Time Theft: A Story from the Pandemic

It is six AM in the middle of April and Anissa is watching through a large bay window. She is watching the marshmallow snow plop down from the canopy, melting into the thick white merengue slung between the tree trunks. She is watching a bewildered possum sinking its naked feet into the fluff, apprehensively crossing the brook and then disappearing behind her neighbor’s wood pile.  The jubilant birds are singing and preening around the feeder, unperturbed by the chilly surprise.  Delivering long firm strokes to her ecstatic, vibrating cat; she watches until her coffee turns cold.     

Setting her cat gently aside, she pads barefoot to the kitchen. She swallows what is left, and then runs the empty mug under cold water for a few seconds.  The action triggers a memory.

 “The most mundane tasks,” she remembered an old boyfriend scolding as he eyed his scorched, greasy pan that she had placed in the dish drainer, “should be done with patience and contemplation.”

In a nod to his philosophy, she deigns to give the cup a proper bath.  She squirts a bead of soap into its mouth and, working the edge of the scrubber around the lip, she gazes out the window above the kitchen sink, searching unsuccessfully for the possum. The counterfeit snow is still falling but will disappear within the hour.

Under normal circumstances, this idleness would not be the pace of a typical Thursday morning. Instead, Anissa would be racing to get ready for work: yanking a wrinkled shirt from her overstuffed dresser drawer, plowing it with the iron, and darting off for a quick shower. She would eat breakfast in the truck, leaving behind a deluge of crumbs and small drips of coffee wherever she went.  At work, she would proceed at the same accelerated pace, powered by the persistent stress churning in her chest.

For as long as she could remember, Anissa had approached the necessary tasks of life expeditiously. She did this even though the result was often calamitous: errors, spills, stubbed toes, broken objects; It was worth the risk, she thought, because of a certain calculation: the less time spent doing work, the more time she’d have to create

“Work is for survival, art is for existence, and if you need them both you are usually screwed,” was her challenge to her old boyfriend’s lesson on mundane tasks.

“You must slow down and appreciate being,” he maintained. It was the last significant thing he said before leaving her.

Throughout her life Anissa had worked many different places. No matter the nature of the work, it was always accompanied by a seething resentment and a tenacious yearning for long stretches of uninterrupted time.  Time to compose any number of poems, stories or songs that drifted through her imagination, to make sculptures from pieces of nature or junk, to play music, to draw.

Creativity was so valuable to her, in fact, that she deliberately set up her life to have few obligations. Never-the -less, she remained consumed by the expectations of work. She would save money with the hope of taking time off. Then, some major expense would claim it.  As the decades went by, she gained little in the form of economic advancement, and her art went unassembled, her stories unwritten, her instruments un-played.   

Recently, she decided to act. She trimmed her expenses to the bone. She drastically cut her hours. She had accumulated some savings that would serve as a cushion. She would only work enough to survive.

And, then, came the pandemic.

Anissa now sits at her desk. Today she is writing. Tomorrow she may be drawing. The next, playing music.  From her radio she hears the stories from hibernating voices across the country, across the world: accommodating the change as their circumstances allow. She is moved by the layers of physical, psychological and economic devastation. She watches developments closely. She watches as her own savings dwindles.

 She does not want to go back.

Christmas 2019

The Christmas branch hung from the rafters
In the years after my mother left;
She was the one who did Christmas best:
With the crescents and the bittersweet
and the orange clove scents and the wildflower wreaths.
He could never fill her shoes;
The Christmas branch, not our only clue.

"It's got two bottoms, " I complained.
"Or two tops," my dad's refrain.
My friends were confused by the Christmas branch,
"Is he just too cheap to buy a tree?"
"No," I said, "He's just artsy."
"It's a protest against the slaughter
 of Christmas trees," said his other daughter.
"More room for presents," said my Uncle Ed,
"And easy disposal once it's dead."

We never solved the mystery
Of the Christmas Branch that hung from the rafters
In the years after my mother left;
She was the one who did Christmas best:
With the star fashioned from milkweed pods
And the batter spoon and the potato stamp cards,
The string of lights, monochrome blue
He could never fill her shoes.
The Christmas branch, not our only clue.

It had one bulb, as I recall
And after that broke, none at all.
He took the explanation to his grave
And the credit that I never gave
Just for carrying on,
In the years after my mother'd gone.
And I never had the chance
To tell him I liked
That Christmas branch.

Plastic II

Disposable glove
Tossed in the mud
What have you done?
You aint out here cleaning ovens
Though you're covered in grime
Shaped like your crime

Disposable glove,
You are making a scene
On a day like today when the air is so clean

Disposable glove,
here comes the dark
And it's time to get out of the park.

Plastic I or Christmas 2018

Inflatable doll

Emptiness looms on your polymer tongue 

A circuitous tribute to all you've become

Inflatable doll

Flaccid and dumb

At least the lights and the narcotic food

Wrestle the dark for the traveler's mood

Inflatable doll

Someday escape from your moldy brown box

And float out to sea to choke what you mock

Inflatable doll

Exhausting yourself on the frosted front lawn

A cowering heap, I applaud your defeat

You can only hold air for so long

From the Bottom: An Open Letter to the Kings of Capitalism

Dear Kings of Capitalism, 

I only have two rules when it comes to my existence as a working class stooge. 
The first rule is that  I like to do a quality job. It doesn't matter if I'm scraping dinner plates, pushing morphine or molding the minds of tomorrow, if I'm getting paid to perform a task I'm going to do it well. Nobody has to tell me.  I enjoy the internal reward that comes along with a job well done. If I do something poorly I am miserable. 

The second rule?  I don't want to spend more than forty hours a week (arguably already too much) doing it.  I don't mess around while I'm at work, but ask me to work extra hours and I'll morph into disgruntlement before you can say "pink slip".

Over the last few decades I've worked primarily as a waitress, and educator and a nurse. I don't care how fulfilling or important, I never describe my work as a "career", since to me a job is a job: it's what I do to survive. I only became a nurse and an educator in order to make a living doing something that was personally fulfilling, but I did not become these things to become these things. They are not part of my identity. If I won a million dollars I'd quit working as soon as the check hit my palm. 

Clearly, however, the dominant structure of education and healthcare in this country will not allow me to satisfy both of my rules. The demands of the system require that I choose. I can do a quality job and work extra hours or I can do a crappy job and work the prescribed number. This is why I personally experience a large amount of stress working in these professions: cognitive dissonance. If I try to stick to rule number one I found myself violating rule number two and vice versa. I cannot get out. It is a cognitive dissonance trap. 

The broader implication is that this trap affects a lot of people. People like me routinely disappear from these essential professions since they are unable to cope. This tends to leave three types of people behind: the newbie, the slacker, and the workaholic. The first, of course, hasn't yet realized the struggles that she is about to face. She will work for a while and then leave, unless she falls into one of the remaining categories:  the person who does the bare minimum and is perfectly satisfied or the person that doesn't mind being exploited since this is all she does. 

My advice if you would like to hold on to more quality employees? Stop filtering us out. Stop making unreasonable demands on our time. Stop giving us too many classes and too many patients and impossible tasks that require us to put in unpaid hours in order for us to feel like we've done well. If your turn-over rate is high and you look around and all you see are newbies, slackers and workaholics you may want to reconsider your assignments. 

I beg you, let us do a good job and go home.  It's the least you could do considering the daily sacrifice of flesh and blood we make s for your measly wages. Label  it a "unprofessional" if you will, but you do not own our precious leisure time. 

Love, 
Working Class Stooge 

Moonlight

The moon is merely a place to die
It's no gruyere or pizza pie
Cold and blunt as a maniac's knife
Like the lump in the throat of the executioner's wife

The moon is like love, if your love's gone dry
And the dust is as deep as a dead man's eye
Lend it your rogues from your prison cells
They'll ball like babes in the belly of hell

Gods emerge from its pitch black holes
Drained of power, grey and old
Straining to hear their pretty harps
But there is no home in the endless dark

Press Release from the Guerilla Science Desk!

New hypothesis concerning consciousness: consciousness as a state of visible light (or visible light as a state of consciousness). Whatever, they are the same fucking thing.

by Lara Samuels

Introduction: 

First of all, I don't think I'm a total nut job. I am a skeptic and an agnostic. I do not embrace pseudoscience of any kind. However, I have developed what I think is a plausible hypothesis concerning consciousness that I have not seen anywhere else in my extensive (not) research of the subject and, quite frankly, it is impossible to talk about consciousness, or even physics for that matter, without sounding like a whackjob.

So, screw it, here it goes.

Here are some things I know just from taking basic science classes over the years and most of them will be relevant when I propose my hypothesis concerning consciousness. None of these things is in anyway radical or controversial and I'm going to cover them as briefly and concisely as possible:

1. Visible light has no mass, sometimes behaves like a wave, and sometimes like a particle. It is a component of the electromagnetic spectrum (EMS), specifically those wavelengths from about 400 nm to about 700 nm. The rest of the EMS is not visible, since our eyes have not evolved to “see” it, but it is detectable none the less.

2. Visible light energy, like all energy,  is neither created nor destroyed, but it can change to another form. For example, solar energy can be converted to electrical energy and then to the mechanical energy in your blender. However, during conversion to other states, some of this energy is "lost"  as heat (thermal energy). This heat dissipates through atoms and molecules and many propose the notion of "heat death": that all the usable energy in the universe will eventually become heat. It's as though usable energy is "concentrated" but will eventually diffuse evenly through the universe. Kind of like a gas...

3. Photosynthesis is a cellular process that algae, plants and photosynthetic bacteria perform, taking the energy from visible light (not, incidentally, the remaining forms of EMS) and transferring it to chemical bond energy. This chemical energy exists in all of the bonds in all of the molecules in our bodies. So, yes, you have sunlight in your tissues; no wonder you are glowing! Without photosynthesis, visible light would just bounce off the planet and return to the universe unchanged. In other words, it is photosynthetic organisms that trap this energy in chemical bonds. You should thank them every day. 

 4. Combustion occurs when hydrocarbons reacts with oxygen to produce carbon dioxide and water. If this process is fast and involved a high concentration of carbon based matter, heat and light are released. If this process is slow (as in decomposition) then the energy is released as heat, but there is no visible light released that can be detected by the human eye. Combustion is in essence the opposite of photosynthesis, since in photosynthesis, carbon dioxide and water produce hydrocarbons and oxygen. In combustion, oxygen is “fixed” into carbon dioxide (I put it in quotes because I've never heard a chemistry teacher refer to oxidation as "fixing", and it may not be the right word since CO2 is a gas, not a solid). In photosynthesis, carbon dioxide is fixed into hydrocarbons (now that's definitely correct!) 

Hypothesis Concerning Consciousness 

Okay this is it: I contend that consciousness is visible light energy stored in chemical bonds. 

In this view, consciousness is perhaps analogous to a “state” of light (or maybe EMS is a “state” of consciousness?), much like gases, liquids and solids are states of matter. I'm going to say that light is analogous to the gaseous state of consciousness and that consciousness is the solid state. I'm not sure about heat but I think it's involved. Maybe analogous to a liquid state? I have to get high again and figure that one out. 

The mechanism by which "gaseous" light is fixed into its solid state (consciousness) is photosynthesis. Note that in this view consciousness is a state of visible light only, since these are the wavelengths of light utilized by photosynthetic organisms. It is unclear whether other forms of EMS are also consciousness, or perhaps represent different stages of development along what might be analogous to a “birth/death” cycle, where shorter wavelengths are a type of pre-consciousness and longer wavelengths are the product of consciousness deteriorating. 

When chemical bonds are broken and energy is released in the form of heat during normal physiological processes,  a body experiences consciousness. The rest of the "stored" consciousness will be released when the body decomposes, but since bonds are no longer being broken at a high enough rate, the subjective sensation of consciousness is no longer felt. When a body is burned, the release of consciousness is so dramatic that the light is visible to the human eye in the form of fire. So, yes, fire is consciousness too. 

Implications:

There are several implications here, besides the implication that I have gone over the deep end and perhaps need psychiatric help. 

First, the implication is that consciousness permeates all living matter,  and even non-living matter that was once alive. The degree of consciousness may depend on cellular activity. For example, the brain breaks the most bonds of all and therefore may be the most conscious, but in this model, my arm is also "conscious", so is my cat, my house plant, the spider crawling across my desk and even my wooden desk. But if the subjective sensation of consciousness is only experienced when these bonds are broken, then inanimate objects or living things that utilize less energy may be less conscious.

Metaphysically, my proposal means practically nothing except that the consciousness I am experiencing is perhaps more eternal than my physical body. However,  it does not necessarily follow that consciousness itself  is eternal.

Additionally, the model does not imply "life after death" for the individual person, only the consciousness that permeates that person. Once released back into the "sea" of photons, the consciousness is no longer a cohesive whole as it was in the body. The process I have described is analogous to decomposition: when my body decomposes the atoms will not reform into "me" again, but they will find their way separately to other organisms. Same with the photons. Once they've been converted back into light they may wind up in other conscious beings, but they will not reform my being. Further, the things that constitute a person, that is,  the memories, personality, psychology, etc. of a person certainly die when the body dies and that person ceases to exist. 

Finally, it does not follow that consciousness/visible light is “god” or has any role in the creation of life (though it could).  This hypothesis is compatible with established scientific theories concerning evolution. 

Conclusion

It is important to note that this hypothesis is just that, a hypothesis. It is also a testable hypothesis. I'm not smart enough to come up with an experiment but some things come to mind. For example, we are now capable of artificial photosynthesis and I'm wondering if this could somehow be linked to AI. There may be mathematical approaches to the problem. There also may be some detectable differences between organisms that utilize chemosynthesis along the ocean floor and those of us that are entirely dependent on photosynthesis. 

Why am I even bothering to think about this crazy stuff in the first place? The real reason? The same reason people cling to religion: because people they love die and they can't handle it. I fully confess that it is only after my friend Gig's death that I struggled to find something plausible but somehow comforting to explain his absence. 

 I am comforted by the idea that the elements of my friend Gig's consciousness are still floating around out there, albeit in separate quanta that will never reform into him. I also am comforted by the fact  that what I can feel permeating my body is actually light and that the animals, plants and fungi I know and love are also permeated with consciousness though their subjective experiences may be different than mine. It gives me a satisfying kinship with the universe. 

So, yes, I stumbled upon this idea during an philosophical and perhaps even religious quest, but the principles involved are firmly rooted in science and are therefore testable by minds far greater than my own.