Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground.

Rocket summer…

Ray Bradbury, “Rocket Summer,” The Martian Chronicles

Last night, despite being exhausted from work, I stayed up to watch the Falcon 9 launch. It was beautiful and amazing, despite the webcast dropping frames like crazy as people piled on to watch in the final minutes before launch.

I love me some rockets. Scoff if you will, make your smug penis jokes as you sip your no-fat latte and contemplate the meaninglessness of the Cosmos, but I love me some rockets.

Rockets are the vehicles of dreams.

Goddard wasn’t just some guy who thought up a crazy idea of riding explosions into outer space. He was a guy with a vision, and that vision was Mars. The rest was just the question of how to get there. Look at the whole history of rocketry and you’ll see that pattern — crazy dreamers building crazy, implausible seeming vehicles to fulfill those dreams. And they dreamed us right into Earth orbit, right to the damn Moon itself. They dreamed our robots to Venus and Mercury and Mars, to Jupiter and Saturn and Uranus and Neptune, to asteroids and comets, and soon to even the Dwarf planets Ceres and Pluto. They dreamed the Voyager probes to the very edge of interstellar space.

Rockets aren’t just neat because they are incredible technology, hugely complex machines that showcase so much human ingenuity that it takes your breath away. They’re neat because they are the perfect representations of our better selves. Our crazy dreaming selves.

This one seemed special, the Falcon 9 and its Dragon capsule that it sent to Earth orbit for a date with a space station. Such a mundane task, really, just a cargo run to the station, another yawner in low Earth orbit, gosh haven’t we seen this before? But it is new, because it is a private company, and one with a visionary leader who sees way beyond making some money doing milk runs for NASA and other companies. Like Goddard, Elon Musk dreams of Mars, and has boldly promised it in a decade.  So this launch felt like the start of something, as the private space race gathers steam and we stand, maybe, just perhaps, if we are daring enough, and let ourselves be those crazy dreamers, on the cusp of a new era.

I keep thinking of Heinlein and other classic SF authors. Like maybe, at last, we can claim their future, the one where humanity strides out into space and to the stars. Grabs ahold of adventure and possibility and exploration. I look at my country in particular, this U.S. of A, and well, one can be forgiven if it sometimes seems as if we’re a bit jaded, a bit tired, a bit under-motivated, content to sit on a crumbling empire and talk about how great we are while we fiddle with our iphones. But this stuff — immigrant driven , in the best American fashion! — gives me hope. Like maybe we have something in us yet, some crazy dreaming. Maybe we can stop being the cranky old empire trying to hold onto its ill-gotten gains, and become starry-eyed explorers and dreamers and makers. Like we can be our best, and not our worst.

[And yes, I went silent again. End of semester stress. Now over, so hopefully some kind of real blogging routine will come into being...]

Everything, it feels like, is a fight. Fixing this life, making a life, learning to be a real boy. Learning to live in passion, learning to connect to people in real ways.

Learning to be able to be alone so I can feel less lonely.

At night, I often go to bed with a movie on the DVD player. One I’ve seen a million times, the volume low so that I hear just a bit of murmur and feel the flickering light play over me. White noise so that I can drown out my head, focus on something else. White noise and white light so I don’t have to face myself in the darkness.

If I face myself, I might have to face all the tiny failures, every day. Because everything is a battle, and I lose so many small ones, everyday, especially with people. Not knowing how to talk to people, or just hang, or whatever, moments of possibility that trail off into silence and awkwardness. One of those today, a moment of possibility, slow-motion fled from, gone.

Fuck, fuck, fuck.

So much has changed over the last few years, so much that is good and amazing. I look at myself today and it’s hard to believe that this person has any sort of continuity with the barely walking wreck of just three or four years ago. I’m on fire with enthusiasm for learning, lost in a geekgasm over science and math. I’m better at that social stuff than I’ve ever been, not that I’m great but I’m better, and…

That’s precisely the problem. I’ve tasted possibility, tasted being alive, and now every part of me is yearning for it, hungry for it, wanting to experience the whole world and all the connection possible, and every damn day these little failures, these little bits of Old Gregory rising up and kicking me in the nuts. Every day a fight to not slink away from the moments of possibility, and every day the moments missed.

In the dark of night, if I don’t drown it out, I might have to face this Gregory, this new one, and feel the full ache of my body for the world and for life. This Gregory is the one that terrifies me. Not the old one, whom I knew well. I was comfortable with him. I knew the game, knew the score. Safe. Secure. With no possibility, sure, but that meant a level of safe numbness could be maintained. A lie, that, of course, because what was numbness was actually death.

But I knew him, and the aches were dull, distant.

This one, now, this new one, a moth drawn to those flames, those moments, yearning to be consumed in them, he scares the fuck out of me. And so I lose battles as I clamp down on him, slink away, say no to another possibility.

People congratulate me on the success I’ve had, the progress I’ve made, with nothing but love and the best of intentions, and I wonder if they know how hard it is, all the time, to be with them, to talk to them, to connect. Not because they are bad or horrible. Quite the opposite. Because they are possibilities! Those hardest of all things to face.

My greatest fear. The thing I stare up at in the middle of the night, yearning, aching, so that I have to drown it in white noise.

Yet I keep fighting. A moment of moodiness, this, a moment of fuck this is just too hard sometimes.  They pass. I go on, fight another day’s battles, lose some, lose some, pick myself and keep going. Because I know the old numbness is worse than this can ever be.

But sometimes, you know, just…Fuck. With a double helping and a melancholy sigh.

Yuri Gagarin

There aren’t many points in history where you can point and say “this was new. After this, something fundamental had changed.”

One of those few times happened 51 years ago when, on April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space. Something new had happened, and humanity forever after is the species that has touched the sky.

=-=-=

You look back at the early space race, and you realize how reckless it was. Everything had to be discovered, everything had to invented. Everything was the first time, shiny and new and unknown. Men hurdled into the heavens in metal cans knowing full well there was a good chance they’d die doing so. There was no prior experience, really, to guide their actions and decisions. At best they had roughly analogous experiences from which they could extrapolate.

Mostly, it was all new, all seat of the pants, all fake it till you make it. Before Gagarin got to experience the free fall of space first hand, everyone involved had been in free fall, no ground beneath their feet. To steal a line from Ray Bradbury, they had jumped off a cliff and then got frantically busy building a parachute.

There’s really no better metaphor for the modern human condition than the space race. Technology and science have brought so much new into the world, changed the rules so much, that we are always in free fall, trying to find our feet, trying to learn and understand this new world.

=-=-=

A metaphor for my life at the moment, too, in so many ways. This going back to school thing, studying science, has been a lesson in ignorance. I am learning how much I don’t know. As the months go by the sum of new and unknown is increasing, and I never feel on top of it, never feel a master of it. I’m doing well but never feel like an expert or a natural. It’s all hard, and I always feel like I’m on the cusp of failure.

It’s weirdly, oddly glorious. I’m in free fall, the ground ripped from underneath me, and I feel more ignorant than ever. I spend a good part of my time feeling like I could faceplant at any second. Panic attacks are not infrequent.

And I’ve never been happier. This may, he says with a touch of dark humor, have something to do with how little happiness I’ve experienced in life up to now, thanks to depression and anxiety. But it has a lot to do with the simple fact that I actually feel alive. I’m smarter now because I am so ignorant, if that makes sense, and rather than scaring me, that ignorance makes me happy. It is a challenge to face, and holds the promise of tons of amazing things to learn. Ignorance, it turns out, is truly bliss, because it demands exploration.

=-=-=

That constant sense of falling, of imminent possible failure, reminds me of an interesting thing about space travel: why do we call it free fall? It isn’t that there isn’t gravity — there’s actually quite a bit of it in low Earth orbit, a significant fraction of the gravity you and I feel on the surface of the Earth. So why do they feel weightless? Because they are falling. An orbiting craft pulls off a marvelous trick to stay aloft — it falls towards Earth but misses (shades of Douglas Adams there, eh?).

Fall in just the right way, and you can fly higher than any bird ever dreamed possible. You may throw up, too. But that’s okay.

Given my interest in skepticism and science, I think you can see where this might seem like a good title for my blog. But there’s another reason, rather more ironical:

I’m really good at doubting myself.

I mean, really, really good. Frighteningly good. I had an attack of that this week — hell, it’s been going on a few weeks. Sudden deep, dark thoughts, all centered on the idea that I’m completely insane to think that I can do this school thing, turn my life around, do something in science. I’m too old, I’m too stupid, I’m too much of an idiot. All the usual self-bashing, ugly and nasty thoughts keeping me up late so that I’ve been walking around in a bit of a daze. So when I had my Calculus exam this week, which was, um — warning! understatement alert! — difficult, I walked away feeling like hell. I was sure I blew it, sure I was about to get the proof of just how much I suck, and…

Well, apparently I don’t, because I got a 99. That was a 93 plus a 6 point bonus, but, well, even the 93 would be pretty frickin’ awesome. I did all the hard stuff, and only lost those 7 points before the bonus because of little mistakes of no particular importance. Apparently, I get how to do integration.

Which, let me tell you, is not something I would have told you earlier this week.

So bad was my self-bashing mode that even when I saw my score online, after a friend texted me saying the prof had posted our exam scores, I didn’t believe it fully. I was sure it was a mistake. Our professor miswrites a lot of stuff in class, all the time, that’s probably what happened. She probably meant to type 66. It wasn’t until I actually had the test in my hand that I actually could let myself believe it.

See, I know we all go through this to some extent — those moments of doubt, especially when faced with things like tests or big projects at work or whatever. My problem, though, is that I LIVE that. All the time.

Doubt is a good thing, but Gregory the Skeptic has to remind himself that he’s after Skepticism, which is something more than doubt. Just doubting is as stupid as just believing.

To be a skeptic, to truly live it, I have to question my doubt as much as my beliefs. Because, really, when it comes to my doubts about myself, it’s really just beliefs anyway: ugly, ugly beliefs that, if I let them gain ground, can destroy me.

And that’s the kind of crap I’m done with. Where there is doubt, there is freedom — as long as you take the next step.

So, yeah, Angry Birds. I know, what? What the hell kind of transition is that? Bear with me, or bare for me, or whatever amuses you. Anyway, I should say Angry Bird Seasons. There’s a connection, see, because this year Seasons has been doing some different stuff. And the latest addition (sadly not on the desktop Mac version yet, come on, Roxio!) is Cherry Blossoms! In the U.S., of course, there are a variety of Cherry Blossom festivals, all descendants of the Washington D.C. Cherry Blossom Festival. Which, of course, by way of a gift from the Japanese in 1912, is descended from a wonderful Japanese tradition, namely hanami, the viewing of flowers. Or, to give a more accurate view of what actually goes on, lots of eating and drinking and merry making while viewing flowers.

Now that’s a reason for a party.

There’s a lot of beauty in a flower. You can contemplate the colors and shape and scent. You can ponder the weird and wonderful mathematical beauty of Fibonacci numbers. This is worth a party. Especially if there’s sake.

Really, in our holidays, we do so little with Nature. I guess you could say we have Earth Day, which has become a sort of big thing, but that’s mostly a didactic holiday. I mean more like just days dedicated to taking a moment to goshwow about some aspect of the amazing world around us. Moments of contemplation, moments of joy. Moments to enjoy an ephemeral part of the world and remember that we are all ephemeral, and be grateful for the people we temporarily share our journey with.

So me, I’ll take Cherry Blossoms anytime. Though I guess in Tucson it would be more of a Palo Verde Festival, perhaps, which would be like a Cherry Blossom Festival, only yellow and with more sneezing.

Even with the sneezing, it would beat Easter.

If that distinction confuses you, here’s the quick version: Methodological Naturalism is just that, a method — you work with the assumption that the universe, all that matter and energy, is all that exists, and base explanations on that assumption. It is, in short, the method of science. A scientist is free, in hers or his personal thoughts, to think there’s a God — but you don’t base your scientific explanations on that. You stick to what can be “seen” and measured.

Metaphysical Naturalism, as you might guess, is simply the next step — namely, the claim that the universe as we have it is, in fact, all there is. There is no recourse to the supernatural for explanation because, well, there ain’t no supernatural.

My leanings, you might further guess, are pretty much aligned with Carrier’s — if you need a philosophical label for me, “Metaphysical Naturalist” does nicely. I don’t have much in the way of elaborate defenses of that (hint: the Carrier book does an excellent job of that). It mostly boils down to the simple feeling, a very sciencey feeling at that, that there’s a reason Methodological Naturalism works, and by works I mean has delivered the most extensive increase in human knowledge in history. Call it the “If it quacks like a duck” argument.

But while the careful thinking and framing of arguments is important, let’s face it — personal philosophy and worldview is about our feelings, too, and this part interests me. It interests me because people can feel so very differently about the same thing. Some people freak out before the size of the universe, talking in hush whispers that it makes they feel vanishingly small and insignificant. Neil DeGrasse Tyson has talked, though, about a feeling I understand — it makes him feel bigger! Like, yeah, sure, I’m one small being on a small planet around a small star in a small galaxy among billions, but dang, you look up and see those stars, and realize that you come from there, the bits and pieces of you, all of them forged in those huge furnaces, and…

Wow. Just wow. As Sagan so poetically put it, deep down we know that is where we come from, and we long to return to the stars.

We aren’t just in the Cosmos –we’re part of it, completely bound up. To borrow another Sagan line, we are the Cosmos trying to know itself. That is a goose pimple sort of feeling right there.

Which brings me to that feeling part of my Naturalism. I have to draw on Sagan here again, from something he said about the idea of the afterlife in The Demon Haunted World. Sure, there might be one — unlikely, but heck, let’s go with the possibility for a moment. So what? Sagan’s idea was basically that he’ll deal with it when it comes — right now, he’s busy! There’s so much to do here, right now, in this life, this universe, that, well, the afterlife can wait.

My Google Calendar is filled up with appointments with the here and now, with this huge, overwhelming, entrancing Cosmos. If there is something more than the natural world as we know it (and leaving aside the incoherence lurking in such an idea for the moment), well, I’m busy, dammit.

Or, to put it another way, it’s simply that this is enough for me (imagine me waving my arm vaguely in an all encompassing way).  It is an awful lot. You want beauty? Holy cow, has the Cosmos got it! You want Mystery? It is the ultimate mystery! You want meaning? What, in this beautiful amazing Cosmos you can’t find something to give yourself meaning and purpose? Learn about it, come to know it a little better, help reveal its beauty a little more.

For a short time, I’m part of this. I’m a thinking, feeling part of the Cosmos, able to witness its beauty and splendor. That’s a pretty full plate of awesome to deal with. All the Google Rescheduler magic in the world won’t save the supernatural from the fact that I simply don’t have time for it.

(ps. I can’t help but wonder if I’m the first person to use Google Calendar features metaphorically…)

I’m deeply interested in the ways we think, mostly because it goes so wrong so much of the time, and yet we get it right often enough to do some pretty amazing things. That second part is really amazing, actually, because golly, when it comes to thinking, an uncharitable person might be forgiven for saying we humans suck.

We mistake our feelings about things for facts about things. We mistake cause and effect, causation and correlation. We assume knowledge we can’t possibly have. We live, quite frankly, in a fantasy world most of the time.

The last week and a half has brought this home to me.

Vividly.

To wit: one of my great failures in thinking is my almost insane ability to construct Worst Case Scenarios. So having an exam, say, the last class before Spring Break was, well, troublesome. It was a Physics exam, and more importantly the exam on Newton’s Laws, the one we can’t drop, and I studied pretty hard for it, and went in feeling like I had a decent grasp on the material. I took the exam, and it was tough, but I went away that day feeling like I probably, all told, did pretty decent.

Then I had a week and a half to ponder and think and let my thinking go into insanely negative territory as I awaited the return to class and finally getting back the exam to find out, no doubt, that I had flunked it completely and totally, demonstrated the most appalling lack of grasp of Newton ever in the history of everything period, and what the hell had made me think I could do this science shit, and Jesus, Gregory, you’re just a stupid dumbass who should just accept that he’s a failure failure FAILURE.

I got an A, in case you’re wondering.

So there you go. Thinking gone horribly wrong. It’s weird, it’s interesting, it’s infuriating, and the struggle against it — the attempt to learn to think MORE BETTER — well, damn it, it never frickin’ ends, and every time you think you’ve taken a few steps you suddenly realize you’re sliding down a slope.

Really, it’s a wonder I can get dressed in the morning. That any of us can. I mean, I know I’m not unique in this stuff, this creation of whole fantasy realms of crap.

The aside to all this is that this kind of thing makes me realize one of the important reasons for Skepticism. When people talk about Skepticism they think so much in terms of debunking of alien visitations and psychics and and whatever latest crap Oprah is peddling, but it’s so much more. And one of the best answers to the “What’s the harm?” question is to focus away from specific things and more to the big stage. It’s not necessarily about any particular topic, but instead about modes of thinking. Because the way we think day to day, caught in misconceptions and fantasies divorced from the test of reality, well, just looks where it gets us. Oh, the places we can go with that kind of thinking!

Like, you know, driving oneself to haunted distraction and self-loathing for a week and a half.

And yes, part of those plans were a new beginning in new digs, and really, screw that. I’ll just stay here and settle in. Maybe change the name,  change up what I do and all, but if I’m going to blog, might as well be where the post are, right?

The last couple of months have also been…well, hard to explain. That’s really the general problem. This life in transition thing reached a point where I was at a loss for words. Adrift, confused, excited, scared, wordless. Combined with getting lost in the haze of studying the Maths and the Sciencey stuff, well. There you go.

But really, I have so much to say, if I can find time. I’m already falling in love with how Physics, even just the basic stuff, messes with how I look at the world. It’s coinciding with a whole bunch of other stuff in my life. Everything, really, is starting to look new and different. And frankly, there’s so much going in the world, good and bad. Things that show the glorious possibilities, and things that show the terrible dangers. All fodder to make my mouth wag like crazy. And I’m crazy busy, beyond crazy busy, and don’t possibly have time to do this. But the thing is, really, that all that busy stuff, all that school and ed-ju-ma-ca-tion I’m whipping on myself, well, it’s just getting me in touch with my passion and all that connects me to this world, roots me deep into it so I can feel the dirt between my toes. I gotta stand up and be counted. I have to voice my passions and concerns, in however small a fashion.

So we’ll see how it goes. I make no promises about frequency, because, well, Calculus and Physics are haaaard.

Two cases in point, recent events wise:

1)A girl scout takes to Youtube to say that people should boycott the Girl Scouts cookie sales to protest their evil, nefarious ways. Those evil, nefarious ways, of course, being that stuff about being open and inclusive of transgendered children. Her, and the people supporting her, have the usual vapors that can be summed up with the phrase “BUT WHO WILL PROTECT THE CHILDREN?!” You know, the usual mixture of fear and hate-mongering mixed with a boneheadedness that makes ignorance look like bloody Socrates.

This does not make me happy, other than in the way I joked on Facebook, to wit: they have made it so it’s a moral imperative for all good people to eat girl scout cookies. I plan to do so. I mean, I get to support transgendered kids, and eat cookies. There is nothing but win there.

No, what really makes me happy is that the internet is in an uproar, and people are organizing counter measures. I really hope that in a few months we see an announcement that the Girl Scouts broke some cookie-sellin’ records. Let the bigots choke on a few metaphorical tagalongs.

2)Jessica Ahlquist, a sixteen year old with more chutzpah than whole platoons of older folk, won her ACLU backed case to have an explicitly religious banner taken down at her school. This banner, hung in a public school, was so unconstitutional that it beggars the imagination. Such a violation of church/state separation should even have religious folk up in arms. Alas, not so — most seem to be condemning her as some kind of terrible demonic atheist, and in the aftermath of the judge’s damning summation against the school district, many took to twitter to, you guessed it, rip in to the 16 year old. Including with some messages that look an awful lot like threats of violence. And, of course, because where you find religious bigotry you can be sure other bigotries aren’t far behind, and you get things like this:

Oh my gosh http://t.co/Ra3UdelL—
Jessica Ahlquist (@jessicaahlquist) January 12, 2012

It’s 2012, and that’s downright depressing. It’s downright depressing that a 16 year old who stood up for the constitution is being treated so shamefully by so many. It’s downright depressing that so many Americans really don’t support the constitution, and that so many Christians still expect special privileges.

What isn’t depressing is Jessica, who is standing up to all that bile and bigotry with what can only be described as pluck, a sense of humor, and incredible composure. We can all learn a lesson from her, and it makes me ashamed to think how often I’ve kept quiet in the face of all those little barbs against atheists. Another wonderful thing is the number of people who waded in and did Twitter battle with the hordes on her behalf. A bunch of bigots learned something today: atheists may quarrel amongst ourselves a lot (herding cats and all that), but damn it, we will protect our own.

So yeah, some ugliness that makes me happy, because so many are standing up to counter it with beauty. We have a chance, folks, we crazy humans.

So, so true. And I wish I could say that I am one of those people that, of course, ya know, it ain’t about me.

BUT IT IS.

Damn it.

Right here is the problem with my country. We have everything, frickin’ everyhing, and it’s not good enough. We live in an age in which we live longer, and healthier, lives than ever, and we freak out and worry and complain about how unhealthy and horrible the modern world is. We have marvelous toys, inventions of passionate and talented humans, and we complain that they don’t shave off a few more nanoseconds of work. We have marvelous toys and games, and complain bitterly because sometimes they break down. It’s like we’re petulant children, unable to enjoy what we have, always wanting the next thing, and unable to accept when things don’t go exactly our way.

And I’m just as guilty as everyone. So a late New Years resolution: I’m going to try to enjoy the wonders of the world, and complain about the mostly trivial annoyances less often (Read: I’m going to try as hard as I can to do this, and probably fail more than a little). I’m going to try to appreciate the marvels we are surrounded with, and the people who make them possible. Gratitude is good. Not the mushy, pointless kind of religion, where all the gratitude is placed on the nonexistent, and the actual benefactors ignored (how many graces before meals ever say, “hey, thanks, farmers!”?). I mean the concrete, wow, a whole bunch of talented people made my computer possible, and all the cool things it does, and maybe I can remember to acknowledge how cool that is before I start bitching about how, say, Chrome and Flash have started behaving funky on a few websites. Because really, the benefits I get from these things far outweighs the few annoyances that arrive from the natural tendency of the world to fail to be perfect.

Or, to put it another way, I know damn well that I am not perfect, nor do I particularly want to be, and in fact would argue that “perfect” is an incoherent concept born of simplistic ideologies. So I’m not really entitled to other people’s perfection, right? Maybe I can just be thankful for all the good things that come into this world because there are so many crazy talented, hardworking folk out there.