I Can’t Breathe

JWise Thoughts

George Cant Breath

On Monday, George Floyd was murdered. The officer who facilitated George’s early exit knelt on his neck for 8 minutes while the man told officers, “I can’t breathe.” When they were done, George was done breathing forever.

Just two or three weeks before this, a bunch of heavily armed white men entered the state capitol building in Michigan without incident. Nobody challenged, nobody dead, nothing but the joy of white privilege.

A few years ago, Native Americans from the Dakotas were forcibly removed from protesting, so economic interests were allowed to go forward unimpeded by the people who had concerns about how their lands were being used. The powers that rule are allowed to bask in their white privilege.

I come from white privilege and cannot begin to understand the sense of what people of color in the United States must live with and fear. Maybe the threat of COVID-19 crashing into our lives gives us the briefest peeks into the tension of what it’s like to be hunted by an invisible enemy. The difference to people of color is that the enemy is hiding amongst all of us white people, is ever-present, and has followed them their entire lives.

America is not ironing out some kinks in the fabric of democracy on the rough road to freedom; we are nuking the highway to happiness with our incredible stupidity regarding the racism that runs deep in the bones of the republic.

Humanity shut down the globe to try to save itself from a virus; I think it’s time for America to shut itself down again until we find the vaccine for racism. This toxic hate is being propagated from the President of our country on down. Just look at the very top left headline on Drudge Report today: Trump retweets a video saying, “The Only Good Democrat is a DEAD Democrat.”

There can be no mincing those words, there is no apology that can be offered when a person in power makes suggestions for a “Good” American to make dead the bad ones. There’s a ripple effect in this type of messaging that if you are hostile to people you see as invaders such as Black, Hispanic, Asian, Middle-Eastern, and they fit the description of the “Bad” ones, then they become the enemy. American soldiers are taught to kill the enemy using this psychology, and now we have the top leader of our military identifying enemies every day, except they are fellow Americans.

The fake news media is the enemy, Hillary is the enemy, science is the enemy, China is the enemy, social media is the enemy, Amazon is the enemy, our allies in Europe are enemies, and now if you identify as a Democrat, you are the enemy.

We are a killer virus where hate of the other is the molecule that infects our sick minds. Sad, but there is likely no cure, no vaccine, no hope that the rage that is being propagated by the leader of the United States is going to just go away.

There are no hopes and prayers and no apology that will bring George Floyd back to life. All of us white people are complicit in George’s death because we don’t hold anyone accountable. We’d better hope that the people of color on this planet don’t see the need to put their knees on our necks until we are pleading for our lives with, “I can’t breathe.”

Pursuit of Time

JWise Thoughts

time

Give me all the time I need to find my way to what I’m seeking, and you’ll have to offer me infinity. I barely know my mind since many of the skills I’ve explored came and went as they evolved to grow into something else once I had become acquainted with them. The constraints on my day are not rigid other than the limitations imposed by the mechanics that life demands. I must eat, defecate, and sleep, but besides that, I’m allowed to surf the boundaries of my knowledge. I don’t mean to deny the luxury of living comfortably in the West while being afforded the opportunity to dance with myself. I need not struggle to find food and shelter but draw my own map of where I want to take myself.

Time is the elastic perception of how we relate to a world and its constraints. When we rush into the next best thing, we destroy our ability to gaze patiently into the infinite. To slow down the passage of time, we must master the boring, allowing ourselves to slip into our unfolding reality without the struggle of an adolescent mind demanding certainty and immediate knowledge. That old saying, “Patience is a virtue,” is key to living a long life, even if it might otherwise be considered short.

Then, in a moment, I lose track of time in some form of novelty where the gravity of information breaks time, and my brain must bring its full focus to bear. This typically occurs when I’m dealing with a subject or situation that I wrap my undivided attention around to comprehend what’s what. On the other hand, the familiar panders to our lazy nature, and this is where people see time accelerate. The habituated, redundant, and well-known does not allow the structures of perception to be stretched, and time is simply lost.

I’ll share two examples of time dilation. First, today, I saw the announcement that a bunch of DSP engineers would be streaming a talk about coding plugins focusing on audio effects. One of the speakers was Sean Costello of Valhalla DSP who I’m familiar with as I own a couple of his VSTs for reverb and delay. It was through Sean’s Tweet that I learned of the “Drunk DSP” Zoom talk, but that was about the extent of my knowledge of what might be streamed. This talk was for serious nerds interested in Digital Signal Processing (DSP) and the banter between engineers from Eventide, Ableton, Valhalla, Neural DSP, Newfangled Audio, and Edinburgh University. They discussed the merits of learning C++ versus Python. Universities teach Python but that is not used for creating products. The professor from Edinburgh explained they want to teach the physics of sound theory, not how to make products. Environments for prototyping, such as the JULIA high-performance language, which is supposed to be great for visualization and complex coding situations that might also require parallel processing, were spoken of. Another engineer touched on Bayesian inference, which is a statistical theorem looking at learning from experience for machines. And finally a short discussion about Discrete Fourier Transforms (DFT) and Fast Fourier Transform (FFT), where DFTs transform signals from the time domain while FFTs are concerned with the frequency domain.

For my second example, last year, we were on the Tara River in Montenegro, navigating rapids in whitewater. The rain was hammering down with a nearby thunderstorm hitting hard; the sound rippled through the canyon, causing a bit of anxiety. We are in a country in which we do not speak the language, deep in a forested canyon that is beautiful and new to our senses. While we are trying to take in the spectacle of this National Park we are also listening to our local guides who were assisting the Croatian organizer of this adventure as we paddled down the river. Earlier in the day, the sounds of Croatian folk music and a shot of Slivovitz before coffee and breakfast had started the morning. From the flooded muddy river to a shoreside lunch near a natural spring we were inundated with new information at every corner and in every moment of the day and well into the night.

What I’m trying to point out here is that both experiences, one a 2-hour long video stream and the other being 18 hours of an epic two-week journey, were both deep learning moments of relatively equal merit. The focus required to make sense of them doesn’t allow you to pay attention with half an ear. In the latter example, not paying attention risks losing your life, while in the first example, nothing may be at risk, but in a sense, there is. You see, to not look into the mystery of the unknown, you relinquish your right to peer into the infinite. Passive nonsense is the sweet we treat ourselves with after a hard day, except that we have somehow equated simple existence as difficult and always requiring the same old pablum to alleviate the pain of being alive.

In that sense, we have become a sad species addicted to our creature comforts, enslaved by the reliance on video games, TV, movies, weed, bad food, snacks, drugs, alcohol, religion, and the host of other crutches we believe we deserve due to what was just endured.

The things I experience and what I choose to entertain myself and learn from are not anyone else’s tools that will make their lives better, but neither are other’s groupthink coping mechanisms. We are programmed to find satisfaction and accomplishment in life when we are challenged at the edge of what we know. It is here on the frontier of our ignorance and our feeble attempts to conquer that darkness that time opens up, and life is no longer fleeting as though it’s in a race to find the finish line. In the struggle to find the unknown, time becomes expansive and slow but arrives with the risk of boredom. This boredom must be embraced by examining in great detail the intricacies of existence, information, life, knowledge, and maybe someday wisdom. Else, in a second, life will be over, and you’ll wonder, “Why didn’t I take the time to see the world as it is instead of through the filter of routine?”

Working In The Past

JWise Moments

Caroline Wise at the Wartburg in Eisenach, Germany

I’m here, but I’ve been busy working in the past. Getting caught up with long-neglected projects is everyone’s dream for a staycation, right? Living in an apartment, there’s little to nothing we need or want to do, but our hobbies need constant care. So what exactly is it that I’m doing? I’m back in April 2013, dealing with five days out of nearly 30 that we spent in Europe. Somehow, those five days never made it into the blog. I was going through stuff and saw that I left notes that these were works in progress. Three of them are now done, starting with April 21st when we were in Eisenach and Weimar, Germany. The photo above is Caroline standing in the room where Martin Luther translated the bible into German back in 1521. From the Wartburg and Bach House, we headed up the road to Weimar, home to Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche for the end of his life, and Gropius, who gave us the Bauhaus.

Dresden, Germany

Over to Dresden on April 22nd for a visit to the Frauenkirche, the Zwinger, and a couple of other stops for this brief moment in town. From this rebuilt city, we went on to Bautzen on our drive east. This wasn’t an intended stop, but we had left on a spontaneous getaway the day before with no other intention than to drive northeast. We stopped in Bautzen because the view from the road dragged us in for a brief stop there and then onward to Görlitz. This blog entry took me nearly 10 hours to write and finish prepping photos. I can tell you that writing from memories that are seven years old is no easy feat. Oh yeah, we spent a good part of the afternoon this day sitting next to a river in Poland with Germany on the other side while Caroline did some work for her company back in America.

Prague, Czechia

Then, on the next day, April 23rd, we were in Prague, Czech Republic, running through Europe’s 13th biggest city. I can tell you that at least three days are needed to do justice to this historical location. Also, at this point, I’m already starting to burn out on finishing these blog posts with over 100 photos between them, not counting that I still have another 100 photos for the last two days, plus the required text. I’d like a break. But that last break seven years ago is why these were never finished and so I’ll continue after this intermission of just saying blah blah. One more thing: when I started writing these posts, I wondered what I might have to say as there were no notes to work from, but it turned out that between Caroline and me, there were a ton of memories to draw from. So many memories, as a matter of fact, that the three finished posts feature 8,591 words about the 30 Years War, Martin Luther, Bach, the Habsburgs, Wes Anderson, Black Ass Beer, and Chimney Cake.

Rothenburg ob der Tauber, Germany

Now it’s time to turn my attention back to writing about Rothenburg ob der Tauber, and although I thought I’d post this earlier, I was making good enough time writing that I waited until I was finished so I could include the link to the complete post. Just click this link above or any of the others, and you’ll magically travel back in time with us to some memories of John and Caroline.

Strasbourg, France

I only have Strasbourg, France, left to write about, and everything I can ever say about this month-long trip to Europe will have been said. I’m guessing that most people who read this post will be clicking on it well after I finish the last day, which will be within 24 hours if I can drag more memories out of my weary brain.

A Yarn About Yarn

JWise Photo of the Day, Thoughts

Caroline Wise and John Wise in Newport, Oregon

As this is a yarn about yarn, I need to begin this post with the two characters that are featured, Caroline and John Wise. The hats and scarves we wore in this photo up on the Oregon coast were made by Caroline. The beany she’s wearing has some indigo-based blue stripes. That yarn was dyed by her, while the rest of the colors were naturally dyed yarns from France. My beany is made of yarn gifted by Stephanie Engelhardt, my sister-in-law, and was handspun over there. My scarf was knitted from yarn we picked up from a shop in Luneburg, Germany; on a previous visit, Caroline sprang braided her scarf from yarn she won at a guild raffle here in Phoenix.

Driftwood Farms Yarn from Reedsport, Oregon

You see, when Caroline and I travel, we stop at yarn shops. We’ll go out of our way to visit these stores, such as this one that was temporarily set up at a Chowder Fest in Coos Bay, Oregon, by Driftwood Yarns and Candles, which normally finds its home a bit up the road in Reedsport, Oregon. As a matter of fact, that green and yellow skein has now been transformed into my newest pair of socks.

Monome Grid in Phoenix, Arizona

While I had just unboxed an instrument that was picked up on our way to coffee, you see in the background some yarn being transformed into socks. That yarn came from Newport, Oregon, but not from the same trip as the yarn above. This is an older photo, and while we visit many familiar yarn stores along that Pacific Northwest Coast, we try to get at least a skein or two for me so I get to wear souvenirs from our various journeys. While I rarely, if ever, remember where the yarn has come from, Caroline has a pretty impeccable memory for these details, often filling in information about what we were doing before and after our visit to a particular shop and maybe even a quirk or two from the owner or their shop pet.

My "Alsek" socks were just finished here at Alsek Lake by Caroline Wise while in Alaska

These became my favorite pair, although all of them are mostly my favorites. What made these (which happen to feature yarn from Portland, Oregon) special was that they were knitted while we were whitewater rafting the Alsek River from the Yukon west to Alaska. They were finished on the second to last day of a two-week adventure as we were camping at Alsek Lake. I took this photo from our campsite looking out towards the Alsek Glacier.

Yarn from WollLust in Berlin, Germany

Last year, I was in Berlin for a music conference a couple of weeks before Caroline and I met up again in Frankfurt; she asked that I visit Woll-Lust for her. She’d eyed some yarns she fell in love with, so I simply had to go. The funny thing is that the majority of the yarn in this photo were things I chose as impulse buys for socks I’d like to see Caroline make for me in the future. None of them are socks yet, but that’s okay as it takes her 40 hours to knit me a hand-fitter pair; I can be patient. On the other hand, two skeins, one variegated with orange and one of the very orange skeins, are currently being knitted up.

Yarn from 1001Fonal in Budapest, Hungary

While in Budapest back in 2018, we stopped at 1001 Fonal, which translates to 1001 Yarns. There is a bummer about picking up so much yarn when we are traveling, especially when it involves flying, as it all has to fit in our baggage to get it home. However, when I was in Berlin, I requested to have it shipped to America and not to send it until a few days before we left Europe. We’ve had the same problem when visiting bookstores such as Powells in Portland, Oregon, and wanting to leave with 25 pounds of new reading material. The burden of nerds.

Caroline Wise knitting socks at Insomnia Coffee in Cannon Beach, Oregon

Here we are on a rainy day on the coast with Caroline wearing another handmade beany. This one is yet again made with yarn collected on the Oregon coast. We have a soft spot for Oregon, and the more memories we can carry around with us, the better. The yarn that is on the five needles required to make a pair of socks is from Wollmeile in Vienna, Austria. Do I need to tell you that they are one of my favorite pairs?

John Wise wearing handmade socks in Phoenix, Arizona

Another pair of socks being worn for the very first time. Can you guess by now where the yarn might have come from? If you guessed Oregon, you’d be correct although these are not from the coast, the yarn came from Knitted Wit in Portland, the same as the Alaskan socks above.

The socks of John Wise in Phoenix, Arizona

These are just some of the socks Caroline has made for my feet. She had a pair at her desk that needed repairing of the sole as they were getting thin, and had I seen them, I would have collected that pair, too, for my photo. The socks just above these are currently on my feet, so I figured that was okay as I had the photo.

The top row of socks, starting with the green-striped pair on the left are from Fiber Factory that was right here in Arizona. The pair of orange and blue to the right came from the same shop. The 3rd pair from the left is from somewhere in Oregon, while the fourth pair is too, but from Newport. The red and green are from the Espanola Valley Fiber Arts Center in New Mexico. The sixth pair is from Knit Happens in Scottsdale, Arizona. The yarn provenance of the next pair with blue, dark red, and green is lost in the fog of time. The last two pairs on the top right are from yarn bought in Haines, Alaska.

The bottom row of socks from the left starts with the Oregon socks I described in the second photo. The second pair are the socks from Wollmeile in Vienna that I wrote about a couple of photos ago. The dark purple socks are from Germany. The blue-gray socks are from Germany and were knitted by my mother-in-law, Jutta, with help from Caroline and Stephanie, my sister-in-law. The blue and red socks in the middle are from Frankfurt, Germany. The colorful yellow-red-blue glitchy pattern is also from Knitted Wit in Portland. The light gray and dark gray pair is also from Frankfurt while the next gray pair is also from Germany. The second to last pair is from Fiber Factory. The last pair is from the Yarn Barn in Florence, Oregon.

Hand Knitted Robot for John Wise on the Polish Border

Not only do I have nearly two dozen hand-knitted pairs of socks, but I also have two made-with-love plushies. This Love Robot (Mochimochiland pattern “LuvBot”) was smuggled into Europe back in 2013 without my knowledge, and then, at an opportune moment, Caroline surprised me on the Polish border with this gift celebrating my 50th birthday. You can’t see all the binary digits around my birthday gift, so I’ll just share what it translates to J 50. What else the reader cannot know, and I may not be able to adequately relate to you, is the tenderness, love, and delight that Caroline brought to this moment of pulling Mr. Robot out of hiding. Not only had she made it without my knowledge, not only had she slipped it into our luggage prior to leaving the States, but she’d kept it under wraps until just the right moment in a unique location that would forever punctuate her presenting this gift of love. You would have had to see her eyes and the emotion that came with getting one over on me while surprising me at the same time.

Hand knitted gift of love from Caroline Wise to John Wise

And just as this yarn about yarn started with the two main characters spoken above, so it ends. This was a gift to me ten years ago when Caroline knitted this caricature of me, notice the gray hair, with her wrapped in my snug arms, the embrace of love (Mochimochiland pattern: “Hugs and Squoze”).

Smiling on Love

JWise Thoughts

Caroline Wise in Phoenix, Arizona

I come to a blank sheet of paper, in this case, my online editing window, and quickly try to find something to write about. Rarely does a day go by that I don’t think, “Hey, I should pen a note to my best friend and wife, telling her and the whole world how much I love her.” Then, without her right here in front of me, whatever distraction crawled into my minuscule attention span guides my brain down other paths and I’m off trying to figure out the cures for society’s problems.

Well, now I’m here and ready to start spilling sappy poetic musings out of my heart, but where does one begin extolling those passions with puny written words? I look to my blog, searching for how many other times I’ve shared this sense of Amore with my wife, and the results show me 430 out of 2,294 published posts having a reference to the word love. I don’t think the post about Crispin Glover qualifies for this list, but the WordPress search isn’t the smartest, and Glover does have the word love in it.

I then wondered: was there a thread that tied these references to love to her? Or was I speaking generally about her, the trees, oceans, and other things? It doesn’t really matter, I figure, as it was part of the subject matter, and I don’t have the time right now to read 430 blog posts of varying lengths to pull the context of a particular word out of them. The next best thing is to look at tags, and very quickly, by those and the titles of these entries, it becomes obvious that I use the word love a lot when we are traveling.

Off the top of the bat, the tag “Coast” appears 51 times, and “Oregon” shows up 37 times. What this tells me is that when Caroline and I are on the coast, we are maybe more aware of our love of one another than at other times. This is only sort of true as we know all the time where our love is and how it pulses through our days. The difference is that when we are traveling, especially in coastal regions, our time together is amplified by the fact that we are out at the edge of the ocean and not preoccupied with history, architecture, food, or other destinations that await us. We are effectively at the totality of what the day will be made of, looking at the sand and sea.

There’s another element at work when we are traveling: we are taking time for ourselves outside the routines of daily life. The time preparing for these travels and saving money for them all starts to make sense as soon as we are underway but really starts to resonate when we start to get close to 100 miles from home because, at that point, we are definitely going somewhere. With no work, chores, or the familiar to pull us into what we know, we turn our awareness on to full observation mode of what is different and what new sights and sounds await us.

The excitement of being with someone else who is enjoying this sense of adventure as much as the other makes everything all the easier. Every minute that passes builds the smiles and anticipation for what awaits us out there. We know that no matter what we find, we’ll discover something about the environment, weather, trees, surf, local eateries, history, street life, churches, museums, odd characters, lodging, or even a table we took a minute to sit down and knit and write at that will enchant us, convincing us that this trip is on track to be the greatest ever.

This comfort with each other is had at home, too. We are doing great being at home during the outbreak of COVID-19 because it’s given us even more opportunities to be together and be outside our routines. So, in many ways, this time is like a vacation, and as we get further down the road of self-isolation, I remain giddy in love that we are traveling into unknown places.

Virtual Whitewater Rafting

JWise Photo of the Day

Virtual Yampa River Rafting Group

For the past few days at 10:00 a.m. Caroline and I get to board our virtual raft and head down the Yampa River for some digital adventures during this time that none of us get to travel in real life. Our whitewater guides Chris and Charles reached out to a bunch of former clients who’d been on river trips with them in the past and asked if anyone would be interested in a bit of an experiment. Without hesitation, we signed up. The premise was that we’d explore what it would be like to venture down the river using Zoom and segments of the river trip itself that Google captured with StreetView some years ago.

On Saturday, May 16th we joined with Chris, Charles, and fellow guests Jen and Steve and headed over to the virtual put-in. A couple of guests didn’t show sadly so it was an intimate trip, but we understood that it took a different breed of brave souls for this first descent down the Yampa River at near flood stage. The put-in was familiar to all of us as Jen and Steve had also traveled the Yampa, but have been lucky enough to run the Gates of Lodore up the Green River too. On each day the guys took over the virtual oars and took us into a story about the river or engaged us to share memorable moments from our own river trips. Along the way, we learned a bit more of the history and refresher lessons about particular aspects of the river and the geology that the river flows through.

Yampa River in Colorado

This photo is from the Yampa trip Caroline and I were on back in 2014; was our virtual journey as spectacular? Of course not, but the interesting aspect of this undertaking is that we spent nearly 4 hours with this group of river enthusiasts who, like us, love rivers. That commonality between us allowed the six of us to share moments of the magic found on river trips and reminded us of our own specific adventures in years past. Listening to the passion of each person was a potent reminder of the effect rivers have on people. So in that sense, the boatmen succeeded in creating a memorable moment that took us outside of our comfort as we had to quickly adapt to a situation that involved others we didn’t know beforehand as we navigated a process and path that was unique to all of us.

We’d gladly join another virtual river trip if for no other reason than to support boatmen who are out of work during what should be the busy season but also because river trips are all about finding it deep within us to see things differently. I would be a fool to scoff at the idea that this wasn’t valuable as first and foremost it was the passion of Charles and Chris and their need to share from their experience that is one of those human traits we should all aspire to. Thank you guys for the effort and for getting us out of our stay-at-home routines during these difficult times.