Death in the Back Room... [Or how I spent my Yom Kippur]

It has been a little while since I've posted... been busy... but the other night I wrote something for another Net based posting medium but because of its subject matter I thought it should also be posted here with some minor edits...

"A season is set for everything, a time for every experience under heaven: A time for being born and a time for dying..." Ecclesiastes 3.1-2 [JPS Tanakh 1985]

Death has a funny way of announcing itself.

Usually you are the last to know... So let me ramble on for a bit as old folks are wont to do when you don't really have time [or interest] to listen.

Don't worry.

It will be painless. You'll be asleep before you know it...

As some of you know I've been spending my time studying how to be a Yid... Well in June I finally got my graduation papers... so now I'm no longer an ignorant long haired twisted pinko pagan... instead I'm an ignorant old gray haired [sometimes silver depending on the darkness of the room or my soul] twisted pinko Yid... But still a cyberpunk type.

Cyberpunk?

Go read Gibson's Neuromancer or others from the mirror-shaded era of '80s Science Fiction... The Matrix is just a shadow of the darkness reflecting that era...

I do computers. I read Science Fiction... I see a Dark Future unless we change... so:

A Cyberpunk Yid...

Imagine that!

Look! can't you see me swaying as I davvin to type this? Davvin? What's that?

Oi... it is the way a Yid's body moves when he prays with all his being...

So how does a Cyberpunk Yid spend the Day of Atonement?

"What?" You Say. "Atonement for what? Only Blue Boxers do tones."

Ah...

[For those of you who don't know what a bluebox is well... just say its a box that makes tones that allows one to make free phone calls... uh... illegally... ]

[For those of you who don't understand atonement... well I'll try to explain...]

For those of you unaware of Jewish Theology and / or Legend, Rosh Hashannah is the first day of the Jewish Lunar Calendar Year....

On that day the Being that runs the Quantum Computing Data Center [Otherwise know as the universe in which we live move and have our being] starts a core dump of the system... call it shaking the quantum dice...

Or clearing out the drek at the bottom of the pot...

whatever....

any way....

The Chief Operator starts to make plans... analyzing... looking... deciding.... Its petal to the metal for ten days balancing the books and then on Yom Kippur the Operator makes final tallies about the important stuff...

you know...

who lives. who dies...

who is smart enough to sell out and then get out of the country before the SEC, FTC, FBI, and DHLS figure out the stockholders and the government has been screwed or who gets caught before they can even buy the tickets....

Who gets to bed the girl and who gets laughed at for asking...

That kind of Stuff.

It's the day we admit we've failed the Chief System Operator's instructions. So what many Jews do is they spend that day pleading with the Chief Operator not to terminate their accounts. You know how that is.

[unless you're my friend Jack and have a crafty hand with other people's telco wire.]

So what did I do? Like any newly minted, ignorant Yid [do I look that smart?] I spent my night and then most of my day at the Synagogue... but unlike most of those folks around me I told the Operator: "Look, I don't understand what's up with You. I'm a lousy human being. I'm not really a good guy. There are other things more important that keeping a geezer like me on life support. If you really think you need to terminate my existence and it will make some kind of difference some time some when then please... by all means."

Look-- I know what I am. I'm no sterling example of humanity... I'll never join a "Social Networking" site... I'm not that kind of social.

I can't do IM... I prefer to think about what I'm trying to communicate rather than putting my foot in my mouth why even in the places I do frequent on-line I've pissed off or hurt people's feelings

[whoever you are, where ever you are I know I cannot take away the harm I have caused you but I ask your forgiveness]...

So I know I am not able to stand among the great or the famous much less the rich and well to do. The slate containing my failures and my sins is mostly black...

You know there is a little understood myth that is in the Torah about a sacrifice that is offered around the time of the Day of Atonement.

The sacrifice is a goat that is given to Azrael [who is identified by some as the Angel of Death and by others as a Canaanite God] to take on the sins of the Yids.. this myth is the source of the word Scapegoat... It is ironic that I've been called The Old Goat on-line for quite a while... and even funnier that I chose HaGedi [Hebrew for "the goat kid] as my "nom de plume" for this blog...

So like I said I went and spent the day at the Shul.

Now our Shul [Yiddish for "School" and synonymous for Synagogue] has a Erev [Evening] Service and then a morning service, then a children's service.. then an afternoon service.. then a Yitzor [Memorial] service, and finally another almost but not quite Erev service...

Oh. I forgot to tell you:
You're supposed to starve yourself while you're doing all this pleading with the Operator. Yes, Its a "fast" day from sundown to sundown... but it sure seems like a long 24 hours for such a fast day... if you get my drift.

You know you got to be really addicted to the service the Operator provides if you're willing to starve yourself to keep it. Would you do the same thing to keep your World of Warcraft account? Ok, So this is life we're talking about.

So I go to the Erev Service. And I go to the Morning service. The place is packed with "Ghost Yids"... some of you may know these as the Jews that are only seen in Shul on Rosh Hashannah and Yom Kippur.

One other thing that is important to remember when you come to Shul during the Days of Awe: Careful when you inhale or exhale you might be stealing someone else's breath... We Yids tend to breath together at times like these... There are other problems like: "Oh wait... Get your elbow out of my eye..."

The place is packed... Oi!

It was after the Children's service that the first shadow fell... The Reform Shul in Charleston is the oldest "living" Shul in America. It was built in 1840. On the back walls of the sanctuary are four wall boxes with brass plates with the names of those Yids that had the money [or relatives with the money] to put up a plate as a memorial to their passing from this life.

Next to each name is a low wattage clear bulb [think "night light"]. The bulbs are only turned on to commemorate the anniversary of the person's death but all of them are turned on for the Yitzor service on Yom Kippur... we like to remember all of them on that day... or maybe its to get them to remember us to the Operator... Dunno.

So I volunteer to help screw in the bulbs at the conclusion of the Children's service for the oldest of all of the boards [it does not have a master power switch like the other boards . ... I think it was installed in the 1920's but I'm not really sure]

When the service concluded I started screwing in the bulbs. I get about half way through and there's a flash then a pop much like the sound of a nine millimeter hand gun heard in the distance.

The bulb I'm holding shatters in between my right index finger and my thumb. The board's lights die and so too the lights on the memorial wall box adjacent to the one I've been working on. The board has blown the circuit breaker... A 20 Amp breaker. Plenty of joules to fry a Jew.

I don't realize what has just happened... until I look at my index finger as I bend to pick up the broken glass [I don't want the children stepping on it after all]. From the tip of my finger to the base of my thumb is covered in black soot from the arc of electricity. Strangely I was not cut by the bulb glass when it shattered. I pick up the glass shards and then go to wash my hand... Thinking on the way: The Memorial boxes are solid metal. If I had been touching the metal box what that bulb blew I would have popped a breaker too...

I get through the Afternoon service but do not stay for the rest.

I'm tired and not just a little shook up. I could have died. Maybe I did. After all we are living our lives inside a Quantum Computer.

The Reality has a Quantum State which is this: Nothing is forbidden. Everything is happening at once. Everything is true. When I say everything, I mean everything. There's not just this one universe but more than we can even imagine

Everything is true -- even the lies we've told each other. Okay?

So the Chief operator didn't terminate my account... in this particular Quantum space... At least not yet.

So my wife and I go and stop at my sister-in-law's $300K house in the 'Hood built in 1890 by one of the town's undertakers... I begin to feel a little better... at least until she asks me: "So if you had died... do you think they'd give you a free wall plaque?"

I think to myself... "Sure with a $250 shipping and handling charge..."

My wife and I head out to help with setting up things at a "Break the Fast" Party... held in an exclusive gated community on the Isle of Palms... Did you know that the barrier island locations around Charleston have been turned into the titles of "Best Selling" pot boilers?...

Isle of Palms is one of "those" kind of places... Next door is Sullivan's Island [Where Poe wrote "The Gold Bug"... and that pot boiling author wrote "Sullivan's Island"]... across the bay [Charleston Bay... the one Randy Newman wrote about] and down the road [I'm sure some day I'm gonna write a song about that road] is Folly Beach where Gershwin wrote the music to "Porgy and Bess"... and I'm pretty sure the pot-boiler writer has written a book... So we're on our way out to one of the barrier islands where all the rich folks live [understand... we live a block way from da hood]

Of course I did not make the left turn when I should have but we still ended up in the right place [hey! we Yids have a *long* history of wandering around and still ending up where we were supposed to go...] So we make it to the home of our well-to-do host and hostess...

Yids party whenever there is a good opportunity. Birth, Death, Marriage, you name it we'll figure out some way to turn it into a party... why? Because we've had to deal with so much grief. So we have a party. This Erev we celebrate the fact we survived the Fast. Me? I think I am partying because I survived the Yitzor Box.

This is not the first time I've had a close encounter with Death.

So we party... in the polite civilized way that those who are accustomed to money are wont to do. Midway through the evening my wife not seeing where I'm standing moves her arm... suddenly my sixty five dollar white shirt [the only dress shirt I own] looks like what Jack Ruby did to Lee Harvey Oswald... red wine does wonders for white shirts.

The hostess is gracious: she offers me a golf shirt or an Air Force Tee that says:

"When it absolutely has to be destroyed overnight -- Air Force"...

I take the Tee... After all my shirt has just been destroyed by my peace loving Lady.

Eventually I get home and I sit down. I pull out my beat up, funky, Open E tuned Guitar and write down the lyrics for a new take on Ecclesiastes Chapter 3 verses 1 to 8... you know the one... Pete Seeger turned it into a hit and no one has dared to try to write a different version... 'cept for some foolish old Goat. You know him.

arrogant to the last...

A season is set for everything
a place and time for every deed
For above and below Heaven
A place and time for ev'ry need

Funny thing about the guy who wrote that stuff originally. You know... In the Book.

He knew about the Quantum rig we're playing in. Read verse 9 and 10... Wait. Put down that KJV. You want to understand what a Jew understands then read a Bible translated by a Jew... The KJV is a bad bit of plagiarism.

Anyway, the way I read those verses is that The Chief System Operator has already fixed the outcome... all of them... [So what do I read today on SlashDot? David Deutsch with some other folks at Oxford have come up with some maths about "the many worlds theory" of Quantum Mechanics showing how *every* possibility really may be true...]

Then I got to reflecting on how tired and stiff I was from all of the togetherness I had suffered. You know me. I'm not so good at that kind of stuff. I don't suffer togetherness too well...

So I take one of my Lady's Little Helpers and I'm off to sleep for 12 hours... When I get up I record the new tune about how theres a season for everything... I drop it into my audio editor... a little cut... a little paste... then some mastering stuff and finally convert it to MP3 and go to upload it on to my little Linux web server... it's been home to the the mostly empty Back Room. The Back Room is a private chat / posting space for writers of my aquintance from the USENET list Alt.Cyberpunk.Chatsubo. The same server hosts my dvusMedia music archives and other stuff... but...

My FTP client can't connect...

It's happened before... We've had power outages and I've had to go an reboot the box [at least before I replaced the UPS]... I wander over and climb around the junk to get to the box. no big deal. Sometime we have power surges here. Nope. The UPS is fine... no red lights from dead batteries....

Except...

The box is dead. It won't power up. The Back Room server is dead.

The Back Room needs a brass plate and a 7 watt clear bulb.

I'm not sure when my little server died. Maybe it was when I shorted out the memorial box... maybe it was when my shirt died with the glass of Wine... maybe it died several weeks ago from loneliness... Maybe it's not dead at all but I just don't know how to make its quantum state collapse into a mode where I can connect to it.

I suppose I'll pull out one of the other boxes I've got floating around here in the drek of the Goat House Studio and bring it back to life... if only to pull the music off of it... or maybe I'll bring it back to life and set it free to its own purpose... and that got me to thinking [a dangerous thing for a silver haired goat to do]:

A lot of what we seek to do as writers or artists is about connectivity... we are seeking to connect our audience to their own emotions... connect them to their own thoughts and sometimes setting them free enough to have new thoughts and feelings... Sometimes it is we who are seeking to connect to our own ideas or feelings or dreams... and the audience is just along for the ride.

As artists or writers ours is a continuum of ideas where all we create and say and do is real and true-- even if we contradict one another. It can't be any other way.

Assuming the Many Worlds interpretation of Quantum Mechanics is correct then this is a thing we are required to do: We must be who we are and we must say these things--- Because that's what it means to be a creative wave function in a quantum computing device. All of the "yous" in all the various states of the Quantum Reality Machine must act out all of your possibilities...

So:

Maybe I died when I screwed in that bulb... or I was shot at the party... or died of an overdose of antidepressants in 1987... or The Back Room became the super star of all of the Web 2.0 sites... all of these are as true as this moment when I sit writing these words.

somewhere we got everything we wanted... in another somewhere we got all we deserved... but in this somewhere we'll get what we dare to create....

Until next time...

HaGedi