Moderates United

Ramble begin/

Tonight I went out to a local event.  I finished my book on luck, and she made a good point about “increasing the surface area of your luck”, which was a phrase I liked.  For me, it means getting out more.

So, through some combination of my inattention and poor communication on the part of the event sponsors, I went the wrong place.  It was raining.  I was annoyed for a minute, then I thought to myself, look around.  I knew where the right place was, so I just redirected myself.

And I watched all the people running around in the rain, with a wide variety of umbrellas.  And I thought: the city in the rain has a texture, a feeling tone.

And it took me back to what I believe is my favorite memory of my trip to New York with my kids: getting caught in the rain in Harlem.  I was trying to get to Columbia University, but the line I picked was too far east, so we wound up in the middle of Harlem.  Now, we were pretty much the only white faces around, but I’ve been around the block a time or two, and looking around, I didn’t see anything or anyone that concerned me.  Just a bunch of ordinary folks trying to get from here to there.

So I decided to walk the ten blocks west, or whatever it is.  Two blocks in, a torrential downpour hit, and we sheltered under a big wood construction awning of some sort with maybe 20 other people.  We just leaned against the wall, waited, and people watched.  And it was a lot of fun.  Again, we were the only white faces for a long time, until eventually some more appeared, but I wasn’t anxious because, again, I know what to look for.

[Side note: growing up white, as I did, the consensus everywhere was that Harlem was where you went if you wanted to get shot.  And in the 1970’s, that wasn’t too far off the truth, I don’t think]

Some white people scare me, most don’t.  Some black people scare me, most don’t.  Etc.

Anyway, we waited a while until it let up a bit, then set off again. I bought us some cheap umbrellas.  Then it started pouring again, and I thought hell we are already soaked, let’s just keep rolling.  Eventually we got to the stairs up to Morningside Heights.  There was a river rolling down those stairs.  I said to the kids, that looks like fun, but first let me take your picture standing in it, which I did.  They thought I was crazy, but that was my screen saver on my phone for many years.  I still love that picture.  They liked it too, and admitted later they had fun.

Different is often good.  You just never know where the best moments of your life will come from.

So anyway, I got to the right place, and the ticket lady gave me a free ticket.  Then the mayor (and his presumably armed bodyguard) walked in.  I had never seen him up close.  Like most people you see on TV, he was much shorter in person.  I’ve met a number of celebrities, and that is a common theme.  If you’re not the Rock or Arnold, you are probably 5’7″ if you are a man.

And the introductions, the we would like to thank, and thank, etc. had not even finished.  It all worked out.

There are patterns in life, there are rollers like they have in airports, where you move with no effort, that only appear when you let go and allow things to flow as they were flowing anyway, but without you seeing it.   That sentence almost but does not belong somewhere in Finnegan’s Wake. (did you know quarks were named after a line in that book?).

Ramble end/

The truth is that I have never had a healthy relationship with food.  Consciously losing weight will require establishing a new relationship with it, which means evolving some fundamental and very old aspect of myself. This is why nothing has been changing.  And this is why even if I lost 15-20 pounds–I have been 265 within the past year–I would most likely gain it back

My intent at the moment is simply to establish a habit of tracking, while trying to access this old, old part of me, and build a healthy relationship with it. 

I know what to do.  Everyone who needs to lose weight knows what to do.  My intent and task is to make doing the right thing feel good.  Hunger is not very painful, and frankly sometimes I feel better when I haven’t eaten in a while.  This is not a pain which prevents anyone from losing weight.

The pain is change, and the pain is risking releasing the emotional hurt which chronic overeating has served to mask.  As I’ve said, all addicts are in a relative state of homeostasis.  What they do keeps them going, so they keep doing it.  Dropping a crutch means risking a fall.  We all feel that, somewhere.  This is why continuing the same way feels so much less dangerous than trying something new, even if the same old way has its own pain, such as poor health.

This dialogue here is me beginning to become serious. I am asking the questions, interrogating my unconscious, my protective self.

I was listening to Bruce Springsteen’s first album, “Greetings from Asbury Park, NJ” last night, and I thought: this must have been remastered.  It doesn’t sound right.  Then I realized I was just REALLY listening, and what I noticed was how young he sounds on that album.  He was just a kid. 

There is an art to finding the new in the old.  The biggest part is, as countless gurus have put it, beginner’s mind.  It begins with curiosity.

As to my weight, I was studying sea turtles in the Galapagos for a couple days, but it was 288 this morning.  I was out of town for the cup, and I drank 3-4 beers, and half a bottle of vodka last night.  I woke up in a fantastic mood.  Seriously.  I feel good, and that good things are going to start happening for me.  The need for this drinking is going to fade away and soon.

Edited: It is a commonplace to speak of “finding meaning”, but I think with deep relaxation, it finds us. It expresses itself through us, if our birthright of happiness is not murdered continually by us as it tries to be born.

Let it be, and it will be.

One thing that is not being discussed yet is that, prior to being Chester the Molester he was best known for a long series of stunningly stupid statements.  He was the Gaffe master.  He’s the guy that whispered within earshot of the mike that “this is a big fucking deal”.  He was the one who told New Yorkers the subway was unsafe.  He’s the one who outed Seal Team Six as the ones who (allegedly, Seymour Hersh and others choose to disagree) killed Bin Laden.  It’s a long list that extends back his whole, long, career.  Trump will have a field day with him.

I just can’t help feeling all these lunatics are up to something.  I just can’t see what yet.  They can’t quit, and they know the Mueller coup failed. I don’t know what the next step is.

This popped into my head in the shower, thinking about millenials.  Pretty much every kid who was not parented by me or someone like me, who was born after this date has grown up/is growing up with an electronic device of one sort or another more or less surgically grafted to their dominant hand.

This will have huge cultural consequences.  What is being seen already is a huge uptick in anxiety disorders.  I think in important respects many of these kids are not going to become actual adults.

Every year, year after year, it seems, we extend adolescence just a little farther.  Every year, it seems, we demand less and less of our kids.

This of course fits the agenda of the Party of Less Freedom quite nicely.

At the level of principle, and certainly practice, I think the world needs assholes.  It needs people insufficiently concerned with social niceties to refrain from saying things nobody else will say.  Quite often, until somebody vocalizes the obvious, no one is willing to act on it.

The essence of the Fabian method–and it has succeeded spectacularly and continues to do so–is that smiling, polite psychopaths can rule the world by making it impolite for anyone to oppose them.  They simply ask a little more, day by day, month by month, year by year, until you have people getting arrested for saying boys can’t become girls just by declaring themselves to be.  This is 2019 in Britain, home of Fabianism (whose window is still on the London School of Economics).

You need people who prefer to be alone with their truth, to people willing to accommodate themselves to anything just to avoid social censure.  Small concessions, continued over time, become large concessions.  Concede nothing. 

Use good manners if you can.  I need to find and cultivate more diplomatic ways of telling people to go fuck themselves, but however it gets expressed, crudely or eloquently, concede nothing in principle.

We live in a fantastic nation.  We live in a fantastic time, with endless possibility, but we have countless traitors to our way of life who–knowingly or not–are trying to tear it all down.  I truly believe this.

If the world would merely imitate us, if it would protect human rights, particularly property rights, protect free trade, and political freedom, it would become us.  They do not need to come here.  There are no secrets to our success.  

This was my graduate student advisor: https://divinity.uchicago.edu/frank-e-reynolds-1930-2019

He was good to me, but I think I kind of pissed him off at one point.  It was my fault.

I only earned an A.M.  I did not apply to the Ph.D program for several reasons, but one of them was a reasonable expectation I would not get in, because I was even then a cranky, curmudgeonly human being.  I was smart enough, but grumpy. 

The river keeps flowing for all of us.  We can move our boats left or right, but we can’t stop the tide of time. I am downstream from decisions made then.  They were the correct decisions.  Some of my curmudgeonliness was warranted.  I was a man in the wrong place.

I have never stopped chasing my golden Snitch, though.  I can say that honestly.  It has evaded me, but I have never stopped chasing, and I continue both to get closer, and to get better at my closing skills.

It occurs to me that mourning requires a slot, perhaps a cylinder, or a channel, which goes up and down.  It needs to be fed and watered, but it does not spread out.  It is inherently a personal, not a social process.  I would this is true even for social losses, like 9/11.  Everyone mourns in their own way, in their own time.

Mourning was a topic we focused on in graduate school.  The professor who taught the required “intro” course was Peter Homans.  Here is his obituary: https://news.uchicago.edu/story/peter-homans-religious-scholar-who-examined-transformative-power-loss-psychology-1930-2009

I also took a course on religion and death, and learned a lot.  I remember particularly a book we read on rural Greek mourning traditions.  At the time of the writing they still kept ossuaries, which is where a deceased person is buried, mourned ritually for a specific period of time, then after a further passing of time, disinterred, and their bones placed in what almost amounts to a grave closet with other bones of the community.

There is something about mourning which makes us human.  It means we loved.  It means we ARE loved, when we know we will be missed when we are gone.  You cannot experience loss without a sense of presence.

I suppose I am mourning something myself, something complex.  I could give it many names, but at this precise moment it does not want to be named.

This up and down, though, versus sideways, is an important emotional image.  I feel that strongly.

I might phrase it like this: some days are better than other days, but all days spent mourning are YOUR days, and no one else’s.  They are your relationship with your grief.  You are at the top, and the grief is at the bottom, and you both slide back and forth.  Again, this is what I feel.

This one was not as bad.  I think it could be read, on one level, as a kind and non-polemical argument against abortion.  It is highly morally complex, and completely worth watching.

This sort of cinema is life affirming.  I think if it was what we were all watching, all the time, our world would be a much better, much more nuanced, much more listening place.

One more to go, then I will have seen them all.