Welcome, readers, to March’s issue of Synchronized Chaos Magazine! This issue seems to center on energy in various forms, both literally as a power source and poetically as a metaphor for people finding the inner strength needed to spur them on to greater insights.

Jaylan Salah writes about finding solace and creative energy through the Finnish rock band Poets of the Fall. As a writer and artist and a young person, Jaylan found welcome, affirmation, and thought-provoking ideas in the lyrics and beauty in the voices of her favorite band.

Since ancient times music has punctuated our life journeys and lubricated our experiences, from early hide drums and wooden dulcimers and lyres and chants to modern sounds produced through technology.

Michael Robinson also writes of his poetic inspirations in taut, restrained free verse, using birds and nature as a motif. Seagulls and peacocks have been present during various seasons of his life and thus evoke various emotions.

Joan Beebe celebrates nature’s renewal and beauty during spring. Her work, written with joy and full sincerity, heralds the coming of warmer weather. She also encourages readers to keep track of their pleasant memories by holding onto mementos.

Peter Jacob Streitz contributes a short story on the loss of innocence and natural human life-energy due to repression and fear from people who moved too fast to control what they did not understand. Elizabeth Hughes, in her monthly Book Periscope literary review column, reviews novels from Hazel Boyd which describe how a group of people, friends and lovers, work to maintain the caring and energy in their relationships over time despite the complications and challenges they face.

And, finally, in a writeup from museum docent Cristina Deptula, there’s a discussion of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory researcher Dr.Adam Weber’s research into improving the efficiency of hydrogen fuel cells. While Weber affirms the promise of this form of energy storage within the next 50 years, the technology will require much thought and effort to bring it to the point where it can become commercially useful. He outlines some challenges researchers are facing and methods they are using to work around these issues.

We hope this issue serves as a kind of ‘muse’ for readers as they continue their own creative and personal journeys.

Adam Weber, photo from http://eetd.lbl.gov/people/adam-weber

Hydrogen fuel cells power city buses all over Oakland, CA, surrounding the Chabot Space and Science Center and transporting visitors around town. Guest speaker Adam Weber, staff scientist at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s fuel cell program manager, spoke at Chabot on future prospects of this technology during February’s enrichment lecture.

According to Weber, hydrogen fuel as a workable, commercial scale technology in the U.S. is at least 10-20 years in the future, as a minimum. However, he supports continued research and development into the area as the technology represents the promise of a 45 percent reduction in our country’s carbon emissions by 2050.

Hydrogen differs from other fuels as it cannot be mined or harvested directly, but must be produced on a large scale, usually by splitting water molecules through electrolysis. The energy to power the electrolysis can come from natural gas, coal, nuclear energy, or, as he hopes, ultimately from renewable sources.

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MEN AND WOMEN—there’s a difference. At least that’s what Shields’ mom formerly decreed. It’s history. It’s science. It’s nature. It’s everything to do with equality and ONLY ONE HAPPINESS. And along with the laws of only one happiness, Shields also knew, by heart, all the other rules in Mom’s house. That’s why he waited a year after his 13th birthday to ask her about the man he’d met the previous Christmas, in his Grandma’s cellar. This was a terrible mistake. When Shields simply asked if the man she called “husband” loved him, his Ma threw a fit! The word LOVE was strictly verboten in or out of their home.

For it was his Mom’s belief that love, as a word, was worthless. “Gens de peu (the meaner class of people),” she’d crow with characteristic fervor. “Love everything from inanimate objects to gods, celebrities, and prime-time TV.” She’d quiz Shields: “And how can love describe the affections of men and women when we incessantly jabber, ‘I LOVE THE FLAG! I LOVE COKE! I LOVE NEW YORK! I LOVE JESUS! Have you ever seen a bumper sticker that says: I LOVE HUMAN BEINGS?'”

When Shields admitted to never seeing such a bumper sticker, or knowing what it actually meant to love, mom told him a story about a long forgotten, magical time when men and women were equally capable of love, because they both possessed The Lobe. God’s Lobe. The Lobe almighty.

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