Its Personal

For Sharon, 38 years after the night I proposed at the fountains in downtown Dallas, October 8, 1988.

How "Spooky Action at a Distance" Came Into Being The song began as a craft challenge, not a song idea. After a productive evening writing whimsical and absurd lyrics — psychedelic 60s nonsense in the spirit of "I Am the Walrus" and a Monkees-flavored AABB piece called "The Vicar's Umbrella" — Rick asked the logical next question for a geek: what if all the words came from scientific white papers? The concept had a literary precedent. Found poetry, sometimes called erasure poetry, is the practice of taking existing prose, lifting phrases verbatim, and arranging them into verse. Jen Bervin does it with Shakespeare. Austin Kleon built a career on newspaper blackout work. A small genre of musicians has set IKEA instructions and software EULAs to music. What Rick proposed was the scientific paper version of the same move. The decision to pull from five wildly different fields was deliberate. The further apart the source vocabularies, the more productive the collision space. The lineup: quantum nonlocality, mycology, deep-sea tubeworm biology, large language model research, and Mars geology. Each field had its own jargon, its own rhythms, its own way of describing the universe. None of the papers knew the others existed. The harvesting phase pulled 40-50 verbatim phrases from each paper — fragments that felt rhythmic, surprising, or accidentally lyrical when removed from context. Phrases like "spooky action at a distance," "mouthless and gutless yet productivity is high," "the model fails gracefully," and "recurring slope lineae, narrow streaks of low reflectance" were already nearly lyrics in their original journal pages. Academic prose has a built-in absurdity when context falls away. The arrangement phase was where the song made itself. Rick's editorial choice was mostly verbatim — every meaningful phrase from a paper, with minor connective tissue (the, and, but, or) and light meter adjustments. The constraint kept the song honest while allowing it to actually sing. A psychedelic baroque pop arrangement was chosen for delivery — Sgt. Pepper-era production with mellotron and harpsichord, a male baritone vocal delivered in academic deadpan. The musical register was crucial: the song had to be cheerful about its absurd material, the way a Monkees song would be. Earnestness would have killed it. The hidden discovery came during writing. Five papers, five fields, no relationship to one another — and yet they all turned out to be about the same thing: communication where it shouldn't exist, endurance in the dark, signals across distance under impossible conditions. Quantum particles. Trees through fungi. Deep-sea organisms. LLMs decoding intent from text. Mars geology decoding history from rock. The chorus collected the accidental thesis: "Spooky action at a distance, spooky action through the trees / Spooky action in the regolith and underneath the seas / The community persists in the darkness and the cold / And the model fails gracefully when the prompt gets old." That's the move that elevates found poetry from clever to real. The source material confesses something its authors didn't know they were saying. Five rigorous scientific disciplines, sitting next to each other for the first time in their lives, all pointed at the same hidden truth. The papers cited in the liner notes: the 2019 arXiv review of quantum nonlocality, the 2023 PNAS Nexus paper on mycelial calcium signaling, Cavanaugh et al. on Riftia tubeworms at hydrothermal vents, Wei et al.'s 2022 Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models, and Ojha et al.'s 2015 Nature Geoscience paper on hydrated salts in Martian recurring slope lineae. The song exists in approximately one place in the universe. It is found poetry from five real scientific papers, set to baroque pop, delivered in academic deadpan, with an accidental coherent thesis about communication in the dark. It belongs to one catalog, and that catalog belongs to one man in Canyon Lake, Texas. Sources: Quantum Correlations and Quantum Non-locality: a review and a few new ideas — arXiv:1908.03114 Local calcium signal transmission in mycelial network exhibits decentralized stress responses — Itani et al., PNAS Nexus, 2023 Genomic, transcriptomic, and proteomic insights into the symbiosis of deep-sea tubeworm holobionts — and How Giant Tube Worms Survive at Hydrothermal Vents (Cavanaugh et al.) Emergent Abilities of Large Language Models — Wei et al., arXiv:2206.07682 Spectral evidence for hydrated salts in recurring slope lineae on Mars — Ojha et al., Nature Geoscience, 2015

Fourteen Christmases, or a good hundred, depending on who's counting. A jazz-waltz love song for Sharon, thirty-seven years after an April Fools' wedding.