Docent #1: I was trained as a geologist and a diver. We dived at Bikini and Eniwetok. Mostly Eniwetok. The trouble at Bikini is that there were a lot of shots on the same site, so it was hard to isolate the effects. At Eniwetok there were a lot of different sites. We scuba dived and had submersibles, for the deeper sites. We looked at the damage to the coral. This was 20 years later.

Castle Bravo was at Bikini, Mike was the big shot at Eniwetok. There was another shot that was in a tank, a water tank. That let us study the effects for the more modern type of weapons. Like the bunker busters, yes… You have a technical background? (No, but my father was an engineer and I think my grandfather was involved in the British atomic tests.) Yes, many thousands of us were involved.

Ironically I ended up helping to create the specifications we sent to the DOE for new designs. Because I understood the effects, as a geologist, I could advise on changes. Improvements. (More efficient? More destructive?) Both.

Of course I worry they’re going to be used. Did you see the Doomsday Clock? (Yes, and I check it frequently.) Then you know we’re at 90 seconds to midnight. It’s the most dangerous time we’ve ever seen, and people don’t realize. The last of the effective treaties with Russia runs out next month. In the eighties, in the old cold war, people knew what we were up against. Now we’re in a new cold war, and people don’t even know how much danger we are in. I wish we had leaders who understood it.

Docent #2: Back when we had an Atomic Energy Commission, it paid for me to go to graduate school. Nuclear engineering. I worked at Sandia. I have a measly master’s and I worked in safety, an I would write these reports and the scientists would say, “I have a DOCTORATE.” They do say PhD stands for piled higher and deeper…

I was in San Francisco in the seventies and eighties. I loved it. Is it still like that? Are you all right? I was working with colleagues at Lawrence Livermore, and I would get over to the city every chance I got.

I had some other Australians in here this week! You’re from Australia, you know how common uranium is, especially in your country, but you don’t even use it for energy. You sell it all to China. (Yeah, like that’s not gonna come back to bite us.) Yeah, you get the money, but at what cost?

I think we should get rid of them all. Everyone who works on them feels that way. But the trouble is that if we get rid of them, the other guy still has them. There are nine countries that have them, and some of them, the leaders are pretty… Unreliable. (What can we do?) Don’t vote for the unreliable ones. You’re both younger than me. It’s in your hands now.

Working in media—new, old, or whatever—you got very used to the fact that almost anything that made any sort of money was, if you dug deep enough, controlled by the same three straight white men.

As far as she was concerned, the feudal era had never ended.

I read 109 books this year only if you count the four series I read (George Smiley, A Dance to the Music of Time, Jinny at Finmory and the Vorkosigan saga) as one each, so there’s probably another 20 or so in there. Looking back, the books that have made the biggest impression were Dan Ozzi’s Sellout, a venture capital story and the perfect accompaniment to My Chem’s Long Live the Black Parade tour; Elaine Pagel’s Miracles and Wonder, which I like so much I’ve started a podcast about it, and Darwin’s On the Origin of Species.

I’ve been annoying my loved ones by thinking aloud that Origin may be the most profound book ever written in English. I first tried to read it when I was fifteen (my older kid: “Why did you try to read it when you were fifteen?” Jeremy: “You know what she’s like.”) Coming back to it forty years later is like returning to La Sagrada Familia with the stained glass windows in; it took my breath away. You may know that of all fictional characters my most ardent affection is reserved for Stephen Maturin. Brilliant, fussy, fretful Darwin is his original.

Origin of Species sees Darwin assembling forty years of patient, painstaking, insightful work in natural history, corresponding with a vast web of respected peers, and synthesizing a staggering amount of data into a careful, considered and powerfully supported argument. At the same time, he understands what the evidence points towards, and what its implications are. Christianity will never be the same again.

Darwin and his wife Emma buried their favorite child Annie when she was ten years old. There’s a glib way to read this – that the loss caused Darwin to turn against God. My impression is quite the opposite. Despite what the promise of resurrection held out to him, and to his beloved wife, Darwin perceives the world with tremendous integrity. One cannot reconcile the account of the creation as written with our current understanding of geologic time. His clarity on this point, and what it cost him, breaks my heart. He stands at the end of a Church of England ontology and with great courage, faces a new and chaotic modernity –

My older kid: “So what you’re saying is, he reminds you of your Dad.” Me: “HEY now. That is UNcalled-for.” Jeremy, sympathetically: “Oh no, have you been perceived?”

English, which had started out as a language of the oppressed, had become an oppressor.

Were there schools? A few, to train servants of the empire.

We had been lied to so often that we spent half our time seeing through lies, but inexplicable things still happened.

As buds give rise by growth to fresh buds, and these, if vigorous, branch out and overtop on all sides many a feebler branch, so by generation I believe it has been with the great Tree of Life, which fills with its dead and broken branches the crust of the earth, and covers the surface with its ever branching and beautiful ramifications.

Ate something regrettable on the plane and had night visitors:

• Dreamed our New York apartment needed extensive repairs. What New York apartment? The real owners came home and were very nice about my delusion
• Dreamed my new bff Gwyneth Paltrow came back from a shallow grave in the woods, writhing and sweating out a strange clear gel as she transformed into an anime ninetail fox
• Dreamed my ex-wife (what ex-wife?) came by the beach house trick-or-treating, wearing a horse’s head quite cleverly fashioned from a steel bucket and flowerpot

I may not be cut out for business travel after all.

It was pleasantly cool in the room. The old gentleman took the lid off the iron kettle, which had begun to boil, and as he did so there was a terrible flash of bluish-white light outside. It seemed to rush past from east to west—from the built-up part of Hiroshima, that is, toward the hills beyond Furue. It was like a shooting star the size of hundreds of suns. 

Flying to Tokyo again to teach a new class of startup founders. Looking forward to it. Highly anomalous. There was a decade and a half when business travel was grinding, career-building toil. Now at last I reap the rewards, by squatting like a goblin at my laptop and only venturing out of the house when the spirit moves me.

All of which is to say there was a corgi! In the airport! A flying corgi! Mirabile dictu.

Bring me the bones of Australian babies, the more the better.

I sometimes wonder if all those English country gentlemen who built themselves big houses with long sightlines and high walls did it because they were afraid of people coming across the seas for vengeance. I hope they were terrified.

…just as people in colonized India and Africa often created ways of communicating that remained unintelligible to their European occupiers, so Jesus often hid from outsiders, especially from the Roman occupiers, what he wanted to reveal only to those who, he said, “had eyes to see, and ears to hear.”

Trust me that I had no other plans. Outside of my immediate family, the only people who were nice to me were people who went to my church.

I had one trajectory and that was to get out.

You can never make that crossing that she made, for such Great Voyages in this world do not any more exist. But every day of your lives the miles that voyage between that place and this one you cross. Every day. You understand me? In you that journey is.

to this unforgettable exchange

Sold the Prius to a friend and got an all-electric car, which I may be enjoying a little too much. I have already driven it to Los Angeles and Portland, and am heading up to Seattle next week. In between there was a quick trip to Detroit and Toronto. Charlie and I spent a good part of the summer following American rock band My Chemical Romance around for a while, just to see what they would do. Interesting things, it turned out, at least to me and Charlie and a few hundred thousand like-minded souls.

My dear friend Yarnivore asked me to tell her a little bit about My Chem and why it matters to me, which prompted a lengthy monologue, and I’ve been fretting ever since that I failed by saying both too much and not enough. For example, I forgot to say that you can get a fair sense of what the band is like by watching six of their music videos. There’s the one that’s like all of Wes Anderson’s Rushmore condensed into three shouty minutes that end with a kiss; the one where they bury their beloved grandmother, who raised them to be artists; the one where the bassist is killed on the beach during the invasion of Normandy; the one where the band itself is become death, destroyer of worlds (of all their songs, this is the one you probably already know); the one where they burn it all down; and a personal favorite, the post-apocalyptic one shot in the desert, drenched in color like a Saturday morning cartoon, with a cameo from my beloved comic book writer Grant Morrison.

Each video is a perfect little jewel of a story about beauty and love and fear and grief and hope, not necessarily in that order. They riff on gender and queerness and mental illness and loss and guilt and complicity and rayguns, all things that I spend a lot of time thinking about, you may not be surprised to hear. These narratives are embedded in the larger narratives of three truly excellent albums, themselves embedded in the fucked-up and transcendent narrative of the band itself, or at least what we know of it, which is a great deal and also almost nothing in the grand scheme of things. My Chem is the kind of phenomenon Anne Helen Petersen calls a rich text. Pull on any thread and you’ll find yourself talking about socioeconomic class or ghosts or Joan of Arc. There’s so much to say about it that Charlie and I have listened to fourteen hours of an excellent podcast exploring the discography through a critical theory lens, and we’re only sorry it isn’t longer.

I’ve talked before about My Chem as a map out of hell, but that’s only half of it. I’m drawn to the band when I’m in terrible pain, suffering loss or rejection or the banal horror of another fascist presidency, but their music also spurs me into trying to make sense of things, trying to make stuff of my own, silly little stories about love and grief and rayguns. I’m an agoraphobic misanthrope but this band can get me out on the road and onto a dancefloor. Thanks to them I’ve seen the Getty Villa and the Detroit Industry Murals and been reminded that art matters to me so, so much.

On this current tour My Chem are wrapping their existing narratives into another grand and mysterious and operatic story that is being revealed a little at a time, in teasing and affectionate interactions with an audience they trust to figure things out. What a gift to see them live at all (this band broke up, not very amicably, in 2013, and it turns out has only reformed because the rhythm guitarist had a particularly vivid dream). What a gift to be in this relationship with them and the other fans. What a gift to be weird and queer and arty and to hear the voices of the dead as they travel through time. It’s not just a map out of hell. It’s a reason to live.

…one cheats oneself, as a human being, if one has respect only for the style of high culture…