Episode Minus 10: Calamity is Not Your Friend
In some circles this image won Christmas. I also spend some time in those circles.
Not even slow motion calamity.
That’s how this all begins, I guess. Well, this is beginning again, actually. We had a different website that got too many bugs (ironic, eh?), so it’s archived for now. Stralfian mischief is suspected, according to Stu. Been using Medium as a refuge, but things are getting weird there. We might keep posting on Medium for a while, but this feels like a home. Life during wartime, right?
This ain’t no party. This ain’t no disco. This ain’t no foolin’ around.
Things could be worse. The Talking Heads were always fooling around, but they did have a message. It wasn’t all madness in their madness. My friend Bug Stu has been looking at lyrics of certain bands for decades. He sees patterns in numbers, meanings in music, like for Talking Heads, and maybe most importantly, he sees mumbling semi-amorphous aliens about the size of a large potato.
Their spaceships are stored in Lake Michigan, according to Stu. They mumble and moan (kind of like an Eastern Screech-Owl does when it’s not screeching) in ways that get humans to do sub-sub-optimal things, at least from Tomorrow’s point of view. Tomorrow is very complicated and complex, so we…ain’t got time for that now. Come on : ).
I put the link to Lake Michigan there as kind of a joke. Kinda like “Hey, since this is coming out of the Middle-of-Nowhere in the East Midwest flyover region, you might need this link, right?” But, oh yeah, there could be millions of people reading this around the world, so it’s a practical thing to have that link there after all.
And really, the Brits are going to play a role in this story. A big one. So when those millions of Brits are looking back into how they got dragged into this story, and they’re reading this, they’ll probably want to know exactly where Lake Michigan is.
And also, if you look at the image at Wikipedia there, you’ll notice the same thing Stu did: it looks like a giant wasp that’s gonna lay eggs in northwest Indiana.
If you look at a bigger map that includes the other lakes, Lake Huron to the east is a groundhog with a baby groundhog on its back. Lake Superior to the northwest is the head of a rat with an aggressive tusk above the nose. Lake Eerie is a mink sniffing around Toledo. Lake Ontario is a muskrat in the water viewed from overhead, wiggling north to get to the St. Lawrence River (to sea).
That’s actually how Stu and his partner Allie Space-Owl first identified the lakes. Tusked Rat Head, Wasp, Groundhog, etc.
Slow motion calamities are hard to spot. They’re also hard to describe, define, and dissect—in terms of cause and effect. And different groups of people with various histories, philosophies, and affiliations fight over just who or what is keeping things from being better. Know what I mean?
And when you talk about it, people call you crazy or bad if you don’t agree with their evaluation. Well, that reaction might be suppressed outwardly, and maybe even explored inwardly, but it’s happening. The Stralfs know this, and lots more, so they use this to increase the odds that we’ll fight about it. (They don’t have complete control over us, it’s mostly a probabilities thing they’re using.)
They hope that between their mumbling us into making regrettable personal decisions, relational decisions, environmental decisions, AND choosing divisive political initiatives, we’ll abandon the planet for another, specifically theirs, which is worse than ours, which we wouldn’t find out until it was too late, according to Stu.
Slow motion calamities are made from decisions that seem reasonable or justified in the short term. The short-term decisions are even supportable with philosophical reasoning. It’s just that in the end, sometimes decades down the road, we notice that we hadn’t accounted for unexpected little or big system effects.
And there are actually two sides to the calamitous nature of the slow motion calamity. One is whatever downside, dysfunctional outcome, or eventual acute calamity happens. The other side is that it didn’t make people much happier on the way to the acute calamity anyway. “Somewhere…over the rainbow” is a red flag, according to Stu.
You can’t see over the rainbow, just like you can’t see if there’s a car coming from the other side of a hill (I was kinda thinking of the arc of a rainbow…that’s how I got on this). You can come up with why there probably isn’t a car coming, or that there’s actually room for three car widths…but…how badly did you really need to pass right then, cost/risk/benefit-wise, is the thing.
Stu says we’re not very good at cost/risk/benefit, especially down the road. We tend to, under others’ influence especially, overestimate the likelihood and degree of benefit and underestimate cost/risk. Allie agrees. Stralfs agree too, and they depend on it.
“Benefit” is hard quantitatively or even qualitatively. Costs and risks are hard enough to grok, but benefit? Sure, you can come up with a number, you can create an index of some kind for well-being, but for each little decision?
That’s partly why Stu just leaves it at “Calamity is not your friend.” It’s interesting, enthralling, part of life in the long term, and it brings people together, but it is not your friend, not in acute or slow motion form.
Before things get worse.
I’m writing this with a mild case of Covid. Things could be worse. I was twice vaccinated and boostered, and there couldn’t have been much contact. The spread of a virus is like the spread of a bad idea. They morph and go at it again. A good idea can even become a bad idea. Too much of a “good idea” can become a bad idea and become cancer even. But what is good and what is bad and why?
I mention that because Stu has created a story along with some characters to tell his story. If you dig around here and at Medium, you’ll run across Rhettie and Wally, two humies, like us. They are creating a story about a beetle, Bug Stu, who is creating a musical documentary to raise awareness about the impact of the Stralfs’ and their eventual plan (which is now 8 years behind schedule). Stu created Rhettie and Wally.
Yes, Stu wrote a story about a story that has him in it. It has lots of music, poetry, history, science, sci-fi, etc. His friend Allie helped him a lot with perspective, because she flies way over head while Stu stays on the ground, plus she’s a little more of a nurturer than he is.
I got a new nice microphone for Christmas, so maybe we’ll do this as a podcast/radio drama. We already have the trailer, so why not? Here’s the trailer. It’s just a minute long.
Thanks for reading and listening!
Tim