Rainy, non-winter winter day. Almonds and dark black coffee. Alone in the secret office.

I just gave a presentation, 10 minutes, at which I played about 5 minutes of a recording I made of a client describing the outcome of one of our interventions. It went over pretty well, but it seems audio is risky at presentations. People like video.

I like audio. I like sitting and listening and imagining.

Growing up I had a friend who used to grab audio off of movies and make cassette tapes filled with clips of dialogue. I used to listen to them all the time– passages from our favorite films.

I used to listen to distant radio stations in the middle of the night in the woods and find comfort in them, the voices on the other end coming through the static from somewhere else, someplace with more going on than windy trees and crickets.

My sound projects are all related to that, I bet.

I have a paper due tomorrow that I haven’t really started yet. It’ll be OK, will hit it all evening and for a few hours tomorrow. I’m forcing a comparison of Diotima‘s description of immortality being the root of all human ambition, and Terror Management Theory (TMT), created by Ernest Becker in the 60s and 70s that describes fear of death as the cause of all human ambition. Becker has it that all culture, all development, all religion, all of everything we do is related to this underlying knowledge that we’re on a clock that’s ticking down, and our behaviors are all based on efforts to buffer ourselves from that knowledge, consciously or not, in good ways and in many harmful ways.

I think TMT is the strongest theory of human behavior I’ve ever seen– hundreds of studies have been done to test its hypotheses, and nearly all of them have been confirmed. It’s now capable even of predicting decisions made by certain kinds of people. One of the most interesting outcomes is that it shows conservative people and more religious people are more fearful than liberal, more secular people. Conservatives actually live most of their lives with a deep fear that causes them to cling to known structures– their mommies, their political ideologies, their religions– and are almost impossible to persuade in any other way because of the terror of letting themselves consider the chance they are wrong, that there’s no heaven, that god doesn’t love them, that they’re mere products of a particular system that has no regard for them.

I’m embarrassed for them, though they’d never know it.