Science, Superstition, and Scripture

Upon retrospect, there were three collections of books that captured my imagination most when I was a child. To this day, their contents still reverberate inside my skull and, more often than not, spill out into whatever I write. The first is called the Life Science Library, a series published by Time-Life Books. They explored the natural sciences and were also very useful for squishing cockroaches . The second is called The Supernatural, a series published by Aldus Books. I don't know why my uncle bought them but I would read the shit out of them whenever we visited their house. They were my gateway into the occult. Each volume had the Sigil of Baphomet on the back cover, how cool is that? The third was the King James Bible. The New Testament didn't interest me much, save for the story of the demon called Legion (for they were many), but the Old Testament was a blast with God and the prophets theeing and thouing and smiting people left and right.

The Loneliness of the Process

You must understand that there is nothing mystical about the writing process. It's not magic. A good writer is just a person with a knack for drawing elements from personal experiences, movies watched, books read, video games played, etc. and then having enough patience to sit down and use them to create a story that he hopes will resonate with his audience and will help them make a little more sense of their lives. That's hardly alchemy. But that's not saying it's an easy task. Or that it isn't a big deal. Imagination and creativity is a big deal. The ability to drill deep into human consciousness and sentience is a big deal. The talent for stringing words and situations together so that they have an emotional effect on the audience is a big deal. These things require the power to find what I can only describe as inner silence. And the willingness to bear the loneliness of the process.

To Sleep, Perchance to Dream

Posting this at a little before 7:40 AM. Tried to go to sleep but couldn't. For years now, I've been struggling with some kind of sleep-pattern problem. Normally, we all have a 24-hour circadian rhythm that tells us to sleep at night and wake up in the morning, right? It also tells our body to when to begin and to stop secreting melatonin, when to suppress bowel movement and when to turn it up again, all that. It's guided by environmental cues called zeitgebers, the greatest of which is light and darkness. The problem is that my circadian rhythm acts like it's on a planet where a day is an hour longer. Every day, I sleep an hour later than the previous day. With this pattern of delay, it takes me a few weeks to set my circadian rhythm back to any semblance of sanity. You can just imagine how disruptive this cycle is. For maybe a couple weeks every month I go to meetings with little sleep, fighting off the fatigue with coffee and cigarettes. When my body clock comes in phase with the normal ways of the world again, I stop acting like a zombie and wait for when the rhythm gets screwed up again. I'm only thankful that most of my work is done at home, where the delayed body clock isn't a problem.

The thing is, I just discovered that this is actually a chronic form of sleep disorder. It's called hypernychthemeral syndrome. It mostly affects blind people for obvious reasons. And, oh look, someone has a blog about it. I feel less alone already.

Hybrids

It surprises me that some people still think modern humans (Homo sapiens sapiens) evolved from Neanderthals (Homo sapiens neanderthalensis). Our ancestors and the Neanderthals were two human species that had a common ancestor (probably Homo heidelbergensis). Yes, there was actually a time when there were more than one human species on this planet other than Homo sapiens. Think of it like the situation in Lord of the Rings: Men, Elves, Dwarves, Hobbits, Orcs, etc. were running around the place, each species sentient and capable of interacting with one another on a cultural level. Except that--in the case of Homo sapiens, Neanderthals, and the other human races--we were using stone axes instead of Dwarven axes, living in caves and mud huts instead of palaces and walled cities, and everyone was kinda just grubbing around instead of making magic rings. There is evidence of Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals hunting mammoths together, though; and that's kinda like the Alliance of Men and Elves.

But where did the other human species go? Well, in the case of the Neanderthals, recent evidence indicates that they did not exactly go extinct. They hooked up with the Cro-Mags. They interbred with the Cro-Magnons (early modern humans), resulting in modern humans having 1-4% Neanderthal DNA. That is, except for ancient African Homo sapiens, because they did not leave Africa. There are those who infer that African people are the true Homo sapiens, everyone else is a Homo sapiens-Neanderthal hybrid.

This opens a can of worms on the race debate. White supremacists on Stormfront insist that Neanderthals were the reason for white people and that the lighter your skin, the more Neanderthal DNA you have.

You wanna know something that opens another can of worms? Two words: Denisova hominins. They're Paleolithic Era hominids distinct from Cro-Magnons and Neanderthals. Genetic tests indicate that for many modern Melanesians and Australian Aboriginines, 4-6% of their genome comes from Denisovans. Early modern humans weren't shacking up with just the Neanderthals. They were also doing the dirty cha-cha with the Denisovans.

Prehistoric college parties must have been epic.

Das Kapital

I'm going to tell you something that might sound a little out of character for me. I've always been fascinated with plants. As a boy, whenever I saw garlic cloves and onions sprouting, I got the urge to dig a hole in our backyard and plant them. I've done so a few times but our dogs always dug them out. Recently, I got that urge again so I planted some kalamansi seeds in a pot. They sprouted like Satan's minions. Emboldened by this, I've also recently planted some onions, tomatoes, okra, and garlic in tin cans. I water them everyday and encourage them to grow by gently telling them: grow, motherfuckers.

Now there's something I have to tell you about those kalamansi seedlings. They're growing in an old pot with a houseplant. A Lima-Lima, or Five Fingers, I think. Schefflera odorata. The kalamansi seedlings are actually squatters. This is where the fun begins. You see, that old pot is a microcosm of the social struggle in Marxist philosophy. It's dialectical materialism in vegetation. It's Das Kapital with a citrus scent. On one side we have the Lima-Lima, a big-ass shrub that's growing askew because a robber stepped on it while escaping with my PSP and my mobile phone. Against my expectations, that plant had survived the ordeal and now looks to be thriving. I'll call that plant THE BOURGEOISIE. It's pretty and owns the land-er-soil and the pot. On the other side of the pot are the tiny kalamansi seedlings. They are the poor and the downtrodden. They are wretched. But they are many. I collectively call them THE PROLETARIAT. If they fully grow, they'll produce kalamansi fruits that I'll turn into juice or put in my patis. They're useful, in short. But they don't own the pot. And they don't have individual names because they're goddam communists. Maybe one of them is Lenin. Anyway, as the bourgeoise shrub grows more roots in an attempt to keep its dominance, the proletariat seedlings will slowly, patiently get bigger. Conflict is inevitable. Thesis and antithesis. We're looking at the beginnings of Red October here, ladies and gentlemen.