the most remarkable cacophony
of sound today at lunch. i was walking
down first street, past the railyards, when the noon
amtrak came in. as the train braked, from
various wheels on various cars
there arose a chorus of screeks and
squeaches that sounded for all the world
like an orchestra tuning up. and i
was not on drugs. the sounds sounded not
unlike something off a beatles album
(sgt. pepper’s, i think), or like
a contemporary classical
composition. as the train slowed to
a stop, the sounds rose in pitch, like a
crescendo, and then ceased almost as if
a conductor had brought down his baton.
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
i read a new yorker story the other day
it had everything a new yorker story ought to have
it had lesbians, professors, sexual degradation
multiple marriages, marijuana
alienated children of a certain age
woods and second homes
snow
i could never write a story like that
i don’t know any professors and i have only one home
it’s pitched in the middle of the desert
far from the woods, out where it never snows
(Copyright 2023 by Tetman Callis.)
“In order to understand physical laws you must understand that they are all some kind of approximation. Any simple idea is approximate; as an illustration, consider an object, … what is an object? Philosophers are always saying, ‘Well, just take a chair for example.’ The moment they say that, you know that they do not know what they are talking about any more. What is a chair? Well, a chair is a certain thing over there … certain?, how certain? The atoms are evaporating from it from time to time—not many atoms, but a few—dirt falls on it and gets dissolved in the paint; so to define a chair precisely, to say exactly which atoms are chair, and which atoms are air, or which atoms are dirt, or which atoms are paint that belongs to the chair is impossible. So the mass of a chair can be defined only approximately. In the same way, to define the mass of a single object is impossible, because there are not any single, left-alone objects in the world—every object is a mixture of a lot of things, so we can deal with it only as a series of approximations and idealizations.” – Richard P. Feynman, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, Vol. I (emphases in original)