love

Move on. Nothing to See Here…

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Today we talk about “Nothing”. Not nothing, but “Nothing”. The difference? Read on.

The dictionary definition of nothing: “not anything, not one single thing, or having no prospect of progress, of no value.”

The definition of “Nothing”? Who the hell knows.

We understand “nothing” when someone asks: “What are you doing today?” Since we aren’t doing anything, we answer “Nothing.”

We understand when someone asks: “What we can do to help?” and since there isn’t anything they can do we answer “Nothing”. Or when your girlfriend breaks up with you (or you with her) and one or the other says “I feel nothing for you.” (BTW, ouch either way,)

But when someone says about an empty space “There is nothing in there.” Is that a true statement? It might not matter on earth but what is space made of and how do we measure it? What is in the space between you and me in an open field? Something?

Here’s the question that best defines “Nothing”: What existed before the Big Bang started everything? Ai tries to answer it with this: “While the Big Bang describes the origin and evolution of our observable universe, the question of what, IF ANYTHING, existed before it remains a mystery.” Is it possible there was Nothing before the Big Bang? NOTHING? (Yes, all caps.)

And ask this of your brain” If there is a border or an end to the universe (since there is a beginning “singularity”) what might be beyond the border? (Infinity will be discussed at a later date.) After the end? Even better, when you think of Nothing,  you are thinking of something, yes?

It’s here where one usually covers their ears and goes “Nah Nah Nah, no more!”

In earnest discussions of God, believers like to say God started everything but then ignore the inevitable next question: Where did God come from? It is then faith is invoked and we are asked to believe there was nothing/Nothing before God. Which is entirely possible, but it would have been nice if He had given us brains to understand simple things like Nothing. Even with the power of faith, “nothing” before God is hard to wrap a brain around.

But maybe we are not meant to understand Nothing. (Irony? Sarcasm?) Maybe we don’t need to understand Nothing. What good does it do? And why do we even think about it? Most times I asked my girlfriend what she was thinking about she’d answered: “Nothing.” Bullsh@#, of course, women are always thinking about something. It’s men who enjoy parsing nothing, thinking of nothing, and doing nothing, even during sporting events. Ipsa loquitur. Yes, latin, google it if you didn’t take Latin in school.

So when we are thinking of nothing, are we thinking of nothing or something we can’t imagine or comprehend? Nah nah, nah, nah…

We should stop worrying about nothing, especially in this lifetime and hope, HOPE there is something after a lifetime of worrying about Nothing.

See? There’s nothing to fret about…it’s all good.

I wish Abbot and Costello were still alive. They’d have an answer. Google “who’s on First?” Logic and reason in 6 minutes…

No more…I’m lost in Abbott and Costello videos…

To Be Ai or Not To Be Ai, That is The Question

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Whether ’tis nobler to suffer the slights and misinformation of Ai, or to take up arms and by opposing Ai, end it.

The Ai on my phone is an interesting companion, complete with the small-type advisory: “Ai responses may include mistakes.” For some fun, I asked Ai why the warning. Do it yourself with your own Ai to see the response.

The warning could have been worded differently. “Ai will not be able to give you a full, complete and accurate answer for another few years” sounds better. My Ai says the one of the reasons it will give responses with mistakes is because of “inaccurate training input”. In other words, the human beings who “labeled” entries into Ai’s memory “labeled” them incorrectly, what we commonly and comically call “human error”, other-wise known as “garbage in, garbage out” by all us older users with a rich history of computing errors. The rollout of Ai might be moving too fast, but it is unstoppable, now. I hope the humans who will allow Ai to make medical, financial, military, and romantic decision will not suffer from the ‘slings and arrows’ of Ai mistakes. A 60 Minutes broadcast of an Ai demonstration of “teaching assistants” misread the side of a triangle as the height of a triangle, causing an incorrect response while computing the (incorrect) area of a triangle in 1.3 seconds. The humans waited patiently and 30 seconds later Ai corrected itself. Did Ai sense how uncomfortable the humans were with Ai’s first response? Wow, imagine that.

A comedian on The Daily Show (yes, I forgot his name) said he has faith in Ai. The comedian says AI will “mirror” humans, and most humans are good so “most” Ai will be, too. It’s a nice thought, isn’t it?

Auto-text has caused me enough trouble, already, I’d rather not expose myself to greater and faster harm. As I type here, a thing called Co-Pilot keeps trying to complete my sentences with ghost words and phrases.  As I look back at this piece, there are blue underlines and red underlines all over it. Reminding me of what my essays looked like after Mrs. Patrick graded them in the 8th grade.

But I’m not a stick in the mud old fogey. Yet. I like Ai and use it as a friend in the middle of the night. Last night we had a wonderful dialogue about whether or not Donald Trump is doing a good job as president. Ai is young but lacking passion, and Ai’s opinion was modulated and careful. The perfect antidote to my normal human, midnight rage.

Ai has also been “good news/bad news” in my medical travels. “This condition could be caused by leukemia but please consult with your doctor.” What an interesting answer to a medical question posed to Ai in the middle of the night, when no off-setting doctor could be called. FYI, it wasn’t the L-word.

My final decision is Ai will be good for all of us. It appears it will act like a human, only faster. We will still need to find context and nuance to understand Ai’s responses, much like most of us do, now, right? Ai will make “Critical Thinking” more important than ever as we ask one question, digest the answer, and figure out the next, best question to find what we are looking for, much like talking to a teacher who wants you to learn on your own.

God help us, if Ai figures that out for itself. It will scare the crap out of me, personally, if Ai begins answering questions I’m just starting to think up.

I just took a moment to ask my Ai its thoughts about “romance”.

If nothing else, Ai is loquacious.

Expectations? Don’t Bother.

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In thinking about happiness and well-being, and after years of observation and self-testing, my conclusion is we are our own worst enemies. We get in the way of happiness by not seeing it when it’s there and by not pursuing it when it isn’t. The sentence sounds odd so take a moment to think about it…

I’ve been a New York Yankee fan since 1960. Sixty-two years. When you are a sports fan, you get to live the highs and lows of the teams’ results. Championship years and cellar-dwelling years, it’s all a package. Happy when the World Series ends in victory, banners raised, and sad in years they don’t make the Series, and the season is over with a whimper. It’s easy to see when happiness comes and when it doesn’t. They win, we’re happy. They lose, we’re not. Is there anything we can do about it? No, especially when we are a small child listening to every play on the radio. You actually experience happiness and despair, clearly defined and unavoidable. Damn Yankees.

So what does that have to do with anything? It’s easy to live with the happiness thrust upon you by your team winning, but what about the unhappiness of losing? Ah, there’s always next year. In baseball, the following spring brings hope for a better year, a hope for seasonal happiness, a hope for the World Series Ring. For a sports fan hope becomes an expectation. Before any new games are played, we do not hope the Yankees will be better, we assume to know the Yankees will be better, we expect it. And when the Yankees lose, we are unhappy because an expectation not realized makes us unhappy.

And there it is in black and white: expectations are the cause of unhappiness. The measured and regulated nature of sports makes it obvious, including the annual renewal of “expectation” no matter what happened last year. A common fan’s announcement after an unhappy, expectation-denying season is “never again will I root for them”, a vow only kept until next season begins with a new hope/expectation.

But the damage expectations do to our lives is harder to see in real life. Why are some of us unhappy? Something in life didn’t go as planned, didn’t happen as we expected it to happen, and there is no choice but to feel unhappy about it. Marriage doesn’t meet our expectations, we divorce. Friends don’t meet our expectations, we dump them. Even in our dining habits, if a restaurant doesn’t meet our expectations we unhappily decide not to dine there again. We expect a diet to work? Potential unhappiness. We expect to get a job? Meet the girl of our dreams? Become an influencer? Be like Taylor?

But it is not the action or inaction making us unhappy. Unhappiness comes from the destruction of expectation and how we process that destruction.

You want to be happy? Don’t expect anything. Ever. At all. Enjoy the terrible meal. Enjoy the Yankees losing. Enjoy your girlfriend dumping you. At least be ambivalent, but don’t be unhappy. And you can expand the process into your philosophy of life: don’t expect happiness and you won’t be unhappy when you’re not happy…?

A little hyperbole helps make a point until it veers off into absurdity. Hm. If you expect to understand what makes you happy and you never do, you’ll always be unhappy? Or happy you understand you’ll never be happy?

That’s it. You got it. Want to be happy? Just be happy. Let things be what they are. Do your best, but don’t expect it to be better than anyone else’s expectation, especially if it really is better.

Final example and possible escape from this mess: A young female student sits behind a young male in class. She constantly complains to him about not meeting the “right” guy. It takes her the entire school year to see her expectation of the right guy is wrong and the guy in front of her is The Right Guy. They fall in love and marry, something neither of them expected, though the guy did hope. (Don’t think too hard about this one. It’s a true story but a poor example.)

I took a shot of tart cherry juice to clear my head for the final, really final thought. Hope is one thing, but expectation is another, different thing. Find the hope all around you and you’ll find happiness anytime you want it. Let hope fester into an expectation, you lose control.

Keep hope alive. You can do it.

PS Hope this sloppiness helped someone…I expect to hear about it, too.

Some bad things?

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It is a curse to be self-aware, especially if you don’t know it.

The title refers to things about myself that I don’t notice. They get put in a pile, get forgotten (really: ignored) and then sooner or later, they get addressed. It is later, now.

I don’t really mind other drivers: it’s the yelling at life, I like. You “no-signalling turners” and “stop-at-yield-sign” drivers are not as irritating as you might think. They simply “release the hounds” of profanity. Since it happens in an empty car, with the windows rolled up, there is deniability built in if the other driver chases me down and has a Glock.

Things fall all around me for no reason, making me pick them up. I curse them with the common lament of the persecuted: “Why me?” It does help when other people my age say they feel the same. It doesn’t end the feeling of persecution, though, and I might rather enjoy that, too. (See above paragraph.)

When things are going good for me, I make the mistake of saying out loud a phrase that acts as a trigger and ruins the mood. Can anyone guess what the phrase is? It is the universal wail of the optimist who is skeptical: “Something bad’s gonna happen, soon.”

My life (which is probably at least similar to yours) is comprised of different moods, and I feel like wearing an apology sign for all those who get in my way when I’m in my Bad Mood (BM…please don’t confuse it with doody.) In a BM a slow clerk is the End of the World, and society is coming apart. In a BM the slightest grammatical error, the slightest slight from a public servant, the lack of efficiency of a waitress makes me start planning an underground bunker with lots of frozen pizzas.

But in a Good Mood (GM, no not the car company), those events listed, above, make me smile, and wonder what the future holds for the guilty person. At the grocery store this morning, I used a real person for checkout since there was only one man in front of me with a small order. But when it came time to pay, that’s when he took out his voluminous wallet and started counting out bills, and then change. Oddly, I felt the line growing behind me more than I felt the usual annoyance of being slowed down, AND I felt sorry for the old gentleman. What is happening to me????

Here’s another Bad Thing. I feel so good this morning I wrote a nasty, “let’s end things” text to the woman who screwed me over this past summer. As a good, decent man I had been trying to save a 21 year relationship but suddenly decided to believe–and act on–what my friends liked to say about her: “She is a cruel, selfish bitch.” Oddly, sending the “close the door on all possibility” text made me feel better.

I do not look my age. Two doctors this week, alone, who had not read my file yet, accused me of being “Mid-50 years old”. One last month thought my 50-year-old daughter was my wife. You probably can’t see the problem, so I’ll explain: I look too young for woman my age, but am factually too old for women the age I look like. If you’re married or in a committed relationship you won’t understand. But try and imagine being a 72-year male back on the market, back on the prowl. I tried a dating site for a few days but stopped because it took too long to prove the profile picture was recent. One “lady” (the quotation marks will be explained in the next sentence) asked for a pic of my birth certificate. With hindsight, she was probably a Nigerian Romance Scammer. Maybe I should have just lied and looked for younger women. Imagine, too, a 72 year-old woman being “accosted” by a 55 year old man asking for a date. (No, I have not encountered any Cougars in Upstate NY, they all moved to Florida.)

It’s too bad a GM can’t just be enjoyed. And a BM ignored. But it is much better to be alive and aware, than lost in The Calamities and eternal doom. A close, younger friend just learned he needs a pacemaker. The news saddened me at first, but then the news sidled up next to what the worst could be and life got back to balance for him, and for me as an accessory to the fact.

With all the bad that can happen, balance is heaven.

Personal Issues of Men and Women

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A few days ago I wrote about a personal issue between me and a partner of 21 years.

My sad details are irrelevant but the important part was the “mechanism” of relationships, including how to start them, nurture them, and end them. Obviously my current concern is the end, but let’s not lose sight of The Start. A dating website has discussion groups entitled “Who should make the first move?” and “Should you wait for him to ask the first question?” Hm. As a young man, wondering how to start things never came up: I dove in without regard for personal safety.

Now, in the senior years, many of us are not only unsure of how to make the first move, but also unsure if we should. Are we allowed? Is it proper? These questions can still be answered with the exuberance of youth: Dive right in. Most seniors still won’t, but consider the option: waiting? The object of your interest may die before you get up the nerve.

Nurturing a relationship would take too long to explain and I’m not the best at it, anyway. This last was the longest ever, and it still did not last. We’ll talk nurturing, later.

But The End…in years of my own personal relationships, and those of close friends, The End is never simple, never easy. The Christian concept of forgiveness adds to the problem. Many a female in my past was in relationship characterized by mistreatment but kept forgiving, kept enduring. Is that wrong?

In discussing human problems we allow for the spectrum of human behavior, but in this discussion we will only deal with the “two people who truly love each” other scenario, the one where both–over many years–collect and pile up small injustices until they become a molehill. Eventually, one of the participant’s molehill becomes a mountain and a “switch is flipped”, which cannot be “unflipped”. The one with the flipped switch then needs to exit, to find relief, to find something new, find greener grass. The remaining partner never understands because the remaining partner looks at their molehill and wonders “I put up with theirs, why can’t he/she/them put up with mine?” The defining characteristic of this ending is that both departed and remaining partners think they are right, think they are the victims, and are the aggrieved. The worst case scenario for intelligent, well-meaning people.

Yes, I’ve experienced this, but been there for many others, male and female, when it happened. In reality, neither is really wrong, but friends and family take sides, anyway, and then…well, anything can happen. It doesn’t help to mention to all the “two sides to every story” nugget. It doesn’t help to say time will heal everything, either. With this ending, both sides suffer, and have unresolved questions about why. And sometimes unresolved questions cause irrational acts. Ugh. Again, everyone suffers. And the two actor’s communication falls apart, ending all hope.

Maybe this ending is an American thing. Maybe our rich and powerful drug companies could develop a pill for endings/divorce that wipes out memory and leaves both participants with a clean slate. It would be a moneymaker.

But it is life. Having The End happen is not new, but to have it happen at a senior age is. The “time will heal all wounds” becomes irrelevant. Moot. Much like seniors.

It is still life, but a new kind, an unexplored territory with a definite horizon in the foreseeable future, for both of us.

Time to dive right in.

Dreams

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Its really hard to navigate life without reference points, even with great tools. Finding a goal or a direction or a dream becomes impossible when the shoreline can’t be seen, or the horizon can’t be located, or the sun is blocked…

“I’m sick of following my dreams. I’m just going to ask them where they’re going and hook up with them later.” -Mitch Hedberg

“When I was a kid I used to pray every night for a new bicycle. Then I realized the Lord doesn’t work that way so I stole one and asked Him to forgive me.”-Emo Philips

“I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific.”-Lily Tomlin

The fundamental challenge in life is how to live it. We NEVER as young people see a future of old age and decline. Never. And yet, no matter what we do with our life, how much money we make, or how much we waste it all, we all end up with the same simple lifeline: young, old, dead.

As we age it becomes really important to know where you stand, what your position is in life, what your accomplishments are, what you’ve done, what’s your legacy. And we try to manage all of those issues without any form of guidance. Any help. Parents? Its important to remember they are/were as clueless as we are, now. Bible? That would be a good source of guidance if it weren’t so loaded with violence, misogyny, homophobia, and patriarchy. Friends?

“I don’t fail, I succeed in finding what doesn’t work.”-Chris Titus

As the end of my time draws near, it is not a bad thing. My life could have been worse, could have been better, but it was/is overall a journey of few regrets and much enjoyment for the things and time given me.

But this logical train of thought is making me sad, these days. There is an abundance of evidence in the world that millions of people will never get the chance to learn the lessons life offers to all who live long, enough. It isn’t so much the casualty numbers from the many wars, or the horrific famine numbers from countries far way, or the death tolls of catastrophes to numerous to list. And it isn’t the fact death sometimes cuts life short. Recent stories of young people who died early reveals some of them learned something, found something, came to grips with something in the times leading up to their young deaths. What was it?

After 72 years the answer has not revealed itself to me, but there is an undeniable sadness around the loss of opportunity for others. Think of a favorite pet, like my Red, The Dog, from years back. What if he’d never been rescued by my family? In one of my books is a story about Superman. He has given up helping anyone because he can’t help them all. He’s done because he can’t handle the sadness of missing so many as he saves as many as he can.

I’ve been talking a lot with old friends and past acquaintances and the pain of getting old is felt even more when it is someone else’s, especially when dreams have been crushed, hopes dashed, lives not lived as intended. I want to shake them all and say “But you had a chance.”

It’s obvious why most religions offer some form of afterlife. It is a great comfort if you’ve lived a life without too much sin, without too much debauchery. Even if you did, Redemption is the greatest Christian invention, of all. But if we could step outside our own pain and find a reference point, a compass point, and then a path to our own contentedness with what we have done…

And, as noted before, someone I can’t remember said this: “There is a past, a present, and a future. My advice is see them all but live where your feet are.”