sci fi idea concerning whaling

A sperm whale who's vocalizations can break apart age-of-sail whaling vessels. 

testing

 tESTING my vocabulary on this new keyboard after it was doused in water. That makes it new. New in the eyes of a god that requires baptism

the friday sads

I have the Friday sads. I get them more and more. It's close to Christmas now. Holiday cheer, couples shopping, children, smiles, conversation, me, nothing. Any time the weekend nears I look forward to the time off and then I dread the possibility I'll try to go into some unscripted setting, a room, a well-lit store, a bar, and see others, single, many younger than me, milling about, swiping the glowing rectangle, laughing in pairs, smiling, together. Me, alone. I work my ass off. I work so fucking hard. I build pride out of a stubborn job, a solitary job, left to myself, working alone, trying not to ask for help. At 38, I settled into working hard to make a family, saving money, buying a reliable and new car. That part is easy. It's the meeting and deciding that's so damn hard. Five years in and I run from anything that nears closeness. I sabotage any budding relationship that shows itself. I sleep alone. I talk to myself. I make it through the week and there's Friday, and I get the sads. I know I'll do it again and again, constantly trying and discarding people I meet, and most of it happens because I lack the confidence or the content to converse about normal things. I get so self-conscious. She's smiling at me. What do I do? I smile back. Again and again, but I never say much more than 'hello,' and her smile slowly becomes a frown, then she ignores me altogether. It's over again. They all end the same way. I react the same way, fear, rationalizing, avoidance, nervousness, and the charade ends again. Many arrive. All leave angry, rejected, hating me a little, me hating me a little. It's over again. Now you're alone, alone. No one looking your way anymore, a phantom. You don't exist. Maybe you never did. It's all so contingent upon that first thirty seconds, and you manage to fight through about 15, maybe 20 seconds, and all you can think is to not get too flirty. No, that's sexist. You manage your sex life as if you were a houseplant. Planted in dirt. Stationary. Blooming and dying off, over and over again. 

Sad. I could have been a dad by now. I could have put a kid through to his adulthood by now. I could have loved and lost, grown together, fought, made up, promised, broken, kept secrets, told the truth, figured things out most importantly, TOGETHER. Nope. I did it alone. All through my 20s, into my thirties, rounding the bend in my forties, that dream recedes upon a mental horizon. Now, age-related barriers arise. Physical deterioration begins. Life begins to look different. Most of it is behind me now. Sad. It's Friday. The dark is closing in. I sit washed, fed, ready, and no confidence in leaving the house, being seen, interacting, small talk. I have none of this. It's gone. I fill my head with wikipedia entries, physics videos, science stunts, and various tidbits of history. I watch a scorpion sting a rat. I see it convulse and die, a metaphor for my social life. I have the Friday sads. 

the chloroplast

The chloroplast is the evolutionary coincidence of molecules along a photon's path, acting like a paddle wheel in a flowing stream, powering the production of sugar and oxygen from water and CO2. 

freed weed isn't free anymore

They freed the weed. I read it in the papers, the virtual papers, papers on screen, dancing in under 2 minutes is a thing, watch me, listen, our culture reduced to munching on a thousand half-eaten bags of snacks, seeing our tribal lives from behind the blinds. 

They "freed" the weed. They released it onto industrial economics, the science of min/max, min/max as a way of knowing, interfacing, turning everything into its 'essence' and then belching out the waste through large pipes, and we, repurposing this economic effluent, making a culture of the underbelly of Big Pot. Big Pot, meet Big Sugar, harbinger of African wage theft, maker of confections, the harvest of crystals for pleasure, written in the hieratic whip scars on Haitian-African backs.

We're all in a big pot. Data[based] entities. We're being interfaced, fitted as you will, with scalar economics, a new language for a big old thing, size is everything, numbers go up, freedom in the equation, being a Greek symbol, thinking within, dreaming within, a new, crystalline infinity of wonder and numbers, and we're the topographical entities, sorted, searched, matched, predicted, reduced to the statistical, a formless mass entity, placed into differential equations, to be is to be measured, when you say you "count," you are being counted, nonetheless. 

They freed the weed and made it a business, the business of measurement pervades a substance sought for its nootropical abilities, us, the wanderers from warmth, the seekers of new, invented by hunger, continuously short-selling the laws of thermodynamics for present gain, sustenance, negation of negation, praxis, love, God, the higher symbol, all to create a now in all its full efflorescence that wouldn't exist otherwise. We are Maxwell's Demon, a mythical Pegasus of 'as if' and 'right fucking now,' acting purposefully, siloed within the limits of physics and time, time that fucking bitch. At some point in the big bang, the white light of information denseness coalesced briefly into a ball of rapidly ordering consciousness, yes, consciousness is within the explosion of hot plasma as it crackles through this universe, and into us with every mental spark, the biomolecular harvest of the plasma potential propagated within the safe and tidy confines of the warm and wet slurry of life itself. To consider the nervous impulse as a simple stimulus-response loop, which itself became a way to count, unitize, bracket time, based in the spark, the propagation of plasma through artificial ion concentrations held behind the selective membrane of a cell, chaos rules, the entity within is the entity without, we are the universe's bleeding heart, crying in pain from its birth, until the moment the confines of its existence cease and it falls back within itself to a yawning nothingness known from within the space that defined its existence, now elsewhere, gone for a while, bye.