Month: December 2018

What would you do if you felt good all the time?

As I calm down, I am realizing that I miss tension.  The whole thing about tension is that it feels so good when you release it.  Yes, you may be hitting your head against the wall, but there is no way to replicated that feeling when you stop.

Sex, of course, is mostly tension.  Have you thought about this?  Your dick gets hard and your pussy wet, when your sympathetic nervous system activates, when you react to something, when tension builds.

It is the contrast between that, and the activation of the parasympathetic system in orgasm, that makes it all feel so good.  The more tension, the more powerful the potential release, by contrast.  Maybe this is why some people like being tied up.

What is the contrast?  What if you are completely relaxed?  Do you need sex?  I would say yes, but would the feeling not be different?  Would it not be more frontal cortex based, more relationship based, more connection based?  Something without a firm line moving in, where pleasurable feelings can happen without sexual arousal, and end pleasurably without orgasm, say in dancing?

If we posit that addiction exists to release tension, the amplitude of that release also needs to be factored into the rewards of addiction.

How, to put it another way, can I swim into and out of pleasure, all day every day?  This is logically the opposite of addiction.

I think this is a very good question.

Edit: I will add that thrill seeking is not about fear, but about fear and release.  It’s sex of a sort.

First off, I just read this for the first time.  It is utterly fantastic, and should be required reading in all high school Civics classes (if such a thing is still allowed, in that knowledge makes indoctrination more difficult): http://bastiat.org/en/government.html

If this, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich, The Black Book of Communism, and perhaps something by Hayek, say the Fatal Conceit, were made mandatory, we would rid ourselves in short order of all the intellectual diseases currently besetting our nation.  This, even if we allow, as we should, the Left to require their own texts, whatever they might judge defensible in the face of fierce and clear logic, with the whole of ancient and contemporary history behind it.

Here is the thing: it is not that teachers of history and politics and literature and etc. have read these texts and rejected them.  It is the case that they are inbred, insular, ignorant, and possess the arrogance of grotesque “ideocentrism”, if I might coin a term, which I would intend to combine the negative valence of ethnocentrism, with the parochial rigidity and radical intolerance of possessing only one idea.

Ideocentrism is the central problem of the modern academy.  The solution was to make universities places of many ideas, of, shall we say, multiideationalism, of diverse thought, of diversity in the ways which matter.  But now it is the realm of the “idee fixe”.

Bastiat described all of this perfectly 150 or so years ago.  Read what he wrote.  I cannot improve on it.

I will add two thoughts using modern notions and words (perhaps).

One: if humans are, with respect to one another, the most dangerous predator, government is the apex predator, the top of the food chain, the force that is nearly unfuckwithable.  Our Founders knew this.  Paine described it well, and there can be no doubt Bastiat took Paine’s ideas into consideration.  Paine survived the American Revolution.  He did not survive the French one.

Why cede power to that animal most likely to consume us?

As he says:

For ourselves, we consider that Government is and ought to be nothing whatever but the united power of the people, organized, not to be an instrument of oppression and mutual plunder among citizens; but, on the the contrary, to secure to every one his own, and to cause justice and security to reign.

Two: “Government is that great lie by means of which morally dissolute human beings endeavor to rationalize their existences and actions.”

Government is used not just to take other people’s shit, but to serve as an ersatz religion for bad people.

Government is a deflection, psychologically.  It is a means of saying you favor a cause, without being willing to take ANY personal accountability for its achievement. It is a means of shifting blame.  It is a means of blaming everyone but the guilty, which can be the lazy poor, the incompetent and/or corrupt bureaucrats, or the intellectual social engineers who know nothing about anything, but still insist on being called “experts”.  Usually all three are guilty, but nobody cares.  The task has been accomplished: blame is shifted, consciences are cleared.

Precisely because the feedback loop exists at the level of rationalization, there can never be any reconciling of aim and objective.  In point of fact, ACHIEVING the supposed objective would be disastrous, as it would unbalance a psychological project predicated on long term and utterly selfish lies.

Read Bastiat.  It’s all there.  Nothing is missing.  I am simply offering foot notes.

There’s an old saying floating around “what would you do if you knew you could not fail?”  There are many things like this that show up as memes on my Facebook feed.

I would counter this with: what would happen if you got everything you ever wanted, and it wasn’t what you wanted (to quote a U2 lyric)?  What if you did the work to live your perfect life, and you were still unhappy?  What then?

I suppose practically, you would then need to introspect, and determine what was lacking.  But also practically, it would be terrifying and extremely disappointing.  Terrifying, because here you are in this life that none of us really understand, and you have taken your best guess, and it wasn’t good enough.

This background fear haunts many of us, I think.  Certainly, it haunts me, I realize this morning.  What happens if I do my actual best, and feel exactly the way I feel otherwise?  What then?

If you cannot find small pleasures where you are, now, then it is unlikely you will find them anywhere else.  Champions, the people who win, treasure the small victories of one good pass, one good route, one good block, a PR in the weight room.  That is how they endure the work to be the best.

The ones who are driven by other things routinely go into severe depressions when they win.  This is apparently quite common for Olympic athletes, especially the ones who win Gold.  What else is there left?  What if their drive comes from a primal shame, as was for example apparently the case with Greg LeMonde, who was molested as a child?

I am perhaps creating difficulties where none need exist, but I realize that this is a fear for me, at least.  This is most likely behind most or all of my inconsistencies.

It’s an odd thing with feelings: they cannot be predicted.  You have to do the work, then see what happens.  I have more than once been in despair one minute, then felt fine the next.  How does that work?  How does an emotional state change that seems impossible become possible?  How can a walk outdoors, or a piece of music, or a phone call from a friend completely change how we feel? 

Phrased another way, how DO we learn to deal with the mutability of our nervous systems?  Is the question not why people go and stay mad, and rather how and in what very limited circumstances people achieve and maintain sanity?

This speculation, itself, makes me feel better.  We are truly astonishing and strange creatures.  We are miracles, one after the other.

As I share from time to time, I am an avid consumer–participant?  I think I like that better–of what might broadly termed culture. I’m a bit like the detectives of “12 Monkeys”, trying to find Patient Zero of the virus which is destroying everything good we have built up over the past 5,000 years or so.  There are many patients, of course, but one can readily trace the spread of the disease.

My last two movies have been two films by Luis Bunuel: “The Discrete (I wonder if the French includes the discreet, discrete duality) Charms of the Bourgeoisie”, and “The Exterminating Angel.”

Bunuel was a surrealist, which means he sought the realer than real, the “above real”, the latent structures beneath the veneers, the things hiding in the closets and basements, the things hiding in the hearts and minds, of perhaps everyone, but certainly many.

I would like to apply my own Tubaform, my own deconstructive tool set, to his films, which make both films perfectly logical, perfectly reasonable.

In the first film, there is a recurring motif of the lead characters walking in green farm land.  My read on this film is that they are all people who never quite meet the realities of life, who never quite finish the meal, which symbolizes full participation in life as life.  Bunuel does not apply the harsh political condemnation of them I expected, and with their hypocrisies considered, is far kinder than I expected.  He lets the “Mirandan” ambassador have his ham, after his nightmare.  He finishes with them wandering the path of their lives, together, not quite present, not quite absent.

The Exterminating Angel, in contrast, had a powerful effect on me.  He is describing helplessness, and in particular the helplessness of groups.  We suggest things to one another.  We look to one another.  No one wants to be the first.  No one wants to wander into that darkness alone.

There is a story I told my children often, and which I have likely related here.  I worked for the police department at Berkeley.  On some shifts, my radio carried the police traffic (Channel 1).  While I was there, the University tried to turn “People’s Park” into something more like a park, with bathrooms, walking trails, and a volleyball court.  This of course caused all the fuckups from that era, and their contemporary admirers, to throw nihilistic fits.

At one point, the volleyball court was surrounded by police.  Someone with a chainsaw jumped through their lines, and cut down the wooden posts for the nets while all the cops watched them.  The radio traffic went something like: “L1, this is S13.”  “Go Ahead”.  “They are cutting down the posts with a chainsaw”.  Pause.  “Say again”.  “They are cutting down the posts with a chainsaw”.  “Well, stop them”.  But by then it was done.  The perpetrator got away.

Now, I get full well not wanting to confront someone with a chain saw.  At the same time, it was their job.  They could have had 5 tasers in him within five seconds.  But they were paralyzed, or so it has always seemed to me.  Nobody wanted to make a decision.

I have always told my kids–be the person who takes action when no one else wants to step forward.  Fuck what people think.  Make your own call, act on it, and let the chips fall where they may.

Nearly everything I write comes from this place.  I have far less interest in reading other peoples books than working out my own.  I think the process of contextualizing all ideas within what has come before is perhaps the biggest burden that any academic could face, in the process of trying to do something new and interesting.

Mobs can be paralyzed, and paralyzing.  If everyone is looking to their left and their right, and not forward, they get stuck.

And on a deeper psychological level I felt KEENLY my own continuing failures.  I set out to, say, to a 24 fast weekly, then fail for one reason or another.  I determine to get up at 4:30 and instead sleep in.  Often I fail myself. 

This is the same as that threshold they faced.  Why not walk over it?  What is stopping you?  Do you know?  No spell has been cast, has it?  Is someone pointing a gun at you?  No, then what is it?  You don’t know.  I don’t know. 

The whole thing impelled me, in a fit of both anxiety and recognition, to print out a picture of Tarthang Tulku, to help me remind myself of what I believe, what my commitments are.

Now, it is not mistaken, I don’t think, to view this as a condemnation of the elites, who feed on the innocent (the sheep), but I think it represents clearly that they, too, are trapped.  They are trapped by their own self conceptions, by their felt need to not lose what they have, to avoid risks, to avoid shame.  To above all protect what they think they have, and in fact do not have in reality.

The workers lacked that need, and so felt the danger coming on, and avoided it.  They were likely not in the church either.

As I have said recently, humility is about releasing the need to defend who and what you are.  Disappear, and no one will bother you.  Be useless, and be free.  It is not a renunciation, but a move towards freedom.

This movie made a deep impact on me.  I may buy it and watch it again periodically to remind myself I am free.

So often we build walls to protect ourselves, and wind up imprisoned by them.  Be like the wind.  Be like the sea.  Do not be today who you were yesterday, and do not expect anything to remain tomorrow.  Remain both alert and accepting.  This is the core of what I think leads to honest spiritual growth.

I doubt very much Bunueal saw this.  But some part of him felt it.  He simply lacked the tools to move forward, so he contented himself with description.  Never confuse description, though, with decision and action.  The profound person sees what is next.

It is perhaps not an exaggeration to say that what the 20th century lacked was genuine novelty.  On the one hand, conservatives were looking backwards, and on the other the alleged “Progressives” were looking at one another, and mistaking pipe dreams from plans. 

Walk into the fucking dark.  The worst that will happen is that you will be destroyed.  You will certainly be destroyed and caged where you are. This, to my mind, is true nobility.

Be noble.

It just hit me what Christ was talking about.

He was speaking specifically to a young man whose father had just died, or was dying, who literally wanted to bury him.

I do not think I am unwarranted in saying though, that every sleep is a death, and every morning a resurrection, and that the first order of business many people go through is dying again, and being buried.  They bury one another.  They hide the light.  They suppress the sunrise.  They cooperate in their mutual destruction.

Such are my parents.  They will both die having learned almost nothing about life.  It is such a waste.  One sees it often.  Certainly, I see it often.

I will add: whatever else you do, do not use television as an analgesic.  

You know, this blog acts as a sort of interlocutor who never misunderstands me, as all actual humans I know routinely do. In most cases, I don’t even attempt to be understood on anything more important than my best guess on a Bowl Game, or who the next coach will be.  As such, it is a perfect confessor–or perhaps Freudian therapist–who sits in complete silence.

And it seems to do me good, despite airing so much in public.  I take and use all the tools I can find to claw my way up the muddy cliff face of my life.  I’m not proud.  I will use anything that works.  If what I need doesn’t exist, I invent it.  Anything to move forward, any distance.

I have likely said this before, because I have thought it many times, but if I were on my deathbed, the last person in the world I would want to see is my mother.  She makes everything worse.  She induces anxiety in me; she has never diminished it.

I would take my chances on the Hispanic cleaning lady who doesn’t speak English, or the night nurse.

In reality, of course, my children would be there, my ex-wife most likely, and 3-4 friends.

But I would ask them not to let her in.

I wonder how many people feel like this.  It’s impossible to say, since I think many have never allowed themselves to go there.  Many of us are taught a sense of duty to mothers.

But I can honestly say I have no memories of interactions with my mother which resulted in me feeling anything but worse.  Perhaps I have forgotten.  Perhaps this is my repressed memory.  But nothing in me feels this is right. I got the fuck out of my home the first chance I got.  I went back periodically, but nothing changed.

My mother, for her part, senses this–I am not the only one who feels this way, not by a long shot–but I think she has so robust a capacity for self delusion that she has always been able to convince herself that if people knew who she REALLY is, they wouldn’t feel that way.  I think she herself will die believing this.  I have given up hope that any meaningful relationship between us will ever be possible.  Whatever happened to her, she will never get over.  This is not my fault, and not my responsibility to fix.

Our duty is to look to the future, not the past, to heal our children, and leave the dead to bury the dead.

I’ve been dreaming in recent days of things I could have been.  I could have been an academic, a lawyer, or worked in Silicon Valley.  I did actually work in Silicon Valley, but only as a peon.  I could have risen.  I am smart.  I have talent.

Now, none of these vocations really appeal to me, even now, but the point was that IF I had been able to think clearly, all would have been open.  But I couldn’t think clearly.  I was always the guy people talked about behind his back, saying “how is he not getting THAT?”

Actually, I have a fierce power of focus, so I can likely name the individuals who were doing that, but it is certainly true that what was easy or relatively easy, for most, was always hard for me.  It is very, very hard for me to stay on task.  This gets called ADHD, but it wasn’t for me, and I suspect it isn’t for most people who “have” it.

Developmental trauma always made me on edge, frightened, and it always made me feel like, wherever I was, and whoever I was with, I didn’t belong in some subtle way, and that I was a fox among dogs.  Or perhaps more accurately, a dog among foxes.

And, of course, I have always had a powerful temper.  I created situations for myself that, if I lacked the native intelligence I have, would have been fatal for my job in more than one instance.

But I can do so much more.  I have never come close to using what God gave me in an even, disciplined, sustained way.  It has always hurt much too much.  I have a very high emotional and physical pain tolerance, but you can only hurt so much for so long before not giving yourself a break would only occur to a psychopath, and I am not a psychopath: just a severely wounded human being, trying while limping to keep up with everyone else, and doing so poorly in many respects.

I am significantly smarter than I have yet been able to manifest here or elsewhere.  Everything I do, everything I write, is in spite of continual emotional energy that fights me, blinds me, and tries to strangle me.

It’s quite possible that if I were not natively intelligent, I would have lost my mind long ago.  I can’t honestly say how I have kept my balance and focus as well as I have.

I don’t know where much of what I write comes from.  It just comes.

And sometimes I read things I have written, and they seem foreign to me.

It has likely always been like this, but now, some things are seeming less foreign.  To see something, it has to have a background, and that background is a contrast.  To see one thing, you need a second thing.

That actually works on many levels.  The Tao Te Ching discusses this clearly.

I went into Home Depot
Yesterday, to buy
2 5′ pieces of conduit
The cashier asked me if I wanted
it on my Home Depot card and
If I wanted an emailed receipt.

I sat in my car and tried again to
imagine
Infinity.
Infinite numbers.  Can there be a finite
set of finite numbers that add up to infinity?
No.
Infinite Time
Infinite space:
These are boulders
which cannot fit through the sieves of
our minds.

Then I thought if I could forget this thought
all would be well.

Let it go.
Let it go.
Let it go.

Remember purple flowers in spring,
the laughter, especially, of children.
The green of the spring in the cold of winter
and the rustling of leaves in the heat of summer.
The sound of water moving, and the breeze blowing.
They do not begin anywhere, or end anywhere.

All my life I have striven to be large, so large.
I must become smaller, much smaller.
To diminish is to grow, to lessen is to increase.

This universe does not exist for us,
but we can learn to live happily in it
if
I remember you,
and you remember me,
then all will be well, and the
journeys end the very beginning, and the beginning
the very end,
as we wander in the stars,
and forget we were ever unhappy,
in the bliss of life.

So remember me, and I will try
to remember you.

There is a fog in all this
we all need to dispel from
the clear sun of our hearts.