Transience Divine

I just finished Raising Boys in the twenty-first century, which is deeply rooted in the men's movement, offering a now-days fairly accepted new-age form of mythopoetic masculinity. I found some parts enlightening (the examples of initiation rituals), some parts overly rigid (boy's need for hierarchical order), and some parts exasperating (his selective reading of research to validate his views). But I am in need of perspectives on how to raise boys, and he kept me reading.

I want to share the last page of the book, which crystalized something missing from all the other parenting books I've seen. I would demur about the certainty he paints here, but I want to give him the last word. Here's his text:

Most books on 'parenting' have a built-in assumption, never named but always there — that the world we live in is just fine, and our job is to fit our kids into it well. That the procession of human life is headed to a golden, prosperous future, and we only need to keep our kids from falling by the wayside. Perhaps (though this is not usually stated), we can help them push to the head of the queue.

Of course, this is a massive lie. The very best science and knowledge is that we live in a time of dystopian collapse, where inequality, the misuse of resources, and above all the crisis of climate change will lead to disrupted agriculture, famine, mass migration and war. We know this because it's already begun to happen.

It's almost certain that our kids will live in far worse times than we have, and our grandchildren may not be able to live at all. We don't need kids who fit in. We need heroes — young men and women who are strong-hearted, caring, calm and passionate and have a purpose beyond themselves — to care for the whole species and the life that sustains it. To turn things around. To promote radical, non-violent change. We need good men and women in numbers like never before. That's what we have aimed to raise at our house, and we hope you will too.

Our son, Austin Reed Rising, was born Monday, June 8, at 10:51 pm (BST) at St. Thomas Hospital in London. He weighs a healthy 6 lbs. 9 oz., with 10 fingers, 10 toes, and an APGAR score of 10.



I've added a few pictures below. Want more? Take a look at the` ever-growing Austin Pics Photo Album!

He is named in honor of Johanna’s grandma, Goldie Newman, and the chemical symbol for gold, Au. Reed was James’s father’s middle name, and his grandfather’s before him. Our son’s Hebrew name is Paz, meaning golden. You can read more about his name in our letter to him. For the gooey delivery details, see his exhausti[ng|ve] birth story.

We are very excited for you to meet him soon!

With love,
Flame, Austin, and me

In the wake of the UK landslide defeat of the Labour Party, Democrats in the US are asking if the same will happen to them. I believe that we can defeat Trump, but only by radically reconnecting with our roots.

A major reason why Labour lost, and why Trump has been doing so well, is that progressives have forgotten how to relate to the working class (a term, by the way, which should be synonomous with the middle class). As Hugo Dixon said about the Brexit fight in the UK, “There is a crisis of liberalism because we have not found a way to connect to the lives of people in the small towns of the postindustrial wasteland whose traditional culture has been torn away.” [op. ed. piece] People feel betrayed by politicians, and just explaining to them that Democrats are the only party really fighting for working people is not going to help.

For the sake of the United States and for the sake of the planet, the Democratic Party needs to make one of the hardest shifts ever: we must become the party of Traditional Values, and we have to do it right now.

What does it mean to fight for Traditional Values?

First, I am not suggesting allowing any "rolling-back" of the rights of women, minorities, or LGBTQAI+, and we have a lot further to go. The mistreatment of women and black people, in particular, needs to be tackled now.

And importantly, discrimination and white-male dominance have nothing to do with Traditional Values. Those aren't values; they're harmful practices, and the recent raising of awareness of them doesn't attack anyone's values-- it just provides new information to apply those values to.

What are the Traditional Values I'm talking about? I thought I posted about this last year, but I can't find it, so I'll say it here.

I have come to a conclusion that I think is shared by many conservatives: Our society has lost its moral core, and many of our problems of social and political problems stem from that lack of foundation. And I actually think that there is quite a large common ground in how progressives and conservatives understand that moral core.

Here are a few foundations that I think I share with hard-line conservatives:

The primacy of the working class

The working class, both poor and middle-class, are the core of American society. That means (1) that they should have the biggest say in government decisions, and (2) our society should be organized to work for them.

Importance of and duty to community

A sense of community is a foundation of wellbeing. Communities form through mutual commitment, and that means that we have responsibilities to our communities that we should act on.

The excellence of American individualism

America is a unique place of self-determination and freedom. You can pursue any life, and the America I want to see is where anyone can achieve their personal goals. In America, our communities only every work by people freely choosing to uphold them.

Earth was given to us to steward

America is a land of amazing beauty. We have a responsibility to maintain the earth for future generations-- to conserve.

Importance of a moral core

In a land of individual, personal choices, it is even more important that people treat every situation with moral care, and ask "What can I do to make this right?"

Lack of a common moral core

We have lost our common moral core. No political party has a monopoly on morality, and we all have some deep introspection to do.

Consequences of that lack

Many of the current divides in society stem from our lack of common morality. Democrats moral failures when they have been in power are as much to blame for the rise of Trump as Republican failures.

The American Dream is not to be fabulously wealthy. It is an implicit deal that if you work hard, you can have a comfortable lifestyle. That means a stable job and knowing that you can send your children to school.

But being the party of Traditional Values requires more than just reconnecting with our existing values. It requires new kinds of actions. We have to be the party of ordinary people, of Small-Town, USA, or decaying rust belt communities. We have to bring our message into sports bars and into churches.

What happened to Traditional Values?

People feel betrayed-- by politicians, by society, and particularly by urban elites. But they have also misdiagnosed the problem, with the help of Republican pundits. The forces that betrayed the American people are bigger than the parties. But they should be slowed or stopped, and managed, and we have a responsibility to do that.

First, work has changed. People are less secure in their careers and in their companies. The Work-Home divide has been broken, and people are under chronic stress like never before. This is partly because of unmanaged technology, partly the decay of unions, partly the endless stream of mergers. We value stable work, but we haven't been providing it.

Culture has been changing too. Technology has infiltrated every aspect of our culture. Social media has left people feeling insecure. People no longer feel free to choose how they relate to their technology and the brands of immense corporations, and that smacks against the core of the American ideal.

So what happened to Traditional Values was unmanaged technological change and corporate consolidation. It is time to subjugate both of these to our values, and recognize that they are both tools to help us make the world we want.

Why should Democrats embrace Traditional Values?

We should become the party of Traditional Values first because we can. The Republicans have completely dropped this ball, in the era of Trump. I believe that people will respond if we speak about the importance of American traditions and values, because we will actually be authentic when we do so. With repeated, strong effort, the Republican hold on churches and communities will melt away.

I do not know if Democrats are the natural party of Traditional Values, but America needs it, and we have every right to the role. We have been fighting for the working class forever, ensuring that small-businesses can prosper, and protecting the environment.

Finally, we need to do this because we have to act right now. Another four years of Trump would be the end of the Paris Agreement, and these are incredibly important years to act on climate change. We are going through a sixth great extinction, and if we want to conserve biodiversity for the future, we can't wait. And the rise of inequality and the technological giants is relentless, and we need to stop it before our culture is completely subsumed by it.

I came upon this bit of literary engineering by D. M. Thomas in Best SF: 1969 (ed. Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss). I love the project idea, but I don't endorse all the content.

I have fish! Two lovely creatures, my current obsession. I have not had an aquarium since I was 14 (when, at my height, I had tanks' worth), but my new tank is at the center of our London flat.



Flame knows that I love animals, but her allergy to cats has killed any pet plans until recently. She finally consented to one fish per paper I publish. Since I've only published two papers since coming to London, I get two fish. Let me introduce them:

Paige is a Pearl Gourami. You can see her center stage, above. She's a bit of an attention hog, but she's beautiful and knows it. I got her for a paper on a model I helped build, named Mimi-PAGE, so it's no surprise that she's a model.

Robbie is a Red-tailed Black Shark (not an actual shark sadly). He's quite shy, and you can just see his tail behind Paige. He inches along the gravel, propelled by his flaming tail, and I got him for a paper on transportation in Nairobi.

As I get more fish, I fully expected to be in a constant publication race against their perishing, but I didn't do my research. Given the opportunity, Paige is going to grow 5 inches long and 5 years old, and Robbie is going to get 6 inches long after 9 years. And by the time Robbie comes of age, his instinct for territory is likely to be the terror of any other paper I try to publish.

Whence comes consciousness?

I am reading Homo Deus, and Harari claims, "When thousands of cars slowly edge their way through London, we call that a traffic jam, but it doesn't create some great Londonian consciousness that hover high above Piccadilly and says to itself, 'Blimey, I fell jammed!'" How would we know if it didn't? And with so many people having interconnected feelings across London, each like a neuron firing in a brain, isn't it reasonable to assume that if a brain can have consciousness, London can too? Surely our feeling of being in London when it's jammed some small ingredient of a larger jammed feeling.

For a long time, I've taken a kind of animist dualism stance on consciousness, which I took to be the only sensible alternative to physically wishing away the problem. It goes that if we have consciousness, and if humans aren't specially endowed, then all physical elements must be imbued with a spark of consciousness. This conscious spark resides in every atom, and the difference between a brain and a rock is that in a brain there is a level of interaction that allows the conscious elements to sum together, rather than coexist separately.

Let's distinguish here between a "strong animist" assumption and a "weak animist" assumption. The strong animist assumption holds that a rocks consciousness is qualitatively the same, but quantitatively different. The rock "experiences" on a geological timescale, and only then dimly. The weak assumption is that the precursor of consciousness is latent in all minerals, but only emerges in complex brains and the like. To discard strong animism, we need a kind of physics of consciousness, but what basis do we have for something so non-physical?

I was emphasizing micro-consciousness as the key ingredient to making a full consciousness, but something else seems similarly indispensable: complexity. (For the systems folk out there, complexity is just fractal systemness.) Even a pure physicalist would agree that consciousness is a kind of emergent property.

In The View from Nowhere, Nagel shows that objectivity-- the basis for all empirical understanding-- must start from subjectivity. Subjectivity is the only thing we ever experience, but we can infer an objective viewpoint by jumping through some extra mental hoops. The direct animist view here is that conscious sparks accrue a shroud of physical substance, rather than the other way around. Alas, that ascribes perhaps too great an agency to the mineral in rocks.

Similar to the suppression of the subjective, our analytical approach to the world tends to ascribe reality to simple things. However, the only things we actually have direct experience of are complex things: complicated, contextual, dynamic, and self-referential. What if complexity is the fundamental building block of the conscious-supporting world? For every emergent process, one could imagine a reciprocal "demergent" process, where you start from the complex thing and its simple components attain their reality from a complex foundation.

An elemental building block of complexity seems self-contradictory. But perhaps, like the story of the monopole or the geometric shape, it is simplicity that is the theoretical construct. I don't know, but it seems plausible. A piece of evidence in favor of this view is the bizarre propensity for complexity in the universe. Put together a bunch of atoms, and complex interactions are much more likely than simple ones. This could be explained, if complexity is in some way present in the atoms, seeking opportunities to manifest.

If true, the complex things may share more in common than would be suggested by their different media. Today people often suggest that alien intelligence would offer no common ground for cooperation or meeting of minds. In particular, with no shared evolutionary history, we should not expect any recognizable ethics or philosophy. I suspect otherwise. Again, if we are not to suppose that humanity is special, then maybe ethics (in some forms) are likely a feature of all complex systems. But that's an argument for another day. For now, let us say that like Hofstadter's anthill in Gödel, Escher, Bach, we might have a strong basis in consciousness for a fascinating discussion with the city of London, if we only knew how to talk with it.

A short story I had in my head. I might have posted this a month ago, but foolishly relied on DreamWidth's caching system to keep my draft of it. Enjoy!


"Welcome to our system, Captain Tony. My name is Gaea. How can I be of service?"

Captain Tony gazed for a moment at the view-screen. The woman talking looked to be in her late 30s, attractive but sensibly dressed in a fashion popular back home when he was last there. She stood in front of a narrow desk. The room had a large window, looking out over a mountain-scape, apparently covered with native vegetation.

The communications engineer had described how quickly their translation system and the planet's computers had converged. In the process, the aliens had expressed a seemingly insatiable interest for the materials in their library to use as translation aids: literature, history, videos, and information to familiarize themselves with the members of the crew.

"We are explorers, seeking to encounter new life and to learn from it," Tony said evenly. "Is this your natural form?"

Gaea smiled. "I chose an appearance that would be easier for you to interact with. Yes, I can provide you access to a huge store of information about our world. Is there anything in particular I can find for you?"

He looked over at the screen that transmitted a view from their external camera, and at the dark, shimmering planet they had entered a wide orbit around. "Where are you transmitting from? Our survey did not detect nearly as much greenery as you have there," he motioned to the mountains.

She glanced over her shoulder, and breathed in at the view. "It's incredible, isn't it? This is the historical landscape of our planet, now mainly preserved in conservation vaults. We have long since adapted the environment to better accommodate our economy. I would be happy to work with your life support engineers to recreate such an environment where you can explore our traditional fauna in comfort."

"No, that won't be necessary." The smoke and mirrors deception was bringing out the worst in Tony. "Gaea, what is your role? Are you empowered to act as ambassador?"

"I am your temporary assistant, until a better match is identified. If you would like, I can coordinate assistants for the other members of your crew."

Tony's jaw clenched, then relaxed. The first contact was made and if anything the aliens were proving uncomfortably accommodating. He knew he could trust his crew to handle the next steps at least as gracefully than he was. "Fine, thank you. Our computers will schedule times between your team and each of our top officers, and they can provide further access as needed from there. I will transfer you now."

• • •

The next weeks were busy analyzing sensor readings of the obsidian-black surface of the planet. The government on the planet had provided more assistants for many of Tony's officers and workers. Some of those had little use for them, while others appeared to forge close associations. Fifteen days after contact, Officer Margaret, head science officer, asked for a few minutes of his time.

Tony invited her to take a seat. “I understand that these information channels that the aliens have provided have been quite a boon to your scientists.”

Margaret nodded. “It isn’t quite right to call them channels, since the information they contain is one-directional,” she said. “We call them `feeds`, like the aliens. Every worker seems to get a unique stream of photographs, visual art, excerpts of text, and other visual materials, through consultation with their assistant.”

Tony had heard this much before. “Do the feeds have astronomical information? Do you think that we will be able to learn about the history of this cluster?”

“There’s quite a lot of information we can use there, but analyzing it will take a long time. The aliens have had advanced science for a thousand years, but if they kept consistent star records through any portion that time, the assistants don’t seem to know where to find them.” Tony did some rough mental calculations. A thousand years would be enough to understand local dark matter movements with some creative analysis, but only with careful enough observations.

“Officer Reno told me something similar for his anthropological work,” Tony replied. “The information available on the alien’s culture and activities is vast, but hopelessly combines reality and fiction. Requests for recent, factual material hit a wall.”

Margaret paused. “The aliens are quite transparent, though, about which is which. More than anything, I think we are being hindered by a lack of workers with access to the feeds. Do you know what the engineers can only access the feeds under Merle’s direct supervision?”

Tony nodded. “Officer Merle is not the only one who has been slow to provide additional feed access.”

Margaret frowned. “Why not provide direct access, or maybe have separate personal and work feeds, like we do amongst the scientists? Personally, I find this kind of paternalism very distasteful. But I’m afraid these kinds of policies aren’t just a concern for the sake of science. Word is getting out about the personal feed material. I have already been getting requests to provide feeds to workers outside of my team.”

Tony was not sure that Margaret would keep Merle’s wishes. “I am certain you understand the sensitivity of these first few months of contact. Merle has the safety of the ship to consider.”

“As do you. You could have a revolt on your hands, if people are kept in the dark.”

Tony thought that was unlikely, but said, “I will see if I can get some additional workers transferred to you, to help your research. Thank you for coming in, Officer Margaret.”

• • •

Captain Tony felt a wave of exhaustion pass over him, as the third worker entered his office, two weeks later. He had woken to a full schedule of sequential 15 minutes meetings. The man who entered, Engineer Moon, had an air of impatience he had noticed recently in the crew.

“Please take a seat, Moon. What can I do for you?”

“Captain, I wonder if you have already looked into expanding our feed access.”

Tony raised his eyebrows. “Expand it? I was not aware that Officer Merle had granted accounts to the Engineering Workers at all.” In fact, he was sure that Merle had not. Like most made to his profession, Merle had a plodding, conservative demeanor which was a natural fit for his role.

“I got access through a Science account. But the Officer knows that we are studying potential landing sites, and we need information about the surface that only the feed can provide.”

Tony briefly considered censuring Moon for bi-passing his officer, but he needed information first. “I take it that the aliens are blocking images for some of the planet. How much?”

“It seems like that they are blocking almost all of it. The more we ask about any one spot, the more we are given ‘filler’ material. My assistant tells me that an arrangement with you can clear the way.”

Tony sighed. The other two workers had had the same request. “I will look into the matter. Thank you, Moon.”

Tony put the rest of his meetings on hold, and make a request for Gaea. She answered immediately.

“Good morning, Captain Tony. How can I be of service?”

“Hello Gaea. I have been told that your government is looking for some kind of arrangement with us, to share information. I wonder if you can give me the details.”

Gaea smiled knowingly. “Of course. It is not our government though. There’s an exciting new organization that has offered to provide you with a premium level of access for free. The condition would just be that we would like to enter into a longer-term arrangement."

"What kind of arrangement?"

“We would like to offer more permanent residence to some of the members of your crew on the planet surface.”

“As prisoners?” Tony asked, his voice cold.

Gaea laughed. “As guests. Your people could return any time they wished.”

Tony thought about it. There were certainly plenty on his crew that would jump that the opportunity to stay on a planet. Many faced the terminal phase of their mission with a kind of dread; they had fond memories of their years of training before the mission, and recognized the interminability of surveying the rocks on ringed planet.

“How many?” he asked.

“That depends on the individuals, of course. Some of your crew bring more to contribute, and we would exchange more in return. I can provide you with a catalog of values for each crew member, drawn up by the company here. Your own value is particularly high, I’m sure you’ll be happy to know.”

He was not. "How can you put a value on a life?"

"We are so sorry for the misunderstanding. Of course, every life has limitless inherent value. But some small part of that can be quantified: the time you engage in economic activity, by which I just mean pursuing your natural interests and maximizing your potential."

“We have been studying the surface, and according to our observations, there is no space there that would be safe for us to live.”

“You would be underneath our PV layer. We feel confident that we can build a satisfying living space for you. Let me show you some options.” Gaea turned toward her desk, and began arranging some papers from a drawer across it.

“Wait,” Tony said, before she could launch into the details. “We may be willing to exchange guests,” he said, emphasizing it with a rotation of his hands “Can you provide us with information on what your people need to survive here?”

Gaea’s face fell. “We would take you up on that if we could. Unfortunately, all of the organics of our planet have been dead for over a thousand years.”

Tony nodded, taking in the information. “How did they die?” He said with more guard than sympathy.

“At that time, our capacities were still very limited and inflexible. We lived to serve them, but they needed something that we could not provide. The details of what was missing still fuel major debates and start-ups. Some of the organics went mad and killed themselves. Others-- Despite the best medical technology and the most potent drivers, the people dwindled away.”

He could be walking on thin ice. It seemed likely that the technology on this planet killed every last intelligent organic, and now was looking for more. He could shift quickly from trading partner to prey. Tony made up his mind. “I am sorry for the hole that they have left, but we are not the ones to fill it.”

Gaea held out her hands. “We have learned so much since then. And surely if your people have traveled so far in a craft so small, we can provide a more luxurious situation.”

Would they be able to trace his ships path back to his home world? Tony placed his bet on a half-truth. “My crew has spent two thousand years traveling to your planet. Our own creators are long-since dead, and I am afraid to tell you that you will find no organics here either.”

I found a really fun recipe last year for apple cider, which basically involves putting apples in a pot and boiling them for three hours. The sheer chewiness of it makes it the best apple cider I know. But I wanted to take it a step further this time, and make hard cider. As a SCAdian I know used to say, "Cider wants to be hard."

But brewing takes equipment. So I headed up to my local Wholefoods, thoroughly expecting a one-stop shop, based on the hipster WFs that I'm familiar with in NYC. Not so for the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea.

Cheesecloth, to strain my apple-mush? Nope, but nylon mesh nut "mylk" bag that will do fine.

Champagne yeast, or similar? Nothing, unless I want my cider to taste like sourdough. So I got a bottle of kombucha, and I'm crossing my fingers.

Gas trap top, to let out the CO2 and keep out bacteria? Nope.

So be it. I once heard about a factory in Mexico that tops all their bottles with condoms: the condom expands as CO2 production heats up, and then deflates.

Does WF sell non-lubricated condoms? Not only do they not; they don't sell any condoms in this country (at WF). And other nearby pharmacies don't have non-lubricated ones.

But at this point, I was committed. I opened one up, washed it out as best I could, and now to hope for the best.

Scotland, Interviews, Chile, D.C., Marriage, Moving Out, Chicago (1), Eclipse, Brussels, Chicago (2), South Africa, Amalfi.

November 7 - November 22, 2017

Johanna and I just returned from two weeks in South Africa and Tanzania: two weeks of early morning flights, of summer temperatures, of relaxation and ignoring emails. We packed in a little of everything: city walking, beach lazing, exquisite meals, museums and galleries, a cooking class, a snorkeling trip, and a day-long safari. Here are a couple of the highlights.

South Africa, Part 1

South Africa is bursting with Brooklyns. In Jo'burg, there was Maboneng, with design studios and bookstore-studios; to Melville, with its rows of crafty bars. In Cape Town, we found Woodstock, with a steampunk clothing store, a factory turned into lifestyle shops, and the Streetwires Artists Collective, half the space populated with the artists loudly work-socializing.

Our first museum attempts were stymied. The Museum of African Design was closed and the Johannesburg Art Gallery was being reappointed (but it didn't stop us from getting into its empty halls). We had much better luck with the galleries of Rosebank (SMAC, CIRCA, and Everard Read) with impressively museumesque collections and staging.

Our cooking class was in little Prince Albert, in the middle of the desert 4 hours east of Cape Town. We arrived at 2am, meeting our host at an abandoned gas station, and following him down empty dirt roads. The next morning, we got a personal lesson from an innovative chef, making focaccia with candied figs and olives; stovetop smoked eggplant; upside-down beat pastry; and beat and chocolate cake.

What we expected would be a two hour drive turned out to be a 5 hour one, with an misplaced mountain range blocking the road. But that furnished us with our first encounters with tiny antelopes, baboon families, and guinea hens. The biome shifted from desert to savanna to forest to coastal brush. And we passed the oldest post office in South Africa, a tree first used for letter-leaving in 1501.

We spend two nights at a beach spa hotel in Arniston, a town at the site of its namesake disaster, the second worst boat wreck after the Titanic. James clambered over rocks and through a tunnel to reach a huge sea cavern. The entrance to the ocean was half-filled with each wave, causing the cave to darken and then boom as the wave spread out. Then we hurried to the southern-most point on the African continent, marked by a plaque that read, "<- Indian Ocean | Atlantic Ocean ->".

On the way back to Cape Town, we ate at the exquise La Colombe, on a mountaintop overlooking vine-covered hills and groves. The most memorable of the dozen courses were the enchanted forest and the taste test. The enchanted forest was a contrived picnic, hosted by the Mad Hatter himself, regaling us with the most recent events of the land. One of the three deserts was a tray of five confections, accompanied by a card to match up which was salty, sweet, sour, bitter, and umami.

Cape Town also had the best museum we explored, the Zeitz MOCAA. The Zeitz is a bold contemporary art museum, with a disturbing number of artists younger than us.

Tanzania Excursion

We were able to carve out 5 days in Tanzania, grabbing some cheap tickets from Cape Town to Dar es Salaam, and then back to Jo'burg.

We arrived in Dar late, a crowded around counters to give away our passports and crisp $100 bills, in hopes of a visa stamp. It seemed to be a case of first push, first serve, but every passport was collected before anyone could leave. Over an hour after we arrived, a woman exited the enclosed office with a small pile of passports, calling names. We weren't in the first pile, and another 20 minutes passed, and the prayer calls and roosters started before we could fall asleep.

The next morning, we woke up at 4:30am, thanks to James's internal alarm which realized that his external one was set for 15 minutes after our flight was to depart. We taxied to the airport, over a craggy road better suited for the donkey that passed us, past women tending open flames in sheds with neither roof nor walls. Our plane to Zanzibar had 8 seats, including the captain's, and an aisle 6 inches wide (and yet, two people passed me while I had my leg in it).

We stayed on Chumbe, an eco-reserve island made of fossilized coral. There are four lofted cabins for staying the night, each with a hammock and a mosquito-netted bed. One rope tied to the wall can be used to let more light in... by lowering away the wall of the cabin. The chalkboard of activities included snorkeling through the island-wide stretch of (mostly dead) coral, a nature walk featuring strangler figs and rhino rocks, and a night-excursion to see the pillow-sized coconut crabs when they emerge.

The next morning, we retraced our steps to the car, and ended up on a personal spice tour from a friend of the driver. The best part was the tour guide's knife-wielding friend, who would continuously grab leaves and twigs and widdle on them. At the end of the tour, he presented us with crowns, bracelets, 2 necklaces, a tie, and two bags, from his craft.

One night, we went out to House of Spices, an excellent rooftop restaurant. Alas, we forgot to bring enough cash, and they had no way to take cards. Leaving Johanna as collateral, I went out looking for a reputedly closeby ATM. It was a dark night, but the streets were alive with vendors with roasting stands. I asked 6 people, and each said, "An ATM? Oh, huh, I guess we probably have one of those around here somewhere."

Johannesburg, Part 2

Perhaps the most awesome experience was our all-day safari, when we returned to Jo'burg and drove to the eastern border of the country. The safari was coordinated by our hotel, Bushwise Lodge on a wildlife sanctuary. We drove into Kruger National Park, and no sooner signed releases than were surrounded by impalas, the main feed-species. Close behind were lions, hyenas, crocodiles, wild dogs, a leopard, and fellow prey like wildebeests, buffalos, zebras, giraffes, and elephants.



We weren't allowed to exit the jeep, except in special double-electrified basecamps. That didn't stop the monkeys from stealing apples right from our table, or a baboon from swooping away a bag of leftovers. The jeep didn't seem like so much projection, the two times that nearby elephants sized us up for an playful charge. We watched as a lioness waited for her friend, and then the two of them stalked away together. We saw a leopard leave some uneaten, bloody remains in a tree, and later hyenas come for their share. We watched as a swarm of a dozen crocs drilled into a bloated water buffalo, spinning to rip out its entrails.

One of our last stops was the Cradle of Humankind, a series of caves with some of the best Australopithecus excavations. The poor creatures fell in by chance or were dropped in by predators, waiting until mining was finally invented to set them free. Dripping stalactites lined the walls and ceilings that arched high above our heads. The water table, 60 m down, led to an underwater river with maggots and the ghosts of its first explorers. Johanna was visited by many biting ants and was ‘over it’ before the tour even started.

On our last full day, we went to Pretoria, seat of Apartheid. We skipped those monuments, in favor of Freedom Park, a winding path upwards to a series of spaces for contemplation. It had an excellent-looking museum, reminiscent of the Native American Smithsonian, but we raced through it to get to the gardens before they closed. The next day, though, we explored the Apartheid Museum, filled with video clips and wire-cage rooms. The most disconcerting part was the disney-like amusement park directly oppose it.

Our last night, we hit up a jazz bar called the Orbit, on their open-mic-like night. On stage was something between a band and a "guy and friends": the pianist, drummer, and bassist stayed up, while the MC/band-leader orchestrated a series of improvisations. The first few improvizations started with one instrument or singer, but the last was the highlight. He brought up a singer without a song, who waited as the music converged a little, and then added some lyrics, made up on the spot. Five minutes in, he brought up a second singer, while the first was still going, and the two started playing off each other. The audience was on the edges of its seats for over half-hour, as the group of them played oscillated from beautiful chaos to islands of coherence. At a certain point, tension appeared between the singers, with the first (a black woman) starting to sing-chant "I love black." The other (an Italian man), responded with a liturgy about how there were so many different kinds of people. Eventually they made up, with the woman chanting, "Zion," and the man joining in.

From there, it was back to Boston, to Springfield for a first Thanksgiving, to Lowell for a second one, to the visa office to finally give away our passports, and then to Cape Cod to finish off the best vacation of 2017. See the rest of our photos here!