Goines On: Raging

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Goines’ bedtime thoughts for two nights were topsy-turvy and frustrating, owing mainly to his inability to hold intermediary thoughts in short-term memory.

    “Frustrating” hardly captured it. During the second night (after the incident of the empty sheriff’s car with its engine running) he groggily thought he had pieced together the characteristics of the 2200 bumped cycle, but he wasn’t sure, because it apparently wasn’t 40 years long (like the 2100 bump). 

    The morning after that second night, now awake and able to jot done stuff, he went over (and over) his nighttime finding for the 2200 bumped cycle and found that it was 28 years long, which seemed odd, because that was the same number of years as the standard 28-year cycle. Goines slogged on to the end of the 2001–2400 calendar period, taking notes as he went.
    Compiling accurate notes to summarize his findings was not an easy task, because Goines’ daytime thoughts were now as jumbled as his nighttime thoughts has seemed – at least when it came to calendars.

    At last, though, he was confident that the pattern for the 2100 bumped cycle (for the 40 years 2085–2124) really did look like this:

1. a 6₁ sub-cycle (6 years),
2. the bump years: |_|L|_|_|_|L|_|_|_|*|_|_| (12 years, with the * indicating 2100), and then
3. an 11-6₂-5 run (22 years, ending with the year 2124).

    That bump led to the resumption of standard 28-year cycles in 2125, for 2125–2152 & 2153–2180. His revised nighttime conjecture for the 2200 bumped cycle (for the 28 years 2181–2208) looked like this:

1. a 6₁-11 (17 years),
2. the bump years: |_|_|$|_|_|_| (6 years, with the $ indicating 2200), and then
3. a 5 sub-cycle: |L|_|_|_|L| (5 years, ending with 2208).

    That bump led to the resumption of standard 28-year cycles in 2209, for 2209–2136, 2237–2164, & 2265–2292.  The pattern for the 2300 bumped cycle was a huge surprise – 24 years long – and looked like this (for the years 2293–2316):

1. a 6₁ (6 years),
2. the bump years: |_|#|_|_|_|L|_| (7 years, with the # indicating 2300), and then
3. a 6₂-5 cycle (11 years, ending with 2316).

    The total of the three bumped cycles was 92 years: 40 + 28 + 24, which actually meant that that third bump cycle had to be 24 years, however odd it had at first seemed, because the 92-year total was necessary, mathematically. The 400-year cycle beginning with the year 2001 had eleven standard 28-year cycles – like the 400-year cycle beginning with 2021 – and their total of 308 years needed the 92 years of bumped cycles to add up to 400.

    The following afternoon, Goines finished constructing the table for the 2001-2401 period, and beyond. The first year of each period’s three bumped cycles is shown in bold with underscores:

​  |——————————————————||——————————————————||—————————> 

2001 2125 2209 2317 2401 2525 2609 2717 2801 2925

2029 2153 2237 2345 2429 2553 2637 2745 2829 2953

2057 2181 2265 2373 2457 2581 2665 2773 2857 2981

2085      2293      2485      2693      2885 

    Goines had to review and correct his drafts of these notes so many times, the process was far more frustrating than his nighttime thoughts had been. He felt shakened, humbled, doubting he would ever perform his calendar parlor trick again. 

    He suspected he had done all these pattern investigations to demonstrate that he was still mentally fit, but he seemed to have demonstrated the opposite. Had he been raging with Dylan Thomas against the dying of the light?

    It was time to bring on those whiz-kid programmers, Goines thought, let them have their moments in the sun…before the dying of their light.

    In the meantime, Goines thought he should take a rest. He needed a vacation from calendars. 

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