She came out in the summer of 2020, when it was no longer bearable to remain submerged in fake masculinity. She had grown unimaginably tired of the ever-increasing levels of effort it took to maintain that façade. To look at herself in the bathroom mirror in the morning and try not to cry at the sight of stubble and receding hairline, broad shoulders and square jaw.
So, bit by bit, she told her wife, her friends, her family and her colleagues. And then she changed her name.
The next summer, she and her wife got Blizzards at the Dairy Queen on Arapahoe Road, on a warm summer night. They feasted in the red smoky haze of the forest-fire twilight overlooking the city center from fifteen miles south. And then she saw it: A pulse of blinding light high above the core of the urban front-range, and she told her wife of the vision. She tried to put it out of her head.
She thought the whole process of transition would probably take about two years, and she was right.
Alone, in the winter night, in her hospital bed just south of downtown Denver, no wife and no friends by her side, IVs slowly dripping Vancomycin and narcotics into the vein in her right arm, she watched the news of the invasion on her iPad.
This evil old boomer is there on live TV, bashing her. Literally blaming what she is for his monstrous acts of war:
“Do we really want … it drilled into children in our schools … that there are supposedly genders besides women and men, and [children to be] offered the chance to undergo sex change operations? … We have a different future, our own future.”
She cannot believe what she’s hearing. She kept it inside for so long, and she only just became brave enough to show up as herself. It seemed like maybe the world was becoming more accepting. And then this.
She tried to kill herself in March, but didn’t want to make her family sad. She couldn’t bring herself to do it.
Months passed, more surgeries, more friends lost. The pandemic started to ease. She went to Europe for work. People smiled at her out in the world. She was only pointed at and called a “boy” by a few people that summer. She drove through Texas to prove to herself that the world wasn’t as scary as she had feared. It mostly went OK.
In August, she survived an attack and carjacking by a man wielding a knife. Physically unharmed, mentally obliterated.
Work was OK, almost all she had left, sometimes.
She went to a concert with her ex-wife, it was fun. Afterwards, she cried for two days about what she had lost. She asked to be put on antidepressants. And then more antidepressants.
At Christmas, she kissed a girl for the first time as herself. Held hands. Both hands. Stared into the eyes of this person and saw a soul staring back at her that she hoped would melt into her own. The two of them becoming one, slowly, over time. Learning from each other, sharing with each other. Adventuring together through the rest of their lives.
They were happy, these two women who had to fight for everything they had, had to fight to be themselves.
It was a sunny, July day in 2024, and they were out on the trail, they loved to run together. They were both pretty slow, but they didn’t care. As they crested the ridge overlooking downtown Denver, they both stopped to catch their breath, and to peer through the leaves. And then a bright light
A few nights ago, I had the first dream that I could remember the details of, in over two years. It was an old 8-millimeter film home movie, silent. The kind that parents used to make of their kids, before video cameras were a thing. The kind of film my dad used to use to capture West African mask performances for his research, and used to film me and my sister when we were young children.
In the home movie, I am wearing a pink-purple-and-white-striped dress. I’m probably about four years old, so this would have been in 1982. I’m playing with my sister. This never happened in “real life”, but I think somehow it happened in a parallel universe.
I had this overwhelming feeling of joy during the dream. A family friend had somehow discovered this old film of me, and showed it to me. They were overjoyed to have found this proof of me as a little girl. I was so happy they had found it.
For a while, I thought the friend who found it was the person who had filmed it. Today, my sister pointed out that the person who would have been filming would have been my dad. The dream was about my dad seeing me as I am. As I was. As a little girl, his older daughter. In some universe, this is true. Maybe he did see me as I am. Maybe, it is our universe after all.
The philosophical entertainer, Alan Watts, said that every person should consider two fundamental things:
Your own death – really study it in detail – the certainty that you will pass into nothingness and that everything you are doing will be washed away with the sands of time.
The possibility that you are nothing but a scoundrel – that everything you do is only for your own self interest and nothing more.
These two thoughts lead to other possibilities. If you study them, think about them, you begin to see that the only reality, if there is such a thing, is that the only reason that you are here is to be here. To be the universe observing itself, and that the future and the past don’t matter, because the only reality is here and now, what’s in front of you, around you, the relationships you have built and the care you pay to every moment. Worrying about the future doesn’t matter. No matter what you do, how much you fight the natural tendency of the universe to be a certain way, things will go back to their natural ground state. And that’s neither good nor bad, it just is. People will continue to suffer, people will continue to experience joy, and that you can’t have one without the other. They are two sides of the same coin, so stop trying to get one without the possibility of the other. Just be.
Meanwhile, culture tells you that you must go to school, and then go to college, graduate school, and ratchet your way up the corporate ladder, and that in the future, there will be a reward. And so you spend your entire life striving for that reward, which is always in the future. And you ignore what really matters – the present moment, the relationships, the living of life. They’ve tricked you into running a race, and the reward is either some promotion, or some nice retirement that you’re too tired and worn out to enjoy, or some afterlife which it turns out doesn’t exist – because you get there and you’re nothing. And you’re disappointed by your rat race of a life.
The ethnobotanist, metaphysicist and entheogeneticist Terence McKenna talks about the toxicity of culture in a similar way. That culture tricks you into doing these same things – reaching, striving, instead of actively living your life open to the possibilities of the world around you. He believes that we have become so enmeshed in this “dominator culture” that we have lost sight of the true possibilities of the universe, that are every bit as real as our material world. That our ancestors were in touch with these things as recently as 2,000 years ago, but that we have lost sight of getting in contact with the “wiring underneath the switchboard of reality” because culture tells us that the spiritual (in the oldest sense of the word) is not real, and that getting back in touch with entheogenic substances (literally, “generating the divine within”) is morally wrong and is in fact illegal. Meanwhile, McKenna argues that these door-opening drugs in the form of naturally occurring substances – hallucinogenic triptamines (psilocybin, DMT) are fundamental to accessing this other reality, one that the dominator culture intentionally detaches us from to trap us in our prescribed modes of behavior. In one lecture, McKenna talks about a dream he had which was so initially disconcerting that he believed it was not the truth, but rather a good idea for a sci-fi novel. In this dream, a “fractal soliton of improbability” – in other words, an unlikely and singular event in the universe that in fact happened, intersects with and bisects history in the form of the “Demiurge” (a platonic/gnostic idea of the trickster artisan through whom the universe came into existence) willing itself into existence, 2,000 years ago in the Levant. This soliton had a quantum half-charge, and it split the world into two separate realities – in one, the charge was present, and it affected the course of history in the manifestation of Christ, whose legacy is a series of ideas. In the other reality, where the charge was absent, that idea lineage did not exist.
In other words, the embodiment of Christ in history is a bifurcating event. On one side of that divide, we have our reality, in which Greek science was set back 1,000 years by Christianity. In the other reality, that setback never happened, and the ideas of Christ never interfered with the evolution of mysticism either. So in that reality, both technological and spiritual advancement were allowed to flourish in a way that put them 1,000 years ahead of us. McKenna posits that the beings that are encountered in the psychedelic experience are actually the highly evolved humans in the other reality, trying to contact us and save us from the inertia of our own history.
Where am I going with these two lines of thought – both more or less “dangerous”, controversial or even “crazy,” depending on your point of view? In many ways, the practice of mindfulness and meditation is a way to access the wiring underneath the switchboard of reality, without the need for exogenous enthoegens. This is some of what Alan Watts conveys in his talks – the duality of the human mind – the split between the rational and the metaphysical, the yin and the yang, darkness and light, good and bad, the rascal and the saint. The universe of this reality and the universe of possibility. Watts talks about accessing this universe of possibility by giving up the ego, the idea that you are something other than nothing, that the universe is something other than nothing – a wonderful nothing from which everything springs. To float on the water, you must relax and let yourself sink back. If you struggle to stay afloat, you will sink.
Movies are a way for us to tell stories. Depending on what side of the Platonic argument about memetic entertainment one comes down on, you could say that movies are “bad”, a distraction from a life of the mind, and that they create a desire for unnecessary drama in us. I tend to believe that while movies are certainly a form of mass entertainment, distraction, profit and culture-making, I also think they serve an important purpose. They are the modern day equivalent of the campfire, around which stories are told and knowledge conveyed – sometimes in stealth.
I believe that the core message of a couple of recent sci-fi movies (one based on literary fiction) are actually in line with Watts’ and McKenna’s world views. In “The Hunger Games,” the protagonist hero Katniss Everdeen realizes that the only way to beat the evil and deadly game, the centerpiece of a thinly veiled projection of our society into the future, where only one contestant can live at the conclusion, is to give up. To save her friend Peeta, she will sacrifice herself. After all, we are nothing but our connectedness to those we love. Through death, she will win, by saving Peeta. But Peeta feels the same way, he cannot live without Katniss, so he will sacrifice himself as well. When both decide to die, the game is broken, and the society itself, the sick culture, is destroyed is well. By sinking, Katniss and Peeta both float.
In “Star Trek,” in the original storyline for “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan,” Spock sacrifices himself to save the crew of the Enterprise, and to save his friend, Jim Kirk. With his dying words, he tells Kirk that “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one.” Spock knows that, logically, rationally, to allow the others to survive, he must go back into nothingness. This storyline is subverted by “Star Trek III: The Search for Spock,” in which we discover that Spock left his being, his spirit, his ego or anti-nothingness, in McCoy. He mind melded with McCoy before he died, and transferred his essence to him for safe keeping. When Spock’s body, devoid of his spirit, rises from death, is reborn, his being can be transferred back into his body. This is highly antithetical to Watts’ world view – “Star Trek III” promulgates the idea that your ego is the “bus driver” of your body – that the two are not inherently connected and that only the body disappears back into nothingness when you die. As if to put a fork in the message from the end of “Star Trek II,” at the end of “Star Trek III,” when asked by Spock why he, Kirk, came back to save Spock’s body and being and put the two back together, Kirk responds, “Because the needs of one outweighed the needs of the many.” To this, Spock says, “it is not logical.” Whether or not logic plays a part in it, Spock is right – it is antithetical to wholeness or holiness. As Watts says, the holy are troublemakers – tricksters. Sometimes, truly illustrating the reality of the world requires subverting that reality and showing the contrasting picture. It requires drama, it requires being a trickster. Perhaps this is the real storyline of these two core “Star Trek” films – Kirk and Spock as yin and yang, human and vulcan, emotional and logical, spiritual and physical.
This goofy and impulsive weaving together of the mysticism of Watts and McKenna with the fantasy of modern science fiction is nothing other than a whimsical thought process written down for my own delight. I could say that I am trying to say something fundamental about entertainment and culture trying to subvert itself and poke holes in the fabric of our every day, unquestioning mental subscription to this idea we have of “reality.” But what I think I’m really trying to do is to connect my own mundane, everyday existence up with some thoughts about how there is a middle ground between the extreme view, in one axis, of McKenna – of everything as a façade on top of a hyperspatial mushroom-reality which we have been brainwashed to forget, and between a super-concrete worldview that culture and science have evolved to demand. Our concrete, everyday existence and the culture we are immersed in can be its own trickster. You can access the wiring under the switchboard through cultural manifestations – poetry, the Internet (in certain places), but also through the spiritual and mindful practice of meditation. You are both nothing and everything, a scoundrel and a saint. You are the entireness of the nothingness of everything that ever has or ever will exist (you are made of stars, after all, hydrogen, baryonic matter which has existed since the beginning of time), and you’re also a dude or dudette, sitting on a couch, playing Bejeweled. You are the universe wasting its own time, and that’s OK.
I sometimes ask myself how it came about that I was the one to develop the theory of Relativity. The reason, I think, is that a normal adult stops to think about problems of space and time. These are things which he has thought about as a child. But my intellectual development was retarded, as a result of which I began to wonder about space and time only when I had already grown up.
-Albert Einstein
My friend Jonathan recently sent me a blog post from sci fi writer/mathematician Rudy Rucker’s blog of his memories of Kurt Gödel, compiled from several talks they shared in the 70s. I think it’s interesting that Rucker published this piece within only a week of me publishing my thoughts about my interactions with RL “Bob” Morgan. This isn’t by way of comparison of Gödel and RL “Bob” (although “Bob” did win the California state math championship in high school.) Nor is it intended to compare my writing with Rucker’s. It’s just an interesting coincidence. If you read Rucker’s writing about Gödel, you may even come to the conclusion that it’s an inevitable outcome given the givens.
One thing that struck me about Rucker’s piece is his description of Gödel’s thinking about time- specifically, the idea that time is just one factor in spacetime, and that our perception of time is an artificial perception of an epiphenomenon of higher-dimensional reality. When you combine this with Gödel’s unique way of thinking about thinking, putting himself in a position to think about very complex problems without the constraints of ordinary reality (cf: his idea that the human mind is capable of understanding the set of all real numbers even though Cantor’s Continuum Problem states that we aren’t capable of knowing the answer) I think you can begin to use the idea to think about time in some really interesting ways.
One aspect of time that is quite odd is déjà vu – the feeling that something that is happening to you or a place you are visiting for the first time has happened to you before, or that you’ve been there before, even though this doesn’t seem possible. I can remember having regular, powerful feelings of déjà vu as a child. In one instance, we travelled to Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario, Canada. There were several places there which I was sure I had visited before – they induced very powerful, almost exhilarating feelings of recognition in me. Many people who I’ve talked to about these types of feelings report that they had much more frequent feelings of déjà vu as children. I have not had any of these feelings since I was roughly eight years old.
I think that the Einstein quote at the top of this piece says something about the way we think as children that can be applied to Gödel’s thoughts about our artificial perception of “time.” Perhaps, when we experience déjà vu as children, we are somehow accessing the “unflattened” hyperdimensional reality of spacetime. What is it that makes us lose this ability as adults? Does everyone lose this ability? When you start to explore some of the aboriginal cultures of the world, it seems that not all cultures lose this ability. What is it about western civilization that causes us to fall out of touch with spacetime?
The world still looked the same, but it was different
He walked from the gym, back to where he parked his car
There were still cars here, and people, dirt and beauty
He could smell the bar-b-que cooking down the street
It was the same old world, but the underpinnings of it had been replaced in the night
Everyone was talking to themselves – no, they were talking to thin air
But the thin air was everyone else
The old rules faded into the background, burning away like ground fog at 6 o’clock on a sunny spring morning
The guts of the plane had been changed while the plane was in flight
The re-tooling of the world system had taken place before anything could have been done
At every point on the curve, it looks like the curve is going straight up from here
But things still seem pretty normal
