Vanishing

Another acquaintance of mine has disappeared.  I asked people who knew him about it,  and they just shrugged.  Maybe they know and don't trust me enough to say, but the man is gone.  It happens all the time.   I'm thinking that perhaps it is my particular circumstances where people vanish, relationships break up suddenly, and that it is only me, my world that's constructed this way.

Because in the novels I read things like this don't happen, or when they do,  readers and reviewers complain about dangling, incomplete plots.  Life flows in literary works without constant crashes, without ends before the last page, without black holes.  In my own life, plots tend to stop suddenly, and when that happens, there is nothing to write home about. Is it just me, you then ask?  What did I do wrong?  What should I have done instead? Etc, etc.

It's different in popular songs. There, perhaps it is the short format that allows it.


Little Richard:
I woke up this morning, Lucille was not in sight.
I asked my friends about her but all they did was sigh

Carole King:

So far away

Doesn't anybody stay in one place anymore?

The Speed of Time

We were reading, my comedian friend and I, an article about Hong Kong physicists who said they had proven a single photon cannot travel faster than the speed of light, thus making time travel an impossibility, when it occurred to me, a science ignoramus, that if said photons could be slowed down (they never said it was impossible), then time could proceed forward as before, while we along with our photons could stay behind travelling backwards in time, the only problem in view of the above finding would be returning back to the present, if we so desired.   Which  remark provoked my unknown comedian friend into asking, "what's the speed of time?".  I immediately wrote this phrase down, the way songwriters write down often banal phrases they hear for eventual future uses in song lyrics.   This particular one would fit perfectly into David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust period.

And then it occurred to me that it is perhaps the comedians who more often than scientists stumble intentionally or by accident into deeper truths.   I was watching an appearance of a well known standup comic on a television talk show, and he asked (rhetorically) about people who sit in the audience of various events filming the stage with their smartphones.   They are watching the performance on a tiny screen, to watch the shaky results later on a bigger screen at home,  and this after paying high price for the tickets, to be there, when they're actually not completely there, he was saying. This reminded me of the time when I met an Israeli man while we were both traipsing through some European city playing tourists, and he explained that he, alone among the thousands of other sightseers  there, did not carry a camera, because he wanted to see the place through his own eyes and not through the camera viewfinder.

If all of the above is not terribly interesting, then know that there is a small proud town somewhere in the state of Oregon called Boring.

Ventilator

You can't be too careful when trying to avoid tempting the Devil into sending your way a ventilator of anger and rage.  A victim of murder narrates "Sunset Boulevard", the 1950 film directed by Billy Wilder,  there have been other movies and novels employing the dead man narration, and I suppose that if one was anticipating being murdered, he could write an up-to-the-minute story, the only problem being how to liberate the manuscript from the hands of the murderer. Howard Hughes and Charles Foster Kane are two people who ended their lives with nothing and nobody around them, and only with piles of money. A diplomat published a novel he spent a period of a dozen years writing, and which, he says, does not contain a sentence that didn't come with great difficulty.

A dream.  No one was interested in going so I went alone, and as soon as I sat down in the audience, I forgot why I was there.   I must have read something about the performers that drew me to this event.  A woman sitting next to me said that during the previous evening an old singer appeared, and she was there.  I knew this man when he was starting up, a subsequent one hit wonder, who somehow managed to stay in the limelight.  She said that he told her he was now a millionaire film director, but I'll have to check if that is true.  The performers then all came in a group of a dozen or so, they weren't musicians, and some of them sat down near me.  They divided the audience into groups and I found myself in a group with several of these performers.   We were shown pictures of regions of the world, physical maps as opposed to political, those multi-colored maps illustrating various characteristics of the land, yellow for deserts,  green for forests,  jungles and prairies,  beige for hilly terrains and dark brown for high mountains.  Each map had the names of major cities printed and strangely enough, it showed its region in complete isolation from the surrounding areas which were printed blank.  We looked at all these pictures and then there was an intermission.

After the intermission we were assembled in new groups, and my group stepped inside a roomy, dark bus to work.   We were given the task to identify the regions in the new set of pictures which were duplicates of the maps we had seen previously, except that all the identifying names had been changed into meaningless words.   We set out to work.  I got the idea to consult Google to find physical maps of Earth's regions and sought to find matches comparing the shapes of the regions.  I didn't succeed, but someone in the group did in the end  identify just one of the pictures correctly.