[Dahut-pm] Walking With Dahuts

[Robin Berjon]

DAAAAAAHUUUUUUUUT!!!!

Well, apart from the shouting at the beginning, if I'm honest, which  
I usually am, at least if there exist the same proviso for "white  
honesty" as one may benefit from for white lies, I'm not entirely  
sure how to start this email.

As an incipit I'll just say, very seriously, in fact so seriously  
that it'll sound adolescent, don't read this email unless you want to  
read about me. It's long, and it really is in its very vast majority  
about this little Robin guy. Just because you somehow got involved in  
this joke turned cult called dahuts doesn't mean you have to put up  
with some random dude suddenly breaking with a long-held tradition of  
solipsism. The short version, which can suffice, is in B's words  
herself:

   Will I stay this way forever?
   Sleep through my life's endeavours?
   I don't wanna be
   Going through the motions
   Losing all my drive
   I can't even see
   If this is really me
   And I just want to be alive

But back to how to start this email.

There's the in media res modulo descriptive start:

     It's 0930 Paris time as I start writing, and rather than freshly  
awaken I'm still up. In fact I'm just back from the Tabacaria (an  
excellent poem if there ever was one, check out Pessoa) from which I  
obtained what is the fourth fags pack of the night. These past weeks  
I've been counting the units of alcohol I ingest daily in a hopefully  
not-too-misguided attempt to bridle my consumption to levels that  
wouldn't feature nicely in academic papers on cirrhosis. Tonight,  
I've lost count. To relate to a foundational event, I'm more drunk  
than the time I told Kip I had chatted a while with Nick Cave (which  
was true) and then embellished it (with varying degrees of  
historicity). My iTunes tells me that I'm currently exactly at the  
40th replay of _Once More With Feeling_, which I downloaded on  
morning last, and that's taking into account that iTunes sucks in  
that if you send a song back to its beginning right before it ends,  
it won't add to the count play. And I've done that a few times. Right  
now I'm under Amber Benson's spell, but then who wouldn't be? That's  
a nutshell of now within a few hours.

Then there's the apologetic one:

     I'm sorry it took me so long to respond to this email. I really  
wanted to. Which I guess is why I'm doing it. When I received it I  
was in the middle of a hell of a lot of work, just like the rest of  
the time. After that came vacations, three weeks ago with one yet to  
complete, which I've so far spent largely between watching TV series  
in bed and reading books seated at the same bar terrace, notably  
books that one really shouldn't read such as _Mathématiques et  
Existence_ (Parrochia), _Information - The New Language of Science_  
(von Bayer), and _Cosmic Trigger I_ (RAW). Or rather, one should read  
them but not juxtaposed as they exhibit with one another the sort of  
parallel that is most of the time genuinely best ignored. Either way,  
I've been caught up between doing too much, and realising I haven't  
anything near what I wanted to do, which is the second nutshell,  
within a few years.

Also, there's the manic-depressive turned lucid:

     I haven't posted to this thread because the maniac wants every  
post to be perfect, well constructed, in good English, smart, and  
laid out such that should a smart and pretty damsel were to walk by  
the internet tube as this internet is transmitted, she would come  
serenade me; and because the depressive knows that while he is  
blessed with many friends, both the quality and quantity of whom  
never cease to puzzle him, there is yet no one, really, most of the  
time, that he treats as friend, in terms of speaking anywhere close  
to openly about what he is, has been, and is working on. If you look  
closely, I'm actually a bit dumb with feelings. Most of the time, I  
have to *think* about them, before I get them. So I'm rarely sure,  
really. I figure there are some folks who I know better, closer,  
deeper, longer, larger, whatever to whom I should be answering the  
questions Kip asked, rather than to a rag-tag gang that I certainly  
truly cherish but many of whom I know only under the guise of their  
ASCII, sorry UTF-8, avatars. But the former folks ain't asking none  
of those questions. And I also figure that if Kip's inquiring minds  
are stupid enough to just ask such straight and bare questions of  
this motley crew, then those inquiring minds are very much my kind of  
stupid. And it might just be that I'm calling them stupid just for  
the fun of quoting _Firefly_. That nutshell's now looking at a  
century scale.


So, where do we go from here? As I was asking Chris the other day if  
you drink and smoke way too much, shouldn't you be having your  
midlife crisis at circa 30? Unless either some major takes place in  
my life or medical science makes a big leap forward it is after all  
indeed the middle of my life, if not past it.


Kip talks about dreams, fulfilment, course, being meant to do something.


Going in reverse, I don't think I was meant to do anything specific.  
Predetermination is, as far as I can perceive, something short- 
termed. The toast will fall on the buttered side. The cat will fall  
on its feet. The adjunct of both will hit paws first and unavoidably  
roll over to spread the peanut butter all over the carpet. Anything  
beyond that is unpredictable not because of free will (which is a  
sham on both words), but because the Universe does not have the  
ability to store enough information for things this complexly evolved  
to be determined, let alone in advance (I intuit that this follows  
from Zeilinger's law, and if you think that the rest of this email is  
boring feel free to answer on just this point as I'm interested in  
what smart folks might think about it).

Moving on to the course, heck all I can really say for myself is that  
I'm thoroughly lost. Not in a religious sense (though Geoff I'd be  
very interested in discussing why you think it's impossible for to  
not be religious — and I really am open to an honest debate on the  
topic, I think it could be interesting for all), in fact one of the  
few things that still holds me together is my sense of ethics —  
trying to do what is right for the folks I share this world with,  
even though I get it wrong here and there — and of the fact that no  
instituted moral comes even close to just trying to fight the good  
fight. No, I'm lost in that the only way I know up from down is that  
the latter is where I go after that extra drink.

I don't think I ever set a course for myself. For as far as I can  
remember I've been serendipity's bitch. Going not too far back, I  
don't recall why I decided to go study philosophy at La Sorbonne. I  
knew I couldn't write French to save a kitten on the guillotine, and  
while I liked the topic I also knew that its gist was the study of  
lies proffered by smart guys perhaps long dead but still in the  
business of fooling themselves. Oxford was having me in Creative  
Writing but no, I went elsewhere. I never wanted to start my first  
company, but it was there and offered so I did. I didn't want to  
start the second, but my girlfriend in Belgium needed some expertise  
in the domain to reuse a company her parents weren't doing anything  
with. I didn't want the third, but it was the only way of getting out  
of the Belgian quagmire. I didn't want to go to New York but that's  
where the company was. I didn't want to come back to Paris but that's  
the only place that could offer both shelter and rebirth of the money  
when the bubble burst. I never wanted to become the daemon in charge  
of binary XML, it was the only real offer made to me while I was busy  
figuring out how long the French law allowed me to stay in a flat  
without paying the rent and how long one could think pasta without  
even butter still tasted of anything let alone good if it were the  
sole meal of the day, every day.

And now, I feel burnt out of walking through too much fire in the  
standards department, and just at that moment someone gives me a new  
job.

The point isn't whether serendipity has been good to me or not — she  
very much has — but simply that I haven't made a single decision  
about my life in at least the past ten years, if ever. Not one. None  
beyond do I want white or red wine tonight. When does the end appear?  
When do the trumpets cheer? It hasn't been my call. At some point  
earlier this year I decided I wouldn't be serendipity's bitch no more  
— and promptly gave up. And now she's picking me up again. I've most  
of a mind to follow, and almost half of a mind to think that I should  
just tag along and make the most of it.

That's for the course. But is it fulfilling? Heck, that's an  
impossible question. It's pretty much like asking what my favourite  
song is. Right now, serendipitously, Amber's singing so it's that  
song. But it'll change to, say, Fiona Apple within if only a few  
sentences or a couple months (but then they do tend to involve chicks  
living LA one way or another, so maybe I should just move in with  
Kip :). One moment I am fulfilled, and the next I ain't. Being on W3C  
working groups and furthermore chairing them is at the same time the  
most frustrating and the most rewarding thing I've ever done. You  
work with amazing people, and amazingly fuckwitted ones as well.  
Under the bureaucracy and screw-ups there is something of the good  
fight in there (there's even more if you try other standards  
organisations), even though it tends to swallow you whole. But  
outside of the moments in which I delude myself that it's actually  
useful, no, it's not fulfilling. And it's been occupying not only  
close to my every waking hour but also most of the dreams that I  
recall. So I'm guessing, fulfilled? When seeing those people and  
their bests, when doped on beer and heavy-duty jet-lag with them, and  
on those rare occasions when I'm a good chair and/or email-writer for  
those purposes. And all of that is taking all the space I have to  
give, so no, the answer is no, despite the good times.

Finally, dreams. I think that Mike made a fine point (later supported  
by Jim) when he contrasted "achieve" with "be". I would tend to like  
to think that there's a static vs dynamic thing in between those two,  
but that's not the case and anyway would be on topic in another  
ramble. The current point of order is that for "be", the question is  
real simple: I simply don't remember ever dreaming of "being"  
anything. In fact the simple notion of it dawned on me in reading  
Mike's email. But it sounds tempting, provided I can figure out what  
one would dream of being, I'm not sure. I guess I should try it,  
suggestions are welcome, really. In terms of achieving though, I have  
quite a few dreams, a huge many of which are not in the list below:

   * I want to write kick-effing-arse novels. Like Gibson's _Pattern  
Recognition_ only much more cynical, not written in the same way, and  
darker, and with the absurd love of mankind that Douglas Adams has.
   * I want to revolutionise physics by demonstrating that everything  
boils down to information theory (not Shannon's, something more  
evolved — the empiètement mathematics applied to information) coupled  
with notions of local evolution.
   * Based on the latter, I want to help out a tad with genetics.
   * And still based on the same, figure out a number of mystical  
things, and become a powerful warlock in the process. This of course  
involves getting in touch with beings radically alien, probably from  
the the vicinity of Sirius (hey, it has a smaller star doing  
*circles* around it...). This also indirectly involves becoming a  
master at Tantric Sex.
   * And again, figure out an Economics theory out of the same.
   * Then write more.
   * And then, thanks to my four Nobel prizes (and a couple Ig-Nobels  
just for kicks) and my ruggedly handsome magnetism, become president  
of France. From there I would set the world right and happy, be re- 
elected in the first round for my second term, and then step down for  
my brilliant and sexy Prime Minister.
   * At some point in there I would figure out how to use the  
relationship between human categorisation and the whirlwind of energy  
that is the "real" world to create the first artificial intelligence.  
And that could be declined in many ways with other categorisation  
approaches to create artificially alien intelligences that would see  
alternate realities of interest.

The problem is, I'm actually serious about those dreams. It's the  
only thing I've got that doesn't feel like serendipity's hunted down  
and brought to my feet while I'm busy discovering the very different  
effect of being drunk on apple-based or grapes-based alcohols. In  
fact, they're the thing that feel most, and I've barely given the  
overview list, with no detail. More often than I should, I think I  
can do one of them. In fact, when I have none of them I have nothing  
but Mike's question "Is the world really as I see it, or is this just  
depression talking?" I spend all my time in between having those  
dreams and giving it all up, in between that which poses no  
challenge, and that for which I truly am challenged. I don't defer my  
dreams year after year as Kip puts it, they're just eternally  
deferred by nature. I blame the people who for the past thirty years  
have been telling me that I'm really, really smart. Or I blame myself  
for still, in all honestly, having genuinely not the fucking trace of  
a fucking clue why anyone would think I'm smart. Probably the latter,  
I'd wager.


I won't dwell long on the nice things that Geoff and Chris have said  
about families. I stand in in a number of different places on such  
matters. Families are a bit of a mystery to me for, in a radical  
break with what this email seems to have instituted as tradition,  
reasons that I won't get into. I know that the one dream I have that  
would easily supersede all others is to find that girl kind, smart,  
cute, and to whom I could talk at least a bit, fall in love, make  
babies and the whole thing. If I had that, I'd be happy to dabble in  
physics and novels on and on, and write things that as DNA put it  
were almost incredibly successful but somehow entirely failed to see  
the light of day. I often dream of giving up all the rest just for  
that, something of a metadream. Hard as I've tried it hasn't worked  
out. I still don't know if I'm asking too much of the sweet women I  
meet, or if I should wait for someone with whom it feels right. Did I  
mention I was somewhat lost?

And iTunes sings: "I've got a theory, it doesn't matter / What can't  
we face if we're together? / What's in this place that we can't  
weather? / ... / It's do or die / Hey, I've died twice".

I know this email may seem bleak, and I apologise for fostering it  
unto you. Or actually I don't. Blame Kip for getting me to write this  
down. I thank him ;) Either way, bleak or not, lost or not, I'm not  
unhappy. The unadorned truth just probably sounds more brutal than it  
is. Or at least tell me that.

Take good care all of you, in your strange distant ways you are not  
at all without being very huggable :)

I have one last thing to say: bunnies rock!

-- 
Robin Berjon
    Senior Fuckwit
    Ruggedly Handsome Zombies, Inc.
   "I lived my life in shadow, never the sun on my face
    It didn't seem so sad though, I figured that was my place"