Decibel #7

Sometimes the words flow and sometimes they don’t. So while I’m trying to write this once a week, it’s going to slip a bit sometimes.

Speedrunning Fun

I find speedrunning to be an entertaining and interesting activity (mostly as a viewer) and this little tidbit was too funny not to share:

The fastest way to beat Paper Mario is to play Zelda: link

Breathing Underwater, by Carol Bieleck

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I built my house by the sea.
Not on the sands, mind you; not on the shifting sand.
And I built it of rock.
A strong house
by a strong sea.
And we got well acquainted, the sea and I.
Good neighbors.
Not that we spoke much.
We met in silences.
Respectful, keeping our distance,
but looking our thoughts across the fence of sand.
Always, the fence of sand our barrier,
always, the sand between us.
And then one day,
--and I still don't know how it happened--
the sea came.
Without warning.
Without welcome, even
Not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand
like wine,
less like the flow of water than the flow of blood.
Slow, but flowing like an open wound.
And I thought of flight and I thought of drowning and I thought of death.
And while I thought, the sea crept higher, till it reached my door.
And I knew then, there was neither flight, nor death, nor drowning.
That when the sea comes calling you stop being neighbors
Well acquainted, friendly-at-a-distance, neighbors
And you give your house for a coral castle,
And you learn to breathe underwater.

I love this poem.

The setup is simple, beautiful. It flows in a peaceful way, yet builds, not unlike a story, with a climactic tension of the ocean creeping up to the house, threatening to drown and destroy. The coral castle surprised me. But I also found this denouement satisfying.

More than the form of the poem, I love the substance. It describes a way of being transformed and of living a totally different life that I find compelling. If it’s transformation from addiction, or by God, or by a rational realization or all of the above, I feel like this describes well both the way transformation happens and the way it feels.

The Last Question

The Last Question, by Issac Asimov

SPOILERS BELOW

Below there will be spoilers. If you want to read it, and I highly recommend you do. Please do so before continuing.

This is one of my all time favorite short stories. I’m already drawn to the short story format. I find they often have poignant things to say about humanity and about living that aren’t as straight forward in novels and longer form works. They’re adult parables. I’m also already a sucker for science fiction, both the science and the fiction, dreaming of worlds beyond our understanding with the desire to do so.

After I graduated college, I spent a lot of time thinking about entropy. It really really bothered me. The ultimate heat death of the universe bothered me as an inevitable certainty. The idea left a strong frustration within me. Looking back in an old journal, I see I once penned, “I wonder if the meaning of life is to figure out how to reverse entropy.” In a way it feels like the ultimate achievement possible — a way of buying yourself* not just more time, but all time.

*yourself is, of course, not just you I speak of here. It’s the whole universe and everyone and everything in it.

I’m not sure how many people spend a phase seriously wrestling with the existential dread of the second law of thermodynamics, but I did. And this story helped me a lot. It offered an extremely satisfying idea for an endgame civilization in a way that offered hope and delight. It’s merely a fiction story — it’s not capital T Truth. I don’t hold its ideas as Truth or even think it’s that plausible, but the idea that the universe could start when a previous one discovered how to stop theirs from ultimate death definitely opened my eyes a bit.

Eventually I found a way of not wrestling with the second law of thermodynamics… not a way that was won, but more like the poem above. It was a slow change, not sudden and swift, but a shifting across the sand, like wine. And eventually I learned to breathe underwater.

Today this story remains a favorite. If for nothing more than its personal significance to me.