A Rain of Frogs

In the landscape of my mind there are mountains, dark, eerie forests, vast oceans, plains, pebbled beaches, seedy alleyways and pleasant airy towns with cheery playgrounds.

I have, at one time or another, explored all of these places. Some have fascinated me and some have frightened me. But nothing compares to The Wilder.

In the landscape of my mind is The Wilder, a desert so huge there are no words to describe it.

The Wilder is the only place I have never explored in my mind. It’s a vast flat plain, eye-burning white and stifling. I’ve stood on the edge and looked into its heart and felt it staring back into mine. It seems to breathe, to be alive.

Nothing about me frightens me more than The Wilder.

I’ve been lost there before, on two occasions. Once, when I was about ten or eleven. The other about 5 or 6 years ago. Both times I was dragged out of its jaws by my sister, who seems to be the only person I know who is unafraid of it.

I’m beginning to feel like I’m lost in the Wilder again. It would take me far too long to explain why I think that, or what it means. I have begun to believe that this is a desert I must cross.

And I think I must cross it alone.

What an amazing backlash against “proper” web development practices we’re experiencing. Even champions of web standards like Zeldman are showing the bird to proper coding and just not giving a crap.

I like it.

I’ve been driving standards compliance, accessibility and usability in my company since i was hired. It’s important to me. I don’t see any reason for a site I’ve built to not be completely usable by any cross-section of the population, be they blind, colorblind or purple.

Seeing Zeldman throw in the towel makes me laugh. Of course he doesn’t care. It’s not selling his book, it’s not making him money any more. It’s not buoying his ‘net cache. Look! Is that a bandwagon rushing by? Better jump on it quick Jeff.

Trust me, it’s not difficult to lose passion in this industry. I look at the big community site I’m building, and see it’s current incarnation losing participating members at a terrifying rate. I’ve put hundreds of hours into the new version of the site, and they’re all bailing. Yes, they’re bailing because it’s taking me so long to get the site up. I can only work so fast, what with having to pay the bills and everything at the same time.

But that’s beside the point. Okay, Zeldman has passed the torch. Other design blog “luminaries” are doing the same. I guess they’re bored. I sure am. Standards compliance and XHTML are boring subjects. But they’re also my bread and butter, and the company I work for pays me to be an expert in the field. And I’ve been doing this a lot longer than most people Certainly years before Jeff’s little orange book came out. I saw the bandwagon come, and I saw it go. No matter, like busses and tax seasons, there’ll be another by any minute.

No Zeldman? No problem. Go do your little thing apart from everyone else Jeff. We’ll be over here, doing the real work of the web, as we always have. I read the book. It was a lot of fluff and a very little substance.

Sort of like this site, actually.

There is an ongoing debate about reality. Seriously, go find any online philosophy forum (the term forum here meaning anywhere people can discuss things online, be it a bulletin board, IRC, whatever), an almost every single discussion boils down to it. What’s real? What’s perceived? Is perception reality or is reality perception? Does my butt look big in these jeans? While I’m no expert on any of this, you’re here reading this so I’m going to pretend to be an authority. And as that authority, I’m going to say this. Perception IS reality.

There’s this thing that everyone’s been going on and on about. You’ve heard about it. It’s quantum theory, and it’s as close to proof as you can get for the existence of God. Interestingly, it’s also as close to proof as you can get for the nonexistence of God. That’s what makes Quantum Theory great (or a load of donkey squat, depending on your frame of reference). I can’t hope to start explaining Quantum theory, but one part of it explains that everything that can happen actually does. I think this is called the Many Universes theory.

Basically, every time something happens, it also doesn’t happen, and the universe splits into two so that both outcomes exist. This goes on and on. Since there is fundamentally an infinite number of possibilities, there is an infinite number of universes, and that number is expanding at an infinite rate. Not sure how infinity gets bigger, mind you.

The thrust of this whole post, in fact, is that this particular aspect of quantum theory has changed science. It’s changed philosophy, and all sorts of other fields of interest. It’s changed literature, since every author in the world is doing something with what my sister now calls Quantum Religion. What I haven’t seen, but am exploring here, is how quantum theory affects psychology.

Schizophrenia is a mental disorder which affects about one percent of the population. Despite popular opinion that schizophrenia means a split personality (in reality a disorder called MPD, or Multiple Personality Disorder), it is a disorder which affects perception. Those afflicted are subject to incredibly troubling distortions of perception, from hearing voices to full blown hallucinogenic events – seeing things that don’t exist.

And that is where quantum theory becomes relevant. If every possibility exists, than maybe schizophrenic people are not, in fact, perceiving things that aren’t there, but are perceiving things in alternate realities. While that may be academic, since the effect on the afflicted person is the same no matter what you call it, it does raise questions when treatment is considered.

Because treatment can help control the distortion of perception experienced by a schizophrenic person, the origin of these perceptions becomes important. If the perceptions are glimpses of alternate realities, it means that the barrier between different quantum realities are internal, not external. Because the barriers can be effectively closed by chemical reactions in the brain, it becomes likely that they can be opened by chemical means as well.

And since “reality” as we know it is simply a perception of one of many realities, doesn’t it then become possible to view, and possibly change our “default” reality?

To quote Keanu Reeves, whoa.

Deep. But it’s interesting. It suggests to me that reality is what we make it. Such a suggestion seems to validate many ideas traditionally considered “impossible” in the past. Maybe man really can move mountains, if he believes enough. Maybe anything is possible if we truly put our minds to it.

Maybe perception really is reality.

There was one of those discussions today in our office. You know the ones in which the project managers talk about how much work each person working on the project owes them, and how many favors are going to be returned for saving such-and-such’s *ss?

Well, it was one of those. Someone stated that I, in fact, not only owed my firstborn child to the Project Manager, but in fact owed my entire soul to them.

The PM’s response? ” I don’t really think I want it. I’m afraid of getting dirty by association.”

Ouch.

I was listening to Cake while working, and as always, it was a unique and worthwhile experience.

Western society has lost much of the ability to layer meaning and intention, leaving us with superficial garbage barely worth paying attention to. It’s not just music. It’s television, it’s music downloads vs. album art, it’s clothing you can’t wear twice in a given 30 day period. It’s low-carb soft drinks, or a whole wheat bun on a fast-food burger.

A specific Cake lyric made me stop and think. Excess isn’t rebellion, you’re drinking what they’re selling. Statements like that are deep. They have meaning in layers. As you think more about it, what appears to be a simplistic statement on the surface almost opens up to an entire universe of thought.

When did we lose it? Why? What, don’t we care? Is it just easier to sit in front of the tube and slowly degenerate into an overweight, smelly pile of goo than it is to make the damned effort to create something more meaningful?

Creation doesn’t mean art. Or music. Or writing. It means making something, even if it’s just a bit of time to question the universe around you. I want meaning back, layer upon layer of meaning, piled up in mangled, tangled stacks that leave me in awe.

It’s what I’m trying to do with my work, my music, my art, my writing and my actions.