Notes

         Late morning. You have been busy running errands. Carol got a call from Tampa saying that her sister, Linda, and her daughter, Jennifer, are caught in Paris with no way home at present. Both are teaching school on Monday. You suggested they take a train to Rome and head home that way as the Pope left Rome for Malta this morning.

         Lots of ‘if’s’ in my plan. As they took the trip via AAA they are probably working with them as to how to return to Tampa. What a mess, what a way to end a hopefully very pleasant Spring break.

         Early afternoon and you are at Grandma’s Gardens north of SR 73 on SR 48 about five miles south of Centerville, looking for plants at their nursery. A busy place this time of year. Carol discovered it last year while on a drive up SR 42 to Waynesville.  More errands/chores before the day is over.

         I have no idea who is important in scene six.

         The set up is for Mario and Aeneas as they disappeared.

         I guess, though I am curious about what Sophia, Cassandra and Thales talked about after we left them.

         They don’t need Mario to continue the conversation.

         But you said the ending would be different when the men entered. Only one entered.

         It did end differently, boy. Both men entered the café.

         It seems like a deception to me.

         Well, boy, what do you think these books are? –Amorella.

         You can’t deceive anyone with a fiction.  I admit, somewhere in my head a few years ago I thought the set up of the books might be a rogue of sorts, mostly because of the satire in the first book, Stuck, the published book before there was any thought of a series of six. The fun thing a couple of friends and I thought was that I would finish Stuck, Home, and On Earth as a trilogy and then about twenty years after we were all gone, the marsupial aliens would land, and it would be a really funny joke, like how did orndorff know about the aliens? No one would ever know and it would all end with a mystery. It would be just as good if I didn’t write it in the first place.


        One of my old colleagues at Mason High and I used to joke that if I got shot and killed on a street corner, it would be a local mystery at least, that is if the killer was never caught. We thought that would be funny too. I like twists like that whether they happen to me or someone else, at least on paper or in concept they are funny. In real life I wouldn’t want a mystery caused by someone being killed. When I think of deception those are the kinds of deceptions I think of. Coincidences, mostly.

         It is late afternoon and you are home. Carol is about to go work in the flower garden. You killed bag worm nests on the crab apple tree, weeds in the driveway and the few scattered dandelions coming up in the yard. You just finished updating one of the check books on the computer. Odds and ends. More work with flowers plus store the just delivered ten bags of mulch in the garage from the local Boy Scout troop. More weed killing under Carol’s direction. Presently it is getting on sundown and you are at Walmart buying cat litter and have the travel box to clean before the return trip to Cleveland tomorrow. Very productive day so far, though not in the field of writing.

         I assume we are going with Aeneas and Mario. Did they disappear (fade away) because of the embarrassing situation or did they decide to ditch everyone and work on a personal problem?

         Can’t you come up with something better than that?

         Evidently not. Hey, that’s all I’ve got at the moment. It is by coincidence that Aeneas shows up at the café just before Mario and Thales. Aeneas chooses to talk to Mario not Thales. I forget what their conversation had been about.  Okay, I checked – First Causes and what it would be to have Justice as the god. Mostly these characters just talk.

         Mostly that’s what people do. I thought you didn’t like that about people. And, you talk most.

         I understand, Amorella. Most everyone talks. It is our nature. Anyway, people don’t like novels that are slow on the point of dirge-like as these novels are. Character studies or lots of action or both that’s what’s popular. That’s what people like in books (thrillers) and in movies. When teaching I tried to entertain the students once in a while, mostly with humor. I’m not seeing much humor in here other than dead-pan or gallows, which is appropriate enough I suppose.

         It is going on 2200 hours and all I did was watch an episode of Fringe that I DVRed the last week in March. It was on alternate reality and earthquakes and a building in NYC disappearing. It had a good review so I decided to try one more episode after not getting into the first one of the series. It is so strange to me that I can’t get into it. Friends say the show is right up my alley, but it seems too far fetched. I need more reality in those shows. Very odd.

         I can explain it but you won’t like it.

         Try me.

         You are indifferent to such thinking because you have already considered the concept in book one, only you made it a planet not a building.

         Alternate Earths had been done before in a book titled Twin Earths (I think.)  Some checking and I found Twin Earths was actually a newspaper comic distributed by United Feature Syndicate and it first appeared in 1952 [I was ten years old and I read it.] The creators were Oskar Lebeck, who was the writer and Alden McWilliams, the artist. Also, while Googling this info and found something more interesting in Wikipedia. The professor is Hillary Putnam: 

“One of Putnam's contributions to philosophy of language is his claim that "meaning just ain't in the head". He illustrated this using his "Twin Earth" thought experiment to argue that environmental factors play a substantial role in determining meaning. Twin Earth shows this, according to Putnam, since on Twin Earth everything is identical to Earth, except that its lakes, rivers and oceans are filled with XYZ whereas those of earth are filled with H2O. Consequently, when an earthling, Fredrick, uses the Earth-English word "water", it has a different meaning from the Twin Earth-English word "water" when used by his physically identical twin, Frodrick, on Twin Earth. Since Fredrick and Frodrick are physically indistinguishable when they utter their respective words, and since their words have different meanings, meaning cannot be determined solely by what is in their heads. This led Putnam to adopt a version of semantic externalism with regard to meaning and mental content.” . . . [From Wikipedia] --  [This argument can also be found on You-Tube.]

“Putnam's "direct realism" aims to return the study of metaphysics to the way people actually experience the world, rejecting the idea of mental representations, sense data, and other intermediaries between mind and world.”  From: Wikipedia

         Strangely, I find myself agreeing with these concepts throughout my books even though I have never considered it before, that is in reference to Putnam. I didn’t write on any scene today but I did learn something tonight . . . . I am not a philosopher.