World of Juan Lam

Yuto's Radio

2023-12-02T00:00:00Z

My brother’s life began, really began, one evening in July when my father came home in as spirited a mood as we ever saw him, gifts in hand. That evening, as it turned out, he had gotten a promotion at work and liquidated his bonus, turning the check into three gifts: a small and weighty cardboard box for my brother Yuto, a bouquet of summer flowers for my mother, tied together with a satin ribbon, and for me a bag of hemp that rattled with the promise of wonder. In my bag there was a painting set of fresh new brushes with fine strands of goat hair waiting to be broken-in and made pliant by the efforts of my ten year old imagination. You could imagine that I was as happy as any boy could ever be, and was quick to put it to use. But it was my brother’s gift that made all the difference in the world for him and for me and perhaps for all of Osaka. Inside his plain brown carton box was a Sony transistor-radio, and though everyone will mark 1984 as the year that Yuto was swept away into the stars, it really happened that night in 1983 when he pulled off the plastic cover on the back of the radio, plugged in a battery, and turned the volume knob to power. Oh, he was gone from then on, gone from the very first crackle and squeaky tuning whine, seeking an errant radio wave, gone up and out into the deep blue night.

It was a lucky thing that my brother got his radio then. Being summer, he had a whole month and a few extra weeks besides to fiddle with his radio. The other thing he had going for him is that, at the time, all of Osaka was getting deep into the throes of a radio-craze, so my brother wasn’t too strange or unique in spending his holiday lying on the grass with his radio playing. These days nobody uses radio except in their cars, so I think it’s worth spending some of my time now to explain how things worked for us then. There weren’t as many radio stations as there are now, to start. At least officially. From what I recall there may not have been even more than two, both under the control of the government, and this was the result, from what I understand, of an excessive eagerness in policy. However, the radio revolution that happened all over Japan that summer and so thoroughly changed my brother’s life was the direct result of an exception in the radio policy, which allowed free and unlicensed broadcast for transmitters below a certain power threshold. These transmitters couldn’t broadcast much further than, say, a five hundred meter radius from their transmission point. But a five hundred meter radius can reach a lot of people somewhere like Osaka, not to mention Tokyo.

It was no surprise then that this single exception, so much in contrast to the strictness of the overall policy, was like a hole in a boat. All of Japan rushed in through the thing and claimed the radio as their own. We called it mini-FM radio, and it belonged to the people. Though I am not as fond of the medium as my brother was, I believe radio was always inevitable. Among us humans there is nothing more valued as the ability to express ourselves, to be heard. It is little wonder to me that the medium of radio, which is a medium of amplification and proximal distribution, should be so coveted, so treasured.

In the first two weeks of that summer, lying down on the grass of the furthest part of our home’s property line and listening to the radio was all Yuto did. During those days he was out there I would set myself up next to him under the shade of whatever tree we happened to be by and paint. My proclivity for landscapes and scenes of nature probably formed during those summer days. Not that they lasted long, mind you. On our fifteenth day of the ritual our mother got fed up and told Yuto he couldn’t just lay around all day and that she wouldn’t put up with it any longer. This was just as well for Yuto, who had by then already cycled through all the mini-FM stations in our proximity. Our neighbors, as it turned out, weren’t very interesting mini-FM broadcasters. Yuto was already dreaming of the denser center of Osaka which he was sure would offer a greater variety of stations and, perhaps even higher quality ones.

So Yuto spent a day or two fixing up his old bicycle which he had broken before winter and hadn’t touched since. Once it was all fixed up he used what few supplies we had in our house to create a mount for his radio on the bike handle and off he went, gone in the mornings before breakfast and back always just barely in time for supper. What exactly he did those days while he was gone I couldn’t say, as Yuto was afforded far more freedom than I was at the time, he being fourteen and I only eleven, perhaps nearer twelve. But I’ve put together a working theory through my memory of Yuto’s first-hand accounts, the accounts of many of the residents of Osaka (the quantity of which will be accounted for soon), and some of what my eleven-year-old self imagined my brother was doing while I was stuck at home.

When my brother left home in the mornings, he put on whichever t-shirt he found first, his favorite pair of jeans, and his white trainers. On his way out he’d grab some spare batteries, and a baseball cap, the one I gave him of my favorite team the year before. I was, and still am, proud of his enjoyment of that gift. My brother would have breakfast, say farewell, and mount his bicycle, going off into the city where he would spend the day roaming, exploring.

When my brother explored Osaka, he did not do so as you or I might, because what Yuto explored was not a physical geography, but an aural one. In some ways, Yuto was something of a tourist in Osaka, sampling whole neighborhoods through their broadcasts ― local clusters of overlapping sounds ― organizing them into subcultures and genres and moods. Some broadcast channels, he said, played music, sure, but there was much more than music to be explored deep in Osaka. Much more! There were whole productions of theater, political discourses, channels dedicated to the recitation of anonymous love letters, broadcasts where the hosts spoke in reverse, pirated recordings of university lectures, and even some stations where only the sounds of lovemaking were broadcast. And it is this novelty and variety that called my brother out into Osaka everyday with his blue bicycle and radio, because my brother, who always took a deep academic interest in the world around him, couldn’t help but be enthralled by all that texture, contrast, richness, and nuance hidden in the invisible air. If I could ask Yuto to draw me a map of Osaka from his memory, I have no doubt it would resemble nothing more than the echo-location of a bat, mapping out buildings not by their positions relative to streets, but to sounds and feelings. In other words, I am not sure he would be able to get around Osaka without his radio as a map to guide the way.

Because the radio was Yuto’s sole obsession for the entirety of the summer, he became a fixture of Osaka’s various neighborhoods, and people would often holler and wave when Yuto soared past on his bike. If he ever stopped at a spot to listen to a particular broadcast for very long, it was rarely in the same spot, and almost never to the same channel, his fingers always hovering over the tuning knob of his portable radio. Midway through the summer, perhaps closer to the end, people began to comment to my parents and I that there were days he would sit around and listen to nothing but static all day. Too much radio, they said, might’ve fried his brain. But given what I know about my brother, and knowing what happened just a year later, he really must have been up to something else.

Yuto, I believe, was invested in radio not as an intellectual medium, nor solely as an artistic one, but as an expressive and physical medium. Not for the broadcaster, but for the listener. To clarify what I mean I think it’s worth pointing out that by the end of summer Yuto rarely stopped to listen to any one channel. He would fly down the streets and alleys of Osaka, zipping around with his head low, one hand on the handle and the other perpetually on the tuning knob of his radio. I theorize that he did this because at some point Yuto became interested in his own body ( of which his bicycle and radio were merely natural extensions ) as a sort of kinetic paintbrush: distorting, focusing, magnetizing, and magnifying the radio waves around him, leaving a wake in the ocean of invisible sounds of Osaka. So if he ever stood still on the sidewalk, or a street corner, or even the middle of the road listening to static, I would not be surprised if it was because he discovered in that spot a place in sound-space where signals, cultures, energies, overlapped and converged and averaged out into something profound and novel for my brother. I cannot blame him, myself, for I am a painter and do I not do the same in my own way, with color and light, what he did with radio waves in those days? Oh, Yuto. You really must have discovered something sublime with that radio of yours.

I was glad when summer came to an end that year because it meant I’d see more of Yuto. Though I enjoyed that holiday in my own way, painting and playing baseball with the neighborhood boys, I missed my brother’s presence for it was the first time I went so long with such little interaction between us. Yuto’s attention was always hard to get but never so much as when he got his radio. He was perpetually distracted right from the start, not in that flitting manner whereby external stimuli hold undue sway over his attention, but rather he was thoughtful, occupied with whatever was on his mind. Perhaps it may be said that he was never distracted, but focused quite intently on some object no one but he could perceive. Yuto was a good son, a decent student, but really quite a shoddy brother. Not to say he was ever cruel or selfish or a bully how some brothers are, but he was always too distracted or occupied to suit the needs of a younger sibling: shenanigans, conspiracy, fighting with branches. For this I always resented him a little, though it was not always his fault we were a little distant. We always had between us the natural distance of age, for example, which made it so that when I was at the age where play-acting was my fancy he had already outgrown it so I had no one to play with except my own shadow, and that was an inevitable distance. Perhaps all of our distances were inevitable, even the present one.

I took consolation, however, in the fact that he was always a little distanced from the rest of the world, too. Our parents had his admiration and affection, but nothing short of direct inquiry could get him to reveal his inner thoughts to them. It wasn’t cruel or even intentional on his part. His distraction was a warm thing, not cold and aloof. Yuto was not disengaged, but deeply engaged. So I’ve learned not to take it to heart because he always did love us. He loved me, too. This I know because on the days he was grounded I knew no more tender a soul. But always his muses called and he was whisked away again. It’s that way even now, when the distance between us is greater than before, Yuto being so far from Earth, sitting on the Moon.

When school began it was difficult for Yuto to be so separated from his bicycle and radio, but he made peace with it because his summer rambling had made him quite a popular figure in Osaka without him knowing. Everyone loves a mystery and what Yuto was doing all summer on his bicycle made him the most sought after fellow in the school. People exchanged stories about how they had seen him during summer out in an alleyway sitting on a box, or out in the park lying down on a bench, and in turn Yuto shared his insights about Osaka. During those days and deep into fall Yuto was more present with everyone, even me. He brought me out on a bike ride into Osaka once or twice that autumn, since I had finally turned twelve and my parents let him take me after much begging. I’ll always remember how surely he rode on ahead, looking back to check I wasn’t too far behind before turning around, his scarf billowing behind him. I don’t know how, but even with his radio off it felt like Yuto was tuning his direction towards a precise destination that would not be revealed until he stopped and turned on his radio, and tuned it to just the right frequency.

Once, on a saturday, we dismounted near a train station in the city near a park which was itself near a river. Yuto turned on his radio and tuned it to a channel that, cheekily, only played the sounds of trains, perhaps recordings of the very same trains that passed by near the spot of our picnic. We suspected it must have been some mischievous fellow in a nearby apartment with a sense of humor. We had a laugh and ate our sandwiches and listened to the radio-trains. It was a glorious afternoon.

In the winter Yuto picked up writing, I think with the intent of chronicling some of the amazing things he experienced while biking around the city and some of the folks he’d met. But I think that he also started theorizing in his journals about the relationship between his body and the radio waves, and the music he heard in the static empty-space no one else could hear. But this I cannot confirm because he took his journals up with him later.

Mid-spring Yuto discovered a new mini-FM station and this ignited that spark in him which had wound down through the winter. This time it was a particular station that captured my brother’s imagination, and this was an odd thing to happen because Yuto had always been agnostic about the stations before. He had favorites of course, and thus favorite “spots” in Osaka, but his devotion was almost exclusively to the medium of radio itself, far more so than to any one sort of broadcast. Thus, we all found his obsession with this particular station curious and exciting. Naturally everyone felt that they had to see what had so captured Yuto’s attention that it had even gotten him to skip school. Some people behaved jealously over Yuto’s newfound love and so we knew that they were hosts of a mini-FM station and had prided themselves on Yuto’s patronage, and took it to heart that he never stopped nearby anymore to listen to their broadcast.

Though Yuto listened only to that one station from then on, he still biked and walked around all of Osaka. Part of the reason that Yuto must have been so fond of that station is because it moved around, too. The rumor at first was that the host of the new moving-station was inspired by Yuto’s commitment to mobility, but then people started to believe that the mystery host was a girl from Yuto’s class who was attempting an elaborate courtship with Yuto. But those rumors were quickly dismissed because as people tuned into the station, hundreds maybe thousands of Osakans altogether, to see what had Yuto so riled up, they discovered that it was a station about stories of daily life in Osaka told in a myriad of voices that always sounded familiar but not quite like any particular person.

Every day five or six of these vignettes of life aired, and because the transmitter moved you had to as well to finish hearing the stories out. Many people found the stories as enchanting as Yuto did and a few things happened as a result: first there was a philosophical war that broke out among those who enjoyed the moving story broadcast.

Many followed the school of Yuto which was one of kinetic engagement with the stories, a sort of binding where they followed wherever the transmission led. These folks walked around Osaka, listening, watching out for whoever had the transmitter at hand. Sometimes people walked in groups, and would scramble to re-orient themselves when the signal eclipsed them, rushing to re-enter the radius of the story radio. A sizable group of these listeners thought it better to just follow Yuto, who had the best pulse on the frequency and would rarely lose it.

The other, reactionary philosophy concerning the story radio was one of stillness, which is perhaps the school of thought I am most sympathetic to. The reasoning of these listeners was that we aren’t meant to chase after the snippets of these stories, but rather let them eclipse us, overlapping with the ongoing story of our own life and then go on. After all, do we not each of us already have an infinity of potential lives and branching paths available to us that we must make peace with so as to focus on this path, this story? Well I think so, though my brother could never, since he was firmly a seeker. Yuto always wanted to eat the whole world, to suck on its core like a fat plum, not a centimeter left unaccounted for.

One of the interesting developments with the story radio was that people started relaying the signal because it got too impractical to follow Yuto around all day. Surprisingly, even the municipal government got involved in the effort. Originally the policemen tried to disperse wandering listening groups and make them go back to their jobs, but even these officers ended up following the stories, so ultimately the city decided it was best to invest in some infrastructure to make it so people could at least stay in their offices. Anyways, a grid of relay nodes tuned to that particular frequency of the story radio was set up in the city of Osaka in a short time, and the philosophical debate was put to rest. Almost everyone could listen to the story radio from the comfort of their homes. Still, Yuto rode on.

Once the relay nodes were up in Osaka, it was no surprise that efforts were made to get the signal out further. The stories made it out to Kobe with some level of fidelity, but attempts to get them to Kyoto bore strange fruit. The signals couldn’t get relayed so far out without strong distortion, but folks over there liked it just the same, adapting what they could make out of the distorted stories into their own stories and arts. Operas came out of it in Kyoto, they said. Even rock albums and musicals and television programs, and even a new form of radio-augury whereby the pattern of distortions were used as fixtures of personal divinations, and even therapy. What did you make of that noise? Oh the sound of an elephant, doctor. Fascinating!

Of all the developments my favorite is that of the adaptations in Kyoto because to me it is a reaffirming model of life. My view on art is that the world has a perfect, or at least true form which is complex and faceted, thoroughly rich, but that the eyes of mortals are so distant from that wholeness, that utter unity, that the true signal is degraded into a static, chaotic noise. And yet! And yet we try to make sense of it. We try endlessly to distill its meaning from what little we could salvage from that great garbling rift that is our humanity, which the signal could not get through purely. And I truly believe that once every work of art, every novel, every statue, every joke, every song has been made, we will have been able to simulate that great perfection we are born in and apart from. To me, of all the great artists, the sense-makers, perhaps it was my brother Yuto who was the best.

One evening in the summer of 1984, a few weeks after Yuto turned fifteen, the story radio halted its broadcast. That day he hugged our parents, then me, and grabbed his backpack and radio. “Goodbye,” he said, which he had never said in that particular way before, and then he left on his cobalt blue bicycle. We ran after him, asking where he was going, but he didn’t stop and neither did we. He rode into and around Osaka in some pattern we couldn’t discern, and our numbers grew until almost all of Osaka was following Yuto. Yuto stopped at the bay, on the start of a long wooden pier that reached out into the ocean. Just then a new voice came from the radios tuned to the story frequency, and it spoke in Yuto’s voice even though he did not move his mouth. The crowd of people that had gathered gasped in shock and awe and relief that at last the mystery of the author of the Osaka radio stories was resolved and they could stop trying to guess which of their neighbors a given story was about, because all the stories had come from the mind of Yuto.

How Yuto learned to transmit stories from his mind I do not know. I don’t think he was aware of the fact that he himself was the frequency he had been following all along until perhaps even that very evening. I also refuse now to repeat the specifics of what Yuto said that night at the pier as the sun dipped into the sea and the stars sparkled into view for purely selfish reasons ― I think those words belong only to me and to Osaka. Some things need not be broadcast. Besides, I am sure some adaptation will reach Kyoto or Tokyo or wherever you are soon enough.

However, I will tell you my own theory of what made all this possible and it relates to Yuto’s summer of static. It is my belief that Yuto so thoroughly captured the spirit of Osaka with all his biking and listening that he tapped into some dimension of potential-Osakas where all the things broadcast were captured, distilled, mixed-up, and made new by my brother’s imagination so that, through him, we had the most privileged experience of experiencing ourselves, each other, as something new and foreign, yet undeniably familiar.

But as for what happened after Yuto’s farewell speech, I cannot explain this even in as far-fetched and fantastical a means as my explanation of his telepathic transmission, which I am sure he did unwittingly. I assume that, somehow, Yuto must have honed his fine intuition for the body’s kinetic relationship with the radio waves around us towards the achievement of human flight without the use of wings or motors. For this is what he did: Yuto began to pedal with utter conviction towards the end of the pier and, rather than fall over into the ocean, he flew over it and towards the moon.

Many people ask me, even today, why my brother left for the moon, and what answer can I give? My true opinion, which is often unsatisfactory to those asking, is that my brother likely left Earth for the same reason he ventured out from our property line and into the city last summer: for a better view. A better view into that pulsing, vibrant, confusing mess of life we call Earth. Why else would the story radio be broadcasting still? Why else would it broadcast different, foreign voices in tongues we do not speak? In any case, I’ll say this as proof of my conviction at risk of sounding crazy: Hello Yuto, I know this broadcast will eventually get to you on the moon, if I got the transmitter working right. I just wanted to say I love you, and forgive you for leaving. This distance between us was inevitable because you always wanted the world and now you have it. But as for me, well, I think Osaka’s just fine. And thanks for leaving me the hat! I wear it almost every day.

The End

Flower on the Cliff

2023-10-19T00:00:00Z

Three days after Rían Boyce's funeral, Anthony found himself in the town of Doolin for a purpose that eluded him. When Rían asked him to go on this journey, he said nothing except that it would be meaningful to him if Anthony indulged a dying man's wishes, and that perhaps he might be able to get something out of it from his siblings. Anthony agreed because as Rían made the request amidst bouts of arduous coughing, his brown eyes took on a hint of the mischievous, conspiratorial nature that had made them friends in the first place. Two days later, he was dead.

On the day he was supposed to meet with the Boyce siblings, the sky had been a happy blue, with low and lazy clouds. He could see from his rented cottage the whole municipality of Doolin, a humble central cluster of homes and businesses, and then the rest -- a spattering of thatch-roofed homes separated by vast plots of green, and beyond that the deep blue of the sea. Just as he had set out from his room to go to where he needed to be, the sky had turned into a dreary gray, then a deep dark gray, and the solitary, thin, dirt road to Oscar's Pub had been hidden behind an impenetrable veil of rain, and all he could see between the thick droplets on his glasses were faint orange glowing lights piercing through the mist.

The door had been rattling in its frame on account of the wind when he barged through it. He set his cane against the doorframe and patted down his body, looking for a handkerchief to wipe his glasses with.
There was music at Oscar's, a bodhrán played by a girl keeping time with two fiddle players: one an old man with a long mustache, sallow skin, and closed eyes. The other a fellow, reserved and skillful, a tender player. At the far end of the pub, sitting by a small round window, were half a dozen fishermen with harpoons set against the wall behind them, drinking large pints of dark beer and eating from hearty bowls of stews and chowders, exchanging sea tales, passing the tide.

And more still: farmers discussing the harvests to come, and harvests past, their wives delivering parcels of news and projecting news to come, some spinning yarn. Off in a corner were two men by a telephone taking turns putting the phone up to their ears and listening attentively, their backs turned to the pub, shoulders set in a square and urgent way, their business unknowable but imminent and important. Near the bar were the adolescents, having a laugh with flush cheeks and ambitious quantities of beer and whiskey at their table, passing time. Perhaps more than anyone at the pub, the youth passed the time.

"You're feckin drenched, lad," the bartender said. "Do you happen to be named Anthony? I'm Oscar, myself." He threw a rag at Anthony to dry off.

"Ah, yes. I'm Anthony. Anthony St. James," he said as he wiped his face and hair down with the rag.

"You're not Irish," Oscar said. He waved him over, and Anthony moved closer to Oscar and set the cane against the bar. Oscar began preparing a whiskey for him. "Compliments of the Boyce family. It'll warm you from the inside."

"Thank you. I'm American, in fact."

Oscar furrowed his eyebrows in such a way that they resembled fishing hooks. "And you’ve come all this way to Doolin?"

"To Doolin," Anthony said. He took a sip from his whiskey.

"All this way and you managed to forget a raincoat." Oscar grinned, which was an awkward expression on his rugged face, but charming in its strangeness.

"Well," Anthony said. "The sky was clear until just a bit ago, the promise of a perfect day, to be fair to your fine country.”

The bartender laughed and the whistling of the wind picked up as it passed the windows and played at the straw roof. In the distance, growling thunder chased fleet-footed lightning. “Fine and fair my country is, there are scarce few lands as fine or as fair. But false are the promises of an Irish sky."

Oscar pointed to a table in the center of the pub, where two young people sat, glancing around the room: out the door, out the window, at the liquor. "They're waitin' for you."

Anthony resisted the urge to adjust his tie as he joined Oscar in walking over to the Boyces, with his cane and his peg-leg making thudding sounds against the wooden floor.

The Boyce siblings had pale skin, and their hair was the color and texture of a bundle of reeds in autumn, just as Rían's had been.

Ron, the youngest of the siblings, pointed his chin at Anthony. "We've been waiting long enough," he said, standing up. "You're Rían's mate?"

"Hello," Anthony said. He shook hands with Ron and then Rosy, who had stood as well. "Yes. I'm terribly sorry for your loss."

"It was some time coming," Rosy said. Rosy Boyce had freckles across her cheeks and nose, but as sporadic and sparsely placed as the township of Doolin, and her eyes were dark and discerning. "He called us to say goodbye, and to tell us that you were coming."

"Not that you had much in the way of a choice. He was a persuasive bastard," Ron said. He interrupted himself to say "Go on, take a seat, so," as he glanced at Anthony's leg.

Anthony obliged, taking off his coat and then sitting at the small round wooden table. He set his cane against the table. He could feel the proximity of the Boyce sibling's legs to him and he was careful not to make contact.

"I don't mean to be rude," Anthony said. "But I must admit to not knowing why I'm here, exactly."

"To play a game with us," Ron said, leaning back in his chair. "To honor our bastard brother."

"A game?"

"More like a conversation," Rosy said, "than a game. But a special conversation."

"That is not much of a game," Anthony said in a dubious way. But he was relieved, because he would much rather have a conversation with the Boyce siblings than play any sort of game. He was not overly fond of games.

Ron snorted and then motioned at Oscar for a beer.

Rosy leaned closer to Anthony. Looking at her, he could not see any sign of mourning Rían's death, except that her eyes were tired and watery, but not red or puffy as with those who have cried. "To be perfectly honest with you... we Boyce's struggle to speak in earnest with each other without at least some form of pretense."

"I see," he said. "And how did it work, exactly?"

Ron sat up properly. "The way it goes, so, is that we meet here every year and have a talk about a certain disagreement between the three of us about how best to live."

"And the way this disagreement came to be is that in our childhood we all lived together here in Doolin on a farm not too far from where we are. And on this farm, if you can picture it, were some low walls like the ones you can see out the window now, sure."

All over the countryside there were long low walls of balanced stones. Not packed together tightly, in the manner Anthony was accustomed to seeing, but loosely, with space for light and wind to pass through and play. "Yes," he said. "I know what you mean."

"Right, so, each one of us when we were young and playing by the walls on our own without the other two to pester us, had the same experience."

Anthony leaned forward, intrigued. Here, there was something of interest for him, and he became more comfortable.

"At some point, playing by those walls near a sapling tree on our family's lot, we all separately had a moment of revelation. Deep, movin', important. We, each of us, tripped on a stone on the ground from the wall, and scraped our heads on the wall. Never losing sight of the little sapling through the opening in the wall where it had fallen apart."

"Ah," Anthony said, and his heart picked up its beating pace. This was it, what he needed. A place where moments upon moments layered together, perspectives intersecting at a point across the long spool of time, jumbling up and confusing itself. "And what was the revelation?"

"For meself," Ron said. "I thought that day that what a fine thing it was to live, to be part of a long line of peoples who worked to let us exist. Like one of them stones on them walls. Isn't it that you can't have one without the other? And I also thought about me dying, maybe the first time I had ever thought of that. And so said I: 'what's the point of life if not to honor the stones behind me?' Life should be about fixin' the walls where they're broken, and restoring the rest when you can. Maintaining them."

"And mine's much the same," Rosy said. "Much the same. Excepting that what happened for me was that I thought to myself -- me ancestors built these plots. Put it all together, stone by stone. And so I wondered why couldn't I build me own walls too? Not for me own sake, but for the sake of the future. Somethin' for them to look back on, somethin' to protect them."

"And Rían?" Anthony asked. "What did he think?"

Ron chuckled. "All he would say to us was that there wasn't a single wall in all of Doolin he hadn't pissed on when he was after drinkin'. And then he fecked off to Dublin, which just about sums up his position on the matter."

Oscar, who had been picking up glasses near their table, began to laugh. They looked over at him, and he smiled sheepishly. "I didn't mean, sorry, to be eavesdropping 'n' all."

Ron rolled his eyes and Rosy waved him over. "Come, Oscar. Join us."

Oscar glanced around at the patrons, and felt that he could take a moment to join them. He pulled up a chair, and sat just out of the bounds of the table, too big a figure to tuck in his chair. He clasped his hands between his legs. "Rían was a good lad," he said.

The storm outside had tempered down to a drizzle in time for duskfall. The last of the day’s light reached in through the windows with long, orange fingers that tickled the perspiration on the glasses on the tables.

"You're too young to be so set on all that," Oscar said amidst the silence. "Too young, by far. D'y'know whatfor we make it so that the walls have hole's in 'em?"

Rosy and Ron shook their heads. "Just assumed that's how it is."

"Well everything's the way it is for a reason, isn't it?" Oscar said. "You two are big city folk now, living in Galway 'n'all, but you haven't forgotten the Doolin winds, have you? Or how it is out in the hills when it's storming like just now."

Rosy shook her head, laughing. "How could one forget?"

"Well, the walls are that way because the wind's so fierce. That's all. They built walls the regular way and they kept on getting knocked down, back then. They figured that they ought to just let the wind get through, so. And so here we are."

"And so?" Ron said. "What does that have to do with our particular discussion?"

"I'm not sure, sorry," Oscar said. "I suppose... I just mean to say that Rían had a good head on his shoulders, so. I think he had the right notion about the discussion."

"That we ought to piss on Doolin's walls?"

"That there are some things that there are no use building walls against," Anthony said. "Sorry to interrupt." They all looked at him, and Oscar nodded appreciatively.

"I suppose that's what I mean," Oscar said.

The siblings looked expended, like the wind had gone out of them. "We'd use to go around in circles about this," Rosy said. "Just arguing about what the best way to live was. For the legacy, for the future. But it's just... different now that he's gone."

"Well, it's a very strange game," Anthony said. He offered an apologetic smile.

"I..." Ron said. "I'm going to miss him." Tears began to fall down his face and he quickly moved his hand to wipe the tears away.

Rosy reached over and hugged her brother. She began to cry as well.

Oscar got up and fetched some water from the bar. He offered it to the siblings who took their cups and tried to sort themselves out. Looking at them in that moment, Anthony could tell that they were younger than he had thought. Early to mid twenties, at most, and how very alone they must feel, and he understood why it was that Rían had asked him to come.

He put his hand over Rosy and Ron's and said, "Thank you for letting me join you here today in Rían's stead. And for the sake of the game I must admit I think he's right. You don't need to build a legacy. You don't need to build a future. That's what I think, anyways."

Rosy cleared her throat and shakily said, "Rían told us to give you the sapling in exchange for coming... but it died the day he called for the last time. But we didn't want... we still wanted you to come for the game."

Anthony smiled warmly at her. "I understand," he said.

Ron cleared his throat, which was a little raw, and asked "What exactly is it that you collect anyways? Old things, odd things, or occult things? That's about all a man can collect, so."

Anthony laughed. "I suppose so. You're right. What I collect is... hard to describe. It's the sort of thing I recognize when I see it. Usually personal sorts of artifacts. Family heirlooms, sometimes, or a special portrait. It has a glimmer I can see."

"You're not one of 'em fellas who makes spells, are you?" Oscar asked, his tone suspended between joking and cautious.

Anthony smiled. "Do you believe in magic, Oscar?”

Oscar lit up a cigarette. "I believe in the ground beneath my feet and God in the Heavens and the love of my wife, sure, but nothing beyond that myself." He paused. "And yourself?"

"I think magic is a perspective, if you follow. I don't believe so much in spellcasters or anything like that. No witches. But I believe that there are these moments charged with meaning, and that the essence of such moments that happen in the life of a person could be found in certain objects. That's what I collect."

"Why?" Rosy asked.

Anthony considered the question and said simply, "Because I seek to understand."

She nodded. "Okay."

Ron set his hand on the table and said, "Thanks for yer company, Anthony." The siblings stood and shook his hand. "If you'll be excusin' us. We have to mourn our brother, now, I believe. That's how it's supposed to go in a normal, regular family."

"Do keep in touch," Rosy said.

And just so, they left the pub.

"Those walls... It's too true, Anthony St. James. There ain't no wall that can stop time. Or death," Oscar said.

"So what do you think is the best way to go about it all?" Anthony asked.

Oscar considered him for a moment and said, "The best way to go about it is to not go about it alone." He paused. "Will you give me a moment, lad?"

Anthony waved his hand in welcome.

Oscar got up and lumbered over to the back room of the pub. He came out with something in his hand.

"You have to understand how it is to be from Doolin, it's a lonely place, and harsh," he said as he sat down.

"The clouds come down low here, low enough that you can brush them with your fingers if you're in the right hill on the right day. And they cast these shadows, bein' so near 'n' all. And so when I think about my life when I was a lad, it is to have lived under the shadow of clouds. Lots of clouds. Proclivities and faiths and tempers and recipes and superstitions passed down from generation to generation like the culture of yeast for making beer.

Me pa' was a drunkard and I ain't have a mother, which all in all made me a bitter fellow. When I was older I was tired of all of it, and so one day I walked to the Cliffs. I just sat down, absolutely miserable, and it started to rain just to top it all off. I hoped that I might slip on the grass and not have another worry in the world, to be right honest with you. But I'm something of a coward, thankfully. So I stayed put.

The wind never lets up in the Cliffs. It just howls and whips about, and I used to be a thin lad if you can believe it. I was being buffeted by the wind. So, scared, I scooted up away from the edge and held onto the long grass for my life in the storm, and I touched this little flower by accident."

Oscar opened up his palms, and showed him a small yellow flower, perfectly vibrant.

"That was over twenty-some years ago and the flower hasn't let up either. When I saw this flower back then I thought to myself that I was a bit like that flower, too. Just holdin' on all alone up in the face of the wind, right by the cliff's edge. But then I thought that the flower wasn't that alone because I was up there too, holdin' on for dear life, and so we were doin' it together, and that wasn't so bad."

Oscar gave it to Anthony. "Does that work for your collection?"

Anthony looked at the flower in the palm of his hand and nodded. "More than you can know, Oscar," he said.

Oscar patted him on the back. "It's yours. Now be safe, lad. And don't go at it alone. That's my two cents, anyways."

Anthony stood, shook his hand, and set out under the cloudless Doolin night sky back to his inn, with a yellow flower in his inner-vest pocket.

The Alchemy of Life

2023-10-09T13:27:03Z

They forgot to talk about the magic so I'll be the one to tell you, because I wish they hadn't forgotten to mention it to me all those years ago. I wish they had set me aside, looked in my eyes and told me what I'm telling you now. And I'm only telling you because you deserve to know just as much as I did, and as anyone does, because it's the most important thing there is to know. So here it is: there's real magic in the world. It's not the woo-woo stuff that is performed by candlelight, and it's no dazzling magician's sleight-of-hand, either. No rabbits and mirrors and top-hats. Not necessarily, anyways. What it is, really, is nothing more than what is utterly ordinary about your life, seen in the right light. There's a magic alright, but if you're reading this and you're a grown adult then I'm sorry to tell you you'll have to squint to see it, unless you're extraordinarily lucky, because you've probably forgotten how to see it, though this is through no fault of your own. They just forgot to tell you. But how could they have forgotten? How could we have forgotten to tell the children?

In school they taught us only half of the alchemy of life, which is worse than having taught us nothing at all, because ritual without incantation is mere performance. They taught us how to dismantle the world into its component parts at the altar of our intellect, taught us names and symbols for all the eviscerated matter, and how to explain its function in the whole (and badly at times). But they never taught us what mattered most all along -- that the altar serves a higher purpose. That there is an incantation that goes with the ritual of learning: that it is the song of adventure.

I wish they didn't hide the song away because it would have changed the whole thing from the start. The incantation tells you why it all matters. It matters because it's an adventure. Don't you wish they had told you that language was an adventure? That grammar, spelling, rhetoric, it wasn't all just some stuffy thing to memorize, but the rules by which the magic of connection and imagination happens. I wish they had told me that language was a brave, intimate adventure to connect with one another. To not be alone. That to make a poem is to make a prism, and that all the world's language is all the world's light, and the language of your heart the crystal that channels the colors of your soul.

I wish they had told me that mathematics was an adventure too. That it isn't just for itemizing, dividing, projecting, and calculating. I wish they had told me that mathematics is an adventure because it's a language just as words are, and that it's just as brave to do math as to make a poem. I wish they had told me it's the language of the universe itself, and that you can play with that language just as we play with ours, and that we could model our world with math as we model our inner worlds with words or paint. In fact, I wish they had taught me to paint as we are meant to paint, with gusto and verve, and be fearless about it the whole while.

I wish they had taught me about these things and more, but most of all I wish they had taught me how to chart the stars for myself, and how to be kind and how to be brave. I wish they had told me that there's more to learn than anyone could ever teach you and that all of it is worth doing and learning so long as you bring a knick-knack back to share with others when you return home. I wish they had told me that learning is the best part of being human and not just the worst part of being a kid.

So here I am, telling you now, because they didn't tell you and I think you ought to know: there's a magic in the world that you can see and use if you have the eyes to see, and the hands to make, and the heart to love. The magic is in the books that make you cry for things that never happened and jump with joy for the happiness of others. The magic is in the act of abstracting the world into formulas and functions, and in turning formulas into reality. The magic is in the painting on a cave wall, and the making of a bridge that'll stand for a hundred years. The magic is in listening to someone turn their emotions into a chill in your spine by nothing more than the evocation of a musical note, aptly timed. The magic is in the people around you, worlds in themselves, and that sometimes they are worlds that we can take harbor in, and we call that friendship, and that there are worlds we can crash into and meld with, and we call that love.

Twenty Three

2023-04-02T13:27:03Z

Last month I turned twenty-three years old, and I am writing this only a mere two or three weeks after returning from a trip to Ireland. Among my first reflections when I turn a year older are, as always: "I wonder what fifteen-year-old Juan would think of me now?"

I think it's a useful question to ask yourself periodically. I consider myself lucky in that I have access to records of fifteen-year-old Juan's aspirations, dreads, fears, anxieties, etc... It's fun to see how I measure up to my expected future and have a laugh about it. Having a laugh about it is important because no one should live their lives by what they dreamed up at age fifteen.

But in my case, I like to think that fifteen-year-old Juan would have thought I was very cool. Especially considering my trip to Ireland. He would have been quite jealous at that — that's right, fifteen-year-old Juan, I've seen a real castle.

I'm not an author, as I had hoped, nor am I a physicist as I (less realistically) day-dreamed about, but in a certain sense I am also everything I could have hoped to be at this age — if not exactly how I envisioned. I am no author, but I do write (sometimes), and I am no inventor, but I do make virtual reality games, which is just as cool by my estimations. I have a great group of friends, my family continues to be lovely, and I have a wonderful girlfriend. What more can one ask? What this leads me to feel is that I am, undoubtedly, on the right path. For the first time, I feel sure of what I want out of my life.

I love new years and birthdays because they offer up a metaphorical threshold we may pass, a threshold for reinvention and new personal beginnings. And so, having crossed this threshold I'm thinking about who I want to be next year, at the border of the next threshold.

A Year in Review

In the process of reading through all my journal entries as twenty-two-year-old Juan, I was able to distill the most recurring elements into a tidy little list. Throughout the year, the things I desired for myself came down to the following:

to be kinder
to be less prideful
to be more focused and principled
to learn to embrace challenge
to learn not to worry about being liked
to achieve what I set out to do

Future Juan

I've been thinking a lot about what I want a thirty or forty-year-old Juan to be like. Juan Prime, if you will. And though it's silly to assume I could project what my life will be like in ten to twenty years, it's slightly less silly than fifteen-year-old Juan doing the same. And it's equally as useful. So, I'll write it down here, so I could look back at it in the future, how I look back at my old aspirations now. Hopefully future Juan'll have a laugh too.

As it is now, I'm a fellow with a non-negligible capacity for frantic, anxious energy. Sometimes that's a boon, especially when I am spurred to passionate (but infrequent) bursts of creativity and self-expression. On the other hand, that same frantic and anxious energy gets in the way of the actual creating part of creativity. Also, while charming now, that's just not how I want to be in ten years' time. I'd like to think I'll have tempered down by then. Because what I want is to be someone who, beyond being jovial (which is an attribute I relish in now and hope to keep), is also more profound and substantial — more tranquil. I want my energies not to be scattered and tumultuous, but rooted, confident, consistent and sure. Patient.

What comes to mind when I imagine this theoretical Juan Prime is some of the tranquility, patient, and humble energy that an older Ged had learned throughout "Wizard of Earthsea" by Ursula K. Le Guin.

I think that a lot of my anxiousness comes from my relationship with time. Or rather, all of our relationships with time as humans. In the past I've constantly tried to tackle this anxiety by engaging with streaks of perfect schedules and morning routines. I've achieved Inbox Zero — no emails in my inboxes. But none of it has aided me in my primary problem which is the illusion that if I just organize myself correctly, I can do everything I want. This is folly. And it's one I've subconsciously known but not fully recognized until I read 'Four Thousand Weeks' by Oliver Burkeman. There's a saying I like that I have tactically neglected to actually take the time and internalize. I feel it applies here: you can do anything you want. You just can't do everything you want. That's an important thing. Some things just need to give.

Twenty-Three

This year I think I want to work on my relationship with time. I don't want to use it as an instrument for my own ends. In truth, what I need is to learn that I can't use it as an instrument at all.

I want to give myself permission to do the things I value in their own time. But first I have to learn to focus, and not let anxiety or fear lead me to being distracted. This is primarily about writing, naturally (when am I not struggling with writing?). But I've been thinking back to high school, and how I used to write for fun (imagine that!). I wrote simply because I wanted to. There was no rush, no pressure. It's been a while since I've felt the drive to do something simply for the sake of doing it. I intend to relearn that. I must.

I got a brief glimpse of that internal freedom during my trip to Ireland, and before that an MFA reading at UF. As I stood among the Cliffs of Mohre and walked on the rocky fields of the Atlantic coast near Doolin in County Clare, I had a wonderful sensation — the realization that most of the things we worry about don't really matter. They're ephemeral and illusionary. Only our physical spaces, our community, our faiths, our health, our people matter. The world is not something apart from us, something that is lying in wait to challenge and confront us. We are part of it. Us. Not our GDP, not our followers, not our incomes, not our accolades. Just our beings. And that's a wonderful, wonderful thing.

This year I want to spend more time participating in the world. Not just a watcher of Shakespeare's proverbial stage, nor a set piece in it. But an actor. A "player" — one who plays, as described in "Finite and Infinite Games".

Part of play is challenge. And as I mentioned, I want to take on more challenges. I want to grow physically and mentally and continue pushing at the boundaries of what I think I'm capable of. And of course, to be kinder.

We'll check back at twenty-four, God willing.

Infinite Multiple Choice

2022-11-23T05:01:00Z

You know, I think writing is hard. It is, and I'm tired of pretending to myself that it's not. On a surface level, I've always recognized it is difficult. Plenty of famous authors have admitted as much. But I've been thinking a lot about the fact that it seems to be especially hard for me, even though I'm someone who has claimed the love of writing for just about a decade now. So today, I'm going to explore that topic a bit. Let's see where I get to with it.

What Makes Writing Difficult

I was talking to my buddies Ethan, Tristan, and Sebastian the other day about art (our mainstay topic). Ethan's a visual artist and Tristan & Seb are musicians, none of them much for reading or writing. However, we were talking about the creative process -- what does it take to make something? What goes into it? When it came my turn to explain writing, I had a bit of a revelation. Or a few.

?��Revelation 1: Writing is about stamina

For me, the hardest parts of the writing process have to do with ideation, especially towards the beginning. For some, this might be the most exciting part! Good on you if so. But for me, this part is exhausting and difficult.

Next time you catch yourself in a daydream don't let it come to a stop. I challenge you to see how long you can sustain it in a coherent way. That's what writing is, and I think it can be quite difficult.

Which brings me to a wider point: writing is a craft that requires stamina. You can't do it without some. How long can you spend imagining a world, its characters, and their actions? Can you imagine all that over multiple days? Can you do it over multiple chapters? How many drafts? If you can last long enough -- then the story will exist. If you can't, then it won't. It's a war of attrition, in a way. Your will to write battling in opposition to the natural imaginary entropy that will come with time.

But that's just about the act of writing. The pure labor of the task. There is something deeper in the actual spirit of the task that also calls for some longevity of will: making choices.

?��Revelation 2: Writing is difficult because of decision fatigue

The gist of decision fatigue is that you become less capable of making good decisions the more decisions you make throughout the day, because making choices is hard and requires your brain to do quite a bit of processing.

And what is writing if not a craft entirely predicated on the practitioner making choices? A point that I brought up with my roommates was that with writing you have no physical material with which to work. It's all in your head. I recognize, of course, that Jerry Garcia, like many other talented musicians, makes plenty of creative choices while jamming out. But a key difference between playing the guitar and writing is that the physical means of practicing the craft of music influences the creative outcome.

Any chord that Jerry decides to play informs the next chord, and the next note, and springs up lots of other ideas almost immediately. But there is not an infinite number of things that could happen -- there's only a limited range (even if that range is massive).

?�� I really hope music people do not take offense - there is no artform I admire as much as music. It's a wonderful, powerful, and creative thing

The thing with writing, though, is just about anything can happen until you begin to set down some "material" -- pure stuff. A consistent world, a consistent character, etc... that will "behave" in a certain way. But it requires a lot of set up -- writing, for me, is like a big limestone boulder on a long hill. It requires a lot of force upfront, but once you get the story going it'll roll on its own.

?�� As a sidenote: I don't believe endings should be too hard. If you already have a whole story behind you, then you have enough material to come up with an ending

Anyways, the essence of writing is this: you have an infinite canvas to play with, and it is so blank it's blinding. You have no brush, no string, no materials except a spell book called a dictionary and a syntax of incantation called grammar. These incantations of yours are shaky vessels for something potent and infinite: your imagination. Your only job, really, is to use your spells in such a way that you reduce the infiniteness of possibility into something more concrete and coherent. If you're skilled then it's something beautiful.

No pressure, right? Right. Except one more thing. As you embark on your brave journey of reducing infinite nothing into a smaller something, you don't have much immediate feedback on whether your work matches your imagination, or if it sounds right. And that's a big deal.

?��Revelation 3: Writing is difficult because there's no immediate feedback

When I say immediate feedback, I don't mean someone in a writing group giving you a critique, or letting you know your pacing is thrown off by a two-page departure in the story to describe a single meal. I mean that, when a musician is playing their instrument they play a note, or a chord, and they can hear immediately, whether it sounds right. They can adjust and play, adjust and play, discovering their way to the "right" sound if they don't have it in mind already.

Same with painters. You see the results of a brushstroke as soon as you put it down and can adjust accordingly. But with writing, your medium is words, which are symbols for thoughts. There is no immediate feedback with words, except for the sound of them (which I suppose is an important component to writing). But, very often, if your writing is bad, it's because something is off of translating your story from its natural format (thought and imagination) to its new one (spell-word vessels of meaning).

That's perhaps the biggest obstacle I struggle with. Though stories are what I love most, and move me most, and fill my heart with joy and genuine excitement -- writing is an activity I haven't found easy to do recently.

I don't write as obsessively as I program, or as I write CSS for my website, or develop games. I think all those things are easier for me than writing because largely I can just fiddle around with things until they function or look right. And that's because of the feedback process. As soon as I make a change, I can see its effects and then iterate from there. That's much harder to do with writing.

And that's what makes writing so hard. So, I guess, the question is: how can I make it more fun for myself? Should I? Should I just drop it if I don't live breath and sneeze prose?

Why writing is hard for me

Truth be told, I've spent more time agonizing over writing than actually writing over the last few years. If you ask any of my closest friends, and if you ask my writing group, and if you ask God Himself, they'd all tell you that my biggest hang-up is writing. I worry about not writing, and I worry about how good I am, and I worry about if I'll ever get published or even ever write a book. I have a million false starts all the time -- announcing to my friends that I'm going to write a novel, and then not doing it.

It's not fun.

It's not fun. And I suspect that something is in fact quite wrong, because while it doesn't necessarily have to be a joy ride all the time, it shouldn't be this much of a struggle to get myself to write.

That doesn't mean that I'm thinking of quitting writing or anything like that. Not at all. But I do have to change some things around and figure out a new process. I'm likely going to have to retool my way of thinking concerning writing and overhaul my relationship with the craft so that I don't associate writing with the guilt of not writing.

So, what can I do?

Couples Counseling - Me and My Muse

I think I need to scale back a lot of my grand gestures and sudden impulses to write. That is to say, no announcing my next great story or novel. I'll announce it when it's done. That also means that rather than try to force myself to start a writing habit or anything like that, I should go small.

I could also give letting myself write when I feel inspired a shot. Don't know which one is better there, so I'll have to try both.

Either way, both of these should accomplish my goal of relieving pressure from the act of writing. It could just be a fun silly little thing I do for fun, which is something I need. Because I suspect that if I don't let writing become fun again, then I'm never going to be able to get to where I want to go with it.

Something that's helped me a bunch already is separating my writing life from my professional life. I wasn't ever a professional writer, but for a long time I was convinced that was what I needed to be. Thus, my financial success hinged (in my own mind) on my ability to write. That probably did lots of damage that I now have to scramble to undo. These days, however, I've let go of the idea that I will make ends meet by being a novelist or serial short story writer because I've found an equally important way to channel my storytelling needs - mixed reality - that will also serve as my profession. It works out! No worries there, anyways. But I would still like to do creative writing for myself on the side, which is the impetus for this blog post.

Strategies for Making Writing Less Hard

This is the part where I want to resolve some of the difficult parts of writing I mentioned earlier in this post.

The three key issues are:

Writing is about stamina
Writing leads to decision fatigue
Writing has no immediate feedback

Let's see how we can go about solving these issues.

Writing is about stamina

I could try making a novel in a brief concerted effort -- sprint not marathon
Or I could do the total opposite -- marathon not sprint (helpful, I know).
I could try that leaving things off mid-sentence thing to make myself more inclined to just start writing during the next session.
Just... write more! It's like running. The more you do it, the more you can do it.

Writing and Decision Fatigue

I could try writing after eating, since eating replenishes willpower for decision making.
I could use more mad libs
I could use premade or custom-made questions that might incite my imagination, and thus not leave me scrambling to come up with something
- Similarly, I could use more prompts

Writing and Immediate Feedback

For this one, I might just have to try something my teacher, Camille Bordas, has been advocating for a long time -- focusing on the sentence. I have always "known" how important the sentence is, but I think I only just now began to understand how important it is. I might be able to get more joy out of writing if I just focus on the individual sentence more often.
I might also want to change my approach to writing and let it be more directorial. I could try imagining that, through words, I am getting involved in the "camera-work" of story. In other words, I could try turning it into imaginary directing, instead of just describing things. This is an attitude shift -- become an explorer! Not a narrator. At least not while writing.

And I'm just about out of ideas. Please feel free to correct me, help me, or otherwise give me more tips if you have any thoughts on anything I've written in this post. I suspect I'll be doing a lot of thinking concerning writing going forward.

-- Juan Lam, November 2022

Sandman - Deeper Dreams Still

2022-08-12T12:35:04Z

Introduction

Sandman: Deeper Dreams Still is a fan comic, created with the assistance of AI, that follows Dream of the Endless as he seeks out a new creature in the universe that aspires to dream, and makes the judgement on whether it is worthy of that gift, or not.

This project was made with two goals in mind: to give us the opportunity to make a Sandman story of our own, and to test the limits of what AI art is capable of. The Sandman by Neil Gaiman is our favorite comic book, but making our own issue of Sandman, or any comic for that matter, would have been too large a task for just Luis and I. The debate on AI Art is tricky but, though the jury is still out on whether AI Art is art at all, we hope that this counts. We hope that through this project we have made something that is art by using AI as one of the tools in helping us realize our vision.

We chose to make a Sandman comic because Sandman is all about dreams. It's about the art we make, the stories we tell, the people we are, and the people we hope to be. It is the perfect world to tell this story, a story about dreams, and how they'll carry on after we're gone. I hope you think it’s cool! We certainly do.

Without further ado, here is Sandman: Deeper Dreams Still. You can read it by going through the pictures in the carousel, or by clicking this link to download the full resolution PDF from Google Drive. After the story itself, there's going to be a section explaining our methodology (for those interested). You can read the script and some notes in our Google Doc over here.

-- Juan Lam & Luis Larios, 2022.

Sandman: Deeper Dreams Still

Tap on the pictures to enlarge

Background & Methodology

Summary

Brainstormed story idea
Spent a long time experimenting (bulk of project)
Then wrote the script with limitations in mind
Spent a lot of time figuring out what AI could and couldn't do and then generated backgrounds according to script
Luis began laying out the panels
Luis drew inits, or put them together in Photoshop, which we fed to the AI so that it could paint over it.
Done! (After a lot of Photoshop).

Background

Creating this project was a lot of work (and a lot of fun). I discovered AI Art in the beginning of 2022, and was amazed (and somewhat terrified) of what it was capable of. I introduced my roommate Ethan to VQGAN + Clip, and eventually Disco Diffusion, and he quickly became an expert in AI Art, outpacing me and most everyone involved with AI Art in short order. Over that time, he helped to uncover everything Diffusion Models (like Disco Diffusion) could do. Inspired by this, and seeing the lack of narratives made with this tech, I set out to create a narrative project using AI Art. This is that project.

Of course, despite the increasing quantity and quality of documentation and instruction concerning AI Art, like The Traveler's Guide to The Latent Space (which is an incredible resource), AI Art is still fickle, limited, and very much novel. As such, Luis and I had to employ a lot of work arounds. In that sense, we had a creative partnership with the code that generated the images you saw in those panels. We had to "work with it", as it were.

The two main AIs we used were Disco Diffusion v5.2, and DALL-E 2, though we truly mostly used Disco.

Most of the project's development time was spent figuring out what the AI was capable of doing well, and what was out of question. We learned a lot of lessons.

Techniques & Experiments

Firstly, we decided to use Disco Diffusion to generate the backdrops and scenes. Disco has an artistic quality to it, and a surrealness that is very charming. And besides, Disco was the expertise of my roommate who pitched in with tips every now and then on "prompting" the AI, setting certain parameters, and choosing our models + visual transformers.

But what Disco is not good at is getting humans right. It's just hard, and lacking some of the innovations Ethan's made with Disco in recent weeks, wasn't worth the effort of trying to salvage via Photoshop.

We used DALL-E to help out with creating Morpheus and Matthew because DALL-E is better at coherent things, at the cost of being less artistic. But even with the might of DALL-E (which is great at making people), we couldn't just ask for Morpheus of the Endless, or Dream, or even "Sandman". Asking for any one of these got us either Morpheus from The Matrix or Sand Man from Spider-Man. Or a mix of both. Because the models only know what it's seen, it doesn't know how to draw the Morpheus we wanted. It hasn't been shown enough images of the DC Character "Sandman" AKA Morpheus AKA Dream of the Endless, to know what that really is, or even how to draw it.

You can imagine that was a headache to figure out on a comic that's supposed to be AI generated (it was a headache). But Luis had the idea to, instead of asking for Morpheus, ask for a digital painting or comicbook style painting of someone who inspired or looks like Morpheus. So, we ended up asking for a lot of goth Robert Smiths, goth Neil Gaimans, goth Brandon Lees, and goth Tom Sturridge's.

Just a few of the hundred or so images of Morpheus' face we tried to generate. Made with Majesty Diffusion. We used none of these.

That more or less did the trick, but we weren't too happy with it. No close-ups with Diffusion models. We needed DALL-E. That, with some help from Disco, was the solution. Though ultimately we still needed the help of Photoshop, as is evidenced by this picture.

Luis had to do a lot of photoshopping.

We also tried asking for the silhoutte of a goth man in, say, a field. Or a hall. But Disco Diffusion couldn't quite get that composition down and at the time we weren't really using DALL-E. We ended up having to do the backgrounds and foreground separately. Sometimes, what we would do to get a coherent but artistic picture is create an output with DALL-E (or a sketch by Luis), and feed it to Disco to "paint" over it.

Init image vs Disco output

Where style and prompt are concerned, we spent a lot of time deciding on the look and feel we wanted. I spent about two weeks just generating test renders of a meadow at dawn with a white pedestal (in the Dreaming), to figure out what prompt combination worked. We tried to keep it feeling a lot like Sandman. As such, when prompting, we settled on asking for backgrounds to be made in the style of Charles Vess and Mike Dringenberg -- that turned out incredibly.

Writing & Prototyping

While I was experimenting (generations with Disco took ~45 minutes per picture), I worked on the script. It was helpful to be able to "write around" things the AI couldn't do at all. Originally, Dream was meant to go on this adventure with Delirium, but there was really just no shot the AI could pull that off. We also played around with the idea of having Death join in, but that was only slightly more plausible. I was rereading Sandman when I thought to myself -- you know, I really like Matthew. So Matthew it was.

Once we had the complete script and had settled on what prompts to use (for consistency), as well as what we could do, I started generating the images according to the script, and Luis did the layouts.

Pictured above are some of Luis' sketches for the layouts

After all the images were generated, it was just a matter of handing it over to Luis for color correcting, laying it out, making the different elements, and making a complete PDF.

Conclusion

I want to thank everyone who was involved in Sandman, beginning with Neil Gaiman himself, as well as Charles Vess, Mike Dringenberg, and Dave McKean (who we used as reference for the cover). This comic is meant to be an homage to their work, and the work of all the other great artists we imitated for the dream sequence. Where this particular comic is concerned, I want to thank Luis Larios who was my partner in making this. It could not have been done without him. I also want to thank Ethan for his advice concerning Disco Diffusion, and Nikki Kershner for looking over the script.

If you've read Deeper Dreams Still and are worried about AI affecting the world of art, I just have this to say: I can't promise that AI won't change anything. It will change everything. But in making this project I learned very quickly that while AI can mimic the aesthetics of art, it can not mimic its substance. Substance comes from the experience, the soul, of the artist. That cannot be forged. Not by an AI, and not by anyone.

What I hope I achieved with Sandman: Deeper Dreams Still is to take the meaningless output of the AI and arrange it in such a way that it may have meaning, to make a relationship with a very human technology such that it may give me a seed, and I give it the soil it needs to grow.

Here's some extra generations that we never got to use. Hope you enjoyed, and thank you for your time :)

Magic Words

2022-07-30T20:35:03Z

In my last blog post, I talked about the beginning of two journeys: one fitness related, and the other writing related. A quick update before we hop into the core of today's post: Where writing is concerned, I've decided more or less that the novel I had in mind would work better as a graphic novel instead. This revelation isn't me being loosey-goosey. It happened because I worked on a graphic novel for the first time this summer on a secret project which should be announced sometime next week. Beyond that, I've also started my Master's program at the University of Florida so I don't foresee myself being able to write a novel for a tiny bit more.

On the fitness front, I have lost 10 pounds within the last month, and it's because I've managed to go to the gym more consistently, and keep a good handle on my caloric intake. Woohoo! Why that happened is unclear. I think it must have been a combination of things. I've publicly declared I would go through with it in my last blog post, which helps, and perhaps I'm also more willing to do it this time around than other times.

Mostly though, I think I've also had a bit of a change in perspective. Perspective is a tremendously powerful thing, and it's made the difference between losing 10lbs and not losing 10lbs over this last month. First of all, I tried making the gym more fun. It's been helpful to go with my roommates and friends whenever I can, rather than go alone. Second, I've also been trying to listen to audiobooks while I'm there -- gym time is reading time now, and since I love reading already, the gym takes on some of that good-will.

But the most interesting change I've made is how I think about food. I've been cooking more, partially to save money (I am a grad student now and money's tight), but also to take more control over what food (and how much of it) I'm putting in my body. I started thinking of calories as "energy units", which is what they are. But calling them "energy units" (in my head), has had some interesting effects:

It sounds cooler, so I'm more interested in logging my intake
It's shifted my perspective on what it is that I'm consuming

The reason we're told to eat more veggies and fewer sweets is because of efficiency. Eating 4 ounces of chicken breast with 4 or 5 ounces of, say, broccoli has about the same, or less, amount of "energy units" as a doughnut. But guess which one is going to keep you satisfied longer? It's not the doughnut.

One other area I've been thinking about applying the "magic words" principle to is technology. In Vannevar Bush' pivotal essay "As We May Think", he proposes a vision of how we may use computers to better log, link, and derive insight from information we collect throughout our lives. Back then, the vision for digital technology was as information and communication apparatuses. But... is that how we see technology now? I know I don't. To me, technology today is all about social media platforms, games, streaming services, and search engines (with search engines taking a sort of back seat to social media platforms). Part of that is baked into how we think about, say, "phones".

When was the last time you thought of your phone as a tool that allows you to collect information, log data, and communicate with others? Chances are... rarely. When I think of my phone, I think about the apps that go on it. My phone is where I go to send Snapchats, or scroll through Instagram, or text. A mobile version of my computer. Just a mere gateway to the platforms that live on the Internet, rather than as a tool that is used to do particular things with particular intention.

Intention matters, as I've mentioned before in this blog post. Are we using technology intentionally? I don't think. Computers were promised to serve as a means to augment our lives by giving us easier, quicker access to information, and ideally for free. It does do that. Wikipedia, YouTube, blogs, forums -- these are incredible tools to use to learn. But we've also overstepped the bounds of that promise. Our phones don't exist to augment existing connections anymore. The whole thing has taken on a life of its own, and not always in a good way. We don't go on Instagram to keep up with friends anymore. We just go on Instagram without any intention other than just going on Instagram.

To those ends, I think it's important to start changing our perspectives on the technology we're using daily, evaluate whether the reasons we say we use technology align with our actions, and to be more intentional about the whole ordeal.

Try thinking about your phone as a communications and information device, and see if that changes something about how you use it. And get back to me!

Twin Journeys

2022-06-07T21:41:41Z

For the past few years, maybe since 2015, I've been trying to write a novel. It started with a book I planned to call "The Wordsmith", which I have never written. I got about as far as a the second chapter. This book was attempted at least two more times since, until I finally decided to put a pause on my dream of writing a novel as well as shelf that story idea entirely. It never came to fruition.

In the same span of time, I'd also tried and failed a few times to make a genuine change in my body. I've always been a bit overweight for my stature and age, and I've never been so happy with it. I wanted, and want, to get fit. To take ownership of my body and make a genuine difference in my physique. I want to feel strong and empowered and healthy. But I've struggled with that, too, in the same way I've struggled with writing a book. In a funny sort of way, they're twin journeys that have started and stopped at similar times. Until recently I had taken a pause on both things. I stopped trying to write novels, and I didn't really make much but half-hearted attempts at going to the gym.

Admittedly, my break from writing a novel has been more fruitful. In the time since my last attempt at writing a novel (2019) I've grown a lot as a writer by making a bunch of short stories (Around 10, I believe). In 2018/2019 I had a pretty unhealthy relationship with writing -- I was chastising myself for not writing thousands of words per day, and hurrying myself to a deadline that didn't exist. I was convinced I wouldn't make it as a writer unless I published a book before I was out of college. My break from writing a novel was spent largely re-tooling my relationship with writing itself. Trying to make it more fun, putting less pressure on myself, and to focus on just enjoying it as much as I could by doing short stories instead. That effort has been successful. I've written lots, and made good writing friends, and I am proud of the stories I've made and the fun I had making them.

My weight-loss journey has been... not so fruitful. A few weeks ago, I hit the highest weight I've ever been, and now I'm in a position where I feel a strong desire to turn things around, to reach new heights. And this desire isn't limited just to my gym-going. I want to write a book, now.

As such, I am beginning a genuine journey on two fronts. I want to lose weight, and I want to write a book. Whichever goal I hit first will only serve but to encourage the completion of the second. That said, I have to be very tentative with my self on the front of writing a novel. I've planned a few things out to make sure that I do not fall into the trap I fell into before -- a trap of insecurity and fear.

Where my book is concerned, I will be publishing it online for free. This is because the pressure to make profit off of a novel puts too much strain on my creativity, and when embarking on such a journey as writing my first novel, I need as little strain as possible so I could focus on doing the work. Making it free here on my website accomplishes another thing -- it makes it so that I don't have to worry too much about whether its good. It doesn't have to be. Nobody will feel like they've been cheated of their money if they do read it, and besides, it's my first book! What matters is it gets created. I want to have fun making it. And in that spirit, I will be making the writing experience a serialized one. I'll publish chapter by chapter, because I think that's more fun than working away for a year and then dropping a lump of pages on the laps of my friends and family.

Writing a novel is a bit like achieving a fitness goal. If you're new, focus on showing up and doing the work consistently, and to have fun doing it. You could worry about the fancy stuff later. And that's what I plan to do, exactly.

Metrics and Merit

2021-11-08T00:00:00Z

Friends, likes, followers, grades, years of experience, SAT scores, retweets. All of these are metrics that the average American is likely fairly familiar with, and it’s little wonder why. Metrics pervade our lives in subtle, but never-ending ways. In our current political atmosphere we are constantly drilled with numbers: global temperatures, money spent, national debt figures, and an assorted array of percentages. There is a promise there: these numbers are too high or too low, and the goal is to reduce or raise them. When you shop online, or try to choose a book or a movie to pick up, it is likely that you will look at reviews to help inform your decision. This is no accident, simply a byproduct. Muller suggests in The Tyranny of Metrics that, “The quest for numerical metrics of accountability is particularly attractive in cultures marked by low social trust” (40). When engaging with the Internet, low-social trust is certainly an issue, and metrics are a very smooth way to bypass issues of trust in a digital environment. But metrics have pervaded more aspects of culture than mere purchases: athletes are measured, employees are measured, and companies use metrics to inform decisions. But in a society of metrics, the critical question is: are we using them appropriately? The answer is complicated, because it is highly contextual. When used well, they are incredible tools, but when used incorrectly, they can be extremely damaging to the fabric of society. The key to avoiding harm with metrics is perspective. A metric is useful so long as it is used as a means of communication, and not as a judgement or evaluation in and of itself.

Metrics are appropriate tools in the context of systems, games, or structures of any sort that have a desired end goal to achieve. In other words, metrics excel where there are inputs and outputs. However, that does not necessarily mean that metrics should be used with abandon in any such structure or system. Muller points out that metrics that are incorrectly used are often harmful. They could lead to systemic gaming or outright cheating if the wrong metrics are emphasized as goals, or if simple metrics are used to determine success in complex processes (Muller, 23 - 24). In other words, metrics fail in systems if they are used as forms of judgement. For example, should a company that produces x amount of tape dispensers choose to focus on individual employee production rates as a metric of success rather than simply the amount of tapes produced, or some other factor, they might find that implementing stringent production requirements for employees might lead to more low-quality dispensers and thus less satisfied customers. By using employee production rates as a judgement of that employee’s quality, they’ve subverted their own purpose.

However, when the right metrics are used in the right way (as a way to communicate attributes or performance), they can have an incredible impact on optimization. In the movie Moneyball, the Oakland A’s were able to turn around a miserable season because their Game Manager Billy Beane changed his perspective on the metrics being used in baseball. The strategy switched from trying to find generally talented players with looks and charisma to trying to find players that could get them the most amount of wins. This subtle shift made a world of difference for the Oakland A’s in the early 2000’s, and changed the face of baseball. The old standards of evaluating players were inherently judgement-based. Advisors considered players “good” or “not good” based on metrics that were incorrect, and wrongly used. Beane’s strategy didn’t make any judgments about the players, it only took into account their ability to get runs. Focusing on the runs was key to getting wins, not making judgements about the players.

A more tangible example of an inappropriate use of metrics is its utility in aesthetic judgement. Although there are special arguments to be made for ratings of books or films on review aggregator websites, generally speaking, the use of metrics to judge or evaluate a work of art or aesthetic experience is inappropriate. Richards argues in Principles of Literary Criticism, that there is a way to determine the quality of a work, and the degree to which the art manages those criteria is the determining factor of its quality. Richards suggests that an artwork is bad if its communication is “defective”, or if what it is communicating is of no value (185). These are good criteria, but attaching metrics to them gets messy. For example, should one try to impose a metric standard to the rating of a short story, one might attempt to break down the “communication” aspect into components such as plot, dialogue, atmosphere, prose, and character development. Attaching a numerical value to any of these aspects is well enough, but what of the worthiness of the communicated experience? That is trickier. Trickier still is the compromising of those aspects. Suppose you thought the story was well written, but you didn’t enjoy reading it at all: is ascribing a metric to that aesthetic experience valid? It may be attempted, but it will fail as a valuable judgement of the aesthetic experience. However, there is an argument to be made that ascribing a general numerical value to an aesthetic experience might work as a communication of enjoyment or the experience’s impact on the viewer. For that reason, review aggregator websites are not so outrageous — the reviews collected are merely useful communications of enjoyment, not absolute declarations of quality. They are helpful when deciding on a movie or novel — you can reference the communicated average enjoyment of other observers to decide on whether or not to engage with the work and make a more personal absolute judgement.

One of the supreme failures in the use of metrics is over-simplification. To say a movie is the best of all time because it has the highest review score on a website is simple and demeaning, but to use that metric of enjoyment as an assessment of appeal, as an aspect of its qualities, is more appropriate. The more nuanced perspective, and the most honest one, would be to say that it has a high rating because of x, y, and z reasons. The merit is in x, y, and z, not in the score that results from it. Ultimately, metrics are appropriate when used in the right context and as a means of communicating an attribute or a bit of information which can then be useful in making a judgement or evaluation. A metric is inappropriate when used as a judgement or evaluation in and of itself.

This Autumn Still

2021-10-06T00:00:00Z

Ask a book-keeper to tell you something about books. Books know secrets, they might say. Books are magic. Books are that door to those particular places or truths that might be otherwise difficult to get to, unless you know where to go. But ask Lorenzo and he will grin, lean in close, and say: books are quiet. Books do not chirp or trill or bark or bubble. Books are silent except, perhaps, when they fall. When they fall they thud wearily and quiet fast. And when they open they only whisper, or flick when a page is turned. But this autumn morning, fresh and still, Lorenzo’s books make song.

The music rings like crystal bells. This is the sound: what snowdrops might sound like, if you could hear them, during a snowfall on the brightest day of winter. Lorenzo carefully places his cleaning rag on the counter of his sitting place and peeks out the window. He sees people perusing the plaza in front of his bookshop, but there is nothing besides. He locks the door. The books sing, and Lorenzo seeks the song. Stepping up the stairs and searching for the soundly fare, he walks and walks and finds nothing. But the music continues. Sixty years of practice tell him he must merely keep searching, almost without aim. The song does not come from one particular place, but every place in his shop that has a book, or a spell, or a scroll of secrets he might sell. In the end he finds nothing until he comes upon a little, final, nook. There glows in gold a book he doesn’t know, its leather-binding glittering with familiar majesty and some measure of impatience. He smiles, at last, and uses the shelf to support him as he sits. When he touches the book, he is gone.

Lorenzo is a proud Italian man, a lover of his country. But it is not home to him — not so much as this place, this special place he has come to. This place, the place between pages, the rhythm between words, the flicker in a flame. And Giana, who embraces him, holds him close in her arms, and tells of all the things she has done or seen, or heard in that interim time. She is the heart of this place. There are trains and telephones, and warm running water. You can forage mushrooms and make stews or soups or broth. You can doodle, sing, weave, or dance. You can make magic. There is no death for the people here, or suffering. Only all the esteemable things of Italy, like love and gelato, with the majorest mark against it being a smidge of unavoidable bureaucracy. But Lorenzo and Giana can not be seen or heard or even felt by the people of this place, though they can kick fallen leaves up into the air like bursts of twirling wind. They cannot doodle, or eat, or pet a dog. It is the nature of the spell that binds Giana to the place, and that binds Lorenzo to Giana.

And here, Lorenzo is young again, and together they make love by fresh springs and venture into the market to watch the people. Lorenzo reads her poems from his place, Giana shows him art from hers. In this way they spend months together, going to and fro. Adventuring and discussing, learning and watching. But the time draws near, and Lorenzo can feel the calling of his place.

So he brings Giana to a stop by a pond, which ripples with a gentle breeze, and she grows sad because she knows their time is nearing. He tells her that he has a gift for her, and she turns her head in confusion. It is a gift that he has come upon through a great many hours of study and many more of patient thought. When she asks him what it is, he does not tell her. He only smiles, and tells her that he will see her in a year’s time. Because this autumn is different.

This autumn, it is Giana who will come into that little nook in the bookshop, and rise up and feel the spines of leather books. And though she will be lonely, she will not be alone. Because it is to Giana that customers will smile or curse or bargain with, and her hand they will shake when a deal is struck. And it is Giana who will drink wine and taste the sweetness of plums as she thinks of her love in a distant place. It is the first time in a long, long, time that Giana will feel the coolness of winter, or the wetness of spring, or the heat of summer. And Lorenzo? He will watch, and he will learn, and he will ponder in the quiet, lovely place, on how to break the spell. And he will wait for his love to return again, and tell him stories and recite poems, and describe wonders. This autumn is special, because for Lorenzo it is this autumn still.

When Winter Came

2021-09-13T00:00:00Z

Polina’s mother died on a chilly autumn morning, and as she breathed her last she smiled because it was not winter. She had escaped her fate. Polina coughed as she walked towards the home of her childhood, carrying the ashes of her mother in a wooden box thrice blessed by an eastern witch.

She passed the weary meadow, and looked beyond the rocks. There was the River Volga, and by its mighty waters, on the bank, was her home. Polina did not enter or come near. She went to the shore and opened the box with her mother's ashes. Polina emptied the box into the air, and the ashes glimmered in the light of the morning sun as they arched up and got caught in the wind. This was the closest thing she had seen to snow since she was five years old.

Looking through the window of what once was her home and seeing nothing, she couldn't help but to remember. When she and her mother abandoned their cabin by the River Volga many years ago, Polina knew she would not return. Staying another season would mean death. They gathered what money they had and took the first train south. By the time winter had come they were in Morocco, far from the reach of the frost.

"Will we die, mama?" she asked between sobs as a little girl. "Will the curse kill us?"

"No, my little babushka, not at all," Marzanna said. "The witch who cursed me very much underestimated just how strong we are." She held her daughter in her arms. "Now come, no more tears. We shall prevail."

In Rio de Janeiro the sun was high, and Polina was angry. "Mother, will you listen to me for once?"

Marzanna smiled. She was in a drunk and shallow haze of sensations and light. "But darling what is wrong?" She teetered about their apartment, a hovel, dressed in extravagant colors. She spent more money on that outfit than she did on their food that month. And the potions, of course.

"Look at you," Polina spat. "You're drunk already and it’s just past noon."

Her mother giggled. "I know! Isn't it wonderful? Oh, but look at the time. I should go."

"Can I at least come with you? I've never been to Carnaval."

Marzanna stopped and seemed to sober for a moment. "You haven't?"

"You always leave me. Always." Did her mother not know that she wanted to see foreign magics? To dance in the crowd? To be with her?

"Because it's not safe for you Polina. The company I keep is not the sort I want you around, my babushka. Not at all." Her smile faded as she reached down and touched Polina's cheeks. "You are growing to be so beautiful my darling. But you are pale, and white like..." She faltered. Marzanna looked deep into Polina's eyes, which were so much like her own. "I have to go. The sun must shine within us, my darling."

Polina sighed. "You always say that. You always say it's because of the curse that you're never here."

"Our curse which has forced us to travel the world? To see new people and new lands and to enjoy the brightness of the sun? We've never had to suffer another winter again and it is because our curse is a blessing. We have won, my darling."

“Our blessing? Really, mama? Is it our blessing that I can’t go home? That I am stuck here in this room all the time while you go and party and fool around? Or that I cannot meet my own father?”

Her mother stiffened, and when she spoke her voice was shrill and loud. “Enough! Enough of that Polina. If your father cared to meet you then he would have stopped his bitch of a wife from cursing us. From keeping us away.”

Polina was silent, and her mother breathed to calm herself down. Marzanna reached into her purse and pulled out a small bottle, golden in color, and drank it until it was drained. She smiled, artificial joy on her lips.

"Winter is more than just a season, my darling. That is why we are here! There is no need to dwell on the past." She stepped out the door, but had enough lucidity to look back at her daughter for a moment. Tears had begun to well up in Polina’s eyes and she did her very best to stave them off. But she saw her mother looking at her with inattentive, happy eyes and the tears fell down her cheek. Polina tried to rub them off with the back of her hand, but they fell freely. Inside fear began to spring up. She could not cry too much, but she feared the tears would keep falling until the curse killed her.

"You should go on a walk, or see a park,” her mother said. Her tone was cheerful and relaxed, and Polina despised the ease of her voice. “Do not cry, my love. Tears are the snow of the heart. We have everything we need -- each other. The sun."

She left, drunk on joy. Polina looked out at the parade below, watching alone from the window in their shared room, and in her heart it snowed in Rio de Janeiro. But she did not cry long, for she feared that her mother was right. The curse was theirs still. She put on a happy face, as best she could, and let the sunlight warm her body in the bed.

Naples was safe, even in the last stretches of autumn. Polina, without her mother's ashes to accompany her, made her way to the bookshop by the sea. It was a little green building that looked like it was shelved in the wrong section, sidled up between stone buildings tinged gold by the touch of an ancient, constant, sun.

She peeked through the front window, trying to spot her friend. It was empty, save for the books. Polina opened the door and bells jingled as she did, a crystalline jingle of gems that she could only just hear above her. But the owner of the store heard it quite clearly, for he poked his head out of an alley of shelves. "Polina, is that you amore?"

"It is me, Lorenzo."

“My Polina! How old are you now? Surely you must be twenty.”

“You’ve got your arithmetic facilities yet, Lorenzo,” Polina said.

He walked over to her with his bad hip and a smile. He was shorter than her, but his embrace was comfortable and warm. The tweed of his green jacket was a familiar texture, and the smell of pine on his tie. "And your mother?" he asked.

Polina grimaced, "She walks with us no more, Lorenzo."

"I'm sorry to hear that… she was still quite young. Was it... did it snow?"

"No," Polina said. "It did not. Natural causes."

"I see. Well, sit. I will get you a caffè." He pulled out a chair from somewhere and offered it to her. She took it and sat as he went up the spiral stairs that lead to his private quarters on the third level. He returned within moments and had two steaming cups in his hand.
"That was fast," she said.

"Oh yes, it's been long since you came here. I enhanced the stairs for efficiency."

"Enhanced or enchanted?"

Lorenzo laughed. "Both in one. Where have you been as of late?"

"I have given my mother her burial rites, and that is all. When she passed we were in Arizona. The shamans there helped me, few though there are. When I returned to Russia I had her ashes blessed. And now I am here."

"Ahh," he said. Polina wasn't sure if it was in response to her or simply an expression of gratification at his espresso. “And to what do I owe the pleasure of your visit, young lady?”

"I don't know. I came for company. You're my friend, Lorenzo." She cast her eyes about the room. Sunlight streamed through the tall windows, reaching high up towards the ceiling of Lorenzo’s bookshop. From where she sat, it seemed like the rows of books would reach ever-upwards without end.

"You know Polina, I have always liked you best of all my customers."

"I've never bought anything here."

"No, but when you come you ask to read my books. Or you drink caffè with me. And when you are troubled you ask for some wisdom or some chapter to help. So many of my customers come and say ‘Lorenzo, can I have a spell, please?’ Spells! They seek spells when a simple book will do. Bah! You are my best customer with no doubt!"

She smiled and raised her cup. "To our friendship, and to your wisdom."

He raised his. "To my caffè.”

They sipped in silence. “Is there nothing I can do for you, Polina?" Lorenzo asked after some time.

"I suppose I have a question. Do you think that my mother's curse is mine also? The woman who cursed her was a vengeful witch. She hated my mother, and me. That I existed."
He adjusted his position in his seat. "Well, it depends, no?"

"My mother... She was afraid of the power of the witch who cursed her. She went to great lengths to escape it."

"Before I met your mother, I did not take the Russians to be superstitious, you know?"

"Then you do not know Russians very well."

"I have since come to learn better," he said. "But my amateur opinion is that the curse was just a way to get Marzanna out of Russia. No more than that, my Polina."

Within Marzanna’s daughter, something shattered and cracked under the pressure of a truth long-denied and known longer still. "But she went so far... I always thought we would have been just as well settled in Morocco, or southern Spain."

"I fear, my Polina, that the extent of your mother's intensity was self-imposed. I doubt that the curse is yours also."

When Polina asked, her voice trembled with desperation. “Can you check? Is there some way for me to know?”

“I can try,” said Lorenzo. He put down his cup and took her free hand in his, closing his eyes. Polina watched his face as he discerned her spirit, and she felt the ghost of his touch in her heart.

When he opened them, she noticed for the first time the golden specs in his brown eyes. “You have no malediction,” Lorenzo said in his steady and wise voice.

“She lied,” Polina said. She shook. “Did she ever consult you to find out about me? About her curse?”

“No. I would have certainly made you aware of the fact if I had known, Polina.”

She shook her head in disbelief. “Why would she lie to me?”

Lorenzo patted her hand gently. “She was not a witch. She was afraid.”

Tears began to fall from her eyes. "I was afraid! Even now I fear my own tears. I fear to feel anything that is not happy. She would say 'Winter is more than a season. The curse will kill us if we are sad, or if we are blue. It must be summer in our souls.'" Polina sobbed. "I'm scared to cry."

Lorenzo stood and embraced her. "Oh my darling. You needn’t fear anymore. Not a bit. I will give you a spell, free of charge, for all the spells you have not bought from me."

It was some time before she calmed enough to open her eyes or take her head away from the comfort of his tweed jacket, and when she did it was because it was cold -- a touch so foreign to her that it almost escaped her.

In Lorenzo's bookshop it snowed. White flakes glittered in the sun as they fell upon her, and she gasped.

"It's snowing."

"Yes, it hadn't escaped my notice." He smiled. "You are free, Polina. The snow is yours now, as much as the sun. You can cry. You can laugh. You can go wherever you wish to go. Her curse has never been yours."

"No, it has always been mine," Polina said. She looked at the snowfall around her and breathed in the cool air of winter. "But now I'm free. Thank you, Lorenzo."

"If you need someplace to stay, I've been looking for a shop-hand. I'm afraid you'll have to learn Italian, though." Lorenzo waved his hand and the snowfall reversed directions, floating upwards into the ceiling and out of existence.

Polina smiled and embraced Lorenzo. "I'll return soon. I have to go for a bit. Thank you, again.”

She did not know why she stole the sailboat -- it might have been because she wished to weep but did not want to do so where someone could find her. Instead, she set the sails and went to sea. The day was bright but sinking slowly, the delicate balance between afternoon and evening. There were good winds, so she went far out into the water, where the ocean bobbed her up and down on waves as if rocking her, cradling her. It did not matter that she was chilly anymore -- she had the liberty to be chilly. To be anything.

Polina stared into the sea for some time, watching the ripples of the water as the waves moved her boat. She looked past her own image on the surface and into the depths. When she found nothing in the depths, there was little for her to do but look at her reflection, then the ripples. And then remember.

"My babushka," her mother said. Her words lingered in her mouth too long, complacent slurring. She smelled like liquor and sun, and Polina looked up at her with squinted eyes.
"I'm not an old lady, mother," Polina said as she laid down again on the bow of some rich man's yacht.

"You are acting like one. Why don't you enjoy yourself? There are handsome young men here. You can pass the time."

The sun beat down on Polina as it always did. Her mother never went anywhere the sun was not proud and bright. In fact, Marzanna would not even sleep through the night, leaving her resting time for when the sun could warm her.

"I am passing time until we can go back home and read a book and go to sleep."

"Ah," said Marzanna. She came and laid down next to her daughter. "Well then I shall spend some time with you here if you will not come spend time with me."

Polina turned her head and looked at her mother properly. She was well into a few drinks, by the looks of it, but her breathing was content and even. "That is a first. Don't you have some Italian man you'd rather work your charm on?"

"No. I'm right where I want to be," she said, and smiled. "Next to you. I'm happy."

"You're always happy," Polina said. "And drunk. I bet you've had three of those potions by this time."

"No," her mother said. "I have not had any today." She closed her eyes.

"Oh."

"But I have had a lot of alcohol."

"I figured," said Polina.

"I love you, my daughter," Marzanna said. She reached out her hand and Polina took it.

"I love you too, mama."

"Without you, I would be alone. You are my world," her mother said, and Polina almost believed her.

"No, mama. I am not." Polina replied. But her mother was asleep and could not disagree.

That evening, Polina rocked in the ocean on a lonely boat until she too fell asleep.

Revolutionizing Municipal Bonds with Blockchain

2021-07-21T00:00:00Z

Over the last couple of years, blockchain has revolutionized the space of traditional finance with Decentralized Finance (DeFi) -- opening the door for individuals to displace the institutions we rely on today with cryptocurrencies, automated market makers, and decentralized exchanges. But as the community matures, focus is turning away from finance to new areas prime for innovation in a turbulent time: art, games, business, and governance. NFTs have taken over decentralized gaming, and have given artists a new way to take control over their creations. Meanwhile, DAOs are the hot new thing for people who’d rather work in a cooperative than a Big Tech company -- but how about governance?

The road to changing how governance is done is bound to be slow, but cities all around the world are starting to pick up on the benefits of blockchain and even introducing it as part of their municipal programs (see MiamiDAO for an example). One particular way that blockchain can help your local community directly stands out above others: evolving the municipal bond.

Municipal bonds are simple, but very powerful tools for community building. If the city wants to build a new school in the community, for example, but they don’t have enough money at-hand to do it, they might put out a municipal bond. What this means is that you can pitch in with an investment to get the school funded and built, and in return the municipality that put out the bond will pay you back your original investment + Y percent of interest earned over X period of time. Pretty sweet right?

This is a vital part of community-building. It helps the city take more immediate action on making improvements to the community’s infrastructure or amenities while also allowing community members to get directly involved and make some money for participating. Often, schools, transportation infrastructure, electrical infrastructure, sewage, hospitals, low-income housing, etc… are products of municipal bonds. Moreover, it empowers the citizen -- with municipal bonds, citizens can invest in, and enjoy the fruits of, their community.

There’s a catch, however, and it’s pretty big. How do you even buy one? Chances are that you, like me, have no clue. In fact, you might not even have heard about municipal bonds until now. Municipal bonds are the reason the Golden Gate Bridge exists, so how could such a powerful investing and community-building tool escape our awareness?

Traditionally, municipal bonds are pretty hard to access. The first factor is price: they’re usually priced at a minimum of $5,000 and bond denominations sometimes reach a price as high as $100,000. Moreover, the process for getting one out to the public is overtaxed by bureaucracy and middlemen. In other words -- they’re reserved for people in the know, and that’s not you and me.

Cities have tried to assuage this problem by making efforts to directly sell bonds to the public, and they’ve even sold bonds for smaller projects in lower denominations. These are called mini bonds (muni bonds sold in denominations of $1,000 or less). In fact, some cities have taken this down to denominations of $100 or less, which are called micro bonds. These are certainly more accessible, but they present problems for the city that issues them. Namely, they need a way to track who owns what bonds, and they need an easy way to distribute bond ownership as well as payments (municipal bonds are sometimes done with good ol’ fashioned pen and paper certificates) without getting overburdened with administrative costs.

Blockchain is a solution that can help solve precisely both of those problems. Using a blockchain with smart contracts and a stablecoin or municipal cryptocurrency can solve the problems of tracking and disbursing municipal bonds and municipal bond payments. The benefits are clear: the city saves money on administration, and the blockchain reduces the need for middlemen which saves more money, and reduces the opaqueness of the municipal bond issuance process. The idea isn’t novel -- City of Berkeley Councilmember Ben Bartlett proposed exactly this a few years ago with his “Berkeley Microbond Blockchain Initiative.”

While municipal bonds help build communities, micro bonds connect communities. The traditional structure of a municipal bond, like much of the financial and legal systems of the United States, are antiquated and not conducive to allowing the individual man to contribute to his community or even make investments. This results in lack of diversity in critical places of influence, and a sense of helplessness within a community. Community members might feel they are subject to the whims of community managers and have no input. Using blockchain to solve these issues by reducing friction at points of difficulty for involvement is impactful because it creates an environment where everyone in the community has equal opportunity to make a difference.

And ultimately, I believe that if we can improve the communities that we live in and the infrastructure that upholds them -- we might be on our way to solving some of the biggest issues in the USA.

And the Bike Went Nowhere

2021-07-18T00:00:00Z

It was fifteen past six in the morning when Father James Feldman knocked at his door. Tyler wasn’t surprised by the fact that the priest had come to visit him at six in the morning, not at all. He was surprised it hadn’t happened sooner, and that Father James had with him a purple bicycle.

“Good morning Mr. Chen,” said Father James. He offered a wide smile and pushed his thick-rimmed glasses up his nose. He was a short man, and the light of the rising sun glimmered on the bald spot on his head. “I have a humble request.”

“Morning,” Tyler replied. “What’s with the bike?”

It was a small bicycle, even next to Father James. The glittery purple body contrasted sharply with Father James’ black robes, but Tyler thought that overall, it was not the strangest thing he had seen the priest haul with him.

Father James looked at the bike, then at Tyler. “It’s for you, of course.”

“For me?”

“That’s right. You don’t have a car, so I figured this was the next best thing.” He patted the bike. “This will do the job well enough.”

It was common knowledge that Father James often chose congregants to do special tasks for him, and Tyler had a feeling he was about to become such a person. It was not something he expected, really, because he wasn’t the sort of person people ask for favors. So he let Father James inside, because he was curious.

“You’ve got a lovely place,” Father James said. “But you need some plants other than succulents.”

“I like succulents,” Tyler said. And he did, because they were easy to take care of—their leaves would not wilt and fall if he messed up. “Do you want tea?”

“I’ll take earl grey,” Father James said, and for the first time this morning Tyler was not surprised. Their very first conversation had been about tea, which was not what Tyler had expected from a priest. Father James preferred darker blends and to steep them for a long time—only to douse it with milk and sugar. Tyler had a more respectable preference: chamomile, or peppermint when he felt festive. Tyler prepared Father James’ tea first, then worked on his own. But it never came out the same as when his mother would make it. Tyler suspected it was because he didn’t steep it long enough, but he didn’t want to run the risk of it turning bitter.

When both cups were ready, Tyler brought them over to where Father James had sat down. He was staring at the red lanterns on the ceiling that Tyler’s mom had made him put up for Chinese New Year. He never bothered taking them down, and besides, it was a reminder of his roots. Father James took a sip from his cup and grinned at Tyler when he sat. “We missed you at the barbecue last week. We were afraid the Buddhists had bagged you for themselves.”

Tyler shrugged. “What if the Buddhists gave me a better offer?”

“Somehow I doubt it. They’re not as lively as we are. From my experience, anyways.” Tyler laughed at that, and a moment passed as they drank their tea. “I’m sorry for not attending,” Tyler said.

“Not forgiven,” Father James said. “I’m sorry to say Tyler, but you’re going to hell.”

“Of course,” Tyler said. He sipped his chamomile, which came out better this time than last.

“But if you help an old fellow out with a small favor, I’m sure heaven will have some leniency.”

Tyler wanted to point out that Father James’ hair, those on his beard anyway, had yet to grey, but he knew the priest enjoyed the performance of himself. “How can I help?”

“Well, I wouldn’t want to impose on your time. I’m sure you’re a busy young man. Are you sure you can do me this favor? It’s quite all right if you can’t.”

Tyler looked at his succulents and empty driveway. “I mean, you did tell me I’d go to hell otherwise.”

“Wonderful! Well, I need you to deliver a package to a dying friend of mine.” Tyler’s eyes widened. “Jesus Christ.”

“Exactly, Tyler! Jesus.”

“Isn’t this something you should be doing yourself? Why me?”

“Unfortunately, I have many responsibilities. And unlike Padre Pio, I cannot be in two places at once.”

Tyler stood up and collected the tea mugs, moving them to the kitchen. Father James followed and handed him a brown package.

“Is this how you usually do things?” Tyler said.

“You’re asking me if I delegate tasks to people who would feel too guilty to say no? Maybe. But really, Tyler, I’ve always believed that God speaks in sign language.”

An hour later, Tyler found himself riding the purple bike to the hospital by the beach. It was a scenic journey, but uncomfortable—the bike was a bit too short for him. He imagined Father James looked even more foolish riding it from the church to his house earlier that morning, and he took some comfort in that. Tyler had asked about the size of the bike before Father James left and said he’d look like an idiot. The priest chuckled. "Ah but Tyler, don't you know the price of wisdom is to have been a fool first?"

He walked into the hospital and asked for Rio Martinez. The guard pointed him to the urgent care wing after checking his ID. "202," he said. "Up the stairs to your left." When he was a kid, his parents owned a pharmacy business that had the fortune of being next door to a Cuban cafe. Tyler was reminded of it as he walked up to room 202. The smell of Cuban bread overpowered the smell of hand sanitizer by a slim margin.

He felt nervous now that the moment had arrived. He felt anxious about lots of things often, but he wasn't sure why he felt nervous now. He didn't really like hospitals. Still, he approached the bed on the far end of the room, by the window. It was the kind of view that was reserved for dying people. It was eight in the morning, and sunlight filtered through the curtain, spilling into the room. One of the nurses must have left the window open because the ocean breeze played at the curtain’s fabric.

There was a man in the bed, and he was made of wrinkles and blood spots. He was sleeping, and Tyler stared. He did not want to disturb him. The old man looked so still, and he drew in short and quiet breaths. Tyler felt like he was holding still, as he would when playing freeze tag, or hide-and-go-seek, in those critical moments as he waited to be found. He never lost when it was time to hide, but was very poor at seeking. He never knew where to start.

But the old man, Rio Martinez, coughed himself awake, and Tyler was embarrassed to be caught staring. Rio was not shocked to see him. "Hello," he said. His accent was thick with the traces of his native language. "Have you come to deliver me?"

Tyler was confused for a moment but pieced it together. "Oh, uh... Yes I have a delivery for you from Father Feldman."

He nodded as Tyler reached into his pocket and got the package. "Father Feldman is a man of good. He blessed me last night."

Tyler reached out and put the parcel in the old man's hands. He waited as Rio opened it. He wasn’t sure why. Maybe he hoped it would contain something important, a revelation, a truth, a call to action that Tyler could follow. He watched as the old man’s shaky hands opened the package.

A rosary fell onto Rio’s lap, and he smiled. "Ah. Good," he said.

"A rosary?" Tyler asked.

Rio nodded. "Si, rosary. Thank you for delivery young man."

"You're welcome," Tyler replied. "I should get going."

"Wait," the old man said. "Come here."

Tyler stepped forward, uncertain.

"What is your name?" the old man asked.

"Tyler."

"Ahhhh. Ty-ler." The old man said it the same way the staff at the Cuban cafeteria had said it when Tyler was a boy. "I am Rio. Like river. You know?"

Tyler nodded.

"Can you deliver for me something?" the old man asked.

Tyler could not say no.

The old man reached over to the table by his side. Struggling, he grasped a collection of leather journals before Tyler could move to help. Rio handed them to him. "What do I do with these?" Tyler asked.

The old man raised his hand a moment as he caught his breath, but it turned into a wet cough. Tyler watched helplessly as he fought for air. When he got it again, his accent and the hoarseness of his voice made it hard to understand.

"Do whatever. These are mine. My life. But I have lived it, and no one will live it again." He paused for a moment to see if Tyler was following. Tyler was confused but nodded him on. "I have lived good life. Strong. Like rio. Don't you think?"

"Yes," Tyler said, though the old man did not look strong now.

"Strong like river. Strong rivers end at oceans, no? Sad rivers die in land. I was born in mountains. Cuba—it's beautiful." He looked out at the beach through his window and pointed at the water. "Deliver there."

Tyler followed his gaze. It was a glorious day, the last of summer. "Okay," he said. The old man leaned back into the bed, and he seemed satisfied. "Gracias." He closed his eyes and thumbed the rosary in his hands.

Tyler said goodbye and left with the journals in hand.

There was a slight breeze as he biked, and he realized it had been a long time since he left his apartment. He was moving towards the beach, but he wasn’t completely sure of his route. He wasn’t the best bicyclist as a kid, despite the best efforts of his mother. She’d tell him it was because he was too worried about falling and that’s why he fell.

Tyler parked his bike in front of an ice cream parlor that sat between a nursery and an Asian pawn shop. Soon, he found himself at the edge of the water. The ocean ebbed at his feet, wetting his shoes. Tyler did not mind because he was busy flipping through Rio’s journal. He tried reading it, but he couldn’t quite grasp the rushed penmanship nor the language. But he found various sketches throughout the small journals. Some in pencil, some in ink. Portraits of people who Tyler would never know, but that Rio had clearly known very well. Laugh lines and wrinkles and dimples were detailed with familiar care on various portraits. Some sketches were of animals. Others were tulips and roses and orchids. There were mountains, rivers, things. Kites, trains, motorcycles, and gondolas. And words, of course, words he could not understand. Though he doubted he could understand even if they were in English, for Rio had lived a life so unlike his own.

One page was a drawing of Chinese lanterns. Hundreds and hundreds of them reaching into the expanse of the sky until they were little ink blots on the page. Tyler had never seen that, and he was Chinese. He imagined that if he had his own journal, it would be empty. Tyler fought the urge to turn around and take the journals with him, to take it back home and put it on the shelf under his TV, next to his succulents. Instead, he walked waist deep into the water and threw the journals out to sea beyond the reach of the currents that would wash them ashore, and he hoped that maybe they’d find their way to Cuba.

When he walked back to the ice cream shop his shoes and socks and pants were wet, and every step reminded him of the fact. People stared at him, but he did not care. He was relieved to find that his backpack and bike were still there. He hadn’t brought a lock for them, so he was pleasantly surprised.

He plopped down at one of the tables outside the ice cream shop and stared out at the ocean. He was thinking of maybe ordering an ice cream when a little girl popped her head out from behind the entrance to the plant shops.

"Pst," she whispered, though she was very loud.

Tyler looked at her, and tilted his head forward. "I took care of your stuff, I have a bike like it. I got it from Walmart," she said.

"Really?"

She nodded.

"Thank you," Tyler said. "That was very kind."

The girl smiled at that and then came out from the door frame. She looked around and then ran up to him. She placed a small plant from the nursery into his shirt pocket with lightning speed.

"Can you take care of my plant? He's dying."

Tyler furrowed his eyebrows and looked down at his own shirt. The flower tickled his chin. "It looks fine to me. Why do you think it's dying?"

She shrugged. "It stopped growing, and my mom said all plants should grow."

"Well," Tyler started to say, but she ran off before he could finish. He wanted to tell her that wasn’t technically true. But it didn’t matter much, really. He sat there, staring down at his own shirt for a few minutes, then got up to order ice cream.

When he arrived at Father James’ church, the mid-afternoon sun was blazing and the priest was washing an old, retired SUV. He saw Tyler approaching and called out "Who knew there were so many spiritual benefits to washing a car?"

"I did it," Tyler said. He was mindful of the plant in his shirt pocket as he dismounted the bike and leaned it against the property's fence.

"Ah, that's good," Father James said. He was covered in soap and he smelled like oranges. "I like your plant."

"It was a gift," Tyler said. "But I have a question.”

“Ask away.”

“I was wondering why you sent me to Rio. Did you know I would have to take the journal to the ocean?”

“Ah, the journals!” Father James said. “He loves those journals. Did you have a read?”

“No. It was in Spanish.”

“Ah.”

“But why did you send me? Did it mean something? What was I supposed to get out of it?”

Father James offered a grin. “Really, Tyler, I just needed some help. And besides, you got a bike out of it! For your troubles.” He pointed at the purple bike, which leaned against the church’s fence.

“You want me to keep the bike?” Tyler asked.

“It’s a gift,” Father James said. “So, you have no excuses not to come to the church barbecues. But you can always sell it, if you prefer.”

Tyler stared at the bike for a moment and shook his head. "No, I think I'll keep it. It's a nice gift. Thank you."

Father James smiled. "That's great to hear."

Tyler pointed at the bucket and sponge. "Need help?"

"I won't say no."

Tyler picked up a sponge and started washing the car with Father James. "So, does this mean you'll convert to Catholicism?" the priest asked.

"Hell no," Tyler said. "But what do you know about Taoism?"

"Nothing in the world is softer than water, yet nothing is better at overcoming the hard and strong," Father James quoted. "Daodejing."

Then he took the hose and doused Tyler in water, laughing.

When Tyler arrived home that night, he placed his plant on the shelf under the TV, and went to sleep. When he woke up in the morning, he thought that it might have grown.

The Necessity of Open Systems

2021-05-04T00:00:00Z

Note: This is a living document, which means that I might update it as more things come to light or new developments are made.

Introduction

We, as a society and as a generation, are on the cusp of a subtle and profound change. We are living in a time of maximum potential energy -- do you feel it? It is the year 2021 and we are recovering from a global pandemic which has shifted the way we live, the way we communicate, and the way we do things in a very fundamental way. And through it all, there was one major lesson learned -- when things go wrong, it is our infrastructure, our systems, which will make or break us. Within mere weeks, we were capable of adapting to what otherwise would have been a devastating blow to our everyday lives through the power of technology. Education, work, and even museum visits all happened through Zoom which, while not ideal, is far better than not having any of those things at all. What was proven is that, if rightly applied -- we can leverage infrastructure and technology to achieve great things.

We are living in a time of change; we are at the meeting of the wind and rain that forms the first whisps of a hurricane. But these are merely raw components. What shape will this potential take? Time will tell for certain, but it will take some shape. Someone will shape it because that's what humans do. It is our most impressive ability -- that we can give shape, individually and collectively, to shapeless things.

What follows is a vision, not for the shape of what is to come, but a way to give everyone a part in shaping it. To offer a path that we can follow to forge a better world. And it all begins with the material at hand. How do we solve the problems of today and grow the world of tomorrow?

The Problem of Trust

When you break down most of the pressing social and political issues of today, the core of the problem is trust. Most people do not trust the institutions we rely on, and upon which most of the United States economy functions, to be fair or to abide by the rules that keep citizens safe.

In 2020 and 2021, we've seen that Americans don't trust Wall Street to play by the rules. They do not trust Law Enforcement to be guardians and not executioners. They do not trust the government's ability to secure a democracy. And that's all in the United States of America, land of the free and the model of democracy. How much worse are the issues abroad? Globally, we face the issue of privacy. From an anecdotal perspective, I would say that most citizens don't even trust the companies and the software we rely on for communication, social activity, and general life operation to keep our data private and secure.

There is no trust, and that is the crux of the issue, because though trust is intangible, it is deeply necessary for any human institution or system to function. How can we restore that trust? How can we hold the leaders of our systems of governance and finance accountable?

In other words, how do we bridge the disparity between the sovereign bodies that affect the lives of millions, and the very millions they serve?

Blockchain: A Mechanism for Trust

When Satoshi Nakamoto set out to create Bitcoin, they were looking to displace the bank with the people. To have the whole of society at an individual level become the guardians of transaction records without the need for a central authority. It's an impressive system, but not solely for its ambition alone -- the underlying protocol of Bitcoin, known as the Blockchain, is an elegant mechanism for trust.

With a blockchain, you don't need to trust an institution to make sure transactions are legitimate because everyone (including you) can verify the information whenever they want. With Blockchain, you can supersede the need for trust. It's trustless. It will programmatically play by the rules, and only a majority of the network, or the society, can change it by democratically choosing to.

Envision a society where you didn't have to trust that your information was safe, that your votes were secure and truthfully accounted for. A society where you could be certain your identity isn't stolen, or that the laws were being followed. It all happens, seamlessly, as per the rules you voted to put in place according to the democratic process. What blockchain technology does is put those things closer within our grasp than they otherwise would have been.

But Not Enough

However, it's not the perfect solution -- blockchain is a technology, not a miracle. What matters most going forward is how we work together to implement blockchain in places where it would truly make a difference. The solutions to human problems require human effort. Technology cannot solve our problems for us. But we can use it as a tool to help us on our way there. And if the events of the past year have proven anything, it is that the health of our technological infrastructure is tied very tightly to our success as a society. For better or worse.

With that in mind, we must be careful not to let intrinsically unfair power-dynamics creep into our systems. Blockchains, though decentralized, aren't necessarily equally fair for all users unless specifically implemented to be so. In other words, unless we make these technological protocols democratic, it's possible that they won't be, and could turn totalitarian or oligarchical. Moreover, there is a danger to a system that programmatically enforces rules. Namely, what if the rules are wrong? Or biased? How easily can we change them? These aren’t secondary concerns — they’re absolutely vital. If we don’t get it right, then we will dig ourselves into a hole and not out of one.

The use of any technology needs a philosophical framework to accompany it, or else it will merely be a husk without a spirit and soon be colonized by the very institutions it seeks to subvert.

Open Source -> An Open Society

Open source software is software that is publically available for review and contribution. That means that you and I can go into a project's public repository and check out how the code works, and contribute features. There's plenty of benefits to open source software: it's secure (many eyes review the code constantly, so it's less prone to massive bugs or breaches), it's low cost (usually free), and typically works on most operating systems.

But that's not why people use it. People use open source software because of their ability to verify the code, customize the code, and propose changes to how it works, if the majority of the community agrees. Most people don't need to, and usually don't, use those abilities -- but it's open to them if they so wished. That is at the core of open source software -- if you wanted to, you could. And because anyone can validate that the software is up to par and does what is intended, you don't need to exercise trust. You can simply rely on it.

What I'm proposing is an Open Society. One in which anyone can participate in the mechanisms that run our world today. A society in which, at any level, citizens could vote for their desired outcomes, see how resources are being managed, and have access to the infrastructure necessary to succeed in a capitalist economy. In other words, I'm a proponent of creating an environment where democracy could thrive at its fullest potential, where all citizens can participate more fully in the capitalist society we live in and engage with their community more seamlessly and transparently. And I propose we do this by creating technological infrastructure that makes it possible.

I believe that corporations, local counties, and governments are all systems that take input (trust, money) and give us outputs (mutually agreed upon value).

In the system of government, the input is both trust and money. We trust the government (subjecting ourselves to its laws) and we pay them taxes. In return, the government promises to provide us with security, law enforcement, legal representation, certain services, and (in democratic societies) the ability to influence the legislature of the government.

As of now, however, the balance of that transaction weighs in favor of the systems, and not the people they serve. Through decentralization and blockchain, we can shift that balance, and we could create a more prosperous and peaceful society. But it starts with giving sovereignty to the people, not systems.

What kind of world is that? What does it look like?

Visions of an Open Society

To believe in an Open Society is to believe that, fundamentally, if people are given the right resources, incentives, and opportunity, they will proactively participate in the building of community welfare. They will engage with the tasks at hand in a productive way of their own accord. Indeed, through the use of blockchain, crypto, and DAOs, we could create communities (even municipial ones) that citizens can invest in and earn from. Thus, the focus of an Open Society is on making sure that all citizens are given those resources, such as accessible, low-cost, and quality education so that they can bolster their own well-being as well as that of the community.

This vision has, at its core, people. Not systems. Thus, it is a vision of a decentralized society where power and the ability to verify its use is in the hands of many and not the few. The soul of this society is trust, and a vital spirit of growth. Where all voices can have an impact, and new ideas can spring forth in compromises and innovations that arise from disagreement. It is a world in which we could verify that our privacy, our identities, our freedom of speech, and our ability to engage with systems is guaranteed.

This is an Open Society. But how can we get there?

Blockchain: The Infrastructure of an Open Society

The invention of crypto and the blockchain have allowed for some incredible innovations technologically so far -- but what would happen if they were applied at scale?

So far, the innovations of blockchain and have largely occurred in the finance space. And though the potential impact could reach far beyond that, it's not a bad start.

Economic Freedom

Cryptocurrency has allowed for the instant, secure, and borderless transfer of value in a peer-to-peer format. The implications are tremendous: you won't need to make a minimum deposit in a bank account because the value of your assets is secured on the blockchain (this is life-changing for people who don't have enough money to even make a minimum deposit at a bank, because it means they can safely store their money and transact it digitally). Moreover, your assets are always accessible to you. You can withdraw or add whenever you want with no limits. If you live in a country plagued by political issues, you don't have to worry that your assets will be confiscated or censored.

Finally, decentralized finance systems allow for anyone to grow their wealth with less paywalls, fees, and transaction time. With the proper knowledge, investing becomes even simpler, and you can do more with your money. You can loan out your money to corporations, peers, or liquidity pools at your own discretion, at your rates, and have those transactions secured and executed by smart contracts (programs built on the blockchain).

It sounds simple, but it's a tremendous amount of freedom, and for many people around the globe, it's more economic freedom than they could have imagined. At its core, the innovation of Decentralized Finance isn't that it changes our financial infrastructure (though it does do that in some capacities). Its chief innovation is that it gives anyone with a phone and an internet connection access to a free, worldwide, and secure financial infrastructure. The implication is that many more billions of people who currently can't participate in the world market, or store and grow wealth, will soon be able to without needing to wait for their government to catch up.

This economic freedom is vital to an Open Society, because by giving citizens around the world a platform upon which to build wealth, they can have more security, more engagement with economic activities, and become productive and prosperous citizens that are, importantly, given the opportunity to pursue happiness in their own terms. Economic freedom gives citizens agency.

Digital Ownership & User Agency

The ability to own assets isn't limited to currencies. With blockchain, anything is available for ownership verification. Blockchain could be used for proof-of-ownership of both physical and digital assets. This, of course, is the realm of NFTs, and the impact is astounding because it can permanently shift the relationship between content viewers and content creators.

With NFTs, you can invest in artwork, not just own it. Imagine investing in a piece of art, and making a cut of the sale every time it is purchased. That is usually a power reserved for closed circles -- but not anymore. With creator tokens, we can even invest in individual artists and share in their success. This level of financial involvement is unprecedented, because creators and consumers can both create value from each other in a symbiotic relationship. Musicians, writers, directors, artists, and other creators can have their work funded by the community, and then the community can profit not only by the value of the content, but also the dividend from its success.

In essence, this is the most agency the user has ever had -- to be investors as well as consumers. To participate in the content they love.

The Final Frontier: Sovereignty in Communities, Corporations, and Governments

One of the simple, yet most important applications of a blockchain is the ability to guarantee that votes can be cast easily, securely, and instantly. This means that we can increase the frequency and ease with which votes are made, at scale. Imagine being able to more deftly and easily vote on matters that influence the direction of your community, your company, or your government.

To these ends, one of the most fascinating advancements of blockchains is the creation of Decentralized Autonomous Organizations. According to Wikipedia:

A decentralized autonomous organization (DAO)... is an organization represented by rules encoded as a computer program that is transparent, controlled by the organization members and not influenced by a central government. A DAO's financial transaction record and program rules are maintained on a blockchain. What this unlocks is the possibility for a bottom-up approach to organizational governance. Engines for change in the hands of the people. These could be, if well-applied (and there is much research being done on how best to apply new governance models), extremely democratizing for all social systems. DAOs could be used as complimentary systems to modern Cooperatives, or overhaul the corporate structure. One such implementation I am intrigued by is the Distributed Cooperative Organization (see disco.coop). Indeed, there's a world of opportunity for us to improve our systems — even the ones most of us thought we couldn't change. New things are possible, and we can shape the world -- without destroying it first.

Conclusion: A Vision of Hope

I believe that through an open source philosophy and the use of blockchain technology to solve the issue of trust in critical areas, we can slowly begin to forge a stronger society. One that is truly free in a significant capacity, where the individual has agency. This new society is one in which we can trust our systems, and engage with them in a spirit of cooperation. And cooperation is key. It’s the ultimate goal. A society where we transact with each other and not against each other. Where money is the oil in an apparatus of growth rather than an ultimate goal.

But to create this society, we have to be willing to give everyone the opportunity to get involved, and give them the resources necessary to learn how to make an impact. No growth can happen without creating an environment where everyone has the resources, incentives, and opportunity to engage.

This is just the start. This article is necessarily limited by how much I know, but there is a vast community of people with far more knowledge, and far more vision than I have alone who are working to change the world. Will you?

Thank you for your time,

- Juan F. Lam, Spring 2021

Fulfillment by Emptying

2021-04-01T00:00:00Z

Last year, I read the Daodejing and had the opportunity to write an academic analysis of it using a scholarly article called "The Paradox of Virtue" as a basis. My analysis concerned itself with the intention behind moral behaviors and the reason why the Daodejing is so vague in describing "The Way". As a consequence of being in the class, I had another opportunity -- I read the Bhagavad Gita.

The Bhagavad Gita deals with the same concerns as the Daodejing for the most part: how do you know how to act morally? How do we become better? What is the meaning of life, to what ends should we as humans apply ourselves?

While the Bhagavad Gita and the Daodejing both deal with these questions in the context of their culture, they both call us to eliminate our "selves" from the equation of action, and act as duty calls us to (in the case of the Bhagavad Gita) or the way the particulars of a certain situation require (Daodejing). The Bhagavad Gita goes further, however, and offers an insight: one can achieve salvation through the emptying of the self by meditating and having mindfulness of duty, but one can also achieve salvation by worship of Krishna (the Hindu god). For most people, worshiping Krishna and sticking to a few morally upright behavior is an easier path to salvation, to release from the karmic cycle.

That perspective interested me, because it allowed for a connection I had not yet up until that moment drawn: while the Daodejing, and indeed Buddhist philosophy, calls us to empty ourselves by paying attention to contexts and mindfulness of our own finite nature the Bhagavad Gita calls us to focus our intent on a higher form, a higher entity, as an easier (though not as fast) way to achieve salvation. And in a sense, so do Christianity, Islam, and Judaism.

Behold Philippians 2:5-8:

"Have among yourselves the same attitude that is also yours in Christ Jesus. Who, though he was in the form of God, did not regard equality with God something to be grasped. Rather, he emptied himself, taking the form of a slave, coming in human likeness; and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross."

Here, and throughout many parts of the Bible (like in Romans 12), we are continually called to offer ourselves up for God and the service of others. To empty ourselves in a directed way.

Conclusions

Thus, it doesn't seem far fetched to me that part of the human purpose, one of the keys to human greatness, is to be empty of yourself. To be fundamentally focused on the moment at hand, the conversation you're in, the actions you're doing, or the person you're interacting with. Many artists have given accounts of being so utterly absorbed in their work that they are rendered unaware of the passage of time. This kind of deep connection and involvement is critical, and major religions tells us so. I think it's a truth worth keeping in mind.

Proactivity is Greatness

2021-03-22T00:00:00Z

Lately I've been overexposed to the world of Web 3.0 technologies. Blockchains, Virtual Reality, all that nerd stuff. It's been great fun, but it's distracted me from sitting down and doing some proper writing, both creative and non-creative. Last week I finally got around to writing a short story for my Sci-Fi story collection, and I thought that was pretty nifty, so while I'm on a role I figured "why not do that other thing?" and that other thing is this!

Over the past three years I've been pondering the question of greatness. It started in my senior year of high school as I wondered what I would make of my life. How would I direct it? Back then it manifested in questions like: "What will my major be? What career will I pursue?" But now I'm a Junior in college. Exactly one year from the end of this semester, I'll have graduated university and be forced to ask more questions. "What will I do next? Where will I work? How will I pay the bills?"

While those are important questions, I've come to realize over the past few years that they're not the questions I should be spending time thinking about in the shower, or in the brief moments before I fall asleep -- no, those questions aren't so important. What I do next, where I will work, what direction my life will take is not so important as the question of how I will direct my life.

I suppose it's the difference between worrying what route the river will take me and worrying about how I will swim in the first place.

I began to think of people who have directed their lives in ways we might consider excellent. Here's a list of people I am interested in as representative of human excellence: Jesus Christ, Benjamin Franklin, Nikola Tesla, Ada Lovelace, Shakespeare, Newton, Tolkien, da Vinci. They're all great, but what makes them great?

The inklings of an idea began to form as I read through all sorts of material across various genres. However, Angela Duckworth's Grit was definitive. Grit is a book about what makes the world's best different from your every day Joe. It's not talent. It's Grit. Perseverance. But there's some caveats to that. Perseverance on its own is insufficient, it's about having perseverance plus purpose. Shooting hoops for hours on end won't inherently improve your performance in basketball, even if you have the perseverance and the will. You have to practice deliberately.

The word deliberate is key, because it implies intent. Likewise does purpose. But that is an incomplete picture of greatness, by my estimations, because there are plenty of people who are perseverant, and who have purpose, but do not reach greatness. Duckworth's ideas are foundational, and accurate, but I think that greatness is about something more. There is an attitude that lurks in the actions of great people. Not a methodology, or a personality trait, but a perspective.

I found it in a guide on writing. Here's a quote from William Zinsser's On Writing Well:

"The difference between an active verb style and a passive-verb style--- in clarity and vigor --- is the difference between life and death for a writer. "Joe saw him" is strong. "He was seen by Joe" is weak. The first is short and precise; it leaves no doubt about who did what."

The difference between a great sentence and a bad one is simple: one is active, the other passive. I think that, perhaps, the same applies to people. It's an obvious conclusion: people who sit at a couch all day clearly won't accomplish as much as people who are out and about, working. But even active people could be passive in their activity -- because while action is important, it's about the intent with which those actions are directed. Being active, in the sense of having a job as opposed to not having one, is not worth much if those actions amount to busy work and checking emails.

As such I think that being active as opposed to passive is a good starting grounds for being great, but it's not enough. And besides, I've found that any goal which is defined principally by it's not being X or Y is typically weak.

Going back to that quote about great sentences, I think it's interesting Zinsser uses the idea of "vigor," because I found it again in this article titled "In Praise of the Old Gods":

"Religion is active, you must practice wonder and observe mystery. To learn a creed and a mythology is to begin to produce a vigorous life, and any vigorous, embodied life will produce creeds and mythologies. The mythos we create is the opposite of nihilism, it is the definite optimism of the power of the world waiting be lured back by us."

There's an interesting correlation that starts to appear with activeness and vigor. It applies not only to sentence structure but also to the act of belief in higher powers. Perhaps this unique combination leads to so many religious people being counted among the greatest of humans in history (think: Jesus, Buddha, Gandhi, various saints and martyrs, philosophers, Mohammed, etc...)

I've combined the two ideas of activeness and vigor into what I call proactivity, and I've spent a long time tracking it through various books and articles I've read, carefully awaiting moments when it jumps out at me. Here's a map of the content I've studied that is linked to, or mentions, Proactivity:

Proactivity is the perfect word for the trait or behavior I'm trying to describe because it encapsulates every facet of the greatness paradigm.

Proactivity = Intention + Vigor (Passion) + Activeness + Purpose. It is a recurring element throughout various texts I have read, and it might just be the key to greatness.

All of the separate components of proactivity are worth exploring on their own, and among these intentionality (or mindfulness) is particularly vital because it is the gateway to proper proactivity. After all, you can't act with intent if you don't learn how to be intentful in the first place. To these ends, it might be worth considering that the process of self-reflection, or discernment, is critical to any measure of success.

That said, if I had to summarize this discovery of proactivity, it'd be like this:

Proactivity is a vital, purposeful, and mindful engagement with the world, as well as the context of individual moments. Proactivity is achieved, not only in action, but also in the direction of our thoughts, and even the direction of our spirits. Thus, to be proactive is about engaging with the world, and not being a passive subject of it. To be a conscious enactor of change in the context in which one exists.

So, when you're thinking about why some people accomplish great things and others don't, consider this note I took from Duckworth's Grit:

"Great things are accomplished by those people whose thinking is active in one direction, who employ everything as material, who always zealously observe their own inner life and that of others, who perceive everywhere models and incentives, who never tire of combining together the means available to them.”

That is the essence of Proactivity.

The Aurum and Argentum

2020-08-13T00:00:00Z

Golden and folden are the cards
That maketh and shapeth shapeless fates,
And harply play our mortal hearts
To turn hate to love and love to hate.

Silver is spun the silence of sooths,
Forsooth that it glimmers so rare,
And so parts from our divinations of youth
That it’s not truth ‘til there’s white in our hair.

Thus call it not an auguration
When I my reason so unrope,
For I oft drink from that libation
We mortal men doth calleth hope.

This chalice I raise not to my own wealth
Nor for sovereign powers unto me bestow
Nor the kiss of Fortune herself,
But that there is one truth you should know;

Though Silver sooths I cannot hear,
And Golden cards I cannot see,
So is the hope I cherish dear:
My future to be found in thee.

Rusalki

2020-07-15T00:00:00Z

The rusalki we are called. Not because we are unclean spirits, but because we are cleansing spirits, and to mankind that is worse. My water is Volga, which is the river nearest my village. Volga runs from east to west, as the sun does, and so too do I during the course of the day.

My sisters tell me that in the summer we leave the Volga and go into the forests to taste warmth. "By night we visit the crops and cleanse them, if the farmers have paid us respect." They are excited by this, but I have not been rusalki long enough to have experienced summer. That is good. I was born from a blizzard. I will ascend before autumn.

My sisters say this drive makes me unpleasant. When I first became a rusalka they tried to explain what had happened to me. They were quite surprised, perhaps pleased, that I already knew. I had chosen to be rusalka. They were not as pleased when they learned I had no intentions to stay one.

"But darling, we are so beautiful now. Free! Why be bound to mother earth anymore?"

I sought a freedom more distinct. They did not understand. They understood less that I also knew how a rusalka ceased to be rusalka.

"You ought to have been a witch instead, since you know so much."

But I could not have been a witch, even if I had wanted to. My disposition is too simple for such sorcery. I have always invested in the acquisition of truths rather than power, and though I have doubted my position at times I now feel justified. It will be the key to my ascension.

Summer came, after a humble eternity. I swam up and down my river in anticipation every hour, hoping to catch a glimpse of him. I did this until I saw him at last. It was a beautiful summer evening, and I felt some warmth for the first time as I rose from the water to lure him. My master enjoyed his evenings by the river when I served him. He did not recognize me, but he recognized my beauty. I had aged to my potential in the small eternity of spring.

He stared, amazed, at my naked figure. I motioned him to come towards me, running my hands over my breast, and pleading for his proximity. He came into my embrace. Fool.

I watched the bubbles escape his mouth as I dragged him into the Volga. They popped in time with his heartbeat on the surface. Before he ran out of oxygen, I looked at him and spoke, knowing he'd hear:

"The night I was banished from the village, you accused me of stealing a key. It was not a key I stole." I brandished his knife. My only mortal possession. "Behold then, your key. This is the key of death."

Blood poured from him as he drowned, and I was warmed by it. Rusalki no more.

The Golden Chicken

2020-05-21T00:00:00Z

In a distant kingdom, in a distant land, there lived a princess. Though she was old enough now to try her own luck with the ways of the world, her father, the king, kept her in a tower. She had been there from a young age. "A princess as beautiful as you, Vasilisa, ought to be protected," he would say to her. She was a good daughter and obeyed. It was no trouble at all because in her youth she preferred the company of books --- and the tower was full of books! Every book of every manner of story was stored in Princess Vasilisa's tower, stacked high to the very tip! Many years passed, and the Princess had read every book in the tower, from top to bottom, from bottom to top, and then when she had done that, she read every book backwards. Princess Vasilisa had exhausted every book in the tower, and grown wise and fair-handed and yet her prince had still not come!

So it was that one night, an inky and blotchy and twinkling night, the Princess stood aside a window and looked out into a world that she knew well due to careful reading and understood poorly due to careful keeping. Princess Vasilisa knew that grass was soft, she knew sunlight was warm, and yet she did not know what it was like to lie in a meadow --- just like the one outside her window --- and be graced by sun-warmth. She yearned, she yearned, she yearned! But soon, she swore, soon her prince would come and she would taste these things at last. The wait would make it all the sweeter!

A curious thing happened then, a very curious thing indeed. As Vasilisa stared at the silver-lit meadow in the full-moon night, ready to sleep, she saw a golden chicken come from the forest. The chicken was large, at least twice her size and he pecked at emerald grass. First she was frightened, but something urged the princess to call for the chicken. "Chicken!" she called, "I have never seen one so gold as yourself." The chicken looked up to her, startled, and clucked. His bronze eyes found hers and he did not dwell long before he sped away. Vasilisa had never seen such a thing! For a moment she hesitated, she very badly wanted to chase after the golden chicken. But what of her father's warnings? Vasilisa thought it over, but decided that the golden chicken was far too rare a sight to be admired for only a brief time.

She was moved, then, to chase after the golden chicken. Vasilisa began to hurry up and down the tower, grabbing all sorts of books which she had long ago memorized, and throwing them out of her window. She did this for some time until she had created a staircase outside the tower with which to climb down from her window. Princess Vasilisa ran down from her tower, swiftly descending from on high, her books swaying in the night breeze, but God was with the Princess on that evening, for she did not fall!

Princess Vasilisa savored the feeling of silvershine from the moon on her fair skin, of the emerald grass tickling her toes. She wasted little time, however, and set off after the golden chicken. For many nights she chased after the golden chicken, never far and always near, but never near enough and always just a bit too far. She followed his glowing trail with determination, but could not catch him. One night she finally grew tired and thirsty from her pursuit. Princess Vasilisa the Wise came to a large oak tree, as old as the roots of the world. She said to the oak tree "Father Oak! Father Oak! I am tired and thirsty. I will need a place to rest to continue pursuing the golden chicken."

The oak tree stayed silent for some time, but Vasilisa knew through her reading that it was never good to hurry an oak, and thus she waited patiently for a response. Finding her worthy, the oak tree spoke. "I see you are patient, even when you are tired and thirsty. Go get me water from the river and use this leaf to collect it. Do not drink from it, and I will reward you accordingly."

Vasilisa took the leaf in her hands and went to the river. Gathering water into it, she returned to the oak without even wetting her lips with the water, though she thirsted. Vasilisa poured the water over the oak tree's roots. "Very good," said Father Oak, "For this, I will let you sleep in my branches. And for your patience you shall never thirst again." A flask of wood appeared before the princess, a beautiful thing, and though she drank and drank from it, there was always fresh water. In the morning Vasilisa thanked the oak tree. "Father Oak! Thank you for your kindness, I must hurry now to find the golden chicken."

With that, Princess Vasilisa departed from the oak tree and followed her heart to where she knew the golden chicken had run. Along the way, however, she grew hungry. She saw many brambles full of berries, but was certain these berries were not meant for human mouths. Seeing a mockingbird on the ground, she approached her, but knew not to come too close, nor to call out her name. Princess Vasilisa sat down and waited for the mockingbird to come to her. Though the mockingbird flitted away once, then twice, then three times, she always returned and Vasilisa never moved. Finally, the mockingbird flew right onto Princess Vasilisa's lap. "Little daughter, I see you are clever," said the mockingbird. "How can I be of service?"

"Oh Song Mother, I have chased a golden chicken for many days and many nights and I have yet to catch him, but now I grow hungry. I cannot discern a good berry from a bad berry in this forest, for they all look the same!"

The mockingbird trilled, and flew off. Vasilisa was frightened, but trusted the mockingbird to return. After many hours, the songbird returned and Vasilisa had still yet to move!

"Princess, I see that you are trusting! For this I will give you a hearty meal, and my blessing. No berry will harm you now, you can have your pick of all the berries in the world!"

A mushroom stew appeared before the princess, and a tankard of good ale. Eating and drinking it, the Princess thanked the songbird. "Little mother, thank you! But now I must continue to find my golden chicken."

"'Fair fortunes, my child" said the mockingbird.

With that, Princess Vasilisa ran off again, and whenever she hungered she ate berries from the brambles unafraid of being harmed. For many days and many nights, Princess Vasilisa pursued the chicken, and could not reach him!

One day, Princess Vasilisa approached a meadow. The trail had grown brighter, and as she entered the meadow she was disappointed to see that the trail had faded, and the golden chicken was nowhere to be found. Sorely disappointed, Princess Vasilisa was prepared to cry. Exhausted, she sat in the meadow's emerald grass and basked in the sunlight upon her skin. After a while Princess Vasilisa took heart and stood once more. She looked over the clearing once, twice, and thrice. She found no clues at all. There was only a pond and some rocks! She approached a glimmering stone by the pond and sat by it. She had read many stories of helpful oaks and kind mockingbirds, but stones were in none of the books she had read at all! She was without hope, but decided to ask the stone for directions, even though she knew it would not answer.

"Grandfather Stone, glimmering bright, you have sat here for many seasons and have seen many things. I know it is silence that preserves you, but have you seen a golden chicken come this way? I have been following after him for many days and many nights, and I have yet to reach him. Though you speak no words and sing no songs, I am compelled to ask you anyways."

Three long moments stretched before Vasilisa, and she sighed. Standing up, she brushed off her dress and turned to make her way back to her tower. In that moment a brilliant light came from behind her, and she turned to see the golden chicken in place of the glimmering stone!

"Golden Chicken! Golden Chicken!" she exclaimed, "I have sought after you for many days and many nights and now you are here!" Her joy was without end, and she embraced the golden chicken, which stood proudly and brilliantly before her in the meadow.

"Little Princess, you have sought me with persistence! I expected you to cease seeking me when you grew tired and thirsty, but you did not. I expected that you would stop when you hungered, but you did not. I expected that you would lose hope, but you did not! You were patient with my friend the oak, you were trustful with my friend the mockingbird, and you were faithful in the face of a glimmering stone. For this, you are worthy of my companionship!"

The princess was overjoyed and sat atop the back of the golden chicken. "Golden Chicken, where shall we go?" she asked.

"I will show you all of the world, little princess!"

And so it was that for many seasons, Princess Vasilisa and the Golden Chicken traveled the world and saw many marvelous marvels, and wondrous wonders. Thus, for a long time or a short time, I cannot say, Princess Vasilisa traveled in peace and joy with the Golden Chicken.

It was a rainy day when the Princess and the Chicken stopped at a crossroads to make a meal when things took a turn, for from the rain and fog Baba Yaga appeared on her mortar and pestle, sweeping her tracks behind her with a broom. "Aha!" cried Baba Yaga the Witch in a shrill and shrieking voice, "at long last I have found you!"

Quick as a whip, she tied a rope around the Golden Chicken's head. "You are mine!"

Vasilisa cried out in shock. "Grandmother! You are taking the Golden Chicken, my friend. How could you do such a thing?"

"Do you not know, Princess Vasilisa? This golden chicken belongs to me. He escaped from my coop long ago and I have sought him for many seasons. Now I have him, and for his disobedience, I think I will eat him, and use his feet as stands for my hut!"

The princess was ready to burst into hopeless tears, but made a final offer. "Oh witch, is there anything I can do to keep the Chicken?"

Baba Yaga glared at her, and thinking for a moment, smiled wickedly. "Here," she said. "Behold three bronze olives, full of poison. These must all be consumed, Princess Vasilisa. Only then can you keep the chicken, for you have sought him as I have done."

Princess Vasilisa despaired, for she could eat poisoned berries without harm, but not bronzen olives! She prepared to pick them up, however, and eat them. For she loved the Golden Chicken with all her heart.

She could not reach them, however, before the Golden Chicken quickly pecked them all with his beak and ate them. "Now, Grandmother, they have all been consumed," he said. With a burst of light, the Golden Chicken was golden no more, and so small he did not reach the Princess' knees.

"Now you can keep him," spat Baba Yaga. "Though he is golden no more, the challenge is fulfilled. The olives have been consumed."

The Princess dropped to her knees and hugged the chicken to her chest, but despaired he was no longer golden.

"Baba Yaga, is there nothing I can do to make my chicken golden once more?"

"Bring me an oak nut, bring me the feather of a mockingbird, and bring me a glittering stone. Then your chicken will be gold once more," said Baba Yaga.

Princess Vasilisa ran swiftly into the forest and for many days and many nights she traveled. She came across her old friend, the Oak Tree. "Father Oak! Father Oak! I have caught my Golden Chicken, but now he is gold no more. May I have an oak nut?"

"Of course my child, and be swift, for Baba Yaga's patience is thin," said the Oak tree. An oak nut dropped into her hands, and Princess Vasilisa ran to the brambles of the forest and called for the mockingbird. "Song Mother! Song Mother! I need your help."

The mockingbird came flying down from a tree, and landed before her. "Little daughter, how may I help you?"

"Song Mother, I have caught my Golden Chicken, but now he is gold no more. May I have a feather?"

"Of course my child," she said. "And be swift! Baba Yaga's patience is thin."

Vasilisa ran to the meadow where she met the Golden Chicken, but could not find a glimmering stone. Remembering, however, his glorious transformations, Princess Vasilisa ran back to the crossroads.

"Baba Yaga! Baba Yaga! I have here your oak nut and your feather!" Vasilisa exclaimed as she approached the witch.

"And where is my glimmering stone?" Baba Yaga asked.

"You are holding it! For the golden chicken can transform into a glimmering stone."

"Very well, I do not believe you, but let us see." Baba Yaga fed the small chicken the oak nut, and tickled it three times with the mockingbird's feather. With a burst of light, the chicken became a glimmering stone, and with another, a Golden Chicken!

Baba Yaga, frustrated and disappointed, mounted her mortar and pestle and went away to her hut once more.

"Golden Chicken!" said Princess Vasilisa, embracing her friend. "You were gone, but now you have been returned to your true state! Where shall we travel to next, now that we are safe?"

"For this I thank you, my Princess! But now I have realized it is time to return home, for Baba Yaga stole me from my prince's grounds. You should come with me."

Disappointed, Princess Vasilisa agreed. For she knew that the Golden Chicken's prince must be missing his chicken, and it was never right to keep for oneself that which does not belong to you.

For many days and for many nights, they traveled together towards a glorious kingdom. When they arrived at the castle, mighty and beautiful, they were welcomed with much gladness.

Princess Vasilisa spoke to the prince, who she found handsome, with some measure of sadness. "Mighty prince, one night I stood at my tower and saw this Golden Chicken! For a long time I chased him, and at last I found him. For the duration of your search for the golden chicken, I have been on many adventures with him. He is my dearest friend! But now I return him to you, for he is rightfully yours. Will you allow me to visit him? I'd regret never seeing his golden feathers ever again."

The Prince, enraptured by her beauty, her wisdom, and her kindness, said "I would be honored if you would stay in my castle for some more time, Princess Vasilisa. Thus, you can be with the Golden Chicken longer."

Princess Vasilisa's heart soared, and agreed promptly. For many days and many nights, the Prince showed her the wonders of his castle and his kingdom. It is said that in Prince Ivan's gardens, there are many golden chickens and chicks, and many marvelous marvels and wondrous wonders.

It is also said, though I am not one to say for certain, that after growing to be fast friends, Princess Vasilisa and Prince Ivan eventually fell in love and lived happily ever after.

The Wanderer

2020-02-16T00:00:00Z

https://youtu.be/eR-y72mTMh8

^ Check out the AI-Dream of this poem!

Among the monoliths of the green expanse,
He walked in a silent daze.
And it was by chance, by hallowed grace,
That he came upon that maze.

Beware, beware, for its song enchants,
The songs of a broken home.
Beware, beware, the green-stroked roads,
The enthralling forest Rome.

So the winds of change carried melodies,
Through the hallowed branches' reign
And the golden veils of long-lost memories
Danced like oblivions twirling bane.

He wandered through, and he blundered, too
Going hither-to and fro.
This was his land once, but is no more
And now where's there to go?

The Rain and Snow

2019-11-28T00:00:00Z

The city is raining, raining,
Like silver draining from the sky.
Not a drop on her skin.
She's got an umbrella, you see
Because she's clever and quick.
Who'd want to get rained on?
Rain just gets you sick.

She'd put down her umbrella
If only it were snow.
But it's just rain.
And rain hurts when it
Splishes, splashes, splatters
Against your skin.

Or worse still when it gets
Inside your clothes -- makes you
Feel bone cold, makes you remember
You're a mortal soul.
Better then, better then, that it be snow.

But there's a thing we oft forget about snow
A thing we don't oft remember of rain,
That snow-cold harbors wither-winds
Whither the way that rain-fall grows green.

There's nothing so confusing as the rhythm of the rain
But we'd live life much more fully
If we learned to dance it all the same.

The city is raining, raining,
Every drop falls on her skin.

The girl is dancing, dancing, having learned to live again.

The Traveler

2018-10-04T00:00:00Z

As the fields that yield their Spring to Fall
We are quick to crawl and slow to walk,
And when beckoned on by life's call,
We are slower still to leave our flock.

Perhaps it's not our will or way
To keep ourselves the paths we pave,
But it's our fate to never stay,
So forge or find a path to brave.

Or seek yourself in ruined lots,
Be they old or new it matters not.
For I have seen many a man
Be lost then found by his own hand.

And if the stars compel you so,
And your soul sings a fire song,
Then do not fear the fire's glow,
You will be home before long...

Cosmic Conundrum II

2018-10-04T00:00:00Z

The Fire of Purpose is the Master of Night,
Both Keeper of Day and Kindle of Passion.
To stifle the Flame is to smother the Light
And bring to an end the Spirit of Action.

No blaze is in sight, I'm a King with no Throne,
No purpose inside, I'm a Hearth with no Home.
Once a Child of Fire, now Son to the Tame,
Self-made slave; I am bound by no chain.

It was mine alone to lose or to keep,
But now the flicker is vanished, left with no claim.
The fault is my own that my quill did so sleep,
And now the quest is my own to earn back my name.

So I mustn't be too weary yet,
For now I must take heart.
My freedom I am bound to get,
But I must seek it first in art.

Cosmic Conundrum 1

2018-03-18T00:00:00Z

The silver moon is no slave to its phases.
Between fullness and newness she does not hide.
She cares not for her waxing or waning white faces,
So long as she may enthrall the wild-blue tide.

And a clock does not look at a minute ago,
Nor even the moment it’s on.
It spends all its life counting the minutes to go,
Until all the minutes are gone.

And flowerless flora don’t often weep
But stand still, stout, and regally-bound,
For it isn’t the ground but the sky that they seek,
And so wait until spring-time is found.

So do not chase a sinking star,
Await a rising sun.
Do not focus on who you are,
Focus on who you’ll become.

https://youtu.be/pHLA2yoWiEI

^ Check out the AI-Dream of this poem!

No Flowers for Christina Portbell

2018-02-28T00:00:00Z

No Flowers for Christina Portbell
That is what they say.

But her hair was like not-so-Spanish Moss,
And her eyes were like Forget-Me-Nots.
But now she is all Red Roses,
The sort she didn’t have
On Valentine’s Day - the day we saw her last.

She was openly an Orchid,
But wistfully Wisteria
And soft and gentle like a Water Lily,
Strong like some Willow Tree.
She knew all about the theory
Yet she never had the practice,
Of crying or kissing or hugging someone beautiful,
Or as beautiful as she.

But the Daisy Meadows have her now,
In a sea of white-ish, pink-ish, green.
No Flowers for Christina Portbell,
That is what they say.

I never knew anyone so beautiful,
Or as beautiful to me.
But I’ve seen flowers that compare,
And she’s joined their ranks and rows.
No Flowers for Christina Portbell,

The most beautiful flower the world had ever known.

Mr. Smith

2017-12-21T00:00:00Z

A/N: This was my first ever short story. I hope you do not cringe at it as badly as I do.

It was generally agreed upon, through an indisputable vote of all confidence, that Mondays were a terrible invention. Perhaps not for a billionaire philanthropist, or the CEO of an international corporation, but almost certainly for the incontestably average Mr. Smith.

Because of the inherent apathetic nature of the office, his first name was irrelevant. This, of course, stripped him of all particularity. Mr. Smith didn't much mind it; his office work was his passion and his coworkers were his closest friends (friends being a relative term). Thus it came to be that slowly, but surely, Mr. Smith's first name not only became irrelevant, but unnecessary. His professional life had the happy coincidental convenience of also being his personal life, and as such, his friends, too, called him Mr. Smith.

Mr. Smith worked at an average office, using an average computer (adorned with an average amount of dust), and worked with a set average amount of customers. When it came time to return home--something he was always slow to--he got into his normal car, and returned to his normal house.Mr. Smith's abode was perhaps peculiar in the regard that it was free of any distinct characteristics from the other homes in the suburb. The hedges were perfectly rectangular and an acceptable palette of green. It would seem that his shrubbery, too, adhered to a strict rubric imposed by the monotonous tastes of their keeper. The plants also referred to Mr. Smith as Mr. Smith, but in private and with discretion, so as not to violate the policies of normalcy they subscribed to upon their creation.

As a courtesy to the esteemed Mr. Smith, it was with much difficulty that the hedge community of Gallow Street withheld from voicing its outrage at a most brutish oddity. The cause for their anger being a tremendous ravaging of the sidewalk, gray like the sky, by way of a piece of paper.In as dignified of a manner as he could, Mr. Smith rushed his way to the valorously rebellious debris that was foolish enough to defy the order on his property. He grabbed the paper and chose to inspect it.

Looking at it for a long while, he discerned its contents. Mr. Smith was startled by what he found within. It seemed to be a sort of map. This of course, was an irksome matter. Maps had no place in this suburb, nor in such times as these. Indeed, the map had no place there at all. It would seem, however, that the suburb had a place on the map.Mr. Smith was not long to come across his street address; it was circled heartily in red and notched at the end of an arrow that pointed towards another circle---drawn with an equal measure of gusto--that encompassed a crude drawing of a tree. A very large tree that, of all the greenery in the town, was alone in being untouched by the urbanization of recent days. It grew freely and its great branches stretched towards the sky, taking no particular shape or order except that of being sun-bound.

He looked up from the quaint piece of paper and fumbled for his keys as he unlocked the door and grabbed a newspaper at the foot of the entrance. Stepping inside, he dropped his briefcase by the door and put his coat on a hanger. The whole while he stared at the paper, and it wasn't until he had arrived at his living room that he placed it down on his counter.

Mr. Smith loosened his tie and grabbed a ceramic cup, one of the few in his cupboard, as well as a bag of tea and an accompanying kettle. The process was quick, practiced, and methodical.

As he waited for the kettle to announce that the water had reached a satisfactory temperature, Mr. Smith once again looked over the map. He found it a strange thing, a very strange thing indeed, and he could see no reason for its existence, and he was all the blinder as to why his home had been featured so prominently on it.

As the kettle sang its song, he settled on a theory. Surely it was the doing of some child with a great imagination and a bountiful amount of idle time. He found it in his heart to forgive the nameless prankster. After all, at least the young person that made the map was a tremendously gifted cartographer. But it was a prank nonetheless. He tossed the map into a bin and went about preparing his tea.

When the ritual was finished, he took his cup and sat down at a table with his newspaper and proclaimed the readings to himself as he sipped on his tea. He flickered through to the section about the town committee and unspooled the words on the page. There was nothing much there to discern. It was all awfully petty, but one proposal did catch his attention.

There was a motion in the committee to get rid of the park tree, one that he found, at first, to be a ridiculous notion. But as he read through the opinion pieces, he found it to be a more reasonable idea than before. Some parents had complained of children hurting themselves in attempts to climb it. But was that not the result of bad parenting?

Mr. Smith decided it was of little consequence to him. Although the tree had offered him the wondrous fruits of adventure and joy in his childhood, those times were now long past. The committee would vote on the matter that very evening, and they would have a decision posted on the next day's paper.

He flipped through more pages but found little more content of interest to him. Still, it was a part of his schedule and he would hardly part from it.

Once more Mr. Smith approached the bin and with a flourish, he granted the lonesome map some company.

Soon after he indulged himself with the consumption of television, and the television indulged itself with consumption of him. When he tired of the exchange he allowed the monitor to rest. Finally, with a fluid movement, he rose and retrieved his briefcase. He brought it to the table where he had sipped on his tea, where there was only one of everything. One man, one chair, one purpose, and one task. He began his work.

The work was of such a nature that there was hardly any person in the world that could quite understand exactly what it consisted of except for, of course, Mr. Smith. All that could be said of it is this: it was a dull and tedious work, and it was of an infinite nature in all aspects of its being. It was infinitely terrible, infinitely long, infinitely torturous, and infinitely enjoyable to our dearly beloved Mr. Smith.

He forwent his evening meal and sustained himself with the inventory of his briefcase. And such was his merriment that infinity came to a close infinitely too soon, and at promptly nine in the evening, he reported to a tiresome meeting with his mattress.

The morning sun came to consciousness upon the awakening of Mr. Smith. A common happening. But that particular morning, an outrageous, obscure thing occurred. It was typical of Mr. Smith to lull the day into dawn with the gentle songs of the kettle, but this morning the day was awoken with an urgent gasp, and it was not even from the kettle.

Mr. Smith had opened his eager eyes and reached for his glasses when he found himself in a precarious position. His hand had not found what it searched for, but instead introduced itself to a familiar foreigner on the nightstand. For Mr. Smith had not found his glasses but, instead, a piece of parchment. He looked it over and was very much startled, and very much more afraid to find that it was the map from the day before.

But how? It could not possibly be some mere prank. Whoever had made the map had gained entrance to his home.

Perhaps he had left the door unlocked? No. He hadn't. Besides, the culprit must have known, in some way, that he had thrown out the map. Did someone want to hurt him? No, that couldn't have been it either. They'd have done it already if they meant to. So what was the game for? What sort of person would have pursued so much trouble simply to irk him?

And although his life was perhaps, in grave danger, Mr. Smith did not pay it very much mind. The matter would have to wait. After all, nothing was worth being late to work for. Particularly not something as childish as this. It almost felt like an adventure, the sort he used to have in his youth. But no, he would not indulge these games any longer. He had meaningful things to do now, and the sooner he got to the office, the better.

With as hearty a hop he could muster, he got out of his bed and went about his morning routine. Mr. Smith did not take long in this as he always prepared the same meal, drank the same tea, and wore the same clothes. Before leaving, he located his glasses and, now gifted with clarity, took a long look at the map. At last he grumbled and grabbed it, folding it into his pocket as he walked out of the front door, but not before locking it. With his briefcase in hand and the map in his pocket, Mr. Smith went to work.

The office clock ticked at him balefully, as if clucking its tongue at him and shaking its head. It was not a good day for Mr. Smith. He had hardly gotten any work done at all, and that was an issue. A very grand issue. He found, for the first time in all of time, that he could not focus on his work. Not one bit. Mr. Smith resolved to will away the distraction by way of tapping his pencil against his desk. Then his foot. It intensified. At last he stood in frustration and silently fumed as he made his way to the coffee machine. For Mr. Smith, coffee was something he scarcely ever touched. It was a terribly disgusting invention but he found himself hungering for energy that no amount of earl grey would ever provide.

With a cup in hand he stood before his desk. He stared at his drawer for a long while. He knew what to do. Casting his cup aside, he pulled on the lever to his drawer and took the map in his hands. He stared at it and with a "hmph" brought it to the paper shredder. He glared as he inserted it and listened to the machine whir with delight. It was done.

Feeling immensely relieved, Mr. Smith made to get back to his desk when the clock struck four and everyone began to pack up and leave. He was tremendously unsatisfied with his day, but he was more tired than upset and so collected his things and left the building.

Upon arriving home he found that he was filled with more anxiety than before. What would happen if he opened his mailbox? What would he find? He thought that maybe it would be best to leave the mailbox closed for the evening. He could always check in the morning. He took two steps forward, then stopped.

"Enough!" He spat.

Mr. Smith stomped towards the whimpering letterbox and pried open its mouth with all of the gentleness of a rhinoceros. He found nothing but the newspaper. Mr. Smith smiled. The paper shredder had done wonderfully. He'd be bothered by all of this silliness no longer, he declared to himself.He closed the mailbox and took a step back. He heard the slow and agonizingly loud sound of a paper crumpling. There was hardly any reason at all in looking down, but he did so anyways. It was the map.

Mr. Smith picked it up and, urged on by the accusatory staring of the letterbox, he rushed inside. He locked the door once, twice, and thrice. Leaning against it, he dropped to the ground. What could any of this possibly mean? He looked searchingly at the map as he sat there with his knees held up to his chest like some child. The arrow pointed at the tree in the park with an even more remarkable redness than before, and the circle around it seemed all the more eager. Standing, he brought his briefcase with him to his table and placed it down gently. The map was given a spot next to it but was treated less honorably. It didn't seem to care all that much. Mr. Smith went to his kitchen and prepared his tea.

When that was done, he pushed aside the newspaper and picked up the map instead. Clearly someone wanted him to go to the park tree. He'd not have even considered going at any point had he not been as weary as he was at the moment. But he did consider it. And the longer Mr. Smith considered it, the more he wanted to go. He imagined that if he went then all of it would stop. And so Mr. Smith made a decision. The next day, during his lunch break, he would go to the tree.

So long did he mull this option over that when he rose the sun had begun to cast a grey shade into his room as it dipped down into the horizon. He put his tea away, made himself something quick to eat, and was soon one with his mattress. He left the map on the table.

The next morning he returned to his scheduled behavior. He did not shriek the sun into stirring awake as there was no surprise. The map was not on his nightstand. It was, as he discovered after getting prepared for the day, exactly where he had left it.

And so Mr. Smith went to his work. And he worked hard that day, and he interrupted it solely for the purpose of eating lunch, which he ate across the street in the park. It was mercifully empty and he was able to acquire a seat on a bench just across the tree. It was a worn and old bench, about the same age as him. But, like him, it was a tremendously average object and wasn't all that peculiar. Sometimes a bench is just a bench.

The tree was as tall as ever, and as beautiful too. Its roots on the ground were accompanied by small flowers sprinkling the area around the tree. It was complimented by a small pond just to the left of the bench. A pond he remembered well.

As he sat down with his bag of lunch on one side and his briefcase on the other, Mr. Smith was overcome with an overwhelming anxiety. Whoever drafted the map could have been any one of many things. A prankster looking to humiliate him? Or some murderer intent on playing with his psyche before killing him off?

Mr. Smith shook his head. These sorts of things didn't happen in this town. Everything was perfectly normal here. He looked at his watch. It had already been twenty minutes and he hadn't even so much as touched his sandwich. He was suddenly rather taken by hunger and he began to eat his food.

By the time he had finished, nothing had yet to happen. Nothing at all. Mr. Smith took the map and saw that it had no new wisdom to offer him. He looked around in confusion, and was tempted to search the tree for answers, but he was acutely aware that he had to return to the office.

And so at last Mr. Smith stood and he went back to work.

Such did the next day pass also, but not the one after.

That day, Mr. Smith found more while sitting in the park bench than solely reminiscence of a time long past. He found another anomaly. Something stranger, perhaps, than even the map.

The daffodils all leaned towards the tree, as if straining their entire body to hear a whisper that was always just out of reach. Mr. Smith found this to be an astonishing thing. Certainly someone must've noticed this. He looked to the pond for answers. It offered him a question. The waters of the pond, despite the absence of wind, rippled towards the tree, also eager to hear its secrets.

Mr. Smith was prepared to abandon the park altogether. Strange things happened here, and he was not accustomed to strange things. But despite himself, he found his feet urging him towards it. Finally he stood right in front of the tree, staring at its long, wide, twisting trunk. It was the most unusual tree he had ever seen, and deeply beautiful despite its asymmetrical nature. He ran his hands down its knotted base. Mr. Smith had not touched the tree since he was still a child. Since his grandfather had died.

He remembered the times spent here all at once and every memory that arose offered another and another until his reminiscence branched out like the tree itself into a glorious growth. In particular there came to him a recollection of time spent sitting inside of the comfortably large hollow at the base of the steadfast timber as his grandfather read to him. Those were good times. Times when he had a name.

Moved by his emotions, something that was not a common occurrence, Mr. Smith reached into the hollow, where--in his youth--it was typical to find some note or some drawing that someone had left for others to discover. Mr. Smith did not find a note.

Instead, much to his horror, he found himself touching a liquid, and that his hand had disappeared entirely. He wrenched it back with such intensity that he was launched onto the grass. Some pedestrians stared at him, and he was perfectly embarrassed. He got up and muttered an apology. He looked quickly at the hollow, which he now noticed shimmered a dark shade of blue, and retrieved his briefcase. And, as Mr. Smith always does in times of trouble, he returned to his work.

For three long days Mr. Smith did not return to the park during his lunch break. For three long days Mr. Smith had not even spared a glance at the map. For three long days Mr. Smith could not bring himself to work with the vigor he usually did. For three long days he pretended that nothing happened. But indeed something had. And it was interrupting his work. Mr. Smith was a placid man, but if there was one thing in the entire world that he would not forgive it was that.

On the first day away from the park he had put it off his mind completely and forgot its existence entirely. The solution was simple. He would never return. But on the second day his unfocused demeanor had taken its toll and his work suffered. Still, he was obstinate. It was not until the third day when he admitted to his bathroom mirror that he had some sense of curiosity about the whole thing. The mirror looked at him demurely and he went to sleep.

On the fourth day he went to the park during his lunch break, but he did not bring a lunch bag. There would be no pleasantries. He walked up to the tree with his briefcase in hand and, fearless as he's ever been (which is to say he was quite afraid), he reached into the hollow and once more felt his hands engulfed in a thick water-like substance. It was warm, like touching the glass of an automobile on a sunny day. He felt nothing there. Until suddenly, harshly, he was pulled in completely. And yet he did not drop his briefcase.

The sun comported itself with the enthusiasm and gentleness of a child awaking his parents on Christmas Day as it roused Mr. Smith into a semblance of awareness. Mr. Smith found that he did not like waking up in such a way. There was no kettle's song, no tea, no paperwork to do. It was all rather terrible, really.

But Mr. Smith had yet to open his eyes, and when he did all of his senses came to him in a rush, as if they had been caught in traffic on their way to work. They stuttered clumsy apologies and got to their positions awkwardly, knocking over all sorts of things in doing so. Such was the origin of his headache. Despite this his vision blurred back into clarity, and he saw his surroundings. Such was the origin of his wonder.

He was not in his town anymore.

It was a most handsome place, and he found it to be so familiar that he couldn't help but feel uncouth when he didn't remember why it seemed so substantially recognizable.

The air was thick with joy the likes of which he never knew, and the waters of a stream nearby hummed calmly, and the forest buzzed with the songs of spring and the bees danced their ballad across the flowers that grew there. They were a tall and precious and delicate sort of flower, that needed not the grace of the sun's light for they glowed of their own beauty.

And so he walked to a nearby pond, and he found in doing so that even the ground was gentle in its being and was as soft and perfectly kind as it could be, even when he stumbled dizzily. At last he arrived before the pond and was met with a reflection of himself that was alone in being the only normal thing in the place. But even that was not true. The reflection was too sharp, too crisp. There were ripples across the surface, but the reflection was perfectly mirror-like. And so it came to be that Mr. Smith grew cognizant of the fact that he was in a place quite unlike his home.

He dipped his hand into the surface and brought it out in a cupping gesture. The water he had collected in his hand was like some sort of liquid mirror. The gold-streaked red sky smiled in the reflection, peeking out just behind his head. He dropped the liquid back into the pond and stood up.

Try as he might, Mr. Smith could not bring himself to panic, as the land did not allow for such emotions; it took them and smothered them in light until they could be no longer. And so Mr. Smith sat amongst the flowers and contemplated the obscure things he had beheld that day. He had made little progress in his contemplation of recent events aside from affirming that they were indeed obscure, when he was interrupted.

"Did you know," said a soft voice behind him, "that I've been expecting you for quite some time?"

Mr. Smith stood and turned around. The voice was unfamiliar, but the face, like the place, was known and yet unknown to him.

It was a quaint old man. He was not tall or imposing, nor small and meek. He was proudly holding out a hand in greeting. He wore bright blue robes that swept in the mellow winds and large round spectacles, covered slightly by a hood.

Mr. Smith, well acquainted with the art of making a good introduction, took the man's hand firmly and shook it twice then released. "My name is Mr. Smith, my fellow. It's nice to meet you."

The old man smiled brightly and began to walk away towards a path out of the clearing they were in. Mr. Smith realized that they were in a forest, and if he didn't catch up soon he would get quite lost. He extended his legs as far as he could and, with as much grace as he could muster while still somewhat dazed, he walked towards the forester.

"Say, do you know where we are?" Mr. Smith asked.

"No, I can't quite say I do. But I think I know where we're going."

Mr. Smith was perplexed. "And where exactly is that?"

"Home, I believe."

"Whose home?"

"We shall see." The man in the blue robes stopped shortly and turned around. "Now look, we can continue down this path, or we could go down this one. Neither presents any danger," the old man grinned, "I think."

Mr. Smith was fairly lost. Things were happening much, much too fast for the poor man. He steeled his nerves. "Neither. Not until I at least know your name!"

"Mr. Smith is my name." Replied the old man serenely.

"Nonsense! I am Mr. Smith!" Mr. Smith exclaimed. That is to say, the real Mr. Smith. After all, there could hardly be two Mr. Smiths.

"No, I don't think so. I have never known you by that name."

"Well I have never known you at all. I demand your true name, sir!" Mr. Smith announced in the most commanding tone he'd ever used (it wasn't all that commanding).

"Very well, very well. My name is Gregory." The forester said.

Mr. Smith was positively confused, more dizzy than when he landed. "And how can you know me? I've never met anyone named Gregory Smith."

"But surely you remember acquainting yourself with your own grandfather?"

This gave pause to Mr. Smith. "Grandpa Greg?"

The man laughed and opened his arms. "It took you quite some time to figure it out. Has it been that long?"

There were no words for Mr. Smith to say, so he simply embraced the man in the blue robes. He found himself, for some unknown reason, becoming acutely emotional. They walked together down a path of Gregory's choosing.

"You know, my grandson, you stumbled across this place rather quickly. We were not expecting you so soon."

Mr. Smith had gathered his bearings and was immediately overtaken with a sense of wonder. "Was it you? Did you send me the map?"

Gregory laughed, and the trees laughed with him, shaking as the winds picked up. "No, not I."

"Then do you know who?"

"Yes I know him quite well. We're steadfast friends, he and I."

"Well, who is it?" Asked Mr. Smith.

"You'll see." Gregory stated simply. "Now look here, do you see them? The tents?"

They had just passed through the forest path and into an opening. Mr. Smith beheld a shining market, surrounded by hundreds upon hundreds of homes made of stone and oak. The market tents stood tall and proud, immensely prideful of their wares. Some were bold enough for red, others just shy enough to opt for shades of blue. But they came in millions of other colors also.

Mr. Smith heard it then, all the noise of people. There were no cars, no trucks, no beeping. Just music and laughter and shouting and horses neighing. And off to the side was a castle. It wasn't a terribly large castle, but it was a castle nonetheless. The banners were of the same shade of blue as his grandfather's robes.

"I see it."

Gregory nodded. "Come along then."

Soon they were in front of the castle. There was a moat around its perimeter, though it was much more pleasant than a moat ought to be. The water reflected the sky's pink-streaked golden haze and the torches on either side of the drawbridge burned bright as it was lowered slowly with a groan. Finally, they were granted passage into the grand estate. They walked past the drawbridge and nodded towards the guards.

Gregory stepped aside as they reached the main doors and allowed Mr. Smith to pass first. Mr. Smith's hands touched the wooden surface and he pushed both doors inward. They followed the command eagerly, and allowed Gregory and Mr. Smith entrance to the main hall. A blue carpet stretched itself across the room and satisfied itself with stopping just in front of a grand golden throne. A golden throne where there sat a king.

Mr. Smith and his grandfather walked the length of the room. Courtiers danced about on either side of the carpet, but the two Smiths stayed their path. At last they arrived before their king, and Gregory bowed, but Mr. Smith did not. He needn't to, for he recognized the king.

"You wouldn't bow to a child?" The sovereign accused. "That's awfully petty, my good sir knight."

Mr. Smith stuttered before he decided on a response. The courtiers did not stop dancing. "I hardly need bow to myself."

The younger version of Mr. Smith grimaced. "Fine, but it's really rather rude y'know!"

The king hopped off his throne, he was too short for his legs to reach the ground. "C'mon this way, me. I really wanna show you something!" He paused to giggle. "You're me and I am you. Isn't that weird? Anyways!"

Mr. Smith looked to Gregory who only pointed his hands vaguely towards the child-king rapidly running off to some other part of the castle. Mr. Smith ran off after him. He discovered quickly that he was in desperate need of exercise, and that the castle was much, much larger than he had originally thought.

He chased after himself until at last the king stopped in front of a set of stairs. "That was fun! But I think I won way too easily."

Mr. Smith just wheezed, briefcase still in hand.

"Alright, alright. Let's go old man. We've still got to go up these stairs."

And so they did. It was a long and rather tiresome trek, but Mr. Smith did not grow weary of it. The king spoke without end about all sorts of things, and it was a comfort as they went up the tower. But at last they made it to the top, and the child king opened a door.

Night had already befallen the kingdom, but that did not damper the beauty of what he beheld. The stars sprinkled the night sky and twinkled in coordination to produce moving images of knights and of horses and of dragons.

The moon watched over the scene with a solemn silver shimmer, and it illuminated the land and cast a glow on the purple night sky where the clouds floated lazily. The moat, as well as all other the bodies of water in the distance, reflected all of this; but the most beautiful of all the sights were the villages and the towns and the markets that littered the lands. They shone brighter than the stars.

The king sighed. "It's really neat, huh? I really like it up here and I thought maybe you might too."

"I do." Said Mr. Smith. And he did. There was nothing abnormal or terrible about it, only familiar.

It was quiet for a time but there were questions that needed to be answered.

"So, it was you who sent the map?" Mr. Smith ventured.

The king bobbed his head up and down enthusiastically. "Yeah! Did you like it? It took me forever."

Mr. Smith nodded his head, "Yes, it was neat. But why did you send it?"

"Because I saw you one day. Through the tree. You looked awfully miserable walking to work. It was sad."

"No, no. You must have seen something wrong. I love my work. I really do!"

"Kinda, I guess. I just think you don't have a lot of other options. You're not what I expected you to be like, y'know?"

Mr. Smith grew irritated. "Yes, well there's no space for knights in the real world. They don't exist."

The child-king rolled his eyes. "Okay, whatever you say."

This only served to fluster Mr. Smith even more. "And besides, I don't know what you mean. My life is perfectly fine, thank you."

A giggle and a toothy grin. "Oh sure. You really like throwing tea parties with just yourself, don't yah?"

"Oh be quiet. None of this is real anyways. I'm just having a bad dream."

The child-king laughed even harder. "Must've been all that tea."

"Shut up. Go away! I want to wake up now. I'm tired of this. How do I get out of here?" Mr. Smith tried to shut his eyes a few times. It was a futile attempt.

"That's really not how that works, mister."

"Then how, exactly, do I wake up from this terrible dream? What is this place anyways?"

"It's not a dream!" The king said heatedly. "You're at home."

"This," Mr. Smith pointed vaguely at the expanses on the horizon, "is not what home looks like. Home is...It's...it's..."

"More boring?" The child-king offered.

"More normal." Mr. Smith said sternly.

"Well it's not your home. Not right now, anyways. It used to be. This how you saw the world, once, when you were like me." "And what does that mean, precisely?"

The child-king shrugged. "It's the same place. You just see it different now that you're an," he made a face, "adult."

Mr. Smith contemplated the notion. "And you're just a figment of my imagination?"

"Nope!" Exclaimed the king mockingly. "Can't have a figment without an imagination!"

Mr. Smith glared at him. "So how did you come to exist? You're not part of my world. The real world."

"This world's been around as long as you have, sir. And I think your world is the fake one. All the concrete and glass and cars and," another face was made, "even the trees and grass are fake sometimes. It's weird."

Mr. Smith did not say anything.

"I think you should totally stay a while. Oh! I know! I'll host a tournament and a feast in your honor? It'll be so much fun!"

"I don't think that I should-"

"Preparations will take a while, of course, since it's sorta short notice, but I'll invite everyone!"

"But I don't want to-"

"Anyways we should probably send a letter out right now if we want the dragons to-"

"I want to go home!" Mr. Smith yelled out.

"Wait, what? Why?! It totally sucks over there and it's positively one hundred percent awesome over here. You'll change your mind when you see the dragons. Watch. Some of them breathe fire and..." the child-king trailed off. "You're serious aren't you?"

Mr. Smith nodded sadly. "Yes. I need to go back home. I don't know how long I've been here but I must go to work and-"

The king was dejected. "Fine... We were going to have a lot of fun together y'know? I wanted to take you to see the giants tomorrow."

"Perhaps another time?" Mr. Smith compromised.

The king's watering eyes cleared up and he bounced up in excitement. "Heck yeah! That'd be super cool. You could come back any time, really. As long as the tree is there. And that tree's always been there so we're all good."

Mr. Smith smiled at his younger self who said "Okay, we'll take you back home tomorrow morning, but you should stay the night. There's a room for you here."

They walked down the stairs, and the child-king led him to his room. There was still music in the castle but it was dying down.

"Okay here." Said the king. "This is your room."

"Thank you, my king." Mr. Smith smiled down at him again.

"My house is your house too. Technically." He jumped up and embraced Mr. Smith warmly. "Thanks for coming. See you tomorrow!"

And with that he ran off to some other part of the castle, and Mr. Smith was left alone.

That night Mr. Smith did not sleep, for he hadn't had his evening tea, and this caused a tremendous discomfort within him. So he clambered back up to the tower and sat out in the cool night air and stared at the stars.

For hours he watched as the stars enacted great battles and dramas and tales of love and loss, and he was utterly entranced. For he indulged himself in consumption of the sky, and the sky indulged itself in fulfillment of him. The tales were not interrupted but instead enhanced by the sound of a familiar voice.

"I expected to find you out here tonight."

"Hello grandfather," Mr. Smith greeted as the old man sat down next to him on the cobblestone floor and joined his watch.

"You've changed quite a bit, young man."

"No more than you have. You're alive now, which is quite a big change I'd say."

"I've always been alive. Here. In this place."

"And what is this place exactly?"

"I believe you've already been told what this place is." Gregory said calmly.

"Yes, yes, but I don't quite get it."

"You're in your heart, child."

"And yet it's a real, physical place?" Asked Mr. Smith.

"Indeed." Said Gregory.

"So I could stay here for some time?"

"Yes, I think you could. I dare say that you ought to. You could learn a lot here. Really live, for a while. Or forever. It really is your choice, my dear lad."

"But I have a job at home-"

"Tell me, do you really care for it that much? Does anyone there even know your true name? I don't think so."

Mr. Smith sighed. "I suppose that's true."

Grandpa Gregory shrugged and stood. "Think about it."

#

Mr. Smith did think about it. He thought about it often as he spent the next month and a half inside of his own heart. He explored the beauty of it all, he traveled to distant mountains and fought many a foe. He served his king proudly, and he made many a friend.

But as all good things, his time there came to an end. One day, more particularly beautiful than all the others (as each day there seemed to be), the people of the land felt a distant rumbling taking the ground.

The king called council and all the nobles gathered in confusion. They discussed the possibilities of what it was, but no one had the faintest clue. Mr. Smith watched the despair of the people with some measure of sadness. None of them had so much as experienced an earthquake.

He watched as couriers ran about yelling "The news! The news! The world is ending!" One of them had passed right by his side when it all clicked. He knew what had caused the earthquake. Mr. Smith ran to the king and Gregory.

"I have to go back home!" He announced urgently.

They looked at him in confusion.

"You can't possibly be leaving just because the ground shook!" The child-king protested.

"That's not it. It's the tree, they're going to cut down the tree! If I don't stop them..."

Gregory understood. "Let's go."

"But..." The king whispered. "I don't want you to go."

Mr. Smith kneeled down and hugged the boy. "And I don't want to go. But that's what it is, the whole point of being an adult. It isn't about me anymore."

The child-king began to cry, but he was valiant.

"I..." He turned to Gregory and with a shaky voice gave a command. "Order preparations for a procession, grandpapa. Our hero will leave with honors."

He turned and went about giving orders.

"Let's go get ready." Said the forlorn king.

Mr. Smith nodded. He went to change into his normal clothes, and it felt strange to abandon the robes and tabards and cloaks he had grown accustomed to wearing. His regular apparel felt cold, empty, and unsubstantial.

At last it was time and he stepped out into the throne room with the king and Gregory by either of his sides. The throne room was full of people, and they all cheered his true name, and the trumpets sang for him. They threw flowers and handkerchiefs of all colors and types, but it did nothing to lighten his mood. He would be leaving his home.

#

The trek towards the clearing where Gregory had found him had been eerily silent. The trees seemed stiff and the flowers seemed washed out. The songs of the birds were muted, and the shine of the sun was overshadowed by storm clouds. And yet, it was still of immense beauty to Mr. Smith.

They arrived at the clearing much too soon, where the tree stood as tall and proudly knotted as always, and where the pond was as deeply reflective as it could be, as if it meditated on the changes within Mr. Smith.

"I'm going to miss you terribly!" Exclaimed the child-king.

"And I." Said Gregory.

Mr. Smith could not help but feel great love for them. He drew them both into an embrace. "Thank you for everything, you two. I-"

"We know." Gregory said gently. "But now, you must go."

Mr. Smith nodded and disregarded the irksome lump in his throat. "Do I go the same way I came?"

Gregory shook his head. "No, they're detached. You must go through there." He pointed at the pond.

Mr. Smith nodded and took a step towards the water before he stopped. He turned around and walked up to the king. He handed him his briefcase. "So that you remember."

The young boys eyes freely released tears. He opened the briefcase and pulled out the map. He handed it to Mr. Smith. "So that you r-remember me."

And with map in hand, Mr. Smith walked into the pond and was soon enveloped entirely in its warmth.

#

It was the gasping that he heard first. Mr. Smith opened his eyes as he walked out of the pond dripping wet with cold, mucky water, and saw that another group had gathered to greet him. Though this one was much less admirable. People stared at him in horror and disgust as he made his way to the tree, by which a group of woodchoppers were ready to get to work. He was well aware that everyone thought him to be some freak. He didn't particularly care.

Finally he arrived at the base of the tree and sat among its roots with his back against the trunk. He sat there for quite some time before anyone even dared to move or speak.

The first was the mayor of the town. "Excuse me, mister-"

Mr. Smith looked at him expectantly. "Yes?"

"It's just... well, you see, we're about to cut down this tree and in order to do that we're going to need you to move."

Mr. Smith pretended to evaluate the option for a while, and he stood up. Everyone sighed in relief and the woodchoppers began to load up when he spoke again.

"Actually I think I'll stay right here."

And so he did. They all bargained and pleaded and pretended to reason with him, but it was to no avail. The town council, so as to keep up appearances, refrained from having anybody use violence, and as such Mr. Smith stayed in front of the tree. They decided on out-waiting him. Surely, Mr. Smith had to eat and sleep at some point. He was human, after all.

And so there he stood. One man, one purpose, one tree, one task. That was the beginning of his work. The work was of such a nature that there was hardly any person in the world that could quite understand exactly what it consisted of except for, of course, Mr. Smith.

All that could be said of it is this: it was a noble and loving work, and it was of an infinite nature in all aspects of its being. It was infinitely satisfying, infinitely valorous, infinitely worthwhile, and infinitely enjoyable to our dearly beloved Mr. Smith.

For days and nights and years and decades he forwent all meals and rest, as he sustained himself in the worthiness of his deed. He did it all for the place. And such was his love that he stood before that sky-yearning tree forever. And he was self-sworn to protect the place, and he was self-sentenced never to return to it.

#

Such was the tale of

Mr. Smith