A conversation between college mascots, Testudo (order Testudines) of the University of Maryland Terrapins and Mr. Duck (order Anseriformes) of the University of Oregon centers on a human (order Primates) “turtle.” *

Mr. Duck:  Now that we play in the same college football league, I feel a personal relationship to you, allowing me to talk freely to say what’s on my mind. I’ve been a little upset recently because board of the Consumer Advisory Council of the Oregon Health Authority (the OCAC) includes a person who identifies as a turtle. Are you Terrapins trying to take over my territory? This is Duck Country, you know. And we beat your football team in 2024.

Testudo: No, actually, I saw that news story, and it befuddled me. Turtles and ducks can share a pond, but humans and turtles can’t share an identity. Although there are many examples of mimicry in the animal kingdom, most are associated with predator-prey or reproduction-care. The “turtle” on the OCAC is a human. Really, I’m twice befuddled, first because the human turtle’s turtleness serves no purpose other than some self-gratifying but unreal physical identity and second because the “turtle” serves on a board that specifically addresses mental health. Why put such a person on such a board?

Mr. Duck: I see your point, and I’ll add this. Over the past few years I’ve noticed humans adopting identities normally associated with the animal world, furries, for example. Most of those appear to be mimicking as best they can as mammal species. This identification as a member of the order testudines is a bit odd because its only in that reptilian part of the brain where that mimicry lies though it is true that upon being frightened, many humans instinctively imitate retraction of their heads by raising their shoulders and by ducking (my word) into a nonexistent shell.

Testudo: I’m no an expert on human behavior, but I agree that there’s little in humans that seems turtle other than their embryonic form that seems to verify the principle that ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny. Early on we seem indistinguishable. Later on, we have virtually nothing in common; we turtles live a lifestyle few humans could tolerate for long.

Mr. Duck: And yet, there’s a human claiming to be a turtle while serving on a mental health board. And probably—this is my guess—no one on that mental health board has the courage to say, “What the H-e-double-toothpick is wrong with you? You’re clearly not a turtle. You have neither a soft shell nor a hard one. You live in a human structure. You walk on all fours unless you choose to crawl. You can read and speak a human language. If you get sick, you go to a doctor not a vet. How do you justify calling yourself a turtle?”

Testudo: Strangely, in spite of all their illogic and folly, humans still call themselves an advanced life-form. I think of how they choose to ignore the real nature of the world. Their conscious denial of reality and lack of understanding remind me of a famous tale associated with Bertrand Russell. After giving a lecture on the astronomy, a woman challenged him by saying that the world rests on a giant turtle. Russell then asked on what the turtle rests, and she responded, “Why it’s turtles all the way down.” The question to ask the human “turtle” is “On what basis do you see yourself as a turtle?” Now, as a Maryland Terrapin, I would like to think that it’s turtles all the way down, and for me it is on the tree of evolution. But such an infinite regress is as improbable as a human being being a turtle. Humans, can’t live with them; can’t keep the out or our habitats; can’t get them act human.

Mr. Duck: if I run into the Oregon “turtle,” I’ll use a duck pun and say, “You’re quackers.”

Testudo: Oh! Don’t do that unless you can accept being cancelled by the libs at the university. They’ll make sure you never wear the duck costume again and will probably put you in front of a tribunal for saying a human can’t be a turtle and that any human who declares “turtlehood” is “quackers.” Nowadays, Libs say identity is not an absolute in any sense, even a biological one. A human can be any life-form—maybe even any inorganic form, say, a crystal of quartz, for example. Just keep your bill shut to avoid the grief. Libs seem to have neither a sense of humor nor commonsense when someone points out their folly. Do what I do. I take it slow and easy knowing I will probably outlive with my renowned turtle longevity all the foolishness of the current generation. Slow and easy, Mr. Duck, slow and easy. Be, if I may also use a corny pun, unflappable.

*Alec Schemmel, Fox News Published March 13, 2025 "Oregon mental health advisory board includes member who identifies as terrapin species"
https://nypost.com/2025/03/13/us-news/oregon-mental-health-board-consumer-jd-holt-uses-turtle-pronouns/  

I took the liberal media tour this morning. Holy cow! Did you realize we are in END TIMES. Well, that seems to be the vibe I got just reading through the headlines. Goodness, no wonder Rosy O’Donnell moved to Ireland! The world on this side of the Atlantic is about to end, and funny…I feel fine.


Much of the negative news on liberal media outlets centers on government jobs cut by Elon Musk and DOGE. Lest you think I lack compassion, I’ll say I feel sorry for anyone who will lose a government job because I assume most unnecessary government employees believe they serve a legitimate purpose, even those who simply wrote reports that went nowhere and accomplished nothing. Let me provide a context for that statement.


When I was a professor, department report writing was thrown in my lap because, to be truthful, no one wanted the tasks, I write relatively fast, and I like to get things done. My only questions when my chairman said, “We need to write a report on…” were “When’s this due?” and in meeting the due date, “Who’s going to read this?” Most calls for reports originated in Harrisburg. The 14 state universities were, when I became a faculty member, “colleges” with autonomous control and state funding. That condition changed when the schools combined to form a university system with a chancellor. Then the avalanche of managerial jobs rolled over Pennsylvania’s higher ed. In Harrisburg, where the Chancellor kept office, the accumulation began with secretarial staff, vice chancellor with staff, and sundry other bureaucrats all justifying their jobs by accumulating reports: “My job is valuable. See, I have all these reports.” Yeah, courtesy of Don Conte and a bunch of other faculty members burdened by those reports. I think of Frank Norris’s The Octopus, a novel centered on wheat farmers and their struggles with the railroad. The novel’s title conjures up images of the rail lines as tentacles reaching over California’s landscape. For me that cephalopod rested its head in Harrisburg and the office complex specifically built for the university administration, and the tentacles reached out to gather in reports that, for all I knew because there was never any feedback, the “octopus” shredded with its beak. Bureaucracies thrive by self support, that is, by calling for endless reports. And those buildings from which they issued calls for reports? Let me say that structures and furnishings of the Chancellor’s office complex added nothing to the labs and libraries of the sundry state universities. No student gains from many taxpayers’ pains: the bureaucracy spreads like cloned aspen trees.


The Rapture


So, now, descending as though from a SpaceX rocket, Elon Musk is delivering the Day of Judgement, Dies Irae, the Day of Wrath. And all the government employees whose jobs are more a product of an out-of-control bureaucracy than of a necessity for America’s wellness, are running as though there’s a refuge from the inevitable end. Nina Simone’s “Sinnerman” lyrics might echo in your ears:
        
        Oh, sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
        Sinnerman, where you gonna run to?
        Where you gonna run to?
        All on that day


But there’s no where to run to for shelter: The USAID agency virtually wiped out, the Department of Education cut in half, and the Inter-American Foundation reduced to just one person. But consider what this last agency funded:

• $903,811 for alpaca farming in Peru
• $364,500 to reduce social discrimination of recyclers in Bolivia
• $813,210 for vegetable gardens in El Salvador
• $323,633 to promote cultural understanding of Venezuelan migrants in Brazil
• $731,105 to improve marketability of mushrooms and peas in Guatemala
• $677,342 to expand fruit and jam sales in Honduras
• $483,345 to improve artisanal salt production in Ecuador
• $39,250 for beekeeping in Brazil

Hey, I’ve been to Guatemala and I’ve eaten in Guatemalan restaurants. Come to think of it, I don’t remember mushrooms and peas on the menus. That $731,105 was well spent. Next trip I’ll look at the menus more closely. But really, what American benefits from any of those expenditures on the list? Discrimination against recyclers in Bolivia? Helping Brazilians get along with migrant Venezuelans? Well, maybe the wellness crowd loves the artisanal salt. Sodium chloride and possibly a few other elements in the shaker for a mere $483,345!


So, it’s the end of the world as many profiting from America’s largess knew it. The Democrats are in an uproar, railing against efficiency, screaming about cuts to education as though any of the people in the Department of Education actually taught a kid or supported anything other than teacher unions. They’re upset about not funding alphabet activities in foreign countries or transsexual operations in Guatemala.


Maybe it is the end of the world as we know it, but, in the words of R.E.M., “I feel fine.”


I really do feel fine.

We humans go to great lengths to discover what lies in plain sight. I’m talking specifically about human identity, our own identities.


“Who are you?” I might ask.
Please don’t respond, “I’m  a chef,” I’m a cop,” I’m a Congressman,” “I’m the king,” or “I’m the G.O.A.T.” Those are responses to questions of doing, but not necessarily of being.


Doing vs. Being


That, however, begs a question. Aren’t our identities defined by what we do? How else can we define ourselves? It’s a problem, it seems at first glance, to be analogous to my saying I cannot think of time without thinking of place. I cannot think of So-n-So without thinking of Such—Such. She’s “Mother.” He’s “teacher.” They are “gang members.”


Because many of us believe identity is not bounded solely by doing, we slip into our Merriam-Webster or Cambridge Dictionary character to proclaim identity “as the state or fact of remaining the same one or ones, as under varying aspects or conditions. That makes some sense in the context of the word’s etymology, which derives from the Latin, idem, “the same.”


“I’m not defined by what I do,” you say.


Yes and no. Maybe you don’t define yourself by “doing,” but others define you thus, and you, in turn, define them thus. It’s not a fault; the penchant to do so derives habit and that relationship we have with the physical world and with culture. Plus, we let our five senses affinities guide us. “Gladys? Oh! You should hear her sing.”  “Phil? That guy’s a comedian if there ever was one. Funny, really funny.” “Have you seen the antique cars Bob restored? He’s worth a fortune because of them.” Are there Gladyses, Phils, and Bobs outside of doing? If so, how so?


Take Jennifer Garner, for Instance


I think of a Capital One Venture credit card commercial in which actress Jennifer Garner says that we might know her from “her other job,” but then mentions her personal business of running Once upon a Farm as she walks through an orchard and greenhouse. Wow! Jennifer has not one, but TWO identities. Both, it seems, defined for others by WHAT she does.


Who is the “real Jennifer Garner”? I have no doubt she is more than either actress or Garner the Gardener, more than a Mrs. through two marriages and is more than partner with another guy, more than mother of three. But do I know her identity in the sense of her “being the same under “varying circumstances”? Do I know whether or not Jennifer thinks she has an identity peculiar (distinctive) to her and to no other? Even if I knew her personally, would I be able to define that identity?

​Everything in my limited glossary of personality plays out in my assessment of another’s identity. Pretend I know Jennifer. Do I assess her identity thus? She’s optimistic. She’s hard working. She’s caring. She’s hypothetically or otherwise difficult to get along with—no wonder she’s been divorced. She’s been the victim of cheating husbands. She’s a Simon Legree boss on her farm. Look at the limitations of my identity glossary. None of the foregoing might apply. Maybe Jennifer is Mother Theresa incarnate. But even if she were, that identity would still be one based, for me at least, on “doing.”


The Quest      


Going off to find oneself through adventures, going off to find oneself in a cabin in the woods, going off to a wellness center, to a psychotherapist, to a cult leader, to a guru, to a tattoo parlor, yeah all those can be versions of a search for identity. Joining a cult, joining a mob wearing keffiyehs and protesting in favor of a terrorist group, singing with a group some civil rights song in support of government waste…gosh, the possibilities are endless in the search for identity, for self, for self-meaning.


Defining oneself is hard because we are all multiple identities: child, teen, young adult, middle aged adult, dependent, independent thinker, political animal, philosopher, and pseudo versions of ideal identities…driven, indifferent…commanding, subservient…foolish, wise…


Faulty parallelism of mixing adjectives and nouns aside and a faulty modifier thrown in this sentence just to keep the grammatically and syntactically astute among you awake, the search for identity is, I believe, as complex and as frustrating as any human endeavor for good reason: Before aligning all the wavelengths of our lives in a laser like identity, we bounce between what we are and what we expect to be, the mirrors of identity we use for syncing the light that exits a pinhole.   


And there’s a further complication: We wear masks we believe appropriate to each social setting, so staying “the same” in “varying circumstances” is difficult at best. Do we wear those masks as we search for identity beyond the confines of society? Do we wear them on a visit to the Guru in the Temple in the Himalayas? As we scale a cliff? As we sit in a cabin in the woods?


Whoa! Now I’m wondering if there really is such a thing as identity sans doing. Yet, all around me I see people in search of their identities. Young people in Goth; young people as “influencers,” merely by fashion or daily doings. Reality show stars as identities to be emulated. Eight billion of us, but usually only those in the saddle of ease and affluence riding off into the sunset of self-discovery. By the way, how far off is that horizon?


In Fiction


Characters in search of identity abound in literature from ancient to modern times: Gilgamesh, Odysseus, Aeneas, Beowulf, Dante, Ralph Ellison’s narrator in Invisible Man,* J. D. Salinger’s Holden Caulfield in Catcher in the Rye. ** The theme is dominant in coming of age stories and tales of both rugged self-sustaining individuals and victims of diseases, cruelty, and doubts. It’s common because it’s common in real life. Maybe you have said or thought “I’m in search of who I am.”


A Sometime Thing or Full Time Job?


The thrill of an amusement park ride can provide a momentary feeling of self. Dangerous voluntary risk-taking, such as swimming with sharks, climbing ice or rocks, or parachuting can focus our attention on “true identity” though the focus might be little more than a rush of neurotransmitters. “When I’m parachuting, I’m my real self.” “Climbing Half Dome in Yosemite and Skiing down Canon Mountain in New Hampshire give me that ‘I’m alive!’ sensation. Nothing beats it.” Others can say with regard to risks not foolishly taken on a whim, “Battling that disease taught me who I am.” “Meditation is the path some choose to seek their identities, their “true” selves. For others, a simpler path lies in a digital capture. “Look, here I am on top of Mt. Lookatme.” For still others, it’s a TikTok or YouTube short. “Look how many views I got.”


Parmenides saw the world as rather static; Heraclitus, as dynamic. Being frames our lives for the former; becoming frames our lives for the latter. I tend to view the world as Heraclitean flow (You can’t put your foot in the same river twice), but I temper that view with Zeno’s paradox that argues Achilles could never overtake a tortoise with as head start in a race or that one never reaches the end of a race because one has to overcome being halfway, then halfway of that, then halfway of that ad infinitum. If there is such a “thing” as a “true self,” then it’s that distant finish line we don’t get to because of our fractional approach.


On your way to your true identity you will at any moment have an identity. Do you stop there? Or do you keep going? Those who claim victory in the race appear to be pigeonholed in life, incapable of change, often completely intolerant of change. Barkalounger recliner static. “Can you see if we have any beer in the refrigerator? I’m too exhausted to search. If we have one, cold you bring it to me with some chips. Oh! Wait! Yes on the beer, but I just found some chips on the pillow." Are you one to have found pieces of your many former selves that are sufficient enough to serve as your current identity?


Sorry if this casts self doubt on who you are; not sorry if it gets you off the Barkalounger where you sit in a pile of old broken chips of self identity. At least walk into the kitchen, open the refrigerator door, and peer in. You might find more than leftovers and an old can of beer. You might see ingredients you can use to make a gourmet meal you never experienced.


    




*From the book: “But here in the North I would slough off my southern ways of speech. Indeed, I would have one way of speaking in the North and another in the South. Give them what they wanted down South, that was the way. If Dr. Bledsoe could do it, so could I.”


**From the book: “He always looked good when he was finished fixing himself up, but he was a secret slob anyway, if you knew him the way I did.” AND “But it was freezing cold, and I took my red hunting hat out of my pocket and put it on—I didn’t give a damn how I looked.”

Told myself I was not going to watch the State of the Union Address, but... you guessed it, I did.


I know that traditionally the opposition party usually shows little enthusiasm for whatever a sitting President says at the annual gathering. I can fault Republicans and Democrats for failing to clap for remarks that entail benefits to Americans or commonsense initiatives like balancing the budget.


So, how did this year’s address go? Pretty much like a junior high classroom when a bad teacher is replaced by a worse substitute teacher. Or should I say classless room? Because I haven’t seen a better example of classlessness in the Joint Meeting since Nancy Pelosi melodramatically ripped up Trump’s speech.


I’m befuddled by the Democrats’—what should I term it?—truculence, defiance, passive aggression, or just plain Trump Derangement Syndrome. Seems that nothing—cutting waste, fraud, and abuse from the budget, throwing illegal criminal aliens out of the country, stopping the tragic deaths by fentanyl, honoring a border patrol agent, Laken Riley’s family, and police and firemen, reporting on billions of dollars in new investments by formerly foreign companies—nothing was worth so much as a Zen one-hand clap from Democrats. Smug and angry, they sat motionless, writing on white boards, holding up little signs in unison, and looking at phones as the President spoke. Frowny-faced from beginning to end of the address, the people on the Left-leaning side of the aisle seemed to disagree with everything, or they were given marching orders not to show any emotion other than seething anger.


What a hill to defend! It appears that Democrats are in favor of fentanyl deaths, keeping foreign investment foreign, sending money to distant lands for social engineering, and Laken Riley’s brutal murder. They seem to oppose without a positive counter strategy: It was motiveless malignity, to use an expression by Thomas Carlyle to describe evil Iago, on display in front of not just the nation, but also the world.


Low class, childish. Enamored with itself and believing in an unwarranted sense of superiority, the Democratic Party has no high ground, not social, not political, not economic, not philosophical. How can no one in the party stand to honor a mother who lost her daughter or a border agent whose actions saved another border agent when they came under fire at the border? Did I say, “low class”? I think I mean “sick.” Literally depraved. Why did I watch? Why did I watch?


Sick and simultaneously laughable hypocrisy. The party allowed the debt to rise by trillions as bureaucrats drunk on money spent without accountability. As yet, untold billions went to support whims and whimsical “scientific” and “social” experiments. And no one in the party seems to care. But they certainly can get angry that Trump wants to take practical steps to save the country money, such as that spent to rent empty buildings or to pay social security to dead people.


The hills that Democrats choose to defend, such as allowing boys and men in women’s and girls’ restrooms and locker rooms and in female sports, continuing to pay government workers for little or inconsequential work or for rent on empty buildings, or for distributing money for social engineering programs in other countries, or feeding terrorists, these hills are not high ground.


By not standing at any time during the Address, Democrats revealed where they stand and what they stand for.
   ​

I believe we should take a moment every so often to consider the two most telling aspects of our existence: Where and when, or place and time.


You’re thinking, “Don’t you mean Minkowski space or Einstein’s Spacetime? And what about matter and energy? You know that E= mc^2 formula everyone knows? You think you know more than the physicists? Humbly, I’ll say, “No, I don’t know more, but for everyone matter and energy always exist in some ‘place’ at some definite time.”


What Is Place?


By “place” I mean any part of the Cosmos that has affected humans directly or indirectly or that has been affected by humans or human consciousness. “Place” is space that has a history of meaning: Your neighborhood, the Gettysburg battlefield on which the fate of a nation was determined or the waters off Midway where the 1942 battle doomed the Japanese to defeat within a matter of minutes, the Acropolis that symbolizes an epitome of human intellectual achievement, or the location you associate with some success or failure. Place is personal—on both an individual and a collective basis. Although I have never visited it, I have a relationship with the Sea of Tranquility born from my watching Armstrong and Aldrin bounce over its surface. I might say the same for sites the Mars rovers tracked and photographed and for the black hole Sagittarius A that astronomers imaged with the Event Horizon Telescope and the technique known as Very Long Baseline Interferometry, or VLBI. Through the eyes of others and through technology many locations throughout the Cosmos have become “places” for me.


It’s place that generates deja vu, place that encapsulates a time in your past. Every place has character that is a combination of a physical environment and an experience within that environment. Let me emphasize: Place is more than its physical attributes. In fact, we recognize some places for the experiences of many who preceded us. It isn’t just the physicality of the site, it’s what happened or happens there both in reality and in imagination, or what we anticipate to happen like a good time at the beach, a win at the slots, or a victory over a rival school on the home team’s field. All places have “character,” but some seem somehow to have a richer character, and among those are the places in our personal histories. Ambience isn’t estranged from time; it is time’s safety deposit box. You can revisit a time only because you have a key to the box in your brain’s vault. The key to place is the key to time.


That place embodies personal time is important to me. As the frontispiece of this website asks, “Can you think of ten minutes ago without thinking of place?”


It is this question that drove me to assume a priority of place over time in the human mind. “When I was in elementary school”; “When I was in high school”; “When I had my first job”: All these and similar statements, such as “When I was ten…” conjure images of you in some place, in some physical circumstance. Even if you have experienced one of those rare “out-of-body” moments, you still localize it.”* Every such psychedelic or hallucinogenic experience occurs “in a place,” often seen from a hovering position: You as a drone looking down on you as a person in a place. Think actress Shirley MacLaine meditating on some mountain and suddenly finding herself “observing herself” and then writing a book about it. That journey she took to various sites she visited on her quest for identity began in a place. MacLaine wrote in Out on a Limb that “...Looking back, I can say that making that simple, lazy afternoon decision to visit an unusual bookstore [the Bodhi Tree Bookstore in West Hollywood] was one of the most important decisions of my life.” I’m guessing that the bookstore subsequently became a secular shrine for some of MacLaine’s fans who elevated a particular space to a particular place (imbued with meaning).


It isn’t the time—whatever definition you have of that—but the place that is tangible in the present, or that seems to be tangible in retrospect. And memories of that “ten minutes ago” or “dozens of years ago” can, just as Marcel Proust described in his multi volume Remembrance of Things Past, come from some present day physical experience, such as that smell and taste of a madeleine dipped into tea that led to Proust’s retracing paths like Swann’s Way he knew as a child, a journey not to a disembodied existence, but to a place, specifically Combray (AKA Illiers or Illiers-Combray).


Isn’t that experience common? Anecdote warning; dive, dive, dive…


About a week ago my daughter visited with the specific intention of making me a batch pizzelles, the flat patterned cookies associated with Abruzzo in central Italy and dating back to the 8th century BC. She had kept the waffle-like pizzelle iron that belonged to my mother and the recipe I knew as a child.


As she stacked up the fresh waffle-like pizzelles, the smell of anise began to suffuse my home’s atmosphere as the rising Sun spreads its glow over the dawn sky, rosy fingered as Homer wrote. The anise time machine wafted me to my mother’s fifties-style red formica-countered kitchen. And in the ethereal realm of memory I saw myself, maybe 11 or 12, standing by the gas stove and holding the long handles of the manual waffle iron my mother sometimes delegated me to use before she bought an electric version. A blob of the dough pressed by the manual iron turned into a pizzelle by guesswork and experience: “Donald, put about this much in the iron, hold it over the flame on one side, then flip the iron to do the other side.” It was painstaking work a little boy could accept with the anticipated joy of eating pizzelles and any peripheral cookie matter that oozed out the side of the iron, an excess I broke off and crunched when I stacked the central disks on a plate. Because my mother made pizzelles rather regularly after she entered the age of Edison with an electric pizzelle iron, her house often welcomed any visitor with a slight smell of anise that eventually, I assumed, infused itself in the walls and furniture just as the smell of Schaller’s Fine Bakery used to hang in the dewy morning air above the sidewalk outside the yellow brick building where I peddled my bike slowly just to linger in the hovering smell of fresh bread on my way to see friends. ** Place, not time, reader; place, not time, is primary.
    
Alpha

Are there exceptions to the primacy of place? Well, beginnings seem especially important to us, and we are fond of acts that symbolize the commencement of something new, like breaking ground for a building, all the dignitaries holding gold-plated shovels on which a little dirt covers the tip just at least for the brief moment required for the local newspaper’s photographer to snap a photo: “Everyone say ‘Dig,’ please.” But the most important beginning for each of us is that alpha moment we cannot associate with any place.

The first “first” in our lives we did not imprint on memory. I cannot expect a description or narrative from you if I say, “Think of that first moment of life, your personal beginning in birth as you arrive like a space alien landing on an unfamiliar planet you have subsequently come to call ‘home.’” Unlike you, however, the space alien could describe an arrival because it (he? she?) came from a place already imprinted and ready for comparison. We arrived with nothing to compare, so that birthplace of yours and mine never embedded itself in long term memory in a brain that had no reference place; and thus, the moment itself is gone because you can’t generate from the reference vacuum. Maybe some ideas and ways of thinking are a priori, but a specific time isn’t. Infancy is a timeless time, isn’t it? In late toddler years, placelessness and timelessness are supplanted by the experiences in places that make time incarnate. After that first lost childhood memory, you might in Proustian detail recall the places where you later celebrated the anniversaries of that long forgotten (or never remembered) birth. “We went to Chuck E. Cheese for my tenth birthday.” “I had a party in my house for my eleventh birthday.”  “I met friends at Sam’s Bar for my twenty-first.” “I just sat facing a blank wall at home lamenting my fortieth.”

Don’t many subsequent firsts tie time to place? The place where you met, the place where you got engaged (“Direct your attention to the Jumbotron above the left field stands”), the place where you got hitched (Pachabel’s Canon in D echoing in the background), and all those other “firsts” and the places where they occurred. All those “times” forever (whatever that means for a finite being) affixed by places. Yes, beginnings occur in places, and it’s only the limitation of human development that erases memories of early years until the conscious mind can retrieve them from the hippocampus. I might ask, “What’s your earliest memory? What’s that alpha moment?” I’m betting it’s not time sans place. The only times sans place for you lie forever buried in a young brain with no recollection, in neurons without memory imprints, synapses connecting nothing before that gradual awakening of self awareness, a baby exploring hands and feet, then mother, and crib, and room, and house, and neighborhood, and town…With one exception: that very first memory of yours of you doing something in a place with walls, or trees, or mother…Search your memories now.

Don’t fret over your inability to remember your birth. That’s a cosmic condition. Your birth might not shelter in your accessible memories, but others can remember it for you. There were older humans around to witness it. But the FIRST OF ALL FIRSTS, no one remembers. In no place—and therefore in no time— the universe arose from a singularity surmised to have been smaller than a proton. The event some 13.8 billion years ago can’t be captured even by WMAP, COBE, or JWST. It lies in unremembered past just like your birth. Having been in no place, it now occupies all places, making each of us the center of the universe with the only memory of it lying in the Cosmic Microwave Background at 2.72548±0.00057 K. Hot birth fading into cold radiation.

In Medias Res

In a frequently used plot development, an author begins a story in the middle of things, then retraces the background story forward to fill in the gaps. We know the technique because it’s as old as the Iliad and the Odyssey. It’s used in many TV detective stories, the detective seen behind bars in the opening scene, the ensuing scene defined by the caption “Ten days ago…” with the subsequent unfolding of the tale to the opening scene. If you were to start today writing that autobiography to lend permanence to your legacy, you might ask, “How did I get to this point?” as a segue to “It all began when I first met Sally on that bench in Central Park. Little did I then know how that chance meeting would lead to my sitting in this office today.”


Well, right now, with no definitive omega moment in sight, you assume you are in medias res, “in the middle of things” between the known things in your past places and the unknown in some future places. But are you actually in an interminable middle? Your finiteness ensures nothing but its inevitable end. You really don’t know that this moment won’t be your omega moment. Not to frighten you, but your horoscope warns you“to look before you cross a busy street today,” and for you to avoid walking down a dark alley in Bagdad or to avoid using your phone to text while you drive. You might run into a handsome or beautiful stranger today, but you don’t want to actually run into him or her.

Of course, knowing what is a “middle time” in your life is nothing more than awareness of your present. “Middle” presupposes a “before” and an “after.” You might note “before,” and after for schooling, a particular job, or a relationship in retrospect, but not during. You distinguish a “before” and “now,” both characterized by the places that mark them, but not a definitive “middle” until there is an “after,” or omega moment. Trust me on this; I cannot in my early eighties think there won’t be mid-eighties, late eighties, nineties, or a brief moment when I hold the current position of being “the world’s oldest person,” a title that I think I would prefer to replace with “the world’s second oldest person.” Everyone who reaches that oldest age pinnacle is destined to relinquish that position, usually shortly after reaching it.


Middle? I don’t think anyone in the Middle Ages thought he was in “the middle.” Sure, one could be aware of a past, but that only put one in the present. It’s only in retrospect that any of us can note some time we spent in some place that had a before and an after.

Omega Times in Omega Places: The Second Law of Thermodynamics in Action

Then there’s that omega moment that the world’s oldest person will reach. The grand finale in a place TBD. It might be a cushy venue by which others, and not you, associate time and place. You don’t need me to tell you that such a moment will come; deep down you know it even if you cannot visualize yourself experiencing it. You cannot say like Christ, “Before Abraham was, I am.” Nor can you say “I am the Alpha and the Omega.” Nor even like Yahweh, “I Am Who Am,” a statement of timelessness and placelessness. A statement of pure existence itself. Being Itself. Being that by fiat wills beings into being.

Your omega moment is inevitable. It will occur in a place, and it will, as much as we surmise, precede an eternity in “no place,” at least in no place like all the places you have used to mark your finite existence. Given the mystery centered on that last moment before you enter a placeless eternity, I cannot argue that you will not carry the memory of that place into forever or find yourself like Shirley MacLaine reliving all those “middle” moments that once lay between the alpha and omega moments of your life, memories that only arise deja vu in the mind of a “reincarnated you” embodied in a slug or another Shirley MacLaine.

Time’s a tough nut to crack. Brilliant St. Augustine of Hippo said he knew what time was until someone asked him what it was. Is time merely our accounting of the amount of entropy in our lives, the organized stuff diffusing into disorder? Is it an accounting of those moments when we discovered a new order in thoughts or circumstances, such moments punctuating the inevitable dominance of disorder? If the entire universe is headed inexorably toward higher entropy, locally, it isn’t, right? Let me explain.

I’m in the process of replacing the degraded shingles on my roof with a metal roof that’s predicted to last 50 years. As the new roof decays into disorder through wind and ice damage and oxidation, I’ll witness some of the entropy, but I have no illusions about being around at age 130 to replace it and establish a new ordering. Things fall apart, and we put them back together for another go round. Or, we replace them in whole or part. Their decay and the moment of our restoration we mark by duration and instant. Not far from my house is Century Inn, a hotel and tavern on the country’s first National Road that opened in 1794. But a few years ago it caught fire, so the more than 200 year-old hotel that had hosted James K. Polk, General Santa Anna, Marquis de Lafayette, Albert Gallatin, David Bradford, Abraham Lincoln and Andrew Jackson had to close for extensive repairs to restore its former glory. Is it time that destroys, or entropy, as the Second Law of Thermodynamics mandates? Before the fire and restoration one could walk on creaking wooden floors, the process of decay taking two centuries, the fire taking an hour or two, the restoration two to three years. The inn is now ready to weather two more centuries.

Back to the Middle

Are you and I in “the middle” as the Mesozoic was sandwiched between the Paleozoic and the Cenozoic or in tighter frame, the Jurassic sandwiched between Triassic and Cretaceous? Yes and no. Maybe you and I are in the middle of things if the planet is 4.5 billion years old and it lasts to its predicted end 4.5 billion years hence. We ride the seesaw by sitting directly over the fulcrum. On one side of us from closer to farther along the board sit Egyptians making pyramids, unknown people making Gobekli Tepe, the Neanderthals going extinct 40,000 years ago and sequentially farther along the board to T-Rex, to trilobites long before dinosaurs, to the first microbes long before trilobites, to microbes long before before multicellular life and the places where they dwelt in Hadean time. That one side of the seesaw is heavy with past life! On the other side sit potentials—life yet to be. So, are we in the middle? The answer is “probably,”maybe,” or “no” because we don’t know what comes after this. If nothing comes after this, then this, dear reader, this is the end and the middle was 2.25 billion years ago during the middle of the Great Oxidation Event.

No really, is this the middle? What if we considered a larger framework, the history and unfolding of the Cosmos? Well, we can make an educated guess. The Cosmos as a whole might be headed for cold diffusion, high entropy, but locally, it will undergo reordering as Andromeda and the Milky Way merge, forming a new ordered entity, a larger galaxy. The time frame for that reordering is billions of years, but that duration is a pinprick on the universe’s drive to diffusion, a process that might take more than one hundred trillion years—give or take a week. Too long to comprehend, anyway.

On the grander scale of the Cosmos, saying that we are in the “Middle of Things” makes little sense in view of the universe’s estimated 100 trillion+ years till it ends. The approximate 14 billion-year age of the universe is a mere 0.00014% of the predicted lifespan of the universe. The biggest omega moment is beyond our comprehension. And to think! It will be on a cosmic scale either a gradual or accelerating end of all places and time.

That Omega Sentence
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As usual, your insights will serve you better than mine. I hope I provided you with an adequate point of departure.


*Silvia Bünning and Olaf Blanke:  https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0079612305500244


**Schaller’s Fine Bakery is closed now robbing future young bike riders of the experience of smelling freshly baked bread on the sidewalk and street outside. But then, in an age of indoor children holed up with electronics, how many would be out riding bikes?