Interactions in Real Time

In a letter written to someone the other day I mumbled out something about myself that is more true than my quick typing should have been able to write. I have reread it several times, and found it more true on each rereading, therefore I thought I’d share this with you.

I enjoy communication. I enjoy talking with people about things that interest them, that challenge them. I enjoy conversations about anything someone likes, or hates, or is thinking about. This is joyful to me. This is learning, this is expanding, this is experience.

Moreso, this is something that simply isn’t possible without being human. I know a great many people think that Heaven will be wrapped up in God’s love, being close to him and knowing everything. Perhaps. But someone connected to the all-knowing source cannot experience the moment of realization — the “ah ha!” moment, the moment when your reality changes, broadens and becomes something different because of something you just learned. Only living beings which are separate and non-omniscient can have that moment, can change each other’s lives. Only we can sizzle with the warmth of a new experience, a change in ourselves due to something we have just learned.

Only we can change moment by moment, evolving through interactions in real time.

I’ve been making some difficult choices recently, to give up on things I simply don’t have enough time or interest to do any more. What I gave up this week was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done.

Not because it didn’t make sense — it totally made sense. I hadn’t touched the bass guitar in over a year, except perhaps to dust it. It was time to let it go.

But this reaches more than twenty years back into my soul. I remember those years when it seemed that a life of music was the only possible path for me. Not just that I lived and breathed music — in my choice of friends, in my free time, and in my dreams — but because no other life path seemed likely or possible for me.

I still love music. But my creative interest lies now in writing code and writing fiction. It has been too many years since I found myself sprawled on the bed, running my fingers down the neck, teasing each note out until the walls shrunk in. Until demons in the air lifted me up to hear the glass and wood surrounding me reverberate in harmony with my angst.

No, music isn’t where my creative energy lies any more. It was good to pass those instruments to a new home, and focus on the characters who call me now.

Perhaps the thing I love most about technology is how it changes our lives. In ways we can forsee, and in ways we can hardly imagine.

Sixty years ago everybody assumed we’d have flying cars by now. We’re not even close to that, however most of us walk around with more computing power on our hip than existed on the entire planet sixty years ago. This has changed us much more than flying cars would.

But the most intriguing thing is not what new technology brings us today, or even how one technology changes us. The most intriguing part is how these changes interact.

Like we already see with designer drugs: the problem is rarely the effect of the drug, so much as the unforseen and difficult to test interactions with anything else the recipient takes or even is, when genetics themselves play a role. The changes brought to us by technology are similar. I don’t think that Facebook alone has changed us half so much as the interaction between all of the social media today, how it enables us and how it limits us. How we take for granted things we couldn’t even imagine 5 years before.

How has this changed you, and how much better or worse is your life now?

I’ve finished a new short story called Friends. It’s an easy 2500 words to ride through, although a bit of an emotional roller coaster even given the short length.

It’s been through the first readers blender and everyone seems to like it, even a few people who normally aren’t fans of my stuff. I’m going to wrap it up and try to get it submitted this week (assuming Worldcon doesn’t eat my brain, which it probably will)

The site is now running from wordpress, so that I can do some more interesting things here.  You’ll be seeing a lot of changes soon.

Author of Science and Speculative Fiction. Current pieces are the flash fiction piece Reality Fails, the short story Door of No Names and the novelette Children of Another Star.

I have lived in the San Francisco Bay Area for nearly 20 years now. I race motorcycles for fun.

I work for Tango as a Senior Operations Engineer.  You can check out my latest resume if you wish.