...a uniquely portable magic
"Books are a uniquely portable magic." – Stephen King, On Writing
I started a blog many years ago. Not so much to gain followers or to light little flares saying “look at me” but to catalogue my thoughts. I archived one I had written for years, Alzheimer’s Disease The Brand, because I grew tired and hoarse writing and speaking about billion dollar funding and deluded pharmaceutical industry efforts to provide a small molecule solution to derangements in senescence. I think I have the archive somewhere if anyone is interested—just ask.
The second blog that had a link name change when it went free to host, data & donuts, still persists when time allows has been sort of superseded by this newsletter. I can still look back over the years and see me naively trying to change the world—one data analysis at a time. I am going to record those and include them as audio from time to time. Many are prescient, some are amusing, all are a talisman for thoughts and ideas from the past.
One of my favorite things to write about?
The books I am reading. I keep most of my books but what is missing is what I thought about it at the time.
This book, Entangled Life is a beautiful book read by the author with important life lessons swirling among the fungi and their influence on our lives.
Merlin is telling a tale of a friend and magician David Abram
“Every night he passed around the tables; coins walked through his fingers, reappeared exactly where they shouldn’t, disappeared again, divided in two, vanished into nothing.”
David explains why people experiencing the magic were convinced that the world they experienced afterwards had changed—traffic was louder, the sky was brighter.
“Our perceptions work in large parts by expectation. It takes less cognitive effort to make sense of the world using preconceived images updated with a small amount of new sensory information than to constantly form entirely new perceptions from scratch.”
Basically magicians are doing their work in our blindspots, he goes on to share. I would argue that our blindspots are up for grabs in a wide variety of domains.
This is the premise of the entire world of the fungi. You would be surprised by the problem-solving behaviors in brainless organisms.
But then again, it is time to get out and vote…