Wednesday, September 18th, 1996 Dear God, Life. What a concept. What a challenge to do it, really do it. Do it good. Do it well. Do it justice. Do it justly. Platitudes parade their way around my head, thinking about how wise and wonderful I can make this letter to you sound, filling it with untested truisms and suggestions. Saying without doing. Emptiness of pretending to what isn't. And what is? I am. The computer I type on. The evening sky this beautiful late summer day, with the clouds and the sunset. The neigh- bor upstairs walking about tending business. Work is. School is. Attitudes are. Healthy ones and hurtful ones all the same are. Birds. Buildings. Cars. Grass. Fingernails. Relationships. Comedy. Trees. Animal activists. Newspapers. Politics. Greed. Benevolence. And what isn't? My neighbor Bill. He is. Standing on his balcony across the way from me, he smokes his pipe now and looks in to his apartment, as he is wont to do, I supposed looking at his television. Alone. Almost always alone. And I, who could offer friendship, also remain alone most all of the time, staring at my own brand of screen ... the one registering all these damn keypresses I am doing right now... and do with great regularity almost all the time. Ah, but what of it? What of being alone? Isn't it okay to pursue what company I want when I want it? Isn't it okay for me to pursue my happiness the way I wish to as long as it doesn't get in the way of others' pursuing theirs? Am I not given citizenship and all the rights and privileges pertaining there- to? Including the right to be as private a person as I wish to be, and to hell with the rest of the world if I so wish? Yes, I am given all of this. And I take advantage of it. I, pursuing antisocial behavior with a vengeance, preferring the company of my dear 386 computer's keyboard to that of a real human. Finding the predicta- bility of the computer strangely comforting, strangely warm yet strangely cold and heartless. Enjoying the control I have over the operations of the Personal Computer, knowing it will only do what I tell it to do, no more, and no less, unless some rogue pro- gram takes control or unless I don't know what I am doing. And the more than 2 to the power of 8x8,000,000 states that the machine's memory can take, perhaps could be enough to occupy a being for an eternity, for how long can it take to count from 1 to 2^64000000? Not to mention the 2^1048000000 states possible on just one par- tition of one of my hard drives. And how many of those states make for useful work? And I wonder just how many of those states could contain incredible secrets of the universe, ending up decoding into an essay explaining who you really are, God? I wonder just which state of the bits would have the drive have a few thousand copies of Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech? Expressing the polynomial for that state would certainly take more space than the actual speeches would, a polynomial with 1,048,000,000 powers of 2 expressed. Or would it if we could zip it? Ah, but I digress. From what, you say? From life, my dear God. From responsibility (for I should be writing numerous pages of a users' manual for an assignment due Friday, and yet I'm not). (And I'm actually thinking about going to bed and reading my _Zen and the Art of (Finding Work?)_ book which I bought last week.) And contemplating the action-reaction patterns that happen at work. Humanitarian ideals or goals, I am becoming convinced, are not fiduci- arily responsible ideals or goals. Time spent on compassionate be- havior is not time spent on getting work done nor money made. But such behaviors are a necessity for human life (not for human exis- tence). Support, love, compassion, caring, careful listening, grow- ing -- these are all things that can not be tied to fiduciary re- sponsibility, because they are not readily quantifiable by any sys- tem that I know of. Dollars, and maximizing profit-- now THAT is quantifiable. Maximizing return on investment -- now THAT is quan- tifiable. But love? And rejections based on the attempt to quan- tify (qualify, or judge) the nature of love? The discernment and splitting of things up with Phaedrus's knife so we can tell our- selves, "This is worth it," and "That is not." Unsuspended judge- ment to separate ourselves from others based on perceptions that only God can know if they're true or not? And who are we to judge anyway? Others? We're hardly competent to be judging ourselves and our own motives and goals because we are a society that doesn't know itself. How can we even pretend to be competent to put ourselves in the position of judging others when we cannot even do it to our- selves, in most cases? But we do. And the blame-casting surely feels good. It soothes, coats and protects us from our own acidity or excees alkalinity, our own hatreds, prejudices and vices. Blame is the Pepto-Bismol of life.