Babies should not be permitted to defile the sanctity of my repast

Babies, their Locustlike Omnipresence, and Why they Should Not Be Permitted to Defile the Sanctity of My Repast

A Culinary Review of Maya Del Sol, by PsyCHO ButCHER

Oak Park. Earnest Hemingway called it the city of broad lawns and narrow minds, and despite their unflagging liberalism, this continues to be the case today. Liberals often fail to see how they can be narrow-minded, always assured that they are completely correct in their beliefs, and thus, having arrived at their narrow-minded opinions through the best of intentions, recontextualize their mental arthritis as a perverse virtue. Oak Park is the sort of place people are scowled at for not recycling plastic by housewives who commit far greater sins to the planet by their overconsumption of gasoline for their mini van. It is a safe, reasonable, and banal place to grow up-and thus, it produces a profusion of babies. Babies should not be allowed in restaurants unless their owners have given the other patrons of the restaurant to discipline the child for its misbehavior, with sharp knives, if necessary. My rhythm guitarist, a female, assures me that crying babies result from a failure of parents to apply a program of operant conditioning on their hellspawn. Children who eat cocoa puffs in front of the TV, with a plastic spoon and a sippi cup, are so overstimulated at meals, and so unused to sitting still, that in every restaurant they must run around with a fish stick in their hand or face the angst of a life spend in the waning days of a great civilization, with doom on every horizon. Our children know it is their fate to suffer for our collective sins. They hate us for it. Thus, they cry.
Maya Del Sol is the most promising restaurant to spring up in this culinary wasteland for a great span of time. Usually, Oak Parkers, mild in their dispositions, fail to recognize good food when they encounter it. Oak Parkers mistake snootiness for good food. Their suburban lives have given them so few experiences by which to judge anything, every piece of shoe leather served on the right table setting passes for fine cuisine. Maya Del Sol is a Latin Fusion restaurant, meaning that the chef has license to serve up food from anywhere on the globe that Che Guevera would have sought to convert to communism. This, generally speaking, is a good idea. The empanadas we ate, though wrapped curiously in spring roll wrappers, were presentable. Their salsa verde was truly incredible, curiously, served with an unpalatable alternate that tasted like Campbell's tomato soup out of the can. The Tilapia tacos I had were decadent, extraordinary, apocalyptic in their glory. Best since Mas, on Division street.
I recommend this place. Knock over a stroller on your way in.

the larva, in its first instar

So, here she is, the larva that we seem to have generated. For those of you not completely familiar with our own, strange species, humans have internal fertilization and prolonged incubation of what, were we a member of a more normal species, (class insecta, for instance) would be a first or second instar larva. I included an image of a Philianthis sp. larva, a bee-hunting wasp, for comparison.

We, somewhat lovingly, refer to her as "the parasite' because she drains resources from her mother via a big suckerlike appendage called a "placenta". Not a parasite in the ecological sense, of course, we anticipate an increase in Darwinian fitness. I already like her, in fact, she demands sushi and sleeps a lot, likes music and wakes up early in the morning.

Dear Ruby

Dear Ruby,

I am sorry we pissed you off with the ultrasound yesterday. It was obvious that it annoyed you because you kept slipping trying to slip away from it, to hide under a liver, a kidney, whatever. I wish the technician had captured the exact moment you gave us the finger. Through the amniotic fluid, it was clear as day....wrong finger, by the way, I will teach you to do it right someday, hopefully. You like Jan's new guitar a great deal, we can tell by the way that it wakes you up and causes you to flutter and move about. This was a very different kind of sound.
I am cursed with the knowledge of all the terrible things that can go wrong in human development, and the whole time, I was looking for telltale signs of something wrong, but my untrained eye saw nothing of the sort. Your heart is mammalian by now, your cranium is quite human, you have a spinal column, legs, lips, eyes, a visage. You sleep a lot.
I am starting to think of you by your human name, not Oblivia, forgetfullness, but Ruby, a girl destined to wear a pink tutu or to color on walls, to like dinosaurs or to want to be a princess, to own a goldfish or to decapitate barbies, or to want her barbies PERFECT, undecapitated. I feel I have met you before, we both know this, because of a dream I had years ago. This is druggie metaphysics, I know, but your gender seems to confirm that you are, in some sense, the same person I shared a three hour conversation with, in this lab room, caught between one reality and the next, between one time frame and another. The name is a perfect synthesis of your mom's and my thinking. A gemstone, yes, but countrified and ungenteel. Part of the natural world, yes, and adrift in honkeytonk energies. Ruby.

Sun

Somewhere, near the sun, in an orbit so tight it would be virtually impossible to see it because of the stunning glare of solar plumes, is the planet Vulcan, interior to Mercury, in the Vulcan zone. If it is not there, it should be.....the same way palm trees should be visible out my window and the smell of the ocean would be very welcome. Still, this is a wonderful turn of the Earth.

Light. As a feather. As a cinder. The brood cell is done, and I have stocked with a doll, a few clothes bearing skulls, a children's guide to Cthulu from an expert Demon.

Sparkles, like the sun off a tropical ocean, like LSD lights sending sunset remarks through closed blinds. Last year, about this time, the garden fragrant and fertile from Siva and Kali, decomposing everything, connecting me, human and mortal. A Sunflower Baphomet stared at us as we watched a candle burn and made wisecracks in a dark room, for hours.

This year, I urge to bury the city in sand just high enough to make people put out beach towels. I spy juvenile cardinals on the trees of our neighborhood and in our yard, clumsily foraging and making stupid decisions. Eumenid wasps have filled my drill holes with their own babies.

Sun. Old beast. Thank you.

NOthing In String THEORY PRECLUDES THE EXISTENCE OF THESE iTEMZ

Nothing in String Theory suggests that the following ITEMS do not exist:
Interdimensional subatomic wormholes: These entities spontaneously appear, and disappear, billions of times a second, carrying electrons from this part of the universe to distant parts of the universe. The net movement of electrons is zero, however, because we receive distant electrons as well. Since electrons are the same everywhere, the only real effect is to cause an intergalactic electric current of sorts.
Neural tube dilemmas: The neural tube of the human nervous system develops early in life, and involves the massive migration of cells inward from a layer of tissue on the top of the developing embryo. Anything that interferes with this process at the anterior end can cause a condition called anencephaly, literally, no brain. String theory says nothing about why this happens despite its claim to status as a theory of everything. Nothing in string theory predicts why neurons migrate the wrong way or developmental holes fail to close, however, it does happen, to unfortunate humans, causing much suffering. Damn string theory.
Vast Unknown. The vacuum. The void. The horror.
A great old one at the bottom of the ocean: It waits, in a city of noneuclidian geometry, dreaming, till a time when it will rise to the surface and anoint its followers with special powers. Since the mathematics of string theory are noneuclidian, they can be taken is weakly in support of, possibly even allied with, Cthulu.
Robot Sex. Though a simple understanding of biology, and evolution, can demonstrate that no nonliving entity can reproduce sexually in the sense that we understand it. Sex involves meiosis, and the transfer of genetic material from two individuals into a single genome. Robots have no genomes. Damn string theory.
Mxyztplik-This is the extradimensional enemy of Superman. He comes here, he causes trouble. For some reason known only to string theorists, if he is forced to say his name backwards, he must return to his own dimension.
Lawn Chairs. Damn string theory.

in the garden

hope reads the hourglass sees the sand thinks of ancient deserts midnight caravans the smell of mint tea under a sky full of celestial incandescence. it is here, lover, in the distant strangeness, that our eyes meet, under a blue veil of Tethyn brine, hexacorals bristling from reefs now long extinct, the habitat of Plesiosaurs, the breeding ground of sea turtles. hope sees a life folded within this life, a place where sunflowers grow and dew condenses on water glasses, a cosmos where perfume and envy mix with the rush of warm air currents creating and uncreating itself by seed, by mushroom and earthworm.
i see you in these places sometimes, starlight eyes and emerald crown, riding a pixie chariot pulled by atoms. you are with me then, a speck of ephemeral sunrise.

String theory predicts your extradimensional doom

Stole the gif from Terri Pilling, at NDSU......obsessively interested in string theory currently and enjoying the potential existence of Calabi-Yau structures embedded within this universe, at every conceivable point, as if they belong there. That is what those things are, undulating in that creepy manner.......there are an infinite number of them, at every conceivable point in space, because they are not really structures at all, just aspects of the dimensionality of the universe we are not able to observe directly......I am even more partial to the notion that this universe we currently observe is a "brane", a four dimensional slice of a larger, multidimensional reality which we cannot observe directly, but only through inference. In fact, both possibilities might actually be the case. Even better, and I am surprised at the timidity of string theorists, not timid in other respects, from proposing that there may be other time-like dimensions folded up into the small interstices of the spacetime we experience.

I think it promising that, before such a theory existed, adding stringy dimensions to normal, 3d physics produces interesting ways of explaining things we take for granted....like electromagnetic waves.... This was done by Kaluza in 1919 before anyone understood quantum mechanics....all Kaluza did was stick an extra dimension into reality, combined it with Einsteinean spacetime, and found that his model predicted Maxwell's electromagnetic waves. Oscar Klein was the person who first described what this extra dimension might look like. Imagine a dimension, perpendicular to the four dimensional timespace we inhabit, but small, so that any trip along this axis inevitably leads to the same place in a very short distance. All of us, or the subatomic particles within us, at least, move in this direction constantly. Trips in this direction cycle, though, they oscillate. Add more dimensions, you get the spaces described in the gif above.

I also like the idea that there are big, macroscopic dimensions, we are simply unable to sense. That is, of course, what people implicitly mean when they say "creature from another dimension". Such a creature would inhabit a universe parallel to our own, but removed along the axis of one of these invisible dimensions. Our entire physical universe, the spacetime we think about, can be though of as a plane, cutting through a larger solid. This creature's universe would be another such plane. If the planes intersect, you get a line. If two four dimensional timespaces intersect within a five dimensional solid, you get a three dimensional space at the intersection. This could be the entire universe, as the worlds pass through each other instantaneously, or a two dimensional field that exists for a duration. Through this field, terrible creatures could come and go, perhaps dragging human victims to their doom. But, could they exist here? Unless you tweak other elements of reality, physical laws should work the same there as they do here.

This could happen to you. Tonight. As you sleep. An interdimensional Hound of Tindalos could drag you, screaming, out of your bed, through a gate into a terrible world, never to be seen again. Nothing in string theory precludes such a thing, and, following the logical lead of all string theorists that they must be right because their ideas are cool, even in the absence of evidence, we must assume that this can and will happen. Tonight. Beware.

Space Gnomes

Gnomes are our enemies. Anyone who does not know this is dangerously deluded. Consider this: when was the last time a gnome did anything but steal your possessions and make you late for work? Space gnomes are particularly odious. One thing about space gnomes I will never understand is their objection to relativity.....both general relativity and special relativity piss them off, presumably because it interferes with their plans for interstellar dominion.

Here is a space gnome trick, repeatedly tried, to circumvent relativity. Gnome 1 departs from a stationary object, in deep space, with no other point of reference. Gnome 2 stays on the stationary object. Gnome 1 accelerates, reaches a speed of 95% the speed of light, stays at that speed for ten years, turns around, and returns after accelerating to 95% the speed of light in the other direction. Gnome 2 stays put. When gnome 1 returns to the stationary object, usually someone's yard, it talks shit about how the YARD was not stationary at all, and that to think of it as such violates the entire principal of relativity. There ARE no privileged frames of reference. AND YET, gnome 1 has aged many more years than gnome 1, enough time to drink a great deal of beer. Gnomes are assholes for even bringing this up. In fact, the garden is never stationary, it is moving with respect to the rest of the universe, whether the gnomes choose to observe stars, planets, silver surfers, or not. There is no such thing as a stationary object. So, why the fuck was it gnome 1 did all the aging? This REALLY happens to gnomes.
I finally get it, what gnomes do not understand when they gripe like that.
It is the acceleration, both ways, and the deceleration, all of it, that broke the symmetry between the gnomes. In fact there was no symmetry to begin with. Not in this case. The gnomes usually try a new trick after pulling this one.

The next trick is to go to very distant points, with respect to each other, using their long lifespans as an aid to space travel, then accelerate to a good fraction of the speed of light, and cruise past each other, not accelerating, so that their combined velocities are greater than the speed of light. They do this because relativity pisses them off and they are trying to fuck with it. This trick is never really satisfying though, because from the perspective of each gnome, the other is receding at less than the speed of light. The Lorentz contraction of space, in the direction of movement, and time dilation, make it so that, to each other, they are receding at just shy of the speed of light. They can add a third observer, gnome 3 to the mix, as a stationary point between them, and this third gnome sees them receding from each other at greater than the speed of light, but this is not a violation of relativity and all three gnomes know it.

I remember a time when two gnomes, in separate spacecraft, accelerated to 99% the speed of light, using an enormous amount of fuel. They cruised at the same rate, relative to each other, one of them trailing a bit, and turned on their headlights. Both were annoyed because the light was not blue-shifted at all, since both were not moving with respect to each other. They even tried using a mirror, the one in the front turning around and shining its headlights on the gnome in the back, who was holding a mirror. Nothing, because from their perspective, noting in particular was amiss, even though, from the perspective of the rest of the galaxy, as they cruised, clocks were running SLOWER both aboard the gnome ships, AND in every distant planet (not faster there unless they mess it up by turning around and accelerating home), also, everything aboard the ships was very short in the direction of motion, from the perspective of distant planets, and all the distant planets were squished really flat in the direction of their apparent recession away from the gnomes....but none of this was apparent to the gnomes on the ship, even though it was happening, and that pissed them off.

The truth is that relativity pisses off gnomes because they have a belief that there is one, single, center of the universe that is NOT part of cosmic expansion, that is totally still in the absolute sense, and that they can put a planet, and a nice green lawn there, and sit, unmoving, forever.

snowflakes

Slither slither smell the air..through the withered wood over treebranch and under henbane between stone after stone, like the world serpent swallowing its tail like an electron vibrating in an S orbital high above an atomic nucleus slither smell the air dance the survival rhythm sense the mouse sense the footfall fear the avian menace avoid open space at all costs avoid outer space with its vacuum energy and freezing temperatures cosmic rays and vastness stay snuggled up in the core of a lifeless asteroid under a pillow of plasma in the fractal geometry of methane snowflakes falling on a dark moon sun set another setting universe expanding always expanding and somehow the same size always a fragment of it experiencing itself somewhere typing done with coffee.

Quarks

Quarks. They come in flavors. The flavors are paired though, by color. UP pairs with DOWN-one color. CHARM pairs with STRANGE-another color. TOP Pairs with BOTTOM-a third color. Quarks have a spin of one half, which means if you rotate a quark half a turn, it is the same as it was before you started rotating. They are not physical objects though, and they do not actually rotate. These three colors actually stack by ontogeny. Top and Bottom are thousands of times heavier than Charm and Strange, and a thousand times more unstable. Likewise, Charm and Strange are heavier than Top and Bottom, and unstable. Each color of quark has a corresponding lepton, and a corresponding neutrino. There are electrons, muons, tauons. Muons, as you might guess, are heavy, tauons are alarmingly heavy...electrons are light. Every particle has an antiparticle. There are positrons, for instance. Everything arranges itself by color. A proton is composed of up and down quarks (two of one, one of the other), neutrons have the inverse (two down quarks, one up quark). This explains their charge, by the way, because an UP quark has a +2/3 charge, and a DOWN quark has a -2/3 charge. Three quarks together somehow invoke the existence of a massless gluon, like a photon, except they only exist within a proton, holding it together, forever, though it can switch to a neutron, by changing the status of one of the quarks. This process releases a neutrino. Neutrinos are massless too, by the way. They are not exactly within protons, but changes in quarks invoke their existence, to conserve angular momentum. You can make mesons out of two quarks, by the way, but mesons are not stable. I do not know what happens when mesons decay though, into gamma rays, neutrinos, and antineutrions, lone quarks are impossible for some fundamental reason, more like why you cannot have just the inside of a basketball without the outside, somewhere, rather than why you cannot have half a cat, which in fact, you can, but it decays into a dead cat quickly and bisected cat is not really half the whole. None of this stuff is either there, or not there, in the sense you might think, because there are an infinite number of virtual quarks, and virtual other particles, that do not exist at the moment, whose existence can be invoked by the right set of conditions...in coming into existence, energy is transferred into matter, the opposite of the destruction of matter that occurs when fission or fusion occur. You can make a hydrogen atom from two up quarks, and a down one, a gluon, and an electron. For good measure, throw in a neutron-a gluon and two downs plus an up. Now, if you really want to, you can replicate an age of matter that probably existed for a few hundred years after the big bang, or less, maby. Make mater out of strange and charm quarks, and surround it with muons. You could do it. You could even make matter out of top and bottom quarks. Surround it with tauons. This matter would be superheavy, superunstable. The quarks would decay into charm and strange, then the charm and strange would decay into up and down. It would be great while it lasted. In the end, matter, not antimatter. If there were no top and bottom, there would be no assymetry, and antimatter everywhere, colliding with matter, releasing gamma rays. In the end, no matter. But I am composed of both matter and energy as I type this. The math actually makes sense in five dimensions, spacetime and a fifth, strange and bounded and not infinite. Therefore, it is significant that top and bottom quarks once existed.
There are approximately 140 types of mesons. A meson has a quark and an antiquark. Two normal quarks will not stick together. You can make a meson, called a K meson, out of a strange quark and an anti-down quark. It is unstable, decaying into a pion. A D meson, by the way is composed of an anti-up and a charm. D mesons, apparently, can flip into an antimatter state, composed of up, and anticharm. Antimesons. Pions are the lightest mesons, the normalest ones, composed of up and antidown down quarks, or down and antiup (an antipion). No meson is really stable. They decay into neutrino plus antineutrino. Kaons are heavy and surprisingly stable, composed of strange and anti-up quarks. A very heavy one is the upsilon, a bottom quark and an antibottom.
This fifth dimensional space, which is bounded, has a top and a bottom, one spin is at the top, one spin is at the bottom, of this domain. Top and Bottom, Up and Down, Charm and Strange, opposing walls, opposite spins, of one half. In the middle, all hell breaks loose, matter is obscenely heavy and not real in the usual sense. You can flip through a dimension like this, but not really ever be there.
Spin, parity, and angular momentum, are conserved during all the flipping. They are the parameters within which the particles exist, and we only think we know the particles are there because we infer their existence from the rules.

The Morning of a Fierce Battle...My Thoughts

Listen to the drums in the distance. Skin stretched over bone of ancient beasts. Bronze shields reflecting the morning sunrise. The smoke of extinguished campfires. Our swords are sharp and our archers have the high ground. Elms sway in the distance. Earthworks have been built. Ready for battle. Their armies will come no closer to our homeland. Horses snort, their masters holding the reigns and speaking words into the beast ears of the nervous creatures.

In the distance, giants, their knees taller than the men they camp with. You can make out their crested helmets, their axes glint in the sun, the skulls of men strung around their necks like beads, a necklace, a warning. They are not immortal, though, giant, though they eat the flesh of men and drink beer by the keg instead of by the pint. An arrow between the eyes will kill one. On our side, we have witches, their black tresses falling to their shoulder, they pass one eye among them and take turns seeing, but with a word they can pronounce a giant dead, or a man, and the victim has no choice but to obey and die.

I fear one of them has put a charm on me because I cannot stop looking at her, her white shoulders, the curve of her hips, her strange and wonderful lips. Yet, where her eyes should be, there is nothing but smooth indentation. Sometimes, I dream of this creature and it is terrifying.

Horns blast. Dust clouds from a thousand hooves. The archers wait till the enemy cavalry is within range. The battle begins.

Doom

Doom. Under the weeping wood. In the gloom. In the darkness. In the cloudy twilight. The smell of sulfur-a finger pointing to another world, in the wisps and hollows, a volcanic spring. Strangeness. Nihil. Stillness. The nightbirds, their cries a forlorn compass, counting corners, marking time, circle like ghost ships. The nightmare visits, drops from the vine like an overripe plum. Abomination. Life reflected in its opposite-unlife. Nightshade. Atropine. Fire. Jimson Weed, its flowers open in the twilight of morning. Wolves cry in the distance. A stranger dies.

Apoidea

The day before yesterday, I identified a Halictus parallelus from WI. This is a social bee, though it lives in small colonies, not the metropolis hives of Apis, the honeybee. A lifelong beekeeper tells me that the reason Apis is getting so many diseases is that it never evolved to stay in the same place for year after year. Apis swarms at the drop of a feather in summer, and yesterday, Mr. Beekeeper was pulling a swarm off the cyclone fence. It escaped, a rare thing nowadays, feral bee colonies. My Halictus queen never got to found one. Sandy country out there in WI where I caught her, and hopefully her distant realatives are doing well. Six or eight workers, maybe more by now. It will all be over in August or Sept, the whole set of workers having spent their lives to produce a dozen or more queens and a similar number of males. Sand, not wax. Tunnels, not hives.
In my garden, Agapostemon viriscens, on my sunflower, and Megachile georgica. The first a beautiful green halictid bee, like halictus, but only quasisocial. They share nests as an incidental effect of their construction activities, and tolerate each other, but do not truly cooperate. I see big females and smaller ones though, a big one was foraging earlier this year, and I am beginning to conclude that this species leans toward eusociality. I read that eusociality, queens and workers, evolved over and over, and has been lost as many times, in that family, the halictids. Tattoo on my arm reads...I serve no queen. Entomology joke. Speaking of kinky, Megachile georgica practices bondage. The males have enlarged tibia to block the female's vision during mating. Another Megachile, Ashmeidella, very tiny, ID'd my first one only recently. Also, a strange parasite, probly torymid, from a trap nest I set out behind the greehouse. How the thing found a host, in Chicago, amid such uncertain surroundings, I cannot comprehend.

Summer Bee Update

Weird year for bees. Wet weather. Favors some and hinders others in a way I do not yet understand. Bees are complex in their population biology-always going extinct in one place and growing to abundance in another. There is a study of bees in Carlinville IL, the most famous bee study ever, in the late nineteenth century, by a man named Carson. There is a return study that concludes that, despite changes, most of the same bees are still there. In my yard, everything has speeded up to a ridiculous degree. Male Megachile georgica swarm and lek about ornamental sunflowers. Agapostemon viriscens, not early at all, but back from a long hiatus, forages there.