Pondering the Universe from the Sky Club

"In all affairs it's a healthy thing now and then to hang a question mark on the things you have long taken for granted."

-Bertrand Russell

My view, for the next several hours it seems,

Sat here at the Sky Club talking to a young mother from Boca who's taking Tommy, a precocious and funny five-year-old, to go see his dad in Los Angeles. For all the world, with all his energy, he reminded me of Drew when he took off down the D concourse at Hartsfield, only to explain when they retrieved him after shutting down the whole concourse for a missing child, "I had to run." Because of course.

Tommy's fascinated with airplanes, so we talked about why they fly and how much gas they burn going all the way to LA. It's not a smiley sort of evening, but talking to that young man about planes and stuff was really enjoyable. I do miss mine, all five of them. Time flies.

My in-persons cancelled for the balance of the week, and gleefully Peg booked me on the first available flight out of Panama City. I left PC for Corning at 2:28. I will arrive tomorrow. No kidding.

I've learned truly to loathe air travel, the fake customer service and the perky shittiness of the whole experience. If you're old like me you remember when air travel didn't resemble the last train ride to Auschwitz. Hell, they even let us smoke, although by the time I arrived on the flying scene it was at the back of the plane.

Did you know that airlines used to see smoking on their jets as a functional good, insofar as the tar and nicotine sealed the leaky spots in the pressurized cockpit? I'm not even making that up.

But now there is no comfort or customer service; the Sky Club is filled with folks who are apparently traveling on this endless Casual Day that is life in the United States in 2024. No wonder we don't scare anyone with our martial prowess or aura of seriousness--put on a collared shirt for pete's sake.

Now I am sounding old.

Flying up here I found myself immersed in and mesmerized by Reality Is Not What It Seems, by Carlo Rovelli. Relativity explained to history majors like me. There is no time except in a relative sense. There are only quanta and photons and waves and particles, and black holes can't ingest the whole universe because Max Planck taught us that there's a point at which a thing can't be crushed until it won't compress any further. Good to know.

In between reading a couple paragraphs at a time of Rovelli and waxing nostalgic for back when I was smart, I read more of my tax hornbook in preparation for the August adventure at NYU. Rather than trying to memorize all this stuff, I've worked to distill concepts that will allow creating a prediction or an inference when I don't know the answer to a particular problem. In the end, someone always pays the income tax on realized value. There's a margin in pushing that day of judgment down the road. There's a margin in pushing those gains onto someone in a lower tax bracket, with limits. If you get too creative, they're going to make you defend your work in court.

In sum, taking all this tax law and starting to turn it into my own reality. Rovelli conveys the notion in physics that reality is a body of "information", a term of art in physics referring to every potential outcome of a given moment (although I reckon there's no such thing as a "moment"), quantified in our observing and creating that outcome. Making a very, very rough analogy, when I start to take all this new knowledge and sort it into my own bins, I'm creating my own quantum reality. And, further to the point, time slows a bit and I grow a little less old than if I was trolling internet news sources.

A ramble, to be sure. Still three hours before we board to go home to Peg. Hell, I'd be there by now if the Columbia wasn't in the shop for its annual. Delta stinks at the one thing at the center of its mission: delivering passengers safely and somewhat comfortably to their destination, on time.