Coffee, Chance & Quasimodo

I’m depressed. A black mood, too heavy for the blues, while my guitar gently creeps into the shadows behind me. I can’t play today. Usually an hour or two of soaring, deafening guitar-playing will lift me out of this, invading every cell in my body with interstitial minor keys and effortless improvised solos, but not today. It’s already three o’clock and I’ve yet to taste my first coffee. The day is practically over. If I want to go out it’ll be four o’clock at least before I’m ready.

My circadian rhythm is so far out of whack now that I don’t start writing until midnight, with the first rush of words taking me through to the very small hours, and I’m only beginning to review and edit at three. I’ve become nocturnal, feeding the possums more than I do the magpies at my door. Outside it’s a warm, muggy Brisbane day. Overcast and loud with cicadas running their engines all day, just like yesterday and tomorrow.

I finished ‘CHESED’, a complete chapter last week, 11,000 words. Now I’m tinkering and tidying, but at three in the morning it’s not like your judgement is at it’s best. As usual it’s the latter part that needs work. I always finish in a rush, wanting to get to completion, orgasm, the safety of the printed page, final and resolute. Once it’s able to stand on it’s own, each piece supports me, makes me more complete, more confident in my vision; a pit prop, a flying buttress holding up the crippled hunchback, the emptied author. Once I built cathedrals of light and magic with my sword, now I’m the quasi-human wretch seeking sanctuary. Part gargoyle, part green man, and part plaster angel, with clay feet all the way up to the neck.

An old joke we shared, Catherine and I. The Modo Brothers: Quasi, Crypto and Pseudo, and little baby Neo, characters for comic novels that we laughed into being, that we neglected to write down.

After seven years of drought it’s been raining for seven weeks in Queensland. Grass burnt flat for years is growing so fast the motor-mowers can’t keep up. Dams that were down to 15% capacity produced tap water that was orange or grey, but never clear. Even so, television pundits still mocked those who bought bottled water as effete, middle-class, bourgeois fools. It’s very satisfying to enter such exalted company just by choosing to drink clean water. Now the dams are filling again.

And among the floods, washed out bridges and soggy disasters the mosquitoes are spreading faster than a rumour. Mosquitoes are marvellous machines. Light, beautifully streamlined, able to hover like helicopters and dive like jet-fighters. Equipped with an avionics package that keeps them moving in unpredictable patterns, protecting them from surface to air attack, able to refuel anywhere warm blood flows.

Their multi-point landing gear is cantilevered and so sensitive they can land between two bundles of nerve-endings on the average mammal. The only indication that they’ve fuelled up is the sting that comes when the pipe is drawn out, not pushed in. if it weren’t for the slight lag in the flight system adjusting to fully-laden weight they’d get away un-scathed every time. The Lilienthals and Sikorskys, the Bleriots and Fokkers would have done well to model their designs on this brilliant aviation marvel.

This doesn’t stop me killing them of course. I take a great deal of violent pleasure in slapping them into my skin, back-handing them against a wall, leaving the grey outline of their elegant architecture on skin, or wall or wallpaper.

“Got you, you bastard!”

Killing things is so out of fashion these days that a man must take his pleasures where he can.

Time for coffee number two.

I use artificial sweetener rather than sugar, a concession to diabetes and weight-loss. And every cup of coffee takes me closer to the end of a complex mathematical equation. The box contained 500 pills when it arrived, or so says the label. For each coffee I use half a pill and put the unused half back in the little plastic dispenser. Sometimes a previously divided half-pill will come out and I’ll use that one for the coffee of the moment. What are the odds that the last pill out of the dispenser will be a whole pill, or a half-pill?

• Factor in the odd accident which causes me to drop a whole pill or two, or even a half pill or two, or one or more of each.
• Factor in the number of times I drop the box, re-arranging the layered arrangement of pills.
• Factor in the shape of the box: tall, upright, wide enough for a label, and thin enough to slide between two coffee-jars. Will this keep the lighter half-pills near the top? Is there a mathematical constant, or changing ratio at work here?
• Factor in the effects of friction. Whole pills are smooth. Half-pills have a rough split-edge. How does this affect their movement relative to each other?
• Factor in the changing ratio of whole to half-pills in the box as the numbers decrease. What is the probable ratio? What factors determine the ratio? What effect will this have on the larger mathematical process?
• Factor in the specific tipping motion necessary to have the pills drop through a slot carefully calculated to dispense a very few pills at each action, preventing a wasteful cascade of pills every time it’s used. Does this favour the whole, or the half-pill? Or a sub-ratio of the two? Does this change over time as the numbers of pills and half-pills left in the box changes?
• Factor in a child using the box as a percussion instrument, causing an uneven Brownian motion to sort and sift halves and wholes. What effect does the rhythm the child uses have on the distribution? What if an adult with a better sense of rhythm and rhythmic imagination (me) does this? Will a samba have a different effect to a tango? Will it be different if I tap on the box with my fingers or shake it like a maraca?
• Factor in the effect of each of these sub-factors on each other.
• In the end does it come down to either/or? What factors determine that?

This is the sort of (disturbingly obsessive) calculation that leads me to favour willed action over random chance as the major determinant in what happens to us. The mathematics of chance are so damned complex that the willed application of personal energy seems to have the advantage in terms of Occham’s razor. The simplicity of thinking in a straight line pushes a lot of mathematics to the kerb. Focussing all of your personal power, physical, mental and psychic, cuts through a lot of crap.

Magic works. It doesn’t work for everyone and it doesn’t work all the time, but it works. Just like everything else, that is. Knowledge, skill, aptitude, practice and circumstance have a large thumb on the scales. The chances of me potting a three-point dunker in an NBA play-off aren’t nearly as good as the chances for someone who actually plays basketball, for instance.

Time for coffee number three.

I shook the box.

Randomly, in a non-random kind of way.

Feeling better already.

Everybody wants to go to heaven..

..but nobody wants to die.

I’ve never been afraid of dying, never been afraid of death.
As I understand it, it’s a perfectly safe procedure with three steps.
You’re living. You’re dying. You’re dead.

Then on you go. At least, I do.
And now that she does, and she’ll be there, I’m entirely happy.
I try not to sound eager, it upsets the kids.
Upsets my parents too. But then, they think they’re closer to it than I am. They forget that I’ve been up close several times and had a good long look at it.

When Catherine died they had nothing to say, not really. It was all much too much in their minds that they’re aging; graying hair and slipping memories; ‘senior moments’ my mother calls them. And they both dread the imminent parting. Who goes first? Who’s left bereft and alone to struggle with two people’s worth of grief after sixty years and more? They miss the immanence in the imminent, the Jewel in the Lotus.

Nothing dies really. Everything changes, but the only important thing is whether that particular multi-dimensional point of reference in the universe; your personal, individual consciousness, the You that you are without your clothes on, disappears.

And it doesn’t have to.

That’s what the whole ‘and thou shall have eternal life’ bit in the Christ stuff is all about. I mean, the whole cloud-walking, ‘Hey, St Peter,’ pearly gates and harp-playing thing is pretty average marketing by twenty-first century standards. But the basic point is this. If you connect yourself to the big eternal consciousness of God, you don’t die anymore than it does. The tricky thing is remembering who you are and not just dissolving in the bliss; not that there’s anything wrong with that, I’m sure.

But if you do want You to survive after you’ve dropped the dust-suit you have to make the effort while you’re still in it. Personality won’t do it. You’ll have to do better than that. Individuation, the full technical meaning, is the very least you’ll need just to make a start. Unique is the watchword. You have to be absolutely unique. A clear and perfect lens through which the universe observes itself unfolding. And remembers which pants you left your keys in.

And there’s been a whole lotta people done a whole lotta things before you.
So you’re going to have work hard for Unique.

Luckily it’s a niche market. Idiosyncrasies are encouraged. As are individual contracts. That’s the point of this particular millennium. You can work your own passage to the hereafter, if you know what you’re doing. And you do have to know what you’re doing, oh yes. The big flooding tide of the millennium has washed up all sorts of lunatics and laptop-messiahs who think that they’re Christ, or the Paraclete, or this years Holy Joe with a direct line to the stars. You are advised to avoid these people. If they really know what they are doing they should be spending their time doing it, not trying to convince the gullible and giddy to join in some sad little go-nowhere scheme. Starting a new church isn’t necessary, although building a good library never hurts.

Avoid cults. Can’t put it any plainer than that.
Would you trust Amway to sell your soul to God?

Presumably there’s an infinite number of ways to cement the deal in an infinitely varied universe. I’ll let the physicists do the math on that, it’s never been my strong suit. But immortality is available. You can get it wholesale through a number of large religious organisations if that’s what works for you. Check that they promote peace, let women hog the remote, and have been around for at least a thousand years without becoming decadent to the point of pederasty. Anything less you can regard as unproven. And remember that religion is theory. Magic, even if it’s as simple as prayer or meditation, is practice. And only practice makes the perfecti.

But bespoke tailored immortality is the new model, coined fresh for this millennium. All it costs is everything you’ve got and a bit more. Which is why I work with Catherine. Between the two of us we have room for us all, my Merlin and I. But then, we’re playing for keeps. For always and ever, worlds without end. And we have a lotta laughs and plant some trees along the way.

Why is it harder for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a dromedary to hem trousers? Because the rich man isn’t working on the stuff that immortality is made of. Fame and a big bankroll won’t do it. And God isn’t there to give you what you want. Unless what you want is what he’s got to give. But God, as the saying goes, is a broad church. Which is where Aristeas came in. And where he goes out.

Regards, Aristeas.