RadioParadise.com just played REM’s “What’s The Frequency, Kenneth”, which is all right by me.

Today… well, Saturday, actually, I post these things very early in the morning and then go to bed… was pretty much all right, except for sewage backing up in my bathtub once again. I believe the last time this happened, it was the Saturday before the Super Bowl, so yes, I was due. But that doesn’t make it fun.

Once more, I behaved badly, calling the apartment complex’s answering service (these things never happen when the office is open on a weekday) and bitching and whining at the poor girls over there who get paid very little money, I’m sure, to answer the phone, and who really can’t do anything to help me except page the guy who COULD help me, who never wants to, because this only happens on weekends, usually late at night, often on holiday weekends.

In my defense, when this happens, it’s horrible and nerve wracking. Suddenly you’re held hostage by your own misbehaving plumbing. You can’t leave, because (a) if the tub fills up quickly (as it often does in this situation) you have to be there to keep bailing it out or to try to dam up the overflow if you can’t keep up with… whatever you have around to try and sop it up with (I’ve ruined so many towels over the years I’ve been here… believe me, you don’t want to launder stuff that’s been soaked in raw sewage, you just toss it… I should bill my apartment complex for them) and (b) if you’re not there to answer the door when and if maintenance finally dawdles around, they’ll just leave a note and go away.

In addition to this, when your bathtub suddenly starts to fill with sewage, suddenly, you have no bathtub. Many times when this happens, the toilet no longer works either (you often find this out simply by trying to flush the toilet and having it suddenly overflow all over the place, which is always a complete and utterly unwanted shock, especially since fate always seems to dictate that the toilet be full of the most disgusting stuff imaginable when this occurs). This time, I had my toilet still working (which makes it easier to bail the tub out, you can just dump it straight into the toilet) but my kitchen sink was backing up into my tub, as well, meaning I wouldn’t have a shower or a working kitchen sink until this got resolved.

Beyond that, I often think these people who work for the answering service just don’t care… no, I take that back, I know they just don’t care. It’s not their problem, and they have no motivation to take any kind of extraordinary measures or make extra efforts to see to it that this gets resolved. And I hate this. When something happens that is severely fucking up your life, you should not have to go through a chain of apathetic people to whom your distress means nothing in order to get, finally, to the person who will help you. Worse, you should not have to leave messages with people who simply don’t care and trust them to pass them on to the person who is supposed to help you. It’s extremely aggravating, especially when you have to call your apartment complex office first, listen to a three minute long taped message telling you all your other options if this ISN’T an emergency, or abjuring you to call 911 if it’s a security issue because the apartment complex management just don’t fuckin care, until you finally get transferred to the answering service, where you get anywhere from one to five minutes of Muzak before they get their thumbs out of their asses and pick up the phone.

To say it’s frustrating, to have to go through all this while, you know, sewage is steadily backing up into your rather small bathtub, is a remarkable understatement. And I know it’s not the poor women at the answering service’s fault, but nonetheless, I do try to convey to them just how much distress I am in when I call over there about this nonsense.

The worst part of it is, is that this has been happening ever since I moved in here in December of 1997, and I’m damned sure it happened to whoever lived here previously, and they’re never going to do anything to permanently fix the problem, because that would cost a lot (they’d have to basically install a bigger drain pipe under the building) and they don’t live here.

All this, and I’m still desperate to get that lease renewal notice on my door, because I just hate moving so much, and can’t afford to now, anyway.

ANYway… despite the fact that the new maintenance guy supposedly lives somewhere onsite (I don’t know exactly where or I’d have just gone over and banged on his door, except that wouldn’t have done any good, because he won’t do anything without an official work order from management or the answering service), he didn’t show up for about an hour, and by that time, I’d been bailing (thankfully clean) drainwater out of my tub for about ten minutes, as one of my upstairs neighbors obviously took a shower. (It could, and often has been, much worse; generally what surges up into my tub when the sewage line under this building backs up is, well, sewage, and if you’ve never experienced real, ripe, raw sewage backing up into your bathtub… or as on one occasion still burned as if by acid into my memory, your kitchen sink… well, you just haven’t seen Shakespeare performed by escaped maniacs with chainsaws and blowtorches in your living room.)

But the maintenance guy finally showed up, and for a miracle, didn’t give me any shit about it being too dark to go up on the roof and snake the drains, and half an hour or so later, the tub finally gave an acquiescent gurgle and obligingly re-swallowed what it had so rudely regurgitated, leaving me to clean up a mess that was much, much less horrid than I know from experience it could have been.

Other than that, well, yesterday’s blog drew the long thought dead Mike Norton out of hiding, and garnered me some comments and email from everyone’s favorite Las Vegas stripper and self declared she-geek Suspiria, so I thought it quite a success, thank you Mike, thank you, Sus.

At the thrillingmysteries Yahoo group, one of these fine Aussie fellows threatening to publish some of my work posted a question asking if the Fantastic Four should be considered more a pulp era type concept, or a Silver Age concept, and while that was just ridiculous and absurd (Silver Age. Shut up.) what really drew my attention was a note as to the ‘hostility being directed towards the FF in places like AUTHORITY’.

Now, I had no idea anyone anywhere had any hostility towards the classic Lee/Kirby FF, but if there had to be such bad vibes anywhere, it doesn’t shock me that they’re emanating from a stronghold of Warren Ellis fandom. I’ve never read anything by Ellis, because I’ve had a lot of younger fans go on and on and on at me about him, and describe his work in detail, and while I could say that it sounds to me as if it really sucks with the strength and power of Kryptonian super-lungs…

Oh, this is what Crash Test Dummies sounds like. Hey. I like.

Anyway, it sounds to me like Mr. Ellis’ work wouldn’t be anything I’d enjoy, and as a general rule I avoid the whole I Bloody Well CAN Write Just As Well As Alan Moore Because I’m British Too crowd of writer/wankers. But one thing I do admire about Mr. Ellis is that rather than screw up my damn Silver Age heroes the way many other Moore-wankers insist on doing, he creates his own dreadful and appalling Modern Age characters and inflicts horrifying melodramatic excesses on them, instead. And that’s just fine.

However, I have had some experience with Mr. Ellis’ fans, and I just want to say, if anyone is hostile towards the classic Silver Age Fantastic Four… one of the finest, most enjoyable and most creatively brilliant, not to mention one of the most pervasively influential superhero concepts ever created… it would definitely be that pack of pinheads.

Other than that, Saturday was unremarkable.

As a last note, I just had about ten windows open at once and my computer froze up again. I was playing Radio Paradise at the time and got an interesting eternal electronic drumbeat when everything locked down on me. After a few minutes I despaired and rebooted, and praise Microsoft Word’s automatic back up feature for saving me a copy of this document, or I’d be extremely vexed right now.

And that WAS the final note, until I tried to post this and discovered Angelfire is currently spazzing out and won’t let me post anything, and in fact, when I tried to post this, it not only wouldn’t let me post anything, it completely trashed yesterday’s entry. So Saturday’s entry is completely gone; I have no archived copy, and that sucks, because it got some interesting comments. And if you’re reading this, I don’t know when, because right now, Angelfire is being a complete cybernetic asshole. CHRIST. We build these damned machines. They should do what we want.

Anyway… tt’s re-run season everywhere, so I’m re-running an article from the early days of this blog that got no comments back in April and probably won’t get any comments this time around, either. But I’m pretty proud of this one and I’ve got a few new readers now and I know I never bother to read anyone else’s archives, so here they are, if anyone wants to read this thing now and let me know what they think.

Enjoy. This blog, or something else. Big world.

WHAT YOU THINK YOU KNOW THAT ISN'T SO

I'm an agnostic. Maybe I should have front loaded with that yesterday. I should definitely bring it up today, since the delightful, but regrettably right leaning, Emily Jones has very kindly posted a link to my blog on her own deservedly popular blog. Ever since then, I've had a lot of traffic here, and I suspect it's mostly from the conservative side of the blogosphere... and I can't imagine those folks are enjoying what they're reading.

(RERUN EDITORIAL NOTE: Actually, that was a month ago, and most of the conservatives from Emily’s blog seem to have vanished, including Emily herself. But whatcha gonna do, how you do gonna do it?)

Maybe it's a good thing my chat threads haven't been working all weekend. ::grin::

Anyway. If a lot of conservative footprints are tracking across my blog these days, I should definitely get up front on the agnosticism thing. Most conservatives I know are at least somewhat religious. In the basic dichotomy as to moral and ethical social theories, there are two fundamental bases for all morality. One is 'it's wrong if it hurts someone else unnecessarily'. The other is 'it's wrong if it offends God'. The first is the basis of secular humanism, a moral structure that does not require divine authority to define write and wrong, but that simply assumes that all human beings should be accorded certain amounts of dignity and respect as a fundamental moral and social principle. The other... the 'don't offend God' model... is a much older one, and is based in the concept that humans are unfit to create their own moral codes, or really judge each other, and we require God's guidance to do so at all appropriately.

I'm a liberal, a secular humanist, and, as noted, an agnostic. Just so we're all clear on that.

Now, a lot of people confuse agnosticism with atheism. I just recently had a woman respond to my personal ad by telling me that I clearly wasn't right for her, because, while she wasn't a Christian, she had deep spiritual beliefs, and I was an agnostic. I strongly suspect she mistakenly believed that meant I was an atheist... someone who firmly believes there is no higher power in the universe. And I'm not an atheist, atheists have an amount of faith in their basic religious tenet -- God does not exist -- that I personally am uncomfortable with.

Being an agnostic means I basically admit, I don't know. I don't know if there is a higher power. Or if there is, what shape it takes. Or what it wants me to do, or if it wants me to do anything. I don't rule out the hypothesis that there may be a God... without convincing evidence, I won't rule out any hypothesis. I try to keep my mind open. As James T. Kirk once said, "I like to think that there are always... possibilities."

Oh, yeah, I'm a geek, too. Get used to the pop culture SF & fantasy references. We do that a lot around here. :-)

The phrase 'agnostic' comes from the Greek root word agnostos, which translates as, unknown, or unknowable. And that's what I pretty much said before: I don't know. And I absolutely admit that I don't know, and I try to keep my mind open.

I don't know that God created the heavens and the earth and all things within and upon them in six days. On the other hand, I don't know He or She or It didn't.

I don't know if the Earth is a crumb of dirt on the back of a giant turtle, which is on the back of a larger turtle, which is on the back of an even larger turtle, going down to infinity. I will note, as my extremely liberal mother once noted to me when I was in sixth grade and studying Iroquois mythology and making fun of it, that the Iroquois creation mythology is no more ridiculous, when looked at dispassionately, than the creation myth of any religion, including Christianity. If all of humanity came from one breeding pair, Adam and Eve must have had one helluva lot of genetic diversity in their DNA. And let's not get into talking snakes.

I don't know if reincarnation actually happens or not. I will note that the other half of the planet... the one we don't live in... takes reincarnation for granted, but, hey, they could be wrong, too. I've read some interesting material that seems to indicate there is some evidence for reincarnation, but hey, what I read could be wrong or deliberately deceptive. I don't know.

I don't know if the dinosaurs ever walked the Earth. Maybe Satan/Ahriman/Pluto/Astarte/Loki created all those fossilized remains and buried them in various strata of the Earth a thousand years ago, to confuse me. I. Just. Don't. Know.

Steve Gerber once mentioned a belief a few people used to claim to adhere to, that a cosmic entity named Fred had created the entire Earth, and everyone and everything in and on it, in the early 1920s. All evidence of any existence previous to that has been manufactured by Fred to hide the truth. I don't know that that's true. I doubt it a whole helluva lot... but it's the kind of thesis that, by its very nature, you cannot disprove. To state flatly that a Freddite is absolutely wrong requires a leap of faith, a jump into irrational insistence that you simply know how reality works to the extent that you know the Earth actually existed in 1919. Me, I was born in 1961, so I can't know that. And memory is highly subjective, anyway.

Being an agnostic is about admitting that you don't know. Personally, I think there is very little we can actually know about the world/reality we live in, and most of what we can know is very subjective. I know I love certain people, but that's a subjective feeling, so I feel safe in stating, with certainty, that I know I feel that way.

However, I do not know that, if I hold a hammer in my hand, extend my arm, and open my fingers, the hammer will fall to the floor. Now, I'd bet on it, pretty much any amount of money... it's always happened when I've done something similar before, and I see no reason it shouldn't happen again. Gravity seems to be a constant... but I don't know how gravity works. And I'm willing to accept that, since I don't know how gravity works (and as far as I know, no one else really does, either), it's possible it might stop working at some point, unpredictably. Or start working in a somewhat different way. I simply (boy, this is getting repetitive) don't know. As I said, I'd bet on it... statistics are always impressive... but they teach us that the most wildly unlikely things do, inevitably, occur, if you wait long enough. If the hammer has been hitting the ground when people let go of it for a few thousand years now, we're due for an anomoly. Maybe it will just hang there in the air next time. I don't know. Religion isn't all about God. Religion is about that leap of faith... the willingness to jump beyond 'I don't know' to 'I do know, absolutely, certain basic truths, and I don't have to prove these basic truths because I know that they are true and I know it with such certainty that if you wanted to dissuade me, you would have to disprove them to me'.

Atheists are like this. If you wanted to prove to them God existed, you'd have one helluva row to hoe. In fact, I don't think it's possible. Atheists and agnostics alike enjoy talking about the 'invincible ignorance' of the fundamentally religious... how you can't shake a really devout religious person, because they can always answer "God did it" or "God wants it that way" or "God works in mysterious ways". But atheists have their own invincible ignorance. If God himself appeared in front of a really devout atheist, She or He or It could work all the miracles that She or He or It felt like, and SHeIt could not convince the atheist of anything except that SHeIt seemed to be some sort of entity who, apparently, had powers beyond the normally accepted human range. An atheist knows God doesn't exist. Therefore, that weird glowing being in front of them raising the dead and walking across the incoming breakers and turning water into wine cannot be God. It's irrefutable. Because they know God doesn't exist. That may be a clever hoaxster. Or they may have been hypnotized or drugged. Or SHeIt may be an advanced alien from another galaxy with an interesting sense of humor. But it isn't God, because the atheist knows that God doesn't exist, so it can't be.

As a side note, if I were confronted by a weird entity... or just, you know, George Burns (god spare me from Jim Carrey, please)... claiming to be God, I wouldn't take the 'show me a miracle' approach. That's how an engineer might think. I'm a scholar (well, I'm a geek, but we're all scholars) and something of a philosopher. I'd ask SHeIt for specific answers to specific questions. Tell me about the creation of the universe, God. What were you thinking when you did it? What's its purpose? Tell me about the origin of mankind... did we evolve from lower, more apelike ancestors, or did you just whomp us up full blown? Did you really blow up Sodom and Gomorrah? If so, don't you think that was a little homophobic on your part? Do you still find alternative lifestyles threatening? Have you thought of getting therapy? And, lastly, I'd ask 'God' to explain to me, you sonofabitch, why people who you know damned well are going to rape and torture kids are allowed to have kids... or, you know, walk around on my planet at all. And I'd evaluate SHeIt's answers, and go from there.

Once again... I don't believe in much of anything, if I have to take it on faith. I like evidence. As with the fabled Man from Missouri, you gotta show me. I do have a few things I take on faith, but I don't discuss them in detail because... well, I really don't know any details about them. I believe in an afterlife, but I don't know what it's like. I believe the universe is a created artifact, although I don't know who or what created it, or why. I believe there is some greater purpose to self awareness, but I don't know what it is. I believe these things because I feel life would be grim and depressing if I didn't believe them. But I don't know that my beliefs are true.

And that, essentially, is what this particularly long and probably unbelievably boring blog entry is all about: the rational, social necessity, it seems to me, to be willing to admit that you don't actually know that what you believe is true, and it might not be.

In philosophical terms, we'd call this the subjective/objective dichotomy. Some people absolutely insist that there is no such thing... that their beliefs about reality (which are subjective) are, actually, absolute and irrefutable truth (objective fact). The problem with this attitude is, those people all insist that any differing beliefs about reality are, flatly, false or wrong or non-factual.

This is, essentially, the basis of pretty much all human conflict... when one person or tribe's subjective view of reality is in some way threatened by a contrasting, incompatible subjective reality held by another person or tribe... and neither side of the conflict is willing to admit to the possibility that their particular view of reality might not be objective fact.

And now I have a few anecdotes to illustrate this, and then I'll post this, and get back to watching my NYPD Blue Season 1 DVD set. I used to know an astonishingly intelligent and widely read guy named Dick Pero. When I first met Dick, he was, in addition to being incredibly smart and learned on nearly every subject (which is to say, I never hit on a subject, or saw anyone else hit on a subject, that Dick could not converse on knowledgeably, eloquently, and at any length and in any detail his listener might desire) also very open minded. He used to regale me with various anecdotes about paranormal phenomenon and the occult and he had some really fascinating theories about what the nature of reality might be like and why certain odd things seem to happen and, well... he was a fun guy to hang around with.

Dick also was a near hypnotic storyteller. He had an excellent speaking voice, a great vocabulary, and the ability to explain very difficult abstract concepts so that nearly anyone could, at least briefly, comprehend them. I didn't run into him all that often, and later on, our chance meetings became fewer and fewer... but up until the last year or so I knew Dick, I always really enjoyed interacting with him.

However, at some point over the ten year span I lived in Syracuse and knew Dick, something changed for him. I don't know what it was. But as time went on, he became more and more intellectually inflexible. The guy who had once told me a seemingly endless series of personal anecdotes about strange things that had happened to him over his adulthood working in various scientific labs that seemed to indicate that what we generally thought of as 'physical laws' only worked, well, most of the time, and if you really measured a lot of things really carefully, you'd have to conclude that a lot of 'physical laws' didn't quite always work the same way all the time... had turned into someone else. Someone much less open minded. Someone who... well, let me tell you a couple of anecdotes:

This took place during one of the last times I ever showed up at a Syracuse University Cinemas movie presentation. I was a member of the Cinema Board from 1979 (when I first got to SU) until around... hmmm... probably 1987, or so (I'm guessing)... but once the people who had been members when I first joined all graduated and moved on, the group largely changed. The Board had been full of fairly wild, chaotic, deranged and, well, outright bizarre people when I first joined... Steve Puchalski, John McDaid, Dick himself, a couple of guys named Rich whose last names I can't remember (but one of them dated the same girl as I did for a little while, and he and I and Dick went to my very first SF con in Albany together, but I cannot remember his last name), Mike Schaeffer, and all the really crazy people from what would become my own subclique of close college friends... Scott MacLeod, Kurt Busiek, Jeff Webb, Ann Huntington, Janice Westlake, Brent Burford, Rob Morrison... utterly unique and demented individuals all, who were a joy to hang around with watching Prisoner all night festivals or just Midnight Madnesses of Doc Savage: Man of Bronze until 4 in the morning. But after a while, the vast bulk of those guys were gone, and the kids coming in were 80s kids. They looked a lot more like something stamped out of cookie cutters than the kids I'd gone to high school and college with prior to that. They didn't like weird movies. They seemed disturbingly well balanced and healthy. To be brutally honest, they bored the shit out of me.

But Dick, who wasn't a student, still showed up occasionally, and so did I, for a while. (The newer kids on the Board never had any vague clue how to deal with us, but both of us could point to past Cinema Board Movie Schedule Posters at reviews for movies that we had written, so they had to accept that yes, we were Board members, just, you know, old, really weird ones.) And at one of those movies, Dick and I had the following conversation out in the lobby, taking tickets:

"Darren," Dick said, kind of smugly, because I'd been going on and on and on about some strange thing I'd been reading about UFOs, or something else Dick, the latter day, much more inflexible Dick, simply knew was rubbish, "extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence."

I just gaped at him. "What the hell are you talking about?" I demanded. "Evidence is evidence." I was kinda naive back then.

"No," Dick explained, more or less patiently. "Look. If you come inside and say 'it's raining', and I look up and see your hair is wet, fine. That's an ordinary claim. I can take your wet hair as enough evidence that your statement is true. However, if you come in and say 'there's a unicorn in the garden..." He paused, and smiled his annoying, Fu Manchu smile. "Well, that's an extraordinary claim. It requires extraordinary evidence."

I thought about that for a second (I don't think fast, never have, apparently, never will). Then I said to him, very deliberately, "Dick... first. If you're any kind of scientist, and whether it's raining outside or not is of any importance to you, then you absolutely can't accept my hair being wet as any evidence it's raining. I might have stood under a sprinkler and then lied to you. You have to get up and look out the window." I paused, took a deep breath, and then plunged on: "However. If I come in and say 'there's a unicorn in the garden', you'll laugh at me. You won't even put down your book. You know unicorns don't exist, so you know I can't be right. If I show you a Polaroid, you'll sneer and say it's trick photography. If I bring in a witness, you'll claim we're playing a joke on you. If I bring in three more witnesses, you'll call it a conspiracy, and if we all pass polygraph tests, then it's a mass delusion. But what you won't do... what you will never do... is get up and look out the damned window."

And we changed the subject, because obviously, there was just no talking to me. On certain subjects, anyway. I think we talked about Watchmen after that.

Sometime later, I ran into Dick at University Square Mall, which is a much smaller, shabbier place than you'd think from that rather grandiloquent name. As always, I was delighted to see Dick (it never really sunk in to me, emotionally, that he was no longer the fascinating guy he'd once been and I was always initially happy to see him when I ran across him). We talked about this and that, and then, as I am wont to do when I run into Dick, I brought up something that once would have launched him into a wonderful and fascinating discourse, but that this time around... well, see for yourself:

I'd brought up an upcoming Psychic Fair, wondering aloud if any of the 'psychics' there would be, you know, actually gifted in some way, or if they'd all be charlatans. (I don't doubt that most 'psychics' are con men using sleight of hand and various tricks to simulate paranormal phenomena. I just don't necessarily believe that means genuine psychic phenomena is absolutely impossible.)

Dick replied, shaking his head at my gullibility, "Darren, there has never been any credible, reliable evidence that any psychic phenomena has ever actually existed."

I was outraged at this, and sputtered something incoherent that probably had the words "Rhine" and "Duke University" and, I don't know, various other well cited sources from the paranormal literature in there somewhere.

Dick looked avuncular, and then he stated, quite sincerely, "Darren, any time anyone has done an experiment which resulted in data that seemed to indicate the presence of psychic phenomena... when they've studied those experiments later, they've learned that the controls weren't tight enough." (I don't know who he meant by 'they'... The Amazing Randi and Martin Gardner and those other fine religious zealots at CSICOP -- the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal, that is -- I guess.)

Dick paused, and then went on, with a gentle smile, "And any time the controls are tight enough... the data... disappears."

Once again, I stared at him incredulously. This time, I literally could not believe my ears... that my personal Old Guru Dude, my veritable Yoda in human, goateed, balding, leather jacketed form, was spewing such obvious and idiotic nonsense with such a fatuous expression on his face.

But as I said, I don't think quickly. And this was Dick speaking. So I thought things through very carefully for several seconds (a lengthy period, in synapse-firing time).

Then I said: "Dick, do you realize you've just defined a perfect tautology? If there's any evidence you don't like, the controls, by definition, weren't tight enough? And when the controls are tight enough, you can tell they're tight enough because there isn't any evidence you don't like?"

Dick actually looked annoyed with me for a second, after I said that. And then we went on our separate ways, and if we ever talked again after that, it wasn't about the paranormal, and I don't remember the occasion.

And the Late, Great Jeff Webb often used to say profoundly wise things, at the most wildly unpredictable moments. I've always remembered one thing he once said, when Scott MacLeod was going on and on about how he was absolutely convinced that if I started a particular project (inking some Xeroxes of a comic he and Kurt Busiek had done in high school), I would never, ever finish it.

Jeff responded to that, "Scott, just because you're convinced... doesn't mean you're right ."

Now, I'd like to point out here that I eventually finished inking every single Xeroxed page that Kurt and Scott gave me. And that's true. But it's only true because Kurt was swayed by Scott's impassioned arguments, and they didn't give me any pages. And if they had, Scott would probably have been proved right. But still...