not wounded by a million heartaches.

He had not been through it all.

He did not have a wretched past.

He was 34, which is not young. Younger than I was, but a lot could have happened by then.

It had not.

He was fresh.

There was nothing I would not do for him.

There was nothing I did not want for him.

We met in October and got engaged in May.

We knew.

And now he knows he has had enough.

It has been too much.

🖤🖤🖤

Most of all, it is not easy to be married to someone with cancer.

I feel for my husband.

Cancer is so big. Everyone is prostrate before its deadly enormity. It is the answer to every question. It is the reason why. Is it an excuse or is it real? Who is anyone to argue? Cancer is a bully. It is an elephantine disease of body, mind, soul. My husband moved a half a mile away from it. I would love to do the same.

I am stuck until the end.

I do not know what he expected when he married me when I was ill. I am sorry that it has not been what he wanted. I am sorry that I hurt him.

After I got cancer, I was not the same.

I wanted to be.

I wanted my life to go back to what it was.

I was so lively. I was so lovely.

I was so busy. I was so social.

But I could not do it.

No surprise, I changed.

I was withdrawn during chemotherapy and my world became small. It contracted like starvation. It is hard to get back what is lost. It is more difficult still to begin anew.

I tried. So hard. I called. I emailed. I texted. I showed up.

But there was a diminishment.

Cancer is an ecosystem. It is a crime spree.

Things broke. My radius. My fibula. My tibia. My spirit.

My cancer came back a year after it went away.

You think people are nice about it? No.

Cancer is misunderstood.

Everyone says the wrong thing. Which is what they do so much anyway.

Then I say the wrong thing back.

There we are, bumper cars of mismatched words.

I can’t believe the stupid things people tell me in an effort to be kind, about something hard they had to deal with that is not the same as having cancer.

The worst thing anyone can do is tell me they are sorry about my cancer.

I don’t want anyone feeling sorry for me. About anything. Don’t apologize unless you have done something wrong. It is nasty to feel sorry for anyone for any reason because it pushes her away.

Mostly sorry is just a thing to say. Anything else would be better, including I don’t know what to say.

It is always people who are the problem. What else? Our suffering is small compared to our misunderstandings with others, how they fail to give us a break, know what it’s like, judge us fairly, see the world the way we do. It is not even cancer or especially cancer. It is especially this and even that. If you are looking for absolution, you are going to have to forgive yourself.

I have chainmail from years of frustrating conversations, of people who think something bad has happened to me.

I don’t see it that way.

You could tell me everything that’s bad about cancer, like that it’s cancer, but you could not convince me that cancer has been bad for me.

Cancer has made me optimistic.

These are the days of miracles and wonders, of biopharma fireworks, of immunotherapy wow.

I have been saved.

I am miraculous me.

I will skate figure eights into infinity.

I am all claws I am all fangs.

I am not afraid of cancer. I think cancer should be afraid of me.

This past October [2018], I had a tumor in my shoulder bone that was 5 inches: big! It was threatening to break it.

And worse.

My cancer antigens were at 205, when 25 is as high as the level can go.

I had meetings in the World Trade Center while all this was going on. I hate it down there. Skyscrapers as grave markers. It is an ominous place.

When I went for help in Philadelphia at the Basser Center for BRCA at the University of Pennsylvania, only Alistair, my service dog, was with me.

My husband said he had to work.

My marriage had already come undone.

I had stereotactic radiation at Memorial Sloan Kettering. It took only three sessions to zap the tumor away. The treatment saved me, but I have a five-inch hole in my bone that looks like a cave in the Thai jungle.

When my husband moved out, I was still healing. I have a rotator cuff tear and pain from the long way home.

🖤🖤🖤

This is a love story.

Every marriage is a love story.

People who run off to Vegas after knowing each other for 10 days and find a drunk outside the Sands casino to be their witness — they really mean it. Marriage is a big gesture. There is no reason to do it except: love.

It is effusive.

I am sorry I failed.

I am sorry for this confederacy of catastrophe.

I am sorry for it all.

I think that my husband can’t believe I hurt. I know what I’m like: I have a powerful personality, it’s true. But he got me.

He made a vow to love me in sickness and in health.

There was great love between us.

And love is hard to stop.

We made a commitment for when we could not remember why we did.

He decided enough.

I am a monotheist. I am in it for life. I am in everything for life. If you don’t stop me, I will not stop myself. I have the kind of faith that you can only have if you have talked your way out of trouble all along.

I feel so much and too much. Deep in my radiated bones.

I cannot believe it is like this with my husband and not like it was that long ago on Halloween, our first date, which he did not know was a date, maybe it was maybe it wasn’t, he showed up at my door not knowing anything at all.

We were resting on our future arms, we were like people who have never read The Unbearable Lightness of Being, have never seen City of God, have never heard Exile In Guyville, oh what lay ahead.

I remember my husband in the beginning, I know the man I married, I insist he is still there somewhere.

I keep peeling for the pentimento.

Or has this all been a fraud?

Love gone wrong feels like a confidence crime.

That is the worst of it.

Do I have an electron microscope or am I blinded? Do I see more clearly now or is this a distortion? I could ask that about the whole wide world.

Sex and race look different since Trump was elected. We know all the things that we never knew. We were living in a world of trust, we believed we were on a righteous path, that things were incrementally improving, so we did not look so hard into sunlight.

All anything ever is is another way of seeing.

I thought my husband was on my side.

I thought I knew him.

I did.

I don’t.

He changed.

I do not know how to help him.

I do not know how to reach him.

Anything is possible.

I believe in so much.

I am just that way.

I believe in love.

What matters more in this crazy world?

Shame on Casablanca’s ending! I will take the hill of beans.

(This is Garance again.)

Love. Sometimes in our lives when we feel most bereft it turns out that we are not alone at all. It is the kind of cloying Disney sentiment Lizzie might have scoffed at, but it was also the truth with her. She affected a toughness that was both real and a coping mechanism, but which also led her to downplay how sick she was. Even as she was telling me she was in remission in September, spots of cancer had already returned, I have since learned.

“The people who know us when we are not our best selves — what would we do without them? I am so grateful right now for even my mother coming through for me,” she wrote after her first surgery in December. Her mother Lynne Winters and she had a famously complicated relationship, but it was Lynne who took her home to recover both times she was released from the hospital, and who had the difficult burden of having to bring her back, and who sobbed in the sparkling clean MSKCC neuro ward hallway where other parents of too-young-to-die adult children paced forlornly.

“Jim has been the best,” Lizzie texted after the surgery. “I wish you a great first husband. That might be all you need.”

They had, in fact, not divorced. The papers were signed, but not filed. He was her husband until the end, during the final days after it was clear no further interventions would work, when she lay still in bed in what was by then her at least fifth different hospital room, for all the world the image of a big-eyed Renaissance pieta looking heavenward.

“Neurology takes a positive view toward god and prayer,” she had texted after the first surgery. “And relinquishing, which is what god and prayer is about. It is always turning your will over to a higher power and letting the will of the world and not your extraordinary manipulations lead you to your desired result. I always say that, it is my constant prayer: god, if you are out there, watch over me and your will, not mine, be done. That is what will happen anyway, but I pray for release from the dreadful fight.”

She spent her whole life fighting — fighting her parents, society, the patriarchy, social conventions, addiction, depression. But man, did she live big. She had a gift for building love into her life and at the end, her friends built a cocoon of love around her.

And on the morning of January 7, 2020, she was, as she had prayed, released.

#Elizabeth Wurtzel #i believe in love #love #garance franke-ruta #medium #writing

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angry-cryptid · 3 years

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As promised: I made "uranium glass" dice!

I love the color of these (that flourescent green/yellow is one of my favorites since I was a kid and I had a ruler in that color) and the glow is so intense thanks to the Stuart semple glow powder. it's super bright and lasts for ages!

I'll add them to the shop in the next few days.

#dice #polyhedral dice #handmade dice #dnd dice #dice aesthetic #dungeons and dragons #dnd

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lesaffaireslocalestech · 5 years

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Anthropic Cosmology: Fine-Tuning By Design?

The Cosmos would appear to have a degree of design and fine-tuning underlying its structure that allows things of structure and substance that are more complex than just the bits and pieces part and parcel of the standard model of particle physics. An unrelated hypothesis suggests that virtual reality worlds will vastly outnumber really real worlds and thus suggest that probably we might be virtual beings ‘existing’ in a computer / software programmed, hence simulated landscape. Programmed computer software has to be both designed and fine-tuned. So Cosmic design and fine-tuning also points towards the reality of our just being bits and bytes, not electrons and quarks. In scientific circles, especially biological circles, the concept of “intelligent design” is usually given the extreme thumbs’ down because of the supernatural and theological connotations. I intend to steer well clear of that can of worms, focusing on another kind of ‘design’ with accent on the physical, not the biological sciences. Fortunately, when it comes to ‘design’, there’s more than just the God Hypothesis option. There’s the Mother Nature Hypothesis option – life, the Universe and everything is the way it is because that’s the way it is. You got one role of the cosmic dice; one deal of the cosmic cards, and this is what came up, like it or lump it. There’s the Multiverse Hypothesis which negates fine-tuning and design by stating that some universes (like ours) are more special when it comes to the random laws, principles and relationships that enable stuff, including living stuff to survive and thrive (just like Earth is more special when it comes to being bio-friendly relative to most other planets). Finally there’s the Simulation Hypothesis which replaces God with a mortal, fallible, flesh-and-blood computer / software programmer that has created a ‘video game’ called “The Life and Times of Planet Earth and Associated Cosmos”. COSMIC ‘DESIGN’ The Cosmos exhibits some degree of ‘design’ because: There is something rather than just a pure nothing (although pure nothing also ‘exists’). There is more than one fundamental something (electrons, quarks, photons, neutrinos, etc.). And while an external design and designer isn’t required* to explain the diversity of life, natural selection (Darwinian evolution) being more than adequate, the range of body plans appears rather limited. You have an awful lot of left-right symmetry relative to back-front or top-bottom symmetry, albeit there are several examples of radial symmetry. Sensory organs tend to be front-and-centre and towards the top. * Though that in itself doesn’t rule it out. Artificial selection is well known and as biotechnology and genetic engineering advances, artificial selection is becoming more that rule than the exception. In fact an excellent case can be made for the human species being the product of unnatural or artificial selection by an unknown agency. I’d like to focus on two specific examples of apparent cosmic design, radioactive decay and the solar eclipse. There are numerous ways the rate of radioactive decay could proceed, not the least being something akin to all-over-the-map since the process is apparently a totally random process – a random walk scenario. How two identical radioactive (unstable) atomic nuclei can sit side-by-side with one decaying within a minute while the other hangs around for decades is totally anomalous. Even stranger, all this randomness happens apparently without any causality involved. That alone tells you that there must be a hidden program operating behind the radioactive decay process since things just don’t happen for absolutely no reason at all. Something, or someone is guiding this. To pile on the weirdness, random, a-causal radioactive decay apparently follows a strict mathematical relationship or progression (the half-life relationship). That just reinforces the design theory since purely random a-causal chance doesn’t normally select for precise mathematical relationships. If randomness of necessity results in a half-life relationship, then all non-cyclic phenomenon that is random should exhibit a half-life relationship. For example, follow the pathway of 1000 babies born in one city on one day of the week. If half die (decay) in 70 years, does that mean that another 250 will have died when 140 years have elapsed leaving 125 more to die before another 70 years have passed, and so on? Okay, that might be a bit phony since we’re all apparently hardwired to die (decay) shortly thereafter our three-score-and-ten years has come and gone. But take 1000 black pebbles on a white sandy beach. Sooner or later someone is going to throw one of those pebbles back into the sea. Say 500 get tossed after one year. Will there still be 250 left after two years and 125 left after three years? What are the odds? If half of 1,000 brand new light bulbs burn out after one year, will 250 still be operational after two years has elapsed and 125 after the third year? If a battery sitting on the shelf uses up half its chemical energy potential after 10 years, will it still have a quarter left after 20 years? Of course in the case of the babies / humans (biology) and the light bulbs (physics) and the battery (chemistry), we’re talking about pre-programmed shelf life. Unstable radioactive nuclei have in theory no shelf life since there’s no causality involved in their decay, yet they decay away in a precise way anyway. Something’s screwy somewhere! Speaking of design, isn’t it amazing that the apparent diameters of the Sun and the Moon (which is slowly moving farther away from the Earth) just happen to coincide just at the time when modern humans evolved for them to appreciate the resulting solar eclipses!!! FINE-TUNING There appears to be some degree of fine-tuning within the Cosmos, not just to allow life to exist but to also allow non-living things of structure and substance to come to the fore – atoms, molecules, and conglomerates of these. If there were just one or two or even three examples of fine-tuning, one might dismiss the idea and put it all down to chance. But when there are numerous examples, one needs to sit up and take notice and engage in a “please explain”. For example: # The vacuum energy is 120 orders of magnitude less than that predicted. # The electric charge on the electron is exactly equal and opposite of that on the proton. # The exponents and coefficients in mathematical equations tend to be simple low value whole numbers or simple fractions thereof. # The Pauli Exclusion Principle which states that no two electrons with the same quantum configurations can occupy the same ‘orbit’. Were that not the case there would be no solidity to matter; no structure to the atom; no stellar stability; and as to the rules that govern chemistry – well just forget about it. Basically it allows multi-electron atoms to exist, otherwise all electrons would occupy the lowest possible energy state and refuse to enter into chemistry. So, no Pauli Exclusion Principle; no you. # The just-so resonance that allows for the high probability that the creation of carbon will proceed inside stars. If there’s no carbon, then there are no diamonds to be a girl’s best friend – in fact no girls either. # The versatility of the carbon atom. # One might easily imagine a Cosmos where all of the first generation stars just exhausted their fuel supply and slowly faded away into white dwarfs, red dwarfs and ultimately stone cold dead black dwarfs; neutron stars; even black holes. There would be no physics producing novae or supernovae and thus no creation of the heavier elements and no recycling of interstellar materials into second and third generation stars all with elements required to generate life. # The Cosmos is on an extreme knife edge between being an Open Cosmos and a Closed Cosmos. That ‘edge’ is the Flat Cosmos (where triangles have 180 degrees). A Flat Cosmos requires a just-so gravity or critical density of matter / energy. If gravity had been a tiny bit weaker nothing would have clumped together and we would have an Open Cosmos. If gravity had been a lot, or even a tiny bit stronger, the Universe would have immediately collapsed back on itself (a Closed Cosmos) with a post Big Bang event like a stretched rubber band snapping back to its original configuration. # Rather against-the-grain, ice floats on water. That’s essential for life. # Cycling and recycling: imagine the consequences if water didn’t evaporate; if plants didn’t replenish oxygen and animals carbon dioxide; if nothing consumed insect exoskeletons and bird feathers; if erosion wasn’t counter-balanced by mountain building; and just the general concept that problems are just opportunities and that one thing’s garbage / waste is another thing’s treasure / food. EMERGENCE Examples of relative complexity arising or emerging from relative simplicity abound. Here are a few examples. # Wetness from a union of hydrogen and oxygen. # Different chemical properties emerge from different configurations of electrons, neutrons and protons. [I’m still not sure have that works exactly. How can adding an extra electron, proton and neutron turn carbon (6) into nitrogen (7); sulfur (16) into chlorine (17); or gold (79) into mercury (80)?]. Or the reverse, say radioactivity where one element, like uranium, sheds stuff like alpha and beta particles and thus eventually morphs into lead. I mean electrons, neutrons and protons have no chemical properties of their own, just mass, charge and ‘spin’. Chemistry isn’t supernatural, but it sure is spooky. # Life from organic chemistry. # A haystack from sticks of straw. # An automobile from an assemblage of metal, plastic, rubber, glass, etc. or a chair from wood and cloth. # Consciousness from brain chemistry / chemistries. ENIGMAS ARISING There doesn’t seem to be any physical principle that requires the emergence of anything new arising from the parts. Grains of sand on a beach just remain grains of sand on the beach unless someone comes along and purposely builds a designed sand castle. Basically, if there is no requirement set in stone for the fundamental particles (neutrons, a quark trilogy; protons, another quark trilogy; and electrons) to hop into bed and procreate other more advanced non-fundamental things (like atoms and molecules) then emergence is stopped in its tracks before it begins. Now two (or more) neutrons are just two (or more) neutrons. Two (or more) electrons are just two (or more) electrons who would prefer to go their separate ways since they have the same charge. Two (or more) protons are just two (or more) protons who also would prefer to go their separate ways since they have the same charge. A mixture of neutrons and protons are thus that – a mixture. Of course a mixture of two protons and two neutrons comprise a helium nucleus, otherwise called an alpha particle when spat out in radioactive decay. But of course a helium nucleus isn’t the same as helium itself. A collection of neutrons and electrons are just that. Lastly, a collection or combination of electrons and protons appears promising, except – when a neutron decays you get out a proton and an electron (plus energy and an anti-neutrino). So doesn’t an electron mixing it up with a proton just produce a neutron (if you add those minor missing ingredients of course)? Of course one might argue that protons and neutrons are themselves emergent particles that emerged out of a trio of up and down quarks. But I’m not sure that helps much since no one has been able to isolate a quark and put it on the slab in the lab for detailed analysis. While dealing with some enigmas, here’s another one that’s puzzled me. Why is it that when matter meets anti-matter you get this big old Ka-Boom, an annihilation into pure energy? You think that when a negative electron meets and greets a positive positron, that you’d end up with a neutral particle with twice the mass of an electron (or a positron). I mean by comparison, when a negative electron meets and greets a positive proton, there’s no Ka-Boom. Would you get a Ka-Boom if an electron’s second-generation way more massive kissing-cousin, the muon (one negative charge) met a positron (one positive charge)? So there’s more to this sad tale than just equal but opposite electric charges meeting and greeting. So again, there’s a question – might there be some fine-tuning design behind this seeming enigma? Finally, the biggest enigma of all. How is it that the electric charge on the electron is EXACTLY equal and opposite of that on the proton, when these two particles are otherwise as alike as chalk-and-cheese? MATHEMATICS The Cosmos is a mathematical Cosmos. The Cosmos can be expressed by mathematics which suggests that some thought went into the ‘design’ of the Cosmos. The whole point of mathematics is to design or come up with a pre-designed equation(s) that in turn will give you a fine-tuned answer. You can’t really separate mathematics out from the concept of design or fine-tuning. For example, consider the mathematical relationship between mass and energy; or pressure, volume and temperature. Then there’s both Einstein’s and Newton’s gravity; Newton’s laws of motion; Maxwell’s equations dealing with electromagnetism; the Pythagorean Theorem; the quadratic equation, various quantum mechanical relationships, etc. If you want the relationship between mass and energy you got just one fine-tuned option. There’s no cosmic grab-bag of possible equations you can use instead of E = mc-squared. Therefore the relationship between mass and energy is fine-tuned. So if you want to know the volume of a box that’s say 5 units by 7 units by 3 units, do you have a grab-bag of options at your disposal? The short answer is “No”. So the method of calculation is designed and fine-tuned and the answer is fine-tuned. For some further examples consider: # The value of Pi is the same no matter how big the circle is. # All Euclidean (those on a flat surface) triangles have 180 degrees, no matter what. # Kepler’s laws regarding planetary motion where equal time equals equal areas swept out. # Many facets of our social / economic systems as well as those of the natural world can be described mathematically via inverse power laws which are elegantly simple and deeply mysterious! SYMMETRY While anything that has a 3-D structure has to have a left – right; top – bottom (up – down); and back – front, there’s no requirement that there be symmetry. More likely as not your house or apartment, etc. is not symmetrical, especially internally. But your car has for all practical purposes left – right symmetry and that’s by design. There doesn’t have to be anti-matter. There doesn’t have to be equal and opposite electric charges (gravity can do the clumping); there doesn’t have to be male and female (and often there isn’t both – asexual reproduction). However, all these symmetries and many more exist, and one can put that down to deliberate design as opposed to pure chance. Here is a partial list of some symmetries. # DNA molecule. # Crystals; snowflakes. # Plus – minus (mathematics). # Matter – antimatter. # Action – reaction. # Attraction – repulsion; north pole – south pole (magnetism); negative charge – positive charge. # Cause – effect. # Male – female. # Heads – tails. # Spheres (planets, stars, etc.). # Buckminsterfullerene (Bucky-balls). # Yes – no. # Back – front; top – bottom (up – down); left – right. # Cosmic isotropy – Cosmos looks the same in all directions. # Cosmic homogeneity – all points within the Cosmos are equivalent. But there are limits to symmetry. There’s no anti-gravity (unless you wish to count Dark Energy as a form of anti-gravity); there’s no anti-time. SCIENTISTS Scientists, being after all humans, often give in to the rather unscientific use of certain words in describing their scientific description of life, the Universe and everything scientific. They often use words such as deep, meaningful, beautiful, exquisite, and simple (think of Ockham’s Razor). For example, Einstein’s mass – energy relationship technically just is. It exists as a cold-as-stone hardcore scientific fact. But scientists often tend to give that relationship those value-added words like elegant. But it doesn’t stop there. Scientists, probably without even realizing the unscientific consequences of doing this, often ascribe a personality to Mother Nature / the Cosmos. The Universe hates this; nature abhors a vacuum; Mother Nature has an extraordinary fondness for and loves beetles; nature desires this or that or the next state of affairs. I’ve seen scientists use words / phrases to describe Mother Nature / cosmos as capricious; violent (red in tooth and claw); uncaring and indifferent; clever; lovely; strange; and that she often prefers. We’ve all heard the phrase that “Mother Nature is a bitch”. On the other hand, a computer / software programmer could easily like or loath and be all and be a programmer of all of the other things too. Now seemingly when one designs something by choice, say a video game, novel or a house, one does not design that video game / house / novel to be complex and ugly and shallow and without meaning / purpose and inelegant. So the fact that scientists, who should know better, lapse into describing life, the Universe and everything scientific in such flowery terms, well this suggests that perhaps there was a deliberate and planned design behind it all. The designer’s mindset and the scientist’s mindset tend to be in parallel. DISCUSSION So how are we to explain all of this? Firstly, there doesn’t have to be a real purpose to the Cosmos in order for design and fine-tuning to be true. If you reject the God Hypothesis (which I do) and the Multiverse Hypothesis (which has the exact same amount of evidence going for it as the God Hypothesis – none), that leaves the Mother Nature Hypothesis (pure chance) or the Simulation Hypothesis. I vote for the Simulation Hypothesis. Now one concept strikes me as obvious. Programmed software, in order to be something really useful with some degree of order, logic, rules, laws, principles, precise relationships and predictability has to be both designed and fine-tuned. That’s the case when you consider all of our video / computer games and training simulators (concept: puppets on the string) as well as all of our ‘what if’ simulation scenarios (concept: cast your fate to the wind). RATIONALE Software, almost by definition has to be designed and fine-tuned. Otherwise it serves no useful purpose. Software can account for all of the design and fine-tuning elements, including emerging elements, discussed above. There is nothing impossible, improbable, or even unlikely about the Simulation Hypothesis since we humans have created our own versions of simulated landscapes and virtual beings, more and more and more of them ever faster, cheaper and better with every passing year. What we can do, others have done – better, faster, and cheaper. # A great deal has been written and speculated about the abilities of ultra-super advanced technological societies actually creating an entirely new universe from scratch, say by manipulating quantum fluctuations. Aside from the dangers of doing so, like being at Ground Zero and at the focus of a new Big Bang event, wouldn’t it just be easier – and safer – to simulate one? So, once upon a time in a galaxy far, far away, natural selection evolved a highly technologically advanced extraterrestrial civilization who loved creating hypothetical simulations about the existence of other extraterrestrial life forms based on the characteristics of the extra-solar planets they discovered. [That’s something we’ve obviously done too.] One of their multi-millions of simulated scenarios was called “The Life and Times on the Third Rock from the Star Sol”! # Natural selection evolved the human species as per the standard anthropological model and in the year 2525 CE their computing technology advanced to the stage where they could create highly detailed and realistic ancestor simulations – that’s us. [Well, we create simulations of Civil War battles, so why not humans in the year 2525 CE simulate parts of their history?] So, based on pure probability, there will be vastly more virtual reality worlds inhabited by virtual reality beings in ‘existence’ than really real worlds inhabited by really real beings. Now the essential point to remember is that it’s not the absolute number of highly advanced technological civilizations or societies on offer but the RATIO of virtual worlds to really real worlds, and taking us as typical, well the RATIO is multi-thousands to one when you consider all of the video ‘games’ that we have created right around the world, past and present. POSTSCRIPT Are you asleep, perchance to be dreaming? There’s a logical alternative to the above – dreams. Assuming that you’re a really real being, when you dream, you dream up simulated virtual reality beings. Now over the course of your lifetime, you will have over 100,000 dreams. So, one really real person creates hundreds of thousands of virtual beings. Now, what are the odds you are that really real person and not a virtual being in someone else’s dream?

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sodomyordeath · 7 years

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Convergance 8 Playlist

Found an old backup while cleaning up

Behold my playlist from Convergence 8 (May 31-June 2, 2002): Montreal with my original comments

Friday:

I'm dedicating that Set to my Grandfather Adolf Würdinger who died a week prier to all that.

-Opening-

The Astonished Eyes of Evening by Cinema Strange (End to End)

Machina Supremacy - Giana Sisters

Uranium 235 - You Spin Me Round

Suspiria - (Now You See ) The Swine (Re-Mix)

Manuskript - The Sun Always Shines On T.V.

Orgy - Blue Monday [1]

Goldfinger - 99 Red Balloons

Killing Joke - Eighties (Serious Dance Mix)

Tubeway Army - Cars

Yazoo - Don't Go

Fad Gadget - Ricky's Hand (Single Max) [2]

- Captain Matt's Armada Featuring Axel

(where Trevor writes all the songs and does all the work) [3]-

Ghoultown - RotoRiculous

Reverend Horten Heat - Baddest of the Bad

Waltons - Truck Me Harder

Nekromantix - Demons are a Girls best friend

Batmobile - Transelvanian Express

- Fashion Show Part I [4]-

Mark Stewart - Anger

Converter - I died today (Fisted)

Noisex - K. V. (Live)

- Fashion Show Part II [4]-

Atari Teenage Riot - Sick to death

Esplendor Geometrico - Al-Giaber

Einstürzende Neubauten - Haus der Lüge (Live)

Premature Ejaculation - Pigface Show & Tell / Blue Honey

The Eternal Afflict - Kinski is Dead

- This Ascension [5] -

Nina Hagen - Auf'm Friedhof (Long Version)

Schwefel - Metropolis (12" Version)

Bella Morte - Were Shadows Lie

Dreadful Shadows - Chains (Autumn-Remake '96)

- Bella Morte [6] -

[7]

Gigantor - Everything Counts

Vice Squad - Princess Paranoia

The Normal - TV OD

Ghost Dance - Search Lights

The Vibrators - Disco In Moscow

Joy Division - Dead Souls

Sex Beat - Sex Beat

Misfits - Die My Darling

Killer Barbies - Skulls

Wendy O. - It's My Life

Faith and the Muse - Hallow Hills

9XDEAD - Wild Women

Ghoul Squad - Pogo Is dead

T.S.O.L. - Code Blue

The Brickbats - Zombie Flanders

Rammones - Sheena is A Punk Rocker

The Cramps -Sheena's in a Goth Gang [8]

The Fools - Psycho Chicken

999 - Homicide

Ghoultown - Pale Skin Diva

45 Grave - Partytime (Zombie Version)

Christian Death with Rozz - Deathwish [9]

Bloody Dead And Sexy - Bloody Rose

Der Fluch - Rattengift

Jay Kay - Feuer & Asche

Fliehende Stürme - Das Chaos Brütet

The Rorschach Garden - State Protection

[some more that i don't remember right now]

-The Spectrum closed-

Sunday:

[10]

-DJ Doc-

I was there @ 8:20 and started spinning at 8:25 [11]

1000 Homo DJs - Supernaut

Oomph! feat. Nina Hagen - Fieber

[12]

Flying Lizards - Money

Splatterday - Keine Schmerzen Mehr [13]

Sex Pistols - EMI (Unlimited Edition)

The Damned - Neat Neat Neat

Vampire Beach Babes - Tomb Mau Mau

Ghoultown - Boots of Hell [14]

Electric Frankenstein - Grave Yard Truck Race

Frankenstein Drag Queens From Planet 13 - They Only Wants to Eat Your Brain

The Brides - Dress Code Blue

The Vladimirs - Grave Girl

AFI - Last Caress

Baby Horror - El Hotel Del Horror

Action Pact - Suicide Bag

Bordello - Free Ride [15]

Cinema Strange - En Hiver [15]

Bella Morte - Logic [15]

Psychopomps - Badlands

Morbid Poetry - Children of the Eighties

The Merry Thoughts - Boy Sinister

Wall of Voodoo - Mexican Radio

Sigue Sigue Sputnik - Love Missile F1-11 (Short Version)

The Normal - TV OD *

X-Mal Deutschland - Polarlicht

Malaria - Kaltes Klares Wasser [16]

Holy Orange - Pretty Baby

The Rorschach Garden - State Protection *

Alien Skull Paint - Fly With Me

Anne Clark - Abuse

Cat Rapes Dog - Motordead

The Invincible Spirit - Love Is A Kind Of Mystery

Slickee Boys - This Party Sucks

Toy Dolls - Livin La Vida Loca

The Vibrators - Disco In Moscow

Blondie - Hanging on the Telephone [17]

The Stranglers - No More Heroes

P.I.L - The Order of Death

- DJ Mr. Black - [18]

Bella Morte - The Rain Within Her Hands

Crüxshadows - Her Comes The Rain

VNV Nation - [19]

Blutengel - Black Roses

Einstürzende Neubauten - Haus der Lüge

Tears For Fears - Mad World

Depeche Mode - Share The Disease

Pixies - There Is My Mind

- DJ Psyche -

Salome's Wish - Frozen

Faith and the Muse - Running Up The Hill *

Deep Red - Living In Black

Regan - I Am Your Garden

Rhea's Obsession - Memento Mori

Crüxshadows - Cruelty

Written In Ashes - [19]

The Cure - Primary

If/Then - Equal + Opposite

Tapping The Vein - [19]

- DJ Doc -

Alice Cooper - My Generation (Live)

29 Clocks - Psychotic Louie Louie

Dead Kennedy's - California über alles *

Elvis Hitler - Dance of the Living Dead

Motörhead - God Saves The Queen

The Voidoids - Blank Generation

Nina Hagen - Auf'm Bahnhof Zoo

Kiss - God of Thunder [20]

Dee Sniders SMF - The Kids Are Back [21]

Rose Tattoo - Nice Boys

Asylum - System Overload

Sepulerum Mentis - Scary Monsters

Dominator X - Psych Sister

The Redresser - Held Back

Sleepless (br) - Cliche [22]

Antiworld - King of all Monsters

The Plague - Never Die

Strange Boutique - Quicksand Minds

Siouxsie and the Banshees - Hong Kong Garden

Scarehead - Ha Ha

Voodoo Church - Eyes Scond Dead

Penis Flytrap - Cemetery Girl

De Sade - Venom

Killer Barbies - (The Came From) Mars

Nina Hagen - Viva Las-Vegas [1]

Ghost Dance - Walk In My Shadow

New Days Delay - Glass-Made Savior

Joan Jett - I Love Playing With Fire

Skeletal Family - Promised Land

Texas Terri & the Stiff Ones - Cave Women

Iggy Pop - Lust For Life [23]

The Clash - I Fought The Law

Peter & the Test Tube Babies - Banned From The Pubs

The Exploited - Punk's Not Dead

Rammones - Blitzkrieg Bob

Sex Pistols - Anarchy In The U.K.

The Cramps - Naked Girl falling down the Stairs

Gigantor - Everything Counts

The Cramps - Do The Clam *

Ghoultown - Pale Skin Diva *

Misfits - We Are (138)

T.S.O.L. - Code Blue *

Flesheaters - The Wedding Dice

Stiffs Inc. - Sad Song

Gun Club - Sex Beat

Andi Sex Gang & Mark Almond - The Hungry Years [24]

Birthday Party - Release The Bats

Virgin Prunes - Baby Turns Blue

Cinema Strange - Speak Marauder (Unreleased Version)

Specimen - Beauty of Poisin

Ausgang - I'm A Horse

Alien Sex Fiend - Silver Machine

Lords of the New Church - Method To My Madness

Misfits - Last Caress [25]

Dr. Feelgood - Milk and Alcohol

Screaming Dead - Paint it Black [26]

- the end-

* Request

[1] Blame JAK for that one [2] Dedicated to DJ Ricky Prinz, Munich's finest [3] What an opening Act, Axel is really a Modern Day Sex God TM [4] They were doing there own music for the actual fashion show [5] Sadly I wasn't able to enjoy that show as much as I wanted. I was fighting with a headache. And had to re-sort all my CDs after drooping 'em all to the floor earlier @ when we got the notice that everything should start 1 hour before schedule [6] To be honest I didn't like most of what I have of BM on CD but that Show altered my view 180 degree. You guys ROCK. I haven't seen that much energy since Antiworld last year Herbstnächte. BM is a band we should really look forward to see in Europe. [7] Sorry from here on it isn't in order and I'm not sure if I got all songs 'couse I wasn't able to write down the playlist [8] And don't forget what Sheena became [9] Should be in Order from here on [10] Well sometimes strange things are happening an so I had an other set to do on sunday don't try to find me on the web site it wasn't officially announced [11] Just o entertain the crew while doing last preparations [12] Some more songs that I haven't written down just to get a feeling for the volume and decided after that to go as loud as that damned thing will let me go. [13] A local Munich Punk/Power POP band that were playing @ the new years party I did with Ricky earlier that year. [14] Who ever will do Convergence 9 try to get Ghoultown [15] A little tribute to some of the great bands we had the pleasure to here the last days [16] That one goes to Miss Janette [17] That one goes to Maria my beloved one who was turning heads all weekend long [18] Thanks to Mr. Black and Psyche for giving me a break and to Sexbat for checking back from time to time to see if I need an other [19] Can't read that one, sorry :-( [20] This one is for the best Stage Manager on the planet [21] For Brian, not exactly Twisted Sister but the best I could do for you. [22] Time to honor the best Masks [23] From now on it's dedicated to Bella Morte [24] From now on it's dedicated to Purp an all others who still hold the flag of deathrock up. [25] This one was a request of the bartender girl [26] I wanted to end the night with "Beerdrinkers and Hellraisers" by Motörhead but I forgot it at my hotel room so I ended the night with my preferred version of Paint it Black ;-)

#net.goth #2000s #2002 #canada #goth #gothic #convergence #playlist

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