Month: April 2019

It occurs to me a big advantage of having two parents in the picture, as well as grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins and the like, is that that child emerging into adulthood has many models, and can adopt, consciously or unconsciously, it doesn’t matter, the models that fit them best.

I was thinking of my own children. They combine, I think, the best aspects of both of us. They have my emotional intelligence, passion and curiosity, and their mothers stability. I am many things, but stable is not one of them. Self regulation, obviously, is something I am still working to master.

Conversely, if you only have one parent in the picture, I suspect the temptation to draw from mass media becomes nearly impossible to resist, and movies and music and TV are largely lies.

A richer society would be one more geographically stable. I think we all sense this. There is a time and many reasons to go see the world. But it is important to be from somewhere, and from people you can name.

I was thinking last night that the feeling I am getting as far as the Left is that it is too quiet.  In the past, I would get fought on every political post I made.  That is no longer happening.  I assume I am still blocked from HuffPo, but the feeling tone is a bit different.  I am getting the feeling most parents get when the screaming from the kids in the other room disappears, and silence takes its place.  Especially if dealing with boys, it usually means they are up to something.

These people, the core, are fanatics.  Their politics and their self image and self worth, and notions of themselves as good people, are all tied together in a quite undisentangeable way.  It’s a Gordian knot whose only continual command is “FORWARD!!”‘, whatever the fuck that means.

Where can they go?  They’ve abandoned efforts to claim the universal high ground by shouting down their opponents, or so it feels to me.

What they have left are voter fraud, certainly, and a continuation of violent censorship.  What they no doubt FEEL they need is something like a Cultural Revolution, something like large masses of kids screaming about what must be done to “save” the culture, to protect the weak and weary, and to make the world a better place, even if it takes mass murder to do it.  I suppose the stuff going on in Britain would qualify, in tone.

Murder they are not quite up for, just yet.  They are manifestly quite willing to dox people, to assault the characters of good people, and do everything they can to pollute our public dialogue with lies, anger, half truths, and noise.  They are willing to stop the flow of traffic, and disrupt tens of thousands of lives to be heard, to achieve relevance, even if in infantile ways.

Who knows if what I am feeling is accurate?  I grew up living in the shadows, but keenly aware of everything going on around me.  People like me, I think, are usually right about things like this, but all of us are sometimes wrong.

It just feels like there are schemes being hatched out there, by people for whom an open honest life has been made impossible by a long set of choices and derelictions of actual duty.  All of these people need to grow up, but none of them believe that two marshmallows are out there anywhere except in the rhetoric they internalized some time shortly after nursery school.

And I think at root they don’t even believe their own lies.  Most of them just want to see death and destruction, decay and decline.  There are no marshmallows, even in the present, so just burn it all down.

And I got inspired last night to go get a bunch of healthy food.  I’m going to make a huge portion of saag, some kale chips, and I bought a bunch of good protein, a lot of fish, some beef for beef jerky, and a bunch of apples.

Sleep.  Oh what can I say?  I’ll be doing fine, then some monster from the deep will come up and bite me.  Then I got back to sleep, and it’s mostly OK.  One or two episodes like that a night is not so bad.

I’m continuing to try new things.  When I have a magic recipe for me, I’ll post it.  I’ve gotten tired of posting all the things which COULD work.

I had a bit of an epiphany today: part of the task of feeling safe in this world is learning to how navigate people.  Not just manipulate them, but win them to your side, to your way of thinking, to be the sort of person they genuinely like.  Or conversely, be the sort of person who is genuinely interested in THEIR way of thinking, and their side. 

So much of my worldview runs through conflict, through a felt need to fight in many ways at many times on many fronts.

Think about this, though: the highest and best life is one lived in harmony and deep soul level connection with a variety of people, while doing useful, challenging and engaging work, all while growing as a person steadily across a lifetime.  This is the end aim. 

War, obviously, is a failure in this end. War is sometimes necessary, but even in war we need to look to the end state.  It has become a commonplace to speak of “the warrior spirit”, but in truth when we are only speaking of war, aggressive sociopaths with high pain tolerances arguably make the best killers. 

Warriorship, if we are to value it, must come with the arts of peace, and specifically diplomacy.  You need to know how to hold a line, but you should not be afraid to bend.  I think Donald Trump has struck an outstanding balance in this respect with Kim Jung Un.  He showed him he was not afraid of him by mocking him, but at the same time, when the timing was right, he was genuinely cordial, warm, and friendly.  At some point, I think he is going to make it easy for Kim Jung Un to enter into a permanent peace, with all the prosperity which will go with it, for him and for his people.

And it seems to me one of the most obvious principles should be that there is never any call to make unnecessary enemies.  This is the first step to preventing war.  All wars which are prevented are won, provided nothing truly important is given in exchange, and preventing the beginning of a cycle of hatred should be an important skill all warriors learn.  The connection of etiquette with Bushido is I think a good example of this.  Of course, the Japanese are also notoriously short tempered when etiquette is breached.  Americans, in contrast, rarely even realize they, or someone else, has behaved rudely.  They just say “I’m sorry brother.  Let me buy you a beer.”

Be all that as it may, I am going to dig up my Dale Carnegie and I’ve bought a book on etiquette.  I eat like a hungry caveman, all too often.  You should have seen my family at the dinner table.  My mother mildly excepted, we all did.

I had more to say, but it went wherever ideas go when they get tired of hanging out in the waiting room.  They may be out back smoking a cigarette and return momentarily.

But for me, this idea is liberating.  People are a knowable quantity.  My reaction to a variety of behaviors is under my control.  I can learn to expect better reactions if I learn to be human better.

4 beers, I think, a whiskey, then a bottle of champagne, and a six pack of 6.7% beer.  I forgot to set my alarm, but I woke up anyway.  Got to hit the road at 6am.

Woke up thinking about Gallagher and smashing watermelons.

Edit: I did remember.  I will mention as well that I don’t get hangovers.  It would likely be better for me if I did.  I am foggy for an hour, then I’m good.  I get a bad cough sometimes when drinking hard liquor–the liver and the lungs are connected–but that too disappears pretty quickly.  As a practical alcoholic, I’ve figured out methods of dealing with it.

Still, I can’t help but feeling this morning that good things are on the way.  I don’t know why.  Perhaps because I am right.  That’s always one of the options.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8CdY1DQWh08

Can I nostalge (that’s a useful word, is it not?) about times when the “meaning of life” was a thing?  Can I not ask the same questions Burke asks?

We all have these questions in us, do we not?  There’s nothing unique about me.  My questions, I think, are questions everyone would ask if they took the time to be silent long enough.

My life, my soul: they are not exceptional.  I’m just a guy who says what everyone should be saying, who barks when all the other dogs should be barking.

Yeah, so I broke.  My work today left substantially every muscle in my body hurting, and I went to one of my watering holes, and uh, watered myself.  They charged me for 2 beers and a whiskey, but I’m pretty sure it was 3-4, and I stopped at the liquor store on the way home (after getting the drift and leaving a 30-35% tip, after which I think management gets suspicious).

So I was going to talk about mystical stuff, which I could, but I feel vaguely ashamed, so I won’t.

I am a fish.  I am an aquatic animal.  I do live in many directions and angles and depths in a typical day.  I see things you cannot see in an ordinary sunlit world.  I lay on my back sometimes and watch the sun from 15′ down.  I feel the currents around me.

But I’m not talking at the moment.  I’m going to listen to something loud and cool on Spotify, watch Jeopardy, then go pass out on my futon.  Good times.

I will have more to report in a day or two.  Progress is being made, outward self reported appearances to the contrary notwithstanding.

I realize, as I slowly try to build a behavioral line for myself, that it is quite possible, through will and habit, to constrain the expression of traumatic residue to certain contexts and times.

People like me, we learn to do 8 to 5, more or less, or 6am to 6pm, or whatever is needed. We mostly seem normal. I am a bit rigid but I have a good sense of humor (on most accounts).

But it is EXHAUSTING acting normal. Once I done playing my role, I want to numb all that tension and grief into oblivion.  The day is act 1. The night is act 2, and this can be repeated across s lifetime.

“He was so quiet”, we hear of the latest mass murderer, or guy who had someone locked in a closet, or whatever. Two lives. Two segmented lives. Act 1 and Act 2, the second hidden.

Often soldiers are like this. Keep them in a container of duty and they function fine. When leave the service though, they may just want to buy a shipping container and 40 acres in back of the back 40, and hide from the world. Some of our best soldiers do this, I am told, by someone in a position to know. The long term accumulation of fear, based on first hand knowledge of what is possible, just adds up and sinks them. Maybe they are happy, but I think happier is the better word, relative to all other options.

I think most casual readers in the field of psychology will know about the marshmallow experiment: one now, or 2 or more if you wait fifteen minutes, at age 4 or so. 

I’m listening to an OK but not great book, called something like “Can you learn to be more lucky?”.  My rule on things like this is I finish all books I start, because you never know what small detail you might pick up which might make a difference.  This is the same reason I like going to even the smallest, worst funded and built museums: you just never know.  My brain is building patterns continually, and it will pick up, I think, sometimes on things most people miss.

In any event, in some respects she is building the case for the prosecution socially of microaggressions, and for the concept of privilege.  For my part, I have never denied that, for example, the child of a two parent home, and particularly a prosperous two parent home, is intrinsically luckier than the child of a single parent home on the other side of the proverbial tracks.  My point is simply that the goal is to build up the latter, not denigrate the former.  We want everyone high, not low.

Be all that as it may, she made the interesting observation/twist on the marshmallow experiment, that it depends not just on self control, but on how much the child TRUSTS the experimenter, and this, in turn, is highly correlated with the childs life experience.  Children from poorer homes are significantly more likely to take the one marshmallow now.  They get what they can get, when they can get it.  Big dreams and long term plans are not a part of their daily experience.  A marshmallow in hand is worth two in the bush.

And our communal life as a whole is a giant marshmallow experiment.  Are you willing to play by “the rules”, to get educated, and work hard for a long time, in exchange for a long term reward, such as a nice retirement?  Does your answer not depend in large measure on how much you trust the system?

When you look at, say, Neil Cassady and Jack Kerouac, their answer was that we are most likely all going to die in a nuclear war, and that no, the rewards of conformity to a system which requires one to suppress all natural instincts for fun, for adventure, for change, for sex sex sex, is NOT worth the sacrifice.  If this life, this marshmallow, is all we get, then why not devote what small time we have to short term pleasures?

As Weezer put it:

Cuz I can’t work a job like any other slobPunchin’ in and punchin’ out and suckin’ up to Bob

Marryin’ a beeyotch, havin’ seven keeyods

Givin’ up and growin’ old and hopin’ there’s a God.

A sane, well organized society provides those two marshmallows reliably.  Perhaps it consists in part in punishment for NOT waiting.  But it also consists in pointing out that there is a place for the person who waits, a place they belong, where they will be valued and loved and recognized. 

To put it mildly, our society in general does a poor job of this.  Do your job faithfully for thirty years, and you get a pen.  The pension is gone, and you will be forgotten within three weeks.  You have your spouse, but they are a poor consolation in a desolate world.  The kids are gone, most likely, and you ARE left wondering if there is a God, if you are typical American.  You may go to church–you have may gone all your life–but you know it’s hard to know for sure.

I read on the news at the gym yesterday that Russell Wilson got $140 million for I think it was 6 years, maybe 4.  $65 million signing bonus. 

Can you imagine if just ten percent of that money was invested in working to document that the afterlife exists?  This is a vitally important question, and methods exist, but it simply isn’t a priority.

Why is this world–specifically the people in it–so fucking stupid?

I suppose I can answer that question, by appealing to psychology and sociology, but in a deeper, more metaphysical sense, I can’t.