Redwood

Not a good thing

The little, warm bun is one of those small, good things. That and a hot cup of coffee on the laboratory bench make up my morning ritual at work. I heat the bun in the lab microwave for 25 seconds – too much and it gets mushy (ah, if we only had an oven). I had to ride an extra ten minutes to get this morning’s bun. The usual 7-11 had sold out, something truly odd, which I couldn’t help seeing as some kind of omen. Alas, I’ll have ten less minutes to peel off the little whirls of cinammon-flavored pastry. Am I unduly upset? It’s true that I hate to hurry. I am determined not to let my anger ruin it, though.

Doctor Preuss's Proof of Crushing Mediocrity

Psychiatric pharmacologists can interpret my intention in each of these equations freely. When I say “age”, then the individual practitioner may choose to enter an age for his patient that is not correct but perhaps a better proximation of the patient’s wear and tear, so to speak. When I say “horror”, then we should understand a subjective experience akin to that of the imminent approach of a certain death, or its like. By “hate”, we mean the diametrical opposite of love. It is understood that the resulting values can vary wildly, and this does – if nothing else – reaffirm my counsel that these are mere guidelines for safe neuropharmacology. Nothing replaces sound common sense; the closest approximation to sound common sense being Platt’s Harmonious Snap Judgement proximations (see below).

My Oslo

The northwest central part of Oslo, just between the big pill-shaped Bislett Stadium and the brick block silos of the university campus, is the part of town I call home. It is called Adamstuen. Fighting for parking spots around here is like racing all the men of China to the world’s last cigarette. Last night I found a spot right in front of my apartment building. This morning I go out the front door and a guy in a grey suit is leaning over the hood of my car. Next to him a schoolchild was nudging with his toe a half-eaten kebab that lay on the sidewalk. The pita-bread and candy-coloured wax paper wrapping had ejected the guts of the kebab – some brown hunks of sweatsteak, an assortment of unripe garden vegetables and a livid orange ooze – like an exclamation point on the sidewalk.

The Beetle’s Carapace

A hazel planet reckons through the universe. A dashed line shows its trajectory through space and time. This little planet, with a dark, obsidian core, will hurtle within only a couple light years of another planet – this one, violet, and growing. At a precise moment, the little hazel planet with a dark center will emit a package, and this package will progress on its own trajectory, perfectly perpendicular to the trajectory of the planet from which it popped. Some time later, it will crash into the surface of the violet planet, causing large pieces of violet jetsam, which – by the way – have the consistency of the marshmellows in breakfast cereal, to rise up, hesitate and then fall down again onto the surface. A man will approach the package, which has ruptured diagonally across its tough rubbery casing, reach inside, pull away many crumpled layers of cellophane, and remove a small cylindrical plastic item the color of maraschino cherries. The tearaway clear plastic label bears some words in Danish, which the man doesn’t understand, so he tears it away and pulls off the tarty red plastic that envelopes the center of the package. Underneath that plastic is perhaps the most intricately carved and piquantly smelling decorative cheese the man has encountered for months.

On the Vastness and Presumed Sanctity of Space: Personal, Private and Public

We men exist in space, or more correctly a number of spaces. What we may call the space of immediate effect (that is, the space in which a man can immediately effect an action and simultaneously ensure that it is done – say, peeling an onion, making a friend turn his head or strangling a cat) extends roughly as far as the voice can reach and dissipates at a distance where words become intelligible. At the outer periphery of the space of immediate effect, we see a general warping and perversion of this space. A policeman running behind a school-bus, waving his hands and shouting “stop” (maybe the driver has run over a child?) may accidentally impel the driver to accelerate. It may in fact so distract him that he hits another child – thus creating a victim of the deterioration of the space of immediate effect at its furthest limits.