crazy business

So I've just been given a house-sized bundle of cash to build the nucleus of a virtual reality research centre. Though I'm not sure why these surreal things are suddenly happening to me, I was pretty happy about this (happiness tempered with fear of failure, of course). I came home to share the good news with my wife and then spent a good hour rolling around on the carpet with two feisty toddlers. Skin on skin, lips on cheeks, the occasional jolly little fart followed by gales of giggles. Nothing virtual about any of that, and hard to believe that kind of sensory maelstrom could come down a fiber optic conduit anytime soon. It was nice to have that perspective. Over the rest of the evening, as the edge has worn off the panicky quickness of all of this, I've come to wonder if my role in this madness is to be a kind of visionary pundit or something. I don't really know very much, but I seem to be able to draw big pictures with words that excite certain types of people. So I'll focus on that part for now and leave the stunning scientific discoveries to the young'uns with all that youthful stamina. I'll be Marlon Brando in Apocalypse Now. Not often on the screen, but always in the picture. That's the hope, anyway.

driving and walking

I had an interesting revelation a few days ago when I was, once again, forced to drive to work because of a tight time knot that someone had made for me. When I drive home, even though the drive itself only takes about 10 minutes, I'm not actually at home for about another 25 minutes. I'm in some kind of strange netherworld, neither here nor there. Head in the clouds, or somewhere much less interesting. Mushy brained, in transit, like those scintillating beings in the original Star Trek when the transporter beam was not quite up to snuff and Chekhov was madly sliding those controls up and down trying to recompose someone's body. When I walk home, it takes me 35 minutes. And when I get here, I'm here. All molecules intact and accounted for.

I spent a good chunk of the weekend driving through big swaths of Ohio. Sometimes I get a bit tired of Kunstler's undisguised glee about the collapse of America. But I have to say I know exactly what he's talking about here. There's definitely something tired, tragic, and beaten about much of the place these days.

Virtual shenanigans

My head is stuffed full of virtuality these days. It's another part of those different scales, sloshing and grinding against one another, depending in part on how sober I am at the moment I think about them. When sober, they grind. Sometimes that feels good, as right now.

Paul Virilio says that space is dead. All that is has contracted to a single point and everything is happening right now. I'm not sure how literally he means this, but he's a French philosopher, so anything could be true. I'm learning this again as I try to crack my mind into Gaston Bachelard's book the Poetics of Space (featured in my Librarything right now because I'm trying to read it). I note with great interest that I share this book with more users than almost any other book I've entered so far. Yet no reviews. I think I know why.

I've ventured into Second Life a few times. I've learned that less savoury and more experienced characters ('sketchy' types, as a student in my seminar class would have called them) know how to do nasty things like mess with your appearance (I have a butterfly carved into my head -- or maybe it's a cross-section of my spinal cord). I also gather that it is possible to entrap other visitors inside cages. You have no choice but to wait until a security guard volunteer comes along to rescue you. I've heard it fills them with a sense of empowerment. All of this may be deeply metaphysical or it may be, as more hardened and cynical types suspect, yet another marketing tool. Either way, I can tell you that as I entered the building where my office is this morning, I imagined the people I passed to be peering out at me from some remote physical space --- as if the fleshy parts I could see were really just the avatars for a consciousness residing elsewhere. It was easy.

I'm quiet because I'm working

I know my small readership is shrinking, dwindling by the day with my silence. I'm still getting the occasional google hit ("phonetic highland cow" the mind boggles. "Toronto wonderboy huge cock" must, unfortunately, have been a disappointment. In so many ways.) but the rest of you are quietly tiptoeing out of my quiet little salon. Can't say I blame you. All I can say is that the reason I'm so quiet here is because I'm being very noisy elsewhere. To give a hint -- I have a colleague who helped start a very large and very successful research centre somewhere not far from here. By way of advice, he told me that the way to do these things is to find somebody somewhere who is willing to give you a few bucks (even if those bucks aren't even 'real' bucks so much as manufacturer's discounts -- we call them 'in-kind' contributions in the research biz) and then take the story somewhere else and ask them to match those bucks. Then go brag to your university about how much money you've raised and then they'll give you more bucks. Then go to the government and give them the figure and suggest they match it. By the time this fellow was done, he had a new building, a new set of colleagues, and a grand opening attended by a score of international luminaries. Something like that (though on a much smaller scale) seems to be happening to me. Buzz is like resonance. There's a little boy sitting on a swing, and I'm trying give him a precisely timed little push every time he passes by to make him swing higher. Not much of this is my idea, so I suppose I'm being pushed a bit as well. It's exciting, time-consuming, and, much as with my little frisson of excitement in the publishing world, my health is being affected by fears of what could come to pass from all of this. So there. I've kind of explained my silence. I'm being dragged, kicking and screaming, into another little pool of limelight not of my own making. I want it to work out, but I know that if it does it will mean more unpleasantness for me. I'll have the pleasure of seeing positive change flow from my efforts, but I'll be forced to amplify those efforts in ways that will pull me out of my comfortable shell.

Something like that, anyway.

So I'm here, working away, feeling slightly ill most of the time, vertiginous, barfy, belly full of jello, excited, frightened. Still thinking much about mixing of spatial and temporal scales. It's the origin of politics (not my idea, that, but one that keeps jumping into my head because it's so apt), the origin of much urban chaos, the origin of much metaphysical angst. It's behind every collision between pedestrian and car, and it's behind most bad planning decisions. But the interesting part of it all for me is not that we do it but that we can do it.

Mixing scales, hating cars

We've all done it. The glare. It's when, as a self-righteous pedestrian, you feel that a car has transgressed the boundaries of courtesy. It's when the minivan blocks the sidewalk that we're trying to negotiate with our wheelchair or our stroller. It's when the SUV nudges out beyond the stopping line, so used to going through stop signs with a "rolling stop" that it assumes you won't be needing that right of way. It's when you're riding your bike on the road, obeying all the same laws as cars, and you feel the draught of a car mirror blow past your elbow as a rusted out sedan, in a hurry to get to the mall, can't take the time to wait until there's room to pass you safely, so squeezes past you within a centimetre or two, hoping for the best.

Notice how I've written this. It's the car, the SUV, the minivan that I always seem to blame first. This morning, walking my kids to school, the route took us through a short maze of narrow residential streets. There are only a couple of road crossings we need to make where we're likely to encounter cars. One of them is very busy, teeming with speeding vehicles at this time in the morning. It can take us as long as ten minutes to find an opening to cross. We watch while cars make way for one another, yield the right of way so that cars entering this artery from other side streets don't have to wait too long. But a crowd of schoolkids and their parents, sometimes as many as nine or ten of us, have to wait and wait. The other crossing is quieter, but is sometimes used as an alternative to the main road that runs parallel to our little street. To make it a good shortcut, you have to run the stop signs. This morning, as I stepped off the curb with my kids, a minivan lurched up to the intersection, rolled into the crosswalk and then stopped with a surprised little jolt about halfway through when it realized we were going to cross. I glared at the sidepanels. I glared at the headlights. I glared at the tire. And then, almost as an afterthought, I glared at the driver.

What intrigued me was that it felt so natural to think of the body of the car as an extension of the driver. The vehicle was to blame. Its body was the driver's body. The driver himself, perched inside the temple of glass and chrome, was merely the nerve centre. The ganglion that the car used to control its body functions.

There are psychological experiments that show that when we use a tool, the boundaries of the tool are mapped into our brains as extensions of our bodies. The tip of a screwdriver becomes the tip of a finger. A violin bow becomes a part of the arm. A car becomes a carapace, an exoskeleton but, perhaps because it carries fuel and the ability to burn it to propel itself, the car becomes the being, the engine, and we, the drivers, become something much less...a cog in the gearwheel, a lever in the machine.

One of the problems we contend with in cities is the mixture of scales. Those of us inside cars live on one spatial scale. Those of us on our feet live on another. It's as if we react to that by somehow forgetting that there's another scale inside the car. That human being, perched on the leather throne behind the wheel, is really just another being on the same spatial scale as the the wet spot of bone and gristle that he could obliterate with one badly judged flick of his foot.

I'm going to try to spend more time looking through windows, into cars, and into the eyes of drivers. It won't make a difference to them, perhaps, but it will to me. If everyone did this, I'm not sure we'd need stop signs.