Month: November 2019

I’ve listened to Lou Reed’s song “Heroin” several times in the past week, including a live version from a reconstituted Velvet Underground.

He keeps saying “I just don’t know”.  I think this is important.  I think many addicts, myself included, often find ourselves confused.  We want to be passionate, but don’t know how, or where, or why.

But the strong feelings that are released or caused by altered states of the sort characterized by addiction are a sort of ersatz passion, or even an ersatz meaning formation.  You don’t know, still, but you feel like you do.  It’s a temporary solution to existential confusion, to “lostness”, to “Verworfenheit”.

Reading about Reed, it doesn’t appear he himself used heroin.  He was an alcoholic and meth user, who died ultimately of liver cancer.  But the basic mindset is the same.

For workaholics–and in important respect all addictions have unique features as well as commonalities–the rush is competence.  It is getting things done.  It is a feeling of control, of mastery, of winning.  And there are always more details to be sorted, new initiatives to begin, more information to absorb to stay on top.  It is all about keeping a low simmering anxiety buzz punctuated by period dopamine hits.  It is, in other words, all about having a place and a purpose and a way forward, and keeping that line taught so that nothing else ever pushes through.  Too much slack, and some part of you will start asking questions and looking around again.

And I will speculate for sex addicts it’s not all that different from work addicts.  You are always looking for that next conquest, and always looking to sex as a qualitative alternative to the workaday world.  I think workaholism and sex addiction dovetail marvelously, and are most likely highly conspicuous in many CEO’s.  I’ve known one or two myself.

In both cases you maintain a low key anxiety–you can never be sure when you make a pass at a new woman if it will work–punctuated by regular dopamine hits.  Fucking is fun, no doubt, but I think for true addicts the best moment is actually just before it begins again.  This is how I visualize it, anyway.  The relief at the beginning is actually better for most than the actual orgasm.  This is precisely what makes it addictive behavior.  There is nothing wrong with having fun, and sex is some of the best fun you can have.  But what addicts bring is the opposite of emotional presence.  They bring need which will not and cannot be satisfied in that or any other encounter.  But if they could be satisfied, they wouldn’t be addicts.

Few thoughts.  I’m a pretty basic alcoholic, but all that is changing.  I have found I seem to be OK with a beer or two before bed.  That never used to be the case.  If I had two I had to have six, then some hard liquor.  That part of my life seems to have passed.

I actually gave myself permission to get drunk last night, and bought a bottle of Aquavit for the purpose.  I had probably four fingers in a glass–which is a lot for most, but not for me–then went to bed.  I NEVER used to do that.  Absolutely never.

I may in the end give up booze, but increasingly it is seeming like I am, to use a Feldenkrais term I like, “reversible” with respect to it.  I am becoming capable of setting boundaries, of using it, I think, for its intended purpose.

One day soon I may have a daily whiskey for my health and pleasure, and leave it at that.

I think a functional measure of maturity is how easily the sense of helplessness is triggered in a given person.

Peter Levine speaks of “restoring goodness.”  Here is a sample video, which I found interesting: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J8b-6C-5wQo

It occurs to me that what he is speaking about is the resolution of irrational shame.  People who are innocent, who have done no wrong, feel good.  I think feeling like a good person is something which comes naturally to relatively normal people who are, in fact, good people.  Neurologically, feeling shame and feeling good are on opposing ends of the affective spectrum.

This raises the interesting question: are people who are shamed into socially desirable behavior actually good?  I would answer: no, not really, to precisely the extent their own personal feelings would otherwise lead them in other directions.

This leads to the further consideration that a society, as a whole, which acts to shame people into conformity cannot really be called a good society.  Think of Communists.  Think of Southern Baptists.  The effect is the same, other than that Southern Baptists do not and never have felt the need to murder millions of people.

Shame and violence, of course, go together, but nowhere in world history are the two combined so inextricably as in regimes like that of modern China.  First there was the physical violence, the concentration camps and psychological torture camps.  Then the Cultural Revolution where millions were murdered by psychopathic children.  Current dictator Xi Jinping was apparently exiled when his father fell into disfavor during that cataclysmic series of atrocities directly inspired by Mao.

Now, the violence is indirect.  It exists in the “social credit score”, which is a more or less direct measurement of how much shame an individual should feel according to a government which, if it wanted to, would know how many shits you take a day, and certainly knows how many cigarettes you smoke, what books you are reading, what websites you visit, and how many and which video games you own.

All of this, though, is on a continuum.  Shaming can and should be seen as violence by other means.

Shame has a place, like all human emotions.  But it rarely leads anywhere genuinely good.  Its value is most conspicuous in its absence.  Chuck Schumer, for example, seems incapable of feeling shame.  In him, it would accomplish some good.

Liberal: I care about people, therefore I’m a Democrat.

Leftist: I am a Democrat, therefore I care about people.

And I will note that the evolution of the Norman Lear’s of the world–again, compare 1980 Norman Lear to 2019 Norman Lear–has consisted in “evolving” from the first to the second, as their proposed solutions to an array of social problems have failed and they have lied to themselves and everyone else about it.

They don’t want to hear our shit, because our shit is mainly pointing out that their shit is in fact shit.  Vanity is a powerful emotion, particularly when tied to time and habit.

I think all editorial writers who make predictions should end their columns: I will revisit this in X months.

Paul Krugman, for example, talking about the economic devastation of a Trump Presidency, could have said: “I predict death and famine, but I will revisit this in 9 months” and then DO it.

Honest, serious  people would have no issue with this.

The current crop, though: MAJOR problem.

It’s all about selling, yo.  Get me through this week, and then another week, and equally stupid people.

http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20131125-do-the-velvets-beat-the-beatles


“The Velvets merged low and high art that disdained the middle, and made it cool to be not just different, but to amplify those differences. Cale called it “a theory of stubbornness”.


Theory of stubbornness.  I love that.  Most everything good was once created by somebody who pissed a lot of people off, who shocked them, who failed to comply with “obvious” standards.


All Elvis did, to repeat a cliche, was make the innovations and shocking behavior of blacks acceptable–after a time, to be sure, but there he was on stage and eventually on Ed Sullivan–to white people, which is to say the world.  He had a fantastic voice, to be sure, but he wasn’t the only one. 


I’m drinking a few beers, chilling out, and trying to understand, to feel, what made the Velvet Underground so influential.  


It’s so hard, decades after the fact, to hear music as it would have been heard when first played.  It’s so hard to really GROK “influence.”


I have never, to take another example, REALLY understood Bebop (some of the comments on some of the videos I watched actually referenced Bebop, but I don’t know what their context is; my own is that I have tried to GET this music, and took a class in college on jazz history), as it was understood at the time.  I don’t like it.  I don’t like Charlie Parker.  But to understand it in CONTEXT is, I think, to hear it very, very differently.


These are imaginative exercised I will never be able to do properly.  This is what I am choosing to do tonight though while knocking a few down.