I’m thinking that when I get to Denmark in two weeks, I’ll buy a black hat in Christiania and start wearing it with a black jacket and use the name “Schrödinger”.

Good ole’ Erwin, you know, was a bit of horny bastard, always insisting that he be able to have sex with both of the women he lived with… in addition to a bunch of casual fuck-buddy-girls on the side. He pursued this effective polygamy and open sexuality even though it cost him much of his illustrious career.

So all in all S- seems like a good namesake. Plus, H- is spoken for… anyway the original H- was a fucking Nazi bastard and that’s not cool at all.

That who name thing is a heavy thought… I’ve been thinking heavy thoughts this whole time… all the while licking chicken juice off my fingertips. You remember what Nietzsche said about this particular meal, don’t you?

If you stare for long into the fried chicken and french fries, the fried chicken and french fries stare back at you.
- Friedrich Nietzsche

OK… enough physics and philosophy. Let’s move on to professional wrestling. That, of course, means Jesse Ventura. The former governor of Minnesota is out on a media tour promoting his new book. He was on the Larry King show last week, where he was impressively direct, delivering a powerful argument and refusing to be diverted by his host’s attempts to rein in his anger.

Today he was on The View:

That Elisabeth Hasselbeck- the blonde one on the far right- is a real torture bitch, isn’t she? I love the way she struggles in vain to come up with any justification that supports the torture she so clearly loves to have inflicted in her name. Torture bitch gets her kicks from da torture.

But Jesse “The Body” Ventura ain’t having none of that. He just states his case for the law and he states what’s morally right and he does it all clearly and directly and without compromise. Meanwhile the religious people in this country play word games and promote their complexly immoral position… they’ve sold out their Jesus Christ and replaced him with Judge Holden.

Well, fuck ‘em. Fuck Cheney. Fuck the whole lot of lawyers who endorsed this demonic behavior and fuck the whole lot of servicemen who put it in effect. They deserve to be called to account before the law. Get the fucking truth out. I don’t think there’s a more important issue than this in America right now.

I’m with you on this, Mr. Body. The whole torture thing makes me so angry that from now on when I wake up each morning I’m going to hop out of bed and raise my arms in the air and scream “FUCK YOU AMERICA!”

Mmmm… that was some good chicken. Now I need some more Diet Coke. And then I’ll post the porn. Come back later and give me five minutes of your time…

No… Not really. I just wanted to get that in there. That, of course, is a line from yesterday’s episode of Breaking Bad.

Grabbing the latest Breaking Bad has been a regular Monday morning experience for me. I don’t own a TV so I download the episodes from iTunes… each new one is available online a few hours after it airs Sunday night.

It’s a really great show, don’t you think? I love the moral ambiguity. How contemptible is Walter White, if you think he is contemptible at all? I don’t think he’s a terrible man. He makes a drug that people buy of their own free will; the consequences of its use are not his responsibility. And he had to waste that Crazy Eight dude because of the “kill or be killed” situation. I think the lies he told to his wife and kid are the worst aspect of what he’s done. And he really owes poor Jesse Pinkman a lot for all that he put him through… $672K ought to cover that tho’.

Another reason I love the show is because of the fact that Science is always looming over the characters like some sort of Olympian god. Being a former science/math geek who has turned to a less “mainstream” career myself, I can identify with Walter White’s situation, and I can appreciate the character’s deep feeling for the power of science.

And it takes place in New Mexico! I did my post-doc at SFI right there! I can remember all the distinctive smells and the distinctive sights… and I remember it all being permeated with ideas of complex systems and chaos and Coyote and the javelinas and the fucking jackalope and Ten Thousand Waves and Fat Man and Little Boy and Georgia O’Keefe vagina paintings and working through all the volumes of Landau & Lifschitz and all the wonderment that goes along…

One of the best things about Santa Fe was the people. Within the complex systems crowd, you could talk about anything and it would be open for lively mindful discussion and possible action. Any crazy fucking idea that popped into your mind! Anything at all, no matter how nuts it seemed, was fair game…

Let me tell you how much of a math geek I am: Some people have memorized the first few digits of PI, but I can tell you first 20 of the Feigenbaum Number! (It was actually Professor Feigenbaum and his googley insane eyes that led me into the porn business, but that’s another story for another time…)

Time for a road trip to Santa Fe? No… Not now. Maybe in the fall. Besides… I’m getting ready to head back to Copenhagen at the end of the month. Gonna be in Denmark through the summer. My pal and business partner Ray Hoffman has finally got his international legal shit sorted out and is ready to shoot some porn… Why, exactly, we need to travel to Europe to shoot it when we both live in Southern California- the porn capital of the fucking world- is beyond me. But, eh, the pot there is good, and the summer days are long, and the air is fresh, and the girls are hot… So I’m not complaining.

I’m not a big fan of TV.

But Breaking Bad is something extraordinary. It’s the story of Walter White, an intelligent but conformist high school Chemistry teacher in Albuquerque. He’s got a teenage son with cerebral palsy and a second, unexpected baby on the way.

Mr. White collapses while at work. He’s taken to the hospital and learns that he has terminal lung cancer.

He is going to die.

So now Mr. White is confronted with an existential choice: How will he live the last year or so of his life? Will he continue his submissive, conformist lifestyle? Or will he step out into the real world where there are no true boundaries whatsoever?

He steps out. Mr. White starts cooking crystal meth with an accidental partner– an ex-student who is part slacker and part small-time drug dealer. He gets involved in the underworld. He buys a black hat.

Choices in life, however, are not black-and-white. He still retains his old self: his history, his family, his experience. Who he is cannot be pinned down, really. He is a personified version of the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

Mr. White tells himself that he is cooking meth for the money; he needs to provide for his family after he is gone. But there is more to it. It seems like he really wants, for once in his life, to experience the dirt and grime that is reality. He wants to pursue an authentic existence in the real gray world so he “chooses life” just like Ewan McGregor did in Trainspotting; but that dude could look forward to living for decades, while Mr. White’s time is quickly running out.

This is the best thing I’ve seen on TV since The Sopranos. Stephen King says it’s the best-scripted TV show ever.

If you haven’t seen it yet, start with the seven episodes of Season 1. You can get them from iTunes or Amazon. I thought the first episode was a bit cliched. But I hung on and shortly I was seeing the remnants of dead gangster bodies dissolved in acid being flushed down the toilet, and with that my notion of this as cliched “normal” TV got flushed down too.