Garnett P. Williams

Not being a mathematician myself, I’ve always found chaos theory a bit of a chaos. This book helped a bit, but much of the content was beyond me. I offer my microfiction below as an example of what I think the world might look like if chaos theory became a social reality:

CHAOS
A wife is a little confused – instead of her car, she drops off her husband for a change of oil and a tune-up. So this husband sits in the waiting room until they call his name, then he reeves up his legs and flops on the hydraulic lift as the mechanics, also a little confused, hoist him up.

They take his teeth for the grill, his hands and feet for the tires. The man keeps himself flat, he’s more than a little confused, having been hoisted up on his belly by the hydraulic lift. His arms and legs dangle, his heart is pumping, a heart the confused mechanics take for an engine.

One of the mechanics opens the man’s mouth and takes his tongue for a cylinder and his throat for the radiator. He announces to the crew, “Needs new points and plugs.”

“How much longer am I going to be up here?” the man asks.

One of the confused mechanics shrugs his shoulders and whispers, “Everyone is in such a rush these days; they should know this stuff takes time.”

When the mechanics are through, thee man has a couple of incisions in his back, the front of his head is shaved, his pants are pulled down, his balls smeared with grease and an inspection sticker plastered on the right cheek of his ass.

The confused mechanics lead him out to where he will squat on the oil-stained asphalt between a truck and a convertible until his wife comes back to pick him up.

The wife returns and asks, ”How’s it running?”

“Shouldn’t give you too many problems” says a mechanic, “now that we gave her the once over.”

The wife leads her husband away on a leash and when she passes another mechanic, the one who did most of the work, he tells her, “Lady, keep an eye on that stick shift of yours. It’s acting kind of funny. Try not to grind through the gears or you’re really gonna have problems.”… (mere)

https://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2913997.html

It’s a brief, fact-filled yet entertaining survey of the historical evidence of D.C.’s waterways, starting with the springs and working up through the streams, creeks and canals to the Anacostia and Potomac rivers. The Franklin Square springs get half a page, and there is also a description of the stream that they fed, called Goose Creek. “At F Street, near Ninth Street [immediately north of the future site of Ford’s Theater], the ravine carrying the stream was some 14 feet deep. (This was quite hazardous at night, with no street light. On one occasion, Mr. Philip Fendall, a leading member of the bar, fell in and broke his leg in two places.)” However, it was entirely filled in during the mid-1800s. Such is the fate of watercourses which compete with property developers.

Garnett regrets that so many of the old streams have been filled in (the fate of Goose Creek) or covered over, mostly to become sewers, and points to Rock Creek as an example of how a different path could have been chosen. (My comment: of course, Rock Creek is mostly elevated above the flatter topography of the city centre, so it was bound to be more robust in the face of humanity.) He points out how central the vanished waterways were to the city until the later part of the nineteenth century - the White House and Washington Monument were both up against the river shore (the future sites of the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials under water), and the old canal (obsolete almost as soon as it was built) cut through the heart of the city.

And he concludes that the rivers in particular filled in and narrowed because of massive deposits of sediment, “made available to the rivers over the last 200 years by man’s carelessness”, and calls for more sensitivity to the natural waters of the landscape in city planning. He has a point.… (mere)

Not being a mathematician myself, I’ve always found chaos theory a bit of a chaos. This book helped a bit, but much of the content was beyond me. I offer my microfiction below as an example of what I think the world might look like if chaos theory became a social reality:

A Little Chaos

A wife is a little confused – instead of her car, she drops off her husband for a change of oil and a tune-up. So this husband sits in the waiting room until they call his name, then he reeves up his legs and flops on the hydraulic lift as the mechanics, also a little confused, hoist him up.

They take his teeth for the grill, his hands and feet for the tires. The man keeps himself flat, he’s more than a little confused, having been hoisted up on his belly by the hydraulic lift. His arms and legs dangle, his heart is pumping, a heart the confused mechanics take for an engine.

One of the mechanics opens the man’s mouth and takes his tongue for a cylinder and his throat for the radiator. He announces to the crew, “Needs new points and plugs.”

“How much longer am I going to be up here?” the man asks.

One of the confused mechanics shrugs his shoulders and whispers, “Everyone is in such a rush these days; they should know this stuff takes time.”

When the mechanics are through, thee man has a couple of incisions in his back, the front of his head is shaved, his pants are pulled down, his balls smeared with grease and an inspection sticker plastered on the right cheek of his ass.

The confused mechanics lead him out to where he will squat on the oil-stained asphalt between a truck and a convertible until his wife comes back to pick him up.

The wife returns and asks, ”How’s it running?”

“Shouldn’t give you too many problems” says a mechanic, “now that we gave her the once over.”

The wife leads her husband away on a leash and when she passes another mechanic, the one who did most of the work, he tells her, “Lady, keep an eye on that stick shift of yours. It’s acting kind of funny. Try not to grind through the gears or you’re really gonna have problems.”
… (mere)