So where am I going? I'm flying from San Jose, to Los Angeles, to Honolulu, to Guam, to Yap. It'll take about 15 hours. We stay there six days, do a one-hour hop to Palau, stay five days, do a 9 hour trip to Pohnpei, stay a week, and then travel home via connections so obscure they'll take three days.

I'm going to meet up with my brother Embry in Honolulu, and be with him for the three weeks of the trip. The idea is that we'll do a lot of snorkeling and SCUBA diving together, the Micronesian islands of Yap, Palau, and Pohnpei being primo spots for this.

Embry's five years older than me, and we haven't spent all that much time together over the years. We weren't very close growing up, and as adults we've lived far apart. But he's my flesh, my brother, we have the same DNA, he's the only other person who remembers where all the furniture was in our childhood home in Louisville, Kentucky. The only other person who remembers my parents when they were in their forties. Fellow veteran of the wonder years.

Embry and I have been talking about this trip for months now. In a way, it's a retirement present to myself. My treat. Summer isn't a great time to go to Micronesia, and now I'm free to go at the best season. I really would have liked to bring my wife along, but she has to work.

I was wondering whether to bring my laptop on this trip, but I did. Slight fear of it getting stolen or somehow getting wet — one imagines the Pacific islands as dripping in moisture. But it's five years old, so if I lose it, it's not the end of the world. At one point I was thinking I should leave it at home so as to have a total break from my ordinary life — from the writing and the blogging. Well, okay, I'm not gonna blog during this trip, it wouldn't be practical with, like coconut-shell modems. But, after all, writing is nearly my favorite thing to do. If I enjoy it so much, why feel like I should quash it?

I'm thirty thousand words into a satiric cyberpunk novel called Mathematicians in Love that I'm digging a lot. It's coming along in that nice easy way, almost as relaxing a reading someone else's book. I write a few hours a day to find out what comes next. Another reason for bringing the laptop is that the journal is good company, a friendly ear, my favorite form of psychotherapy. When I get back I can of course mine these notes for a series of blog entries — which is what's happening now.

A big trip like this, so far around the asscheek of the globe, I wonder if I'll make it back. What if I just stayed there for good? Hard to visualize me doing that. The last few weeks I've been wondering if I'll even survive: plane crash, drowning, shark-bite, cone-shell envenomation — I'm, like, let it come down, I'm going. I need this break. I'm very stoked.

I wonder if they do have cone shells in Micronesia, or if they're just down in the Southern hemisphere. I learned about them from Stephen Wolfram years ago; their shells are decorated with patterns resembling the spacetime trails of gnarly one-dimensional cellular automata. My publishers are putting a cone shell picture on the cover of my non-fiction book, and I have some alien cone shells as characters in my novel in progress. I recently learned quite bit about cone shell venom in articles on “conotoxins” that I found on the web.

***

Now I'm on the plane from Honolulu to Guam, a seven hour flight. Sitting next to a Yapese man from Guam, in fact, an unusual-looking fellow, a cross between Polynesian and Asian, as you'd geographically expect. Like Filipinos, with maybe touches of Latino and Indian and African mixed as well. He tells me that parrot-fish are very good to eat.

I'm flying to Micronesia! A place I've wanted to visit for my whole life.

We're over the empty Pacific now. Lots of little clouds down there, like a field of Brussels sprouts or miniature cabbages or bolls of cotton.

I took Feb 9 to March 3 off from the blog. I was in Micronesia for three weeks.

I'll start up a long and detailed series of Micronesia notes tomorrow.

***

My disk storage ran out while I was gone, which is why the site's began looking a little flaky. The inevitable bit-rot of digital storage media. But that's all fixed for now, thanks to the Head Monkey of Monkeybrains.

In fixing it, I lost the most recent entry and the three comments on it, apologies to those three commenteers, do come back and post again.

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The muxed entry said this:

If you live near SF, keep in mind the Potlatch Panel on Transrealism on March 5, 2:30 – 3:45.

Transrealism and the Ghost of Philip K. Dick, or, Everyday Life Is Science Fiction

A panel at Potlatch 14 in San Francisco.

Moderated by Rudy Rucker, with Charlie Anders, Terry Bisson, Michael Blumlein, Richard Kadrey, and John Shirley

One of the blurbs on Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly referred to the book as “transcendental autobiography.” Inspired by this, Rucker coined the name “transrealism” for the practice of writing about one's immediate perceptions in a fantastic or science-fictional way. Paraphrasing a remark by Robert Sheckley: “A writer's first problem is how to write. The second problem is how to write a story. And the third is how to write about himself or herself.” Questions to be discussed by the panel may include, “What are some interesting examples of transrealism? “How to I use transrealist methods in my own writing practice?” “Is transrealism a liberation or a limitation?” “Where does transrealism lie vis-a-vis the borders between mainstream literature and Fantasy/SF?” “Does transrealism have an inherent political agenda?”

Date: Saturday afternoon, March 5, 2005

Time: 2:30 PM – 3:45 PM

Venue: The seedily grand Ramada hotel on Market St. near the Civic Center.

Con Website: http://www.potlatch-sf.org/

For background on transrealism see

Rucker's 1983 essay: A Transrealist Manifesto ,

Ruckers' 2003 Readercon talk:Power Chords, Thought Experiments, Transrealism and Monomyths

Damien Broderick's book, Transrealist Fiction: Writing in the Slipstream of Science

A cartoonist named Jason Yungbluth has doctored My Little Golden Book about God to make a weird and very funny alien-invasion pamphlet called The Book of Zogg. Yungbluth hits all these great classic SF power-chords. (Thanks to Richard Kadrey for the link.)

I wrote something similar to Book of Zogg inside of Master of Space and Time, where I had some Heinlein's Puppet Master spine-riding parasitic leeches that have created a religion of sorts based on submitting to alien control. I ahd this detailed description of a tract about the religion's teachings. When I wrote that novel, I was living in Jerry Falwell's Lynchburg, VA, and reacting to that.

***

I've always felt comfortable with the idea of the Cosmic One being God, and that you can somehow get strength from this notion, although the seeming response could be either a self-exciting circuit of the brain, or a social network, rather than some higher being responding to you.

I picked up a book of the ten Zen ox-herding pictures today in Cruz, from 1200 AD. God everywhere, God nowhere, what's the problem? After the guy finds the ox [God], the ox disappears, and then the guy disappears and the picture is blank.

***

Picture of me and God in the form of Jon Pearce in Cruz today. “In his heart the fool hath said there is no Jon Pearce.” Mathcs 7.3.

***

Here's an excerpt, kind of relevant, from The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.

***

If I say that everything is a computation, I’m saying that everything is a deterministic process. And that means that reality is a weave of logical if-then statements, with each phenomenon linked to a cause.

As an extreme example of universal automatism, Wolfram suggests that if we trace the world’s computations all the way back, there may be some underlying supercomputation that generates not only the entire cosmos but also the underlying fabric of space and time.

But then, of course, we’d have to ask why that particular supercomputation exists.

This leads to what is sometimes called the superultimate why question, “Why is there anything?” The question is inherently unanswerable, for no proposed solution can be enough.

Given that the superultimate why question is impossible to answer, it’s in some sense meaningless — but such a criticism doesn’t remove the question’s sting. The question can never be answered, yet it is not emotionally meaningless.

Even if Wolfram were right, it doesn’t seem as if knowing the world to be the result of some supercomputation would be of much use to us. We still wouldn’t know where the supercomputation came from. And — perhaps even more importantly, we still wouldn’t know what it’s for.

And that, after all, is really what we’re after when we ask about the meaning of life. It’s not so much the cause that’s puzzles us as the purpose. Does a person’s life have a purpose?

Well, our studies of universal automatism do suggest one line of thought. Computationally rich class four behaviors are in an objective sense more interesting than those that die out, repeat, or have no discernible structure. So a universal automatist might say that the meaning and purpose of a human life is to produce gnarly or “class four” computation.

The notion of gnarly computation as the meaning of life fits in with the more humanistic world views.

The human artifacts we admire are computationally rich. An empty canvas is class one. Hack artwork is class two copying of existing artifacts. Ugly scuzz is class three. Great art is class four.

The nobler emotions are computationally rich as well. Murderous rage forces some victim’s computation into class one termination. Hatred throws the hater into a class two loop. Too needy a desire to please puts a person at the mercy of capricious class three inputs. Compassion is an ever-evolving class four process.

Get the picture?

The meaning of life is beauty and love.

***

Back to God, there's a lot of force in the old saying, “God is Love.”

Isn't this a great cone shell? I took this picture today.

***

A reader (r.s.) writes in that he sat at the same table as I photographed, in L. G. Coffee Roasting today. Cool. In my Silicon Valley SF novel Spaceland a hole in reality forms just a few feet from that table during a climactic scene!

We went to see the Firesign Theatre near San Jose last night — if you're wishing you could have seen them too, you're in luck, they're putting on a free webcast of their show tonight! You'll find the link on their home page.

I used to worship their records in the 60s and early 70s, listening to them on stereo earphones over and over. Many of their pieces, notably We're All Bozos On This Bus, are great science-fiction, and indeed the boys exerted quite a strong influence on my style, extending even to this day. I share their interest in being funny and serious at the same time. Satire.

Seeing them at this late date is a bit melancholy — the nostalgia thing — but they were in good voice, and seemed as cantankerously lively as ever. One funny bit, Phil Austin pretends to be a minister reading a passage out of the bible, gibberish about moss and “their hearts were not gay,” and he says, “What does this mean? [pause] Nothing.”

I noticed that they've toned down their political incorrectness a bit. They did go after the Chimp — yet somehow it seems harder to laugh about Iraq than it was to laugh about Nam. Well, I'm old now, and not draftable, and don't have that same giddy gallows humor.

Re. the audience, I've never seen so many former hippies in one place. All the same people that I used to see, like, at the Fillmore East thirty-five years ago. Dear friends.

To an external observor, it might look as if I'm rather idle. Just blogging, walking in the hills and hanging out in coffee shops. Wouldn't my energies be better spent in remodeling my house?

Naw, this is a high-volume content-production facility here! Check out the sample cover (may still be revised) for The Lifebox, the Seashell, and the Soul.