Animal Crossing

After I left my parents' place, I stopped off to spend a day in Providence where my friend July lives with her husband Dennis. July and I dated long ago, and even though I don't see her very often, she's definitely way up in the rankings of my very best friends. I tend to like people who have a 'heart of gold', but her heart goes well beyond that.

So we were hanging out, playing on her Wii, while Dennis was out with his two kids from a previous marriage, celebrating the eldest's birthday. Later on they came by for dinner and cake (Dennis is a really good cook), but right then July and I had the house to ourselves.

She showed me her dance game, explaining that she really knew she didn't look exactly like the sexy cartoon person on the screen whose moves she imitated, but that it totally felt like she did. She danced around for awhile, and I watched, and I could see how she did make all the same moves, but they weren't quite right. The cartoon character had a much more flexible spine, and had much better control over her torso and pelvis, so that while July got a lot of the arm and leg movements right, her pelvis and torso could only essentially arch or not arch, and not much of either. But still - it was dance, and it was exercise, and she did very well. When she invited me to try it, I immediately declined. I may love dance notation, but as a dancer I'm fit only to laugh at.

We also played Wii bowling, and I showed her the hundred pin variant. She'd never played it with the ball on manual control, so she kept dropping the ball too soon or too late, which gave me plenty of opportunity to make jokes. But she never got discouraged, and ended up playing well. Neither of us got a strike though.

We also played ping-pong, which I won handily. She wanted to do sword fighting, and complained that I only chose games that she wasn't good at. I told her it was easy - I just waited for her to suggest something, and then I'd pick something else, thus maintaining my superiority.

It was all playful banter. Recently - well, several months ago - Dennis's kids had given her a copy of Animal Crossing: City Folk, and she hadn't played it at all, beyond creating a character and walking around a little. Since they were coming over later, she was a little embarrassed that they'd realize she hadn't touched their gift since they gave it to her.

I first played Animal Crossing when another ex-girlfriend of mine, Alexandra, brought her daughter Leocadia over to my parents house one day for a visit, and Leocadia had a copy. This was years ago. She introduced me to it, and I thought it was beautiful! The plants were pretty, and really all the images had a discrete cuteness all their own, that I found very appealing. I loved the idea of walking around this made-up world, looking at the pretty things.

So now at July's house, I wanted to play, and she was happy about that because it meant that her step-kids might not realize she hadn't played it since they gave it to her.

So I started it up. Her character had sleep bubbles coming off of her from being unplayed for so long, and her hair was messed up. She also had exited the game improperly, and so the hedgehog character popped out of the ground and gave me about a 5 minute lecture on how to exit the game properly.

After that I checked out my inventory. There was nothing. I had a house with a candle and a radio. And roaches, which I proceeded to step on. There was nothing in my pockets.

I went over to Tom Nook's store, and discovered that I hadn't even met all the townspeople yet; so I ran around for awhile and did that. Then Tom Nook hired me to do some errands, which I did; and then I bought a fishing rod, net, and watering can.

I ran around town for a bit, catching fish and insects, and harvesting pears, and making donations to the museum, and selling things to Tom Nook.

It's a nice town. I got stung by bees a couple of times, but fortunately I had purchased some medicine as well, which fixed me right up. Meanwhile, Tom Nook's store was right next to the Town Hall, which is always convenient; and the museum was not too far away either.

July sat with me and watched, getting more and more horrified all the time. She kept saying things like, "but what's the point of the game? What are you supposed to do?"

I explained that you had to pay off your mortgage and upgrade your house; and do favors for the townspeople to stay on their good sides; and earn money by selling things and making investments; and stock the museum full of insects and dinosaur bones and fish and paintings; and donate to the town fund so the town could have nice events.

July was like, "Aaaaaugh! That's the way my life is right now! Why would I ever play this game! This is horrible! I already have to go to work and pay off my mortgage and deal with the neighbors, and do all that other crap. What the hell kind of game is that!"

So I kept playing, and she kept being freaked out about it.

Actually, Animal Crossing is disturbing on a number of levels. For one thing, the game characters periodically nag you to get all your friends to play. Which I guess is not surprising; except that the typical audience for this game is little kids who have no defenses. So it amounts to very aggressive hard-sell marketing tactics used against small, innocent children, in a way that grown-ups are not likely to detect, unless they've been playing the game themselves for awhile, too.

Another thing about the game is that it really is all about how to be a model citizen, without in any way questioning what that might mean. So, you give charitable donations, help out your neighbors, all the while nursing your own finances and being very acquisitive, decorating and enlarging your home over and over again. And you do all this while being a quiet, obedient person who goes along with whatever anyone else says to you, or risk their wrath. Their wrath, by the way, is expressed in subtle insults, cold shoulders, and by ignoring you or even moving away to a different town.

It's an ugly game.

I actually used to play it a lot with Lauren for awhile, after she got her Wii. I'd asked her specifically to get that game, because of my fond memories of Leocadia. So, Lauren and I each had our own character in the game, and we'd play whenever I came over.

What happened was, Lauren quickly developed a very strict approach to the whole Animal Crossing world. For one thing, she didn't care what any of the neighbors though of her. She wasn't interested in them at all. What she cared about was money, and lots of it. She also cared about maintaining the town so its grass was always well tended. In Animal Crossing, if you don't tend the grass, it wears away until you're left with just raw dirt. To keep the grass green, you have to plant flowers, and keep the flowers watered, and avoid running too much over the ground with your feet.

So Lauren set up pathways through the town, leading to all the different places one might want to go; and she planted flowers along the pathways; and set up rules that we weren't allowed to run on the bare grass, but only along the paths, unless we were specifically looking for buried treasure, or harvesting fruit from the trees.

Every time she logged in, she'd buy out Tom Nook's supply of flowers, and plant them around town; and water all the flowers that needed it (they turn brown before it's too late to save them); and she'd stick to her paths; and she'd harvest all the fruit from the trees (she'd filled the town with peach trees, worth 500 bells a piece, instead of just 100 for the pears).

Pretty soon Lauren had paid off her house, run out of upgrades, and was well on the way to having millions of bells in her bank account.

But the game got to be very dull. Once we were restricted to running only along the paths, and there was such wealth growing on all the trees, and there was nothing left to buy, and nothing left to donate to the museum, it turned out there was not much left to do. So she and I both lost interest and stopped playing so much.

I'm not really sure it would have been any different if she'd focused more attention on staying on the good side of her neighbors. She would have just been running around talking to all of them, sending them letters and presents, and visiting them in their homes. Where does that really lead?

At a deeper level, there's a more fundamental question that has always intrigued me. What sort of game could successfully model real life, either at the personal level or the societal level? I've often thought I'd like to design a board game that would model capitalism, and show it going through the various processes that capitalism is prone to. I think such a game would be like my argument to people, in favor of more and better social programs, and whatnot. I could just play that game with my libertarian friends, and watch them get frustrated with the inequalities their free market ideologies would lead to, and watch them gradually come around to implementing various social programs and taxes and whatnot.

At least, that would be the hope. But it's very difficult to come up with a real model of capitalist society, that libertarians would agree was accurate, and that would still be simple enough to play as a game.

Meanwhile, my dad is a Marxist theorist, with strong ideas about all of this stuff, and I've sometimes tried to work out a ruleset for such a game with him. But he's so into the complexities of social theory, that the whole concept of trying to simplify it into a playable game is not so appealing to him. So our conversations about it have never led to an actual playable game. But I haven't given up.

Animal Crossing, on the other hand, represents sort of the opposite of what I'd be aiming for. In Animal Crossing, the situation is really locked up, and can never change. There's always Tom Nook's store, and there are always the institutions and structures and natural behaviors of the surrounding environment; and the neighbors have a fixed range of behaviors. So it's not really surprising that Lauren was able to essentially crush the game. If I developed a 'society' game, I'd want it to be flexible enough all of those fixed ideas would really be mutable. Not unlike Nomic; but with more structure built in from the start.

So yeah. I hung out with July and played some Wii, and we had a lovely time, and a lovely birthday with her husband and step-kids. But they did notice that she hadn't played the Animal Crossing they'd given her. They spotted it right off, when they saw she was still running errands for Tom Nook.

Friendship And Family

Among some of my friends, I have a reputation as being highly accepting of other people. They see that I have a broad array of friends from different backgrounds, with different qualities, some of whom value certain things higher than anything else, others of whom value other things higher than anything else. Some of my friends think I'm so accepting, that they can't understand why I'd waste my time being friends with some of those other friends. Some of my friends think I'm so accepting, that they can't understand how I manage to fit all the people in my life that I do, without cracking under the strain.

Other friends of mine don't think I'm so accepting, but they believe I do have certain qualities that might seem to be accepting. These friends hear me rant and rail against one thing and another, and hear me pass my judgments; and they don't perceive me to be accepting at all. But they do see how my particular type of judgments would allow for a wide array of different types of friendships.

So for example, I'm judgmental towards people who are mean or dishonest. In fact those are really my central requirements for deciding whether to reject someone - are they mean or dishonest? If they are, then I don't want to have them as friends.

The result of that, however, is that I can be friends with atheists, religious people, criminals, corporate types, dreamers, and so on. There are honest, non-mean people in all cultures and all walks of life. So, I'm still quite a judgmental person, but not in such a way that my sphere of acquaintance would be limited to looking a certain way or sharing any particular obvious qualities.

So, there's that. But when I go to visit my family on Thanksgiving, I discover an entirely different kind of judgment. There are deep antagonisms I feel towards every member of my family, each having to do with our own unique history, and my experience growing up.

There's a certain amount of variability. Sometimes I don't just get mad at everyone; I'll be relatively outwardly calm, and I'll manage to engage in watching movies or eating meals, and I'll listen to the family news, and give news about the people I'm in touch with.

But, even just being in the same room with any of them; hearing the way their glass sounds as it touches the table; hearing the sound of their shoes or socks or slippers or bare feet as they walk in their particular way, just reveals some aspect of their personality that jangles all my nerves. There's Marie, fingering her way through all the forks in the drawer, because she can't get a grip on one of them easily, and she figures that just fingering her way through all of them will result in one of them fitting into her hand the way she wants. She won't take the time to look at the forks, and bring her thumb and forefinger over to one of them, so as to grasp it and pick it up; she'll just finger them all, making the noise of someone who doesn't care who else knows her approach to getting a fork. And I'm the same way! I hear in her lazy fumbling, my own lazy fumbling when I'm home in my safe environment. I go through the forks in the exact same way, using the same technique because I too can't seem to bring my attention around to whatever I'm actually doing, and I can't be bothered to give a moment's thought to how to pick up a fork; but instead I stubbornly insist on thinking about whatever topic happens to be in my mind at the time; and these stupid forks are just intentionally trying to distract me from all that, and I'll be damned if I'm going to give in to their childish cry for attention.

And I wonder, would I be the same kind of parent she was, lazily pursuing my own intentions, my own artistic activities or any other project I cared about, determined to ignore my children's pleas for attention and affection?

Or there's Mike, trying to use the new netflix account I set up for him, trying to use the roku interface, and having no idea what to click on, or how to navigate; and I'm explaining it over and over, and getting more agitated the whole time, because I've never been able to teach him anything about computers, no matter how hard I tried, dating back to the days of the 386; and instead it's always been other people who've been able to pierce his veil of ignorance, and help him understand what an icon was, and how to click on it; and now one of his students, whose praises he sings endlessly, helps him with computer problems all the time. And I still can't even show him how to pick a movie on netflix. But he'll patiently talk to me about Rawls and social theory and economics and political philosophy, never getting frustrated in spite of the fact that I get distracted, and lose the thread of what he's saying, and can't really catch up, and just don't seem to be very much of a thinker at all, in spite of growing up under his care, and being taught so much as a child, playing together, and hearing his many lessons about what it meant to be an intellectual; and reading such difficult books at such a young age.

Or there's Letty, now with her own children whose childhood I've missed too much of already; and she very judgmental herself, and who I gave up on finally last year because she didn't want me to invite a lot of people over to hang out and enjoy each other's company, and then complained to me in front of the kids about how I was afraid of not forming a connection with them while they were young. It makes me just want to forget that she and the rest of them exist at all, and pretend that that part of my life is just empty and void; I have no sister, I have no niece or nephew, I haven't alienated them and lost the possibility of real closeness, I haven't gradually become the strange uncle who doesn't say much and who isn't really fun.

I have no high ground with any of them. Just these resentful emotions I can't seem to shake, even though every one of them would rather be close and affectionate with me, than have these strange resentments and judgments. But I just can't get over it.

So, some of my friends think I'm very accepting; and some think I'm pretty judgmental about certain things; but very few of my friends know much of my family context, or the petty judgments that overwhelm me and inhabit so much of my consciousness, so much of the time.

Arduino Odd Couple

I recently got an arduino. An arduino is a simple CPU on a circuit board with various inputs and outputs that you can connect wires to, and a simple operating system that lets you control how its inputs and outputs should behave.

In other words, if you build a machine of some kind, the arduino lets you control it with software, instead of having to design complex electronic circuits. Software is better because it's easier to change and develop than real circuitry. Arduino makes everyone an inventor.

My friend Tony came over a couple days ago, to explain the arduino and how it works, and to lead Will and me in a 'hello world' arduino programming project.

It was so great! First of all, the software installed on my desktop computer without too much of a fuss. Then when I connected the arduino via a USB cable, and ran the 'arduino' developer tool, everything just worked! I could edit code and run it on the arduino with a single step. Just edit and click. Boom!

A few months ago, I tried to start writing android apps, and the experience was utterly different. The android development environment was very difficult to set up, and then each app had to be organized in a very constrained way, and the whole thing was just really uphill all the time. With arduino, I had a working application within minutes. Albeit, just a blinking LED.

Having an arduino, and knowing that programming it is as easy as pie, I'm starting to daydream about what kinds of inventions I may want to make. Nowadays there's really no limit to the type of machine anyone can construct. Retail fabricators will make any metal parts I want, all I have to do is send them the 3D specifications, which are easy enough to create on my computer using free software. The question is, what do I want to make?

For years I've dreamed of building a lockpicking device. Back at Google, there were all sorts of employee social groups, and I helped found one for lockpicking. We'd meet up once a week, and pick locks from a big heavy box of them I kept by my desk. It was fun! The principles of lockpicking are fairly easy to grasp, and I always thought an automatic picker would be a straightforward design project. And I don't mean that weird contraption that just drums the pins until the cylinder turns. I mean a real picker that actually picks the pins themselves.

So, that would be a cool project. Or I could do a more traditional (in hacker circles) project like a 3D printer or a CNC device. Those are very cool, and there is definitely room for new designs and new ideas, like a clay pummeling device, that would reproduce 3D objects in clay.

Or I could do some variant of a pick-and-place machine, which would build electronic circuits. I love that idea because, if combined with a 3D printer, it has the potential to be a truly self-replicating machine, that could take raw input materials and just output a fully constructed copy of itself.

But those are big projects, and I've only just started out. So then I think, maybe I should begin with a small project. Of course, my initial intention is to go through all the sample projects that came with the arduino, and build them each in turn, and play around with making changes and whatnot. But even after that, a relatively small project might be best.

So then I start thinking about what kind of small projects to do. Sew LEDs into my clothes, and have the arduino light me up in lovely moving patterns? Make a hat that squirms around on my head? A mapping device that measures the dimensions of any room it's in, and feeds the data back to my computer?

I just don't know. But the daydreaming process is so pleasant and enjoyable!

By contrast, when I ran to my roommate Will and told him how excited I was about the arduino, he said, "I think arduino is silly. You should be programming the raw microcontroller."

Huh? Did my dear friend Will just seriously suggest that I take a plain CPU - not even a motherboard, but just the chip itself - and try to program it with no operating system running on it, and no computer attached? Yep. That's what he suggested.

I told him, "why do you suppose we aren't doing that already? There are all sorts of microcontrollers we could harvest from junk devices here in the house. Why haven't we been harvesting and programming them all this while? Isn't it because its really really really really hard and something only insane, freaky, gifted people would do?"

That's Will though. He'll make these pronouncements as if they make sense. In some cases he really is joking, but in other cases he's not. And unfortunately, it means that all his suggestions have to be either taken with a grain of salt, or else scrutinized really carefully. I mean, he could never program a raw microcontroller. It's completely beyond either of our skill levels.

I remember one time I was considering getting a hard drive, or more RAM, or something like that for my desktop system, and I asked him what he thought I should get. He said, "I'd wait on it if I were you. The technology's going to get much faster."

It sounded like it made so much sense. Until I thought about it. Oh! Of course the technology is improving. If I wait to buy the thing I want, it'll still be the case that I could wait for a faster version. Will wasn't advocating waiting for a particular iteration of the technology that he expected to arrive soon - he was advocating permanently waiting. When I realized this, I started calling him on those kinds of pronouncements, and he'd then respond by saying something like, "yes, I don't think it's ever a good idea to buy more RAM. You do it when you have no choice. If you have any choice at all, you shouldn't do it."

So, there's clearly a philosophy at work. But it's not the philosophy of helping me get the best product on the market. It's more of a philosophy of nay-saying every idea that isn't his own. He suggested I not get RAM because he himself had no immediate need of RAM, and that was how he assessed my request for advice. He thought the arduino was silly because he himself had no immediate plans for it.

He's not always that way. Sometimes I'm able to sort of wrangle him into considering a project as something actually worth participating in. And then he's great! He has ideas, he solves problems, and acts like a normal creative person. But he apparently sees everyone else as if they're just himself, in a different location. I'm overstating it, but that's how it appears sometimes. I wish he could have an attitude more along the lines of, "I don't know what you're working on or why it's good, but I'd love to participate and find out!"

Fans And Radiators

Every Winter, my roommate's room is nice and toasty, while mine is cold and unpleasant. Both of us have a radiator, but Will is a fixer and I am not.

I actually have two adjoining rooms, and the radiator is in one of them - the bedroom. So even when I manage to have a relatively warm bedroom, my living room is always cold.

Last year I noticed that there were actual gaps in the brickwork of one of the windows in my living room. I could feel the cold air hissing in against the palm of my hand. I plugged the holes with tissue paper, and taped plastic over the whole window, and that actually helped a little. But not much.

This year I decided to just look at what Will did in his room, and try to do it myself. So it turns out he has a big fan, bungied right to the radiator. It blows through the pipes, and sends an enormous emanation of hot air throughout the room.

I happen to have a big, powerful fan too. So I set it up and aimed it at the radiator, and right away my bedroom filled up with hot air, and was very comfortable. If it got too hot, I'd just turn off the fan. It worked like a charm. For the bedroom.

The living room, however, stayed cold. It was kind of impressive. The door between the bedroom and the living room is always open, and I could step from the cold air into the hot air, and back again. It was like there was an invisible wall keeping the hot air in the bedroom.

Will doesn't have a second room, so I asked him what he recommended. He said I should buy a box fan and mount it at the top of my door frame, and blow it out into the living room.

I didn't like the sound of that though. I envisioned wires trailing everywhere, and being unable to close the door, and possibly having the fan fall on my head some day.

But I did have another fan, a smaller one. So I set it up on the bedroom floor, and had it blow out into the living room.

The living room just got colder and colder, and the bedroom stayed nice and toasty. It seemed even toastier, actually. When I asked Will about it, he gave me a funny look, and said something along the lines of, "why are you using the fan to blow all the cold air off the bedroom floor and into the living room?"

He told me to put the fan on the living room floor instead, and have it blow into the bedroom. So I did. A little while later, both rooms were nice and toasty. Even the bathroom adjoining the living room warmed up; and that bathroom was well known as a cold, arctic land in the Winter.

What is it that defines a person's creativity? I know I'm an inventive person, with plenty of creative spark. I'm always coming up with cool stuff of one kind or another. And yet something as simple as the flow of hot air through an apartment, did not inspire me at all. Even when I was cold and uncomfortable, I just didn't care to imagine what the radiator was doing, and how to make it do it better.

My roommate, on the other hand, is constantly thinking about things like that. Keeping his room warm in the Winter and cool in the Summer is just one trivial example. Before Hurricane Sandy, he rigged up a connection between a double-A battery pack and a USB cable, so we could keep our phones and tablets charged during the power outage. He's modified, to one degree or other, virtually every tool or device he owns, not to mention the furniture. Everyone goes to him when they have hardware problems.

But Will wouldn't invent any of the things I create. When I was inventing my board game, he had a very tough time connecting to the ideas surrounding it or the problems confronting it, and really only expressed a mild interest out of friendship.

Or when I was developing any of the various dietary systems I've come up with, he had no interest in any of that, and even recoiled in horror at some of the ideas. They just didn't inspire him at all. But for me, they were wonderful playgrounds!

Or my work with Labanotation. Will has absolutely no interest in trying to explain complex ideas to other people. The idea of trying to write a text showing people how to use Labanotation is something very alien to him. I'm not even sure how he perceives my work in that area. Maybe he sees it as some kind of odd tick. I go in my room and twitch around on the keyboard, about Labanotation.

But so yeah. Ingenuity. Creativity. We're all so different in the things that inspire us; and that inspiration colors absolutely everything we perceive in the world. Will and I live in the same house, but we each see a completely different world around us.

When I was inventing my board game, and people started to play it and ask me what it was called, I couldn't tell them. I couldn't come up with a good name. But I asked Will about it, and he came up with a perfect name for it. He called it "crumble". And that name connects to a lot of the ideas that inspired it, that are woven all through its ruleset. Even though Will didn't connect to the problems involved in coming up with that ruleset, he did connect to the static ideas that ultimately came to be represented by the game. And he was able to synthesize those ideas into a name that captured exactly what I needed it to say.

Ingenuity. Creativity. We all live our lives surrounded by genius. But because any genius has a unique inspiration, it can be hard for us to see it in others sometimes. It's tempting to think of just ourselves as the smart ones, and everyone else as morons. I know a lot of people in retail who have succumbed to that belief. And in many sad cases, it's also tempting to think of everyone else as the smart ones, and only ourselves as the pathetic, uninspired worms. I know plenty of people who see themselves that way as well. I've dated plenty of people who saw themselves that way.

It's tragic. But the truth that I've come to in my wanderings, is that we really are all of us brilliantly inspired with creativity. If we think we encounter someone who isn't, it's just because we're not encountering them in their private, safe space. In one way or another, everyone is Henry Darger. Some of us just manage to be Darger in public.

Hurricane Sandy

Power came back on at about 4:30 AM, and I woke up about 15 minutes later. I'd slept in socks, a t-shirt, my winter coat, and two pairs of pajama pants. According to Will's thermometer, the house was about 60 degrees Fahrenheit last night.

I woke up to familiar rumbles that I don't usually pay much attention to, like the little grinding rumble of the tiny fridge in the living room. As I opened my eyes I could see the little LEDs on the bedroom computer, the Ethernet hub, the Roku, and the speaker volume control knob. The radiator was still silent though.

I went out to the dining room and checked the wall clock. It read about 8:40. The power had stopped at about 8:25, so that's how I knew the power had come on 15 minutes before I'd gotten up.

I put in my contact lenses and booted up my computer. First order of business: sight.

I weighed myself and entered the data into my spreadsheet. Sandy had put about 5 lbs on me, from all the bags of chips, the soda, the bread, the nuts, the canned soups, and other grossness. It's hard to diet during a hurricane.

I came back from Brooklyn last night. Took the shuttle bus from Jay Street in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side. The lights were all on, the stores were open - many of them - and people were out and about. As I walked down along The Bowery, passed Houston, and then turned West, everything was still up and running. I passed a pizza joint with people inside, passionately downing large delicious slices of pizza, and thought, should I? I know there's no power near my apartment... should I?

But I didn't. I kept walking. As I approached Broadway I could see the lights and activity come to a sudden halt. It was night time already, and there were just no lights at all across Broadway. No traffic lights, no nothing. It surprised me, because I knew that a lot of little stores had been opening up and running on candle power or generators before I'd left.

I entered the dark zone, and put on my headlamp. Before I'd gone to Lauren's house I'd thought to myself, "should I bring this? Am I really going to need it? I know Lauren's got power, her whole neighborhood's got power. What's the point?" But I brought it anyway, just because it seemed prudent to carry my emergency equipment with me.

Now I was realizing what my intelligence had failed to tell me: I would quite possibly be returning home with the power still out, and I might need the headlamp to navigate the streets.

The headlamp made all the difference. Stumbling towards home in the dark would not have been fun - I know, because I stumbled towards home for about a block before putting the headlamp on. But as I walked, I noticed that there were indeed other lights to be seen. I passed people walking the other direction, who held flashlights. Sometimes a cyclist would pass, with a pedal-driven light blinking on their bike. And a very few windows were lit up, some with candles, some with actual power, though I had no idea where they were getting it from.

One restaurant, deep in the dark zone, had big signs that said "WE'RE OPEN". It was one of those super fancy SoHo restaurants where the quality go. Inside it was business as usual; TV producers discussing deals they were working on, while sniffing their wine glass and eating raw oysters.

I got the place to make me some salmon and veggies to go, and took it home to my apartment.

Will wasn't there. He'd gone to get food in Brooklyn, and was planning to get home in about an hour and a half or so. The apartment was desolate. It hadn't been that cold inside when I'd left. The lack of light felt oppressive. Lauren had lent me her little battery operated lantern, and I set it up on a bookshelf, and that was almost like having power back; but not really.

Lauren hadn't slept much the night before. She'd been up most of the night checking the news stories about communities in Staten Island and Coney Island that were experiencing horrible conditions. When I called josette as I walked home that next evening (cell phone service working again, yay), I found out that josette had been equally concerned and disturbed over the fate of those communities.

I hadn't been as affected as they were about it. I knew the situation was pretty devastating for a lot of people. Homes destroyed, people killed. Meanwhile I was surrounded by my dear possessions, reading my kindle, playing games on my cell phone, and eating gourmet take-out. I think it was the gourmet take-out that did it. I suddenly felt very guilty to have it so good right now, while whole communities had been destroyed by the hurricane, and seemed to be getting very little assistance from the government that was nevertheless tending to my neighborhood quite attentively.

I also happen to be reading "Solo", by Rana DasGupta, and I was up to the part about World War II, where there was a lot of civil strife in Bulgaria, followed by fascism, followed by communism, and the main character is buffeted around and has to watch all his friends and family go through a lot of hardships, while also going through a lot of hardships himself. Actually, it's a really good book. I recommend it.

But the book, and the fact that there were such horrors going on just a few miles from my home, sort of hit me suddenly. And I thought of the US government at its various levels, and how it had responded to the emergency. On the one hand, I thought, it's all so disingenuous; a lot of the governmental and private organizations responding to the hurricane couldn't care less about the people affected; they just wanted to get things running again so they wouldn't lose another $50,000,000,000 in 4 days. It was all about the money to them. And President Obama even said, the focus was on getting the economy back up in the region.

And on the other hand, at least in this novel I'm reading, the fascists and the communists are portrayed as being utterly indifferent to human life, and concerned only with doctrine and with the absolute appearance of a loyalty they don't feel in the slightest.

I'm not pro-capitalist. The Democrats and Republicans are both far too right-wing for my tastes. But sitting there in my room yesterday, I could see how to some extent, there was a real distinction to be drawn between what we have here currently, and what we'd have in an authoritarian situation.

I'd like to figure out a system that would be better than what we've got. What system, other than the market and greed, would motivate the government and other large organizations, to help people better than they were helped during Hurricane Sandy?

I've thought a fair bit about what kind of system of government I would set up if I could. I almost look at it like creating a game, where the people playing might be trying to cheat; and the rules of the game have to take account of that, and lead all the players inexorably towards the best possible decisions.

That's pretty vague. But I didn't say I'd actually solved the problem. Recently my dad recommended the book, "Rawls", by Samuel Freeman. I'd read the biographical portions, and realized that political philosophy is not the study of how wheelers and dealers trick each other and horse-trade in order to be powerful politicians. Political philosophy is about fundamental questions that any system of government needs to address; like, "what is justice?"

It's a very different approach to the problem of government than what I had taken. I'd been more concerned with protecting government from anyone attempting to gain too much individual power. In the approach I'd taken, people were involved in government at such an indirect level, that no single person, or even large group, would be able to influence its workings to any appreciable degree. Government would have a relationship to individuals, not unlike the relationship of the brain to its individual cells.

But reading about Rawls, this no longer seemed like such a straightforward proposition. My conception of the governing brain didn't take into account any concept of justice. And reading "Solo", I could see how a government that was too indifferent to the individual, might lead to other kinds of problems.

So I don't know. But living through Hurricane Sandy, and knowing that this is really very likely to happen again on a regular basis, I think the problem of government is quite relevant to what's going on; and it's being driven home to the people in Staten Island and Coney Island and elsewhere; and it seems as though it'll be driven home to a lot more people as well, before long. Anyone who suddenly finds themselves bereft of everything they'd thought was secure - or at least, relatively secure - will have to be thinking very closely about the way their government responds to such things, and why.