I put Rayuela down, probably for good. I’m…sort of bored with it, and my language skills are probably not where they need to be to pick up on the subtleties. I started re-reading a collection of Philip K. Dick’s short stories which included a letter from him to another author explaining what he thinks science fiction is:
We have a fictitious world; that is the first step: it is a society that does not in fact exist, but is predicated on our known society; that is our known society acts as a jumping-off point for it; the society advances out of our own in some way, perhaps orthogonally, as with the alternate world story or novel. It is our world dislocated by some kind of mental effort on the part of the author, our world transformed into that which is not or not yet. This world must differ from the given in at least one way, and this way must be sufficient to give rise to events that could not occur in our society - or in any known society present or past
For PKD, setting a story in the future isn’t enough to make it science fiction, and this had me mulling over the dislocation he talks about, which gave rise to more woolgathering, until I landed on a what-if scenario:
What if Eternal September had never happened, and moreover, never could have happened? That is, what if the internet as we knew it in 1993 had remained the exclusive domain of academia, government, and large enterprises?
Remember that at that time, there were bulletin boards, many joined to message-passing federations like FidoNet, and larger private online services like CompuServe. If those had remained the only options for connectivity, what would the world look like in AD 2025?
Just for the fun of it - and fully conscious of the irony - I put the question to both ChatGPT and Claude and got back answers which, to be honest, were a little depressing in that ‘homesick for a place which doesn’t exist’ sort of way. Herewith some of their observations, and it’s pointing out that without the internet corpus, it seems pretty unlikely that LLMs would have emerged at all. AI research would likely have remained focused on things like genetic algorithms and neural networks.
Without internetworking between commercial services and the academic internet, we’d have multiple incompatible digital ecosystems. CompuServe might have evolved into a corporate-focused network with robust business applications, while AOL could have remained a consumer entertainment platform. GEnie, with its origins in General Electric’s timesharing systems, might have specialized in technical and engineering communities. Each would have developed proprietary protocols, incompatible file formats, and distinct cultures.
Local bulletin board systems would have become the primary bridge between these isolated networks. By 2025, BBS networks might have evolved into sophisticated federated systems - imagine FidoNet scaled up with modern hardware but retaining its store-and-forward architecture. Local sysops would function as information brokers, manually transferring messages and files between incompatible commercial services.
This fragmented world might have been more sustainable - each network optimized for its specific community rather than trying to be everything to everyone - but it would have severely limited global knowledge sharing and collaborative innovation.
In short:
No Eternal September → slower, more elitist Internet, delayed mass adoption.
BBS-first world → more fragmented, localized, community-governed networks; less centralization; a digital culture shaped more by sysops than by Silicon Valley.
By 2025, you’d probably have a digital world that’s:
Less commercialized, more community-run.
Slower and more text-heavy.
Rich in local cultures, but without a single meme-flooded global commons.
Basically, closer to Ham radio + local newspapers than Twitter + TikTok.
I graduated from college in 1993 and used the text-only internet (newsgroups and email) a fair amount while I was a student. I remember seeing one of the guys in the computer lab show us a new program called Mosaic, but there wasn’t much you could use it for at the time. Archie and Veronica were way more useful. Right before graduation, I got a part-time job helping a market research company run consumer tests for a CATV set-top box, which offered electronic messaging, interactive menus, and so on. The big idea at the time was “convergence,” where your telephone and television would all come on a single wire, and the fight everyone was preparing for was whose wire: The telephone company? Or local broadband CATV franchisee?
Good grief, it sounds like a discussion of steam vs. horse now. Still, if the walled garden online services had remained isolated and things like FidoNet continued to develop as a sort of backbone, we would have lost the immediate access to (nearly) unlimited information, but we’d also be spared the global bathroom wall of opinion and invective. As for the internet, it might have remained a B2B sort of thing, or a place for enterprise applications. Websites might be limited to catalog storefronts for large retailers, but maybe they would have cut deals with AOL and GEnie instead. Social media would not have emerged, but there’d still be localized enclaves and cliques. So memes, maybe, but slow-moving and regional at best. Newspapers would probably still be around, and maybe CATV/minitel-like services emerged for the non-computerized households.
With Christians, a poetical view of things is a duty. We are bid to color all things with hues of faith, to see a divine meaning in every event.
— St. John Henry Cardinal Newman
OCIA begins tonight. Last I heard, we had 36 folks signed up, so it looks like it’s going to be another big year, thanks be to God. The deacon who used to work with the program has recently stepped back from many of his ministerial roles as a sort of prelude to retirement, so it may fall to me to lay-lead the Liturgy of the Word at the beginning of class. Although not (yet) delegated to preach, I have a brief reflection also prepared. This is an easy one; today’s Gospel reading is a portion of the seven woes. The discourse continues tomorrow, and since I was already looking ahead in case Father asks me to deliver a reflection, these words have been on my mind for a few days now.
One of the key elements - maybe the key element of preaching is the assembly. Who and where are they? You’d think that a homily would largely remain the same across four or five masses on the same day and without a doubt, it makes zero sense to write four or five separate sermons. The assembly, though, may require a different emphasis. The early morning folks tend to be older; 11AM is family-palooza, afternoon is sometimes University Catholic-heavy, and evening in Spanish. All of them need the Word proclaimed; all of them need something different. In the end, the Holy Spirit will move them according to His will anyway, so maybe the most I can do is try not to frustrate that movement.
Mutatis mutandis, the readings today and tomorrow concern internal pieties and external demonstrations of them. The Lord is very clear to his listeners that the first drives the second, and the second is no substitute for the first. In fact, hollow externalities may be worse. We will be known by our fruits, and tomorrow we will be able to contrast superficiality with the fruitful piety of Saint Monica. Her steadfast prayers and concern for rhetoric-bro son (yes) make her a natural patron of parents today, but also demonstrate to all of us what can happen when we let an interior life of prayer become the animation of our actions, large and small. Who knows how many Augustines are among us today?
For the seekers and potential candidates, and catechumens, the message is largely the same, but perhaps with a view closer to 35,000 feet. From the outside (or periphery) looking in, Catholicism must look something like a giant coral reef. Endlessly baroque in some places, occasionally chaotic, but nevertheless giving the sense of a larger order and picture. It may be exactly those external expressions of faith that have drawn them in. Many have told us so in the past - the awe of attending mass for the first time, or a piece of achingly beautiful music or art. The faith is physical, sensual. For us, matter matters. Yet all of these things are means to an end, not ends themselves. They draw us closer to Him, who beckons us to Come, to discipleship. To a radical re-reckoning of the world around us, seeing it with new eyes, everything pointing to a deeper meaning. But also not losing the forest for the trees.
We must let these things lead back to ourselves, back to our hearts, so that we can open them anew to God’s grace. If we don’t, we risk loitering in the lobby rather than entering the feast.
The August formation weekend is behind us, and for my cohort, that amounted to just Saturday, which was nice. We spent the day preaching to each other and going over the finer points of The Order of Celebrating Matrimony Without Mass and then preaching some more in the context of a wedding. Difficulty level: two hours of notice. It probably makes sense to adapt Alec Baldwin’s speech and Always Be Preparing (a homily).
Do you know what it takes to preach the Gospel?
[ holds up a brass rosary ]
Also on the to-do list: I need to write up a final self-evaluation and a petition to the bishop. My wife, for her part, will write a letter expressing her support and consent for the petition. Meetings with mentor and spiritual director. More upcoming practices in September, October, and November. Everything leads to December 20, but everything after that is a gigantic question mark. No idea where or what we’ll be assigned. At my home parish, I’m slowly sort of winding down current ministries in anticipation. OCIA kicks off tomorrow night (36 signed up!), and I’ll need to hand my notes and materials off to someone else. The finance committee met last week, and we’ll need to name a new chair and make some additional adjustments. And so on.
There are a couple of things I avoid writing about. I avoid, if I can, any discussions of work. I like having clear boundaries, and would just rather not get into work stuff. The other topic I stay away from is politics. This one is very much vocation-related.
During my application for aspirancy several years ago, I had a series of conversations/interviews with the director of vocations. One of the things he made clear was that, after ordination, my opinion as such didn’t really matter anymore. In fact, not only did it not matter, it probably ought not exist at all. After ordination, he explained, you will be a cleric of the church. When you talk, you will be speaking as a cleric, whether you’re dressed as one or not. Everything you say or write will be seen as coming from The Church. People will ask you for your opinion, and your opinion no longer matters. If you are the sort of person who likes to have an opinion and enjoys weighing in on the topics of the day, he continued, you may need to reconsider the diaconate.
As a deacon in this diocese, he went on, you will almost certainly have people in the pews who are undocumented, and they will be two pews away from other parishioners who are headed to a Build The Wall rally after Mass. You will be ordained to serve all of them, period.
We can talk about policies and programs, but not people or parties. _If my sister runs for dog-catcher, _ he said, I can’t put a sticker on my car in support of her. This is how it is.
He went on to suggest that, even as an aspirant, beginning the habit of this sort of partisan detachment might be a good exercise, and so I did. As it turns out, this wasn’t particularly difficult for me - I haven’t had a home anywhere in the current political spectrum for some time now, and this conversation gave me a vocabulary and grammar I had lacked to describe why. In the end, though, hewing completely to the Church’s teachings (social or otherwise) gives an interesting sort of new freedom. Unmoored from either party, I can make common cause on programs and policies that comport with the Church regardless of their source. I can likewise take either side to task for their shortcomings. It feels very mercenary and in a way, it is. This turns out to suit my personality pretty well, actually. Nice job on program X, I can support that. Programs Y and Z, however, are bad, and I can in no way defend them. Get your act together. It’s all very surgical.
Are there clerics who weigh in? Sure seems like there are. I can’t answer for them, how they were formed, or how they minister to people On The Other Side of whatever divide they’re on. I can only manage myself, and that’s job enough, thanks.
This doesn’t mean I don’t keep up - I do, probably a bit too much. I have several magazine subscriptions, follow a couple of hundred RSS feeds, and do my level best to gather and glean from across the opinion landscape. As I read, I’m always thinking What is this story about? Who is speaking or quoted? Who is silent? What am I meant to come away with? Some of this is j-school remnants, I think. I never went into the business, but studied journalism as an undergraduate at one of the best schools in the country, intending to go into radio or television news. Instead, I got married, took a full-time job as a sort of junior analyst fiddling with computers, and the rest is history.
In any case, if we’ve spoken in the past and I’ve come off a little hard to pin down politically, good, that’s the point. Because it really doesn’t matter what I think. What I’m trying to think is here and here.
I didn’t get a chance to deliver the reflection I mentioned below, but I did have a chance to try again yesterday, and I am in need of more practice. I tried to cover too much in 3 minutes and forgot the advice about having “One Thing.” I will ask for another at-bat next week. At least I avoided heresy!
Still working through Rayuela. It’s good, but not the most exciting stuff. Lots of Bohemians lying around and discussing jazz, except, you know in Spanish. It’s slow going, and I’m only reading one or two chapters at a time. They’re short, though.
Radio stuff: the N2EME SDR switch, which replaces the MFJ-1708B-SDR arrived the other day and works great. The next order of business was getting sdrpp to act like a proper panadapter and submit (via hook, crook, or rigctld) to be synchronized with the radio. I enlisted Claude to help with several approaches, but none of them worked out, so I turned my attention back to gqrx, which used to work great until suddenly it didn’t and I never could figure out why.
Well, it turns out that somewhere along the way, gr-osmosdr got clobbered and replaced with a version that didn’t support SDRPlay’s API. So I fixed that plus a few other dependencies, rebuilt gqrx, and everything works again. Now I just need to move all my sdrpp bookmarks (JSON) back to gqrx (CSV), which is just going to be some good, old-fashioned text munging.
When that’s done, I’ll be able to get all my apps (fldigi, wsjtx, cqrlog, et al) up-to-date/re-tweaked so I should be back in business radiowise. I should be good to go for the fall and winter. We did a massive closet and garage cleanout a few weeks back, and I found an enormous pile of old CDRs, including Quake and all of my old Valve games (HL, HL2, Opposing Force, Blue Shift, etc). I managed to get keys found and/or recovered via Steam, so they’re all in my current library again, which is just a hoot-and-a-half. I restarted HL2, and I have to say it holds up pretty well. I can only play for short bursts, though; Factorio seems to be more my tempo these days. I started a new playthrough last winter with the new space expansion, but didn’t get very far.
I’m not trying to exit summer too quickly, but I am saying that if the weather were to turn gross tomorrow and all the yardwork suddenly ended, I’d be, y’know, set up for amusement.
Our pastor is out of town for a while, so one of the associates (who knows I regularly serve on Wednesday mornings before work) asked if I wanted to practice giving some brief reflections on the readings. We can’t call them homilies, but that’s basically what they are. I will probably take him up on this, but noticed that the first Wednesday out of the gate is on the Feast of the Transfiguration. I suspect he will want to preach this one, but on the off-chance that he doesn’t, my thoughts are swirling around the following:
Everything that God desires to reveal about Himself is revealed completely in Jesus
We may find ourselves, like Peter, exhilarated, confused, or maybe even paralyzed by this, and if this is the case:
“Listen to Him,” in prayer, in five minutes of silence, and in the words of those around us. We find ourselves with Him now in the Eucharist; let us ask for the grace to Listen to what He may have to tell us.
As for everything else:
I finished Morel the other day. The plot was absolutely bananas and it’s hard to believe it was published in the 1940s, especially seeing how well Casares anticipated some of the mind-blowing plots that have shown up in recent sci-fi/prestige shows. I’m going to put more of his stuff in my queue for sure. Rayuela is going well so far, but I’m only a couple of chapters in. I’ve opted for the conventional path; the author has another suggested path that skips around through the chapters in a different pattern and includes ‘extra’ material that isn’t part of the straight-through read. I may do that on a second go-round; we’ll see.
We’ve gotten a nice break from the summer heat this past week but I think we’re ready for the overcast skies to go away. It might look vaguely like fall out there but there’s still plenty of summer ahead. As a measure of certainty, I planted the lavender cuttings and added some monarda that I found at Home Depot the other night. I’d like to add some Joe Pye weed, creeping thyme, and more coneflowers to the mix and am hoping to catch some bargains as summer winds down a bit.
The annual cicadas are getting their last words, and the late-summer field crickets and katydids have joined in the ruckus, which is nice. Goldenrod is starting to show up around here, which called my first beekeeping season to mind - goldenrod honey smells like…well, feet. Or sweat socks. It’s pretty pungent stuff. You could smell it a good distance from the hives and I was happy to let them keep it for their winter stores. Seeing it in bloom is one of those temporal waypoints I watch for in the landscape. The other one is tall ironweed, which should be blooming soon.
I’ve been doing a little work on the radio shack - added some proper power distribution for the Astron to get rid of a rat’s nest of wiring. I added an inline power meter in the process and have been very happy with it. I’m interested to see how it performs under a TX load. I also re-guyed the vertical antenna with some adjustable tensioners while I wait for a new SDR switch to arrive.
Yesterday, as part of preparation for ordination, I made a general confession. I had been thinking about it for awhile and my spiritual director encouraged me to continue meditating and praying about it. De Sales’s Introduction was a helpful (and fruitful) aid for this, and a week or so ago I sat down with pen in hand and started writing down everything. Old, new, I-think-I’ve-confessed-this-but-can’t recall, and so on. It started slow but picked up speed, and burning the paper afterward was thoroughly satisfying.
I don’t know if I will do it again but at a major hinge-point of life, it seemed fitting. As for the graces - seeing everything laid out on a list which covered a page was humbling, but also a reminder that God’s mercy is far beyond our understanding. Maybe we can’t understand it, except in tiny glimmers here and there.
My spiritual director (and confessor) related a story about St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. When she was revealing her visions, her own spiritual director sought to test her a little.
During your next vision, he said, ask the Lord to reveal my last mortal sin. At a subsequent visit, he asked if she had managed to do so.
So I managed to remove most of the hydrangea. It was…colossal, and I ended up transplanting an offshoot in a different spot where it’s free to get as crazy-big as it wants to. What’s left is bits of the stump which I’ve painted with a bit of herbicide to make sure I’m not fighting it for the next ten years. I’ve got some catmint rooting in water and will take some cuttings from the lavender and brown-eyed susans a bit later today.
In any case, all I can say is: be careful where you plant oak-leaf hydrangeas. Very careful. They can become uncontrollable monsters.
We visited a couple of botanic gardens on our trip and I’ve been fully won over to the cottage style, particularly in borders. Gardening has always been a mixed bag for us. We’ve generally done pretty well with container vegetables and have had raised beds in some form or fashion for a while. The trouble comes from keeping other stuff out of the raised beds. Our yard, such as it is, was formerly pasture. It’s green and nice from a distance, but up close it is a riotous jungle of stuff. This is good, and exactly what I want in greenery.
The problem is that a lot of the green stuff is bermuda grass, which makes a fabulous lawn but can only be really controlled by splitting an atom. It gets into everything. You go to pull out a small tuft in the raised bed and realize it’s connected to three feet of buried root, any particle of which can start growing an entire lawn by itself if left behind.
So I’ve surrendered the raised beds for now. My last gardening stand is the area along the front of the house. There’s a sidewalk between the yard and this area and I’ve been shifting to drought-hardy perennials and natives - stonecrop, coneflower, brown-eyed susans, and yarrow. I’ve transplanted some (butterfly weed and prickly pear) from other parts of the yard and am going to try my hand at propagating others (lavender, cat mint, and anise hyssop). One thing I’ll need to do is clear out a couple of overgrown oakleaf hydrangeas, and I’ll probably move a few of the perennial herbs from their containers into a spot or two. A sickly climbing rose has gotten the boot; I’m replacing it with a coral honeysuckle (‘Major Wheeler’) which should do well in the full sun/southern exposure and give the hummingbirds something to do.
I’m also attempting to rescue a few of the remaining strawberry plants from the raised bed catastrophe; if they make it, I’ll move them in as well to use as groundcover. Most of this area gets a brutal amount of sun, but there are a couple of small niches that stay in all-day shade. For those, I’ve moved a couple of maidenhair spleenwort ferns from our woody areas and will also take a look at pachysandra. I figure if the hostas can persist there, it’s shady enough. I am also, once again, trying to encourage the Virginia creeper to head up one of the brick walls.
The cottage style has been generally described as:
controlled chaos
tall in the back, short in the front
favor natives as much as possible
plant thick, allow spread, and let the plants fight it out
keep opportunistic plants/weeds if they look nice and behave
edibles throughout - herbs, berries, vegetables
I can get behind all of this, especially the controlled chaos bit.
On one of our walking tours in the UK, we stopped at a 16th century mausoleum that had some interesting carvings and whatnot on the outside, including lots of skulls and crossbones. Our tour guide pointed them out to us and then explained that the skull and crossbones motif came about because of a decree by a pope. As you can imagine, he had my attention.
There was, he explained, a fear by crusaders that if they died far from home, God might somehow miss them in the resurrection. There was another fear that if you, say, lost an arm in battle, you’d be minus an arm in the afterlife as well. This, said the tour guide, was not good for the crusading efforts, so a pope wrote a letter that decreed that only the skull and two femurs were necessary to be resurrected completely; as a bonus, they were also easy to ship home to the family plot. Problem solved - Catholics, amirite?
We covered a lot of interesting ground over the last few years, and some of it tended towards the weird and interesting, but this was a new one for me. With some AI assistance and a whole lot of Googling, I have determined that this story is BS.
As best as I can tell, the decree he might have been referring to was Detestande feritatis, issued by Boniface VIII in 1299 and which specifically forbade a practice referred to as mons Teutonicus. This was the practice of boiling down the recently deceased to remove all flesh and leave only a skeleton behind, which could then be transported to the decedent’s preferred burial site. I haven’t been able to find the text of this online anywhere, but if you’d like to read more, have a look at “Death and the Human Body in the Later Middle Ages: The Legislation of Boniface VIII on the Division of the Corpse” by Elizabeth Brown (DOI:10.1484/J.VIATOR.2.301488) for historical context and some excellent analysis.
The skull and crossbones have apparently been used as memento mori for some time, irrespective of scholastic debates on the resurrection. There are several discussions about bodily integrity and the resurrection in the Summa, but nothing that I could find on Lord’s minimum requirements for work.
As you probably guessed from all the pictures, we recently visited the UK. We wanted to take in the sights, of course, but also sought out places associated with favorite writers. What we didn’t necessarily plan were all the encounters with various holy places and things along the way:
St. John Southworth, laying in a reliquary in the middle of Westminster Cathedral
St. Thomas More, whose execution site is marked on Tower Hill just across the road a bit from the Tower of London
St. Columba, who cast a monster from the River Ness upstream to the Loch (!) and was subsequently given the land where the Old High Church of Inverness sits now
The Lindisfarne Gospels and Codex Sinaiticus were also highlights, along with all the other beautiful illuminated manuscripts.
As for writers, we visited Charles Dickens' house, scratched our Mary Poppins itch with Kensington and St. Paul’s Cathedral, went to Mass at the Oxford Oratory (“Where Gerard Manley Hopkins was a priest, Cardinal Newman preached, and JRR Tolkien attended Mass”), wandered Beatrix Potter’s Hill Top and Wordsworth’s stomping grounds in Hawkshead. Visiting Poet’s Corner at Westminster Abbey feels like cheating, but there was Spenser and the rest. Among them was Dr. Johnson; we passed by Boswell’s Court in Edinburgh, which was neat. Greyfriar’s Kirkyard in Edinburgh is said to have inspired a few names from the Harry Potter series, and we spent a morning picking through the riches of ages along Portobello Road.
We were blessed with excellent weather - warm (verging on hot) in London, mostly sunny and cool in the Lake District, and more of the same throughout Scotland. We traveled exclusively by train, foot, and one tour bus. It was lovely to travel and great to get back. By and large we ate pretty well, too. Visited quite a few pubs and drank excellent beer, too.
