Author Archives: itlandm

No more long walks

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That small gray stripe in the far background is a glimpse of a sand road I would sometimes walk. Picture taken during my last long walk in that area.

It may be a coincidence. Actually, according to the scientific worldview, everything is coincidence. You worldview may vary… Actually, I hope so, for your sanity. Although I suppose you can go too far in the other direction as well. (I am thinking of you, New Age people!)

I have been taking a walk of approximately one hour almost every day for the last few weeks. But when I came home from work on Monday, my right foot was hurting. I walked for half an hour that evening anyway, but I’m not sure that was a good idea. Since then, my foot has been hurting so badly that I can’t seriously consider taking long walks anymore. Even walking from the bus station to my workplace hurts now.

Yes, Monday was the day my landlord told me he had sold the house. That was after I came home from work, and my foot had already hurt for several hours.

If this turns out to be a long lasting problem, I will have to find some other way to exercise. But in that case it would be pretty amusing if the house was sold at the exact same time that I could no longer use the feature I most loved about it.

Anyway, I hope I get the chance to talk to the doctor tomorrow about this. My appointment is about something entirely different, so maybe the best I can hope for is to get a new appointment, and even that may not be before the summer vacation. And in any case, it is quite possible – even likely – that my foot will heal naturally over time. After all, my body has had a tendency to do just that for the last 52 years… Although it won’t continue that way forever, of course, and perhaps I needed a reminder of  impermanence in the midst of all my happiness, which I was so eager to display to the whole world.

 

A change of plans

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If you feel like you are pathetic, then do something about it! (From an anime NOT by Happy Science, strangely enough. It is one of their basic principles, thus the happiness.)

I lived in the original Chaos Node for over 20 years, and it grew really packed with stuff, because I was a packrat born and bred. It is probably in my genes, it was certainly in my environment. Be that as it may, I threw away several car loads full of stuff when I moved, in addition to carrying books and magazines to the used book store for two months or so.

Four years later I moved again, and once again I threw away stuff, albeit less than last time. In each of these cases, I only kept what I was sure I was going to use, what I was sure I was going to miss if I did not bring it with me.

After a year and a half, most of it is still not used: Most of the remaining books and comic books not read again, most of the movies not watched again (in all fairness, almost all of them are Smallville episodes), most of the clothes not worn, and most of the old broken computers neither repaired nor used for spare parts, most of the remaining computer games not played. Even though I threw away almost everything I was not sure I would need…

If they are actually going to destroy the house without moving in first, I should ask the landlord if it is OK to just leave things here.  I suppose they are going to torch the place.  I am thinking of leaving about half of my stuff in that case.

Failing that, I intend to bring it all with me to the new apartment, except for what I throw in the garbage bin  Tuesday in two weeks (Wednesday morning is garbage day). Then give away what I can, throw away the rest, except enough to furnish one living room and one bedroom.  And then move to a smaller, cheaper place. There is no point in spending most of my after-tax income on rent if it is not awesome. And I suspect this was my last awesome place ever.

If I find a house in the countryside I can rent later in my life, I have no problem with leaving 2/3 or even 3/4 of it empty. Who does that hurt? Who will scream out in pain if rooms stand empty? But if I don’t, I will try to rent small apartments at a much lower cost. And have so little stuff that I can move quickly and cheaply.

I don’t want to compete with families anymore.  Dragging with me all this stuff is insane: It is cheaper to buy new clothes and electronics when they wear out, than to bring with me a decade’s worth of spares and have to rent a whole house to keep them, or else live in clutter. Or both.

***

The universe agrees. After writing today’s entry, but not yet telling anyone, I found this link posted by an online friend (the article itself is by a complete stranger though, but you have to wonder about the synchronicity here!)

Please, make yourself uncomfortable.

 

Five sure things

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Thank you for the memories. One day, they will be all that is left.

According to Buddhism, there are five sure things in life.

-It is sure that you will lose your youth.

-It is sure that you will lose your health.

-It is sure that you will lose friends and loved ones.

-It is sure that you will lose your belongings.

-It is sure that, in the end, you will lose your life. And whatever the other losses you have not yet experienced, will come with it.

Obviously all this is true even if you have never heard of Buddha. It is just that they like to meditate on it more than others, I guess. In that regard I am a “Christian Buddhist”, in that I see detachment from things in this world as a message shared by the Buddha and the Christ, whatever else they may disagree on.

Jesus told a story about a farmer that had grown rich, so much so that his barns could no longer hold all his stuff. So he decided to tear them down and build new and larger barns. “Now you have much good saved up for a long time to come” he said to himself. That night, his soul was demanded from him (in death). What benefit did he have of all that he had gathered?

In the Christian Church, where I learned most of what has been useful in my life (beyond what I learned from my parents), we used to have yet another song that I find myself singing now. As always it is in Norwegian, but the lines in question translate like so: I will sing about victory when my earthly hope is being crushed; instead I now own a heavenly, which remains in the test of the baptism of fire.

To briefly return to the Buddha, who lived for about 80 years, wandering through the lands of India and teaching Liberation from all worldly attachments. When his life came to an end, these were his last words, or at least they can be translated like this: All things that have form are subject to decay. Strive diligently!

What for, when all things are falling apart anyway? For that which has no form. Now, I may not personally be striving very hard. But now that one of the minor “baptisms of fire” has come over me, by the treachery of my landlord, I have an opportunity I would not otherwise have had:  To know for sure whether I am attached to the things that can be seen, or whether my heart remains in that which cannot be seen.  For the visible is temporary, but the invisible eternal.

Of course, as long as I can still play Sims 3, it is not much of a trial though…

 

Goodbye Riverview

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Here today, gone this summer.

When I rented this place, it was for 5 years minimum. The owner intended to give it to one of his own children when they grew up, which is still a long way off. But things have changed. A relative of his wife and close friend of the family has returned from China and really wanted to build a new house on this spot.  (It is close so children can run over to each other at any time of the day or year.) And he was willing to pay a lot for it. So the landlord sold the house to him.  They are going to tear it down and would like me to get out of here as soon as feasible. I’m moving on the 7th, Light willing. Two and a half weeks from now.

At least this all happened without any threats for bashing my kneecaps in or anything. On the contrary, the landlord offered me a basement apartment of roughly the same size in Mandal, the nearest large town, in an old quiet part of town with little traffic. I went and looked at it. It is OK, and probably 100 years younger than this house. There’s lots and lots of wardrobe space. And it is bound to be a lot cheaper to heat during winter. Plus it is a few minutes’ walk from the bus station, where buses go every half hour instead of twice a day.

So, it is not a complete disaster. But neither is it a cause for joy. I have dreamed of living far from the crime and grime of the city, surrounded once more by green fields, farms, hills and flowing water, like in my childhood (when I, shame to say, did not know to appreciate it). I have lived that dream here. But dreams end. Life itself, after all, is one such dream from which we are going to wake up.  This is much smaller than that.

And yes, I feel a bit betrayed. But not very much. If I cannot forgive such a betrayal and bless them from my heart, I would not be worthy of ever uttering the name of my hero and savior, Jesus Christ, who prayed for those who killed him. This is pretty far from that (unless I have to help carry the washing machine again, in which case I can make no guarantee of my survival.)

I understand that the future of a relative (especially of the wife) is more important than a legally binding contract with a stranger. I don’t want to make more trouble for them than necessary. But even so, starting today I am looking for some other place to move to, eventually. Either cheaper than now, or out in the countryside again. Most people want to pay extra for living in the middle of town, but for me it is the other way around.

One thing that is still sinking in:  There won’t be stone left on stone of the old house. I am not sure that does not hurt me  more than simply having to leave. I know I complained of how cold it was during winter, but it is still a home. Here have generations grown up and lived. People lived here before electricity came to Norway, probably huddling around the wood stove on cold winter evenings, wearing thick clothes. People lived within these walls the summer when Norway became an independent nation for the first time since the Middle Ages. People lived here when the first cars began to roll on the roads, but not on the roads here, which were only suited for horse wagons.  Some family lived here during the harsh year of the Nazi occupation, when the future of the world itself, much less the country, was uncertain.  They lived here when spring came and the King returned to a free Norway once again. The previous owners lived here when the big, straight road was built a minute’s walk from here, straight through the valley.

Now I live here. I am the last human these walls will ever protect, the last of my race to seek shelter under this roof.  It is old, and beginning to grow frail, but it has served for a long, long time. It has, in fact, done nothing else but serve.  For a few more days shall I avail me of its protection, of its familiarity, Light willing. Then it will be empty again, but this time no new humans will come to live here. One day soon it will be razed to the ground, to give room to a new, large, modern house. Only memories will remain, and a few pictures.

It is an irony that I cannot hold back my tears on behalf of a house, even though I have buried two grandparents and one parent without shedding a tear. But then again, I doubt houses go to heaven when they die.  Of course, many people doubt that about humans too. Perhaps I too will doubt when my time comes.

But moving one more time will hopefully not be the end of me. It will be the end of Riverview though.  (And the pretty pictures.)

***

Well, at least now I know why these lines from an old hymn in Norwegian have been on my mind over and over these last few days. I noticed them but did not realize what they predicted, of course. The Light knows the future, but cannot reveal it fully to one such as me.

To my Lord my soul has said: You are my dwelling, my castle. He who has entered a covenant with you, sings praises in the midst of all sorrow.

All dwellings on Earth and probably even those in Heaven are temporary. Only the One is forever.  All that I had, all that I am, has always belonged to God and no one else. “God, you have been a dwelling for us from generation to generation.” Let it so be, world without end.

 

 

Oops – sleeping may be it

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The human body is full of mysteries. Especially down there. But today was a slightly different form of pleasant surprise from what the picture might imply to the younger reader.

So on Thursday I had my blood drawn to test for the proteins that signal a probable prostate cancer. The reason was the sudden onset of one particular symptom of enlarged prostate.

For unrelated reasons, I went to bed at 2AM and slept til 9:30 AM today. The thing is, I did not have to get up to urinate, and when I finally got up, there was almost no liquid. That’s when I realized: This is when I used to sleep for the last 15+ years!

Well, perhaps not exactly, but around 2 to 9. When I lived closer to the city, I could do this and still squeeze in a 90% job before the 5PM bus home. Or very nearly so. When I moved further away, the next bus in to the city would not be get me to the office until nearly 11, so I would have to get up early and take the previous bus now and then.  Three such “long” (8 hours) days over the course of two weeks would be enough.  (Norwegians are very productive – we work short hours and have long vacations and still get everything done. ^_^)

The thing is, I did not actually work 8 hour days as often as that, with the predictable result that I slowly built up a large mound of “time debt”, “undertime” or whatever you will call it. Sometime this winter I started paying it down.

With the help of LifeFlow delta brainwave entrainment, I can go to sleep three hours earlier than before, get up early  and still not be particularly sleepy during the day. In fact, if I wake up a couple times in the night, this makes me LESS sleepy in the morning, because even a minute awake is enough to start delta “music” again.  (I don’t keep it playing all night so as to not mess with the brain’s natural 90-minute sleep cycle too much, and to not develop immunity. A couple times a night seems fine though.)

Now the whole 90% job grew out of the fact that I have Delayed Sleep Phase Syndrome, a minority condition where the body’s clock is nor reset by external stimuli in the normal way. There are divergent opinions on whether it can be cured, or even whether it should be cured. Arguably it needs to be cured to approximately the same degree that black skin needs to be cured: The only serious problems from this inheritable condition are those imposed by society.

In fact, if the minority with DSPS were allowed to live the way they were created, we would have less problems with rush hours and billions of dollars would not be lost to people sitting in cars and raging when they could have been at work.  But let us just let that slide for now. Humans are stupid, as we all know from direct observation of those around us. Especially in traffic, I suppose.

Anyway, my brain is happy with brainwave entrainment. But evidently my kidneys have no respect for it. They probably continue to work hard for the first three hours of the night, every night. (And then more slowly in the morning, as before.) Which means that the sudden onset of the nightly bathroom run did probably not come from any changes down there, but from the changes in my bedtime when I first started to try to work in my undertime, and later switched to working full time.

This, dear reader, is why I almost never go to the doctor. Because when I do, the local clinic usually concludes that I am healthier than those who work there, and the only things I achieve is to  a) embarrass myself, and b) add to my hypochondria score card.  There have only been a couple times in my adult life that a doctor visit has actually helped in any way. OK, perhaps four times.

Oh well. I understand in America, the land of extreme health expenses, it is customary for the better off to take these blood tests even if they have no symptoms.  (And even if the sum of the biopsies and the treatments are approximately as lethal as the cancer, statistically speaking.)

Now, the big question is whether the kidneys will eventually decide to join the sleep rhythm of the brain, or whether I shall have this divergence for the rest of my working life. I have a feeling that if I live to my planned retirement at 75, I won’t have any long nights of continuous sleep even after that. But who knows.

***

Well, I suppose I no longer need to eat tomato and take long walks. Well, unless I want to decrease my “overall mortality” – the risk of dying from any random reason – by 40% by investing half an hour a day. As far as risk management goes, that seems a pretty good investment to me. On the other hand we could be fatalists and say that the day when you are fated to die, you die. That is certainly true. But that day seems to come a lot earlier for most fat and flabby people, in our part of the world at least.  (It’s a bit different in hunger-stricken areas, of course.  May you and I never need to save up fat for times like that.)

Besides, I have started to kind of like both the spaghetti sauce and the long walks. I walked for an hour today again, in rain that was so light it was almost fog. Then went home and ate pasta with tomato sauce. I rather enjoyed them both, truth to tell. Although my “things to write” memory runs full before even half an hour of walking…

Now to decide whether to call off that doctor appointment. I presumably won’t benefit from it in any way; but on the other hand, if I cancel it, the doctor will never know if he later runs into a case like this again.

Sims 3 & EA Origin Direct Download

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In Japan, personal computer games is also an euphemism for games with explicit content. That was not at all the reason why I had a stack about as high as this one, though. They were strategy games, various simulators, and sword & sorcery roleplaying games. And expansion packs for The Sims, The Sims 2 and The Sims 3.

As I have told before, after my two moves there are no longer a couple hundred computer games in my home, but only a handful. However, the Sims franchise – pretty much my only games now besides City of Heroes – comes with a new expansion pack twice a year, as reliable as the seasons. I generally don’t buy them until the bugs are ironed out, as this disturbingly lifelike life simulator either has poor quality control (EA tries to save a penny where they can) or is just too complex to test.

This week, I had installed The Sims 3 again on the quad-core machine and found that with Windows 7 and a Solid State Drive instead of the main hard disk, it ran amazingly smoothly.  So I decided to throw at it one of the largest user-made worlds out there, Los Aniegos.  (Yes, that is a pun on Los Angeles, and the overall structure of the neighborhood is inspired by that area. Of course it is 10 000 times smaller or so.) This neighborhood needs the Ambitions expansion which I already had, but also the World Adventures and Late Night expansions, which I saw no reason to buy before. Also, they have now come down in price. Way down.

(A new expansion pack is out recently, called Generations. I assume my recent renewed interest for The Sims 3 may be in part due to the collective telepathic influence of hundreds of thousands of gamers being excited about the game again for a few weeks. A great disturbance in the force…)

(I am not buying it now, then. Waiting for the bugs to be found first, but also for the price to come down, and for some really good content to be made by users for it.)

(Disappointed to see that the Norwegian name is Generasjoner, which is a literal translation, or barely even that. The name should have been slekters gang, according to the voice in my head. Next time mail me before instead of making a boring translation. The voices in my head are always happy to share their wisdom with the world for free. That’s just the kind of people we are, the voices and I.)

***

After checking the Gamestop in Kristiansand (the city where I work) I also checked a couple online retailers. However, considering the price, the freight and the delivery time,  I ended up buying both of the earlier expansions directly from Electronic Arts, using their new “Origin” direct download service.

“Origin” is the continuation of the EA Download Manager, which has been around for a while.  It serves two functions:  To buy and download games without CDs and boxes, and to update existing games with patches. The name is somewhat ironic: Electronic Arts bought and closed down a famous software house called Origin, best known for its cult hit Ultima series.  It is uncertain whether they originally meant to close it down – they were not really competitors – or whether the clash of business cultures simply made it impossible for the Origin developers to continue doing their work. EA is famous for being extremely suit-controlled.

While the “Origin” download service is a cold comfort for the demise of one of the most creative software houses ever, it is actually quite good at what it does. I would have appreciated being able to choose what disk to install to, but on the plus side, it is very idiot-friendly. You just pick the games or expansions you want, click through a lot of legalese (telling you that you have no rights and Electronic Arts can do whatever they want without you complaining – standard contracts in other words), and the program downloads and installs on its own. When you come back from making dinner, it is ready to press Play. It seems great for the type of humans who “just want to have fun”.

You do not need to be online to play the game, only to install or uninstall it. There is even an unsolicited description of how to uninstall “Origin”, should you ever wish to.  That was a pleasant surprise:  The competing service “Steam” from Valve (yes, probably an attempt at humor, that name) would log on (“phone home” as we say) if I tried to play Civilization 5.  With “Origin”, you can play anywhere, at any time. Or at least that is what they say. You need to be online when you install and activate the games though. And you can only install each game on 5 computers. Simultaneously.

That is pretty generous unless you have a large family, I’d say. And if you decide to  get a new and better computer, you can simply uninstall (while online) from one of the old computers, and “Origin” will phone home to tell that you have a license to spare, which you can then use to install the game again on the new computer.

The problem arises if your computer – or at least hard disk – dies without telling you in advance. This is not uncommon.  By the time I gave up on my C: disk on the quad-core, it was probably too late to uninstall things from it.  And most hard disk deaths are more sudden than that. One morning you wake up and your computer does not.  So over the course of a decade or so, the 5 licenses are likely to dwindle to two or even one. At that point you will probably start backing up your whole disk, which gets around the problem if you buy the exact same type back.

Or, perhaps after 10 years you are not going to play The Sims 3 anymore. I mean, how many are currently playing The Sims: House Party, which came out in spring 2001? Such people may exist, but are probably not used for business decisions.

This seems like a good time to point out that the accelerating change of change acceleration is accelerating, or in other words, the way things change faster than before is changing faster than before. By 2021, if there is even a human world left as we know it (and I very much expect there will be), entertainment is going to be quite different from now. It seems unlikely that there will be sold desktop computers, or even laptop computers, at the time. Hard disks and heavy-duty processors will probably be online, and most interaction with computers will come from handheld pads or tablets with 3D projection. Sims 3 is unlikely to ever be optimized for that.

 

Busy week

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By my standards at least, we’ve had a busy week at work. We have been rolling out the first wave of new technology locally. Mistakes were made, and not by us. ^_^ Problems with central servers affected performance at just the same time, so it would seem to the random observer as if the problems were connected. That was probably not the case. I also have a start on the next new technology, but I find that I am still not able to help much with it. There are parts that are handled centrally that I don’t have access to. Still, I enjoy having more to do, for now. One day I even forgot that the workday was ending, until my bus had gone. I did not come home until around 10. ^_^

I am pleased that the weather has been cool, after the couple days of feverish heat that I wrote about. So it has been fine weather for walking, I don’t need to bring water to avoid overheating.  It has even rained a bit.

 

Spiritual gifts vs growth

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What is this light? It could be a help to keep you on the right path, or a trial that could pull you off the path and into chasing your own tail.

This is something I thought was pretty obvious, but I can see that in a subtle way it can be misunderstood, perhaps even two ways. So I thought I should bring it up. I may as well use an example from my own life, since I am not such an amazing master that I should point at others and tell you what they should do.

I was born in 1958 and grew up in a small farming village on the west coast of Norway, back before Norway became one of the very richest and most advanced nations in the world. We had no television, and the government had a monopoly on broadcasting. It is not surprising that I grew up without knowing quite what meditation was. Even the church was state-owned, back then and there.

When I was still in my teens, I joined an old-fashioned Christian church. (Not the state-owned one – it did in fact avoid membership lists as a blasphemy.) I began to pray earnestly to God. After a while, I decided that it would be impolite to just rattle off my wish list and hang up, so at the end of my prayer, I would simply wait respectfully for God in case He wanted to say something to me as well. He did not, at least in any literal sense, which may be just as well.  But in that silence I could sense something, like an aura, which seemed to come from a direction at right angles to all of our three dimensions. Turning my attention that way, in my mind of course, I received peace and energy and clarity. What happened was that I discovered meditation, untaught by any human soul. You may say that I learned meditation from God.  (Although I only learned the name later.)

Now I could think that I must be some Very Important Person in the cosmic scale of things, to discover something as fundamental as meditation without being taught by mortals. In a manner of speaking, I could be said to be equal to whoever first brought meditation to our Earth and founded the first mystic religion. It is possible to see it in that way. But it is a pretty stupid thing to think.

What happened then  was that I received a gift. A very precious gift for sure, but in itself it did not make me a better person. It had the potential to transform me, sure, but that was not yet happening, or at least not from that reason. It is a fairly slow process, meditation, at least for most of us. And despite learning meditation directly from Heaven, I was very much a “most of us” in terms of progress.

I have also experienced the bliss of religious ecstasy that is, as they say, better than sex. Admittedly I am not that much of an expert on sex, but it certainly was more blissful than anything I had experienced, awake or asleep. The Hindus, or at least some of them, have a saying about samadhi – their religious ecstasy – that “when you have experienced this, you know there is nothing greater to experience”. That was how I felt at the time, although I am not sure whether I was right. I have in fact never experienced anything greater, emotionally speaking.

Even that, however, did not make me into a saint. I had and still have much the same temptations. Well, some of them gradually change over time, of course, but none of these things made me into the awesome spiritual person who one would expect to have such experiences. They were gifts. Growth is something else again.  Some people get more gifts as they grow. Actually, I think that is pretty common. But sometimes gifts come at the beginning, or in the middle, and sometimes they even come and go again. It varies depending on the gift and the way life was meant to be for each of us.

So if you see great lights, hear voices from Heaven, leave your body, experience five minutes lasting for five hours or the other way around,  if you are healed from serious illness or even heal others, these things are not in and of themselves important for your spiritual growth. If you are obsessed with yourself and don’t live a life of helping other people, there is no point in any of these. Or as a better man has said: “If I have the gift of prophecy and can fathom all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have a faith that can move mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.” (St Paul, in his first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 13. Good stuff all around.)

It is a common mistake when we experience something super, that we want to go back and have it again. This is not unique either. When Jesus was illuminated on the mountain with Moses and Elijah, his disciples wanted to build a cabin there so they could just remain in that cool place. Instead, Jesus went off to Jerusalem and was crucified.

So the thing is, having those cool experiences may be something that is given to weak-hearted people so they don’t give up entirely. Or it could be something that is given to Very Important Persons so that they can help others, I suppose. But they are not the purpose of life, certainly not of spiritual life. If you don’t really understand much and you never hear anyone at the other end when you pray, but you give love to others without asking for anything in return, you have advanced far beyond one who sees great lights and feels electric currents surge through the body, and then keeps chasing that experience for the rest of his life.

So that’s the way it is, I believe. The voice in my heart seems to agree, but you know I am not so transparent that I could not fool myself. But when the holy scriptures from far away and long ago also agree, I feel pretty safe to post this, that it won’t lead you astray. Hopefully neither will the cool spiritual experiences, if you ever have those.

A lamentation or three

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Toward the Light…

Today I finally got around to installing Wimp, the extremely legal music streaming service from Norway, on a Linux computer. I had it on my smartphone, but the interface is like an old aunt’s attic where just one look makes you decide to search for something later, if at all. The PC interface is better, mainly by virtue of having more space for the clutter.

And then I found that my only playlist on Wimp was now empty. All music by Knut Avenstroup Haugen was gone, without a trace and without a goodbye.

Knut Avenstroup Haugen is a Norwegian composer, in fact he lived for a while in Kristiansand, the city where I work. He is of the classical (non-crazy) school, making actual music rather than the sound of factory machines or kitchen utensils. And he made the sound track for the online game Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures. The game is too evil for me to play in this late stretch of my life, although it certainly showcased the power of the personal computer for gaming. Some of the songs however are in a class of their own. Or at least they are to me.  Three of the songs from the Cimmeria part of the game are lamentations, similar to the classical lamentations once popular in church music, but more direct, more raw, closer to the barbarian dirge which they represent in the game.

Now I probably differ from every one of my readers in my love for a good lamentation. There are few things that can so certainly perk me up if I feel a bit below the top. In all fairness, I used to be immune to sadness for many years and even now rarely feels its touch, even after having recovered it through the mystery of meditation. So this may work entirely opposite in people given to depression. In fact, I suspect it would. But for me, a good lamentation fills me with the joy of beauty. And these are my favorites: ‘Ere The World Crumbles‘, Ascending Cimmeria, and especially Memories of Cimmeria.

They were gone, just like that. Now that is lamentable. I notice that they are also gone from one of the two parent companies of Wimp.no, Platekompaniet. So there seems to be some disagreement, perhaps, between the composer (or the artists, or the publisher) and this particular music chain.

The thought struck me, of course, that maybe Haugen had converted to the One True Faith and retracted all his worldly music. This is the kind of thinking that is never really far from my mind, I guess. Although I have yet to retract all of my worldly entries from my journal.

But the fact that I am right now playing his music on the Swedish competitor, Spotify, kind of goes against the conversion theory.  So I have sent a mail to Wimp and asked for an explanation. Being that they are Norwegian (and labor is extremely expensive in Norway compared to the less successful nations, such as yours) I don’t really expect an answer. Consequently, I don’t really expect to continue to subscribe to Wimp beyond the last month I have already paid for.

***

Now, a few more words about lamentations. As I said, they may be a bit unnerving for the depressed, and I certainly don’t recommend them for the suicidal, for the precise reason that I love them:  To me, the essential beauty of the lamentation is that it lifts the soul toward Heaven. This was presumably why the genre was originally conceived. The primordial dirge may have been just the senseless keening of the bereaved, but it probably evolved even at the dawn of history – if not before – into a religious function.

After all, by the faith of the earlier ages, at the time of death the soul was evicted from the body, but rarely had much idea of what to do next, nor was it usually motivated to move on. People tended to die young, and often senselessly or brutally, in the midst of their attachment to the material world. Their immaterial part, the soul or spirit or shade or whatever people thought it was, therefore was thought to hang around for at least a while after their demise.

This is where the advanced dirge / early lamentation comes in. As the confused and frustrated soul attends its own wake, probably trying in vain to communicate with its family, the ceremonial singers (and instrument players, if available) begins performing this hair-raisingly beautiful song. The soul is touched by its beauty, and lifted on the power of the music and the implicit prayer, it begins to forget the trivial attachments of the world and rise toward the Light. This, then, is the function of the lamentation: To lift the spirits of all who participate, accompanying the soul of the deceased for a ways on its journey toward the blessed afterlife, whatever that might be in that particular culture.

Or perhaps that’s just me. I am not exactly your average human, I guess even when it comes to music…

 

Interdimensional worldbuilding

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What if the aliens were… us, as we could have been?

So the muses in my head are a-musing me with a new story set in a new world. Actually the background is more interesting than the story. (Usually not a good sign, but I am not being paid for this so I write what I’d like to read.)

So this all starts in the very near future, when off-world visitors appear in public for the first time. They don’t land in front of the White House or even in Beijing, but at St. Peter’s Square in Rome / the Vatican. A man in shining white meets with the Pope and later holds a press conference. He is a high-ranking member of the Imperial family in the Empire of 1000 worlds. Despite the humble name, the Empire actually counts over 7000 worlds and is still growing. But these worlds are mostly alternate versions of our Earth, in different time lines.

We are here not talking about time lines where Hitler won World War 2 or the Viking colonized America. Rather it seems that each of the time lines separated when the first human became self-aware. In the hub of the Empire, which is called Earth Prime, civilization is about 100 000 years old, and most of the others are also older than ours. The collected science and technology of all these worlds is now wielded by the Empire, and 99.9% of this looks like magic to everyone on Earth.

The Empire has no intention of invading Earth, assures its messenger. It is entirely dedicated to spreading love and happiness through the multiverse. They just happened to think some of us might want to join them. Quite possibly all of us, eventually, but it would have to be voluntary.

The messenger, the Oldest Living Son of the Emperor, also obliquely hints at being connected with the world’s great religions, possibly, and with the kick-starting of civilization on Earth in the first place. He is rather vague on these matters though.

The further backdrop of the story is how mankind reacts – or fails to react – to this First Contact and meeting a number of cultures utterly different from ours. The plot is about one young man, fresh out of high school at the time, who decides to throw in his lot with the Empire. But there could be any number of stories written in this multiverse.  Is the Empire really a pure force for good? And even if they intend to do good, what will the real effect be on mankind? Will it crush our spirit, incite us to rebellion, or just fail to make an impression when no further invasion fleet appears?

Well, there may already be stories written about something like that. There is no end to the writing of books, and I have not read them all. It would be typical if someone else had written something like that already.

But the beauty of the Empire is that it has no aliens, and yet almost nothing but aliens. There are worlds with furries (artificially merging human and animal traits), worlds without grownups (where people remain childlike in appearance and size throughout their lives), worlds where people never put on clothes except to have sex, worlds where the moon is densely populated and worlds where it is a billboard. And every technology is magic to those who don’t understand it: You may be able to casually walk through walls yet baffled at the sight of an eeePad.

It is a fun place for me to write, even if I never plan to have it published. And even if I don’t have much time for it, really.