Chace Randolph

Tight Beam Volume 12
January 2025

Hello there, it’s a new month, and a new year, which means it’s time for another installment of Tight Beam. Getting the information you’re looking for from me, to you, as quickly and simply as I can.

Now that the holidays are over, and I have knocked out a lot of my ‘real world’ responsibilities, had a bit of a break, did all the good things over the holidays with the various family members. I have started editing work on Altar of Scales again. I’m about halfway through the manuscript already. After which I can start work on the audio book. The audio book version of the first edition came out to about 7 and half hours, so I estimate the second edition with all the changes and added length will be about a 9 hour audio book, which means probably about 50 hours of audio editing time for me. But then, that’ll all be done, and I can release the second edition of the book. I am aiming for the end of February, or at least in the 1^st quarter of 2025.

I am glad to be making progress again, and while I still don’t have as much time to work on it as I would like, I am making good progress in the time I do have. I am optimistic about 2025. The problems I had in 2024 are solved, or at least figured out, and everything feels like it’s moving along good, lightweight, fast, responsive, tactical. So… all’s quiet on the western front, I guess, or some other euphemism that you like. I am optimistic and happy and everything is looking good. Now that I am typing this, or “Saying it out loud,” I worry that I may jinx myself. But I will continue to be aggressively optimistic. Now to keep this short and sweet, I’ll give you the reward for slogging through my three hundred words of news, and now you can have one of my old shorts, that I hope is an entertaining reward, or a thank you for your time, or whatever. Here’s “Why not”, it’s more of a thought experiment than an actual story, but most of my remaining stock is actually short stories.

Why not?

The power of the question ‘Why?’ is too often underestimated. An individual with serious enough convictions and significant openness may find themselves learning things they never imagined, both of the world, and of themselves. All one must do is apply the question ‘why?’ to everything.

Take a statement, any statement. Even something as self-fulfilling as “What kind of statement?” and ask ‘why?’ of that statement. When you have answered that question. Ask of that answer ‘Why?’. When you have answered that one, ask again, ‘Why?’. This will lead to an endlessly more complex and inward-looking analytical methodology, like nesting dolls. This method of introspection can take on a quasi-religious tone. As it leads people down paths of discovery and knowledge attainment, they never imagined. It will have you reading Wikipedia articles with mathematical symbols you don’t know the names for. Or turning further and further inward, discovering things about one’s self that you didn’t know, and couldn’t have imagined.

This single simple word, when applied, correctly, repeatedly, mercilessly, even liberally, can lead to the attainment of so much knowledge and self-discovery, yet it is so under-utilized. This one word holds so much power that perhaps it is a cause for pause and reflection on the power and usage of other individual and seemingly mundane words.

The key to the usage of the question ‘why?’ is to keep doing it, reapplying the question over and over to a single statement and all of its subsequent answers. As long as the preceding iteration is answered, there can be a subsequent iteration indefinitely. It is up to the thinker, to the person asking questions, how many times they will ask, when they will grow tired, when they will stop. Once they do, the next act should be to ask of themselves, “Why?”