I am having to remind myself. I think the people saying we are headed for total economic collapse are very small minded. What is more likely is a deferment or moratorium, not out of being nice but also out of self interest. Suppose a bank repossesses a house or apartment building — right now, who precisely are they going to sell to? By almost any calculation it is self interestedly better for them to delay the interest than to suffer the larger drop of value of selling it at a loss in a panicking market, during which period they would be trying to sell they would also be collecting no interest. The banks do not want you to declare bankruptcy; they don’t want to repossess an asset which is now worth less than what they paid for it. When they do, they lose money, especially in a market with no buyers. This is a crisis uniquely affecting the whole world. Even in booming industries like Lysol they are booming so much that they can’t keep up with what they ought to produce. There is no buyer and so there is no reason to foreclose, to demand, to screw over en mass. The bank is part of the market as well, and must try to accommodate it — not the other way around. Banks are not a monolithic impossible force but a business as well, a flow of organization and resources, albeit one with special abilities. In line with the government, they can absolutely inject money into the system to keep it going. The government can and does make money – invent it. They print more everyday; of course inflation negates part of this, but not the whole total, hence the growth in real value of goods per capita over time. Printing money is not the only way either. Simply change the rules by which trade can be conducted and you can exponentially grow money; more than by which you could ever grow by print. For instance, by reducing the reserve requirement and guaranteeing the deposits. The only way that an injection will not work is if people remain terrifyingly irrationally panicked. Money is an agreement which has value because we say it does. If we believe we can get this cash now, and that it is ‘real’ and that we do not hoard it but spend it, we can do it. But who knows. Banks are made up of people too and people are obviously not terribly smart all the time, and perhaps especially now. Perhaps my greatest sadness about the world is the belief of the majority of people in money as it existed before 1844 and before even the industrial revolution. People think of money as a fixed and finite resource. It is not. It is an approximate accounting for value. People say money doesn’t grow on trees; how ridiculous! It’s paper isn’t it? It literally does. And we can add further and further total advantage all the time. We have the capacity to do much more than we even allow ourselves to do now. Accordingly, over the past two centuries governments have had to take subtle and covert actions to more than double the available capital possible for accounting purposes from the same starting number, not even maliciously, but simply to make it stick by avoiding a panic. For instance through the introduction of joint stocks, which effectively doubled the amount of money in the world overnight. This did not blow the system, but in fact made possible the industrial revolution: it worked. Because value and potential were there. If we are heading for a recession, it is not because we have to be but because we chose to be, by choosing fear rather than courage and imagination. We have weeks, now possibly months at home to experiment, the ever growing problems of the world in the forefront. Have ideas to fix them! Make real value and not just money, for the money will surely follow tenfold. As FDR wisely put we have nothing to fear but fear itself.

I found myself excited to wake up the next morning for all the things I could do that would be me and my strengths and would need to be done; for all that I could do to and see to help the world that other people could not do or see; for what I could invent, whatever it was, that otherwise could not be invented. And best of all I then found myself excited too to fall asleep in between, to dream it all with dreams that only I could dream.

Excited to be both awake and asleep: I have not felt this in so long.

In times of sensory deprivation, the imagination runs wild. What will you do with yours? Aside from those directly seriously affected — which still, in my circle, is few — I find it interesting to see what the response has been from people I know. This could be a time for clearing house in more ways than one. I generally see people either entering extreme panic, or seeing that they could take this time to catch up on many creative pursuits and ideas, chiefly: how can we help people, and come up with ideas that might ensure this kind of thing does not happen again any time soon? I know which of these two groups I want to be spending my time with. A few things come to mind, both of them I’m paraphrasing: Einstein: There are people for who you give them a problem and they’ll find a hundred solutions, and people for whom you’ll give them a solution and they’ll find a hundred problems. And Deepak Chopra: There are two uses for the imagination, creativity is the best use and worry is the worst. Already I think I have some workable solutions to healthcare capacity problems, some technology to better sanitize mass transit and a few new business models I’m excited to see about in the near future. I must say that in a way I am looking forward to a few months of sensory deprivation and therefore creative rebirth.

… billions of little pings of them are hitting us everyday. Most people sense it only vaguely: distant warmth from the sun. The hum of TV static when you turn it on, which is in fact the background wanderings of the Universe. Picture those piles: those sun-particles (photons). Billions of these pings are hitting us everyday, yet most people do not have the equipment to really notice them.

Ray Bradbury said that books smell like Ancient Egypt. He was right, and that was right and true to him then, seventy years ago. I smelled some of my old books again tonight. Those are the best ones. The new ones won’t do. Perhaps that smell has always been part of the appeal. We have an obsession today with ‘now’ — with all the social media and things, but of course even with our antidotes to those problems. Our mantra is being present, which is a good goal at times but still it is all still: now now now now. When most people are being ‘mindful’ today they are taking it as a Buzzfeed pill, and it’s just the same as saving a picture of a plant. Just to do it. I like to feel lost sometimes. No, most times. It is only when I feel lost outside that I feel found inside. To be alert now is not to be lost. And, you can get lost in now — by noticing all the things around in true mindfulness — but you get lost in the past, too, in old books and old thoughts and memories, and you get lost in the future as well in your imagination. Books do smell like Ancient Egypt — and they can let you connect to the person who wrote them in that Ancient Time, and they can be your friend, your model; and most importantly make you feel that your now problems today aren’t so important or so big. That there have been, no matter how alone you seem, other people to go through the same at many other times. The feeling of ‘now’ is not what most people think of it, and what I thought of it before. It can be the instant, the /instant/, right right now, or the very distant past, or the very far and speculative future — both so far you realize this little small sliver of toast and teeth brushing and setting alarms doesn’t matter. That’s what most people think of as ‘now’, but it’s the only thing that isn’t: that is just the dreadful padding around the real now you always are in, and the vast unknown places — past and future — your mind can think and feel your way into. Now is wherever you lose your mind.

Ray Bradbury put up a sign in front of his desk that read: DON’T THINK. I copied him and put up the same. You can’t care what happens, you have to just love the doing and the drinking coffee and the typing itself. And the words boiling out of your brain. Around 8% of what he ever wrote was published, by my calculations a little while back. And, of many of the stories I’ve read of his, there are many I don’t like or think are only so-so. And that is just why I LOVE him. He is experimental. He is unafraid. You have to be experimental to be good.

I also have a sign above my desk that reads: EGOCIDE. This is what Bucky Fuller decided to commit instead of SUICIDE. Which is: why would you ever care what anybody thinks of you? Reputation, standing. None of these things are lasting, and the people who maintain a good ‘reputation’ with everybody throughout their lifetimes are the ones forgotten in a generation, because they did nothing new and were nothing. It’s funny, because I often find myself acting more loving, caring, genuine, affectionate, and compassionate when I have in my mind EGOCIDE. It is what I want to do, and society has taught me it is difficult or unstrong or a waste of time.

I added a third sign to this set, which are all really saying the same thing. The third one says: REACH. In school, when I loved writing and first got into it — and then immediately got out of it until I turned 19 — one of the first things they told me to really ruin my enthusiasm was “Don’t reach.” In other words, only state what you can clearly and defensively and precisely back up, cite, evidence, know will work, and on and on. This would make me preposterously angry, even in the youngest grades. But eventually I capitulated to be validated as smart. After my first year of writing short stories, during which I wrote one per week, I looked back on all of them, and my first thought was: They’re all too good! I’m so disappointed in myself! I wrote a letter to a friend and I said: I wish I had had the courage to write more truly terrible short stories. Because the bad ones, the few ones I did go with, were weird and terrible and wonderful in those two things: they had new ideas and textures and styles to them, that point me where I could be going, to new ideas. Not just for fiction, but for inventing, for managing my teams, all the rest of it. They were when I was reaching.

Reaching is all that we can do as the human species, and exactly what you should strive to do, not shy away from. If you only did what could be backed up by a mountain-wall avalanche of success, and a surefire underwriting of non-failure, what would you do? If you couldn’t reach, where would you end up? All your stories would be just the same. The new genres would never happen. Sci Fi wouldn’t exist. Hell, what’s the point of imagination at all! Just record, point form, what happened last Tuesday.

With no reaching, nobody would have ever paid attention to electricity, because energy pulsating through everything is just pseudo-scientific nonsense. Tesla would still be a ditch digger. Einstein a dropout filing papers. We wouldn’t have steel or bronze, because there’s no reason that could work over the stone: you’re reaching too far. And, of course, we wouldn’t have the many many many failures — no, experimentations — which led to these successes, but were not them. No refrigeration, no television, no paper or printing presses, or even written letters. Every invention has had to start as a dream, vague and on the horizon, and has started out as a lie until we turned it true. You have to go, as far as you can, to reach, however vaguely and unsolidly, at the periphery, grasp it and get it and then try to understand. But everyone and every idea has been a reach first.

“Don’t reach,” Is possibly the stupidest piece of advice ever given, although I hesitate to make this claim since terrible, counter-factual norms are driven along all the time, but I still abhor that this is given to us, all of us, in schools till this day! Without it we would stay in the caves! So I say: REACH! Reach away!

We now have tools like Google Earth to show us data. But they give us the supremely useful tool of being able to zoom in and out, and so we don’t get a sense of relative scale, even through these tools — of how we stand on our planet. How would we stand?

Imagine that you want to make a satellite map, and print this off in real life. Let’s use for our example a school gymnasium.

For our purposes, we can use Buckminster Fuller’s Dymaxion Map — the most accurate flat map of the Earth every created in regards to the relative size and scale of the surface.

Our map, longest end to longest end, is 67 feet. This gives us quite a spectacular view though, because, standing at about 5’5”, our eyes are at the height most satellites orbit above our planet. We see what they see.

We don’t have to worry about pricking our feet, or tripping as we walk around, even though the topography of our map is quite accurate. The tallest mountain rises up 3/16”, and the lowest ocean sinks that much. That’s less than the paper might waver on its own, if we were to simply set it down.

That’s our Earth. What’s around it? Where have we gone? With our best tunnelling and boring equipment, we have gone an extra 1/32” under the low point of the ocean. This is out of the ten and a half feet total to the very centre.

We have gone also outwardly, to the moon — which is sitting 70 storeys above us.

The sun is the next town over.

What about time? Why don’t I make a book that divides up all of human’s existence on the planet into equal book pages, starting from the earliest known humans that look mostly like us, and going all the way to the present. Let’s make our book 500 pages long. The Birth of Christ is on the second last page. The start of a written record — anything /ever/ written down — just three pages before that. All of the time from the Renaissance to the present day is the last half of the last page. That’s less than the copyright notice.

We live not within our means but within the mind we set (mindset). It is a set, a place, a garden we fill with objects and tend to. If we are setting out, we can make the mistake of valuing something not on what it is but what we are. This mistake happens, all the time, at either end of the income spectrum. Poor people think their great ideas have to be no good, and do not get on them without enough to start, and likewise, and perhaps more often, rich people think their terrible ideas are grandiose. We have an idea and see it not for what its value is, but for what value we think or are accustomed to ourselves having, and divide the idea by our time. But an idea or invention is not how much time is put into it, is not your background, job title, or where you are from, it is how much value it can bring. There is a story about Picasso where he doodled on a napkin, and a woman saw him and asked if she could buy it. He said surely, for a hundred thousand dollars. She laughed and said, “But it only took you five minutes.” He said, “No, ma’am, it took me my whole life.” This is the great failure of attempted hourly accounting. You never stop thinking. Even in dreams, you are thinking. An idea that hits you in an instant did not just find you. It built up from a seed inside of you, watered and wired over a long time until ready to take off. Inspiration is not the coming to of it but the realizing of it, the brief moment of blossoming of the flower, not the whole time, not the seed or the stem or the roots or the sunshine and water that bred it for hours, maybe even years. And in that seeming moment of inspiration you may very well find a hundred thousand, or even five million dollars of real value, which are totally unaccounted for, and could never be, by the instant spent seeing it in the mind, the minutes spent writing it down, the years spent learning the things to think of it. Don’t think of yourself at all. You are a human being; a unique human being, worth an indefinable life, both worth-less and in-valuable. Ideas are the only things that can be valued.

We didn’t have editor until the last few hundred years, or, only around 4% of the time of having written language in recorded human history, and therefore having the potentiality of books, articles, printed materials and the like. And then, when they did come about, what was the purpose of the editor? To get the writer’s word count to fit in the slot marked for publication, for instance, in the newspaper’s column-inch. To fit words into limited space. While, do we have limited space now, especially on an online medium? The information equivalent of ten million words, more than any single human being has written in their cumulative life, could be stored in the weight of a few grains of sand on the shared storage of a server, and, therefore, made available for at-demand searching and indexing by all; not in-their-face, but on demand and to them, when they wanted it. I think we need more of these real, honest, true, unfiltered words.

We’re building the whole world into a prison. If you were to commit a crime, you get sent back to your little space. Well now we all have our own little spaces, where it’s too expensive to leave but still expensive to stay. We have to pay for our little spaces, or pay a greater premium to go out, to sit, to enjoy things. How in the hell can land be owned? It all comes down to building techniques. Once you can own things, you have to have a place to put and secure those owned things. Up until now, that place has been fixed, has been a pile of bricks — stones — stacked on top of each other to prevent break ins and move outs, unauthorized. If we could instead build vessels that each person could own, having the easy ability to pick it up like a sheet of paper, a notebook and a pen, and go somewhere else, we might finally set the land free. I hate when I write like other people.