The Phantom Brigade Returns

A fiction writer’s thoughts about time, mind, and reality

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I realize I’m mostly a fiction author. But I have a strong belief that fiction can (usually does) reveal truths we didn’t realize existed. Aside from that, fiction writers are some of the best thinkers I know. They are highly trained to look at problems they encounter and think of wild, speculative, out of the box solutions that must obey one rule above all others: They must make sense.

Are they always plausible? Never. Meaning, “never always.” But “sometimes always?” Always.

For the past few weeks I’ve been doing some deep dives into a variety of topics. Fuel for my creative mind, honestly. I’ve been digging into the mind of the con artist, which fascinates me but also instructs me in valuable takes on human intellect and nature. I’m a student of psychology, as well as a few other sciences and disciplines, and understanding how people think and what motivates them to behave in certain ways has been valuable to me as both an author and a marketer. And as a regular, everyday human, frankly. People can be tough to navigate. Especially when you don’t think like them.

PRO TIP: The next best thing is to understand how they think, so you can develop strategies.

I’ve also done a deep dive into two other concepts that, at first, I didn’t think would have any overlap, in the Venn diagram of philosophy. And yet, somehow, the more I use my fiction writer’s brain to think through these topics and pull out patterns that make sense, that sometimes-always seem plausible, the more I’m seeing connections. There’s more overlap than I thought. I’m still exploring.

For now, though, I’ve jotted down two notes that are entirely independent of each other. I wrote these both on the same page, in this morning’s handwritten journal. My “morning pages.” They feel like the beginning of something. Two philosophical explorations of time that, I think, will eventually lead me (or perhaps someone reading this) to a deeper understanding of reality.

So, I present these early, essentially preliminary thoughts on two subjects that are so complex we can’t define them, and so simple that we understand them intuitively, without ever quite understanding them at all.

Time

Time is an expanding sphere, and the present is its leading edge. The past is everything toward the center. The future is the field of possibility we expand into—becoming real as we make contact. We are being carried by time, like being caught by a wave.

Mind

Consciousness is something we receive, not something we create. The brain is like a crystal radio. It’s tuned to receive a specific frequency. Alter the brain—crack a crystal, spread the coils, add or subtract—and you change the frequency. This is why brain damage leads to personality changes. We can also fine-tune and change the frequency to pick up more of who we wish to be.

Short. Simple. Just ideas. First ideas, for me. I have a lot more, spinning around in my head like a paper cone gathering threads of cotton candy. It’s picking up mass. But the roots are here, and they’re intriguing to me.

What do you think?

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A NOTE AT THE END

When I was a kid we took road trips, usually between Wild Peach, Texas, and various parts of Louisiana, where family lived. In my adult life, doing the whole van-life thing, Kara and I have done drives that were ten times longer than those family road trips. But at the time they felt like the back side of forever. And since I was usually either in the back of a pickup truck—on a mattress, under a camper shell... my people weren’t monsters—or in the back of a van, I was essentially chronically bored for most of a full day. That meant I thought about things. And, when the opportunity was there, I broke things.

I had a small radio. Battery powered. Nothing fancy. Kind of a Walkman, though it didn’t play tapes.

I also had a pocket knife. Another chronic aspect of my life. I am always with some form of tool. One of my greatest resentments about the modern age is that the TSA doesn’t allow even small pocket knives when I travel. So I either check my pocket knife in my luggage, or I have to make do with some other tool. Barbaric.

I digress.

During the time that I was bumping along in the back end of a van, in a nest of pillows, with nothing but a radio and a pocket knife to keep my mind occupied, I did what I always did. I took the radio apart.

Ok, I didn’t always do that. I always took something apart. It wasn’t always the radio. This time it was, though.

And inside was a wonderland. Green circuit board. Blue capacitors (which I had no name for at the time). Little black rectangles, colorful little tubes, lines of silver. And then there was the coil.

Copper, wound in neat little rows, like some kind of metallic caterpillar.

I was listening to the radio as we rolled along, getting mostly static interrupted by occasional, almost ghostly voices from somewhere out there. Signals too weak for me to pick up on my tiny little toy.

I decided to use my pocket knife to touch that coil.

I was hoping for a spark. Sparks were cool. I did a lot of things with disassembled electronics back then, and sparks almost always came as part of the fun. They almost always meant the end of it, too. But that was a risk I was willing to take.

I did not get a spark, though.

Instead, I got TV.

I am a child of the 80s. If there is any skill we acquired as a mere consequence of our childhood, it’s the ability to recognize a TV show by sound alone. I was an aficionado of afternoon cartoon blocks, in particular. And as I was bounced around in the back of that van, pocket knife open, blade wedged between two loops of a tiny copper coil, I heard something I recognized immediately: And episode of GI Joe.

Specifically, it was an episode called “The Phantom Brigade.” I only know that now because I looked it up. It was an episode I’d never seen, and frankly still have never “seen.” But I’ve never needed to. Because I listened to it like an old timey radio show for the next half hour, and my imagination made the thing so vivid, I think I’d be confused to see the real deal.

So, that was a fun discovery. But it taught me something, too. Actually, it gave me a gift.

Because of that experience, I have a framework for thinking of the mind. So that brief paragraph above—that has its roots in a moment buried in my past, when I was a kid in the back of a van, bored enough to take apart the only source of entertainment I had.

I adjusted that coil, and I changed the nature of the receiver.

And that, I think, is possible for us all.

“Mom… what’s a ‘CIA?’”