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.