So Many Random Little Thoughts

Dearest Rachel –

Some days, I wake up in the wee hours of the morning with no desire for anything but to roll over and go back to sleep. I thought this morning was going to be the same – especially given that today is a Saturday; who wakes up early on a Saturday? But it seems like my mind is filled with so many little random thoughts that I’m not about to head back off to sleep any time soon, and laying about hoping otherwise, when I could be productive (for a certain value of the word “productive”) would be pointless.

To be sure, being pointless is the point, but I do have to be somewhere eventually, and it’s always a concern as to when I’m going to squeeze in this letter to you on any given Saturday. So I might as well stay up – now that I am – and convey some of the things that have been running through my mind as it was making its way toward the surface of consciousness this morning.

It occurs to me that, in real life, I wouldn’t be able to have this conversation with you; at least, not at this hour. You would likely have just dragged yourself to the bedroom (after having dozed off in the family room, thereby theoretically interfering with Daniel’s ability to go to bed, but when I got up to use the washroom, there was a light on out there, suggesting either that he was still up or had fallen asleep regardless. Either way, your presence out there may not have had nearly as much effect on him and his ability – or willingness – to sleep as I might think from this particular remove) a couple of hours ago, and wouldn’t be awake to talk to for some time. Moreover, while we did talk as part of our Saturday routine, that was only a part of it all, and I don’t think I have to elaborate on that any further.

Still, you had a penchant for telling me about your dreams, and asking me (whether out of mere politeness – “let him have a turn” – or actual curiosity – “what dreams does he have, anyway?”) about mine. Your waking up as late as you did gave you an advantage over me, though; by the time you were up, I’d been awake longer for at least an hour or so, enough for anything I might have dreamed up to have completely dissipated, unless I’d taken the trouble to write it down or something like that. These days, I can work on those thoughts without concerning myself as to whether you’d be awake or not, so they’re reasonably fresh in my mind (and, being able to wake up organically, rather than jolted awake by the screech of an alarm clock, I remember more of them).

To be sure, it’s not as if many of them are particularly worth remembering or recounting; I have one from a couple of nights ago, and I put down a couple hundred words of framework, to be fleshed out when I have the time and nothing else worth filling you in on that day. Today’s dream however, involved showing up at my old workplace (“why on earth would you do that?” you might ask, and all I could do would be to shrug and mutter something about “dream logic”), and encountering so many new faces that I didn’t recognize. They let me in because I dropped someone’s name from my old department that isn’t a common name at all, but they still worked there – which, now that I think about it, is a lot lower security system than they had, even when I left. And that was basically it. So yeah, not a story line worth making into an entire letter to you, is it?

Of course, once I breached the surface of consciousness, my mind had other things on its mind for me to do than ruminate on my dreams. I consider myself luck to be able to remember and write down as much as I just did, to be honest. What’s weird is what it seemed to want to have me do; to ask Grok, of all things (normally, if I have a question to ask of a large language model, I’ll check in with the Copilot app that’s built into every Windows machine these days. Maybe my mind thought it would get a different and better answer from a more crowdsourced LLM), first about its makeup (as an LLM what opinions does it have, and by aggregating those it collates from its activity, are they ultimately cancelled out? Turns out, I’ve rather got the wrong idea about how LLMs are built and function, but the explanation is a little more ‘in the weeds’ than I can explain, or even understand at this hour of the morning), and then about my theory about Hell and whether it’s been discussed by other scholars previously, as I’ve always assumed that I’m not capable of coming up with this as an original thought – someone has to have promulgated this before me.

It so happens, though, that while it does cite various sources about ‘hell as choice’ (as opposed to ‘hell as punishment’) – C. S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce, in particular, would be one that would explain where I get my thoughts on the subject from – it admitted outright that comparing it (although I’m not sure it’s a ‘comparison,’ per se; I honestly suspect this is its essential composition) to a nuclear chain reaction wasn’t an analogy it had seen before. This, from a language model that essentially has instantaneous access to the entire internet. It adds that nuclear physics, as a field of study, is only eighty years old, but that’s beyond my entire lifespan. And while it’s true that theologians and nuclear physicists don’t exactly travel in the same circles – Oppenheimer’s quoting of the Baghavad-Gita notwithstanding – the basics of either discipline are accessible that a layman like myself could put them together; I’m still shocked that no one has up until now. Then again, maybe it would take a layman to get both just wrong enough as to connect them.

Either way, it may be time to consider working on that dissertation, after all, as long as no one else has up until now.

***

For all that this was going through my head this morning as I woke up, I feel like I would be remiss to not mention things that have actually gone on in the last twenty-four hours or so. Not so much about the household tasks I wrote you about yesterday, but there was a prayer meeting last night that was part of the group chat – the typical “are you going?” back and forth – that went unresolved until an hour before it was to start. It’s the sort of thing you would have been eager to go to – and two of your friends were making plans to do so – but I expected that the boys would lose track of time watching stuff, and I decided to let them if they would. This is not exactly my strong suit, as you probably remember.

However, much to my surprise, the boys called a halt with an hour or so to spare, and Daniel inquired of me as to when I was heading out. I couldn’t bring myself to admit to him that I’d just assumed we weren’t going, so I told him they had a half-hour to kill before we would need to leave the house, which they took full advantage of to watch another episode.

The crowd turned out to be too large for the room they were initially set up in, and we had to move into the auditorium. Which is great, but I got a lesson in just how out of practice I am at this. Prayers were to be limited to fifteen seconds at any given time, and while that sounds great in theory – especially given the list of people and groups were given to pray for – it’s hard to condense one’s thoughts into a sufficiently short, pithy phrase that can fit into such a small amount of time. That others were praying at the same time added to the hubbub in my brain as I tried to sort out how to talk to Him about one thing or another. Some people and groups got short shrift from the four of us – although with all the others working the lines, I have to trust that everyone who needed to be covered was.

I understand that this is going to be a regular monthly thing from now on, too – especially given the huge turnout – but I’ve really got to work on this for the future; which probably involves getting in more practice between then and now. Just like with my visits to the gym, the muscles won’t grow if they aren’t exercised.

To that end, I need to get up and on with my day, honey. Keep an eye on me, and wish me luck; I’m definitely going to need it.